Case Study: The Alternative Board (TAB)
“From 15 to 15,000”
Situation
VolumePR was charged with getting PR for an annual 2008 economic survey from The Alternative Board, a small business coaching organization. In 2007, The Alternative Board placed the survey release over the wire only to see it flop, with just a small handful of media placements.
Strategy & Tactics
Last January, the VolumePR team realized that the 2008 survey press release had to garner explosive coverage. The objective was to ratchet up the survey’s connection to timely news via search engine optimization. Using the same key words that the media was hammering about the economy was the key to dramatically increase media exposure.
In early January, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke was talking to Congress about the gloomy outlook, the release referred to Bernanke’s testimony, recent predictions about a recession and President Bush’s own pronouncements about consumer confidence. With key words in position, the formerly sleepy press release garnered thousands of hits on Google and was covered in several top-tier media outlets, including Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and Reuters. By using specific keywords, the release bubbled up to get the media’s attention.
VolumePR’s strategic approach took into account that simply peppering a release with ‘keyword spam’ doesn’t land top-tier media coverage; there needed to be some steak behind the sizzle. The sizzle was the economy in this case. Implementing a judicious use of keywords without real news may lure journalist to take a quick look at a pitch or release, but they will delete it quickly if it doesn’t deliver.
Results
At its release, if a Google search was performed on the title of the TAB press release, the results showed that it was picked up in over 15,000 places around the world within two weeks. Volume Public Relations won the MarCom Platinum award for “Best External Communications Program” for the overwhelming success of this search engine optimized survey press release and also the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP) 2008 Bronze Spotlight Award for this campaign.