Don't make 'em come looking for you and your message on the web

Communication World, August-Sept, 2002 by Sheri Rosen

When you are hunting for something on the Internet, you might casually invoke your favorite search engine then type in key words. There is nothing casual about the list returned to you. Site managers methodically design their content and links to boost their rank on search lists to draw more hits. There are even consultants whose sole purpose in life is to manipulate the inner workings of a client's site to top search engine lists.

You'd think the ultimate value of the Internet is the technology that helps you succeed in channeling people to your web content. Aili Jokela has another idea.

"We want to be everywhere on the Internet where our audiences are already. We set out to engage other web sites to deliver content for us, and of course we would make it easy for them," she says. Maybe it's not a revolutionary thought; if your audience is hailing taxis or driving down the street, you slap a sign on the side of a bus instead of expecting just the right people to be watching your television commercial during a soap opera at 11 a.m. Yet, Jokela and her team took the potential of the Internet in a new and enlightened direction.

Jokela is a senior vice president for Fleishman Hillard, the public relations agency responsible for the non-advertising components of the National Youth Anti-Drug media campaign for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "We wanted to deliver the campaign where people are--where they live, work, learn, plan or practice their faith. We wanted to be ubiquitous," Jokela says.

What teen contemplating or dabbling in illicit drugs would go to yahoo.com, google.com or msn.com and type in the key words: "anti-drug PR"? If you were trying to reach kids with anti-drug messages, would you create a site and hope they use a search engine to come looking for you?

Or would you provide content with anti-drug, interactive, relationship-building messages to the sites teens and pre-teens frequent? From the official * Nsync pop music site to a teen TV site with all the scoop on The Osbournes, anti-drug content developed by Fleishman Hillard is free and easy for the site developers--and fun and ubiquitous for the visitors. Even the NASA site, one of the most visited sites by youth, includes a "micro site" called "Explore Space...Not Drugs" that includes games plus advice on taking care of yourself if you're interested in becoming an astronaut.

According to Jokela, more than 18,000 of these partnerships links have led to more than 480 million non-paid online impressions.

Consider it the public relations equivalent of banner ads.

No doubt, it's easier to establish partnerships when the content you are offering is as noble as preventing illegal drug use among teens--and it's a nonprofit effort. I would guess that the likelihood of finding Huggies content on the Gerber site will be a long time coming, even though the audiences for both are the same.

Yet some businesses do thrive on partnerships. Take Avis rental cars, for example. From its web site you can click on a tab called "Partners" and get information about earning Avis points with travel partners as varied as Hilton Hotels, Singapore Air and Eurostar passenger trains. You can even click through to the home pages of those partners, leaving Avis behind. Not all Internet site managers would be open to such an idea.

If linking disparate commercial interests online poses a challenge, don't overlook the opportunities on an extranet or intranet to meet your audience where it is. Think about ways to provide news and information content on sites for related-topic transactions or on sites for other departments, job functions or communities. Today, you may have a link to bring readers from these various extranet or intranet sites to your news site. Tomorrow, you may put your information directly on the sites people visit daily.

Sheri Rosen, ABC, invites you to share your digital knowledge, sheri.rosen@usaa.com. She is assistant vice president, Employee Communication, at USAA, a leading financial services company based in San Antonio.