Valley PR Blog

Intranets amputate PR’s long-tail

By Angelo Fernando on September 26th, 2007 In Social Media

Danny Sullivan’s article in AdAge yesterday (“Why you better learn the PR side of search engines”) brings up the usual suspects in the so-called walled gardens: Facebook and the fate of Times Select at the New York Times.

Which made me wonder about another walled garden, the corporate intranet, which locks down a large portion of the world’s digital content. I recognize that some of it should be for internal consumption only, but if you check your own intranet, you’ll see a lot of it would fill in details of a product story or a new direction that no amount of press release verbiage and ‘about us’ updates could capture. Search engine crawlers can’t peer into these areas of an organization, and they miss the valuable long tail PR opportunities.

People have speculated for some time that intranets (those “balkanized fiefdoms” as Shel Holtz eloquently put it) will quietly go away, or be supplanted by the collection of social media presences in an organization –blogs, IM, tagging, and even enterprise-type Facebook-like applications.

I can’t see this happening very soon because intranets are often seen as a management (read: control) tool in the hands of HR departments; allowing employees to generate content and rank what’s valuable, what information should be shared, and what ought to questioned might seem like allowing the inmates to run the asylum.

But I do believe that PR and marketing people do a poor job of evangelizing the strategic value of intranet content; of getting HR (and often IT) to understand the long tail windfall of moving away from the walled gardens to “open plains,” and making search engines an ally in PR and marketing communications.

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