More on SEO and PR

Interesting post over on Daryl's blog this morning, about Bell Pottinger's launch of a new Search Relations service, which promises to fuse together expertise in search and PR.

The agency says: If you need to make sense of social media and what it means for your brand, if you need to be prepared to deal with online issues or crisis management, if you want to make the investment in your website really work as a communications tool and if you want to effectively manage your brand reputation throughout the digital space, from Google to Facebook - talk to us.

What I find interesting about this is the notion that search expertise, social media expertise and PR expertise are something different. There seems to be a raging debate at the moment as to whether all PR agencies should simply deal with SEO and social media as just another part of their core business, or whether we need specialist agency divisions to focus on this brave new land.

In particular, it's worth looking at the debate from a few weeks back between Weber and Rainier/Custard, discussed in some detail on their respective blogs here, here and here. For those who don't know the background, Weber launched a social media team earlier this year, and Gareth Davies at Custard wrote a letter to PR Week arguing such a move was unnecessary. It all kicked off, leading to some sharp comments from both parties, which are worth a read.

For what it's worth, lots of publishers (my own former employers included) hired new teams of specialist hacks to work on online news when it first launched, arguing that they needed different skills and knowledge to effectively deliver what the online audience demanded. Of course, once they worked out it was pretty much the same audience, they decided it was cheaper and easier to integrate the two teams and get the regular hacks to learn the new stuff and do both jobs for the price of one salary. A similar thing is now happening with hacks starting to develop stories for blogs, podcasts and video downloads.

I suspect PR will end up going the same route, eventually.