Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, The Day after the Official Launch

Yesterday was the official launch of my 4th book published by Pearson, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, co-authored by Brian Solis.  This is the first time that I worked on a year-long writing project with Brian, who is not only a pleasure to work with but he enriched the process and made this a wonderful and thought-provoking experience for me (Thank you, Brian).  Every page of this book illustrates our passion for public relations, social media and technology, and how PR 2.0 is reshaping a well established, century-old industry.

In the past, keeping in mind my first book was published in 2001, it was much more time consuming to track the coverage of prior book launches and measure the benefits of the relationships I developed with audiences, even in terms of sales.  Even then, we were able to see the Web analytics, for instance, web visits, page views and time spent on the site, but still relied on the IT department to deliver those stats to us.  However, today, we are directly involved in the conversations and also can manage the measurement portion, as there are so many more tools and resources that allow us to review the results of our efforts within seconds.  There is nothing more gratifying than hearing the direct feedback from your network and seeing how social media communications create excitement and dynamic conversations in Web communities. Through social media, you can ignite passion in others; passion that leads to action.

For the official launch of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, we posted our SMR on PitchEngine, distributed a traditional news release, created blog posts, sent out social network updates, participated in a blogtalkradio interview, shot video clips, etc. As a result, we saw the conversation grow and increase between yesterday and today.  In 24 hours, here are a few ways that we measured our efforts.  The views on the SMR were close to 200 at the time this article was published.  There were comments on the SMR, numerous comments on Brian’s blog as a result of his Putting the Public Back in Public Relations post and we also noted many of tweets and retweets about the book (via tweet replies and search.twitter.com). On the PFS website, there was a notable increase of 800% website traffic as compared to the average number of page visits in the month of March.  And, best of all our ranking in terms of PR books went from #5 to #3 in our category (also increasing the book sales cycle) on Amazon.com.

I want to thank everyone for their good wishes, feedback and participation.  We hope you enjoy the book and keep the conversation going!