1. Search is important to PR.  What people see when they do a search does influence their perception of your company. It also affects your brand value. And now that the search engines have changed the way they display results with the integration of news, blogs, feeds and video into the web search results pages, there are more PR opportunities in search than ever before. Google launched Universal Search, Yahoo brought in Blended Search and Ask calls their version 3D.  Listen to Mike Grehan talking to Dr.Ralph Wilson of WilsonWeb about the Future of Search.
2. News habits have changed. Reading news online began to catch on as far back as 1995.  Pew Internet reported that the number of Americans reading news online tripled in the next three years. The share of traffic leaving the News and Media industry for Multimedia sites increased by 196 percent from April 2006 to March 2007, according to the Hitwise US News and Media Report.
   • Print News websites received 29.7 percent more traffic from Google in March 2007 than in March 2006
   • Broadcast Media sites received 35.9 percent more traffic from Google in the same time period
   • News Aggregators and portals were also significant sources of traffic for News and Media websites
3. Social news sites influence trends and traffic: Digg, Newsvine and StumbleUpon are impacting how and where people find their information.  A Wall Street Journal article about social news sites talks about the hidden influencers that are taking root online. At digg, with nearly a million registered users, a mere 30 people are responsible for submitting a third of the stories that hit the digg front page.  Making a relationship with the right influencers could catapult your news content onto page one and result in a flood of traffic to your website.

Online news sites, social news and search engines have changed the way people access information.  Figuring out how to deliver the right content to the right people in the right way is the challenge for 2008.

If you're not yet up to speed, get a fast education in online PR and social media.  Learn how you can make the most of these new PR opportunities. And make sure they are in the budget for 2008.