Flickr Image: bunchofpants
If you don’t know what day your birthday is for 33 years what else may you not know? I was talking to my friend Frankie and he was relaying the story about how he celebrates his birthday on both January 14th and 15th. I’m in favor of stretching out a celebration, but it was the reason he gave that I share with you today. Frankie’s parents told him his birthday was on January 15, 1954. One day, while going through important family documents, he ran across his birth certificate and to his (and his mom’s) surprise his stated date of birth read January 14, 1954. When he asked his mom about the contradiction, she told him that he was born close to midnight so she “thought” it was the 15th and she just never looked that close.
In a BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas post last year I addressed Google and the Associated Press (AP) “Google Alert Users: Are You Getting What Google’s Not Paying For?” and it appears the other shoe has finally dropped. In Softpedia’s article there’s speculation and rumor about why Google is no longer updating AP content, including a quote from Google that leaves more questions than answers. My concern is the impact on public relations practitioners who rely solely on free content. The “why” is equaled in importance by “what” the impact will be to media measurement reporting? Just yesterday Linda Vandevrede announced a special “Meet the Associated Press in Phoenix” event on the Valley PR Blog. Perhaps one of the attendees can ask the AP their thoughts on the Google issue. More importantly I hope the pr pros planning to attend are also making arrangements on how to best monitor the coverage their new contacts are going to help them get for their clients.
If you rely solely on Google alerts and have AP media relationships how will you now monitor, report, and analyze the impact of your news coverage? Do you even know the full extent to which this can compromise your existing reporting benchmark? A prime example of the importance of AP stories is “Two health-care proposals may get boot, Dems say” . If you’re in Healthcare PR how do you explain to the C-Suite why you didn’t know about this story? How much will “There was no Google alert for the story so I didn’t know” cost your organization?
While Frankie has never missed a birthday, in fact the last 23 years he’s celebrated two days per year, he did have to go back and change all of his other documentation to match his legal birthday. PR pros will not escape so easily from the impact of this decision by Google. The only cost to Frankie was a few hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles, updating other government documents and work information, but what do you have at risk by not having confirmed data sources, specifically the AP content?
How will you manage year-over-year expectations of clients when your coverage declines? How will you gauge the impact of key messages and campaigns if you can’t access the information via Google? Is it important enough to make an investment?
