I saw this one on the Gaping Void this morning and couldn’t help sharing it as a second cartoon for today.

Image: Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur

Well yesterday I noted that I’d give the results that may begin to offer some insight into the value of PR and a press release.

Well hear are the results from the release for my company’s small business marketing blog.

• Unique Visitors: 362 (91 this morning)
  Placements on Google: 173
• Placements on MSN: No reporting
• Placements on Yahoo: 68
• Most Refered Site: CNN Money

So what do these results really tell you? To me it shows that Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 releases can really drive traffic. The question does remain as to what the real value to the company was.

While I may have promised an answer, I really don’t know more than when I started aside from the initial traffic to the site.

The real question that we will be tasked with is keeping the traffic coming to the page and following us through RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

How would you categorize the test?

Working for a large company, we are always hearing: how does this contribute to the business? As a flack its always tough to defend what PR does, especially when not many people realize what a PR team actually does.

Our search team has valued our releases, search enhanced via Marketwire between $2,000 – $5,000, but it is just on an educated guess or hypothesis. Trying to apply publications’ ad rates is equally skewered when looking for results.

So how can one expect to answer the age old question mentioned above? (more…)