Al these campaigns offered an element of intrigue and many a call to action, encourage online surfers to get involved.  Ikea created a Facebook page showcasing their showroom, where fans were encouraged to ‘tag’ items displayed in order to win them, promoting brand awareness and customer interaction. Burger King promoted their restaurant with a man in a chicken suit who would perform any commands viewers typed in, resulting in 5million hits in the first five days alone.

The viral campaign for the film ‘The Blair Witch Project’ was surprisingly the most effective, with tantalising websites provoking questions of “Is it really real?” amongst other canny web posts of fake newspaper clippings and police reports, resulting in huge box office success, raking in $29million during its first week of release and roughly $249 million to date worldwide.

The list proves how a clever idea and the use of the web can promote your product in a new and triumphant fashion.

We are pleased to note that we have been implementing the suggested SEO and SMO strategies for our clients for some time now.

So how do you know if your PR agency is SEO and social media ready? Odden proposes a six question quiz. The main points are below.

* You need both social media and SEO strategies.

* As discussed previously on our blog, Social Media Optmisation (SMO) can be integrated with SEO strategies to increase your business’ online visibility, particularly through organic search on search engines such as Google.

* When it comes to SEO keyword optimisation, the keywords you have been optimising for on your web pages and in your blog posts should also be optimised for in social media content, along with links back to your website pages on these particular topics.

* You need to get to know your target audiences so that you can customise online content to their interests. A good way to do this is by conducting a survey including questions such as: what social media sites do you visit and how often? What type of search do they use for story research? etc. This should ideally be the first thing you do, in order to assist with developing a blog content plan.

* Develop a blog content plan that not only includes content on your company but also industry specific topics that will be of interest to your target audiences, including journalists and bloggers. Ideally, you want blog content to reach social media news and bookmarking sites and this is where providing quality content can help.

* Have good quality, keyword optimised blog posts on your website as well as interesting and useful content on your social media profiles.

Odden also speaks about establishing your PR agency’s true core competency: traditional or digital PR. We believe that with a highly qualified team with experience in varying fields, it is possible to have a PR agency that can operate competently within both areas.