THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 6
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 6 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:
The latest Digital PR news and resources
5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity
5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns
5 successful campaigns from the archives
NEW - The latest Digital PR jobs
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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
The High Flyers PR Course is now available for free
The PR Insider: How To Master Digital PR in Spain
Repeat Digital: Is B2B PR Really Harder than B2C PR?
Distinctly: Digital PR for healthcare businesses in France
Jessica Pardoe: Why It’s Time To Say Hi! To Bluesky
Trust Signals Marketing: Digital PR Examples: 30+ Surveys That Earned Backlinks and Fueled SEO Success for Brands
recluedo: Under Google’s blind eye, a growing parasite ecosystem is flourishing
PRmoment: What’s next for PR in 2025? Founders make their predictions
Charlie Biggs-Thomas on LinkedIn: Five tips that have helped me land links in tier-one American titles
David White on LinkedIn: Why most Digital PR campaigns are missed opportunities
Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: The emotional drivers behind successful digital PR campaigns
BuzzStream Podcast: Successful Digital PR in Australia with Ellie Sumner from Prosperity Media
Page One Power: Insights From brightonSEO 2024 - How to Evaluate the Value of a Link
Ross Hudgens at brightonSEO San Diego: Data-Driven Lessons from 12+ Years of Content-Led SEO
Roni Shehy at brightonSEO San Diego: How to get hundreds of organic backlinks through statistics link building
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ If you’ve found a great data source but you're not sure how to use it, look at the backlink profile of the data source. This will show you the different ways that other websites have cited that data source which can provide added creativity inspiration for how to use the data you've found.
2️⃣ When looking for data sources for data from different countries, rather than searching on your native Google domain, go to the Google version of the country you're looking for the data from and translate your search into their language. You're more likely to get more relevant results when you search on the native Google domain rather than searching on a foreign version of Google.
3️⃣ If you are estimating which celebrities earn the most on Instagram, check that they actually use their account to post ads. For example, The Rock is one of the most followed celebs on Instagram but doesn't post sponsored content, so obviously isn't the top "earner".
4️⃣ Not getting any good responses from your Journo Request for an expert? Head to Google news and search for "[keyword] expert". You'll then get a list of news articles where experts on your topic are being quoted. Now you know who they are and that they're happy to be quoted in the media, you can reach out to them to see if they're able to work with you too.
5️⃣ Personalising your pitches shouldn't just apply to the content of the pitch. You can also personalise when you schedule your pitches to hit the inbox of your key contacts. Working out the best time to email pitches to a certain Journalist is a bit of a guessing game until you've got a history of emailing them. Once you've sent them a few pitches, you'll be able to see your history of what time they usually open your pitch at. You can then use this data to work out the best time to send your pitch to that person.
Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.
This week is a special Kaggle edition of this section, with five amazing datasets that I’ve recently found on Kaggle.
1️⃣ Friends - The One with the Dataset
Kaggle is a goldmine for datasets like this that would take a bit of time for you to collect yourself, but are already available on Kaggle. This dataset contains transcripts for every scene from every season of Friends, which opens up a lot of creative data analysis opportunities. What I love about this dataset is that you’ve even got bonus data too, such as iMDB ratings, viewership, and sentiment analysis of every scene in the first four seasons which is super intriguing.
2️⃣ Forbes Global 2000 Dataset: Revenue, Profit, and Rankings (2024)
Each year, Forbes releases a list of the world’s largest public companies. This dataset gives you the list of all 2,000 companies along with financial data on each one, which includes sales, profits, assets, and market value.
3️⃣ International Football Results from 1872 to 2024
This next dataset contains results of every International Football match from the first official one in 1872, right up to the last set of International fixtures last month - nearly 48,000 matches in total. The dataset also includes data on penalty shoot-outs, and goalscorers for every match excluding Friendlies.
4️⃣ F1 Race Data from 1950 to 2024
If you ever want to do a F1 data analysis campaign, this dataset should be your starting point. The dataset consists of all information on Formula 1 races from the first season in 1950, up to the current season, detailing drivers, constructors, qualifying, circuits, lap times and pit stops.
5️⃣ List of England Football Results since 1998/1999
Another insane dataset where all the data collection leg work is already done for you. This one has results of every English Football League and Cup game since the 98/99 season, up to November 14th 2024. That’s results for every league from the Premier League down to League 2, as well as the FA Cup, League Cup, EFL Trophy, and Community Shield. An amazing dataset for analysing things like team records over the years, form during certain months, and home vs away form.
In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.
Since it’s the festive season, I’m focusing on Christmas themed campaigns here this month ☃️
1️⃣ Sustainable Christmas: How to Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner by 100Green
📊 140 RDs DR 50+
The festive season always bring a lot of creative Christmasy campaigns, but not that many imo really nail that balance between creativity and an idea perfect to that specific brand. This campaign from last year by 100Green does just that. Their survey found that 61% of people in the UK would like to try to have a more eco-friendly Christmas this year, so they created this really well put together guide on to grow all the ingredients you need for your Christmas dinner.
This is also a great example of where only looking at the number of referring domains a campaign earned without any extra analysis can be misleading. 140 RDs DR 50+ sounds amazing but when you dig into the sites, you realise they’re all from a massive Newsquest syndication. Which is still bloody amazing, but from an SEO pov, there’s an important distinction to be made between 140 unique linking domains, vs 140 RDs, 139 of which are syndications, and won’t be passing the same level of SEO value that 139 unique links would be.
From what I can see, the campaign only earned links in the lead up to Christmas last year. This could be a great example of revisiting old campaigns, especially seasonal ones attached to an event like Christmas. The calendar of when to plant your different Veg could also provide some more outreach angles throughout the year.
2️⃣ Christmas Tinner by GAME
📊 36 RDs DR 50+
Most of you have probably seen the Christmas Tinner campaign before. It’s a great example of a campaign that everyone has an opinion on and gets people talking. The term “viral” gets overused these days but I think it’s a fair description of the Christmas Tinner.
The backstory of the campaign I think is really interesting for those unaware of it, as it’s the perfect example of taking a campaign that was a hit a number of years prior, and giving a classic idea new life. You can read about the original origins of the campaign in this post by Mark Perkins, and then Rise at Seven’s case study on how they revived it to go viral again. Unfortunately the page all the links were built to is now just a 404 page and GAME have no visibility on the SERP for “christmas tinner” 🫠
3️⃣ The Most Dangerous Christmas Songs To Drive To by Chill Insurance
📊 12 RDs DR 50+
I love this creative spin on Christmas songs by linking it to which might be the most distracting while you’re driving. Creative data pieces don’t always have to be massive analysis projects, and this is a relatively simple research piece.
There isn’t a huge amount of popular Christmas songs when you really dig into it (which I have in the past) and all this campaign did was get the BPM for each song. Simple in execution but the creativity reaps its rewards.
4️⃣ Ultimate Christmas Movies by Music Magpie
📊 12 RDs DR 50+
Not every campaign needs to be a huge piece of data-led research, but god the ones that are and that are done well are really cool! In this campaign, Music Magpie analysed 20 famous Christmas movies and ranked them against 25 metrics to determine which was the perfect Christmas movie.
You have your usual ranking metrics like box office performance and audience scores, and of course the classic search volumes! But what I really like is how they counted the number of Christmasy scenes in each movie, based on things such as the number of scenes with reindeers, Santa, snow, presents, elves, etc, which could probably be a campaign to itself just based on the number of Christmasy references during each movie.
5️⃣ Using data to determine if Die Hard is a Christmas movie by Stephen Follows
📊 31 RDs DR 50+
If you’re not aware of the Stephen Follows blog, I highly recommend checking it out, especially if you’re into movies and data. If you enjoy this one then you’ll find a lot more fun data-led insights posts similar to this on his blog. This one is a very detailed and very fun deep dive into the age old question - “Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?”.
Not a Digital PR campaign as such, but further proof that great content will get shared, and that means it will earn backlinks. 83 total RDs, 31 DR 50+.
5 weeks in and we already have a new section added to the newsletter! In this section, you’ll find some of the latest Digital PR roles being advertised. If you’re currently hiring for a Digital PR role and want the position advertising here, you can add it using this form.
Likewise, if you’re looking for a new Digital PR role and are happy to have that advertised, drop me an email and I’m happy to give you a “looking for work” plug in this section too!
Position: Digital PR Specialist at Evoluted (Agency)
Location: UK, Sheffield
Remote/Office Split: Hybrid working - no expectation for regular office commitments
Salary: £28-37k
How to Apply: https://www.evoluted.net/about/careers
Position: US Digital PR Specialist at Legend (In House)
Location: London or Malta
Remote/Office Split: Remote
Salary: Starting salary at €35,000
How to Apply: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4045802900
Position: Digital PR Specialist - ROW at Legend (In House)
Location: London or Malta
Remote/Office Split: Remote
Salary: Starting at €35,000 depending on experience
How to Apply: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4047827537
Position: PR and Senior PR Executives at Connective3 (Agency)
Location: UK, Leeds and Manchester
Remote/Office Split: Hybrid but we often come in two days per week
Salary: Up to £28,000/£30,000 but this is dependent on the role, experience, native expertise, etc
How to Apply: https://connective3.com/careers/
Position: Senior Digital PR Manager at Reboot Online (Agency)
Location: Fully remote - UK
Remote/Office Split: Remote - 4 day weeks (we don't work Fridays)
Salary: £45K starting
How to Apply: email your CV and cover letter to HR@rebootonline.com - addressed to Zoe Blogg
Position: Senior Digital PR Executive (German) at Reboot Online (Agency)
Location: Fully remote - UK
Remote/Office Split: Remote - 4 day weeks (we don't work Fridays)
Salary: £28-£32K
How to Apply: email your CV and cover letter to HR@rebootonline.com - addressed to Zoe Blogg
Position: Digital PR Specialist at Career.io (In House)
Location: Remote
Remote/Office Split: Full Time Remote
Salary: Approximately €35,000
How to Apply: https://talentwwinc.applytojob.com/apply/iaSKIzOI7c/Digital-PR-Specialist?source=Bethany+Referral or drop Bethany Watson a message on LinkedIn with any questions!
And that’s a wrap for Issue 6. Same time again next week ✌️
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Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:
The latest Digital PR news and resources
5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity
5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns
5 successful campaigns that we liked
The latest Digital PR jobs
If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.
Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂
4 December 2024
