THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 4

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 4 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

If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.

Digital PRs are moving to Bluesky. Here are my initial thoughts on if it’s worth you giving it a go.

• If you just want a way to keep up with Digital PR and SEO posts, it’s already easier to do that than on Twitter these days with cleaner feeds and a working search function

  
  

• How useful it will be will depend on how much of an audience, and then activity, it gets within the Digital PR bubble

  
  

• There’s a great SEO following already there and the Digital PR one is growing nicely

  
  

• Having to build your following and followers from scratch is annoying but it is pretty straight forward

  
  

• They have a thing called “Starter Packs” which are basically lists of users related to a topic. I made one here for people that post smart stuff about Digital PR

  
  

• There’s also a Chrome Extension that will help you find your Twitter followers on BlueSky

  
  

• There’s Starter Packs for Journos too which is useful. I might try and share a round up of the key ones that are out there

  
  

• #journorequest has daily activity already. Not on the level of Twitter but fewer PRs seeing them on there means less competition 👀

  
  

• If you miss the old Twitter, you’ll like the fact that the design is basically the same

  
  

• However, some of the functionality is a bit lacking, like the chat for example, but that should quickly improve given the rapid growth in the last week

  
  

• It’s much easier to just see posts for certain topics as you can follow feeds which can be great for seeing trends and opinions relating to any campaign topics you might work on

  
  

• Pretty much everyone agrees it’s a much better alternative to Twitter than Threads was

  
  

• Overall - I would give it a go and make an account. There’s already plenty of valuable posts on there from Digital PRs, SEOs, and Journalists, and you can get a lot of insights from a quick 5 minute scroll through your feeds

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

The PR Insider: How To Stay Ahead of the Latest Trends and Insights in Digital PR

The PR Insider: How To Master Digital PR in Australia

Ahrefs: The Tabloid Technique: How to Easily Land Local Links With Digital PR

WPR: How To Get Press Coverage This Christmas - Eight Essential Tips

Distinctly: Learn how to supercharge your AI Digital PR strategy (Whitepaper)

Distinctly: How to tailor reactive strategies to suit your industry

NOVOS: How to Get Results with DPR Around Black Friday & Cyber Monday

NOVOS: 3 Reasons Your eCommerce Business Needs Brand PR

BuzzStream Podcast: Building Your Digital PR Toolkit: Expert Tactics w/ Olivia Lott

Linking Out Loud Podcast: Regional Differences - Mastering Digital PR in Spain and LatAm w/ Laura Miguez

The Digital Marketing Podcast: What is Digital PR w/ Jane Hunt

Marketing vs The World Podcast: How PR Can Influence All Parts of the Funnel - Not Just Brand w/ Natasha Hill

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: The most overused words in AI written pitches

Louise Linehan on LinkedIn: How to add 65% traffic to an article in 3-ish minutes

Amanda Walls on LinkedIn: Pitch to speak at the next Manchester DM

Google: Updating our site reputation abuse policy

Search Engine Land: How to do audience research for SEO

Katie Berry on Twitter: Why you should write for your audience not for SEO

Moz: 21 Top AI Tools for Content Creation in 2025

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ You don't need to know all the answers, you just need to know where to find them. Saying "I don't know but I can find out" is totally fine.

2️⃣ Don’t lose sight of who your target audience is - it's not your peers. Great feedback internally and on LinkedIn is great, but if it doesn't then also connect with Journalists and their readers, you're just getting vanity feedback rather than results.

3️⃣ Link building being harder for smaller brands is a bit of a myth. You don't need as many links as those big brands in order to compete with the other sites around you in the SERPs. Everything is relative. Your local business doesn't need to be on Daily Mail every month.

4️⃣ If you're outreaching regional/international data, personalise your subject line so the lead is relative to the region/country you're pitching to. A Journalist at Liverpool Echo will care far more about Liverpool ranking in the top 5 of your index than London ranking first.

5️⃣ Set up Google Alerts to monitor what your competitors are doing as well as your own brand/client.

Google Alerts are also a great way of monitoring industry news and what certain sites are writing about a topic using the "site:" parameter.

For example, if you want to see how TimeOut covers Christmas stories, you can set up an alert for - site:timeout.com (“christmas” OR “xmas” OR “festive”)

Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.

1️⃣ Obesity Rates by Country

A great dataset by World Health Organization detailing the obesity rates in (pretty much?) every country. A very useful dataset if you want to rank countries with the best and worst obesity rates, as well as analysing the gender split, and how the rates have changed dating back to 1990.

2️⃣ IFPI Engaging with Music 2023 Report

Called “the biggest study of it’s kind” (probably fair), this report has so many nuggets of data and insights that you can use for any music related campaigns. The report covers topics such as music consumption habits, how music impacts our mental health, streaming music, the most popular genres in different countries, and even more!

3️⃣ US Department of Transportation October 2024 Air Travel Consumer Report

These reports by the US Department of Transportation get released semi regularly, with new data coming out fairly recently in this report. If you have a US client and are looking to create any content around flights or airports, these reports are essential to check out. Lots of great data on topics such as flight delays, mishandled baggage, oversales, and customer complaints.

4️⃣ Open Subtitles

Subtitle scripts from Movies and TV Shows can be a great way of creating some very interesting data-led insights around language used.

5️⃣ OECD Average Annual Wages by Country

This only covers OECD countries, so you may need a larger dataset if you’re doing a global index campaign for example. OECD does however cover the major countries, making this a reliable source if you need the average salaries in a country - a smart way of weighting any of your data for better accuracy.

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.

1️⃣ UK Burglary Hotspots by MoneySuperMarket

📊 80 RDs DR 50+

This campaign is a really great example of a huge data-led insights piece providing genuine value to a brand’s audience. The campaign by MoneySuperMarket analysed their own internal data for home insurance quotes to find the UK postcodes with the highest and lowest rates of burglary claims over a three year period.

I really like the campaign page as well which features a fab tool to look up your own postcode, as well as some expert tips and valuable content that tick a lot of boxes from an E-E-A-T pov.

2️⃣ How Realistic is Sex on Screen? by ZAVA

📊 14 RDs DR 50+

11 follow links DR 50+ to a 404 page 🫣. Always keep an eye on any campaign pages for your clients (new and old) that did well to make sure those pages haven’t been taken down.

What I love about this campaign is how it’s taken a potentially dry campaign with some solid survey stats and combined it with a topic from a different sector to widen the audience appeal of the content. There’s also a great message to the data which fits the brand perfectly, around how sex is portrayed in movies, compared to the reality.

3️⃣ Who Are The Most Common Complainers Online? by Uswitch

📊 7 RDs DR 50+

I really love this creative use of reviews data by Uswitch who analysed negative TripAdvisor reviews of popular tourist attractions to research the most common names of those complainers. I thought the timing of this from a Reactive PR pov was great too, coming in 2020 and managing to find data that capitalised on the “Karens” trend.

7 RDs DR 50+ sounds quite low for a campaign idea that I think deserves better (and as I often say, may have done better since these RD figures aren’t 100% accurate). Originally done in 2020, I definitely think this is one of those ideas that could work really well if done again with a new angle to it.

4️⃣ Workplace Woes: Meeting Editions by Atlassain

📊 568 RDs DR 50+

This campaign did NUMBERS! 1.7k total RDs, 568 of which are DR 50+, 113 DR 80+, and 462 follow links DR 50+. Atlassain did a big survey of 5,000 workers and probably not all that surprisingly, found that most people think there’s too many meetings and not enough them are productive.

It’s a topic that’s not only super on brand for Atlassain, but also has a really wide audience appeal, which no doubt contributes towards the wide variety of publications the campaign landed on.

5️⃣ Reimagine The Game by The Economist

📊 7 RDs DR 50+

This final one is more of a “really cool piece of content” than traditional campaign inspo because something like this would be really bloody tough to replicate. Siemens, a sponsor of Bayern Munich FC, used some seriously slick technology to record noise levels at five home games for Bayern.

The noise heatmap for different parts of the stadium is fascinating and something that would be super interesting for other live events too. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how difficult or expensive something like this would be to replicate, but if you work with a big Tech brand, something like this could be a great piece to analyse going into a brainstorm.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 4. 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

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 🙂