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On this week’s episode of Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley chat about the recent changes in Google’s handling of news releases and the impact that has on PR agencies.

Gini argues that these changes will motivate good PR agencies to become even better. It forces us to go back to basics, to focus on relationships, not on search ranking hacks. Martin suggests that we need to reconsider the concept of “owned media relationships,” that we must look at them as shared relationships with our clients. Joe believes that media relationships always are “functional.” They exist only as long as we can be of value to the journalists at the other end. And we must constantly be focused on what the person at the other end of the line cares about and having something interesting to say about this.

For the past several years, PR pros have been led to play the SEO game to match Google’s rules and guidelines. We succeeded at doing this in the past and we’ll succeed in adopting to the new algorithms. Change isn’t bad for any industry. Change is just bad for those who refuse to learn and change themselves. As Martin says, It’s always time for the PR industry to come up with a better way of doing things.

We also talk about the recent SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas. Martin attended this inaugural edition of a new conference by the folks who organize Austin’s SXSW conference. And he found it to be a return to the smaller, more intimate gathering of a community drawn together by common interests. Great energy. Much more intimate. Much more like SXSW in its early years. Worth attending this year. Worth considering attending next year.

We close out this week’s episode with a comment from Mark Buell relating to our earlier discussion about protecting your identity online. Mark recommends that you should “regularly check which third party applications have access to your Twitter account. If the service doesn’t require ongoing access (like Hootsuite, Klout, etc.) revoke its access. Third party access is a weak link in your social media security chain.”  Thanks go to Mark for a practical useful tip.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter. Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.