Worth More Than Mere Attention

When today’s society said hello to the Internet, when we started making it an everyday part of our lives, when we made best friends of it, we never thought it could change a lot (and a lot, I say) in the lives of every person. Or did we really?

Today, many industries have their digital sides. There is online marketing. There is online entrepreneurship. Even an online education exists.

And now, say hi to digital PR. Or online PR, whichever is appropriate.

Gone, or soon to go, are days when the process is goes from the press to the public. PR firms are now learning to befriend their publics again. Now, the drive is people-first again.

Digital PR puts a premium on what the public needs and wants to know. There is the consideration of the audience’s need to say what they want, ask what they want, to the companies.

And since the trend is again public-centered, PR practitioners are engaged in the online way of making their projects count.

In the hope of making this post more substantial, I am re-posting some parts from http://www.isearchm.com/digital-pr.htm.

Digital PR can be split into two broad categories, proactive PR and reactive PR.Proactive PR

This is most easily thought of as the planned campaign. Elements involved in this will be formulating the message, preparing messaging materials and distribution.

Many brands are still approaching digital PR as an afterthought to their offline efforts.

At its most basic this means making sure your press release makes it to the digital news sites and the bloggers. But to make the most of the internet in order to communicate your message a digital campaign should be planned when the main campaign is planned. In particular consideration should be given to content – what about prepared interviews on video or audio? What about graphics? Is there a way of introducing interactivity?

Should content be going to social media groups that are interested in your brand? How else can you get them involved?

Reactive PR and Social Media Monitoring

Reactive PR is only possible with at least some kind of media monitoring, after all if you don’t know what’s being said about your brand, you can’t respond to it. In the offline world, there is normally a right to reply – a letter to a magazine or a comment to a journalist – in the world of social media there is the option to engage in the conversation. Social media monitoring can additionally be used by brands at 3 different levels, at a strategic level for market research, for communicating the brand message or at the micro level for customer services allowing them to deal with specific individual situations.

The strategic level – a great opportunity for research, what is being said on the forums and in the blogosphere? What do people like and dislike what does this mean for the brand in the next couple of years?

Brand reputation – What is the conversation surrounding the brand? Can we influence the conversation? Are there positive conversations which we need to foster or negative conversations that need containing. Brands should be thinking about supplying material to the positive voices much as they supply recognised journalists and bloggers.

Customer Services – At the micro level there may be particular conversations that are firmly in the remit of customer services. For example those that start with something like “So last week I bought a car and it broke down on the way home”. Stories like this get passed on very quickly. They can gather momentum very quickly, or, they can be turned into a positive experience with a bit of timely and positive intervention.

This is an intense form of monitoring and intervention but there are brands that are doing this very successfully. One approach is to create a specific brand forum where people can engage with the brand and the brand can respond.

There goes. Online PR?