At the moment there seems to be a bit of attention surrounding the challenges that exist for PR agencies in the digital world.  Industry professionals draw attention in particular to the enormous amount of competition, with social media professionals inbedded in competing agencies and specialising in search engine optimisation/marketing, email marketing, web design and build, direct marketing and advertising.  This creates further fragmentation for clients – who do they turn to for digital communications? Reflected Meredith Bradshaw, director of the digital practice at Fleishman-Hillard London.

Bradshaw goes on further to report that in its 2008 annual report, Omnicom (F-H’s holding company) points out that organisations are consolidating their varied marketing needs with fewer agencies.   It reports: ‘In an effort to gain greater efficiency and effectiveness from their total marketing budgets, clients are increasingly requiring greater co-ordination of marketing activities and concentrating these activities with a smaller number of service providers.’

As the strategic communications partner to brands, PR agencies are best positioned to take the lead in digital.  We are in the position to put forward the benefits of digitally enabled public realtions.  As online marketing blog toprankblog.com suggests, you’d be hard pressed to find any modern public relations agency practice that isn’t already researching or implementing a digital PR strategy including search engine optimization, blogging/blogger relations and social media.

As a result, industry insiders are now charged with embracing the online culture of user generated media and the social web.  Participation, transparency and conversation are the buzz words for the future of PR.  The question is, “How to best start incorporating the new rules of the social web into a digital PR effort?”

Come to us, we know