Revolver

As Ashley Friedlein’s of E-Consultancy has revealed (New metrics and business models for digital publishing – selling outcomes not inputs), last year, the Newspaper Marketing Agency in the UK found that 56% of newspaper site visits last for under one minute.  That’s not a great deal of engagement with content.  If increasing traffic leads to greater numbers of unengaged readers, then who cares.  It has been long argued that only publisher’s have access to the data that advertisers (and PR firms) should really care about eg readership figures for specific stories, engagement time with specific pieces of coverage, etc

However, as Friedlein points out, advertising and PR clients are now in a quite powerful position – they know not only the input they’ve paid for (ads or press coverage generated), but they know the outcomes that these inputs have created (or not).  They can now easily compare different input mechanisms and see which ones perform better than others.  In the context of PR, those that are focussing on delivering outcome based campaigns are clearly going to fare better than those that deliver inputs.

In short, engagement is the name of the game.

But lack of engagement exists everywhere says Escherman PR.  The New York Times has nearly 2.3 million Twitter followers – and yet the click throughs on links to its stories via Twitter often barely break into double figures.  Even the best ones are in the low 000s.  Massive reach in this case isn’t necessarily translating into engagement with content (at least not on the scale that you might imagine).

Over in Sunny South Africa, marketing strategist Jonty Fisher raises an interesting question: is social media’s most natural fit with PR?

Disputing the popular view that it is a discipline that should be standalone channel or function in the marketing mix, Jonty contends that rather than being simply another channel, social media has taken on a platform role alongside traditional media such as television or print.

Neatly summing up the nub of the matter, he puts it thus:

“Let’s be frank, before the term ‘earned media’ became a buzzword amongst the social media crew, it’s essentially exactly what PR agencies have been doing for decades. Public relations (much wider than media relations alone) is all about connecting a brand to its audiences, using media pitching to create free publicity (earned media), events and one-to-one interactions to drive word of mouth and brand engagement (sound familiar?), the influencing of opinion leaders (ditto) and the creation of public campaigns to educate and affect perception of target consumers about the brand (still with me?).”

Back in sunny Scotland, that’s precisely the line of thought we followed when setting up Revolver. Whatever you call it (from digitally-enabled public relations to plain old Digital PR) the practice of engaging with the social media has to be driven by the same communications principles and techniques you’d apply to any PR campaign.

That social media is different kind of animal is true. That it requires a slightly different approach and skill set is also true. Apart from that the old school media rules still apply, and any organisation that loses sight of that essential principle runs the risk of blundering into a PR crisis of their own making.

Companies cautious about beefing up their digitally enabled public relations only need look at Nestle’s experience to see why ignoring the expanding field is no longer possible.

The world’s biggest food company is reportedly set to launch a campaign to defend its reputation amid stinging criticism on social media sites.

PR Week reports that the Swiss firm is eager to address a range of issues, from long-standing concerns about its formula milk to a more recent hijacking of its online marketing services by critics.

The publication reports that in 2009, Nestle suffered a social media crisis after its invite to influential parenting bloggers in the US on Twitter was taken over by activists and turned into a “highly visible” anti-Nestle campaign.

While there has been no official comment on the online PR push, PR Week said a company source had told it the firm is keen to counter criticism because “stories don’t die online”.

Whether you like it or not, consumers will research and talk about your company online. If you want to be in a position to monitor, manage and respond appropriately to that, then you’re going to have to invest in Digital PR.

Revolver PR has called upon companies to invest in Digital PR training for young entrants to the industry.

Responding to recent calls from industry figures for the range of qualifications available to both aspiring and current public relations practitioners to be more digitally orientated, Scotland’s leading Digital PR agency has challenged communications firms to invest more heavily in training staff on the job. The company, with offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh, believes that organisations must be prepared to put time and resources into providing staff with the support required to get to grips with the digital media.

“While there is a need for existing PR qualifications to encompass digital issues in order to meet the growing demand from agencies for digital PR practitioners, there is a limit to what you can expect such course to achieve. The digital media moves at the speed of light and is in a constant cycle of evolution and change, meaning that formal course materials are at risk of falling out of date before they’ve even been written,” said Revolver PR Managing Director Iain Bruce.

“In our experience new staff benefit far more from on-the-job Digital PR training than they do by following a course-based syllabus. While this requires more time and resources to be focused upon each individual, it’s a process that ultimately produces far greater returns.”

A number of industry commentators have recently stated their belief that young people need to be more digitally oriented in their qualifications in order to meet agencies growing demand for trained digital PR individuals. They suggest that recruitment consultants are now struggling to find suitable candidates and have call for potentials employees to be formally taught the foundations of digital knowledge.

Revolver PR, conversely, calls for employers to invest in youth through a process of in-house digital PR training, whereby employees are given instruction on the job as opposed to studying through external educational institutions.

“There is far too great a number of wasteful media courses out there that do not prepare young people for the future as it is” says Bruce. “On-the-job training is much more beneficial when considering that public relations companies require young individuals who pay attention, are keen to learn and who take direction without hesitance.”

Whilst the benefits of this are disputed somewhat within the industry, Revolver is of the opinion that internal training in digitally enabled public relations consultancy and social media usage benefits the company just as much as the individual.