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).

The media relations landscape has changed as traditional publications have downsized, re-focused online or been eliminated altogether.

As we all know, fundamentally, Public Relations serves two groups:  The companies that pay for representation and the journalists, analysts, reporters and increasingly, bloggers, that rely on PR professionals as a source of news content.

With this in mind, and considering advertising budgets have shifted online combined with changes in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies to deliver more value to their clients.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, 91% of respondents reported using standard search engines to perform activities such as research companies, past media coverage and subject matter experts.  In the same study, 64% reported using social networks, 55% use blogs and 50% use Wikis as social media tools.

The increased use of search and social media both by the media and by end consumers will no doubt motivate PR professionals to better understand the digital PR strategies and mechanics of successful SEO and social web participation.  Keyword research, content optimization and promotion along with link building make up the core of search engine optimization for news content.  Press releases, archived webinars, white papers, video, podcasts, blogs and past media coverage are all opportunities for news SEO.

Making it easy for journalists or end consumers to find and interact with news content can provide a substantial boost to PR results in a time where the value of PR budgets are in question. Digital public relations savvy agencies are making both traditional media relations, digital media relations and optimized news content work together.  Not to mention working to partner with journalists to provide content via push delivery, but can also optimize (SEO) news content to make it easy for story researchers to find companies the public relations firms represent.

The trend in hard times is for companies to cut all marketing costs that are not tied to direct sales.  Yet, some companies as we can vouch for are shifting budgets to smart, creative digitally enabled public relations efforts.  When no one else is marketing, there’s even more opportunity to stand out to prospective buyers.  So don’t shy away from digital pr, it’s the thing of the future don’t you know?

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

The team at Revolver are excited with the announcement we are joining forces with the digital signage specialists YUVA.

The partnership is currently on track with the phase one development of a media mapping system that creates visual representations of the news and information landscape for a range of industries.  Once completed the technology will be adapted to deliver a raft of real-time media monitoring, promotional and advertising applications to clients in Scotland and the UK.

Not only this but cross media PR and marketing campaigns have such great potential for public relations consultancies as brands are increasingly calling for a joined-up approach to corporate communications, seeing their core message deployed across every possible channel in an integrated manner.

“Our system will target customers that need an affordable, easy to use solution that will work in the most varied of public environments. These range from dynamic wayfinding signs to digital posters, menus, maps, realtime info-graphics, transport schedules and twitter streams,” said YUVa founder Dan Roy.

YUVa – whose clients have included BBC Scotland, The Lighthouse and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra – will work with Scotland’s leading Digital PR agency on delivering a number of proof-of-concept and practical digital signage applications for clients.  According to many reports the market for out of home digital advertising is set to grow rapidly over the next few years, with once recent analysis predicting that the global market will enjoy an annual growth rate of over 26.8% between now an 2013.

What a smart move!

Channelweb has reported on SCC’s IBM accreditation, describing them as demonstrating significant expertise in the breadth of IBM’s technologies which is said to help businesses achieve breakthrough productivity levels, accelerate value creation and achieve agile business operations.

This comes at a busy time for SCC, who has said that companies face a key strategic decision at the moment that they must either get right or face missing out on the potential benefits of virtualisation projects.

The statement follows reports that many server and desktop virtualisation projects are failing to meet their objectives. Responding to claims that only four per cent of UK customers are achieving the expected ROI from virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) installations, Europe’s largest independent technology solutions provider believes that IT departments must proceed carefully to avoid making similar mistakes.

“Companies across the UK are facing one of the biggest decisions of the decade as they consider the long overdue upgrade to Windows 7. If they take the right path they’ll get the desktop of the future, but if they get it wrong they will be on the verge of making a hugely expensive mistake,” said Rhys Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at SCC.

Leading the debate through powerful digital pr, SCC demonstrates the critical need for getting virtualisation right for the future of desktop environments.

A recent survey by industry analysts suggests that online is the biggest consumer influence compared to more traditional channels.  A reported figure of 30% of consumers engage with brands via social media, demonstrating the impressive platform available to businesses.

Whilst social networking sites were designed initially for peer-to-peer interaction, and will most likely continue to be the primary objective of users on Facebook and MySpace, this does not remove the possible opportunities for brands in the form of digitally enabled public relations.

Through an astute approach, understanding consumer behaviour and acting upon it, brands have free reign to become part of the digital consumer conversation within social networks.  As I see it, a 30% share of 300 million-plus users is a healthy enough audience, wouldn’t you say?