Revolver

At the cutting edge is the viral campaign; the short video clip that is so compelling much of an advertiser’s work is done for them when their prospective customers forward it to their contacts quickly building up an audience of millions.

A whole new industry has sprung up, dedicated to unravelling what makes viral ads infectious. GoViral, for instance, specialises in launching viral campaigns – in part by ”seeding” clips on the web in places where they are picked up by the online populace.

Consumers are becoming increasingly immune to mass marketing and advertising, so viral marketing offers something that doesn’t feel like they are being sold to, making them more receptive to the offer.

What once was much a matter of luck is slowly being transformed into a science. Jimmy Maymann, the group’s chairman, has built a polling system, ”which every campaign is taken through prior to launch in order ensure virality”.

The ideal campaign is edgy, surprising, original, erotic and emotional – and taps into popular culture, he says. His system attempts to quantify these elements.

Prime Example of a highly successful viral campaign is Nike.  Their  clip is one of the all time greatest virals ever, with more than 50 million views globally. Featuring world famous soccer star Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar no less than four times, without the ball touching the floor. The creative material is from Framfab, in Denmark. The product on display is the Nike R10 football boot. A massive discussion on whether the clip was actually real or computer edited drove millions of interested viewers to the campaign.

Framfab won two Gold Lions on the Cannes Lions Festival for the campaign. The other winning clip was The Chain, a user generated initiative, consisting of more than 500 user uploaded soccer sequences edited together as one long clip of soccer celebration.

Another strong campaign and a favourite of mine was the one with the John West employee fighting a grizzly bear off to land a fish – just to go that extra mile for quality. Obviously, it is set up, but with costumes from the Jim Henson Creature Shop it looks surprisingly real, until the bear starts throwing Kung Fu tricks at the “fisherman”.

An unusual viral, it created more than 300 million views and has won ten awards, including Best Commercial of the Year from British Television Advertising Awards and a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions Festival, 2001. Executed by Leo Burnett, the viral brings together the best of advertising and content in one.

Showing that efforts to increase brand awareness without selling anything can actually work.  Bearing in mind that it’s important to provide an incentive that encourages others to spread the word about your product, quickly and inexpensively with little effort on your part.  This creates potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect.

Enlisting a niche Online Marketing Strategies firm specializing in Online PR and Online Community Development in your viral marketing campaign will result in effective viral marketing strategies for brands, resulting in significant online audience development.

A recent survey by Terrapinn in November 2009 discovered that the top three challenges to brands when implementing a Digital PR and Reputation Management strategy were:

1. Shortage of time and resources
2. Lack of in-house knowledge of how to engage online
influencers and how to interact on social networks
3. Keeping up to date with the pace of trends and
technology

Having recognised a shortage of in-house skills, businesses are turning to specialist companies for help with their online PR and reputation management strategies, with 56% of respondents saying that they wanted to employ a specialist Online Reputation Management Company.

As well as this, 93% of those businesses surveyed agreed that “online PR and reputation management will become more important over the next 5 years.”

Undeniably.

When considering Europeans spend more time online from mobile devices than they do reading newspapers or magazines with an average of 6.4 hours spent browsing mobile websites, this is THE place you want your business to be.

With 71m Europeans accessing the internet via their mobile each week, 121m people using broadband and 46% of homes owning at least one laptop, their is obvious impetus for European businesses to jump on the bandwagon and invest of digital PR.

In addition, and particularly more interesting, is the fact that Eastern European countries are expected to see increasing internet pentration. Polish people already spend more time browsing the web on their mobiles than any other nationality, 10.3 hours a week on average.  As accurately put by Alison Fennah, executive director of the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), the study provides a “compelling case for brands to explore” and incorporate a growing number of complemetary interactive platforms into the marketing mix and public relations strategy.  She goes on further to highlight that “mobile is the only medium” you can plan regionally in a properly centralised way.

Your online leg of your PR campaign may be the most important. Most importantly is your message honed and ready?

The most recent player to hone their skills is the BBC.  The latest announcement coming from the corporation is that they are set to shift their positioning on the web with a slashing of online content by half as it tightens its focus.  Less generic content and more links to external sites is the drive.  It will halve the size of bbc.co.uk by closing lower performing sites and reduce its budget and staff by a quarter by 2012.  Digital radio stations 6Music and BBC Asian Network will also close.

Is this something to consider?  Does it pay to have more focused online endeavours? Well, in a word, yes.  This is evident in the BBC’s iPlayer recording of 120m requests for TV and radio shows in January, boosted by Christmas catch-ups and cold weather.  According to the BBC, the online service accounted for 100m requests.  More than 20m views came from its distribution deals with broadcasters such as Virgin Media and gaming companies Nintendo – which now accounts for 4% of requests – and Playstation at 8%.

So the key to online success.  Give your key demographics exactly what they want. Not to mention some nifty public relations work.

The many benefits of the ever evolving phone industry has yet another enticing offer in the form of the new online restaurant booking site Toptable, which has launched a free app for the iPhone.  It allows users to find and book restaurants near their location and uses augmented reality to show where the restaurants are.  Other features include a tip calculator to help with leaving a gratuity and a My Sommelier tool, which suggests which wines go with different foods.

This shy’s in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement of its mobile operating system Windows Phone 7, which features integration with its own search engine Bing, connected gaming service Xbox Live and media player Zune.  The computing giant wants to turn around its fortunes in the mobile industry with the launch of a range of phones this year.  This is exciting when you know that HTC has already committed to building devices which use Windows Phone 7.

Interesting to note when according to the American Mobile Association, total spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010 in the US alone.  Google’s $750 million purchase of mobile ad network Admob reinforces that 2010 will be a significant year for mobile.  From this, many expect to see much more consolidation in the mobile sector.

All of this may well mean that mobile may start to take advertising $$ which would previously have been spent online.  Since it is a new medium however, there remains consumer resistance to mobile advertising, so perhaps it is best for advertisers to favour the soft-sell approach of providing useful information in this space through tactful digitally enabled public relations, rather than pushing hard-selling messages.

For instance, this will work with social media and help to evolve search functions.  Search will become increasingly real-time as users take advantage of Google and Bing search results including Twitter and Facebook updates, or use Twitter Search as a stand alone application to be accessed on your phone.

The advent of the digital generation has fundamentally transformed the nature of public relations and corporate business.

Industry leaders have revealed that the world’s top companies are increasingly turning to social media to convey their messages to both the public and their stakeholders, with 79 % of Fortune Global 100 companies admitting to using at least one social media platform as part of their communications strategy, according to a study by Burson-Marsteller.

On average, companies claimed to have 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook fan pages, 1.6 Youtube channels, and 4.2 corporate blogs.  More specifically, Asia-Pacific companies are more likely to have blogs than engage on other social media platforms.  50% of companies surveyed have a blog, while 40% use Twitter and 40% use Facebook.

Burson-Marsteller Asia-Pacific’s lead digital strategist, Charlie Pownall, noted that regional companies have been slower to integrate social media into their strategies, but are changing. “International firms are leading by example in their use of social media; Asian companies have proved more conservative, remaining concerned about resourcing, costs, measurement and the potential reputational risks,” he said. “As their domestic audiences continue to move online, and as the technology infrastructure improves across the region, Asian companies will come to use social media as the core business tool that it has become in the US and Europe.”
Globally, 82 per cent of the polled companies had tweeted in the last week, and 59 per cent had posted content on their Facebook fan page.  In the prior month, 68 per cent had uploaded a video on YouTube and 36 per cent had posted an entry on a corporate blog, reveals Media Asia.

Media Asia further adhere that companies have used social media to interact with audiences as well as using the platforms to relay their own messages.  Thirty-eight per cent of companies affirmed that they respond to audience tweets, and 32 have reposted user comments.
This is interesting to note when news comes that Twitter has passed the landmark figure of 50 million tweets per day and passes Myspace, whilst also considering to allow businesses to personalise accounts used by multiple memebers of staff by adding their own ‘byline’ to tweets in what is the first of a series of additions for business users.

Not only is digital PR reaching and engaging with the business world but has also been adopted by such major events as the 2010 Winter  Olympics.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics learned from the mistakes of the Turino 2006 Games in their lack of online/digital undertakings.  The Vancouver Committee were aware of the growing benefits of digital media, spanning Facebook, twitter, Youtube etc, that can reach millions upon millions who would otherwise miss the opportunity to view the events news.

Graeme Menzies, director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, also known as VANOC, reflected that “when we looked at the social media channels out there, we examined what they are good at, and how they fit in with our mix,” he said. “TV is TV and radio is radio, but this is something else altogether. In the online world you have Facebook, websites, YouTube, Twitter — so how do they go together? Who do you reach with each of them? And how do you create a package that engages people?”

With that in mind, an overview of VANOC’s online and social media communications strategy was created that touched upon several areas.

“The website is the mother ship,” Menzies said. “Our research tells us that it will receive somewhere in the region of 60 million visitors over the period of the Games, along with between 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion page views.”

What is more, Menzies shares Marshall McLuhan theory that what new media often does is it makes something redundant, and retrieves something that was previously redundant,” he said. “Twitter has retrieved the telegram. It’s a good telegram: Short little sentences and things that are important for the next five minutes, but not so important after that.”

This understanding greatly influences how Menzies personally operates VANOC’s official Twitter account, @2010tweets.  Focused on pushing out links and information, rather than engaging in discussions with other Twitter users, Twitter is to be useful for distributing ticketing information and sharing local-focused items.  VANOC created other Twitter accounts too that act as alert services for people looking for information about tickets, scheduling and transportation

In additionb, the official Olympics Facebook page has well over 350,000 fans. Menzies said his team views the page the same way they view the Olympic venues in Vancouver.  Again, however, Menzies emphasizes that the traffic on the Facebook page is tiny compared to the main website. “Everything we do in our approach to social media is in the context and with the knowledge that the website is the motherlode and the mother ship,” he said.

VANOC approach to Twitter and Facebook is to use them to rebroadcast information from the website, and direct people back to the site. Menzies and his team are not jumping in on discussion threads or adding comments to hashtag discussions.  The YouTube channel is used in a similar way, pumping out videos for months.

“Our job is to organize and host the Games in February and the Paralympics in March,” he said. “We’re done at end of March, so our goal is to be in the moment…being ahead of the pack is just as bad as being behind. We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge or behind the times. We want to be in the moment.”

On that point, he said he feels satisfied. “We’ve got a nice package of communications channels put together to deliver a great experience,” he said. “Of course, it will all change by the time London 2012 comes around.”  The beauty of the digital world.

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?

It has to be realised that social media can be used to inform consumers in real-time of how a corporation is reacting to events that affect the customer. Transparency in the process and access to constant information can help stop a negative story from going viral, a great example of positive digital PR.

Neverthless, embracing social media is a huge undertaking, and involves a large investment.  One prime example being Dell who didn’t shy away from these obstacles, instead they’ve gone above and beyond, truly cultivating a cross-platform community.  They’ve created multiple Twitter handles, a network of blogs, and are very active on Facebook.

Dell is also one of the few companies to publicly state that they created a return on investment from Twitter.  Apparently, Dell’s social media efforts help create $1 million in revenue, impressive I think we would all agree.

Saying that, as we all know social media isn’t all about ROI, but it is possible. Creating cross-platform strategies can lead to the most success, especially when your demographic is already Internet and technologically savvy.

When IBM decided they wanted to start using blogs, they didn’t just create one blog, they created an entire network.  IBM created a way and allowed their employees to write about their experiences, what they’re working on, or any other topic of choice.

IBM capitalizes on the intelligence of their employees to give consumers insight into what happens behind the scenes.  By giving the industry experts they’ve hired a voice, IBM is able to highlight the people behind their products. Users get to see how IBM operates, and are given a direct connection with IBM employees.

Indeed, having a CEO that blogs is great, but increase the number of blogs and you increase the number of connections.  Leveraging your employees to write about what they love conveys the corporate dedication to the industry, accurately described by Mashable, the Social Media Guide.

And I for one am all for it.