Revolver

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.

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.

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

Punch have announced the latest offerings of support to achieve a successful PR campaign, nodding to the importance of social media tools in particular.  They recommend six specific steps to achieving this.

1. Engagement – In an age where knowledge is free and consumers are more likely to be acquainted with the products that are relevant to them, Punch say that engagement is a key element when it comes to influencing brand perception online, leading to positive conversation.

2. Conversation – As social media has the potential to be like a fan to the flames of a relevant and interesting story, they say by highlighting news and articles to relevant consumers is a great way of expanding brand reach, whilst also creating online chatter around a subject.

3. Targeting – Reaching out to specific individuals via social networks is a way of influencing industry leaders and initiating interaction with them, resulting in positive relationships emerging.  In general, responding to specific consumers directly will serve to assure users that there is a human behind the brand, not an automated robot, and in the long term can help in the development of a group of brand advocates, says Punch.

4. Addressing Issues – One of the best uses of social media is to address any issues that consumers may have with a brand, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. Punch say that positive feedback should be met in a positive way, whilst also negative sentiments should be listened too and tended too.

5. Crisis – Crisis communications exercises are difficult at the best of times, but as Punch reveal, social media can play a bit role in measuring how much a crisis has affected users online, whilst also social networks are a great medium for keeping people updated, ensuring a measured process of the dissemination of information.

6. Search Engine Optimisation – Punch are aware that the promotion of content through social networks is a great way of generating backlinks to a brand website. With Google having recently implemented social networking conversation into search results, and the value of links from social networks being high, brands can benefit from significantly increased website traffic from social networks.

Needless to say, by outlining the tools and the subsequent benefits of social media this in turn highlights the value and need for digitally enabled public relations consultancy.

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?

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.