[Panorama]
8 July 2011
Thanks to Fresh Business Thinking for providing some helpful guidance and insight from some of PR's leading lights.
First up is Louise Stewart-Muir, Joint Managing Director of Say Communications, who looks at how the return on investment from online PR has made it many people's first PR port of call.
With the prevalence of the internet in all areas of our lives, it seems strange to be having to make the case for the value of online PR (Public Relations). Yet so many people still seem to irrationally prioritise seeing their name in print over positive coverage online.
In reality, online PR is one additional channel that when correctly harnessed will help you to achieve your business goals. A positive reference from an authoritative 3rd party source is a tremendous asset and can significantly impact on your reputation and bottom line, regardless of the medium through which it appears. However, online PR holds a number of advantages over its traditional counterpart that has fast made it the number one tool in your communications armoury.
The most important benefit of online coverage is it tends to deliver a far higher return on investment.
Print publications tend to have a long lead time and a short shelf life but a positive story that is published online is both immediate and permanent. Consequently, the time and effort that is spent researching, writing and pitching a press release continues to pay dividends for a far greater period of time.
Furthermore, depending on the nature of your business, your website acts as your shop window or even your sales floor. A steady stream of online coverage will dramatically boost your visibility in search engines and drive extra traffic to your website. Free online tools such as Google Analytics even allow you to track how people have come to your website, thereby allowing you to measure the success of your PR efforts and justify your spend.
Online PR is fast becoming the most important medium in the PR toolkit but don't be fooled by those claiming it is anything other than a new channel to reach your target audience and change suspects into prospects, prospects into clients. As with any other form of communications content is king. The best PR activities have always been about conducting two-way conversations between an organisation and its public.
Newswires, blogs, video and social networking sites have all provided new platforms through which these conversations can take place. But remember, it's not about distributing semi relevant information, content needs to be well written, on message, highly relevant and targeted.
Tom Church from The Scott Partnership discusses Social Media for SMEs and why it enables smaller companies to compete with bigger brands.
Over the past decade the term 'social media' has gone from geek buzzword to global phenomenon, with people communicating and connecting with each other via various platforms such as, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Social media are real-time, global and interactive communication tools allowing people to broadcast their views, messages, images and events to the masses. However, this is not just a platform for old friends to reunite or your best friend to share unflattering photographs of you to hundreds of people. With so many people participating in social media there is a huge opportunity for businesses to communicate with the consumer. Facebook, the largest and most popular social network currently has over 500 million members, or for a growing business, 500 million potential customers.
Social media are low-cost and no-barriers-to-entry platforms that can allow businesses to interact with internal and external contacts on a regular basis. With millions of potential customers and investors available at the click of a button it can be tempting to spam them with your product or service.
Although shameless self promotion is fine in small doses, the most effective social media campaigns often consist of engagement, collaboration and a willingness to learn. Listen to what customers are saying about your products and respond to all comments whether positive or negative. This not only improves the image of the company's customer service but can also open your eyes to what customers really think of the brand and products. This can lead to collaboration between the business and its customers, helping to achieve an improved product or service that the consumer is happy with. Discussing industry hot topics can facilitate in improving brand image.
By engaging in these debates a SME (small and medium enterprises) can quickly
establish itself in the market and become visible to thought leaders, trendsetters and prospective customers.
This may all sound easy enough to do but the success of a campaign comes down to the consistency and activeness of your online presence. Managing social media can be extremely time-consuming especially when dealing with several different platforms at once. It is important to invest time in developing a social media presence and understand that you will not see results overnight.
Through regular and meaningful conversation with customers, prospects, industry leaders and investors, social media can be extremely fulfilling and effective in helping your business to grow.
By Leigh Richards, Founder The RIGHT Image PR & Digital Marketing Be advised. If you haven't realised it already, online PR can transform your bottom line and boost your company's image way beyond where you would be without it. And as it's relatively low-cost, it allows even the smallest organisations to reap the benefits too.
By conducting a concerted and planned online PR campaign you'll reach prospects that you would never reach with push marketing alone. A strong story will be picked up by dozens of online news sites, some the online reincarnation of popular print magazines; whilst others are a newer generation of specific online vehicles.
Potentially, your story will go far; often well beyond international boundaries.
If those who read your news are interested, they'll be driven to your website and a percentage of them will convert into leads and sales. Better still, those who you don't reach might find you more easily when searching. However, like anything, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. There are pitfalls to avoid too. So rather than re-inventing the wheel, it is worth taking the advice of an experienced PR consultant. You can find one through the Chartered Institute of PR.
Naturally, the first step is preparation. You need to ensure that your website and phone systems are capable of handling responses and making the customer interface welcoming and efficient. Also your site must encourage visitors to follow your company on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or even YouTube.
The next step is to have something worth saying. Weak stories are a waste of time. Be open minded, as your views on what you feel is interesting might not be what attracts journalists. So ask yourself if it passes the "so what test". Additionally, on-line news sites will favour stories which bring something of interest to their subscribers. So put yourself in their shoes. Again an experienced PR consultant can immediately sense the right angle; so enlist their advice. They are best placed to generate the right stories and to tailor them to specific groups such as trade or consumer.
Then find the right online distribution services. There are a myriad of them to choose from, some free, some not, some specific to particular groups, some are very effective whilst others make little impact.
There are those that are straightforward and highly productive like RealWire; whilst others can seem complex to the uninitiated in terms of targeting and usage. You should also supplement their work by tweeting the news and placing it on your website and Facebook accounts.
Once a strong story is out there, coverage will come in almost immediately and at this stage you should review both successes and failures. Suddenly though, your on line visibility will be transformed and your messages will be on a world-wide stage.
However, be careful what you distribute. Even when you have selected the right distribution service there are a variety of pitfalls in sending the wrong text! Small mistakes in the release will stay online for years! Some have major legal consequences. Again, this is where PR consultants can bring experience to each opportunity, optimising the impact of news and doing so safely. They also have their own contact base of journalists to mail to in addition to what you can achieve with wire services. So be advised of the benefits of online PR but also be prepared to take some advice too!
Social Media: Old School Techniques Meet New School Technologies
By Pete Hendrick, MD, Rocket Communications
The last decade or so has thrown up its fair share of the "next big" technology innovations/trends and the media publicity that has surrounded them has made most difficult to ignore. Some have warranted the attention and have achieved the predicted heady heights, take the iPod for example. Others however, such as the millennium bug or WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) have turned out to be little more than hype.
Arguably the most recent of these hyped up trends is social media. As was the case in the early days of the Web, social media has had its fair share of sceptics, adopters, exaggerators and advocates.
While this is all part of the course for a new technology trend as it goes from introduction to widespread adoption, perhaps never before have we seen a trend where so many prejudices have clouded seeing the real advantages it can offer a business. And never is this truer than in the B2B market- Business to Business market. No matter where marketers are in this lifecycle of adoption, one thing is clear: Social media is not just hype; used correctly it offers a powerful set of tools that can provide valuable customer insight and should form part of a marketer's customer service toolkit.
Too often marketers approach social media with trepidation because of the ambiguity of the phrase itself. The term social media blocks together a whole host of tools and technologies which they feel unfamiliar with, nor see relevance in. Both these points are inaccurate. The basic old school principles of business and marketing haven't changed; striped back social media is just another communication channel in the marketing mix. What has changed however is that social media has commanded that these basic principals have become even more critical to a business, because in today's market if someone doesn't like you or your product, it's not just them and a couple of their friends that know about it; the power of social media means we all know about it and fast.
For this very reason, marketers need to stop being scared of the risk of social media and instead consider what the risk of not investing may be. This will involve a shift in mindset and approach. One of the first obstacles to overcome in achieving this is dismissing social media without quantifying why it isn't relevant. This has in the past led to poor decisions when it comes to investment. While it's true that social media for the B2B market will not see a flood of millions customers it doesn't mean to say it simply isn't relevant.
Quite the reverse in fact. The B2B buying process is fundamentally changing and examining the figures makes it difficult to justify not investing. Today 9 out of 10 buyers say when they are ready to buy they will find you (demandGen Report) and 93% of B2B buyers use search to begin the buying process. Source: Marketo. If they can't find you they can't buy from you and worst still they may find your competitors first.
B2B marketers are also used to operating in controlled environments where there are a set of clearly defined metrics. For too many, social media takes them outside of their comfort zone into a world where success is measured by the immeasurable. In social media you are very much reliant on people discussing your brand in environments which are sometimes outside of your control. But consider this; if it wasn't working for brands, then it surely would have fizzled out by now. People will talk about you and your brand regardless. Surely it's better to be part of the conversation than not.
There is also a common fear that people are not properly equipped to implement a robust social media strategy. At its simplest social media is content marketing which is delivered across a new set of digital channels. That's not to say we should dismiss it as a specialism, or the time and effort you need to invest to get it right; but at the heart of social media is creating compelling shareable content. Marketers have been doing this for years. As well as compelling content recognising and utilising those channels which are most relevant to their organisation is fundamental. Once these have been identified the explosion of social media channels has meant that business networking has never been easier and marketers have a plethora of social networking communities at their disposal that can be used to exchange services with existing and new contacts. As a final point you don't have to do it alone either. Today's market is overrun with companies who can help to shape your strategy and guide you on your way.
Instead of fearing social media or getting caught up in the hype there's a lot to be excited about if you're a B2B marketer. There isn't a company out there who wouldn't want to be considered a thought leader or be able to utilise a network of channels that allows them to crowd source and engage their customer base. Social media allows for all of these things and much more. And what's more the tools to unlock this potential already exist within your armoury; you just need to reposition them slightly. So what are you waiting for, take the plunge and jump on the bandwagon and don't forget to enjoy the ride.