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Are PR Agencies Redundant in 2009?: Mark Creaser

The focus of traditional PR still seems to be heavily on print and broadcast media, which are, as pointed out in the Social Media Today article, still the mediums with the biggest numbers. The article claimed that some 88% of newspaper reading time is in print and I’ve got no reason to doubt that figure.

How much do numbers matter though? Surely effective marketing is all about who’s in the audience, not how big it is?

The power of online is in the level of engagement. Done well, a brand’s online presence will have personality that’s much easier to convey on screen than in print. It’s much quicker (and cheaper) to build valuable relationships online; there are no print deadlines, no word limits, no editorial guidelines, no boundaries.

Where will this leave traditional PR? Nowhere fabulous, I suspect. PR probably is still partying like it’s 1999 right now, but it’s very nearly time for the music to stop. For many small and switched on businesses, the return they’ll get from engaging with the world through the web will be much higher than sticking with old-school PR.

Digital Agencies are already elbowing PR aside, and within a couple of years, a traditional PR agency will be fairly niche. Times change, and in 2010 people will want to feel increasingly engaged with the brands and people they choose to do business with.

In a world where your relationship with your customers and prospects is the single most important thing in your business, the arm’s length approach of using traditional PR will seem as outdated and as engaging as sending a fax.

Read the article that got me thinking here: http://bit.ly/2UVV8A

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Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors: Hubspot

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Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

UK interest in online PR will peak in September 2009: Google

Google has just announced an update to its Insight for Search tool which now includes predictions for future search volumes.

I thought I’d give it a quick test on a few relevant terms. First up, online PR.

According to Google, search volumes for “online PR” in the UK will reach a peak in September of this year. They will tail off dramatically in October, rise again a bit in November, fall off again at Christmas – and then reach another spike in March 2010 – but not as high as Sept 2009 (interesting to note that the graph has shown a recurring pattern over the last few years – what happens in September to spike interest in online PR? AdTech?)

As noted at the Google Research blog: “Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations.”

For example, anyone in the business of selling online PR services may want to focus their efforts on September 2009 and March 2010.

There are also ramifications for PR content development. You might plan to develop specific content for the future based around predicted keyword search volumes.

Of course, as ever, this all hinges on the accuracy of the predictions. And as Google are quick to point out, they are only extrapolating from previous data. Still, better than nothing.

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76% Of Businesses Do Not Understand What PR Is: pr2go

The owner of pr2go, the online PR business has criticised practitioners for failing to communicate what the discipline entailed after discovering that 76 per cent of businesses didn’t understand what public relations was.

James Hobday, CEO of pr2go, said that the statistics had come to light as part of ongoing marketing activity for the business. The online service stripped back the PR discipline to its most basic form, offering businesses and agencies the opportunity to access affordable PR.

The service, which sees a team of journalists with experience across a broad range of sectors prepare press information and distribute it on behalf of our clients for a flat fee, has proved a big success, both with businesses wanting localised PR but also with marketing agencies wanting to add value and offer the service to their clients.

“We’ve implemented a fairly aggressive marketing campaign to raise awareness and generate business, and the thing that has appalled me is the lack of understanding of what PR really is,” said James.

“To date, 76 per cent of people we’ve spoken to have not understood what PR is. We’re not talking your average man in the street here, we’re talking marketing managers and directors of large businesses with multiple regional sites needing localised PR.

“We spoke to more than 500 business people seeking to raise the profile of their company across the UK, and their definition of PR varied from telesales to mail-shots. Very few of them understood that it involved the use of online, broadcast and print media to get their key messages and stories across,” he said.

“It concerns me as it is such a massive industry and for those incorporating PR into their communications strategies to have such a weak understanding of what it means suggests that PR practitioners are missing the mark significantly when it comes to actually demonstrating and justifying their product,” he added.

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The problem(s) with social media monitoring technologies: No Man’s Blog

Social media monitoring tools get hauled through the wringer by a user who has tried them all – well worth reading the full post.

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“Don’t think of social media as a marketing channel”: Scaling Social Media « Webtrends

Excellent comments from Justin Kistner at Webtrends: “Having started by building social media programs with systems that I rolled myself to building out a global social media program for Webtrends; I can say that a big realization has emerged from what Jeremiah and Tony have been talking about. Businesses need to think about social media as a communication channel. They should be planning for it and evaluating it using similar KPIs as they do their phones. It’s not a question of if they should talk to customers, prospects, partners, etc. The question is how efficiently they’re doing it.

However, that’s not what businesses are currently thinking or doing. Most businesses are still sticking their toe in the water of social media and as a result have seriously under invested in the space. Large Fortune 1000 companies are gripping about spending $30K on software and handing it over to super small teams–sometimes a single person. Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team? Or a single intern?!! How can they expect to evaluate performance when the team is so under water that they can’t even think?

The reality is that if businesses want to be successful in participating in social media, they’ll need to allocate resources in proportion to the volume that exists for their brand. Small companies can get away with small teams. Large corporations will need large departments. They will be structured like call centers with IVRs, scripts, answer trees, etc. It will take a substantial investment in staff training, infrastructure, and rolling out business processes. Everyone in the company will have to know how to use the tools and different departments will be responsible for different pieces of the conversation.

There is wide spread confusion about how much to invest and how to measure value. To help, Forrester or someone should do a study comparing the amount of conversation hours large brands have on phones, email, and social media. That would help businesses understand the relative investment to make. It would also help them determine which channels are most efficient so they can push conversations to their most efficient channels. We’re deploying a cross-departmental, multi-channel, global social media program here and we plan to share the details for our customers’ reference.”

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Schuyler Brown: Enter the Golden Age of PR: Exit Reality

As we speak, or blog, or Twitter, the Information Age is spawning its evil progeny, The Golden Age of PR. It will be an era defined by its irresponsible use of words to generate commercially driven versions of Reality. Brands are ditching advertising, which is really pretty transparent in its intentions, in favor of spin and PR, which really is not. This shift is partly because advertising is failing and partly because PR is right for the times.

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FriendFeed: My Part In Its Downfall (video)

This is very amusing. And turned around very quickly. Enjoy.

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PR’s love affair with press releases (part 94)

Don’t let traffic numbers and search results give you a false sense of security about the success of your PR program. If you can’t tie it to a specific business result, you’re just wasting your precious PR dollars.

Amen.

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Seth Godin’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.

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So true.

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