Month: August 2009

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

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.”

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.

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

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.