Good question. Some of its practitioners have been around for almost a decade (perhaps more) yet most people still don't know what it is.
It helps to start with clearing up a common confusion between 'public relations' and 'media relations'. PR is a broad set of tools and approaches designed to influence the outcome of a decision. It might include lobbying politicians to get a change in the law; it might mean getting a seat at the table at a standards body to ensure the chosen standard meets your needs; it might mean managing the communications with a community cited near the construction of some unpleasant new industrial building.
Much of the time though, people say 'PR' when they mean 'media relations'. Media relations is a small subset of PR. In the simplest terms, it is about securing the maximum amount of positive editorial coverage for your organisation, company, product or service, usually in an attempt to increase sales. The flipside of this is managing any negative coverage, but this is a challenge rarely faced by most companies, for whom the biggest threat is not a damaging front page splash but total indifference.
In transferring their skills to the online realm, most PR practitioners have focused on the media relations aspect, believing that they can and should try to treat bloggers like journalists. This is a valid option, and - with some tweaks to the approach - can be successful. However it is a very limited assessment of the scope of 'online PR'.
We use what we would call 'online PR' as part of any digital marketing campaign. The first step is to establish what you want to achieve. For us, it seems a waste to just generate 'noise' in the digital world, when it is so simple to track the success of that noise in creating leads. So we establish goals and ensure our client's website makes it easy for prospects to fulfil them e.g. a maximum of three clicks to close them in some way, whether it is a sale, subscription to a newsletter, blog or feed, registration for an online community, or at worst, the download of more information (usually after leaving their details).
Then we apply 'online PR' tools to create interest. These include:
- Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (we separate the technical and copy tweaks you can make to your own website (SEO) from the work you do to enhance its profile (SEM) - e.g. link building, PPC)
- Blogging (great for SEM - as you'll know if you found this blog by looking for 'content driven marketing')
- Social network interaction (e.g. we're targeting LinkedIn groups for a new client campaign)
- Audio/Video (professionally produced video shorts can be very cost effective if distributed via YouTube; podcasts and webcasts can deliver great results, even from small audiences)
- Other social media (we're currently trying out Twitter to see how it drives traffic to one of our personal blogs - check out the feed down the left at http://www.bookofthefuture.co.uk)
You could include more tools, but that's all these different media really are. The reality is that the fundamentals of online PR are the same as they are offline: write something interesting and people will want to read it.
Create and post content that rewards, educates or entertains. Do it via a medium that makes it easy to find. And make sure that whatever it links to gives you a measurable result. That for us is a decent definition of online PR. But you could also call it intelligent, content-driven marketing.
Labels: agency, content, digital marketing, intelligent, intelligent content-driven marketing, manchester, marketing