I hear a LOT of noise from every single PR agency about how they need to adopt digital PR strategies. This is usually assumed to be getting all in the PR agency to tweet, find and pitch to media folks via Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and what not! While they are tactically right in a way, they may not be the foundation of what digital PR actually entails, at least in my opinion.
The foundation of digital PR, in my head, is to make PR a proactive practice and less of a reactive practice. Marketing is moving to inbound marketing, so as to not spam customers/prospects – from push to pull. So, my view of digital PR is to let media (who act as via media between a brand/company and its end customers, whether B2C or B2B) consume and be interested in news and views about the company proactively. This is quite different from what is happening right now – actively push so-called news and quotes via tactics like press releases, emails and a barrage of phone calls.
So, here’s an attempt to explore the scope of what digital PR means for PR agencies. This is just a start and I’m sure there are more than can be added to it to make it operationally feasible and into a meaningful practice area for PR agencies to augment retainers. These could (or, may) help agencies showcase specific and tangible value and hence make it viable to clients to pay for it, over and above so-called media relations.
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What is digital PR?
Using digital and social media tools to augment offline and online PR
Why is digital PR needed?
- The traditional way of doing PR (using traditional tools) is seen as intrusive, just like traditional advertising.
- Media representatives are getting increasingly active in digital and social media platforms
- Helps in getting the clients search-related benefits
How can digital PR help clients?
- By packaging content to be able to better pitch digital versions of offline mainstream media publications
- By pulling relevant media to the story/client, instead of pushing PR efforts to them
- By helping clients take advantage of search engine benefits by placing their content online consistently
How can digital PR help media?
- By letting media professionals get relevant news updates in a communication mode of their choice
- Helping media professionals follow client stories proactively, instead of pushing it to them
- By getting client stories in multiple formats so that they could place it in online media better, easier
Top 3 pre-requisites from an agency perspective
- An exhaustive, frequently updated media list, sorted by location, area of expertise/interest, publication and social media footprint (Twitter, FB and LinkedIn profiles, to begin with)
- An online dashboard of sorts to track what the media folks, at least on Twitter, are talking about/opining about
- An agency-owned platform to post client-related content (any kind), like a simple blog + social handles, at least on Twitter, FB and LinkedIn.
6 broad narratives around Digital PR
- PR as a story-telling process, beyond pushing ?stories?
- PR as a visual catalog, beyond text-based approaches
- Proactive PR, as against reactive, push PR
- Taking over the media/newsrooms of clients
- Digital monitoring and response strategy
- Going beyond mainstream media, to reach non-media influencers
1. PR as a story-telling process, beyond pushing ?stories?
The first step in adding digital to PR is on-going content creation. So, if agencies are merely meeting clients periodically and creating pitch notes, they should continue to do so, but with a difference – the pitch notes won’t talk to individual (targeted) journalists via email and phone anymore. They will be hosted on an agency-owned platform, on behalf of clients, to catalog their progress/journey. Why should it be in an agency-owned platform and not in individual client platforms? Simple – if it is collected in a central, agency-owned platform, it becomes easier for relevent media professionals ot track the updates… as against these residing in 50 odd client websites. Also, most clients have a global, strict guidance of what is added in their website and getting PR agencies to change is will be relatively tough.
Think of it like an on-going story of sorts – every client organization has a lot of things going on – most of it is functional and boring and a few, interesting. The agency’s job, as a client’s digital PR agency is to pick, periodically, all the stories and make those that they know will be valued by mainstream media and other non-media influencers into interesting content packages.
Example: After a monthly meeting with client CEO and communications head, instead of sending them a mail with what the agency will pitch the media for the following month, they could articulate the client progress in short, crisp paragraphs and upload them on the agency-owned portal, under relevant client page, with correct tags to depict the client and its industry well.
This platform should have easy subscription options (subscription via email, RSS feeds, social network tools etc.), categorized by tags. So, a tech. journalist could subscribe to articles/updates tagged as #tech and be updated in a tool/platform of his/her choice. In essence, pull PR as against push PR.
This on-going content update also helps in Search Engine Optimization.
2. PR as a visual catalog, beyond text-based approaches
Every time agencies meet clients, they could make it a practice to shoot quick 2-3 minute videos and upload them on an agency-owned YouTube channel (with appropriate tags). Helping clients with a quick and simple ‘how to’ for videos would be a precursor to this effort.
The idea is to push in context these videos specifically to every media outlet that has an online presence (which is almost everyone). This is all the more pressing a need for press releases.
3. Proactive PR, as against reactive, push PR
Journalists and news reporters these days have a lot of opinions that they air on media vehicles beyond their employer-owned publications and channels. At the very least, they air a lot of opinions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
From a master media list, sorted by ?beat? (interest/expertise), adding social media footprint in the list would help agencies make custom dashboards to track opinions of a set of journalists following a particular beat. For instance, adding the Twitter handles of all sports journalists in a Tweetdeck column could help them track what they are talking and look for matches within client network (within the sports industry category).
4. Taking over the media/newsrooms of clients
Most client websites have a newsroom section that is treated like a web 1.0 property. The page is updated with media mentions and press releases, all written in a formal, stiff tone. This newsroom need not address mainstream media alone and be treated like this. Instead, since it resides online, helping anyone who searches for the brand to land on that page, the tone and manner in which it is updated could be dramatically different, if only we have a clearer understanding of who its target audience is.
The content could go far beyond mentions and press releases and be a real catalog business-as-usual in the client organizations, but written in an interesting, story-telling narrative, including videos, photos etc. beyond just text. I have written in detail about the need to look at newsrooms differently, earlier. This effort, obviously, is a huge push towards search engine optimization!
5. Digital monitoring and response strategy
Regardless of differences like B2B or B2C, clients these days get a lot of online mentions. Tracking offline media mentions is a regular, commoditized job for many PR firms. But, for digital monitoring, it has to be a real-time (or near real-time) task.
This would require making a master list of all possible keywords for a given client and tracking them across the web, using a tool or manually. Not just that, the real value of this exercise is to offer counsel on how to respond (and engage in a dialog with appropriate commenters online) in real-time or near real-time and be seen as a proactive and active communicator.
6. Going beyond mainstream media, to reach non-media influencers
These days, everybody is ?media?. That is, anybody opining on social media is also a ?media? vehicle on their own. Digital PR should be able to identify, track and engage with non-media influencers online and use organic or paid tactics (PR agencies are supposedly weak in handling PR outreach given limited budgets from the communications team, however) to help them share client updates, within relevance and context.
To do this, consistent digital monitoring would help identify these non-media influencers, track them via dashboards and engage with them when in need, by giving them the right kind of content at the right time in the right format/package. For instance, if a Twitter user opines about headphones frequently, he may need to be given updates on a music-hardware client, but packaged as a tweet, with image, link and well formatted tweet, as a suggestive outreach, instead of sending him a press release and expecting him to possibly break it into smaller points to tweet it.
Pic courtesy, agencypost.