Introduction to E-PR

I think it’s fair to say that PR is relativey low down the priorities when most marketers consider the opportunities for applying digital media to support different elements of the communications mix. Advertising through paid search or display ads and using e-mail for direct communications with customers usually take priority. But there are great opportunities and tools out there, in the virtual world, which can support and enhance PR.

What is PR?

Let’s start with the meaning traditional of PR – itself somewhat intangible.

As you will know, PR and Public Relations are often used interchangeably. Unfortunately, PR is also an acronym for ‘press release’ or ‘press relations’. Of course, the scope of PR is much wider than press releases.

The UK Institute of PR (IPR) defines PR as:

‘the management of reputation - the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics”

The ‘publics’ referred to include the range of organisations a company interacts with and is dependent on. These include customers, investors, employees, suppliers, government organisations and non governmental organisations such as charities. Since you are reading this article in ‘What’s New in Marketing’ though, we focus on customers.

The Public Relationships Consultants Association (PRCA) defines PR as:

‘the managed process of communication between one group and another … (it) is the method of defining messages and communicating them to target audiences in order to influence a desired response’.

You can see that the PRCA definition is more action-oriented, in fact, not dissimilar to definitions for direct marketing and digital media often play a role in that.

What is online PR?

Online PR, naturally has similar objectives to traditional PR. Here we simply use the web and e-mail to disseminate messages that reach and influence our audiences within our markets. But the Internet also brings new tools and techniques such as communities, blogs, RSS and the many independent web sites that are available. These techniques harness the network effect of the Internet. Remember Internet is a contraction of interconnected networks.

Mentions of your brand or site on other sites are powerful in shaping opinions and driving visitors to your site. Furthermore, success in search engine optimisation, is partly dependent on links from other sites to your site.

So, the main goal of online PR is maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on third party web sites which are likely to be visited by your target audience. A secondary goal is achieving links through to a destination web site. Such publicity does not usually involve direct payment as for advertising, although “advertorial” on a portal will involve a fee.

“Maximising favourable mentions” also implies minimising unfavourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on other third party web sites. This online reputation management is an important part of online PR also.

To summarise we can define online PR or E-PR as:

“Managing publicity about an organisation and its brands, products or web sites through its online presence and third party web sites and other digital media.”

Differences between online PR and traditional PR

A useful summary of differences between E-PR and traditional PR is that of Ranchhod et al. (2002) who identify four key differences between online PR and traditional PR

1. The audience is connected to organisations

Previously, there was detachment – PR people issued press releases which were distributed over the newswires, picked up by the media and then published in their outlets.

These authors say:

‘the communication channel was uni-directional. The institutions communicated and the audiences consumed the information. Even when the communication was considered a two-way process, the institutions had the resources to send information to audiences through a very wide pipeline, while the audiences had only a minuscule pipeline for communicating back to the institutions.’

2. The members of the audience are connected to each other.

Through publishing their own web sites or though e-mail, information can be rapidly distributed from person to person and group to group.

The authors say:

‘Today, a company’s activity can be discussed and debated over the Internet, with or without the knowledge of that organisation. In the new environment everybody is a communicator, and the institution is just part of the network.’

3. The audience has access to other information.

Often in the past, the communicator was able to make a statement where it would be difficult for the average audience member to challenge – the Internet facilitates rapid comparison of statements.

The authors say:

‘It takes a matter of minutes to access multiple sources of information over the Internet. Any statement made can be dissected, analysed, discussed and challenged within hours by interested individuals. In the connected world, information does not exist in a vacuum.’

4. Audiences pull information.

This point is similar to the last one. Previously there were limited channels in terms of television and press. Today there are many sources and channels of information –this makes it more difficult for the message to be seen.

The authors say:

‘Until recently, television offered only a few channels. People communicated with one another by post and by phone. In these conditions, it was easy for a public relations practitioner to make a message stand out.’

These differences show that in one sense, online PR gives companies additional control over their messages – it can release its messages and stories via its own site where they can be immediately accessed by potential customers without filtering and distortion by media owners. At the same time, online PR gives companies less control. Competitors, independent web sites, even those created by disenfranchised customers, can create negative PR.

It’s often said with conventional PR that “bad news travels fast”, but online it can often spread faster and wider as different publishers pick up a story and communicate it via their web pages and e-mail. This need for speed is another difference. But help is at hand here and is we will see there are tools, some free for monitoring these mentions.

What are the main online PR activities?

Activities which can be considered to be online PR include:

1. Communicating with media (journalists) online.

2. Link-building and generating editorial

3. Blogs, communities and RSS

4. Managing how your brand is presented on third party sites.

5. Creating a buzz – viral marketing.

Let’s now look at this in a bit more detail.

1. Communicating with media (journalists) online.

Communicating with media (journalists) online uses the Internet as a new conduit to disseminate press releases through e-mail and on site.

Options to consider include:

·         Setting up a press-release area on the web site.

·         Creating e-mail alerts about news that journalists and other third parties can sign up to

·         Submitting your news stories or releases to online news feeds. Examples include: PR Newswire: (www.prnewswire.com), Internetwire (www.internetwire.com/iwire/home), PressBox (www.pressbox.co.uk); PRWeb: (www.prweb.com), Business Wire (www.businesswire.com). Some of these charge and some are free. Of course, often direct contact with journalists will still be required to get a story published.

·         Creating a business blog (see below)

Publishing press releases on your own site and via newswire sites can all also help with search engine optimisation – providing more matches as searches seek information related to your markets and providing backlinks to your site.

2 Link building and generating editorial

Link-building is a key activity for search engine optimisation (SEO). It can be considered to be an element of online PR since it is about getting your brand visible on third party sites and creating favourable mentions. It is normally conducted as part of SEO, but this is often a missed opportunity to communicate other positioning messages in conjunction with a PR agency. Many online publishers are seeking content which can sometimes be syndicated across several web sites. Alternatively a PR agency can help setup editorial deals where a company is mentioned favourably in the online newspaper or magazine, just as in traditional print media.

Link building needs to be a structured effort to achieve as many quality links into a web site as possible from referring web sites. It also requires control over links from sites, aspects that need to be controlled include:

·         Which page on the linking site is the link placed (does it have a high page rank in the search engine – home pages are typically best)?

·         Which page on the destination site does the link point to (it is often best if it one that has been optimised for a limited set of keyphrases)?

·         Which keyphrases are used in the accompanying text (search engines use this to assess the quality or relevance of the link which ultimately can determine the position of the listing on the search engine pages)?

·         Which keyphrases are used in the the link anchor text (the text which forms the link anchor text is very important in governing relevance)?

McGaffin (2004) provides a great introduction to link-building. The main principle of link-building is as follows. He says:

“Create great content, link to great content and great content will link to you

However, a structured link building campaign is needed to maximize the number of quality links which are from sites which have a high page rank and from pages with the right content and anchor text.

Assessing links to your site

Type ‘link:site’ in Google to see the number of quality links into a page on your site (as judged according to page rank). E.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.wnim.com.

Note this also includes internal links within your site. To exclude internal links and include pages with lower page rank or that do not have a true hyperlink, but contain the URL, Google this:

www.url.com –site:www.url.com .

For example

http://www.google.com/search?q=www.wnim.com+-site%3Awnim.com&btnG=Search

This will show you other potential partners that you can improve your links with, although many will be directories that are limited value.

3. Blogs, communities and RSS.

Web logs or ‘blogs’ give an easy method of publishing web pages which can be best described as online journals, diaries or news or events listings. Think of the football stars who post their comments about their season on their personal web sites – they are ‘blogging’.

An example of a useful blog which can keep marketing professionals up-to-date about online marketing developments is www.marketingvox.com. Another example, with news items and articles structured according to the chapters of my book is Davechaffey.com (www.davechaffey.com).

There are many free services which enable anyone to blog (for example Blogger (www.blogger.com) which is part of Google).

Business blogs

Business blogs are created by people within an organisation. They can be useful in showing the expertise of those within an organisation, but need to carefully controlled to avoid releasing damaging information.

An example of a business blog used to showcase the expertise of its analysts is the Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/meckler).

Online communities and social networks

Companies can also post to forums to promote their services, but it must be done in a sensitive way – it must actually contribute value to the community. For business services, for example, search engine marketing or online PR specialists may post to the E-consultancy forum with suggestions to help others which also raises their profile since they will have a signature on their e-mail which promotes their own service: www.e-consultancy.com/forum.

For consumer communities it may be possible to respond to comments from consumers or even seed online threads if done in a sensitive way.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an extension of blogging where blog, news or any type of content is typically received by specialist reader software such as RSS reader (www.rssreader.com). It offers a method of receiving news that uses a different broadcast method to e-mail, so is not subject to same conflicts with SPAM or SPAM filters.

Many journalists now subscribe to RSS feeds from sources such as the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm) or Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/newsrss.jhtml). Both of these site explain the principles of RSS in more detail.

RSS will become much more important when the readers are integrated into more popular web browsers and e-mail readers.

4. Managing how your brand is presented on third party sites.

As part of online PR it is useful to setup monitoring services. It also necessary to have the resources to deal with negative PR as part of online reputation management. Microsoft’s PR agency reputedly has a ‘rapid response’ unit that can respond to online PR.

These are some of the alerting services:

·         Googlealert (www.googlealert.com) and Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) will alert you by e-mail when any new pages appear that contain a search phrase such as your company or brand names. This is free for the basic service where you specify the brand name to monitor.

·         NewsNow (www.newsnow.co.uk) – breaking news stories in the UK divided by category and with an alerting service.

·         Moreover (www.moreover.com) – another news aggregators

·         Traditional news aggregators (www.reuters.co.uk, www.businesswire.com and www.factiva.com)

Online reputation management services offer more in-depth analysis and cover other issues such as unauthorised use of logos and use of trademarks. Examples:

·         www.reputationintelligence.com

·         www.brandintelligence.com

·         www.bigmouthmedia.com/products_services/brand-noise

5. Creating a buzz – online viral marketing.

We have left viral marketing until last since it is often not considered to be part of online PR. But, it is not clear where it fits in the communications mix, since it is not really advertising either since it doesn’t involve media buying.

From a functional point of view, online viral marketing often involves generating word-of-mouth – sometimes called ‘word of mouse’ – using e-mail to circulate links through to a web site which includes a viral agent such as a video clip, game, competition or other content.

Smith and Chaffey (2005) say

“ideally, viral marketing is a clever idea, a shocking idea, or a highly informative idea which makes compulsive viewing. It can be a video clip, TV ad, a cartoon, a funny picture, a poem, song, political message, or a news item. It is so amazing, it makes people want to pass it on.”

To make a viral campaign happen, Justin Kirby of viral marketing specialists DMC (www.dmc.co.uk) suggests there three things are needed (Kirby, 2003):

1. Creative material – the ‘viral agent’. This includes the creative message or offer and how it is spread (text, image, video, game, information).

2. Seeding. Identifying web sites, blogs or people to send e-mail to start the virus spreading.

3. Tracking. To monitor, the effect, to assess the return from the cost of developing the viral agent and seeding.

Smith and Chaffey (2005) distinguish between these types of viral e-mail mechanisms:

1. Pass along e-mail viral. This is where e-mail alone is used to spread the message. It is an e-mail with a link to a site with a video or game or less commonly, an attachment.

Pass-along or forwarding has worked well for video clips, either where they are attached to the e-mail or the e-mail contains a link to download the clip. If the e-mail has the ‘WOW!’ factor, of which more later, a lot more than one in hundred will forward the e-mail.  This mechanism is what most people consider to be viral, but there are the other mechanisms that follow too.

2. Web facilitated viral (E-mail prompt). Here, the e-mail contains a link/graphic to a web page with ‘E-mail a friend’ or ‘E-mail a colleague’. A web form is used to collect data of the e-mail address to which the e-mail should be forwarded, sometimes with an optional message. The company then sends a separate message to the friend or colleague.

3. Web facilitated viral (Web prompt). Here it is the web page such as a product catalogue or white paper which contains a link/graphic to ‘E-mail a friend’ or colleague. A web form is again used to collect data and an e-mail is subsequently sent.

4. Incentivised viral. This is distinct from the types above since the e-mail address is not freely given. This is what we need to make viral really take-off. By offering some reward for providing someone else's address we can dramatically increase referrals. A common offer is to gain an additional entry for entry into a prize draw. Referring more friends gains more entries to the prize draw. With the right offer, this can more than double response. In this case, there is a risk of breaking privacy laws since the consent of the e-mail recipient may not be freely given. Usually only a single follow-up e-mail by the brand is permitted. So you should check with the lawyers if considering this.

5. Web-link viral. But online viral isn’t just limited to e-mail. If you click on any of the links in this article – that can also be considered to be online viral marketing or you could call it online PR. Links in discussion group postings or blogs which are from an individual are also in this category. Either way, it’s important when seeding the campaign to try and get as many targeted online and offline mentions of the viral agent as you can.

Mark Cridge of agency, Glue London, speaking at the IDM Digital Marketing Conference presented a great summary of viral marketing, he said:

·         “Viral is not a new concept;

·         It used to be called ‘word of mouth’;

·         It makes the sender look good

·         People will share what they are interested in”

I think the key to success factor with viral marketing, which is sometimes overlooked and is certainly difficult to achieve is that “it makes the sender look good”.

Mark went on to talk about the creative challenges – viral typically has to be unconventional (or at least have clear benefits) to succeed, so companies must be prepared to challenge convention. This sits uneasily with some brands or organizations which traditionally seek to portray themselves as serious, trustworthy and professional.

Other challenges are that if the creative is too commercial, this will restrict the spread, but on the other hand, if it is not commercial, it may not do much for your brand. One of the most widely viewed virals ever www.subservientchicken.com is an example of this. The concept is fantastic – it is unconventional and creative, but its impact on the brand maybe limited because it is not overtly commercial.

Finally, remember that virals are often popular for that “Friday afternoon moment” when people are unwinding or simply can’t face any more work. If you have such a moment go to www.viralbank.com to see the latest virals spreading through the digital neighbourhood.

References

Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2005) E-marketing Excellence: At the heart of E-business. Butterworth Heinemann. Elsevier. Oxford, UK. 2^nd edition.

IPR (2003) Unlocking the Potential of PR. A best practice report. IPR and DTI. Available from the Institute of PR  (http://www.ipr.org.uk)

Kirby (2003) Online viral marketing: next big thing or yesterday’s fling?. New Media Knowledge. March 2003. http://www.nmk.co.uk/knowledge_network/kn_item.cfm?ItemID=4884&ThreadID=46

McGaffin, K. (2004) Linking Matters. How To Create An Effective Linking Strategy To Promote Your Web Site. Published at www.linkingmatters.com.

Ranchhod, A., Gurau, C. and Lace, J. (2002) On-line messages: developing an integrated communications model for biotechnology companies, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 5(1), 6–18.

Further reading

Holtz, S. (2002) Public Relations on the Net: Winning Strategies to Inform, & Influence the Media, the Investment Community, the Government, the Public, & More. AMACOM.

An introduction for PR practitioners. Doesn’t cover advanced topics such as blogging, RSS and viral.

E-consultancy online PR channel (www.e-consultancy.com/topic/online-pr).

The Institute of Public Relations (http://www.ipr.org.uk). For an introduction to PR with reports and definitions on this.