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Three Ways to Align PR and Interactive Marketing

Dan Greenfield — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:01:38 +0000

Joe Ciarallo’s post about the PRSA seeking to establish industry wide measurement standards dovetails with my post today. I want to take a closer look at three long standing “tensions” that hinder alignment between PR and interactive marketing and propose starting points to resolve them.

Why is alignment so important? Social media is making so. We have to confront traditional ways of doing business. I recommend starting with tensions between messaging and key words, impressions and clickthroughs, and story telling and application building. Each of these differences is impeding the integration of PR and interactive marketing which can in turn undermine social media’s effectiveness.

Key Words vs Messaging: Reconciling Different Time Frames

TENSION: PR is getting better at incorporating SEO and keywords, but its focus is still message consistency. The goal is to have CEOs and call center reps tell the same story and use the same anecdotes regardless of the venue. The mantra: reinforce through repetition.

This strategy has been very successful. Today it can pose problems when there is a disconnect between what executives communicate and how customers search. Brands can’t evolve if companies are unwilling to abandon finely crafted messages. And more importantly, users can’t find them. Consequently, as Dana Todd, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Newsforce pointed out to me, ignoring search cuts off PR from “feedback loops” that can drive traffic.

Interactive marketing on the other hand is about constant testing, experimenting and refining key words to increase customer acquisition. Changes in key words are not always reflected in press releases. The danger for marketing is that its focus on hard numbers can limit creative risk taking and limit a brand’s potential. To regularly change key messages can confuse reporters, opinion leaders and analysts who follow your brand.

RECOMMENDATION: It’s hard to align PR and marketing when they have different priorities. At the very least, marketing and PR need to coordinate better so that press materials reflect the company’s search strategy. Marketing needs to appreciate that everything is not measurable (I can now hear marketing laughing all the way to the client’s office.) and it must help PR to turn messages into calls to action that drive web traffic.

PR needs to put greater emphasis on search and understand that updating talking points is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of a modern day communications strategy. An aligned strategy requires PR professionals to be more assertive in counseling clients and bosses about the importance of revising messaging. It also mandates that PR be more vigilant in helping the media to understand changes in messaging.

Impressions vs Click Throughs: Closing a Reporting Gap

TENSION: Dana calls metrics the “biggest point of pain.” PR and marketing have different success metrics. In the past, this wasn’t a problem. Editorial and advertising were separate, and it was OK for PR and marketing to measure different things. Today there is greater overlap and demand for more accurate measurement is only increasing.

Take PR. Its focus is coverage and reputation management. What people are saying and how they are saying are critical to success. Even as we begin counting comments, links, tweets/retweets, and views, impressions and hits are still the standard. Except impressions tend to over report what people are actually reading or viewing. They are approximations. We also measure tone and sentiment, but this too is an approximation of total sentiment and subject to interpretation.

On the other hand, interactive marketing tends to under report. Their focus is tracking conversions and actual click throughs, which don’t account for word of mouth and shared links that never make it to a report for clients.

The result: a gap in reporting and imprecise measurements of success.

RECOMMENDATION: Marketing needs to develop a methodology that takes into account its impact beyond clickthroughs (some kind of multiplier effect). PR needs to reevaluate the accuracy of impressions in determining its impact on a brand’s online presence. For example what is the role of headlines in measuring impressions? Are they more impactful than the body of the story? And is frequency (how many times a messages was received) more important than total impressions? As the rule of three demonstrates, it takes 3 times for a message to be retained.

Applications vs Story Telling: Giving Context to Engagement

TENSION: While more PR agencies are getting into the application business, interactive firms are still regarded as the experts. On the other hand, PR professionals are great at telling a company’s story and building narratives to support messaging.

For PR, applications – social games, contests, etc – aid in story telling; for interactive marketing the tool is the story. The danger of course is building tools for their own sake or having a message with no application to extend it. You can create a great social game that doesn’t extend messaging or design a contest that doesn’t result in long term conversations. So how do we align different objectives and different talent sets?

RECOMMENDATION: Alignment requires that we place tool building and story telling into a larger engagement strategy. Together they can build stronger relationships. In this way, PR and marketing give clients a better command of what is being said and how we say it. Applications then have context, and story telling has a call to action. The result: The user is more engaged. And equally important, by aligning skill sets, PR is not brought in after the tool is created and told – “Go publicize it.”

This is by no means an exhaustive list of recommendations, but it does begin to get at some of the inherent tensions that cause PR and interactive marketing to work at cross purposes. It forces PR to take a closer look at its metrics and forces interactive marketing to take a broader view of its function. Hopefully alignment will help the industry to start standardizing measurements and help clients select the right agency to deliver them.

Let me get back to you.

Social Media Is Pushing PR and Interactive Marketing to Align

Dan Greenfield — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:00:53 +0000

This post looks at the gap that still exists between PR and interactive or digital marketing agencies — even as social media continues to blur the boundaries that traditionally divide them.

The disconnect is one of the reasons I wanted to partner with the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA) and asked Definition 6, an independent interactive marketing and eCommerce agency, to become a sponsor of PR Camp Atlanta. It’s time to bridge the worlds of PR and interactive marketing and foster new ways of thinking.

As Michael Kogon, CEO at Definition 6 said: ”There couldn’t be a more exciting time to be working in interactive marketing. While Definition 6 has been doing search and social media since long before it was cool like it is today, clients are much more receptive today to trying new things.”

And I was encouraged that half of the attendees to PR Camp Atlanta were marketing professionals. Friends had recommended I change the name. They thought it would be to narrow and discourage marketing professionals from attending.

A Difference in Positioning

At one level, PR and interactive marketing speak the same language and share common goals. We both promote social media. We use many of the same tools. Yet most PR and interactive marketing agencies still continue to position themselves differently.

Consider Altanta’s largest public relations firms. “Social media” and “digital communications” are gaining more prominence, but the most common capabilities listed in the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Book of Lists (a paid yearly industry summary) were:

Media relations, reputation and brand management, crisis communications, event planning, corporate communications, executive visibility, grassroots advocacy, media and speech training.

Now look at some of the core competencies of the largest web design and development companies:

Website development, interactive marketing, SEO/SEM, application development

It shouldn’t be that way. SEO is now critical to doing PR. Reputation and brand management is integral to many applications that interactive marketing firms are tasked to create.

Old habits die hard, but to be fair, our clients need to shoulder some of the responsibility. In most organizations, each functional area uses a different lens to analyze the same social data. Little effort is made to coordinate efforts and align results.

Take comments. My good friend and digital marketer and lead catalyst at mass+logic Peter Fasano summed it up perfectly:

The Social PR Leader will measure comment count to capture share of voice, earned media and sentiment.

The Social Marketer will measure Short URL Click through rates and conversion.

The Social Researcher will measure the number of comments by segments to capture the consumer preference of the red or black car.

The Social Customer Service Representative will measure comments with complaints or questions.

The Case for Greater Alignment

I would argue we need greater alignment given the web’s primary role as a communications and marketing channel. In the olden days, alignment was less critical. There was a wall of separation between editorial and marketing as well as earned and paid media. Marketing spoke directly to customers. PR spoke indirectly to customers via reporters and key influencers. Marketing used ads and direct mail. PR used press releases and media tours.

The social web has erased these distinctions. I respect clearly defined roles and responsibilities, but PR and marketing should be working more closely and using web applications, social networks, message development and SEO to build truly integrated web strategies.

I am going to take a closer look at the dynamics that separate PR and interactive marketing in a subsequent post as well as how that alignment might look. But for now in the era of social media, open is the operative word. We need to be open to new approaches, open to sharing data, and open to looking at data holistically.

To be sure agencies will position themselves to deliver integrated solutions when clients begin demanding them. Similarly, it’s up to PR and marketing firms to show clients the way and make the case for better alignment.

Let me get back to you.

Benchmarking Success: Top YouTube Case Studies

Dan Greenfield — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:03:22 +0000

photo source: http://www.saturncorp.com/saturnus/

I am putting together an analysis of YouTube case studies to help establish benchmarks for success. Of course, benchmarking any social media effort is a hot topic these days, but the growth of YouTube makes online videos hotter than most.

As reported in Techcrunch last week, “[t]he real number of streams/day, we’ve now confirmed with a source at Google, is above 1.2 billion/day worldwide…That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day.” According to Comscore, YouTube has 40 percent of the online market share for video.

I started my analysis with Peter Kim, a well-respected social media strategist and a former Forrester Research senior analyst. He has compiled a massive list of social media marketing case studies on his blog. Granted many of the examples have been around for a while, and it’s not all inclusive. But many of the case studies are part of the social media canon, and all are useful in evaluating the effectiveness of your YouTube strategy.

For this discussion, I focused on metrics. (Aesthetics, strategy, video content and branding are for future posts.) I also excluded sites with videos in a foreign language or were not business related. I could not track how often each video was embedded somewhere else, which would also be a terrific benchmark.

The Top YouTube Results (as of June 13, 2009)

Most Number of Channel Videos

Most Channel Views

National Geographic: 4,012,977
Google: 3,863,874
Blendtec: 3,682,113
Visions of an Absolut World: 1,237,383
Embarq: 461,601

Most Views for an Individual Video

Google Explore the sky in Google Earth 4.2 : 19,747,923
Blendtec Will It Blend? – iPhone Video: 6,924,612 views
National Geographic Anaconda vs. Mammal Video: 5,193,996 views
Delta’s New In-flight Safety Video: 1,278,391 views
Experian freecreditreport.com Contest Thank You: 1,107,287 views

Most Channel Comments

Most Comments on an Individual Video

National Geographic Global Warming 101 Video: 19,024
Blendtec Will It Blend? – iPhone Video: 12,198
Google Chrome Japan: 4,477
AT&T Techno Twins Commercial: 1,567
Delta New In-flight Safety Video: 1,157

Most Number of Channel Subscribers

Benchmarking: Beyond the Numbers

These case studios represent the most watched and commented on Peter Kim’s list. Many on the list didn’t come close or even include a commenting option. As a basis of comparison, the wildly popular Dove Evolution video generated 9,003,970 views and 4,153 comments. The Diet Coke and Mentos video generated 9,484,742 million views and 13,825 comments. I didn’t include either because each was not made by a third party.

So what metric is most important to you – most views per video or per channel, most comments per video or per channel, or should it be most number of videos or most channel subscribers? Or maybe the rate at which the video is viewed or downloaded? They all are valid, but hopefully this breakdown serves as a beginning of a basis of comparison in setting realistic expectations and benchmarking success. Your results may differ based on your industry, the content itself or how well you promote your channel and your videos.

One thing is clear; size matters, but content is king. A little company can generate millions of hits by blending an iPhone into dust, and a huge established brand like National Geographic can do the same by showing an snake squeeze and ingest its prey. But it does not have to be a nature film or an exotic destination. Contests and even inflight safety videos can command attention as well.

I am continuing to slice and dice the data. For example, what is the relationship between individual videos and the company channel? What content generates the most views and comments? What makes a video go viral? Should going viral be your goal or building a consistently watched body of videos. Ultimately I am looking to build a model that begins to forecast results.

Let me get back to you.