Interactive Marketing and PR:  Star Trek provides a good visual

Today I continue a recent discussion about the challenges in aligning PR and interactive marketing. The battle lines are drawn with the two sides competing for the hearts and minds of clients.

Consider these two quotes:

The first is from Jonathan Kopp, Global Director, Ketchum Digital.

PR firms are poised to lead the way in social media because they approach conversation influence from an earned media perspective — finding existing story lines and figuring out how to make their clients’ point relevant. PR firms with a digital development capability can use visual and dynamic storytelling to add a deeper layer of engagement–digital assets designed specifically for social media engagement.

The second is from Michael Kogon, CEO of Definition 6, an interactive marketing firm based in Atlanta.

In the past, PR has typically been responsible for communications with internal and external audiences; developing the communications strategy and leading the execution. For most organizations, interactive marketing includes all the “online” marketing stuff. Today, with so much more communication taking place online, it’s more common to see progressive interactive agencies managing all online communications efforts, particularly around blogging and other social media.

So which side is better equipped to manage a client’s social media strategy?

I appreciate the battle lines.  Each has a lot at stake.  But I am not taking sides because I believe each has a critical role to play.

The debate reminds me of a famous Star Trek episode.  The characters in question were in fact more similar than they realized, but their differences in perception drove them apart. The two characters fought to the end, unable to reconcile differences.

OK a little poetic license, but my point is that interactive marketing and PR are very similar.  They are focused on increasing engagement and use the same tools to get there.

But while their services complement each other – positioning/branding,  messaging/key words, impressions/click throughs, storytelling/application building – their strategies and success metrics are very different.

As a result, we create great tools that don’t necessarily extend PR’s finely crafted messages.  At the same time, the messages PR creates don’t always evolve to reflect the way users search for information. And we tend to overestimate PR results and underestimate interactive marketing’s. Our individual clients may be happy, but an overall social media strategy may suffer.

And so the larger question for me is not who wins the battle, but how do we tap the talents of both sides to align marketing and PR objectives?  How do you create a strategy that incorporates key words and messaging, click throughs and impressions and storytelling and technology?  My next post begins to take on these questions.

In the end we may need to reframe the debate and demonstrate how PR and marketing and are extensions of one another, not opposites and not independent of each other.

Let me get back to you.

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 list below summarizes tools that analyze influencers or popularity, evaluate sentiment or number of mentions, identify the location of the person tweeting, offer trend analysis or focus on time frames. I marked an “X” in the category that I perceive is the tool’s primary utility. That is not to say that each tool doesn’t do other things.  Also as an aside, I personally don’t like the idea of sharing my Twitter password with a third party.  You will need to decide whether you want to share yours with tools like Twitstat and Twitterank.

This list is not exhaustive, but it may be helpful in trying to manage the deluge of daily tweets. (Please use the comments section for suggested additions and changes.)

As Pete Fasano and I have discussed, no tool appears to be the holy grail incorporating all these features. I for one want a tool that pulls tweets around your key word  search and ranks them by sentiment, influencer, and location.  I want trend analysis, not just a list of tweets, and I want real time data.   I was reminded of a comment that Anna B made in a post in ReadWriteWeb:

I have worked at several agencies working to put together budding social media practices, and have been pitched by many of the social media monitoring tools. I totally buy the concept– the ability to “listen-in” on consumers in their native space. The challenge I find is that none of the offerings provide the total package.

Some key things on her wish list:

• Efficient filtering of queries (most important, and often very poorly done)
• Sentiment analysis
• Sentiment plus (point in time, trend over time, compared w/ competitor, overlay w/ another issue etc.)
• Identification and targeting of influencers
• Ranking of “influential” or popular posts
• Comparison to competitive information
• Identification of “themes” within the conversation
• Easy, dynamic ability to chart and graph analysis of queries
• Self-service set up of queries (not a week or more lead time with “Customer Service”)
• Backward trending (and not just for 30 days!)

Of course all these tools may become obsolete if Twitter builds a version that incorporates these features.

Some of the source material came from  Spacefruit at HubPages, GreyReview and Measurementcamp. A big thanks to Mike Schinkel for giving me a basic HTML class despite a pounding sinus headache.

They say Twitter is replacing blogs, but still here is some love link to some of the Twitter blogs out there: Klout, Tweetburner, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, Twitalyzer.com, TwitterFriends, TwitterGrader, Twitterank, and Twitturly. These blogs can provide more information about the applications listed above.

Let me get back to you.