ALIGNING INTERACTIVE MARKETING and PUBLIC RELATIONS

Now

The Next Wave

As I written before, the boundaries between PR and interactive marketing continue to blur — even though they still often operate as separate functions in many organizations.

I suspect in time, social media will push companies to the margins that focus exclusively on web applications and media relations. Money will still be made courting reporters and overseeing web development, but the real action will be where PR and interactive marketing overlap. In that digital/social media space, the focus will be on balancing relationships, storytelling, placement, search, applications and a means to measure success.

Right now, the real challenge is managing the transition and determining an effective alignment strategy. Consider what Rachelle Spero, Executive Vice President, Digital Media, Cohn & Wolfe wrote me:

I was recently discussing the alignment of PR and interactive with a peer from one of our sister companies at WPP. She told me that during an all agency call the client asked about search optimization. The interactive agency contact said she had a whitepaper on search. Then the ad agency manager piped in and said he had a whitepaper on search. Then the PR guy added that his agency had a whitepaper on search. Aligning PR with interactive is important to the client. Do we need any other reason?

Rachelle will be addressing this changing dynamic as part of a session at my upcoming PR Camp New York. Rachelle and other PR executives will be paired off with interactive agency executives to discuss how to better align their practices.

The goal of the discussion is not blood on the floor or to pick a winner. Rather, it’s collaboration. It’s time to directly address such issues as messages vs key words, placement vs search, impressions vs click-throughs, and story telling vs application building.

So in addition to Rachelle, here’s a preview of what some of the moderators are thinking about in terms of the alignment issue.

David Berkovitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i emphasized the need to learn from each other:

“Especially when engaging in social marketing, interactive marketers increasingly need to think more like PR practitioners in terms of building and cultivating relationships with the key influencers in their fields. Meanwhile, PR professionals need to better understand what online influencers want – namely targeted, personal communications and often some assets to share, rather than press releases and corporate updates. There is plenty both kinds of practitioners can learn from each other.”

Andrea Harrison, Strategy Director, Razorfish wrote me that the need for cross agency collaboration is critical in managing resources and delivering results.

More and more our clients are asking us to work cross-agency on social marketing programs, highlighting the need for better collaboration with our counter-parts in PR. While in the past all earned media or WOM was earmarked as the domain of the PR shop, the growth of the social web and the role of digital marketing has changed that dynamic.  Now we see PR and Interactive working together to craft and deliver the messages through platform applications and other interactive campaigns.

Joe Ciarallo, Editor, PRNewser.com and Manager, PR Initiatives, mediabistro.com believes that their won’t competition to own social media because everyone will own it.

Brian Solis said to me recently, who ‘owns’ social media within an organization is going to be like who ‘owns’ email. Yes, maybe IT sets up email, but it is used by everyone in the company. The same will apply – if it is not already – to content creation and interactive marketing.

But even as social/digital media becomes more central to the way we do business, Jonathan Kopp – Global Director, Ketchum Digital still recognizes the non digital world.

“Even the most digital citizen lives with one foot firmly planted in the analog world. Each of us is living in our own “digalogue” — the word I use to refer to  conversations that span seamlessly across digital and analog channels.”

In addition, Alex Norman, Executive Vice President, Schematic and Chris Andrew, Vice-President-Group Director Media, Digitas will lead discussions.

So if collaboration is the end game, how do we get there?  Visit the discussion tab on the PR Camp New York Facebook page and share your thoughts. I am interested to get your perspective on how intense the rivalry is now, whether the alignment PR/interactive marketing is really an issue, whether PR and interactive marketing will evolve into one business and if so, what role will social media play in making it happen?

Let me get back to you.

Tweet This Post 

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.

Tweet This Post 

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.

Tweet This Post 

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.

Tweet This Post