Today our interview series is featuring Vilma Bosticco of Prima Pagina, GlobalCom ’s partner PR agency in Italy, who provided us with some insights regarding their local PR practices and regional trends.*
1. What status do social and digital media have in your daily PR work?
They have an increasing relevance. We are in the second phase of social media adoption in Italy. In the first phase, companies were pretty skeptical and tried to understand the real benefits of having a social media strategy. The first companies who understood that social media needed to be adopted were the B2C ones. Consumers were using social media in their private life and setting up a direct conversation with them was easy for big consumer brands. In this second phase, B2B brands are starting to understand the value of social media and therefore they are looking for the right tools to reach their audiences. We were pretty lucky being focused on the ICT market so that we could “live” the evolution of the Web, observe what was going on and get ready to use social media tools even before our clients realized that social media were becoming more and more relevant.
2. Do you use social networking in your PR and communications work?
Of course we do, and we use it in several ways. We have our own blog where we post news about all our clients, and we are on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But we also use more traditional tools to stay in contact with journalists and opinion makers because many of them still prefer to receive press releases information through email. Except from the tools you already use to reach the media, the old, traditional phone call is still an excellent way to communicate with journalists. It is also imperative to create social media releases, so that journalists can access videos and materials and share the links with their online readers. We also manage the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts on behalf of some of our clients, posting news and monitoring conversations. We have learned from experience that if you offer communications services, it is pretty easy to manage a blog as you get access to plenty of information and materials that are very useful for writing posts and content marketing is always something that should catered to anyway.
3. What would you see as most recent innovation in the field of PR?
Start by researching the market properly to understand the context and the needs of your audience, build up a strong business case for each industry you’re focusing on – food and drink market will be very different than the financial services market, for example -, work intensely on your message and support it with effective case studies, then you’re likely on your way to success. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.
*The series is based on phone or face-to-face interviews and written input, therefore please excuse language mistakes which might reflect foreign language influences.
GlobalCom is an award-winning worldwide alliance of Public Relations specialists and agencies that offers international PR services to organisations looking to launch their products and services simultaneously in multiple countries.