As announced last week GlobalCom PR Network is launching its third PR series today. We talked to expert PR consultants of our partner agencies around the world about the influence of social and digital media in their daily public relations activities, about social networking for PR purposes and about recent innovations in their agencies or local market.
Martin Jones, Managing Partner at our Boston based PR agency March Communications was one of the first colleagues to replay to our 3 questions.
1. What status do social and digital media have in your daily PR work?
With regards to digital media, there is a unique opportunity for PR to evolve its role in content creation and further encroach on the advertising industry – PR people have the right skills and are better placed to guide clients in this area than advertising agencies.
There has been a lot of hot air about how PR is dead and is unable to adapt to the new digital media landscape. The issue is not that traditional media is dying, it is that media is diversifying in terms of content type and distribution platform. This means there are greater opportunities for good PR programs to influence audiences and this will see PR take a much bigger slice of the marketing pie in the years ahead.
There’s no doubt that data visualization will be an increasing trend, as it is already becoming more and more noticeable in today’s most popular media. But along with this trend comes an important skill that many PR professionals will need to learn and incorporate into their campaigns.
2. Do you use social networking in your PR and communications work?
Social networking is a key component to our business because we are constantly engaging with outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn on a daily basis for our clients.
A recent example that stands out is with application performance management client, ExtraHop – a B2B Tech company, and our ongoing influencer relations campaign using LinkedIn. The team identifies relevant groups for ExtraHop to join that include influencers in the market and prospective customers. The team suggests and drafts comments for ExtraHop to post in these groups, responding to industry news, supplying tips or simply asking questions. We monitor relevant industry groups on a regular basis for competitor mentions or news that ExtraHop could respond with a PR pitch, blog post or LinkedIn comment.
In terms of reporting, the ExtraHop team scans groups for mentions and captures them in a “weekly snapshot,” showing the influencer value of LinkedIn.
3. What would you see as most recent innovation in the field of PR?
Simplistically speaking, analytics is about making sense of and applying the wealth of information that’s out there – from Google metrics, social media and beyond – to communications. As an industry, we do this already but in a rather haphazard and unstructured way. It’s at the next level up, that analytics becomes really interesting and useful.
We’re seeing analytics take off across numerous industries, especially clean tech. According to a GigaOM article, software and services that can mine data and provide intelligence for smart grid vendors, utilities and consumers — could reach a cumulative $11.3 billion from now until 2015. Ultimately, analytics is valuable for any sector experiencing rapid growth or major shifts in market dynamics or the competitive landscape.
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.