Online PR as a Service: Pitching vs Participating
The more I think about ‘Online PR’, the more I’m convinced that it should be called something else. In a nutshell, everything that your company does online is ‘PR’ – it all touches your public in some way.
As such, ‘Online PR’ isn’t just sending a press release via a web-based press release distribution hub like PRWeb. Nor does it involve emailing influential bloggers in an effort to persuade them to write about you. These things are just good old fashioned media relations practices by another name (with a bit of SEO fringe benefit thrown in).
Nope, Online PR can’t really be positioned as a service per se – it’s something more fundamental to your business. There’s a difference between using the web to ‘pitch’ ideas to influential people and using it to participate in conversations which may influence people. The former involves knowing an influencer (a brokerage service). The latter involves being an influencer.
With this in mind, PR agencies tend to be better at pitching than participating because participation requires being in amongst the guts of a business and interacting with customers (and influencers) in a more intimate fashion. You simply don’t preface a comment in a forum or on a blog with ‘I’m talking on behalf of my client, Acme Co’ – since the only reason to participate is because you care and/or because you can contribute personally.
To this end, I’m becoming convinced that the job of an Online PR agency (or a plain old PR agency) isn’t necessarily to do Online PR, but to find better ways of facilitating it.
To use an example, there’s a great deal being written right now about Barack Obama’s brilliantly executed Online PR campaign. Now this is big time PR. Obama used his web site and a bunch of satellite social media tools to drive interest, donation and votes. I won’t elaborate here – see Technology Review if you want a blow by blow account of how Obama does Online PR really well. But there’s something interesting about why the world is using him as the poster child for this stuff…
It’s this: the Obama campaign used the best of the web - a social networking platform, ‘MyBO’, a Twitter feed, etc - to help people to enable other people to spread the word. In other words it didn’t just use the web for pitching. (This is what, by comparison, Hilary Clinton, seemed to do - use the web as a soap box).
So how does this apply to you and your business? Well, for a start, I think you need to treat Online PR and all the funky new things that we can do on the web as a tool set rather than an activity in and of itself.
Smart companies are creating platforms, tools and content that are designed to be taken up and used by their staff (and their customers, partners, etc) for engaging with and influencing the wider world – in their own ways and on their own terms. They’re using the web to facilitate things. And good agencies are helping them to do this work as effectively as possible – by building blogs, social networks, content pieces and the like, and training their clients to harness them properly.
None of which involves ‘pitching’ or anything that looks remotely like PR as we’ve come to know it.
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Roger Warner
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Joshua
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