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The new PR opportunity of online media

by Richard Bagnall 1/18/2009 1:18:00 PM

...has been clearly explained in this short and watchable video. The video demonstrates how important it is that online media should be a key part of your PR strategy, how the content can proliferate across different media platforms and social networks, and of course the benefit that unlike traditional printed media, it is easy to find and available for media consumption well into the future.

Realwire (formerly Webitpr) is the company behind the video. Thy are a specialist online news and press release distribution company, offering similar services to companies like www.prweb.com and Marketwire. The video is absolutely right, online media is throwing up many new opportunities for PR to seize.

Although I agree with the vast majority of the video, I do take issue with one part of it and that is to do with measurement.

"The influence of your story can then be measured easily" states the video, before going on to say that there are many low cost ways that this can be done. It lists counting the coverage, looking at hits to your website and counting the number of people talking about your coverage as ways to do this. These sweeping statements neatly ignore most of the issues that companies like Metrica who are specialists in the field of traditional and social media measurement face. For one thing, even getting a commonly agreed viewing figure for online coverage is difficult with many of the auditing bodies disagreeing significantly. It also reminds me of the early days of traditional main stream media measurement, when column inches and AVEs often sufficed.

But my main issue is to do with the word of influence. Most social media measurement commentators agree that influence is one of the most difficult areas to measure in social media metrics. How influential is a word of mouth recommendation? It depends on many things, not least how much you trust the channel it appeared on and whether you know and trust the person making it. It's an area that we will return to again, but for now, here's Katie Paine on the subject summing up the problems up very well.

Tags: online media, katie paine, online press release distribution

media analysis | media evaluation | PR measurement | social media measurement and analysis

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Comments

1/18/2009 5:51:05 PM

Hi Richard

Thanks for your kind words about the video. We set out with the objective of creating a three minute overview of how the online media can influence, for audiences that are potentially more focussed on the traditional offline media. Our pre-production research (and the response to the video to date) confirmed to us that this is a challenge that many PR practitioners face. We hope the video helps people to tell the online media story - if only in a small way.

Thanks for also taking the time to give us your expert feedback on the influence/measurement part. I think you have a fair point. Three minutes is very constraining; with hindsight we should have qualified our statement so that the script read "The influence of your story can then *often* be measured *more* easily in the online world". Perhaps those two words might have gone some way to addressing your point? We in no way intended to suggest that the work organisations like Metrica carry out is "easy", and as a numbers man myself - my blog name is the giveaway - I have the utmost respect for Katie Paine's work on the subject.

Our point about online influence measurement is that a lot of the data (numbers, opinions, reactions, actions), that one needs to measure the impact of a story, is often more readily visible online than offline, and many free tools exist that help you gather this data. In particular the visibility of word of mouth online through social media is something that IMHO is a lot more difficult to track in the offline world. I completely accept though that the subsequent analysis, evaluation and interpretation can, as you say, still be a complex and challenging task, particularly for significant brands.

For smaller organisations however this evaluation can, arguably, be more straightforward. They can track resulting referral visits to their own website from any coverage, or from social media sites, through free tools such as Google Analytics. They can then establish whether those referrals subsequently contact them and "convert" in some beneficial way. This is, I would suggest, a lot "easier" and cheaper than the equivalent measurement in the offline world. Similarly tracking the number of people mentioning your organisation through Twitter Search or bookmarking coverage about you in Delicious, and what they say, will give such an organisation a great deal of knowledge about how their story is being received and discussed, and who by.

This is a conversation I would be very interested to continue in the offline world if you had the time?

By the way I also noted your link to your previous post about “not being tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper”, an analogy I use myself as the punch line at the end of every presentation!

Thanks again for featuring the video.

Adam Parker, Chief Exec, RealWire

Adam Parker

1/19/2009 10:30:46 AM

Hi Adam,

Thanks for commenting on the post, and in such detail. You make perfectly sensible points and I'm very happy for it to be on record here that I agree with you! It's an excellent video (being the reason I brought it to the attention of Measurement Matters' readers) and I applaud your initiative in creating it.

I totally accept the constraints that the 3 minutes put on you and take your point entirely about not wanting to have disclaimers everywhere. After all, where would that end up taking us all apart from into the hands of the lawyers and their world of disclaimers (e.g. the value of your social media influence can go down as well as up and you may not end up with as much as you started with)

Sounds like a great idea to meet up, let's connect directly.

Very best wishes,

Richard.

Richard

1/23/2009 3:17:47 PM

Great idea !

if you want, we can have a call together by Tuesday ?

have a good week-end,

L.

Laurent