Who Does The Client Go To For Digital Strategy?
Just reading through the recent issue of PRWeek where Erica Iacono is asking questions to a roundtable of New York PR professionals for the segment The Pulse of the Industry (subscription needed to review the article online).
One of Erica’s questions brings to light how PR continues to miss the target of offering online strategy: “How is the digital and social-media enviornment affecting all of your jobs? A lot of PR agencies have the capability, yet clients aren’t turning to them first to implement a digital strategy. How do you deal with that?”
No one from the agency side, really answered the question. The best answer came from Bethany Sherman, SVP, corporate communications, NASDAQ which was: “From the client perspective, it’s “tell me.” I don’t want to have to ask you.”
Great point Bethany. PR firms need to have the correct talent and resources on staff to be able to confidently go to a client and say here’s what we can do for you online. The issue is that the staff required to run online campaigns is a different talent base than a typical PR firm job. The reason the client doesn’t know is because the PR firm can’t show them the experience and data needed to back it up.
Ty Trippet, PR director from Reuters answer: “It’s all about the traffic. That’s why the online component is so big”
Misses the boat here. It’s not all about the traffic – this is the biggest problem PR has with online. It’s about the CONVERSION, not the traffic. We’ve discussed this in our paper “The Placement Crash – The Failure of PR in the Conversation World“. PR agencies take the client down the road of getting them a placement, driving visibility, but jump out of the driver’s seat of the car once the placement is made. What’s the online strategy to capture the conversation from the web traffic that comes as a result of the placement online, or offline. This is where PR should shine, but literally bails out on the client in there greatest moment of opportunity.
For PR the mindset ends at the placement. From an online perspective the program BEGINS with the placement to get the visibility, then bringing them into the conversation and providing the visitor a way to interact with the subject, company, product, etc. that eventually drives some form of conversion.
Other comments to the question were: pitching bloggers for product reviews, bringing bloggers in to cover an event. All great visibility tactics, but where’s the follow through?
I wrote the Placement Crash article over a year ago. I pitched it to PRWeek over a year ago – they never responded. It’s still obvious that PR still doesn’t get the online world or the discussion would be much different.
I love PR, am a big proponent of it’s value, but there’s so much more untapped opportunity in the online space. The only reason I can see that companies are not taking advantage of it is because they are unconsciously ignorant of the opportunity.
Bonin Bough, EVP, interactive and emerging media, Weber Shandick: “But strategically, if your dot-com is the center point for your corporate reputation, why are you using anybody other than a PR firm to do that?”
Now Bonin is on to the opportunity that PR firms have. Yes, if the talent and ability was there for a PR firm to drive digital strategy, it’s most certainly where the client should go.
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