Christian Perrins, Head Of Strategy for New Media Maze, outlines the significance of online PR within this new era of marketing communications, and more importantly how to do it.

What’s Online PR then?

Wikipedia classifies traditional Public Relations as: “The art and science of managing communication between an organization and its key publics to build, manage and sustain an accurate image”

You don’t have to be an IAB boffin to know that in 2006 these ‘key publics’ are increasingly found online. The headlines are everywhere; “63% of the total British population online*”, “£35bn estimated E-Commerce spend in 2006**”, “10.5% of UK Advertising spend now online***”. (Hopefully you can see the relative links between these three statistics.)

It is in this climate that clients from virtually all sectors are becoming more eager to communicate with these burgeoning online audiences. Not only because the audience numbers and spending figures are so overwhelmingly hard to ignore, but also because there’s just so much cool stuff you can do in the digital arena. Thus the online PR agency has risen alongside the traditional PR agency. The principles are the same but the tools are very different.

At New Media Maze we work with a broad range of clients, from stand alone brands such as Vespa and Piaggio, entertainment clients such as Universal Pictures, Electronic Arts and 20th Century Fox, to publishing heavyweights such as FHM, Arena and Zoo. Whether they’re launching a new product, reinvigorating an existing one or just looking to talk to their customers, online PR is a critical tool for all of these companies. How? Read on.

Working With Online Journalists

First there’s the simple business of treating Digital publications (and crucially, their editors) with the same attention that a traditional PR agency would give to offline media. It makes sense to do so too when titles’ web audiences frequently dwarf those of their print counterparts. So when Peter Jackson is in town to promote “King Kong”, we set up an exclusive video interview with The Sun Online’s readers. When ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ is due out, we give exclusive content to Vodafone’s users. When “Bridget Jones II” is about to hit the DVD shelves, we ask the readers of Female First how they really feel about their ‘wobbly bits’ in a fun online survey. (In fact in that instance we pulled in so many respondents that our results found their way into dozens of tabloids and broadsheets too.)

Whilst working with online journalists and editors to create coverage on Web and Wap sites is an important part of online PR, it is only one facet of the discipline. If anything, the notion of an online PR agency dishing out content to websites who dish it out to consumers is fast becoming something of the past. We are after all, in an age where the most popular sites in the world encourage people to play, to create, to talk, to share, to show off! More simply, it’s an age where everyone is a journalist (blogs, social networks), an editor (wikis, blikis), a director (YouTube), even a photographer (on Flickr there are 156,698 photos of kittens alone. Kittens!)

It’s in this context that online PR really comes into its own. Our role as an agency is to embrace this shift from media consumption to media engagement. We do simple stuff like caption competitions (our “Baywatch Beach Builder” for example challenged Online audiences to create their own stories featuring Mitch, Eddie and the gang). We also run major online promotions such as our ‘Need For Speed Carbon’ campaign with FHM which invites women to audition for a part in the new NFS game… (So far we’ve had over 400 entrants for FHM’s readers to vote on!)

We also run creative challenges which actively seek UGC such as the ‘Sims Shorts’ competition for Electronic Arts. Here we are calling for Sims 2 fans of all ages to create short movies using footage from the legendary game, either with their own software or using an intuitive online movie mixing tool we created especially for the campaign. The winning short is going to be shown at Vue cinemas across the country, taking UGC offline and into the realm of ‘traditional’ media.

New Worlds

One of the most exciting things about working within the digital arena is the constant arrival of new spaces to explore and work with to engage audiences. Our ‘X-Men III: The Last Stand’ activity with Second Life is a great example of this. You’re going to hear more about Second Life later on in this document so we won’t go into what it is in any detail here, suffice it to say that it’s a stunningly created virtual world with increasingly real content and commercial potential.

The idea was to allow online audiences that couldn’t be at the Cannes premiere to attend a virtual premiere of the movie within Second Life. We worked closely with Rivers Run Red (the people behind Avalon Island) to recreate the whole affair, from the red carpet to the stars walking down it! We posted a man with a laptop firmly in the middle of the action in Cannes so that Second Lifers could find out what was happening as it happened. We streamed exclusive content on giant screens and uploaded photos regularly.

The benefit of a piece of activity like this is not just the 300,000 or so Second Lifers around the world who were potentially exposed to the virtual party, but the mass of accompanying coverage we achieved from PR’ing the virtual event itself.

Listening

I arrived at a leading traditional PR agencies’ offices one morning recently to find the entire staff sifting through a giant stack of newspapers and magazines on the look out for any mention of their client’s (or their competitors) brands. Why? Because communication is a two-way deal. PR agencies need to know what’s being said, and by whom. 16 Within online PR the notion of ‘listening in’ is a pretty gargantuan task. Dependant on your source there are thought to be some 8 to 20 billion websites out there. That’s a lot of papers to sift through on a Monday morning, and that’s before we break down all of the individual bloggers out there.

New Media Maze have created a bespoke tool to help our clients get a grip on the ‘buzz’ around their brand. It’s called (appropriately enough) ‘Buzzwurdz’. In brief, it allows us to specifically search news items, blogs, message boards and newsgroups for any mention of the brand.

With this information we can then provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the buzz (quite an interesting task for the salacious ‘Borat’ movie). That’s an indispensable tool for our clients, particularly film companies who are increasingly at the mercy of bloggers such as Harry Knowles and his ‘Ain’t It Cool News’ site which Warner Bros personally blame for ruining ‘Batman & Robin’s’ box office showing. (He wasn’t a fan).

Guiding

You can also directly engage bloggers, either with direct responses to their comments, with ‘Street Team’ tasks which offer rewards such as premiere tickets or signed merchandise to star bloggers or simply with smart press releases. The thing is that most bloggers don’t have much of interest to say. They need conversation pieces to discuss, hence the English obsession with the weather! They search for information which they find interesting then publish it without too much filtering and add their comments. People react. This is how positive and negative buzz builds. We provide the information and make it easy for them to find. How? With search engine optimised press releases fed into the right newswires at the right time of day. Simple.

What’s Next?

So that’s online PR. At least, that’s online PR today. It won’t look like this for long. You’ll note that the term ‘traditional’ PR agency has been used throughout this piece to delineate between ‘them’ and ‘us’. That places these words firmly in their epoch. In a very short time, as ‘traditional’ media are assimilated completely into the digital sphere, that distinction simply won’t exist. There’ll just be PR agencies that get it, and those that don’t.