I just saw an interesting diagram posted by Todd Defren at PR-squared that shows the evolution of advertising vs. public relations in this Social Media era.
“As you can see, PR is becoming increasingly interpersonal: there is a daily flow of interaction, responsiveness and adaptation going on amongst PR people and their ever-expanding publics. […] Meanwhile, the advertising folks are coming to embrace more and more user-generated content, but as PAID media (versus EARNED media).
Advertising’s intrinsic, long-term value to the corporate brand is declining in the Social Media era. And the PR industry is the happy beneficiary.”
The diagram is really insightful and yes, I agree with Todd, but the counterpart of this is that nowadays in Latin America (for example), there are no agencies that can advice corporations on a complete Digital PR strategy.
Of course, you will find the traditional PR agencies that will offer some kind of “exercises” on the digital world, like including the posting of a video on YouTube or creating a “fan group” or a profile of your product at Facebook. On the other hand you will find also Online Marketing agencies that will offer the inclusion of “social” into the online marketing campaign… all good ideas but, all of those are just tactics…what about the REAL strategy?
Companies must first be clear on what they want to achieve when they are going online, nevertheless if the effort is conducted by marketing or PR, and this is a great opportunity for agencies to make interesting proposals. Companies need answers to questions like: What is the best approach FOR US to go online?, Are we prepared to make a conversation?, Do we really want to make a conversation?, What we need?, How is the roadmap-to-digitalPR or digitalMKT traced?
All of those tough, but really necessary questions to be answered prior to jumping online… What do you think?