The web is a two way communication channel that permits people interact with others and share information of common interest. Some companies have been able to identify this and start conversations with their audiences directly. Those conversations, when managed correctly, can evolve into really strong and engaging relationships.
In the past, public relations were supposed to focus only in maintaining a good relation with the media, journalists, editors and specific groups of interest. Within the Internet era, this whole new environment has forced companies to adapt their PR strategies to also include the audiences that can be reached online.
Companies, in their effort of jumping into online conversations must consider that, besides journalists, editors and specific groups of interest, in the online world the audience is millions of people that daily use search engines and subscription services to stay alert of the topics they are interested in.
Corporate Digital Public Relations are the set of strategies that a company implements to maintain a positive and long-term relationship with their traditional audiences in an online environment (journalists, editors, groups of interest), and with their new ones (ex. opinion leaders, bloggers and even real consumers).
In the offline world, Marketing and Public Relations are seen as separate fields -performed by different people, indeed- but when translated to the online world, as Digital Public Relations is an emerging discipline and uses the same communications vehicles as Digital Marketing, it is sometimes difficult to clearly distinguish between them.
Prior to the web, companies had two main methods for communicating with their audiences: through advertising or through media coverage. As new technologies have evolved, other types of interaction have not just emerged but been adopted by people to exchange their information.
Within this new paradigm, the web offers to the companies the opportunity to deliver targeted messages to specific audiences directly, without having any intermediate or needing to invest in mainstream advertisement placement. Today, companies need also to focus on “The Long Tail” [1] when designing communications and marketing strategies towards starting a segmentation of their messages, taking into consideration the broad kind of audiences they may have online.
On a day-to-day basis, Digital Public Relations and Digital Marketing might overlap their efforts and the line between them may appear unclear, but with the aim of establishing a common standing point and definition, it can be said that Digital Marketing Strategies are intended to create online user experiences while delivering brand content to the audiences. On the other hand, Digital Public Relations come into place when these online experience involve -or evolve into- a conversation.
“The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online news releases, and other forms of web content let organizations communicate directly with consumers” [2]
[1] ANDERSON, Chris, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. Published by Hiperion, 2006.
[2] MEERMAN Scott, David, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyes directly”. Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2007.