Joe Ciarallo's post about the PRSA seeking to establish industry wide measurement standards dovetails with my post today. I want to take a closer look at three long standing "tensions" that hinder alignment between PR and interactive marketing and propose starting points to resolve them.
Why is alignment so important? Social media is making so. We have to confront traditional ways of doing business. I recommend starting with tensions between messaging and key words, impressions and clickthroughs, and story telling and application building. Each of these differences is impeding the integration of PR and interactive marketing which can in turn undermine social media's effectiveness.
Key Words vs Messaging: Reconciling Different Time Frames
TENSION: PR is getting better at incorporating SEO and keywords, but its focus is still message consistency. The goal is to have CEOs and call center reps tell the same story and use the same anecdotes regardless of the venue. The mantra: reinforce through repetition.
This strategy has been very successful. Today it can pose problems when there is a disconnect between what executives communicate and how customers search. Brands can't evolve if companies are unwilling to abandon finely crafted messages. And more importantly, users can't find them. Consequently, as Dana Todd, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Newsforce pointed out to me, ignoring search cuts off PR from "feedback loops" that can drive traffic.
Interactive marketing on the other hand is about constant testing, experimenting and refining key words to increase customer acquisition. Changes in key words are not always reflected in press releases. The danger for marketing is that its focus on hard numbers can limit creative risk taking and limit a brand's potential. To regularly change key messages can confuse reporters, opinion leaders and analysts who follow your brand.
RECOMMENDATION: It's hard to align PR and marketing when they have different priorities. At the very least, marketing and PR need to coordinate better so that press materials reflect the company's search strategy. Marketing needs to appreciate that everything is not measurable (I can now hear marketing laughing all the way to the client's office.) and it must help PR to turn messages into calls to action that drive web traffic.
PR needs to put greater emphasis on search and understand that updating talking points is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of a modern day communications strategy. An aligned strategy requires PR professionals to be more assertive in counseling clients and bosses about the importance of revising messaging. It also mandates that PR be more vigilant in helping the media to understand changes in messaging.
Impressions vs Click Throughs: Closing a Reporting Gap
TENSION: Dana calls metrics the "biggest point of pain." PR and marketing have different success metrics. In the past, this wasn't a problem. Editorial and advertising were separate, and it was OK for PR and marketing to measure different things. Today there is greater overlap and demand for more accurate measurement is only increasing.
Take PR. Its focus is coverage and reputation management. What people are saying and how they are saying are critical to success. Even as we begin counting comments, links, tweets/retweets, and views, impressions and hits are still the standard. Except impressions tend to over report what people are actually reading or viewing. They are approximations. We also measure tone and sentiment, but this too is an approximation of total sentiment and subject to interpretation.
On the other hand, interactive marketing tends to under report. Their focus is tracking conversions and actual click throughs, which don't account for word of mouth and shared links that never make it to a report for clients.
The result: a gap in reporting and imprecise measurements of success.
RECOMMENDATION: Marketing needs to develop a methodology that takes into account its impact beyond clickthroughs (some kind of multiplier effect). PR needs to reevaluate the accuracy of impressions in determining its impact on a brand's online presence. For example what is the role of headlines in measuring impressions? Are they more impactful than the body of the story? And is frequency (how many times a messages was received) more important than total impressions? As the rule of three demonstrates, it takes 3 times for a message to be retained.
Applications vs Story Telling: Giving Context to Engagement
TENSION: While more PR agencies are getting into the application business, interactive firms are still regarded as the experts. On the other hand, PR professionals are great at telling a company's story and building narratives to support messaging.
For PR, applications - social games, contests, etc - aid in story telling; for interactive marketing the tool is the story. The danger of course is building tools for their own sake or having a message with no application to extend it. You can create a great social game that doesn't extend messaging or design a contest that doesn't result in long term conversations. So how do we align different objectives and different talent sets?
RECOMMENDATION: Alignment requires that we place tool building and story telling into a larger engagement strategy. Together they can build stronger relationships. In this way, PR and marketing give clients a better command of what is being said and how we say it. Applications then have context, and story telling has a call to action. The result: The user is more engaged. And equally important, by aligning skill sets, PR is not brought in after the tool is created and told - "Go publicize it."
This is by no means an exhaustive list of recommendations, but it does begin to get at some of the inherent tensions that cause PR and interactive marketing to work at cross purposes. It forces PR to take a closer look at its metrics and forces interactive marketing to take a broader view of its function. Hopefully alignment will help the industry to start standardizing measurements and help clients select the right agency to deliver them.
Let me get back to you.
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