ON Message

Working without a Net

Operating any type of business today without an online strategy is a bit like not having a phone number or a mailing address. Finding where a company is on the Internet, on the other hand, is often not as simple as cracking open the local phone directory. Not only reaching out to people, but being accessible to them is an ever increasing concern.

Does it matter? Most companies, especially those not directly involved with the Internet, will be quick to find reasons not to worry about what's happening to their company online. But for almost every company, maintaining a web presence is vital. The issue isn't ignoring a new, potential market; the issue is cutting off current customers. Without getting into demographics, just make the safe assumption that everyone a company is trying to reach is accessing the Net and at the same time becoming more and more reliant upon it.

The core question is one marketing professional must answer: how do we maintain a presence on the Internet in a way that is effective and worthwhile. This isn't specific to any market. Regardless of level of penetrating or development, the question remains one of resources versus effectiveness.

The internet, of course, is more than a simple directory. That has its advantages and disadvantages. It used to be that people would (apart from asking around for recommendations, which is another topic entirely) flip open some type of directory and look for the name of the company they had in mind or move to whatever category included the service or product they were after. This made things very simple. If there was as directory you should be in, you paid for the year and that was it.

The Internet is much more complex. For one, it's not a directory. What it actually is and how people interact with it changes as fast as people's tastes. It's continually new and will continue to evolve and redefine itself for the foreseeable future. Its very character may prove to be one of change, an organism of human knowledge and interaction that constantly adapts.

So how then can the Internet be used to reach customers? Public relations professionals must look at how traditional media is shifting to the Internet. Most or all of it is. There is also the emergence of new media, specifically social media. Social media is media written usually by non-journalists in a less formal manner than traditional media. The most visible of the social media are blogs.

So how, for example, does a public relations professional reach someone writing a blog? That question is secondary to another: why doesn't my client blog themselves? And so it extends from there. Online media invite, or better require, participation. The best or maybe only way to reach people through social media is to become part of it.

The public relations staple, the press release, has also found a new online form: the optimised press release. This is a press release designed not to attract the attention of a journalist, but one designed to appeal to the algorithms search engines use to rank web pages. How this optimisation takes place is somewhere between good writing and search engine optimisation, so as to put the task somewhere between a public relations consultant and a web developer. If you fall under either of those groups, you have to learn how to do it.

Search engines, which can be thought of as filters, are another key aspect of how people interact with the Internet. Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson discussed the concept of a filter in his recent book The Long Tail. In it he pointed out that it's not what's out there but how we access it that's important. The most widely used filter today is Google, which really paved the way for filter technologies that have followed by refining web search algorithms to the point where they produced meaningful results. The filter, of which Google is the archetype, allows that overabundance of information, products and everything else out there to reach the interested person.

Amazon.com is another pioneer in this area. On the site, not only can you search for something by type, name or any definable characteristic, once you've found what you're looking for, the site continues to make recommendations. It shows you what people who bought what you're looking at also bought. This is called collaborative filtering and will most likely continue to grow in importance.

Public relations professionals and marketers must continue to grow and learn how to find ways to effectively put their clients in the middle of this. We've just touched on a few of the salient points of the Internet as it exists, but we will later discuss in-depth many of these ideas and how they relate to communications.

Matthew Smith is chief operating officer of Vivaldi Seasons Co, a local public relations consultancy. He can be reached at matthew@vivaldiseasons.com or see http://www.vivaldiseasons.com

Thailand News : Business News
Bangkok Post
Friday January 26, 2007