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?

Talking about blog design, take a look at Notes from the Road, a travel blog by Erik Gauger that has been recognized because of its great design.  Featuring great photos and stories, Notes from the Road invites you to travel around the world and discover great places at cities and country.

Forget about the classic WordPress or MovableType design themes, even if they are free or not… Notes from the Road takes the blog design one step forward.

Notes from the Road

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.

Wired’s magazine issue 16.02 comes with some great articles, one of those talks about the initiative proposed by PayPerPost by which bloggers subscribed to this network are being paid for each post they make related to some of the products of the brands associated to the service.  A really interesting concept that might come into a real good business.

This blogging schema has been put on doubt because it might harm the authenticity of the blogosphere, but the founders of the service claim that they require bloggers to disclosure their relationship with PayPerPost for every post they are getting paid of.

 For more information, read Wired.