Overcoming New Media Challenges

I, like many people my age, am a digital migrant, not a digital native.  For many of the younger generation the online world is engrained in their DNA.  As marketing and PR practitioners, engaging in on online world can feel uncomfortable, because the ground rules are different than many of the tactics we have been using for many years. 

So what do we do online? Don't we lose control of the message? How do we know who reads this stuff online? Why does it spread so fast? Why can anyone can have an opinion and make it known to the rest of the online community? What about the well-known flogging PR disasters large corporations have experienced recently? What about the companies that were outed for unfairly modifying their Wikipedia entries?

The reality is that consumers inherently have more trust in opinions from like-minded consumers, than they do in information on branded websites or in traditional media. And that's exactly what is happening online. The capabilities of the web today make it easy for anyone to have an opinion and make it known to everyone, like it or not, people are talking about your company.

In China where I live, for example, today there are more than 160 million people online. And they are spending more and more time online, an average of about 18 hours per week.

There are huge numbers of people creating and consuming information via popular new media bulletin board system (BBS) portals, search engines and video sharing sites Sina, Sohu, Baidu, Tom and Tudou.

Naked Conversations

In preparation for a speech I gave recently in Hong Kong about new media, I contacted Shel Israel, coauthor of Naked Conversations, the now-famous book about social media. I asked Shel for his perspectives about what had changed since the book was published about two years ago, his thoughts are posted on his blog. This book is amazing because it is so on point - Israel and Scoble called the revolution ahead of time. This book is a must read, in addition to Cluetrain Manifesto, and some other newer books including Infotopia and Wikinomics.

That's not to say that the days of traditional PR and advertising are over, far from it, these types of media are still extremely useful for helping marketing and PR practitioners reach target audiences that care about their companies, products and services.  But at the same time, if companies do not include new media elements in their broader plans, at the least they are missing and opportunity to engage all of the people that consume information and entertainment online, and at the worst, they are allowing competitors that are executing campaigns online to steal their business.

Tips For Overcoming New Media Challenges

So given this new media world we now live in, what to do we do about it as marketing and PR practitioners, and how do we avoid the pitfalls?  Here are some helpful tips.

Consumers are creating media content themselves. Traditional PR experts who are used to dealing with journalists are now faced with the challenge of how to reach those individual "reporters" and ensure your messages are delivered to the right targeted audiences?

• Identify the most influential new media in your industry through research
• Respect them and talk with them in a polite manner, be aware of their importance
• Communicate with them via e-tools: MSN, QQ, email, but do not be afraid to call them directly or even meet them face to face if possible
• Provide multimedia materials as much as possible including video and audio
• Invite them to attend the offline events including press conferences, product launches, or other events
• For consumers, communicate directly via ecommunications including news letters, corporate blogs, BBS interaction and search engine listings 

New media can spread good and bad, correct and incorrect information to the world very quickly. How can we ensure we use the most effective, timely and correct response to it?

Listen and learn, build an online media monitoring and alert system, not only for portals, but also for BBS, and blogs, and take appropriate and moderate actions when necessary. Provide more background information, fact corrections and multimedia materials as soon as possible, since new media has unlimited space and allows instant interaction. Build your own new media including websites and blogs, and keep it updated, new media reporters visit these frequently to seek latest information, especially when there is a crisis and more importantly, don't hide and hope it will go away, prevent an issue from becoming a crisis.

More and more consumers do not read printed media any more. Is it still effective for us to use traditional PR approaches? Traditional media outreach is still an important part of any marketing communications campaign but at the same time you need to respect and engage with new media. Do not treat new media the same as traditional media respect the differences, don't be afraid, be brave enough to communicate with the consumers directly. Use new media tools to communicate with your audiences and don't get left behind, take the time to learn about new media and become an expert.

Evaluating new media

How do we evaluate the effectiveness of a new media campaign? Measure how much traffic (page views and clicks) a campaign drives to the targeted website. Measure how many online conversions were recorded during the campaign and monitor how much media coverage was generated.

In summary, some of the rules of engagement are different and it is possible for things to go wrong if we don't give the online community the honesty, transparency and respect it deserves, but make no mistake, the online world can be a critically important part of a broader marketing or PR campaign, and we need to pay attention to it. 

Scott Sykes is VP & Asia Pacific director of New Media Practice at Weber Shandwick