Burson-Marsteller

The 4 P’s

by Tommaso Valle on 31st July 2008 • The Cast Blog

Most people acknowledge that the media scene is changing. The dynamics of newspapers, broadcasting, even editorial offices are changing. But we still have to explain how PR will change and how PR practitioners are facing this challenge on a daily basis. If I had to identify the keywords of the digital revolution, I would try to build a new paradigm based on 3 P’s: Promiscuity, Proximity and Participation.

Promiscuity means that the barriers between information producers and information consumers have crumbled – both these roles might now be played by the same person, potentially by every single one of us. In facing this challenge, companies want to be closer to consumers and directly address contents to them – proximity. But the only way to be really close to clients/stakeholders is to accept a form of engagement which allows them to participate in the brand reputation building.

Going back to PR, the key questions are: how can we help our clients manage this? Do our traditional tools still apply to this new media landscape?

Over the last months we have spent hours and hours listening to bloggers and e-fluencers. We interviewed more than 100 bloggers in 8 European countries, asking how they usually receive information from companies and which formats they would prefer. More on this in September when we launch a report based on the results.

The bloggers’ comments and suggestions have fed into a platform for social media releases with specific features that enable multimedia contents, limit heavy e-mails, open up discussion and allow information sharing on the most important social networks – see www.oursocialmedia.com.

The tool has already been successfully adopted by some of Burson-Marsteller’s core clients in Europe including Adobe, SEAT and Symantec. And we already have a first multilingual social media release issued for Dubai Infinity Holding in French, Italian, English and German.

The social media release is not just the evolution of the traditional press release. It is a new way to approach the distribution of corporate content.

All text and visual content related to the announcement are linked and downloadable from a single web page. The tool allows users to upload to the web page multimedia content, including: PDF files, links to other websites, video files, podcasts and high resolution pictures. The tool also allows users to optimise the press release for search engines through bookmarks and the hyper-linking of keywords.

A key benefit of the service is that clients and client teams can use the tool with minimal training and it is possible to build and publish a social media release within minutes. The releases will be stored and classified, so users will be able to sort them by date and company.

But if our platform makes the creation of a social media release pretty simple, this is only the first step of a more difficult process: identifying who the relevant bloggers are and which social media outlets can be targeted for every specific client and content.

One thing has not changed – in the new media landscape, communications tools are still only valuable if they are part of an integrated strategy that starts by identifying the relevant target audience (in this case – which bloggers), going through a tailor-made approach that ends with measurement and evaluation.

So in summary, the fourth P – Public Relations – will play the pivotal role in helping brands make sense of, adapt to and ultimately engage with this increasingly influential community of stakeholders online. With the right tools to do the job, this is truly the dawn of a potentially golden age for our profession.

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