Essay on
PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences
by Deirdre Breakenridge
PR is a two way street nowadays. We don't just throw information about our company into a tv or a billboard and wait for people to buy our products. In the way the world works nowadays we have to create PR where we are ready to have conversations with people. And not just ready, where we encourage the public to have a conversation with us.
PR serves the company for creating an opinion by the public. But not just that, we ideally thrive for creating relationships with the public, having conversations and serving a public interest. The internet gives us an enormous amount of opportunities for that, whether it is social media, blogs, SEO, podcasts and other channels out there.
Online reputation management (ORM) is something we can implement in order to track our company's reputation online. That includes monitoring search engine results, social media mentions, online reviews, and other forms of user-generated content. ORM is important for a company because the internet gives users a lot of space to share their opinions with a wide audience. That can build a reputation fast. Whether a good one or a bad one. With ORM we track reviews, comments and other user generated content. There is a huge variety of tools that we can use in order to track our reputation.
Tools
Social media listening tools
Those are tools that monitor use of certain keywords on social media in real time. Some tools use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze also the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of mentions related to a brand or topic. That is pretty impressive and very useful. At first I thought that only when someone speaks about our brand we can use this, that would mean only when our audience is big enough that they speak about us, but we can also use this to track what they say about products or similar products to ours or topics related to our company's offerings. That is an amazing way to gather fresh data about our audience in real time.These tools can also help identify influential users or thought leaders in an industry or topic.
Search engine monitoring tools
These analyse usage of keywords beyond social media, that means on the whole web and can also track backlinks.
Online review management platforms
They help gather and analyse reviews from different websites.
All of these tools can help us manage our online reputation. We can also use them in order to connect with influencers and brand ambassadors. We can use this data to create high quality content based on the data we collect.
What is important to remember is to be as transparent and honest as possible and responsive to users speaking about the brand and our key topics. That way we create conversations and truly build our public image and reputation. Next time gathering data about customers I will look more into these tools. I think it is an amazing help for creating strategies and even analysis about a company's environment.
