Contact Information:

Angelia Chandra (Spokesperson)
Point PR
Director of Digital Media
Point PR House
38 Lucky Street
Washington DC
20380
020.889.8899 (office)
07812.389.3899 (mobile)
Email: a.chandra@pointpr.com
Web site: http://pointpr.com
Blog: http://angeliachandra.wordpress.com

America’s First Internet News Survey Unveiled: Internet News Overtaking Print in the US

POINT PR has become the first agency in America to conduct a survey to track the growth of the Internet, particularly as a source of news. The result shows that the use of Internet as source of news is overtaking the newspapers readership.

Washington, USA – March 02, 2008

The key findings of this research are:

• The overall share using any traditional source of news on a given day has fallen from 90% in 1994 to 73% today.

• 37% of overall Americans regularly get news online, up by 6% in just two years. A decade ago, just 13% of the public went online for news at least three days a week.

• The rise of Internet-based news causes newspapers readership to decline. However, online versions of newspapers are getting more popular.

• Online newspaper sites, streaming news programme, and social media are the
  main sources of Internet-based news.

The survey was conducted from 3 – 7 December 2008, and it involved 1,489 adult participants.

MULTIMEDIA ELEMENTS:

Download New Media Poses Challenges to Traditional Media

In this post, I’d like to discuss what has happened to traditional media after the emergence of new media. I’ve made a video to show you my opinion based on some research data. So, take a look at it and you’ll find the answer to the question I mentioned in this post title.

This video is created using Xtranormal application and edited using Windows Movie Maker.

The script and whitepaper are available for download.

We all know press release is the basic yet important tool in PR. Has press release died after the emergence of Web 2.0? Of course not. In fact, press release has relived and transformed into a PR 2.0 platform so called the Social Media Release (SMR).

I recently read the book “PR 2.0: New Media. New Tools, New Audiences” by Deirdre K. Breakenridge and here are some useful information on what to include in a SMR according to him:

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds (direct news feeds on content related to the subject matter as well as links to content).
• Photo libraries with high resolution images. (These images are for download into a print publication.)
• MP3 files (a digital audio encoding method to reduce the size of an audio file for easy download) or a podcast.
• Video footage for Video-On-Demand (VOD).
• Links to previous coverage on a topic with the ability to use del.icio.us or Digg for social bookmarking. (Journalists can tag their favourite information by locating, classifying, and ranking noteworthy references and resources.)
• Technorati is a leader in “what’s happening on the World Live Web.” Because bloggers commonly link to other blogs, Technorati searches and organises blogs, and tracks how blogs are linked together (by recording the relevance of the links to your subject matter).

Therefore, press release is now more than just a page of paper filled only with graphics and texts. Now, journalists can get more data from SMR in shorter time period. Journalists can download materials that are useful in the publication such as pictures, videos, podcasts directly from the SMR. All of these information could also help journalists to cover news completely as more and more journalists go online to retrieve news. The “2004 Media in Cyberspace” study described in an online article by John V. Pavlik Ph.D. (p.5) discovered that:

• 76% of reporters go online to find new sources and experts.

• 73% of reporters go online to find press releases.

• 81% of reporters go online daily to do searching.

• 92% of journalists go online as part of their story research.

Furthermore, the other important aspects of SMR is that it is not only for use by the journalists. It is also for bloggers who are interested in writing about a certain company or subject matter. Consumers or public who are online could also gain access to the SMR. As such, SMR also helps the company to communicate directly with its consumers.

Here is a useful SMR template from Shift Communications – a known PR agency in the USA. Shift Communications claimed to be the first one to create a PR 2.0 SMR template. This template is free for download from their website:

Click for Original PDF Document

You’ll notice that some basic press release rules are still there. Contact person, headline, main facts, quotes and boilerplate statements are still important in SMR. So don’t forget the 5Ws and other rules in writing a traditional press release even though we are now living the Web 2.0 world.

I also found one video on YouTube about Social Media Release by WebitPR agency. It is quite useful to help one understands SMR even though the agency is promoting itself with the video Put that aside, take an unbiased look at it here:

Here are some practical tips to get the most out of using social networking sites according to David Meerman Scott in his book – “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” :

• Target a specific audience
• Be a thought leader
• Be authentic and transparent
• Create lots of links
• Encourage people to contact you
• Participate
• Make it easy to find you
• Experiment

Based on these tips, I went back to analyse one of the branded profiles I’ve found previously – the Apple Students profile which currently has 990,791 fans.

Apple Students Profile on Facebook

It targets a specific audience which is obviously students. It also provides interesting information such as the special discounts for students, free music to download, recent top movies, etc. It also provides links to many other websites related to Apple. It also has discussion boards, review sections, and the Wall that allow people to discuss and post questions. Its profile page is incredibly easy to be found as it has so many users that invite their own friends to also participate in the profile and there is a logo on any user’s profile who has become its fan, ie. bearing the name “Apple Students”.

So I can say these tips really work!

Having known from the Top Social Media Sites 2008 that Facebook, one of the popular social networking sites, has massively grown 116% in a year reaching 200 million users, I am interested to look further into this.

What actually is people doing with social networking sites? How does it benefit the PR industry in being a channel to promote and engage brands with the public? According to the McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3 (conducted on March 08 ) – below are the things people typically do with their social networking profiles:

Click for Larger Image

The McCann research also mentioned that it is important to “exist inside social networks to create profiles, develop networks to distribute content and employ advertising and sponsorship to drive engagement with consumers.” I was curious to know how brands exist in those social networking sites so I decided to search for any existing branded-profiles in Facebook and here are some interesting one that I found:

• Apple Students, has 990,791 fans who have connected their profile with the Apple Students profile. You can get all the latest news of Apple products in here. There are also some interesting sections to attract its members by providing free songs to be downloaded and most importantly special discounts up to $200 for the student members.

• Twilight, the famous novel series and movies, has 1,089,950 fans. It provides links to the official websites, updates for the latest news, pictures and upcoming events for Twilight.

On the other hand, from the graph above we can also see that 23.3% users install applications on their social networking sites. Hence, I was searching again to find out whether there is any branded-application exists in Facebook and actually there are quite many! Here are just a few examples:

• Send Ben and Jerry Ice Cream application, allows users to send virtual Ben and Jerry ice cream to each other. It has 75 different flavours of the real ice cream to be sent out. It also provides reviews and discussion board sections. Currently, there are 36,904 monthly active users sending out those virtual ice creams to each other.

• Virtual iPhone is one interesting application that allows people to explore the iPhone device virtually. There are discussion boards, reviews section, etc posted by Facebook users who have added this application to their profiles. You can see that there is also a lucky draw to win an iPhone simply by adding this application to the profile. As such, this is one interesting way to engage people to participate. Virtual iPhone currently has 4,969 fans in Facebook.

It is very impressive to see that these brands succeed in connecting their brands with the Facebook users simply by asking the users to be fans of the brand’s or the product’s profile or by installing an application onto their profiles. In my upcoming blog posts, there will be some tips on how to be successful in using social networking sites as a channel for PR. So come back soon!

I found one interesting statistics data called Top Social Media Sites 2008 published at www.washingtonpost.com today. This research is conducted by comScore, an Internet marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet’s largest businesses. (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComScore)

comScore ranked websites by its worldwide traffic stats dated November 2008, as follows:

1. Blogger (222 million)

2. Facebook (200 million)

3. MySpace (126 million)

4. WordPress (114 million)

5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)

6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)

7. Flickr (64 million)

8. hi5 (58 million)

9. Orkut (46 million)

10. Six Apart (46 million)

11. Baidu Space (40 million)

12. Friendster (31 million)

13. 56.com (29 million)

14. Webs.com (24 million)

15. Bebo (24 million)

16. Scribd (23 million)

17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)

18. Tagged (22 million)

19. imeem (22 million)

20. Netlog (21 million)

Blogger, which is on top of the chart, has grown 44% since the last survey in November 2007. Facebook, surprisingly, is up 116% reaching 200 million users. My Space is pretty steady while WordPress has grown 68%. On the other hand, Windows Live Spaces is down 22%.

Click here for similar ranking in 2007.

As I mentioned in my previous blogs, negative comments or stories about products or services is inevitable in the practise of PR on the Web 2.0 world. “Dell – Hell” is one such example of a negative comment that appeared on a blog and brought down the company reputation.

It all started when one customer, named Jeff Jarvis, complained about a Dell laptop he had bought by writing all of his complaints on his blog and tagged it Dell – Hell. However, the Dell company did not give him any response. His blog was then followed by other unsatisfied users and this got larger and larger and eventually resulted in Dell’s sales drop.

Fortunately, after a lot of efforts, Dell managed to cope with it. Now Dell has its own corporate blog called Direct2Dell and it even has its own employees’ blogs called Your Blog.

Take a look at Jeff Jarvis’ blog – The Buzzmachine where you can find more information about the Dell Hell issue.

Or click here for a shorter explanation of this issue as well as some interesting lessons from which PR practitioners could learn, also written by Jeff Jarvis.

Weblogs is one of the applications that play an important role in the PR 2.0 industry.

This year, there are about 346 millions people in this world that read blogs and there is an 11% growth compared to last year. (source: The McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3).

More and more people are reading blogs online. So I think instead of spending a lot of money for media relations programme trying to convince reporters to cover news, why not try to create a blog or target bloggers to help us convey our messages directly to our target public online? We no longer need to wait for the traditional media to cover our news. We are now free from their filter and we have the power to send our messages across directly to our targeted public and this is all so GREAT!

After setting up blogs or having bloggers write our stories, we should be happy that all our hard work are actually worth it. Just take a look at the research result below:

However, there is a problem. Not everyone is writing a favourable story for us. Someone might post, write or leave negative comments and/or stories in their blogs and we have no control over that. Of course, we should be worried about that!

However, according to David Meerman Scott in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, he said: “I strongly believe that comments from readers offering different viewpoints than the original post are actually a good thing on a blog, because they add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of an issue and by highlighting that your readership is passionate enough to want to contribute to a debate on your blog”.

I agree with David as it is much more credible to have both positive and negative comments/stories on blogs. It makes much more sense to the readers that all the opinions do come from actual users of the products or services rather than just posting some edited comments on the blogs, for example. We need to welcome such negative feedbacks and then find an effective way to handle the criticisms.

These days I’ve been reading this book. It is definitely one interesting book and I learn quite a lot from it. This book is very accessible as it is written in blog-style which makes me feel like I’m reading a story book. It also provides a lot of examples and links so I can then find out more about a particular topic from resources on the Internet.

The first chapter starts with an interesting title: “The Old Rules of Marketing and PR Are Ineffective in an Online World”. It struck me that I’ve got a lot to learn to work in the new media as all the old rules applied in the traditional media that I have learnt are not applicable in the case of new media.

So what are the new rules that we all have to know then? According to Scott, these are the new rules of Marketing and PR:

• Marketing is more than just advertising.
• PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
• You are what you publish.
• People want authenticity, not spin.
• People want participation, not propaganda.
• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
• Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.
• PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
• The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
• Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
• Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
• On the Web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

I second his thought on those rules, especially the following rules. First, the rule – “Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate” - is similar to the statement from the video I posted here previously that “PR should engage people when, where and how they want to be engaged”. I think this is one advantage of Web 2.0 which was hardly done in the traditional media because we didn’t really have as many ways in sending our messages across. Nowadays, with Web 2.0, we can send our messages by using the media that is mostly appreciated by the targeted public. Of course we should do some research to determine which platform is the appropriate one. It’s about sending the right messages in the right time, at the right place, with the right way.

Secondly, with regards to the rule that says – “On the Web, the lines between Marketing and PR have blurred” – I do think that actually, be it on the Web or in real life, Marketing and PR should work hand in hand with each other anyway. It is ideal to work within an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) concept. It would be good if Marketing and PR are supporting each other. The messages would be addressed and understood better by the public. However, I realise that in the real life, it is hard to practise IMC for reasons that we all know well.

Later on at the part three of this book, there are lots of “How To” tips which are very useful. A must-read book for PR practitioner who is interested in new media!

If you are Athens users, click and log in here to read the book.

While browsing today, I came across an interesting video on YouTube that helps me understand better about the relationship between PR, Web 2.0 and social media.

This video titled “What’s the Buzz About PR 2.0/Social Media?” is created by Robert Sears, the PR 2.0 Social Media Manager from the SSA Public Relations agency based in Denver and Phoenix – USA. He talks about the usage of social media in PR.

I agree with his statement that in using Web 2.0, PR should engage people when, where and how they want to be engaged. I do really think it is important to find out the “when, where and how” our targeted public want to be engaged with. Now with the emergence of Web 2.0, we have plenty of choices to convey our messages across. We can upload videos on Youtube, upload pictures on Flickr, create a profile on Facebook, post stories on weblogs, and etc. But we can’t just use all of them, we need to know what our target public are really involved with. We need to know whether they only read blogs or watch videos or both.

Another interesting point that Robert made in his video is that social media provides a global public focus group. Everyone expresses their opinions online which somehow lets us know what they think about our products and services. It provides us a valuable insight into what they really wants and needs. So, simply get online and you can follow their conversation to find out what they really wants or needs. This is such a great contribution from Web 2.0 since consumer insight is one important point in PR.