Day: February 18, 2004

PR on the Internet….where are we now?

The Institute for Public Relations has released a “Primer for Internet Audience Measurement“.

It’s a well timed piece of research which provides an introduction to the various means of online website measurement from hits, to unique visitors and page views. 

If you’re experienced in measuring website traffic there isn’t a huge amount of new advice here but it is a good introduction and includes an interesting comparison of the metrics used online and in traditional media.

The reason I believe it’s well timed is that the Internet has now been a popular medium for about ten years.  I know many of you have been using it longer than that and while it could be argued the launch of Windows 95 really sparked the Internet’s incredible growth, 1994 was probably the year the Internet began to move from the academia and engineers to the public at large.

So from a Public Relations standpoint where are we?

The Internet creates an environment where crises breed at a far faster rate than in the real world.  Any perceived control we had over information is gone.  Any e-mail communication is open to the world either through leaks which occur every day or disclosure in legal process. This universal disclosure is coupled with instantaneous information delivery practically anywhere on the planet. Geographic boundaries are increasingly meaningless.

Furthermore people have never had a better opportunity to share their thoughts, both positive and negative about your organization.  Newsgroups, consumer websites and mailing lists have all democratised opinion. The new arrival of weblogs has further complicated the picture.

People no longer accept “corporate-speak”, they don’t want formulaic answers, they want organizations to talk to them as individuals, to treat them as individuals.

On the plus side, the ready availability of a corporate presence online provides a unique opportunity for organizations to engage with their audiences – of course many decide not to do so. Recent research found that in times of crisis, consumers visit the organization involved as a primary source of information.

We now have tools that enable us to reach audiences at a fraction of the time and cost of our historic tactics. When you couple this reach with the Internet’s ability to offer cost-effective measurement it opens up a new era of accountability for PR. If we have the time.

The 1950’s comic books that forecast that we’d all be lounging around today letting the computers do all the work were all wide of the mark.  The advent of the Internet, e-mail etc. has made certain tasks such as research faster and easier, but overall we are working harder and longer today than in the pre-Internet era.

Another trend is the connections betwen like minded individuals.  Special interest groups can be quickly created online posing a range of challenges and opportunities for PR professionals. Furthermore, while the early stars of the Internet were global websites, there is now a growing trend among consumers of looking for local content, news and information.

The Internet has completely conquered certain markets.  The technology business, as you would expect, now runs over the Internet.  For most technology companies the majority of sales leads are now captured online and only supplemented with traditional activities such as trade shows and sales calls.  Other markets such as travel and books have seen similar growth .  However, it would be misleading to say everything has moved online.

For example, people still like shopping locally and in many cases phenomena that have grabbed the Internet’s attention have failed to have a similar affect of the attention of Main Street USA.  The most obvious recent example is the Howard Dean campaign.  The Dean organization did a fantastic job of reaching out and mobilising the online community, finding cash online and exploding to the top of every pre-Caucus opinion poll.  However, as soon as the campaign moved into the real world, the wheels came off the wagon.  Dean went from the Democratic mover to the Democratic loser in less than two weeks. The Internet, it seems, doesn’t mirror the offline world in every respect. We must be careful to balance the two.

Finally, the Internet is alive.  Unlike, for example the Print media, where the major innovations in one hundred years were better distribution, lower cost production, color and the introduction of the tabloid format, the Internet is constantly in flux. New tools and practices are emerging all the time.  Whilst e-mail will remain a major form of communication once we have solved the problem of spam, new technologies such as weblogs, RSS, Atom etc. are being created every day which directly impact how you reach your audience.

So the Internet isn’t a fixed target.  It’s useful, it’s hard work and for most industries it is only one of many audiences.

After ten years of PR on the Internet, a useful summary might be, in the words of the Irish Prime Minister..”a lot done, more to do”.