In the mad rush to have a presence online, many companies miss the virtual boat, attracting either few visitors or the unintended types of visitors to their site. International communications firm Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart learned about a year after launching its site that one of the best ways to attract users (read: future clients) is to give them the low-down on what it has done for each of its clients. New York-based OA&R, which specializes in medical, public affairs and information technologies services, has created Web sites for the Regional Airline Association, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Glass Packaging Institute. Yet despite its worthy track record in cyberspace, it closed down its Web site (then, http://www.oar.org) in February and decided to start anew.
It dawned on them that although they were carrying an online torch promoting the worth of PR and battling the naysayers, the audience they were reaching was comprised mostly of students and entry-level professionals, not business magnates and entrepreneurs. Yet who they truly wanted to reach was potential clients - customers who weren't likely to stay at a site that merely offered PR 101 nuggets and didn't answer that nagging question: What can you do for me?
And they decided to proceed in a fairly anomalous way: to place online not only the company's client list but case studies on evergreen programs they had recently tackled. Today, of OA&R's 125 clients, 112 are listed online. And 26 of those clients are highlighted in case histories.
"This is atypical," says Shoshana Rosenthal, public relations coordinator for Trusted Information Systems, a Glenwood, Md., company specializing in encryption and network security software (i.e., firewalls) and an OA&R client. "What makes this [Web venture] stick out is that they were willing to take some risks and provide details on what they're doing for their clients" even though it gives their competitors a heads-up on learning more about their operation. (TIS is one of the companies that gave the go-ahead for OA&R to put together a case study on its client work. The piece details what went into OA&R producing TIS's first annual report after it went public last year.)
Even though it's too early to tell (since the new site launched Aug. 19), OA&R is projecting 10,000 hits per month (it does not have figures on current site traffic).
A Site is Born
OA&R went full-throttle on the site overhaul in May. And then, after spending months working on the concept, site planners decided to take a leap of faith and ask their clients to go front-and-center for them - a move that's uncommon in an industry sometimes driven by concerns over confidentiality.
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Source: Glenn Whiting |
For about six weeks, from June 15 to the start of August, OA&R execs began approaching clients and asking for their OK to post case histories. OA&R approached about 60 and got the go-ahead from about one-third. In return, it allowed those who said "yes" to approve the content.
Aside from the "case studies" of client campaigns, the site, http://www.oarpr.com, is a virtual treasure chest of background on OA&R as well as a forum that provides electronic routes to query senior staffers, job postings and links to other sites. The site provides a window into how OA&R undertook some heady PR tasks for some of its major clients - IBM, transportation company Navistar, the American Hospital Association and Nature Made Vitamins.
To up its ante as a global competitor, it designed its online case studies to reveal some poignant and meaty details. Synopses show how particular OA&R campaigns led to: changes involving senior-level execs (for the AHA undertaking, more than 300 hospital CEOs were trained in political advocacy); and massaging the inner workings of companies (for Navistar, the results of an employee survey program on the company's values were released to 15,000 employees).
"We wanted this site to be case history-driven and we were willing to take some risks" by revealing specifics, says Glenn Whiting, interactive services manager for OA&R, Washington. D.C. Although execs won't reveal the cost of the restructuring, they did say outsourcing such a project would likely carry a $75,000 price and they estimate they saved about 20 percent on the overhaul because they handled it in-house.
When OA&R made its foray into cyberspace more than two years ago, the essence of its site was exactly what planners had hoped for: a venue that would serve as an online advocate and educator for PR - or as Creative Director Steve Dahllof recalls, a kind of classroom. But later, that tack proved to be the dilemma: the site needed to be a business tool for OA&R, not just a soapbox for the PR profession.
(Other, more tangible, signs pointed to that as well: since the site first went up, traffic had trailed off from 2,000 monthly visitors to 500.) The revamped site features a map that details each of OA&R's overseas offices (you can click on an office and get access to contact names, telephone numbers and addresses); its client list and an icon that invites you to send e-mail questions and comments to CEO Bob Seltzer. Allowing users to e-mail Seltzer might seem like a compulsory attempt to include top management, but for OA&R, it's much more. Seltzer, who came to OA&R in June of this year, became a member of the internal team planning the new site. And other employees, from across the OA&R spectrum, have been integral to the site's restructuring - and hopefully to its success. (OA&R, 202/452-9408; TIS, 301/947-7194)