The technicalities of the Web are intimidating and perplexing, but PR practitioners need to become familiar with them. Working with Internet designers, project managers or IT professionals on a Web project is no different than talking with print-house managers about publishing brochures, annual reports or fliers in the off-line world. You need to speak their language. Without knowing words like 'blue-lines,' 'leading,' 'justification' or 'four-color,' a PR professional would be lost when speaking with a printer. The same holds true in the online world. If your Web designer suggests adding Shockwave (a form of animation) to your message you better know what he is talking about.
"But, you don't have to understand all of the technical terms," says James Horton, senior director at Robert Marston and Associates, Inc. and founder of http://www.online-pr.com, a resource helping PR pros understand the mechanics behind a Web promotion. "People in PR should know what HTML is. But they don't need to know how to code it."
The question of just how much Web knowledge a PR person needs is defined by who they are speaking with on their team.
"Sometimes the guys who write breakthrough, genius code find it hard communicating their work to other people," says Dalin Clark, marketing director for Genex, an ebusiness consulting company. "It takes a really special person to explain all the technical jargon."
Project managers do this well. They're a buffer between heady design-speak and you. If your team is fortunate enough to have one on board he or she will translate the technical jargon into English, making it possible for you to relax about knowing all the shoptalk and concentrate on doing your job: trouble-shooting the site.
No passing the buck
Whether or not your team has a liaison between the site's engineers and you doesn't change your accountability when a site crashes. It's as much a PR responsibility as it is an issue for the people who designed, built and maintain it. If your company builds a site that requires a high-speed connection like a T3 line and your primary target audience will receive the message at home, your basic misunderstanding of modem speeds will cause the promotion to fail.
Take cartier.com, the site of watch-maker Cartier, which, considering its consumer focus, should be visited primarily by users in the home. Site-seers accessing the page with a 56K modem and a regular phone line get only music for the first 35 seconds, followed by a blank screen. The graphics are too big for the connection. Yet, users on a T1 line (the kind used in corporations) can view a dazzling multimedia affair.
Cartier's PR person should have halted construction, on the grounds that the average modem would not be able to digest what was coming through the line. Sure, it's a stunning design, re-enforcing Cartier's high-end image, but only users with modems above 56K can receive the message Cartier wanted to spread.
Management Upfront
Because of this responsibility, PR cannot leave a Web page's design solely in the hands of designers. Users' expectations of how a site should look are the foundation on which pages are built. It's PR's job to understand those expectations.
"People expect all sites to be interactive," says Janet Allbee, marketing analyst for Driveoff.com, an online car dealership. "The question is how interactive and how often must the content change. With companies like Coke or Pepsi users' expectations are very high. They should have sites that are very interactive with content changing constantly. For non-profit organizations...the expectations are not that high. You can get away with less interactivity and very little content change."
Take the tour
Once a site is built, but before it goes live, PR practitioners should walk through the site with their technical partners. Have them sell you the merits of the site. During the demonstration, the questions of who is the audience, what Web tools will they have at their disposal and what do they want to take away from the site should be running through your mind.
(Allbee, 303/431-4515, [email protected]; Clark, 310/736-2000, [email protected]; Horton, 212/371-2200, [email protected].)
Good Terms to Know
URL: Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address for a Web site. (PR
NEWS' URL is http://www.PRandMarketing.com.)
Broadband: a transmission channel able to simultaneously carry multiple
signals, like video and audio.
Cable modem/modem: a device that converts digital signals to analog for
transmission and then converts it back to digital after it's received.
Browser: A computer application that enables you to get to the Web and
view pages.
Firewall: a form of technical security that protects computers and networks
from hackers, viruses, etc.
Whiteboarding: An area on the screen that multiple users can write or
draw on.
Listserv: email that is administered by a computer (handles subscription
requests, etc.)
Mail bomb: When someone sends you a huge number of emails and crashes
the system.
Hyperlink: An icon on the Web page that, once clicked on, will link you
to another page.
Wallpaper: The background that the text or graphics are embedded in.
Packet: Data that is routed between Web pages.
Router: a device or software that determines the next network point to
which a packet should be forwarded.