Digi” PR” Is Just Another Way to Say ” People Rule”
Everyday, on the Internet, millions of people are voting on thousands of things:
- What they think of movies they’ve seen.
- How they rate restaurants.
- Books they recommend or suggest you never even read the first page.
- Hotels they fell in love with or asked for their money back.
What does this have to do with PR? Nothing, if you choose to ignore it as the ranting of amateur critics. And if you have a closed mind about digital PR, that’s precisely what you may do.
So delete this now.
OK, talking to the faithful, it is so closed-minded and myopic to view the Internet reviewers as amateurs. Forget their academic credentials-which you really don’t need to rate a hotel chain- they have something you need and your clients can benefit from mightily. They have power. (Ask Obama)
And this is a form of power you can harness and leverage if you harvest the public opinion on the Web and use it as proof points for your clients’ products and\or services.
The idea is to stop viewing public ratings (PR) and public relations (PR) as two different worlds. More effective is to view the former as a powerful way to reinforce the latter. By gathering positive votes (which is what the reviews really are), we can build independent support into our media pitches, backgrounders and even create polls based on an aggregation of public reviews as opposed to those created by paid consultants. In effect, we are demonstrating public endorsement of our PR positions.
And you can get as creative as you like. Say your client is a movie studio with a low ad budget indie film. Such movies live and die to a great extent by the volume and the quality of the reviews they garner.
If your film is scoring with the public on movie sites, create a landing page of your own to reflect this grass roots appeal and use print, broadcast and Web PR to drive traffic to your page. In a flash, as millions contemplate which movie to see, they recognize that a low profile sleeper may be a better bet than the mega budget star vehicle.
In many ways, the Web is a great town hall with millions of opinions residing on a Balkanized set of Web sites. By linking this opinion to support your clients’ product or service, you demonstrate that the power of the people can propel the power of your PR!
Mark Stevens
CEO