For me, one of the most difficult lessons to remember about online PR is that I have almost no control over how the audience sees my campaign materials. If you are producing materials for television, your products look better if you use good lighting, writing, camera work, actors and graphics. For radio, experts use professional voice-overs.
For print, graphic artists and photographers can make the difference between read or dead. Online, however, making promotions look better can often work against you.
While online, the viewer is in charge. The visitor sets the pace, burning through your Web site at warp speed, ignoring all the features (and ads) you think he or she should linger over.
Through their browser settings, viewers choose the fonts they will see, the point sizes, the formatting. Try to send them e-mail and they may filter you out forever (and you'll never know). Send attachments with your e-mails and your readers may chuck them, sight unseen.
Much as it goes against all my training and common sense, I find myself time and again stripping my promotions down to the ugly, bare essentials: e-mail in straight ASCII text, no formatting, no graphics, no file attachments, homely home pages with no animation and only small, speedy graphics.
When I'm designing a campaign, I envision a matronly inner-city librarian working on a PC running DOS, or a Mac Classic with a black & white monitor and a 14.4 modem. Can I reach her? What will this page look like on her screen?
The Limits of Bandwidth
This humbling lesson that I'm at the mercy of a viewer's hardware or software came up again recently when I was asked to promote a CD-ROM online.
The client put a demo version of the disk on its Web site, wanting me to lure the target audience to the site. After trying to be as polite as possible, I finally explained the problem this way: "The more people who come to your site, the fewer CD-ROMs you will sell. The site works against you. People will believe they are getting an accurate impression of what it feels like to use this CD-ROM.
"They will think the CD-ROM is slow, the graphics are lousy, and the programming is buggy, because that's what the average online user will experience at your site. You don't control the speed of their connection, the color or resolution of their screens, the memory they have allocated to their Web browser or the plug-ins they have installed. The more prospects who visit your site, the more sales you will lose."
Another client tried to solve this dilemma. Instead of demonstrating the CD-ROM at the Web site, they allowed users to download a demo. Guess how many people downloaded the 14.5 megabyte file? How many people couldn't get it to work once they waited through the download? What impression does this leave with the prospect? Here are some solutions:
Provide Alternatives
In 1995, the Playboy Web site, http://www.playboy.com, wanted to run an interview with cyberpunk author William Gibson using a new technology called RealAudio. I begged them to provide a text transcription of the interview. When the text version got ten times the traffic of the audio version, the Web master sent me a thank-you note.
Offer Choices
The Roland Collection Web site, http://www.roland-collection.com, offers clips from more than 400 films about art. After lengthy discussions about bandwidth problems, they decided to format the streaming video clips for three different connection speeds: 14.4, 28.8, and 56k. Their logs showed downloads evenly divided between all three speeds.
Mail the Demo
John Wiley & Sons, http://www.wiley.com, wanted to show prospects a demo CD-ROM of "The Culture of Animal Cells." We suggested offering a text-based excerpt to the target audience online. The excerpt gave an e-mail address where prospects could request a demo CD-ROM in the mail. Now they will get an accurate impression of what it feels like to use the product on their own systems.
Offer a Spokesperson
Wiley wanted to do an online campaign for "Architectural Graphic Standards CD-ROM," http://www.wiley.com/ags. A familiar problem: the site didn't give a good impression of the value of the product. Our solution: we put the creator of the CD-ROM on a chat tour. He visited one architecture school's Web site, the architecture forum on CompuServe, and a computer graphics forum on AOL. There's nothing like having a knowledgeable spokesperson discuss the benefits of the product with the target audience.
Throw a Party
A cable TV company wanted to promote the Web site it built for its high-speed cable modem customers. The problem: most of the journalists that we wanted to review the site would use conventional (low speed) connections. For them, the site would be slow and disappointing. Our solution: hold a press briefing in each of the cities where the product would roll out, inviting journalists to a central location equipped with a cable modem so they could test-drive the site the way it was meant to be seen.
It's hard to work in an industry focused on the latest, the greatest, the glitziest, and yet create campaigns that appeal to that underfunded librarian in Brooklyn. But when it comes to the number of people I reach with my campaigns, I'd rather be on the fat end of the wedge than the cutting edge.
Steve O'Keefe is director of Internet publicity services for The Tenagra Corporation, Houston. He will be presenting a workshop on "Promoting Books Online" at the Publishers Marketing Association in L.A. April 28, and attending the Book Expo America immediately following. If you'd like to meet Steve in L.A., e-mail [email protected] for an appointment.