The Social Media Conundrum
As we all know, communicating and marketing via the online medium is hotting up. It seems to have reached a frenzy in 09 with business owners and marketing managers wanting to be involved in the frenzy and the PR and Advertising industry trying to keep up and offer clients effective social media marketing solutions. This year alone I’ve attended several events regarding the social media issue and we’ve even hosted one ourselves.
Despite all the panic about getting brands into the online space what I have noticed is that the majority of our clients generally don’t value appearing in an online article nearly as much as they do appearing in print in a traditional medium such as a magazine or newspaper that can be purchased from the newsagent. This is despite the fact that moving their brand into the online space was a clear part of their brief and when we commenced the campaign.
It doesn’t matter if you give clients all the statistics about the percentage of consumers who are now getting their news updates and their media fix from online sources. It seems that to most business owners their feeling is that an article in the online arena or contributing in the right way to a relevant blog isn’t as ‘real’ or valuable as a traditional piece of media exposure.
This observation has really made me put all the social media panic in perspective. The PR industry is definitely moving in the right direction in incorporating social media into campaigns however I do feel there will always be a place for traditional media as most clients value exposure in publications that it can feel and touch or watch and listen to.
What would you value more – exposure in a physical magazine or its online equivalent? I would love to know your reasons.
Well, let us hope so for the sake of my job, eh?
I think you’re right, Monica. It has as much to do with journalists’ attitudes towards what they put online and what they put in print, though. There has long been a “just stick that online” culture.
I deal with PR people every day and I’m pretty sure most of them value seeing their clients in print above an article published online. The silly thing is, that online coverage is potentially searchable by the entire WORLD and will probably stay that way for years, if not forever.
But long live print snobbery, in my book (or should I say magazine?)!
I agree, it’s tough when clients ask what we can do to put their brand online, but are demanding print as well… It’s great to achieve both, but clients shouldn’t complain when we have one and not the other. Both take time and invole relationships with journos / web editors, even if there is that mentality of ‘just stick it online’.
I work in a technology-specialist PR agency so that will probably explain some of the differences we see from what you have described. While there are exceptions, the majority of our clients value online more than print.
As Jen says, its anything online becomes part of a company\’s permenant story, an archive of success. Also in the online world PR results can achieve some of the measurability that other facets of marketing can give through hyperlinks. Checking web traffic reports, or using a specific URL for PR can demonstrate how much click through an article generates.
When someone reads about a company or product online they are immediately able to action their response – going to the site, buying, whatever.
The one problem online suffers from is it lacks the glory feel of print. Last week we got one of my clients a double page spread profile in BRW. He went out and bought a copy just to frame the piece… and I suspect his mum bought one too
There are pros and cons for both. In the online corner, a pro is definitely its measurability and the ‘profile’ you can form of the person who is reading and responding to coverage. However, there is a certain impermanence to the web and the vast amount of competing coverage can mean the piece gets swallowed up when the next thing comes along 30 seconds later.
Print, as Emily points out, has a ‘glory’ feel. Once you have a tangible copy, no one can take that away from you, even if the next magazine comes out a week or a month later. And you can frame it! It’s easy to change or make a web article disappear; print has a permanence. Unfortunately it is also more difficult to know whether someone actually read the article, who they are, how they react etc.
So I’ll sit on the fence for this one