Posts tagged: Digital PR

We would not only need products that can satisfy people’s needs, but we would also have to create needs that these products can satisfy. A rather simplistic solution to this seemingly complex conundrum is public relations (PR). To navigate an increasingly complex and fast-paced digital industry at the intersection of technology, media, and society, PR pros must step up and employ emerging tools and analytics to stay in the game.

For some context, Forbes aptly predicted back in 2019 that the average user attention span is dropping by 88% every year. Likewise, an insightful 2022 Microsoft study reveals that the average attention span is merely 8 seconds – down from 12 seconds back in 2000. The shortening moments of undivided attention suggest it is not possible anymore to gauge the pulse of consumer opinion to guide public relations activities through conventional means. Social listening is one such indispensable tool to keep up with the pace of the data-driven digital world. Essentially, it implies monitoring the web and social media for keywords associated with a brand, a particular campaign, or even a specific product by employing analytical tools.

Pinning What Makes Your Audience Tick

Understanding what sticks with your audience is the key to effective PR. Off-late, consumers tend to be more inclined towards brands whose messaging resonates with their personal values and outlook. Using social listening tools, PR gurus can gauge the public sentiment about the brands they are managing and reorient the brand communications accordingly through dedicated PR initiatives.

Proactive Crisis Communications in a Sea of UGC

‘Social’ is a behavior, not merely a media channel. User-Generated Content (UGC) is a ubiquitous means for people to share their experiences and feelings about brands, products, and services, largely on social media. UGC may take a number of forms: unboxing videos, product reveals, and reviews – positive or negative. In such social media landscape is where the need for crisis communication PR often starts as well.

Analyzing Brand Health with Sentiment Analysis

Aka opinion mining: sentiment analysis is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique to determine whether a data point is positive, negative, or neutral. In the world of digital PR, the data refers to online conversations concerning the brand. This data – mentions, comments, reviews, tags, and more – can be translated into display analytics mapping out graphical trends depicting perceived sentiments. This novel technique can offer invaluable insights into the prevailing tone of conversations involving a brand’s keywords and PR pros can ensure not to miss any unfavorable shift by setting up periodic notifications.

Step Up Your PR Plan With Evidence-Based Competitor Analysis

Conduct a comprehensive brand health analysis by not only tracking your own keywords but include a data-driven competitor analysis into the bargain. This practice will allow for a more well-rounded PR plan – one that takes into account external threats and potential opportunities. Whether it entails keeping close tabs on what the direct competitors of the brands are up to or the strides the industry leaders are making – social listening allows a hold of competition tactics as well as emerging trends.

Quantifying Brand Awareness To Make Data-Driven PR Decisions

One paramount utility of social listening is to gauge brand awareness by monitoring the brand name online. Brand awareness is an intricate metric as it feeds into the share of voice which in turn translates into the market share of the brand. Social listening allows this metric to be precisely quantified by using parameters including but not limited to language, location, and date of mention. PR pros can deep-dive as much as needed by using filters such as Boolean search mode for keywords that may be too common.

Tap Into Influencer Marketing Opportunities With An Integrated Approach

With the rocketing relevance of influencer marketing, dynamically navigating the micro-, macro, and everything in-between- influencer landscape with social listening can be a valuable addition to the PR strategy. PR practitioners can keep a keen eye on which influencers are already mentioning the concerned brand, the nature of the organic mentions, and not forget, the potential for future collaborations. At that, analyzing key metrics such as engagement can help PR pros better identify whether micro-bloggers are more suited to a particular brand promotion or it would be more favorable to go big with mega-influencers to generate large-scale buzz for a mass-consumption product.

Enrich Audience Segmentation with Behaviour-Based Personas

The fact that sets apart social listening from other audience analysis tools is the fact that it integrates the organic online user behavior with more conventional demographics like gender, age, location, language, etc. churning out augmented user personas to take your PR strategy to the next level. PR pundits can dive deeper into the intrinsic needs and wants of a brand’s target audience in addition to traditional qualifying factors used for audience buckets.

Longs story short: the future of PR is digital. Public relations ought to be practiced where the public is and Hootsuite affirms that the average netizen spends more than 40% of their waking life online, i.e. 1.43 billion years!