What’s Next in Interactive PR?
Lately the online media buzz has begun to shift from social media to mobility. Even talk of the emerging juggernaut Pinterest has begun to wane. Yet, in some ways social media and mobility go hand-in-hand: Both enable users to interact and engage creatively and directly in unprecedented ways. Whether mobility will overshadow social networking in coming months remains to be seen, but it’s clear mobility is offering new challenges and opportunities for PR practice.
New Technology Creates New PR Opportunity
In recent weeks, we’ve been engaged in a number of conversations with colleagues examining media and digital technology trends. Consequently, we’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about our vision of where, and how, PR 2.0 & mobility converge. Our take on the point of intersection is a concept we alternately call “immersion public relations,” and 360̊ public relations.*
Immersion PR
In our view, mobility, and its ever-growing stable of related user applications (apps), provides companies with an unparalleled opportunity to showcase the best of who they are as a brand, seamlessly integrating all platforms. This means customers/users can immerse themselves in key aspects of all company-related marketing content–including proprietary Web sites, product showcases, social networking, corporate video, electronic newsrooms (e.g., press releases, advisories & annual reports), traditional media coverage, blogs, etc.— in one-stop-shop fashion, creating the most complete marketing experience the company can provide. Moreover, companies are able to control this changing mix of content , updating it periodically, as dynamics change within the organization or brand.
We also think of this new PR “app” concept as 360̊ public relations,* referring not only to the broad showcase of content, but to the experience of the user being enveloped in the digital space by every conceivable conception of a company the user can imagine. We envision this as a singular experience, more dynamic, and therefore more compelling for customers/users than experiencing the same content on separately accessed platforms.
At MediaWorks, we are embracing and moving into mobile technology to better serve PR clients, so we’ll be actively engaged on “R&D” for “immersion public relations” over the upcoming months. We invite you to join us in creating, sampling and developing this promising new technology. If you’re interested in immersion public relations* or 360̊ PR,* please feel free to let us know how you like the concept, what you find useful or appealing about it, and what steps you may be taking to develop this new technology.
As always, you can reach us with a comment below, or on Facebook or Twitter.
*Trade names adopted by MediaWorks, Inc. directly related digital applications incorporating multiple aspects of traditional marketing & PR.