By M. Isi Eromosele

For public relations, the advent of the digital age has created an incredible host of challenges and opportunities by using new technologies to connect with customers on a global scale.

Digital public relations practices are in the forefront of the new ways of conducting public relations.

In conducting global business, it is a necessity to create innovative public relations campaigns that build awareness, visibility and effective market positioning for companies. These stated goals can be achieved through combining traditional public relations strategies with the most advanced, innovative digital channels to affect maximum effectiveness.

A well thought out digital public relations campaign can help a company with management issues, corporate positioning, general awareness and creating buzz, among others. The company’s upper management would need to share a strong belief that new communication approaches are needed to succeed in a world that is now digitally empowered.

Implementing successful public relations campaigns requires the integration of a fast moving approach with proprietary tools and innovative techniques.

Position and Brand Development - Proprietary tools can help companies build powerful, differentiated positioning that reverberates with target audiences. This could be followed with measurement of online perception, identification of detractors and potential evangelists, mining of crisis issues and the use of highly defined data and analysis to push the public relations program

Media Outreach - A highly focused media relations team would work daily with the highly influential media, including print, web and broadcast.

Blog Relations - A blogging program would need to be set up to bring influence upon the traditional media, using the best practice approaches.

Content Development - The digital world requires content that is clear, concise and powerful. Companies would have the opportunity to work with media as well as become the media. A wide range of compelling content would be needed for communication channels ranging from social networks, blogs, podcasts, video blogs and more.

Content Syndication - Content would be created and syndicated for broad digital distribution.

Press Release Optimization - Properly designed and optimized press releases can be powerful tools to generate high publicity and drive quality traffic and links to company websites.

Tracking and Analysis - Campaign processes and results would be tracked and analyzed to measure ongoing successes of the Digital Public Relations campaign, enabling the rapid adjustment of strategies and messaging.

Other services can be blended into the digital public relations campaign, including Search Engine Reputation Management and Viral Marketing.

With the proliferation of Search Engine Marketing and an increasingly Internet savvy consumer, public relations needs to abandon its traditional writing voice to concentrate on crafting digital headlines that contain phases that can be tracked by search engines. Content must be methodically crafted for keyword optimization for Internet optimization tools to pick them up.

Previously, public relations consisted of competing with a few major organizations and answering questions from a select number of media inquiries. These days, there is a plethora of sophisticated blogs and media savvy citizen journalists, news videos and text content that people can download instantaneously. Web users can use podcasts to get audio information from innumerable sources on the fly.

All of the above requires a new way of thinking in implementing public relations campaigns in the digital age, combining the opportunities presented by new technologies with a better understanding of how people use these same technologies to search for information.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group