Are PR agencies ready to rule web 2.0?

Swedish companies invest 288 million kronor (45.5 million USD) per year in social media campaigns. Well, actually they don’t. But it is an intriguing thought, if they did. According to a survey by Coremetrics called ‘Face of the New Marketer’, US marketing professionals spend 7.8 percent of their online marketing efforts on social media campaigns in Q3 2007.

social media investments

During the same period, Swedish companies invested 924 million kronor (146 million USD) in online advertising (pdf). If the same percentage of the Swedish online budgets were spent on social media, that would be about 72 million kronor per quarter, or 288 million per year. Now, I don’t believe for a second that we are even near those figures yet but you could look at the number as the potential market for these services in the short term. Then you could start asking yourself questions like:

a) How long will it take for us to get there?
b) What will drive marketing professionals to spend on social media?
c) What type of consultants will capture the lion’s share of the spending?

And let me make a quick attempt to answer, just from the top of my head:

a) Probably longer than what is healthy for many brands
b) Communications agencies need to evangelize these services to clients, they need to show ROI and how to measure, and they need to show successful cases
c) I am convinced that PR agencies could be in the driver seat when it comes to social media.

Dagens Media’s editor in chief Rolf van den Brink asks this week whether PR agencies in Sweden are ready to handle the social media landscape. And while I think many agencies lack deeper knowledge about web 2.0, I disagree that advertising agencies should be better suited than PR agencies to tackle relations directly with customers. PR agencies are used to managing relations with different audiences and to deal with messages that aren’t directly in your control. Previously you needed to communicate via gatekeepers (read: journalists) that could distort, praise or ignore your message. In social media, your message is in the hands of the consumers. If any consultant would be able to advise clients on communicating in a transparent, chaotic, conversational media landscape, then it should be PR agencies. I don’t see advertising agencies excel in two way communication, do you?

Björn at JMW adds a few more arguments:
– PR agencies are good at assessing news value, which will also be relevant in new media.
– PR agencies are experts on producing content, which can drive the conversation.

But that’s in theory. How it is in practice, is a completely different ball game. Some agencies are already working with these matters, while others are many steps behind. So, who’s ready to make 288 million kronor?

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24 nominees for Swedish PR award Spinn 2007

Out of the 76 entries that were submitted to the Swedish PR award Spinn 2007, the following have been nominated:

B2B (Årets business-to-businesskampanj):
Svensk Mjölk – Guldmedaljen 2007
Prime PR/Allers förlag – Allers kan kvinnor
Prime PR/TelisaSonera – Sommarens kioskvältare
Andréasson Public Relations /Netstar – Communityn, från lekstuga till
marknadsföringsverktyg

Consumer (Årets konsumentkampanj):
Prime PR/Svenska McDonald’s – Nya Happy Meal
Prime PR/TeliaSonera – Julhälsningar via SMS
Prime PR/adidas – “Kom ombytt”
Mahir PR/Universal Records – Martin Stenmarck
Goody Bag/Swiss Masai Sverige – MBT (Världens minsta gym)
Edelman/Microsoft XBox – Lanseringen av Halo 3

Integrated campaign (Årets integrerade kampanj):
Sargasso/Twentieth Century Fox – Simpsons The Movie
Full Tank/Linné 2007 – Mr. Flower Power Linné 2007
Edelman/Naturvårdsverket – Batteriinsamlingen
Prime PR/adidas – “Kom ombytt”

Spokesperson of the year (Årets talesperson):
Edelman/Naturvårdsverket – Batteriinsamlingen
Text 100/Symantec – Per Hellqvist tar IT-säkerhet till folkhemmet
Spotlight PR/Telge Kraft – Ekundernas vän mot eljättarna

Event of the year (Årets event):
Edelman/Microsoft XBox – Lanseringen av Halo 3
Sargasso/Enosvezia – Hemmafester med Ramon Bilbao
Progress PR/BMW Sweden – “Vi har planer för framtiden, har du?”
JMW Kommunikation /Cycleurope Crescent – North Pole Bike Extreme by Crescent

Digital campaign (Årets digitala kampanj):
Re:Public Relations och Mikaela & Helena Reklambyrå/Sveriges Mediebyårer – Floskeltoppen, Stockholm Media Week
Prime PR/Nokia Multimedia – Nokia N73: “Grymma stövlar”
Prime PR/Libresse – Libresse, Let’s Design!

Winners will be announced on Nov 21 in Stockholm.

Updated: One nominee was missing in the press release from the Association of Public Relations Consultancies in Sweden (!) and it has been added to the Integrated Category making it 24 in total.

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Now that’s what I call PR

Mickes Car Rental in Visby hits the jackpot in the New York Times in an article about Ingmar Bergman’s beloved island Fårö.

“Faro is not easy to reach. From New York, fly to Stockholm; Continental (from $570 in early November ) and SAS (from about $720) fly from Newark. From Stockholm, take a 40-minute flight (http://www.skyways.se or http://www.gotlandsflyg.se) or three-hour ferry (http://www.destinationgotland.com/) to Visby, Gotland. (To go by ferry, take a train from Stockholm Central Station to the nearby port town of Nynashamn or the bus from Stockholm City terminal, timed to match the ferry schedule). In Visby, rent a car at Mickes Car Rental (http://www.mickesbiluthyrning.se/), Avis or Europcar, and drive to Farosund on the northern tip of Gotland, about an hour. There, you can board the free ferry that crosses to Faro.”

volvo244 And the readers of NYT will be offered fancy cars like this one 🙂

Via Per Westberg.

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Poor PR from Facebook

There has been a buzz recently in the blogosphere about Facebook and its implications for public relations. But what about the site’s own PR tactics? The last few days the social networking site has taken a few punches in Swedish media because users have put up fake profiles of famous Swedes. First, there was fashion journalist Sofi Fahrman who realized she had a very realistic profile on Facebook. Some of her closest friends had been invited to connect, only it wasn’t the real Fahrman who was behind the profile. Then the Swedish king, Carl XVI Gustaf, received the same treatment, even though it was quite easy to tell this one wasn’t the real thing. Today, the leading Swedish news site Aftonbladet.se follows up with a new article, stating that Mona Sahlin (leader of the Social Democratic Party), Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, former Prime Minister Göran Persson and a bunch of other celebrities all have fake Facebook profiles.

Questions about identity theft and online security strike at the heart of social networking sites’ brands and can’t be neglected even if they’re from a small country in northern Europe. But when Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet try to get in touch with Facebook they get the silent treatment. No reply.

“DN has tried to reach Facebook for a comment, without success.”

“Aftonbladet has tried to get in touch with representatives of Facebook without getting a response.”

This is obviously a missed opportunity to manage this upcoming crisis situation. I expect that Facebook will need to increase their PR efforts if they want to continue to challenge MySpace in the social networing arena.

Footnote: Jeremy Pepper wrote about Facebook’s poor PR more than a year ago.

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The bad reputation of PR

“Don’t tell my mother I work in an advertising agency – she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse”, is a well-known quote. Maybe the same could be said about the PR profession.

Last week I noticed a public relations term that I haven’t encountered before – Black PR, meaning the practice of paying journalists for coverage. Apparently this is a common practice in for example Russia and other nearby countries. PR Week recently wrote that the Ukrainian Association of Public Relations (UAPR) for the first time ever had made a resolution condemning a black PR campaign. The campaign in question was allegedly arranged by telecommunications company Altimo and designed to “smear Norwegian rival Telenor and the country of Norway”.

“Telenor has submitted planning documents from Altimo to the UAPR, which it claims show various journalists were paid off – $4,000 for a story, in one instance – and that Altimo had a clear and deliberate strategy to destroy the reputation of its rival. Altimo, owned by Russian company Alfa, has insisted the documents are false and, in turn, accused Telenor of waging a smear campaign against its company.”

The opposite of “black PR”, according to one comment in the article, is “Western-style communications”. But not all Western countries seem to be as “clean” as we wish to think. At least not if we should believe Toni Muzi Falconi, a Senior Counsel at an Italian management consultancy. He recently participated in the PR Formos 2007 (pdf) conference in Vilnius, Lithuania to discuss ethical and “black” PR practices and published his speech on his blog. It lists a number of cases from Italy that could be described as black PR.

After the conference he blogged about some of the other findings.

An April 07 study of the business community in Lithuania about the role of black pr revealed that:
– 35% believe that all public relations agencies indulge in those practices and specifically 50% say that those practices are mostly used to gain direct advantages for their clients, while 47% say that they are used to smear their clients competitors.
– A good 33% of the sample say that they have been themselves victims of black pr and the same number believe that in Lithuania the practice is more widespread than elsewhere.
– Some optimism in the 32% who say the phenomena in decreasing while 28% insist that it is instead increasing.
– Finally 47% believe black pr is not a crime, 40% indicate that it is less serious than bribing a public official while 10% say it is the same.

Inga Latkovska, from Latvia, was quoted saying “that in her country it was easy to bribe the media”.

Yaryna Klyuchkovska, from Ukraine, estimated that “some 50% of the pr spent goes in those practices, without even considering political pr where it certainly much higher”.

Thorsten Lutzler of the DPRG, the German public relations association, said that black PR is also conducted in Western Europe and “that 54% of the German public believes that pr is propaganda”. He also stated that the DPRG had a new policy to go out in public and denounce every bad practice.

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IKEA in PR gaffe over sponsored links

The Swedish furniture giant IKEA is in a bit of a trouble in Norway. IKEA had bought sponsored links for “Stressless”, which is a registered trademark for sofas and armchairs owned by the competitor Ekornes. On a search for Stressless on Google, a link to IKEA came up on top, which of course upset Ekornes. IKEA pulled the ads and apologised to the competitor.

When the Norwegian news site E24 asks the Communications Manager of IKEA Norway if they had bought links to other brands owned by competitors, he hasn’t got the facts straight and handles the crisis situation very poorly.

– No, I am not aware of any, he says. But E24 does a few searches and finds that IKEA has also bought links for “Tripp Trapp”, a brand owned by Stokke.

Now, do you know if someone is mooching off your brand?

[Via Börje.]

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