PRCA ‘Positioning Digital’ event part one: “Hijacking” online chatter

I went to a PRCA breakfast meet-up last week. It was very good. There were two speakers; Mat from Porter Novelli and Fernando from Ketchum. They were the two main reasons for it being very good. Though the pastries were certainly competitive.

Fernando spoke first. (He’s also very nicely recorded his presentation on some clever piece of kit so you can watch it here again). He is head of digital at Ketchum UK. This post will focus on his talk. I’ll write about Mat’s in a bit. Fernando spoke about lots of things and I wrote down lots of his quotes which I thought would make me sound smart. He proposed there were three main pillars to digital PR;

1. Build, borrow or steal an audience

2. Topicality is king

3. Find you niche

One of the main points that struck a chord with me was something that James over at 77pr has reiterated before; we get obsessed with being top of the strategic marketing food chain in PR, yet some of the most beautiful, creative and down-right brilliant pieces of well-timed executions are topical, tactical and reactive. I believe these punctuations of earned activity also have a disproportionate affect on brand equity in comparison to the budget spent on broadcast advertising (though I’m still working on that argument!)

One of the advantages that PR probably underplays is it’s flexibility and opportunistic nature. Fernando demonstrated through case studies how through “listening first” (if you are reading an agency social media creds deck and it doesn’t start with the “the first approach to social media is to listen”, then you haven’t been searching on slideshare for long enough), the team were able to come up with some brilliantly insightful and creative on and offline campaigns by “hijaacking” an undercurrent of conversation identified through listening.

Will a new measure of a PR agency’s creativity be how good they are in ‘positive reactivity’? Rather than firefighting negative stories or public unrest, should reacting to online conversation to drive the news agenda proactively be the focus in an economy filled with unrest?

I love the idea of ‘hijacking’ and I like how it moves PR agencies from their previous USP of media familiarisation to consumer familiarisation. From having a true consumer insight, rather than a journalist one, we should be able to come up with better ideas that will also appeal to journalists and inevitably their audience too.