Interactive PR and Your Online Brand

Chances are if you are a company, you have an online presence - even if you’re not the one that has created it. Consumers are alive and active online and are, in all likelihood, talking about your company. Companies need to be proactive in managing their online presence and a vital component of this is an interactive PR campaign.
Interactive PR is the use of online tools and technologies like: search engines, social bookmarking, new media relations, and blogging, to disseminate information about your company online. Allowing you to communicate directly with the general public, consumers, and potential prospects.
The following are key elements of any successful interactive PR campaign:
Promotion of content through social networking sites
To launch a successful social networking site campaign, you need to have something to promote on these sites – social media content. This content can take any number of formats, including but not limited to; videos, photos, and blog posts.
What content gets read is no longer decided by an editor, social networking sites, including news sharing sites, democratically allow users to choose which news stories will make it to the popular pages and get in front of readers eyeballs. Aside from the initial traffic that you receive from hitting the front page of these sites, there are other benefits, including: increased subscribers and highly targeted valuable inbound links.
If you get an article, picture, blog post etc to the front page of digg or the other news sharing sites, you can expect to get well over 40,000 unique visitors. Having your social media content succeed at one social networking site, greatly increases the chances that it will become popular on the other sites - multiplying the effects of the campaign.
Blogger Outreach
An integral component of any interactive PR campaign is to get influential bloggers to talk about your product or service. A blogger outreach campaign will connect you to leading relevant bloggers in your niche to have them review your product honestly in their blog. The 3 main benefits of a blogger outreach campaign are: branding and WOM review from a thought leader in your industry; targeted relevant traffic to your site from the blogs; and natural inbound links that will help with your sites search engine rankings.
Corporate Blog Integration and Podcasting
In the open and transparent age of social media, blogs and podcasts are vital for reputation management and consumers have come to expect them. Companies and brands should consider employing blogs and podcasts to create open and honest dialogue.
Proper blog integration, distribution, and strategy is vital to the success of any corporate blogging initiative. Any blog that spins the truth will be found out - in a world of social media, transparency is the only option. The proper implementation of a blogging and podcasting strategy for your company company blog is vital to ensure that your company is aware of and follows corporate blog conventions. Without a proper strategy in place, companies may be better off not blogging at all and will end up missing out on all of the benefits derived from a corporate blog.
Online Media Center
Once you have driven traffic to your website and have started to create an online community around your brand, you need to ensure ease of coverage from both traditional and online news sources. Building an online media center on your site that provides these writers with ease of access to your marketing and brand collateral. You need to ensure it is as easy as possible for people to cover you as possible. The harder you make it for them to get collateral to insert into their coverage, the less likely it is that they will cover you.
Social Media Monitoring and Brand Management
Your brand no longer lives in a corporate environment where you can control your message; everyone with a stake in your brand now controls the message. Your brand lives everywhere online, from blogs and forums to twitter and youtube.
Monitoring your brand across all online channels to determine where your brand conversations are taking place and their tone is critical when undergoing an interactive PR campaign. This reporting will allow you to make strategic decisions with your online and offline marketing and advertising initiatives and provide you with a real time snapshot of your current brand landscape.
With this information, you can: adjust, on the go, your online marketing initiatives to capitalize on or respond to customer feedback; evaluate the effectiveness of both online and offline advertising initiatives with greater accuracy allowing for better targeted campaigns in the future; and deal with situations as they occur online, increasing brand loyalty.