Seat at the Table

This week’s BusinessWeek on how marketers are pulling together their audiences as the mass media market fragments (the article is only in print as of today so I’ll try linking again in a day or two).

I’m not sure if I was proud, bothered, or both when reading about the marketing ideas for engaging customers online.  These were ideas that I’ve seen developed and implemented in PR for years.  The sidebard story, Fighting Attention Deficit, lays out the following “new” strategies for engaging customers online:

1. Rally communities to build your brand – my team and other teams I worked with were doing this years ago.  We would work with clients to have them engaged customers and prospects in discussions groups (still huge), listservs (remember those) and other forms of online communities.  This was when the word “blog” was a spelling error to most and myspace probably referred to one’s cubicle.
2. Tap the Wisdom of Crowds (let your audience improve your products and services) – We would often spend hours pouring through the newsgroups, listservs and consumer written articles to get feedback for our clients.  We did this as a way of closing the feedback loop and letting clients know what their audiences were saying about them.
3. Hire ad people to let them know what search words bring in the most buyers.  Yawn.  The research team I worked with at Edelman spent an enormous amount of time testing messages and key words within those messages to determine which ones are most effective in getting a company’s audience to take action.   For that matter, ad agency researchers have long been doing the same thing for some time.
4. Explode your brand by allowing viewers to immerse themselves though podcasts, video blogs and other techniques.  This is simply  an extension of taking audiences inside a company (or brand) through stories on management, how a product is made, through customer driven events, publicity stunts and other techniques PR has used for years to create a stronger bond between a company (or brand) and its audience.

So why doesn’t PR get credit.  In some cases, some would argue advertising did it first (such as testing messages).  In others, I might just attribute it to the PR industry having, ironically, bad PR.  Maybe, despite all our talking (mostly to each other it seems), we’ve still barely made a dent in having the marketing community understand what we do.