THE NEW PR IS SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMISATION

Significant as they are , websites are only one vehicle for building brand awareness or simplify sales. As digital marketers the world over start to move substantial chunks of their advertising budgets to digital media, much of it is going into online PR rather than into what we conventionally think of as advertising. This is because the web is such a natural environment for PR, the essence of which is generating buzz — getting consumers and the media talking about your brand.

Collectively, all the approaches that are used to generate buzz and leverage online consumer opinion have become known as social media optimization.

Internet users have always used the web primarily as a means to connect with other Internet users . Initially, people connected through email and internet relay chat (IRC), then chat rooms, instant messages, EMS, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter As social networking applications are becoming both easier to use and more sophisticated, all instantly, without waiting for downloads and without being sent to a new page.

The international Clothing retailer Gap updated its ecommerce site to not only look more modern (shades of orange and grey, with lauds of white space), but to provide a much more usable service to its customers. With older sites you need to leave the page that you are on in order to see what is in your shopping cart — and finding your way back again is never easy. On Gap’s site, there is an [n-line shopping bag and its content opens up within the page that you are on. you can hover over any item to see its photos and details, and to make changes. If the black skirt doesn’t work with the other items you subsequently selected, you can exchange it for another colour from within the shopping bag. And you can check out from within the bag at any time, with one click. On the site, you can leave comments or reviews in context against any item, and see the comments others have left. Finally, so that you don’t have to search around the site to see what is new, you can subscribe to changes in the catalogue by RSS (technically standing for rich site summary, but more commonly referred to as really simple syndication) feed. This means that any time a new item is listed or a price changes, you are notified, and, if you are interested, you simply dick on the link to be taken directly to the relevant item.

A year later, Gap’s parent company updated the site again, and, in a fairly controversial strategic move, made the site a portal that houses the sites of their other clothing retail brands Banana Republic Old Navy and Pipeline. Brand purists find this hard to accept. Why would you risk undermining a high-end brand like banana republic by associating it so intimately with a low-end brand like Old Navy? Perhaps it you view it through the eyes of the customer’s processes it makes a lot more sense. A woman going to a shopping mall might go into banana republic to get something for herself, then go to Cap for accessories and stop in at Old Navy to get something for a teenage daughter Online, this would involve visiting multiple websites, putting items in multiple shopping carts, and filling in multiple purchase forms. But now you can do all of this shopping with a single cart and a single checkout. The site adds great value to the customer’s shopping process, without allowing preciousness about branding to get in the way.

These examples illustrate how widely new marketing to the new consumer differs from what marketing became in the 1990s. If you compare this shopping experience with the tedious processes on the majority of ecommerce sites, you will see that the difference is not minor — it is massive. In a market still characterized by product-centric online catalogues and needlessly baroque shopping processes, there are wide-open opportunities for domination of entire market sectors or highly-focused niches.

This connectedness is becoming richer and more rewarding. Any vehicle that provides people with a valid pretext for connecting with other people is warmly embraced. This is the driving rationale behind viral marketing. People engage with viral media because these media allow them to bond with other people; they don’t bond with other people in order to engage with viral media.

Today, every company I talk to wants to include ‘viral Campaigns’ in their communication strategy. They do not like being told that you cannot create a viral campaign you can only optimize the potential for a campaign to go viral. As with anything in emarketing, an intimate understanding of your target
Consumer base is an absolutely essential starting point. If you do not know what is likely to grab their attention and make them think that fellow members of that target population will thank them for sharing, you may as well stick to a blinking banner on a news site.
But if you get it right the results can be absolutely astounding.
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