Online Social Media Marketing – Public Relations 2.0

Online social media marketing is public relations 2.0. Gone forever are the days where a company or organization could set about pursuing a traditional media campaign where magazine, newspaper, radio and television coverage are the sole focus. Reason being, the average person now spends more time online then they spend on traditional periodicals and broadcast media, combined. The crowd has moved to a different venue and you have to move with them. Traditional media is still very much ingrained into our collective psyche as having the most cache (though we are likely the last generation to think this way), but prestige aside, the practicality is no longer there.

Nowadays most every business, product, service or organization has an online presence where their goods and services are sold and marketed. If you want to make a sale and turn press into sales conversion do you want someone to read about your product in a magazine and file your information away in their memory to hopefully be retrieved at a later date, or do you want that person to read about you, become interested in what you are selling and be able to access your product at the click of a button?

Online social media and online marketing encompasses many things, all of which equal high quality, targeted traffic to whatever you are promoting. For my company, it means creating a long chain of online information that work in conjunction with each other to raise a client’s overall profile online to raise them above their competition. Virtually every industry is saturated at this point, and the ones that are not become so rather quickly. To raise above the fray, i insist that my clients agree to a combination of online social media, online marketing, search engine optimization and online viral marketing in addition to any traditional public relations efforts we put forth.

Online social media and online SEO marketing should be consistent with traditional marketing and media relations in that it should stay on message, offer information, use targeted keywords, create relevent incoming links, and establish the client as an expert in their field.

I will go more in-depth with online marketing, online social media and online media marketing in my next few blog postings.