Student: What is the medium you use the most in your work?

Kondek: PR professionals still prefer to get their clients' message out via print and broadcast, but online PR is becomingly increasingly important. I work in a part of MS&L that specializes in online outreach. Event-based PR is also important. Personally, I'd say that PR firms as a whole are still behind the times a bit, in that most prefer to place stories via print, broadcast and through event-based PR, saving only a small portion of their budgets for what could be beneficial online tactics.

My office specializes in those tactics: we conduct outreach on behalf of our clients to blogs and other web sites, podcasts and at message boards and the like. Often this takes the form of putting product into the hands of bloggers so that bloggers will try the product and tell their readers what they thought of it. We also call that Word of Mouth Marketing. The kinds of blogs we regularly do this with are mom/dad blogs, tech/gadget blogs, food blogs, and others. We also use YouTube and other resources in innovative, communicative ways. Some examples of stories we have placed or online things we have created are:

• Philips Electronics Hates The Clock Rule, Too
  
• Countdown to Father's Day

Student: What is your audience when using online tactics? Do you specialize in one field?

Kondek: MS&L has offices all over the U.S., so it actually has quite a few specialties. The Detroit office of MS&L, for instance, also specializes in automotive PR, and our New York office specializes in consumer products. We have used online PR for consumer products, health care, automotive, electronics and technology, and food, for the most part. We're usually trying to either affect a purchase decision or communicate a concept, so the audience varies.

Student: Is it easy to calculate the ROI with this medium?

Kondek: I hope they are teaching you this in school: ROI is highly subjective, and everybody has different ways of calculating it. (Tell your prof I said that, see if he/she agrees.) Further, many PR professionals use subjective ROI methods to justify what they are doing for their clients. However, it's an important question, and this is how we do it: we provide our clients with a number of impressions. By impressions we mean the number of people who potentially saw their message, the size of the audience. We also stress to our clients that online impressions differ from print, broadcast and event impressions. With a print impression estimate, you can't be sure that everyone saw your story. With an online impression, you can be more certain.

Let me explain: let's say you place a story in a newspaper. That newspaper is read by 30,000 people, so you tell your client that each of those 30,000 copies passed through three sets of hands, and ring up 90,000 hits. While that’s a safe way to return some ROI, nobody really thinks the story got read that many times. On the other hand, let's say you place a story at a BLOG with 8,000 readers. Chances are good that most of those 8,000 read your story, because blog readers function differently than print readers. And blog content is different, too. It can be linked out or accessed by search engines or it can morph in various directions. Take a look at that YouTube link above — it shows Philips Electronics prototypes, and has 50,000 views. That's 50,000 people who not only watched the video, but who were searching for info when they found it.

And the best part? Things on the internet don't go away, they turn up again and again as people search for them. The next time someone searches for info on a product or company, they may find a story we placed. We work with some of the same bloggers and web editors over and over again so we can give a good estimate in advance of the kinds of audiences we can create.

Student: What are some drawbacks to tools like blogs, webcasts, podcasts (i.e., content issues, lack of control...)?

Kondek: Bloggers are not professional journalists, normally, so they sometimes react to messages in unexpected ways. We always expect an honest review of something we send to someone, but sometimes a blogger will take something the wrong way and publicly — and personally — slam our client or us. Talk about "lack of control!" Also, we are dealing with lower numbers of readers with blogs, lower number of listeners with podcasts. Still, we feel it all adds up to a positive. But while there is a sense of new potential there, it doesn’t work for everything. For example, you may have a product or event that people just aren't interested in. No amount of cajoling is going to get them to talk about it.

Student: What trends are forming in the industry regarding tech and Internet technologies?

Kondek: People are doing very innovative things with cell phones and texting. Podcasts are growing - there are a small number of listeners now but that will change dramatically. The key is that people are no longer allowing themselves to passively receive information and entertainment. They go out and get it, or create it, or both. The challenge to PR firms and their clients is to join this landscape by giving people something they want, not disrupt it by giving them something they don't want. For example, people are able to watch an event on TV or in person and "liveblog" it (blog/message about it at the same time). Being a part of that is an important goal to PR professionals and their clients, both of which are still waking up to this kind of method.

Student: Are there language or culture barriers that disallow global use of these new mediums?

They don't disallow use of the medium but they can be a challenge! For us, though, this has meant conducting our tactics in multiple languages. In fact, we've had to learn how different countries use the Internet. Take blogging, for example. It’s very popular in North America, England, France and Japan. Growing in China. Central and South America, not so much.