Online public relations
Online public relations (PR) is about building an online system for identifying relevant news outlets, sharing content, identifying online influencers and trying to manage online messages (Hanlon, 2019). According to Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2019, p. 420), online public relations involves:
[…] maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or websites on third-party websites which are likely to be visited by your target audience. Online PR can extend reach and awareness of a brand within an audience.
In trying to maximise favourable mentions of an organisation, product or brand, online PR makes use of the network effect of digital technologies, i.e. it is aiming not only to place content in particular online outlets but to also have this content shared widely on a variety of digital media platforms. The more high-quality content about an organisation, its brands or its activities that is shared on reputable third-party sites (for example, in articles or blogs written by well-regarded journalists or experts in a field), and the more that content is shared by members of the public, the higher it is likely to appear in organic search results (i.e. those not being paid for).
Uses of online PR
Online PR can serve several different purposes (Hanlon, 2019):
- raising awareness of an activity, an organisation, its work or its customers
- generating engagement from potential customers, existing customers or wider stakeholder groups
- monitoring what is being said about the organisation, whether the sentiment is positive, negative, mixed or neutral.
Engaging with influencers
In order to achieve positive online PR, organisations often engage in deliberate
Identifying online influencers such as bloggers, media owners or individuals with a large online following in the social networks and then approaching them to partner together to communicate with their audience.
Knowing who are the best influencers to use depends very much on the organisation, its products or activities, and what it is trying to achieve. Most influencer outreach involves some form of payment, and influencers with large followings can expect significant financial compensation for promoting a product or an organisation on their websites, blogs or social media. Where payment is involved, such a promotion might be better considered as a form of advertising rather than public relations. Influencers must comply with consumer protection law and make it clear in any promotional communication that they are being paid to advertise an organisation’s product(s) by indication that it is an advertisement.