IndiPR

Q: What is Digital Public Relations?

Digital public relations serve the same basic function as traditional public relations which emphasize the building of mutual relationships between an organization and its publics. Digital public relations is a powerful tool that will enhance your corporate communications further, faster, wider, cheaper and more interactive, something that would otherwise be impossible to do in the traditional public relations.

Q: What is InDiPR?

Interactive Digital Public Relations (InDiPR) is an Indonesian based digital public relations consultant specializing in maximizing web, multimedia and interactive media solution to achieve your communication objectives.

Q: What does InDiPR do?

The digital solution that we offer is to amplify, augment, supplement and synergize your corporate communications timely and accurately.

We have a range of service from:

Viral Communications: spreading your message like a virus through websites, social networking sites, forums, groups, podcasts, search engines, messengers, wikipedia, blogs and online news services.

Digital Media Planning: optimizing and maximizing your online public relations and advertising campaign by digital media research, target market profiling and media planning

Issue and Crisis Management: we monitor the blogosphere for potential issues, prevent issues from escalating into a crisis, isolate a crisis from spreading, engage and manage issues and crisis timely and accurately.

Communication Intelligence: we keep track of your key stakeholders such as competitors, industry, regulators etc. and monitor their activities and development in the digital world, including PR campaigns, advertising, blogs and web activities.

Web Analytics: we analyze your digital communications such as corporate websites, e-mails and corporate blogs based on usability, searchability, interactivity, efficiency, content management and effectiveness in fulfilling your users’ communication needs and wants.

Q: Why do I need to go digital?

With the internet penetration rate in Indonesia reaching 8.9% of the total population (+ 20million people) digital media is an unexplored field filled with many opportunities for companies. The number is only getting bigger and bigger as years go by. Based on a 2007 estimate, the growth of internet users in Indonesia will rise to about 100% in 2008.

The internet carries both opportunities and threats. The demographic profile of internet users in Indonesia is young, well educated, energetic, productive, have the buying power, open minded opinion leaders and trendsetters. You can imagine the impact it would have to your corporate image if you establish mutual relationships with these people. However, if you don’t maximize digital public relations today, it is most likely that your competitors and unsympathetic stakeholders will do so and give your business a serious disadvantage.

Traditional advertising and public relations also face what is known as clutter. Indonesia is named the most cluttered country in the world, which makes your public immune to traditional advertising and PR. A 2 hour movie shown in local television can run for more than 3 hours with one hour being nothing but commercials. More and more people are zapping through channels in a commercial break. Technological breakthroughs such as “Teevo” offer uninterrupted, commercial free television leaving less room for advertisers. In traditional public relations, corporate events and press conferences got pushed to the “Ceremonial’ column, which nobody reads or even fail to be reported at all.

Q: I also do a transformation to digital and it has not worked, what am I doing wrong?

The common mistake for new digital PR practitioners is to assume that the new media behaves similarly to the traditional media. What is happening is that practitioners simply put their traditional press release in corporate blogs or websites. Digital public relations require a totally different mindset than traditional media.

The traditional media mindset is something which is called the “Rambo” technique. In layman’s term it is firing hundreds of bullets in the hopes that one or two people will be killed. Digital public relations on the other hand require the “Sniper” mindset, firing one bullet to kill one people or ‘one shot one kill’.

In digital public relations, we must see that each individual is unique, have unique needs and wants, behave uniquely, requires unique set of information and have unique ways to obtain them. Digital public relations need a complete understanding of what information we want to convey, which target audience requires this sort of information and what is the best way to make this information readily available.

Q: How will digital PR enhance my corporate image and brand communications?

As said before both advertising and public relations face a common enemy called ‘clutter’. As an illustration, in advertising companies advertise in television programs that are hopefully being watched by its target audience. You have to remember that not all of its target audience is watching that particular program. Even if they do, there’s no guarantee that the audience will see your commercial because people like to zap between commercial breaks.

Traditional public relations also face the same problem. For your message to get to your audience, you must go through a series of gatekeepers. Editors in chiefs assign journalists of what is worth covering or news worthy, journalists decide what angle they want to use, for a balance report they must get other point of view or sources, editors decide what type of information is relevant, media has a fix format that they must fill or not exceed, newspapers has their own views and idealism. All of these factors resulted in your message being partially transmitted, twisted, distorted or even not get through at all.

The digital solution that we offer is to employ the “push pull” strategy. We “push” the message out by way of viral communications and word of mouth. If people see good things about your product or image and think it is important and relevant to them, people will tell their friends and their friends and so on. With digital public relations, we no longer be the sole communicators, the users are the communicators. Another is to “pull” people to your website by ways of Pay per Click (PPC) ads, creating links and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). This is where digital public relations stood above the traditional, customizing and tailoring the message to the users interactively.

Q: How will digital PR help me prevent issues and crisis?

With digital media, issues and crisis are harder and harder to isolate and contain. An issue that hits your operation in another area/country will affect your operation here in Indonesia, vice versa. If use correctly, digital public relations can minimize your potential threat and stop them from escalating timely and accurately, by ways of monitoring issues regarding your business, industry and competitors.

Because the internet is fast and easy, people become their own reporters, editors, publishers and readers. Anybody can write about anything, anytime they want and be read by people all over the world. News about an event is posted in the internet the instant it happens. The most notorious case of how the power of the internet can ruin someone’s reputation in Indonesia is Yahya Zaini and Maria Eva.

Here at People Interactive Digital PR, we engage your key stakeholders and the media and get the message out unfiltered and creating a mutual dialogue and understanding. We do this by monitoring the blogosphere for potential issues, preventing issues from escalating into a crisis, isolating a crisis from spreading, engaging and managing issues and crisis timely and accurately.

Q: Which one is better, digital or traditional?

Both traditional and digital media have their own strengths and weaknesses and they both amplify, strengthen, enhance and compliment each other.

Q: How will I measure digital PR effectiveness?

Digital public relations are far more measurable than traditional public relations. For example websites: we can tell how many people access them, how often, at what time, the most visited page, most searched information, and also their comments and opinions. So long it does not violate ethics and regulations; we can even track down who is accessing our websites. For e-mails there are ways to see how many people we are sending, how many receive the e-mails, how often, how many are interested with the information provided, how many are not, how many forward it to their friends and so on.

Of course gaining this data is more the realm of IT people. However, IT people cannot translate this into communication effectiveness evaluation, or communication strategies and plans. People that can interpret the information technological data into an understandable communication strategy are extremely hard to come by. What separates Interactive Digital Public Relations (InDiPR) is that we have the obligation to our clients and the necessary resources to gather and interpret the data into actual business communication analysis and strategies.

Q: How well is the cost efficiency?

Digital public relations are by far much more cost effective than traditional advertising and public relations. Establishing a simple website cost you next to nothing, and some ad driven providers can even offer you for free. A more elaborate websites cost more to make but still cost lower than relying on traditional media.

Hiring professionals and consultants is about the same as traditional media but has virtually no additional project costs such as event management, media buying or release distribution. A single 30 second advertising spot on a primetime program costs about five times more than a month long digital public relations campaign. While a single press conference costs you six months worth of digital public relations consultancy.

Q: My target publics are not internet users, will I be able to reach them?

Sure. If you have a good product and benefits the customers and people in general, sooner or later people that are not in touch with digital will be touched by people who do. A good example is that there are thousands of products that are long being discussed as a hot issue on the internet and get tapped by the traditional media.