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The Changing Face of PR
Charleston Regional Business Journal
October 13, 2008
Andrea Serrano makes a point of asking customers at her downtown clothing boutique how they heard about the store.
The No. 1 response is word of mouth, says Serrano, who owns B’zar on Upper King Street with her husband, Gustavo.
That has led the Serranos to rely primarily on the power of online social networking to promote their business. They have built a Facebook page for the store that allows them to send new merchandise updates and other information directly to almost 750 customers.
It’s one example of how the Web tools once thought to be the domain of teens and young adults are becoming part of businesses’ marketing strategies. Locally, many businesses are just beginning to experiment with the tools. But marketing gurus here and nationally are preaching the need for businesses get on the online networking bandwagon.
“The world is going this way,” said Lyn Mettler, who in 2007 created Step Ahead Web Strategies, a Web-focused marketing firm in Charleston. “It’s changed from marketing being a one-sided conversation, where the company is telling the audience what they want them to hear, to an engagement.”
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is the buzzword used to describe the trend and the online tools that promote collaboration, engagement and user-driven content. Along with Facebook, Web 2.0 includes such tools as blogs, micro-blogs, sites that search and aggregate blogs, video-sharing services and even virtual worlds where individuals and businesses meet.
Sound overwhelming? It can be. But the point is not to use all of those tools at once, experts say, or for every firm to use the same strategy.
“It’s really who your audience is,” said Kira Purdue, executive vice president of Trevelino/Keller Communications Group in Charleston. “If you’re a really niche B2B business, Facebook is probably not for you. But maybe you should create a network on Ning.”
Ning.com is a Web site that allows anyone to create an open network to discuss an industry or topic. Purdue compares it to an ongoing version of an annual industry convention.
Where they are already going
Serrano also uses e-mail distribution lists to contact customers, but she says reaching out to them through Facebook allows her to catch their attention in a new way. That’s an important tactic in the age of information overload, when even sorting through personal e-mail can be a chore.
Aaron Siegel, owner of Fiery Ron’s Home Team BBQ in Charleston, keeps his restaurant’s 550-plus Facebook fans up-to-date on specials and events through a group page on the site.
“Frankly, I think people are more attentive to Facebook than to their own e-mail at this point,” Siegel said. “A big (e-mail) blast, they might just skip over.”
For the Serranos, the Facebook strategy has worked so far. In September, 3 1/2 years after opening B’zar, the duo opened a downtown shoe store called Suite Sole. It has almost 400 friends on Facebook.
“People spend hours on Facebook at night now,” Mettler said. “The point is to reach people in a place where they are already going.”
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, 70% of adults in the United States use the Internet daily, and 13% of adults use an online social networking site daily. The group’s May 2008 survey reports that 29% of adults say they have used a networking site.
More immediate
In the blogosphere, the Pew project found that 11% of adults read a blog on a daily basis, and 33% say they have read a blog.
Purdue, of Trevelino/Keller, emphasizes the need for businesses to keep on top of what customers are saying about them on blogs. It’s an opportunity for both feedback and to address a complaint directly.
“Whether you like it or not, people are out there talking about you,” Purdue said. “If you don’t start managing that and participating in that, you’re missing the game.”
Previously, unhappy customers complained to their neighbor about a business.
“Now I’m complaining to the whole Twitter universe,” Purdue said, referring to the micro-blogging site that allows users to update friends with brief notes on their thoughts or activities.
Michael Reardon, an associate professor of communications at the College of Charleston who teaches a course on technology and communication, said the rise of Web 2.0 makes everything more immediate. Companies are now feeling the need to dispel rumors or problems right away, like presidential candidates have begun doing on their Web sites.
“My take on it is people are still trying to figure out how to use it (for business purposes),” Reardon said.
Siegel said he sometimes scans the Web to see what people are saying about Fiery Ron’s Home Team BBQ. When he first opened in 2006, he tried to respond to negative comments, but he says he’s backed away from that.
“It’s just not worth it,” Siegel said. “You insert yourself into a situation, and all you do is light a fire.”
People business
James Cook, a real estate agent with Carolina One, recently decided to take advantage of social networking’s growing popularity by advertising on Facebook.
Different from creating a Facebook profile page, advertising on the site allows Cook to target his ads to specific types of people who might be clients. For example, Cook is interested in people in South Carolina who are older than 25, an age cohort more likely to include potential homebuyers.
Cook said he gets about 100 hits a day from his Facebook ads, and probably three or four of those people contact him for more information.
When he advertises on search engines, Cook uses text only. But on Facebook ads, he uses a photo of himself.
“A lot of being a real estate agent is meeting people,” Cook said. “It really is a people business. So it’s effective to be on a people Web site.”
Dunhill Staffing Systems of Charleston is also using a networking site to put a personal touch on its client interactions. The firm recently created a MySpace page that has video clips of staff members introducing themselves.
“They’re meant to be fun,” said Vice President Katie Whitman, adding that it gives people who’ve never walked through the door of the office a face to go with a telephone call: “Oh, Katie, that’s the person I just spoke with.”
Dunhill Staffing was inspired to create its MySpace page after attending a forum on Web 2.0 that the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce sponsored this summer. Pennie Bingham, the chamber’s vice president for business development and innovation, said the forum was a way to help local businesses stay competitive as social networking becomes the norm.
The chamber is following its own advice: Its new Web site includes a section where members can create profiles of themselves and communicate with one another. Eventually, chamber officials say, the site could include videos of local businesses sharing success stories.
Video-sharing is the main attraction of a Web site that Benefitfocus, a Charleston-based health care benefits software provider, created about a year ago. The site, www.icyou.com, is a place where people interested in health care can post videos about a range of topics such as stress or surviving cancer.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue, vice president of media for Benefitfocus, said the site was largely a research and development project, a way to understand what types of health information people are comfortable sharing. It’s meant to help the company figure out ways to automate the health care industry.
The site now has thousands of videos, and company officials said 90 percent of the content is posted by users.
Keeping up
After creating Dunhill’s MySpace page, Whitman said she is mulling over what to do with it next. Job postings are one thought; events are another. But updating the page’s content regularly enough to keep people coming back will be a challenge with a staff of seven, Whitman says.
“I’m sure I’ll get more out of it the more I put into it,” she said. “But how much time can an individual put into it?”
Her dilemma illustrates one of the challenges of Web 2.0: Though it’s free to sign up for most of the applications, keeping up with them takes time.
A blog with no posts is no different from a Web site — and maybe worse. Marketing professionals and others who have found success with Web 2.0 applications say they demand daily attention.
“The thing we hear most often is, ‘I don’t have time. I don’t have time to do something else,’ ” Purdue said. “What I say is, it needs to become something that’s just a part of how you do business.”
Purdue said Web 2.0 applications, done correctly, can actually save businesses time.
“If you are more effectively reaching your core customer, whoever that is, you are more effectively, in theory, selling your product,” she said.
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