PR + Web 2.0
What excites PR people the most about Web 2.0 is that some of the social media companies that are hot can help us do our jobs. A red-letter date for the relationship between PR and Web 2.0 came earlier this year when Facebook let third-parties develop applications to extend Facebook's functionality.
On November 2, Forbes published a Q&A with the founder of RockYou, Jia Shen. RockYou offers a very interesting business model. The company creates these third-party applications that can be selected by Facebook or MySpace users to augment their memberships to those social networking sites. As a consequence, the applications attract more users and encourage social interaction. RockYou can then "monetize" the user base by selling advertising.
From my perspective, there is certainly potential for using RockYou-powered applications as part of coordinated marketing campaigns that would combine PR and social media to drive web traffic. We are thinking about those campaigns each and every day at Schwartz.
They are already starting to happen. If you are a Facebook user, you see Facebook applications that invite participation in contests or other collaborative experiences run by companies. By relying just on your own list of friends, an interesting contest spreads rapidly. If it does not catch on, the cost for developing and executing these contests is fairly low.
Bringing this idea very close to home, more and more reporters have Facebook accounts. My colleagues and I will occasionally post news from our clients as part of our Facebook status messages. It's a non-assuming way to alert the reporters and analysts on our friends' lists, and certainly the topics we post are relevant to the Web 2.0-savvy Facebook audience.
Facebook offers its own marketing vehicles, where companies can "rent" space to include small little applications on Facebook home pages that promote an offering or encourage interactivity. Beyond these sponsored opportunities, there are a number of unique ways to use the social networking sites to augment PR programs.
The key is to use these sites judiciously and transparently. As recently noted in Twitter conversations including Robert Scoble and others, what you place on Facebook can be read by all of your "friends," so everything one does is open to criticism.
Posted by Ross Levanto on November 3, 2007 at 2:39 PM
