New Opportunities In PR!

As we know, PR is essentially all about creating press coverage in one form or another for a client via established media relationships.

Measuring the value paid towards PR has always been a challenge with no guarantee of media coverage. And what about the effectiveness of coverage? For the most part this never happens in any accountable form.

PR does not have to be this way.

Armed with a good SEO strategy, marketers and content creators can reach the consumer directly provided value is being created. Is that not what PR is all about anyway? Today, digital media has broken down the walls protected by the major media companies allowing anyone to publish content. So why not PR?

As a PR professional you have the power to self-publish any message in ways that may ultimately prove to be way more target-able, powerful and measurable.   In an age of DVR's and VOD, no one likes to watch advertising and they don't.  The trick is in providing content that is valuable for your audience, much in the same way that good press coverage provides information that we all want to read and be informed about.  It's all about knowing your audience and being authentic.

If you are looking to seed content to mainstream digital media for use within their offerings, make sure you keep this new medium in mind. This is NOT TV. Keep content to 15 to 20 second snippets as journalists are not inclined to use video that requires extra editing for example.

If you are a non believer, here are a few stats for you:

One in five broadband homes will have the technology to watch internet-based video on their TV sets by the end of 2007, according to a new analysis from Emerging Media Dynamics. The report assesses the progress made by devices such as Apple TV, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and SlingMedia's SlingCatcher in solving the final "twenty foot" barrier. Over 72 million broadband homes – representing over two-thirds of the marketplace – are projected to have PC/TV devices by 2017.

IPTV subscription video revenue will grow exponentially from $779 million in 2006 to $26.3 billion by 2011 not including advertising and value-added TV services, according to a new report from market intelligence firm iSuppli.

A new Bivings Research survey of the U.S.'s top 100 newspaper sites found video to be more of a central component of its content. About 92% of paper sites now offer video (up from 61% in 2006). Within this group, 39 sites offer original video content, 26 use AP's video service and 13 offer video content from local news outlets.

Clearly times they are a changin'. So don't sit back waiting for mainstream media. Take your story into your own hands and self publish.

For additional insight, I recommend you read:
Video Rocks Traditional PR
http://www.prnewsonline.com/digitalpr/casestudies/videorocks.html

Healthy Video Snacks - Shelly Palmer
http://www.shellypalmerblog.com/?p=465

While I primarily focus on innovation in online video and IPTV within this blog, there are of course many new formats to be mastered and monitored in PR such as blogs (written & video), wikis & social media solutions to name a few.

Why the pro-sumer can now compete with the networks...

First a few facts...while most people still watch most programming on their TV, a four-year analysis of Internet use have found that 47% of time online is currently spent viewing content as opposed to 33% of that time spent for communication purposes. This is significant because 4 years ago, those numbers were reversed. This shows that viewers of content are more and more using the web as a respected delivery tool for online video.

Powerful production tools have been at the hands of the pro-sumer for quite some time, and quite a bit of talent is being discovered as a result. Distribution has been another story with every site requiring different specifications for upload, making the task a laborious one.

And lets not forget how everyone is trying to get paid for their efforts...via advertising. Advertisers & sponsors price the value of programming against the amount of viewers. Before now there was no easy way for a small publisher to aggregate all of their viewers across multiple distribution points on the web, other than counting them manually. This left advertisers to question the math behind the numbers. Now things are about to change.

Online video distribution and analytics tools that allow undiscovered talent to distribute and measure the success of their programming throughout the web are beginning to emerge. These types of tools will become the great equalizers, as small publishers are able to more easily distribute their content to all of the major online video portals, while tracking the numbers through an impartial 3rd party.

The new, online video publishing tools are now offering one stop shopping for distribution, bundled up with analytics tools to enable programmers to more easily track their fan base.

Tubemogul: http://www.tubemogul.com/
Vidmetrix: http://www.vidmetrix.com/

Or how about a budding local news journalist being able to broadcast live with little more than a laptop, web-cam and internet connection. Now they can with Mogulus: http://www.mogulus.com

To compete with the networks is no easy feat, given their infrastructure and the dollars they place behind advertising their own shows. But at the end of the day it is all about the quality of the idea, and new ideas tend to come from the ground up, not the top down.

All this makes it much more likely that the next 'Sopranos' will be an online show, and that that show has a high likelihood of being brought to you by someone other than a major network.

For those of you that think that watching video content over the internet is for the few or decades away...a few more facts.

IPTV subscription video revenue will grow exponentially from $779 million in 2006 to $26.3 billion by 2011 not including advertising and value-added TV services, and 1 in 5 broadband homes will have the technology to watch internet-based video on their TV sets by the end of 2007. Over 72 million broadband homes – representing over two-thirds of the marketplace – are projected to have PC/TV devices by 2017.

ComScore's Video streaming reports:
• Online viewers watched an average of 158 minutes of streaming video per streamer.
• The average video stream duration was 2.5 minutes.
• Nearly three out of four (74.3 percent) U.S. Internet users streamed video online.
• More than one out of three (35 percent) U.S. Internet users use YouTube.
• The average online video viewer consumed 63 video streams (more than two per day).

Adobe’s Flash Player, YouTube, Apple’s QuickTime are all planning on being fully H.264 (HD) compatible this year.

The bottom line is that this will all make for a much more competitive marketplace. One that will keep the networks on their toes, while giving the little guy a real chance to compete...