Big Data is more than just a topic that Tech PRs promote on behalf of clients

In the tech industry we love a three letter acronym, we don’t have nearly enough!  The latest- OAO (online audience optimisation) is the successor to SEO.  But whichever three letters you pick, data drives success.

Social Media Today argues that the death of SEO is good news for most as it levels the playing field as OAO doesn’t necessarily require a big budget, just  good content that engages people – it’s all about making your site more sticky.  We’ve written a lot about how PR can help with the SEO challenges faced by marketers as a result of Google’s changes.  And for us, the rose definitely smells sweeter by another name - OAO is the starting point or goal of any PR campaign focused on increased visibility.  We talk more about audiences than a theatre manager - whether it is the media (traditional/social) or prospects or end-users .

Inc proposes that the foundation of OAO is understanding the language of your audience.   It also talks about actionable caring.  Both of these things are what we have always told new PR recruits when discussing media relations.  Firstly; know the language your target journalist uses and secondly; understand what they are interested in and let them know that you care by reflecting that in your pitch.  It has always been our benchmark of success, whether it is ‘Offline’ or ‘Online Audience Optimisation’.

In the ‘olden days ‘(before the Internet) we reached out to our audience (physical media) via phone, post or fax and it was a lot more effort to ensure they were engaged.  Even if we managed to talk a journalist into writing -up a story we’d pitched, we rarely knew whether a prospect or end-user had in-turn been engaged by that story.  As Henry Ford has been much quoted as saying:  he knew half of every dollar he spent on advertising was wasted. He just didn't know which half. Similarly, we only knew if our clients won business or engaged prospects as a result of PR if they told us (not a very accurate means of measurement).

The PR and marketing industry can now better measure who was engaged, for how long and whether it was as a result of a media story, word of mouth recommendation, or content on the website.  This has real meaning; unlike the traditional methods such as anecdotal insight or AVE (hopefully that three letter acronym is now buried).  For example, the media are becoming more transparent about story readership as this helps them drive revenue with advertisers/sponsors, which is of great benefit to the PR industry as we will be able to measure the number of people who read a story rather than just how many could have read it.

Media stories are obviously only one facet of audience engagement - our clients that are successfully transitioning from SEO to OAO are heavily focused on building integrated marketing campaigns.  This ensures everyone communicating inside or outside of a company is talking the same language, and more importantly talking the same language as their target audience.  It also hopefully means that the whole company understands the sentiment of their audience, failing to do this, as Mike points out is a disaster!

But to do OAO right, you need data.  As PR Daily points out, no industry is immune from the impact of Big Data and there are big benefits to our industry.  Working in tech PR means we are in the half of public relations professionals that do understand what you can do with analytics and Big Data and it is fast becoming a core part of building OAO (Online Audience Optimisation) strategies for our clients.  As B2B technology PR is a fairly niche market compared to the consumer sector we can track the progress of OAO using a number of free or cheap tools.****

It’s worth looking at this video from the PR Moment event that discusses how important it is to become a measurement geek.  But in a nutshell by analysing the Big Data that’s out there PR now has the opportunities to prove what makes engaging content rather than just relying on our instincts for a good story.  And as an added bonus, we can now prove PR’s worth which was pretty difficult before!