Monitor Your Community to Increase ROI

No, you won’t need night vision goggles or an invisibility cloak to monitor your community. What you do need is to pay attention to your surroundings—your referential universe is an endless source of inspiration if you just give it a chance. Working inside of a system often makes us lose what’s most important in succeeding—the holistic view of the industry.

Now, let’s suppose I’m Peppercomm. In case you’re not familiar with that company, I’m a serious PR agency, always putting the interest of the clients first, working under the tagline of being a good listener. However, in my ambitious efforts to create compelling campaigns, I don’t seem to have the time to look around me and see if I’m missing something.

DISCLOSURE: The example is just a pedagogical approach, randomly chosen, not paid and not on behalf of the Peppercomm agency.

But today I just decided to contemplate the state of facts in my industry. I’m starting from the following premises:

1. It’s excessively competitive
2. Nobody seems to be sharing anything online

And I find myself having a few questions about it. First of all, what’s the PR community like? It always seems like there isn’t one!

What is a Community?

We could think of it as the totality of people who matter directly for my business, or indirectly through opportunities or threats of any kind.

Of course, this definition is very wide—it means I’m interested in following a very wide number of people, along with their activities, their preoccupations, the trends they’re following. In our case, the core of the community starts online. So we’ll also start from here.

What engages people interested in PR to be a part of it?

It’s much easier to spot a community in industries where sharing leads to progress and is believed to be beneficial for all parties. However, this is not the case of Public Relations.

This industry is hermetic from the point of view of sharing strategic campaign insights—because they’re often reluctant to give away their competitive advantages.

After researching the way things are written, read and (not) shared very often, there’s just one answer: curiosity of looking over the fence without giving the impression that grass could possibly be greener there.

What’s It Made Of?

But let’s see what we mean by the idea of a community. A definition would help us better capture the essence of what we’ll be following.

In our case, the PR community I would be interested in includes the specialists in the field, both more and less successful than me, their networks and their strategies. Of course, the latter are very hard to define, except for the cases where they decide to take pride in a project so unique that nobody would even consider making it inspiration for a client of their own.

Where Do People in Your Community Get Their News and Information?

As we’ve documented on the Social Media section below, the most popular sources of information in the industry are the following:

• PR Week
• PR Newswire
• PR Daily

Considering this, I should pay special attention to any of them mentioning my brand or one of my campaigns—as they are the opinion makers.

Where Does My Community Hang Out Most?

Everybody seems to be silently reading the posts of their competitors while trying to hide their own game plans as well as possible. But they all have to hang out somewhere—which means that every PR officer out there is interested in reading something. It’s in my best interest to find out what that is.

The Web

Just like most of the communities, the PR people are active online—if not necessarily sharing competitors’ insights, then at least for building communities that organize events and contexts to meet and share real, meaningful connections offline.

One of the most authoritative PR sources is the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), with a network of over 22,000 professionals organized by geographical areas.

It’s a known fact that specific cultural differences shape our marketing approaches, which makes us relate to our immediate neighbors’ work. An added benefit is the convenience of meeting online with people closer to you, as opposed to the ones who live on the other side of the continent.

Source:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/increase-roi-actively-monitoring-online-community/159880/?ver=159880X2