As an agency we live and breathe media relations – in fact our team have won awards for it. However, at Diffusion we also understand that great press coverage alone is no longer enough to influence and win customers or to effectively shape and manage your reputation. And simply bolting-on a corporate blog or experimenting with the latest fad tactic isn’t enough either.

Surrounded by increasing media complexity and fragmentation, having a clear communication strategy aligned to business objectives, has never been more important. At Diffusion that’s where we begin. Big picture first. We then use our expertise across media relations, Social Media and Search marketing to design payment-by-results campaigns where the selection of techniques is as specific as the audiences you need to influence.

The reality is that conventional marketing wisdom is being challenged on a daily basis, but there are a set of five connected trends that we believe are fundamentally reshaping the communication landscape. These broader developments are driving as well as being driven by technology, but their implications for effective marketing are not just restricted to the internet. They are at the core of Diffusion’s approach to developing PR solutions for our clients that connect in today’s world.

Powerful Peers

A few years ago your customers were just your target audience; today they’re your most important Influencer. In our online world your customers share their opinions like never before, they can lean across the garden fence and talk to millions, and their conversations about you around the virtual water cooler are on constant replay. Both online and offline, it has never been more important for PR to harness the trust we place in peer-to-peer conversations, to generate word of mouth recommendation and promote genuine brand advocacy.

Reputation Management Engines

Customers are proactively seeking out the information that they want on brands, products and services. That journey increasingly begins with Google. Search engines in all their forms are dynamically changing shop windows that provide snap shots of your brand that can attract and repel customers with equal force. PR through the deliberate application of media relations and social media engagement, is in a unique position to help brands proactively shape their Search reputation. For us public relations and reputation management are one and the same, so today there is no other place for Search than at the core of modern PR.

Engaging Conversations

The most powerful brands of tomorrow will be those that are actively engaging with customers. Connecting with them emotionally and intellectually. PR is no longer just a one way conversation conducted through a set of media intermediaries. It’s about connecting brands to their key audiences and helping to facilitate two-way engagement. Like all good conversations it’s also about listening, to customers, tastemakers and competitors and being in a position to know how and when to respond. This requires new levels of transparency and honesty and an ability to feed those conversations into the heart of business decision making.

Mass Media vs. Mass Niches

Your customers are consuming more media from more sources in a greater variety of formats and exercising more choice than ever before. So relying solely on traditional coverage in a handful of publications to reach all of your target market all of the time no longer works, if it ever did. We think media fragmentation is a great opportunity. Consumers are creating self selecting communities based on their interests and also around new platforms like social networks and blogs. We are in what Chris Anderson calls the micro-culture era. The challenge for organisations is to understand that niche audiences demand niche communication.

Reputations are Earned

However big your budget, reputations worth having can’t be created, they have to be earned. From a communication perspective this means reversing the norm of organisations focusing solely on what they want to say, rather than on what there customers actually want to hear. It’s about developing real stories and compelling content that nurtures and adds value to your networks of customers, journalists and bloggers. It about moving beyond turgid press releases and using the best mix of traditional and digital channels so audiences can choose to hear your messages on their terms not yours.