The digital age: taking public relations to social media

Companies are increasingly looking to expand presence on Facebook and Twitter.

KARACHI:

Social media may have arrived in Pakistan almost a decade ago, but it has largely remained off the corporate sector's radar until recently. Under-appreciation of its potential in reaching out to current and potential customers meant that there were little or no deliberate efforts on the part of big brands to engage with target consumers online.

However, that trend has now started to shift, as companies handling public relations (PR) on behalf of corporate clients have finally started to take the avenue seriously. At least two major PR companies have set up dedicated subsidiaries that handle clients’ presence on social media during the last month alone.

“The PR business is gradually going online. I think the digital segment will be the mainstay of the PR industry one year on,” Xenith Public Relations CEO Zainab Ansari told The Express Tribune in a recent interview.

Xenith Public Relations – one of the oldest PR companies operating in Pakistan – has recently established Xenith Digital as a separate division of the company. “It is the digital extension, or natural succession, of traditional PR,” Ansari said; adding that she expected clients to work with her digital subsidiary as well. Xenith Digital currently boasts a portfolio which includes major brands such as Pantene, Safeguard, Gillette, Always, Head and Shoulders, and Pampers.

As a stand-alone online PR company, Xenith Digital will run Facebook and Twitter pages for its clients. Other services it offers include online conversation moderation and reporting, emerging trends and best practice sharing, identification of online ‘influentials’, social media policy development, website design, mobile/tablet app design and online content creation.

“Big corporations are now realising that PR gives them more value for their money. That is the reason many of them now consider advertising and PR as distinct functions and allocate separate funds for them,” she said; adding that she expected that about a third of Xenith Public Relations’ total revenues would come from its digital division in the next three years.

Adcom – one of the country’s largest ad agencies - but it was only last month that it established an integrated communication agency under the name, Green Man’s Ark.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Green Man’s Ark Director Operations Faisal Khan said he expected the share of digital segment to increase up to 12% in the next three years, from the current level of less than 2% in the total ad spend of the country.

His company already employs 17 people, and a website gone online. Khan says the number of employees is likely to go up to 45 within a year given the growth potential in the online industry. Green Man’s Ark has hired statisticians, anthropologists and fiction writers and has taken a different route of integrating different mediums with fusing technology and adapting to the transmedia story telling format, Khan says, to serve its clientele that mainly consists of multinational companies.

Another leading advertising agency, JWT Pakistan, has recently agreed to acquire a minority stake in Converge Technologies, a digital PR agency, subject to regulatory approvals.

A recent statement issued by JWT Pakistan quoted its CEO Mansoor Karim Shaikh as saying that their partnership would leverage each other’s strengths and scale up their integrated offering. Converge was founded in 2007 and currently employs 90 people. Its clients include heavyweights such as Unilever, PTCL, Mobilink, Hewlett Packard, Bank Alfalah, Nokia and Pakistan State Oil.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2012.