Digital Essays: Bite Communications - Earning attention online

digital.

As the nation goes gaga over drumming gorillas, the gap between those
who do digital and those who don't is getting wider all the time. And
the PR industry as a whole still seems to be holding back.

Journalists are desperate for us to provide them with information more
effectively. Indeed, recent research from Glide Technologies revealed
that journalists would like much more multimedia content. They are
frustrated when they cannot find basic press information online, are
asked for passwords or are unable to access recent archive press
information.

Anyone with an internet connection can spark a conversation with a
global audience of millions, so it seems criminal that our number one
target audience thinks we're still not communicating effectively with
them online and giving them what they want.

Some brands are all over this, but I think many aren't and a social
media newsroom is an easy place to start on a journey towards being
digital.

Also, today's so-called attention market is more demanding than ever.
Consumers are relentlessly bombarded with brand-generated communications
and the internet has brought with it even more ways for brands and
consumers to talk to each other - whether they are listening or not.

We have created a complex, ever-growing networked market for attention
and now the competition is even tougher as brands use the internet to
capture the attention of their target audiences online. When your brand
messages are competing with sticky sunglasses, laughing cats and things
in blenders, you have to do something creative to succeed.

So how do brands do this? For a start you can't buy attention any more.
You can still spend huge amounts of money on advertising to interrupt
consumers as they go about checking out all the other amazing stuff out
there, but it's getting much harder to capture their full attention and
achieve a desired response.

Today, you have to earn attention. Companies must create amazing
products and services or execute an amazing idea that creates
conversations about their brands. And because the market is so fierce
right now, the threshold for making even the smallest of ripples on the
web is incredibly high.

This places an unprecedented amount of importance on creativity and the
ability to execute a good idea in a way that brings genuine value to the
consumer and therefore earns their attention.

At a time when a corporate press site can attract more traffic than a
major US news publication, there is a great opportunity for brands to
think differently about the value of their content and how they can
attract attention by being in the right places and, once they have been
discovered, giving people what they want.

So brands should first make sure they have a presence everywhere their
target audience wants to find them online. In that way, they can become
part of the natural discovery process that takes place every single
second on the web.

This requires an investment of time. Time to research target audiences
carefully, time to establish exactly where and how they like to consume
content, and time to find out what they really like to do on the web.
And this includes journalists too - if they are spending their lives on
Twitter, then why aren't we distributing news through that platform?

Once the brand is truly live online and has realigned its digital
footprint to cover the most important touch points, we need to think
about the bigger picture.

What can we do to create something amazing that gains attention and
truly deserves it? By using specialist creative people with a deep
understanding of how the web works and what brands need to do to engage
with their online audiences effectively.

And that's where we come in - helping brands develop a live presence on
the web and execute those amazing ideas that will earn them the
attention they desire and the ability to deal with the fierce
competition on the web of tomorrow.