HONG KONG – Public relations professionals have been working on owned, shared and increasingly more on earned media in the recent years. With so much focus on content marketing, it is noticeable that PR (mostly earned media) has proven to be 80% more effective, according to PR Newswire, which held its first Hong Kong media coffee event and live webinar of the year on May 15. The event focused onthe topic “How digital and social media have changed online news reporting and its impact on public relations“.
As Asia-Pacific is one of the regions with the highest penetration of e-commerce and smartphones, and so the media coffee event received good responses from customers and prospects, attracting participants from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, mainland China, Australia, Canada and even the United States to attend the live webinar.
After an opening speech from Royce Shih, Vice President, Asia-Pacific Sales and Marketing of PR Newswire, the first speaker was Michael Pranikoff, Global Director of the Emerging Media of PR Newswire based in Washington with the following key highlights:
• Fast changes are taking place in the media landscape around the world and consumers are using content differently nowadays which marketers and communicators can take advantage of such changes.
• The line between editorial and user-generated content for business and consumer continues to be blurry and journalists now use social media to find news stories, news sources and to validate sources.
• As sources of owned, shared and earned media converge, the converged media (i.e., the sponsored, promoted, and branded that is shared) will ultimately form the basis for earned media, which is getting more important than ever before, triumphing over branded content.
• Google’s latest patent filing indicated that brand mentions from high authority websites are the future link-building which will determine the visibility and ranking of brands on search results.
• Use multimedia to get more visibility for content as it increased engagement with journalists and the public by 35%.
The second speaker, Salina Ghafur is the Head of Marketing of Sina Hong Kong and was instrumental in launching Weibo in 2009 which is now the top social media website in China (fifth globally) based on the number of active users. The salient points from her presentation include:
• The significance of having a presence in Weibo, which has over 536 million individual accounts, for corporations doing business in China especially when Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube are banned or have limited access in China.
• The statistics presented further supported the fact that Weibo is the number one communications channel in China with 61 million active users, 130 million posts and 60 minutes browsing time per day through over 75% wireless login.
• Shared some interesting self-media case studies that demonstrated the power of Weibo’s viral effect, such as the Wenzhou train collision accident which first Weibo feed was posted inside the train by a passenger came in 4 minutes after the accident happened and was published two hours earlier than any media. There were over 4,500,000 posts related to the incident soon making it the hottest topic on Weibo.
• Other case studies that leveraged on Weibo also include the Rubber Duck Project and the latest trend in social commerce as in the case study of Xiaomi handphone, which sold 50,000 Xiaomi handphones in just slightly over 5 minutes on Weibo ecommerce.
Event attendees and webinar participants raised some questions during the Q&A session and one of the questions was about how a company could create multimedia content with limited budget. Pranikoff felt that the challenges that companies are now facing were to create content specific to their target audience and to stretch the lifespan of one piece of content. Ghafur added that social media has become an integral part of any organisations and dedicated resource should be allocated to support it. The event ended with light refreshments and a networking session amongst participants, speakers and PR Newswire staff.
Royce Shih explained that the goal of the media coffee event is to enable communications professionals to hear from leading media organisations on how their respective companies work, providing insight into their specialisation areas, giving advice on achieving coverage and informing them on effective targeting of journalists within their sector, and how to build a mutually beneficial relationship. He added that more events of such will be held in other key markets in Asia-Pacific and the next one will be in Kuala Lumpur in June.
