We have supported our clients' efforts in traditional public relations for a number of years, managing press conferences, press releases, and in developing corporate image collateral.

While product launches have long been a key service we provide, we understand that we must work with our clients to build and sustain a groundswell of brand support — incrementally changing consumer behaviors via a steady stream of relevant and candid communication to both “media” and “consumers.” Social media technologies have proven to be particularly valuable in these efforts.

Of course good customers are crucial to the success of a company, and they must be engaged in an inclusive, non-exploitive way. But the input of neutral and especially critical voices is crucial. We must listen to these voices and address their concerns. In many cases the critical customer is still a customer, and has become critical as a cry for help. We must listen, respond and adapt strategy accordingly. A converted critic can just as easily become an evangelist as can a satisfied customer.

In recent years the need to respond quickly to defend a clients' reputation, to rebuild a reputation damaged by unfavorable incidents or adverse reporting, or to simply re-inform influencers about a company, an individual or a public policy has taken on a new immediacy as the internet has become the true definer of public image. Ultimately, the only place it is possible for an individual to hide in our society is in public. Our job in reputation defense is to be proactive and responsive… taking one of two possible approaches, as determined by the scope of the bad PR. The first is an approach toward suppression...to execute a well planned and diligent effort to subtly replace the visibility of negative search results with positive or neutral results, thus moving less favorable information to later search engine pages where it will not be seen by the overwhelming majority of searchers. We have used this technique with great success for both corporations and individuals. Once results have been achieved, we continue to monitor the situation, and continue to obscure negative mentions as they may re-emerge. This approach is very effective against website entries on sites that are not frequently updated and against information that is not readily re-interpreted. The success of our efforts has been recognized by several financial companies, who hired us to do due diligence for private placement offerings… calling on us to use our expertise to uncover data that had been obscured by the efforts of others.

For more severe issues, or in cases of direct misinformation, it is necessary to take a more proactive approach and confront the negative conversation to either refute it as incorrect, or at least to bring the client’s message into the discussion. This is more effective in engaging blogsites or other sites which are frequently updated, because search engines measure a site’s importance by the frequency of its updates. In cases where it is necessary to make an impact, feedback of the immediate effectiveness of our efforts is vital, and there are a number of tools available to quickly and accurately measure that effectiveness. Digital PR has the advantage of being directly measurable, the main issue is determining specifically what a client wants, or more importantly, needs to measure.

The nature of Digital PR is that while we can often discuss in general terms strategies that we may undertake on behalf of our clients, it often defeats the purpose of our efforts to provide specific details of an effort, or to discuss who we may have undertaken these services for… our client’s confidentiality always takes precedence over our marketing needs.