When the promoters promote themselves
Learnings from the PR and Communications MarketSpace
PR and communications professionals are using our platform (Market.Space) to keep track of their clients and competitors. Since the platform is built to aggregate, organize and visualize the online activity within an industry segment, we just had to ask:
How are PR firms managing their own online presence when they’re not managing their clients’?
In other words, how are the promoters promoting themselves? Where are they investing their time and dollars in content creation? What results are they seeing?
The PR Marketspace
The PR MarketSpace has 42 companies (and growing), including the 10 top national firms (by revenue) and the 10 ten San Francisco firms, plus a number of others of note. The MarketSpace is a live stream of the online activity of these companies across news, blogs, social networks, apps and videos, filtered for relevance, clustered by news cycle, and fully surfable by individual companies or channels. As the data flows through, it’s visualized in interactive and exportable charts, so you can see patterns and benchmark activity and performance. It’s one of scores ofMarketSpaces we have created so far, like Mobile Gaming, Business Intelligence, Team Messaging, 3D Printing, Venture Capital and even our very own, Monitoring Marketspace.
Here are some things we noticed
(By the way, this is just a month of data and preliminary — to be refined and updated over time. Thanks in advance for your input!)
Share of voice is distributed evenly across the larger firms
Top PR firms have a surprisingly even distribution of news mentions over the one-month period we studied. Other comparably sized MarketSpaces we have studied (Consumer Security for example) often have a wider variation of mentions between companies at the top, with the same handful of companies often dominating the news month after month.
Coverage comes from the usual suspects
Not a surprise. PR Week, The Holmes Report and O’Dwyers held top spots for stories mentioning PR companies, as expected, with Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg appearing largely as a repository of press releases. (For these purposes, we excluded incidental mentions in the course of client announcements.)
Investment by channel varies
Four firms, Ketchum, LaunchSquad, Siegel+Gale and SHIFT Communications, are at or near the top across at least two channels among Facebook posts, Tweets and Video drops.
PR firm blog posts are mostly instructional
Using the Market Space for selected PR firms, we took a look at what firms have been blogging about for the last two months. Most posts are instructional — typically focusing on methods and tools of interest to PR and social media practitioners within their clients and client targets. Blog posts about general industry trends came in a distant second. Less than 10% of posts we examined had anything to do with particular work for clients, or awards won in the course of client work. The investment in blogs featuring original research was relatively small.
PR firms publish new blog posts about every business day
Every PR firm we studied runs a blog with activity in the last month. We see everything from one to 60 posts a month, with an average of around 25 per month. This puts most firms on pace for a a post every business day. The outlier here is WagEd, which is outblogging the pack.
Larger firms tend to dominate in terms of followers on Facebook and Twitter
These charts show the relative follower numbers for the top firms on Facebook and Twitter. The same top three, in the same order, lead in size of their Facebook and Twitter audiences. These firms also are among the largest and most recognizable.
PR firm videos aren’t often viral
Incremental views in the last month on PR firm videos were limited to a few hundred, at most, with one exception, Brand Matters: The Rich Idea, which was a monster, relatively speaking. In general, Siegel+Gale’s videos have been in the top performers in views.
Of course, in B2B marketing like this, it doesn’t matter how many people see your content, as long as the right people see it.
What did we miss? Want to see your firm?
We’ve just scratched the surface of the PR MarketSpace, and it’s constantly changing. It’s up to you now to take your own look into the data set. Check it out for free, customize your view, and get your updates in real-time via Slack, RSS, email or our chart-ful web app.
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