MOBILE FRIENDLY PR: AWARENESS ON THE GO

Where is everyone going?

The concept of Mobile PR is a leap towards revolutionizing news on the go. One of our responsibilities in the public relations industry is to share news and make it enticing enough to be read while people are moving, while also ensuring that messages are being absorbed.

As companies are working to leverage this new-age communication method, PR experts are supporting them by beating the path towards a crucial goal: reaching out to new audiences.

With the constant evolution of our industry, we’ve discovered the 24/7 news cycle. This ideology, which encourages news fluidity, is one that I am trying to embrace. Looking at Natasha’s blog on New Age Copywriting, the ‘Less is more’ concept really applies to the mobile environment. As Natasha highlighted, while everyone is constantly running ten steps behind in their daily tasks, people simply don’t have the luxury of sitting with a newspaper and immersing themselves in lengthy news articles that they find intriguing, especially considering the busy lifestyle of Dubai.

It is crucial that we optimise our PR practices and make them mobile-friendly to engage new audiences. I don’t believe in encouraging screen time, but it is becoming a method that seems inevitable.

How?

Understand the different distribution channels and then work out how they can be optimised with new content development strategies and digital best practices.

The Game Changer

Media houses work on the move. Constantly. Many of us now naturally type faster on the QWERTY keyboard on our mobile phones than on our laptops.  This change is inevitable and, honestly for me, quite welcome.

This is the nature of my job so I do succumb to reading the newspaper on a daily basis, but I receive most of my news updates from a variety of mobile channels.

Now that I’m familiar with them, I’m working on incorporating certain content development strategies and digital best practices, such as:

• Concise content
  • The main mantra here is: Easy to read, easy to remember.
• Social Media Friendly
  • Part of the content development plan is to keep in mind the social media spill-over. Make the headline catchy, clickable and easy to read on a screen.
• Mobile Crisis Management
  • Like any industry, crisis management is a large part of our deliverables across the agency. We now need to think about how best to include mobile channels in our crisis management strategies – this has become best practice.
• Location, location, location
  • Location is everything. With the incorporation of mobile friendly PR, we need to be found on the right channels by the right people.

To harness the power of mobile, we must collectively work towards educating industry professionals on the change and how to move past traditional methods.

Don’t ignore the significance of traditional PR, but let’s work on welcoming in mobile methodology and making traveling news the next big thing.

Ribal Temraz is the Senior Account Executive of Cicero & Bernay Public Relations. An independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai and offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the GCC. | www.cbpr.me