Employees in 'traditional' PR agencies are fully convinced of the growing importance of online PR, but say they are too busy and lack understanding to run effective online campaigns.

The survey found that 99 per cent of all respondents said that the internet is either important or very important for PR purposes and believed that online coverage is either important or very important to their organisation or clients.

Nine out of ten respondents said that online coverage has become more important to their organisation or their clients in the last 12 months. The majority of respondents saw SEO, the archived nature of coverage and the internet's global reach as the main benefits to online news coverage, according to a survey by online PR agency webitpr.  

However, 55 per cent of all respondents believe their peers are incapable of performing comprehensive and effective online PR campaigns. This is primarily due to a lack of understanding of online PR or being too busy with their traditional PR day-to-day role.
 
The respondents surveyed came from a variety of PR sectors including tech, consumer, healthcare, finance, PA or corporate departments and included agency, inhouse and freelance staff. None of the respondents who took part in the survey worked specifically in online PR related roles to help create a more reliable basis of results.
 
Adam Parker, CEO of webitpr, said: “Since the advent of social media and so called Web2.0, it’s not surprising that people working in the PR industry are taking the online area more seriously than ever before. And with this in mind, we were certainly expecting the results to be in favour of online PR but we didn’t expect them to be as much as it proved.”

“Not too long ago, SEO as a PR tool would have been relatively unheard of among the PR industry. However, the majority of respondents showed a high awareness of the benefits of online search and reputation management.”

“Although the results are far from doom and gloom, a worrying result received from the survey was the lack of confidence PR people had in their peers’ ability to perform effective online campaigns. If this is a true reflection of the entire industry then it should be cause for alarm as the technology continues to move forward and the tight grip of the traditional media continues to loosen.”

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