Internet and PR: is Ukraine to face PR revolution?

Posted by Peter Ivanov on April 7, 2009 under Articles/Cases/Analytics/Advices | 2 Comments to Read

PR specialists in Europe and US have already understood: in order to be well-known there is no need to be necessarily published in trustful edition. Nowadays company can reach its goals by using Internet blogs, social networks or forums as well. Also, to my mind, forums in Europe are not so efficient instrument as in CIS countries. Progressive Europe and USA are living in a world of PR Web 2.0: companies create their own blogs, register their pages in the social networks, and distribute press releases to the new “journalists” – bloggers.
On the other side, lots of Ukrainian companies still ignore Internet as communication channel. Although, times when Internet used only chosen people, has past. Consumers and journalists use web as primary Information source. Some progressive business use web for buzz distribution.

Everybody knows that conservative companies acting isolated will never avoid being mentioned in Internet once. If you are either interesting or keep silence they will find some information about you in blogs, forums, yellow news portals. And this information they find is not necessarily good. Very often Ukrainian companies aren’t control the media area.
The problem
IT press in Ukraine is facing deep crisis. During the last month due to the advertising budgets decreasing 2 IT publishing houses had been closed. Measuring in editions equivalent Ukraine lost 7 magazines that wrote about PCs, mobile phones and hi-tech novelties. It is not a joke any more! Leading IT vendors in Ukraine has now left only a few print editions to work with.
I suppose that in new severe conditions the role of Internet channel will significantly increase. PR will move on-line for some companies or even product categories. Lets us now analyze blogs as one of the most perspective PR instrument of the future in Ukraine.
Blogosphere of Ukrainian Internet
Just before financial crisis boomed some commercial banks started to finally understand the meaning the importance of internet “noise” and planned some budgets to work with this channel. It was only first weak steps.
In the last year on of the biggest Ukrainian bank,”Privatbank”, launched its own blog (http://privatblog.com.ua/). The bank has reached few targets developing that service. Firstly, “Privatbank” always tried to be a leader in opening up the World Wide Web. For example in June 2008 this bank launched Internet-widget, that open an opportunity for every user to sell bank services through its own site or blog getting oneself tips. Moreover “Privatbank” was one of the first companies that started using Internet banking in Ukraine.
But let us come back to the “Privatblog” and mention a couple of loses that arise (or rising) during its work:

• So, among the blog members form the Bank you may find the TOP management including the President whose last post on a page was dated 31.09.2008. Everybody knows that the President of such big bank has no time for blogging or even answer to the comments. So why do they added him to the blogger list? It would be more efficient if the right for virtual communication have only single business branches representatives (retail, corporate);

• The topics I have found on the “Privatblog” are not adequate to the real questions or problems of the bank or even banking system in general. Ukraine is living in a deep financial crisis. In such hard conditions every communication channel should work for fighting against banking panic. Despite those problems there is a discussion concerning “Privatbank” – Skype partnership on the last blog pages.

Analyzing this example I would like to mention one more time the secondary role of blog in the eyes of PR managers and marketing specialists of the Bank. We should give them credit for answering even the negative comments and not deleting them. “Privatblog” is not distributing any company messages.
Progressive companies try to use blogs of popular editions. We could also call them columns. For example liga.net informational agency offers blogging platform for famous politicians, businessmen or other authoritative people who are experts in their branches. If the PR manager wants to make a market expert out of his client he launches a blog on a popular platform. In case with liga.net I know a legal agency, “Yust Ukraine” whose manager is having a blog there.
As I was telling earlier, either corporate blogs or participating in social networks hasn’t become an important PR promotion channel for companies and its products. I can prove it with a couple of arguments. First of all, business is not ready yet to pay bloggers or on-line PR specialists. Second of all, the public is primarily focused on the fact of existing blog or even Live journal account, not on the resource content. Hardly ever in Ukraine we will ever be able to see an accident similar to that one took place on a CNN, iReport, blog where American teenager posted an information concerning the Apple president Steve Jobs who supposedly had a heart attack and is going to die soon. The news spread really fast and Apple PR specialists had to deny this untrue info. By the way, that news hit the company’s shares value pretty much. In Ukraine you can post whatever news you want on your blog and nobody but your friends will ever read it. At the same time the news concerning the fact that President of Ukraine V. Yuschenko registered himself an account on Twitter were distributed widely and is being discussed recently.
Even the leading worldwide corporations operating in Ukraine still don’t want to use blogs as an option. For example Apple and its distributors didn’t pay a lot of attention towards branch local Mac-blog. Although, such blog have been launched with the help of Apple Ukrainian users. It’s called ProstoMac blog. It functions as a helper for IPod users, MACbook users or any other Apple product. Although, this blog it is not an Apple project.