Webitpr announces results of Online PR Survey

Online news release and coverage monitoring company webitpr has published the results of its Online PR Survey, questioning 101 respondents from agency, in-house and freelance backgrounds.

The respondents surveyed came from a variety of PR sectors including tech, consumer, healthcare, finance, PA or corporate departments.

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.

Respondents were taken from the PR Week subscriber database and webitpr's own contact database and answered the survey questions via an online survey.

* 99 per cent of all respondents said that online coverage is either important or very important to their organisation or clients.

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.

* 90 per cent of all respondents said that online coverage has become more important to their organisation or their clients in the last 12 months.

* 99 per cent of all respondents said that the internet is either important or very important for PR purposes.

* 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.

Chief Executive of webitpr, Adam Parker, 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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