Online PR is still not an exact science by any means, and it can often be unclear where an offline campaign stops and a digital one begins.

I thought it would be useful therefore to pull together a few case studies showing the power and versatility of online PR in action. Below is a non-definitive list of eight. I’d be interested in hearing of any other specific online PR examples.

CASE STUDY 1 - Creating a new search term out of nothing

Client: 21st Century Formulations – Skin MD Natural

Consultancy: Expansion Plus Inc

The problem: Beverley Hills-based skincare company 21st Century Formulations not only came up with a new skin care lotion (Skin MD Natural), they came up with a new skin care lotion category: “shielding lotion”. All well and good, but consumers had no awareness of this new category, and were therefore unlikely to find the website set up to advertise the product.

The solution: An online category and brand awareness campaign was launched that aimed to reach consumers online through high search rankings on specific keywords and phrases, articles, blogs, newsgroups and forums. The main objectives were to create a new search term – shielding lotion – and gain search engine visibility on the researched keywords and phrases - Shielding Lotion, Dry skin, Dry skin treatment, Dry skin lotion and Eczema treatment. The strategy involved the following tactics:

• Keyword research undertaken and the website’s pages were optimized for the chosen words and phrases;
• A news section of the site with RSS Feeds was created;
• Weekly articles on the subject of dry skin and related skin conditions were written and posted to the site. Every article page was optimized on these keywords;
• All articles were posted to the news page and syndicated in an RSS Feed using the PRESSfeed content syndication system.

Results: The articles were picked up in Google News and other syndication websites, improving the site’s search rankings through regular content updates and increased inbound links. Prior to January 2006, there was no mention of shielding lotions on the internet. Today when you search “shielding lotion” in Google you get over 20,000 mentions. When you search “Skin MD” you get almost 40,000 results. The articles were published on many other websites and the leading physician journal for aesthetics and wellness. The news pages also showed up in Google Blog Search, and the feed was picked up on more than 1,500 other websites and blogs.

CASE STUDY 2 - Attracting shoppers to an internet retailer

Client: Nordic Store, an online retailer selling Scandinavian products including maps, woollen products and books

Consultancy: Nordic eMarketing

Problem: Nordic Store is a leading Nordic online retailer founded in 2000. NordicStore.net focuses on supplying online shoppers with a large selection of Nordic products, from countries like Norway, Iceland and Finland. The company relaunched their site in early November 2007 and wanted a PR boost to get their message across.

Solution: After reviewing their current status, awareness and competitive environment, a four-month online PR strategy was devised which focused on attracting consumers for direct sales and increasing the site’s online visibility. All impact was measured as much as possible through Online “Buzz” monitoring and IndexTools Web Analytics. The following tactics were employed:

• To boost the search engine visibility of their new site, search engine optimized press releases were sent out related to the client’s range of services and products. Each release had live links back to the new website for the key phrase marketing;
• These news releases were distributed over three different newswire services, all with their software and consumer niche strengths, reaching newsrooms across Europe, Canada and the US;
• The releases were delivered directly to the inbox of possible buyers, as well as gaining significant internet reach. To ensure that the releases reached appropriate editors, the distribution channels were carefully selected.

Results: Within a few days there was a rise in visits to the client’s site, with sales up 132% year on year. Furthermore, focused search phrases such as books and calendars, woollen products, woollen products, woollen sweaters, woolen sweaters, Icelandic maps, Iceland maps, maps and travel guides all had improved results. Hundreds of other strong phrases now generate more than 30% of all search, increasing from only 11% before. Link-popularity went up by 300 inbound links.

CASE STUDY 3 - Integrating brands following an acquisition

Consultancy: Liberate Media

Client: Spannerworks

Problem: Following Spannerworks’ acquisition by iCrossing, Liberate Media was tasked with communicating the digital marketing agency’s integration into the iCrossing brand in 2008.

Solution: To deliver on the key objectives for the brand integration, Liberate Media felt that a new approach would be needed to reflect iCrossing’s forward-thinking approach. It was agreed that the communications messages should be conveyed in an innovative and easily accessible format, utilising a social media-focused strategy to assist message delivery and distribution. A new platform called a social media video release (SMVR) was devised, containing the key elements of a social media press release combined with interactive video, allowing the viewer to click through to supporting data such as relevant sites, key statistics and research that supported the narrative. The SMVR was professionally shot, edited, coded and had links inserted to achieve the desired social media-focused announcement.

Results: On launch day, which was coordinated with US and UK offices, the video was launched via iCrossing UK’s blog and seeded on relevant news channels, linking all traffic back to iCrossing’s corporate websites. The SMVR was also made available to the web via interactive video site asterpix.com, as well as mainstream sites such as YouTube. In all, the video was viewed over 2,000 times on video publishing sites such as Asterpix, YouTube and Metacafe. Coverage was achieved in NMA, Media Week, Travolution, Brand Republic and ClickZ news, as well as several blogs.

CASE STUDY 4 - Creating standout in a busy marketplace

Consultancy: Ogilvy PR

Client: Johnson & Johnson

Problem: In January 2007, Johnson & Johnson’s Aveeno® brand was set to launch its new line of anti-aging facial care products, Aveeno POSITIVELY AGELESS™ into an already overcrowded marketplace. Building awareness and a “buzz” for the new line through traditional public relations would be a daunting task, and J&J asked Ogilvy PR’s 360° Digital Influence group to develop a strong, online word-of-mouth initiative as part of the brand’s overall marketing campaign for the new product line.

Solution: In a saturated market, it would be difficult to draw enough attention to the new product launch. Ogilvy decided that building buzz meant creating something of value to a particular group, and decided to tap into the fanbase of an existing artist and get them to talk about something they couldn’t ordinarily get themselves. They teamed Aveeno up with world-renowned British street artist, Julian Beever, and Keep America Beautiful, an organization focused on community beautification, to launch Aveeno’s new POSITIVELY AGELESS product line. Beever would create a “Fountain of Youth” on the pavement of New York City’s Union Square to get consumers talking about the new product line and start a “buzz” about the overall POSITIVELY AGELESS campaign.

Results: As Beever created his latest pavement tour de force, the Digital Influence team filmed the entire process and then packaged it as a time lapse film running just over four minutes. The film, “How the ‘Pavement Picasso’ Does It,” was posted on YouTube, giving fans and those intrigued with his work something they couldn’t easily get for themselves: eight hours of action condensed into four minutes.

CASE STUDY 5 - Creating viral fun to raise awareness

Client: T-Enterprise

Consultancy: Publicity Heaven

Problem: Glaswegian games developer T-Enterprise doesn’t sell directly to consumers but wanted to boost its profile in the eyes of business partners and so generate an increase in sales.

Solution: Working with its PR agency Publicity Heaven, the company scans the news each week for suitable victims to parody in free online games. Its developers are able to turn games round within 24 hours of a news event happening. The first big success came when Heather Mills threw a glass of water over Paul McCartney’s lawyer during their divorce proceedings. The company built MuccaChucka.co.uk, challenging players to control a cartoon Heather trying to soak Paul and his lawyer to collect a £24m divorce settlement. As the divorce was dominating headlines in the national media, Publicity Heaven knew a national newspaper would pick up on the story and secured an exclusive page three splash with The Daily Star.

Results: T-Enterprise’s directors were smart enough to understand that mainstream consumer coverage would in itself generate additional coverage. And it did – the story generated 100 other media mentions including The Times and CNN. Ultimately 1.13m people played the muccachucka game online with 359,000 people playing on one day alone. Similar games were created around the Terminal 5 fiasco, The Apprentice, Gordon Brown, the stolen passports fiasco, and Beijing police’s brutality towards ITV journalist John Ray. T-Enterprise received two sales enquiries from significant plc companies, directly attributable to the media coverage.

CASE STUDY 6 - Building emotional engagement in cyberspace

Client: Hotel Chocolat

Consultancy: Immediate Future

Problem: An understanding of emotional engagement is at the core of Hotel Chocolat’s marketing. Starting primarily as a catalogue-based company, the chocolate retailer was selling an increasing proportion of its products online, and wanted a campaign that increased its profile over the Easter period.

Solution: Initially, immediate future conducted a full online audit, identifying a healthy ecosystem of chocolate fans online, including diary bloggers, foodies, wine lovers and mum’s networks. Contact was initiated with influential bloggers and online journalists, offering Easter eggs for review. Further tactics included:

• Partnerships were struck with influential bloggers and online publications, who were each given a set of Easter-themed questions to post on their site. Readers on the sites had to answer the questions by searching online, with the resulting answers forming a code that had to be entered on the Hotel Chocolat site. Successful entrants were entered into a prize draw for a luxury Easter hamper;
• A Hotel Chocolat Facebook group was created;
• Consumer-facing press releases were optimised with relevant SEO phrases;
• Blog posts included appropriate web addresses and key phrases, with the aim being to create positive comments and opinion in the Google search window.

Results: Over 100 positive online pieces of coverage resulted directly from activity over the six-week campaign period. A large number of influential bloggers placed numerous posts throughout the campaign, becoming powerful advocates for the brand. SEO PR and blog relations activity vastly improved Hotel Chocolat’s Google rankings, ensuring positive coverage and recommendations were returned on key search phrases. At the end of the campaign, coverage generated as a result of the online PR activity accounted for 23 rankings in the first 100 Google search returns for “Hotel Chocolat”. The ‘online Easter egg hunt’ proved to be enormously popular, with almost 4,500 entries on the Hotel Chocolat site.

CASE STUDY 7 - Underground tactics to instill credibility

Client: Scansafe

Consultancy: 6 Degrees PR

Problem: As more and more people use the web, the issue of safety on the web remains high on the news agenda. According to statistics, over 30,000 new porn web pages are added every single day, while a Harris poll showed that 94% of men and 95% of women had visited a porn site by accident when surfing the web. Web security firm, ScanSafe, needed to create awareness for a free and easy to use web tool it had created called Scandoo - but it wanted to reach tech and gadget bloggers first, prior to consumers.

Solution: Six Degrees agreed to give the launch an ‘underground feel’. The team decided to focus on ‘those in the know’, including bloggers, tech-savvy writers, PC journalists, gadgets freaks, as well as the regular ‘watchers’ who understood web security. The plan was to create a buzz around the Scandoo name. The strategy during the early stages of the launch was to ‘tip off’ key writers in phone conversations, and on email and Skype chats – informal conversations along the lines of ‘did you know…’ or ‘have you heard about the latest web tool…’. The story was then announced to technical online and print media, with FAQ and background documents providing back-up for the PR team and spokespeople to ensure they stayed on message, especially when it came to discussing competitive offerings. Examples of web search terms that the press could try out, for example the word ‘toys’ or ‘dolls’ revealed sex sites in the top four results, were also given out.

Results: Scandoo received more than 10m hits from around the world, with 80% of users originating from North America (42%) and Europe (38%). In media relations terms over 50 press articles appeared, three on BBC News Online, and there were 450 mentions on blogs.

CASE STUDY 8 - Using a blog to highlight charity campaign

Client: British Heart Foundation

Consultancy: Coast Digital

Problem: The British Heart Foundation wanted to raise the profile of its annual ‘Help a Heart’ campaign, drive targeted traffic to the BHF’s main website and generate additional interest in related activities.

Solution: Online PR was used to maximize reach and engage with a wider audience. A dedicated ‘Help a Heart’ blog was created and regularly updated, helping with search engine optimisation and building awareness amongst journalists and PRs.

Results: The ‘Help a Heart’ blog attracted over 3,000 visitors during the campaign and was the second highest referrer site to the official British Heart Foundation website, with 35% of visits from first-time visitors. There was also an increase in quality inbound links, with companies like Virgin Media placing links to the blog on their intranet.