Dubai: Digital and social media have blurred many lines, not least in the way they define content and who creates it. These days, the bottom line is that anyone with an opinion and a smartphone can create the words and the images to spark a narrative.
While traditional media and advertising are going through a top-to-bottom disruption as a consequence, digital’s impact on the way the public relations industry creates — and puts out — content has been, on the face of it at least, less sharply etched. But that can be deceptive.
“What matters, irrespective of whether it’s content for traditional media or on social, is that the message has to be consistent,” said Yiannis Vafeas, managing director at the Middle East and North Africa operations of the PR firm Golin (formerly GolinHarris).
“There’s really no getting away from the fact that all approaches have to be aligned to the client’s best interests. If at all anything matters more than that, it’s the fact that agencies need to have the in-house resources to make it happen for the client. That is the true bottom-line.”
Golin is part of the Horizon network, which also includes the FCB advertising agency and, more recently, Blue Barracuda, an integrated digital-facing entity.
But isn’t there some point where Golin’s social media exposure comes across some overlaps from what Blue Barracuda puts out?
“At Golin, there are two key products we offer under our social platform — real-time marketing and community management,” said Vafeas.
“Relevance is the most important commodity of the social web. We drive relevance by monitoring conversations from our audience and reacting quickly with content that allows our clients to play an active role in the news agenda of the day,” he said.
“We do this through The Bridge — our real-time marketing hub that pairs the latest in technology with analysts, copywriters, designers and video producers to produce the right content in the right time and then share with the right audience,” he added.
“On the community management side, we produce content and conversations that reflect a business objective rather than just gather meaningless ‘likes’. We call it purposeful engagement. Having said that, we do collaborate with Blue Barracuda on many occasions where there is a need to deliver an integrated digital communications solution. But we at Golin do the billing for the client content that is produced on social media platforms.”
And it will do so with a snappier name — ‘Golin’ as opposed to ‘GolinHarris’. The change-over to the new name was initiated early last month and followed an unveiling at the Cannes Lions event.
“It’s been three years since we changed the internal structure at the company to create teams built around the communities we are a part of,” said Vafeas.
“Having seen through that process, we felt a shorter name is more in tune with the times. “It’s a natural evolution, and is simple and bold.”
It sure does come with a catchy slogan as well — ‘Go-all-in’.
“We are excited to embrace the rallying cry of the agency and confident our clients will benefit with the new set of services and client servicing structure we now offer,” said Rafic Saadeh, chairman and CEO of the Horizon Group.
