With mobile devices now vastly outnumbering PCs and laptops, faster network speeds and the availability of mobile broadband, mobile is rapidly becoming <the number one communication channel around the world.

It is also the fastest growing personal medium that has ever existed, offering an unprecedented ability to interact with people on a one-to-one, targeted basis. Mobile has proven to be particularly successful for the marketing and advertising disciplines, offering enhanced engagement with key audiences and a direct way to interact with brands. It also offers public relations practitioners a number of opportunities, as well as challenges!

On the one hand, since the rise of smartphones and the introduction of the tablet, a number of traditional print publications have taken their content and optimised it for mobile devices. Understanding and interacting with the publications that have done this means that the reach of activity can increase. On the other, mobile internet has led to the number of news sites, blogs, social media feeds, video  channels, podcasts, vodcasts and other forms of media exploding. It also makes activity more immediate and of the minute than ever before. Identifying and engaging with the opinion leaders and voices who have the ear of their market has become more complicated, while the need to track what’s being said at all times of the day or night to ensure that clients are well represented is a never-ending job.

A well-placed and researched campaign could, for example, lead to someone in a shop looking at a product and running a Google search or scanning a barcode. This would then show local, crowdsourced reviews or top results from trusted bloggers or journalists, helping to influence opinion at the point of purchase. The same could happen at an event for B2B companies. Seeing what’s being written about a company could influence the next step made. It can also make the unexpected and sometimes unavoidable crisis even harder to handle. In this way, PR campaigns can have an immediate, contextual effect, so consultants need to be au fait with all the tools at their disposal to be able to influence the increasingly mobile media.

Mobile can also be used to interact and communicate with key stakeholders, although it’s important that this is only done if you have the opt-in approval of these groups. It would be a disaster for a PR campaign if an agency were to start sending out SMSs to journalists when news comes out as an alert. If however, a journalist was attending an event or is due to have a briefing with your client – sending them a reminder SMS via their work mobile can make their life easier. Again, if a journalist is attending an event, an SMS is a far more immediate and less intrusive way of reminding them and sending them the address.

Essentially, PR practitioners need  to understand that mobile has made information even more immediate than fixed line internet. Social media, mobile news sites and mobile messaging has led to the spread of information by the second. The revolutions in Eygpt and Lybia are testament to this, in the same way that the first images we saw of the Japanese earthquake originated from mobile devices.

By Dee Gibbs