Online PR is a tricky thing to find stats on, but lucky for me, Tim found an awesome E-consultancy study on the subject (and he was kind enough to hand it over). So below you can check out what both clients and PR agencies are thinking about Online PR and where it seems to be heading in 2009. Happy Friday!

From E-consultancy – Online PR Industry Benchmarking Report (December 2008)

The Basics

• E-consultancy’s most popular definition for Online PR was: “maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands or websites on 3rd party sites.”
• 39% of all PR activity has now moved online.
• 47% of client fees are made up from Online PR.
• 29% of companies outsource their Online PR work to Search Engine Marketing agencies while 22% outsource to Web Development agencies.
• Two thirds of PR agencies have dedicated online divisions, but most predict that Online PR will become immersed into overall PR strategy eventually.
• 65% of PR agencies believe that the biggest benefit of Online PR is “the opportunity to listen and engage with stakeholders.”

The Clients

• Only 20% of clients are satisfied with their PR agency’s Online PR knowledge, while 13 are very dissatisfied.
• 12% of clients admit that their own Online PR knowledge is poor.
• 38% of clients report that their PR agencies use optimised press releases, while 75% of agencies claim that they do.
• 57% of clients believe that the main benefit of Online PR is “the opportunity to create an integrated marketing communications approach.”

The Strategy

• Most popular Online PR service offered: Online (traditional) Media Relations - 84%.
• Least popular Online PR service offered: Corporate/Brand Microblogging – Twitter: 38%; Widgets: 35% and Virtual World activities: 12%.
• Social networking, blog relations and video creation are not commonly used by most PR agencies.
• Microblogging is only used by 10% of PR agencies.

Online PR Opportunities

• Clients claim that specialist internal resource is the key change that would improve their Online PR (55%), while PR agencies claim that training and clients place more value on Online PR is what is really needed.

Online PR Threats

• The top three reasons cited by PR agencies for the limited use of Online PR were: Limited client resources (48%); clients questioning the value of Online PR (48%) and limited client understanding (47%).
• The biggest barriers to the use of Social Media channels in Online PR are seen to be limited resources (73%) and limited internal understanding (53%).