When it comes to incorporating ‘online’ into your communications, one of the biggest decisions to consider is whether to use a specialist or an integrated approach. Is it better to brief your ‘traditional’ agency to ensure consistency or engage with a specialist? Should you hire someone with experience in multiple disciplines, or a long historin just one?

Today our user-generated module has been taken over by a selection of graduates and bright young things from within the PR industry. As such, Reputation Online has been talking to this group of digital natives about their thoughts on the topic.

Though the answers were surprisingly varied, there a resounding sense of a need for enhanced communication and transparency between all parties – whether that’s two agencies working on different parts of a campaign, or within a team where one consultant is responsible for digital and another for offline.

Sheema Sidiqqi, part of the Digital Marketing team at 19 Entertainment, elaborated on this point, saying that there is far more benefit in incorporating digital activity into traditional campaigns. However, she notes that universities simply aren’t embracing this. “My university only featured one class on digital PR and marketing. Digital aspects were mentioned in traditional classes, but the professor didn’t really provide a lot of detail. From what other students have told me, most universities aren’t adapting a digital aspect to PR and Marketing to their curriculum.”

Education was also at the heart of what Andy Vincent – an Account Executive at Cow – had to say, as he referenced an apparent lack of willingness for people to learn digital skills. “One of the major issues that these people face is that quite a few of the ‘old hands’ are somewhat reticent to learning ‘new’ digital skills. I think the key factor here is that prior to educating the general morass of PRs, you will always be faced with the issue of many PRs viewing digital work (including social media) as a bolt-on to campaigns that already exist, when realistically they have the power to be a campaign in their own right.”

The majority of those we spoke to were very aware that the separation of digital and traditional PR is often ‘frowned upon’ from within the industry, but highlighted the fact that this often isn’t reflected within PR strategy as it should be. Amy Tweddle, an Associate Campaign Executive at Diffusion PR, told us that as new tools have bridged the gap between offline and online, she sees integrated approach as ‘vital’. “There is so much overlap between online and offline that it would be damaging for a company to ignore one in favour of the other. It could also, however, be detrimental for a company to employ two different ‘specialist’ agencies as there’s a real possibility that the outcome would be two, separate, disjointed campaigns lacking an over-arching and consistent message. The most effective PR comes when online and traditional media relations are implemented together.”

Is there one definitive answer though? Becca Caddy from Wolfstar made what could be the most important point of all by noting that a ‘one size fits all’ approach just doesn’t exist. “Ultimately, the ideal situation would be that multiple agencies should work in their specialist sectors in an integrated way. However, I accept that it is completely dependent on the requirements of the brand and social media as a whole would tend to mirror this view – you cannot apply one size fits all strategies in this space.”