(NOTE: This was originally posted on the PNConnect Blog)
For several years now we’ve been working with some of the biggest brands in the world on the execution of their digital strategies. Our focus has always been on the new ways we could help our clients create business value, be that for the purpose of increasing awareness, driving engagement, acquiring customers, cultivating loyalty or, as was most often the case, all of the above.
Over the years, how our clients departmentalized our work would admittedly fluctuate: sometimes it was defined as social media marketing, sometimes digital marketing. Often times these definitions stretched across the paid, earned and owned spectrums. Regardless of what definition was used, from our perspective there was always a high degree of overlap in the motivations and mechanics of these programs, as well as patterns of success — much of which we observed was heavily anchored and driven by strong content publishing strategies.
This being our experience, about 18 months ago we began quietly building a new service team within Porter Novelli called PNConnect that was uniquely focused on one question:
“How can we help brands think, act and operate more like publishers?”
We think the notion and significance of “brand as publisher” is a marketing model shift that many companies are just now discovering and discussing. And we think our insight and perspective on this shift is not only differentiated, but field-tested, which is why the time is right to formally introduce PNConnect today: pnconnect.porternovelli.com.
We built PNConnect to take the best elements of Porter Novelli’s social media marketing, web development, creative production, and advertising services, and blend this expertise together to create a global service team that’s focused exclusively on solving the new content challenges that brands today are facing.
We’re big believers that content publishing is a multi-dimensional sport — that there are premium content experiences that can complement and elevate a brand’s day-to-day publishing cycles; that development trends, like responsive design, can create new efficiencies of scale for reaching people across screens; and that small, smartly timed content promotions can be just as effective (if not more) than big overpriced creative.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll have much, much more to share about our team, our experience and the approach we’re taking with PNConnect. You’ll find all of that here first.
UPDATE: PRWeek wrote this news piece about Porter Novelli/PNConnect earlier today