Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

The clock is winding down on the pure (traditional) PR agency model and you can see this firms establishing ePR capabilities or forming alliances and partnerships with Digital Marketing companies to protect their own futures. Here at SinoTech Group (STG), I believe 2009 is going to looked back on as a watershed year for this transition of the PR Firms into digital PR companies and then I am predicting some may eventually evolve further into full digital marketing & PR firms; offerings a wide variety of services to their clients. To this point, SinoTech Group has seem most of the partnering activity in this past quarter coming from PR firms wanting to outsource to STG to provide their clients with additional services from reputation management to even search marketing.

I guess PR world is no different from the Marketing world where clients are wanting more for their money and additional Digital PR services could offer that sanctuary in a stormy business climate.

Don’t get me wrong, Digital PR would often struggle without traditional PR agencies to write the releases and develop comms/branding strategies for them, but it’s the new distribution and technological skills of the digital agencies that impress the clients and will give PR agencies and their clients the new lease of life they seek online as well as in the press, radio and TV.

So what do you think? Is this the general trend you are seeing or will the PR world and the Marketing world remain mostly siloed? Will Social Media Marketing (SMM) be a domain area that is shared by both?

Please post a comments below on your ideas or bring your suggestions into the twitter world: @sinotechian