Last night driving home from a very engaging dinner with colleagues I Uttered this:
There are a lot of people talking about the future of PR and our direction in the face of social media. This morning I was reading Geoff Livingston’s post, “Social Media: PR, Advertising or None of the Above“. In the post Geoff continues the conversation concerning where corporate social media fits, and for him it is pushing away from PR and advertising and towards word of mouth marketing (WOMM).
I believe that PR is more entrenched and naturally better at community engagement and word-of-mouth. But here is my caveat…good and talented PR people are a perfect fit to add social media into their quiver of arrows. PR people that learned that the P in PR is “public” not simply “press”. The problem, as we have all talked about endlessly over the past 12 months, is that too many PR folks are mistaking social media as a platform where old-handed tactics, blast email and hiding behind a marketing event will lead to success.
Let’s get real: people who are really bad at PR are going to be really bad at social media.
- If you don’t know how to put the work into building a relationship with a journalist you certainly won’t be able to properly engage directly with a community.
- If you believe media relations is the end goal of every campaign you won’t succeed in social media.
- If you don’t understand how to properly use technology for word of mouth and social networking you won’t succeed in social media.
- If you think an online video and a Facebook Group is enough you won’t succeed in social media.
I don’t believe corporate social media can be a separate entity, rather it must be a part of an overall strategy of communications. There is no better place than the PR group to make that happen…the question is whether PR people can adapt quickly enough and shed themselves of the weak links in order to be the next social media leaders? I have a feeling that many folks out there believe that corporate social media is a separate entity, I see it as a natural and evolutionary extension of public relations. Can’t wait to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
/kff
4 Responses
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I admire you for continuing the fight, my friend. At the same time, I’m giving up on our wayward brethren and looking for new answers.
I reserve the right to change my mind, but it’ll take some significant changes for me to do that, though. We’ll see where the ball lands.
You’re right – it’s critical that PR folks adapt to and adopt social media before it gets split off or rolled into the marketing or (gulp) IT functions.
I think a key part of that adaptation needs to come through training communications professionals in the basics of social media. We have to start with the basics, too – I know a lot of people that go cross-eyed as soon as I talk about Facebook, blogging or podcasting… never mind micro-blogging, wikis or any of the other social media tools out there.
Posts like this led me to establish a social media training wiki to encourage the social media community to use its own tools to develop a best-practice ’social media 101′ training course.
Hopefully over time this will evolve to provide a blueprint for people looking to introduce social media training in their organizations.
The URL for the site is http://socialtraining.wetpaint.com.
@geoffliving Oh no, that certainly concerns me. Hate to see that someone like yourself has given up on the PR folks in this social media fight, hopefully I can help turn you around some day.
@davefleet Thanks for the URL, going to check that out. I’m actually running a social media ‘bootcamp’ on 12/4 and lots of this stuff is exactly like what I was going to talk about.
/kff
To clarify: it’s not that I think PR people or marketing people CAN’T “do” social media marketing. I think they can. BUT, they have to give up strict adherence to some of the “absolutes” of their core disciplines.
I agree with Geoff — most will not be able to do so. Those that can meld the skill sets, build new types of organizations. they will be the winners. But focusing on who “gets it” literally and figuratively? Counterproductive.