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PR, Social Media and the Multi-Disciplined Approach
Posted by
Bob Brin on May 20, 2009 at May 20, 2009 8:29 AM
Social media sounds a lot like PR some days:
• Building relationships with an inner circle of influential blogger moms.
• Your story breaks on the AP newswire and suddenly it's all over Twitter.
• Reading and pitching the best bloggers.
• Monitoring and assessing positive and negative sentiment.
That's not to say it's just the same. It isn't. But the reason PR is finding a natural transition to social media, is based on evolutionary factors:
• Most PR pros come from a journalistic background, so the concept of citizen journalists is not that alien.
• Letting go of control is not a new thing. PR is based on the concept that you offer your message/story/content to a tough crowd of journalists who do what they will with it. Now days, control is even looser and your content is even more vulnerable, but the shock isn't as great as ad agencies are finding with their multi-million dollar ad campaigns getting torched via Twitter over a weekend.
• PR is accustomed to immediate and dynamic response, with television, radio and Web coverage happening hours or minutes after your news event
• PR understands that opinion leaders rule. Reporters themselves, industry analysts, early adopters and users all have opinions and that's where people turn no matter how transparent companies attempt to be
• Relationships rule. You don't get to those opinion leaders without carefully, gradually developing trust over time.
• PR's bread isn't buttered by the media buy. It's a business built upon developing substantial information that attracts. When you have to intrigue a cynical, curmudgeonly reporter with a 20-second pitch, you know how to package an idea in its purest form.
What PR doesn't always understand
• We're talking social media. So entertainment and drama is important. Ad agencies get the value of the emotive response driven by compelling creative and theatre.
• The ROI of content and engagement. Digital shops understand the economic connection between individuals and content. They're disciplined at providing rich media and building user bases that scale over time, by constantly analyzing the behavior.
• Creating fake stories and fooling people still doesn't work.
In the end, what's needed, of course, is a multi-disciplined communications approach. And while PR folks need to leverage the affinity of their skill sets, we can't get lazy and think of sparking conversation as "getting coverage" in the new media or that we've done our job by getting some good hits. The conversation goes on.
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