As a PR Manager are you finding the explosion in social media is making PR unfashionable – and unsexy – to your marketing and brand folks?
Is this because your marketing and brand manager’s are having a love affair with social media – egged on by the advertising and digital agencies who have squeezed public relations out of the picture?
I was one of those who pioneered the fusion of PR and social media in Australia and I’ve written extensively about it. I saw a bright future for it. And I still do.
But just a few years later it seems the social media tsunami has just swept everything in its path. It has arrived more quickly, and is much bigger, than I ever envisaged.
Led by the persuasive advertising lads and lasses, who have jumped on this bandwagon to make up for the decline in the effective of traditional advertising, most marketers are becoming converts to using social media.
The trouble is that social media is increasingly being used as a promotional tool to bombard the consumer with. The result is that in many brand marketing organisations PR is being pushed to the sidelines as a serious brand building tool as social media becomes the favourite, new and exciting marketing tool.
But we PR folk shouldn’t get discouraged. Hasn’t this been the history of advertising; they over extend themselves and over indulge! They bombard rather than coerce. They shout, rather than whisper. They don’t call advertising “interruption communication” for nothing.
I believe that the use of social media for hard marketing and promotional purposes will inevitably cause a huge backlash as consumers react to their private space being invaded.
While we wait for that to happen what we as PR people need to do is to define, and then capture, a position that in the new marketing paradigm will work for PR – and those in the marketing and brand arena who use it.
As sure as the sun rises every morning there will come a day when your marketing and brand people will come back to you because they are disillusioned with the way consumers are reacting to what the brand has been doing to them – and asking how PR can help rebuild relationships and reputation.
If you are looking to reposition PR within your organisation for that day I think there are two key phrases to focus on, and build capability around, – influencers, and earned media.
Influencers are key. Influencing those who influence others has always been at the core of what PR is all about.
Now it seems the Head of Global Marketing and Brand Building at one of the world’s largest, and best, marketers – Proctor and Gamble – may have done PR a favour by saying at a recent US conference that PR should ‘stake its claim’ and own real-time marketing that targets communities (as opposed to paid media that continues to reach the masses).
He was apparently backed up by other senior marketers who espoused that there was a real role for PR in generating word of mouth and peer-to-peer recommendations. An outcome of all this is an elegant article about PR’s path to providing unique value for brand marketers, including a quadrant analysis to show where PR might/should fit for marketers, by a senior US PR executive. It’s well worth a read.
However to me, all this is really just about PR to its roots! Knowing who to influence, and using the power of word-of-mouth in communication is where PR excels, and where it is capable of delivering what no other corporate or marketing discipline can. And the role of PR is even more powerful in the era of social media.
Also at the core of PR is the concept of earned media i.e. the belief, which has been proven in research studies, that editorial (in whatever form this may take) is perceived to be more trustworthy, credible and believable than paid space which is clearly recognised as carrying an advertising message.
In this regard Melbourne-based Trevor Young recently wrote a good piece for ‘Marketing’ called “Owned and earned versus paid media”. Proctor and Gamble’s CMO reportedly differentiated between the role of paid media in what I thought was a telling way i.e. “Paid media creates an emotional connection and provides the air cover so that PR can move in to win the ground war”.
I believe social media provides one of the greatest opportunities ever for PR – so long as we engage in conversation, and encourage two-way communication.
The worst thing we as PR people can do is try and compete with our advertising cousins on their turf. It’s much better to stick to our knitting – do what PR has historically done well. The key for the future is to focus on the two areas where PR can deliver what no other marketing or corporate discipline can – identifying, reaching and engaging in conversation with influencers and generating earned media (traditional and social).
Of course it’s all very well pontificating this from the sidelines. I guess it’s a tad more challenging and difficult being a PR Manager and seeing marketing and brand people within your organisation, along with their advertising and digital partners, having all the fun using social media.
No wonder some PR Manager’s I know, facing this situation, feel like wallflowers!
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