As the social media evolution continues, businesses want to engage in social media, and more than just blogs. The challenge for communicators isn’t necessarily learning best practices. It’s offering a unique, integrated blend of new social media, marketing and public relations services to the marketplace. Rather than throw-up a long ridiculous term, I have been shortening the many descriptive terms in this evolutionary offering to a simple description of “Social PR.”
Social media has forced contemporary media to become 1) much more accountable to its readership and 2) extremely trend oriented. This fifth estate trend has also introduced a new level of dialogue between customers and the companies that serve them. Consider that:
* Message control is gone
* Media outlets predominantly cater to the communities, not the companies, and want great trend-based info to serve those communities
* Ethics and transparency are increasing musts. Companies will be held accountable if they are caught wandering from the path…
The way we react to social media’s impact is by moving away from message control, and getting back to creating value for the community served by the newspaper (or TV station or…). This is social PR. As Rich Becker likes to remind me, this is not really a new thing, just good old fashioned, principle-based communications.
These principles apply across tactical outreach. Whether that’s delivering a phenomenal speech, a good blog post, an intelligent social network application or a great newspaper pitch.
Communicating directly to the stakeholder or through the media, give them the information you have as a subject matter expert… The information that the community values, wants and needs. That’s what social PR really is: Socially intelligent, relationship building communications integrated across new and old media forms.
Generally speaking, reporters respond to this kind of pitch. This is no different than the general precepts used to create an editorial mission for a blog or social media campaign. And thus done well, Social PR is integrated across tactics.
This thinking is not new, but it has become lost in the past twenty to thirty years. Perhaps public relations is an art. So many practitioners don’t get it. But in my mind social PR is just the modern form of old-fashioned public relations: creating goodwill by being a contributing, participating member of the community.
Geoff, thanks for getting our minds churning! This is a little something I’ve been calling conversational PR, which really is simply, Public Relations using social tools…it’s pretty amazing that we strayed so far of the path over the years. Thanks for helping to get people back on track!
One of the problems I identify in terms of developing social PR (and like the phrase) is the difficulty many businesses have in producing regular content. By this I mean news releases, comment, blog posts etc. Content creation, and the community and discussion that develops around that content, is one of the biggest factors in social media.
As you correctly point out it’s much less of a one-way communication. Consumers expect a greater sense of involvement and indeed ownership over concepts and ideas, and a feeling that they have genuine engagement. Many companies, particularly those not directly related to tech and online issues, seem to be finding that engagement difficult to achieve. Sure, there’s still a lot to be done with utilising traditional PR and marketing methods.
Brian coins another great phrase in his comment – conversational PR. Interesting to see the difficulties many companies are having in adding value to that conversation.
Brian: Thanks for that. I see social PR is more than PR with social tools, rather it’s the full PR integration of traditional and new media, using the same principles and approaches across all tactics.
Conversations are clearly a part of that, but so is committing great value to stakeholders both directly in social environments, and indirectly through the media, speaking engagements, etc.
Robin: Agreed. We are still very early in this process and much more will be revealed as time goes on.
Also, I just want to state that I am not trying to be cute by creating a term “Social PR.” This was done out of laziness. Trying to communicate the topic in 5 words or less has been almost impossible, the jumbalaya term Social PR has done more in my meetings with biz execs to get the concept across than any others.
I like the term “Social PR” it’s always good to have a label around which conversations can gather in the same way that “Web 2.0″ became a topic title without ever getting a definition that everybody agreed with.
I was recently talking about online social strategy and the phrase “Participation Marketing” slipped out and was immediately seized for use in marketing materials and presentations – people love a label.
Social PR does sound better than PR 2.0. I also like Brian’s conversational PR. The best PR actions have always had a social, conversational and relationship element. Even good media raltionsh worked becuase you took the time to actually tak to and build arelaitnsip with a rpeorter or editor.
Now that we have tool that it possible for everyone to have the power of voice we can have real conversations with all our stakeholders.
Does it best belong in an ad agency? Not necessarily.
But it does have to cross silos and disciplines. Whatever we call it, it has to pervade the organization and change the internal culture.
I have been floating this term around for the past few weeks to some of my non social media friends and they don’t really like it. Probably because it sounds a little like a social director and there has been so much media exposure to the PR person who is basically a promoter/publicist. That makes it feel cutsie to them.
I first heard the term from a client a few weeks ago and have been using it with that client since. He calls it Social Marketing, but that is a similar take. Not that I would ever advocate that PR and Marketing were the same discipline ;-)