Question Time: What’s the ideal balance between PR and social media consultancy?
April 7th, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe
This week we’re running a daily Question Time on the Liberate Media blog. We’ll be posing a timely question to our peers and industry network, suggesting our views on the subject, and inviting informed responses back. There’s nothing like a bit of open debate and collaboration sometimes!
We thought we’d begin with a general question about the ideal balance brands/organisations, and PRs, should be looking to generate between traditional PR and social media consultancy.
I’ll begin by saying outright that there is no correct answer here. It’s a subject that is still very much up for debate, with some going so far as to argue that PRs are not the best people to be providing social media consultancy. An opinion I strongly disagree with.
At Liberate Media we’re of the opinion that digital PR should offer a blend of traditional PR and social media techniques. From our experience, it makes sense to have one consultancy handling the two, with the two strands being interlinked, as creative ideas, collateral and messages can often be effectively cross-fertilised.
We do not believe that PRs should be differentiating themselves through social media (as is rapidly becoming the case unfortunately), but instead be integrating social media thinking with more traditional PR techniques. At the end of the day, we’re not re-writing why people communicate, but how, and it’s this that PR and social media need to address together.
The exact split between PR and social media investment is the tricky bit! The social media resource model that has emerged over the past 12-months is project-focused, with spikes of activity around product launches etc. While this makes overall sense, at Liberate Media we believe there is also a strong case for retainer-based social media consultancy to allow for profile and brand building, and reputation management etc, to respond to the speed at which issues break across social networks.
We’d be really interested to hear your views on today’s question. Please let us know your thoughts…
Tags: communications, marketing budget, PR, Social media
