Three years in social media/PR - where next?
September 11th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton
This week marks the third anniversary of the launch of Liberate Media’s blog, which naturally got me thinking and reminiscing about the launch of our company and how the environment around PR, social media, and everything in-between, has changed over the years.
Casting my mind back to 2006, I know it’s really not that long ago but play along, social media as an opportunity for brand communications and an opportunity for the communications industry at a whole was still at a very early phase of development. Sure, we’d experienced the now infamous and much discussed Dell Hell case study, so the evidence was mounting on the effect and power of online communities, but only a small percentage of agencies and brands were experimenting, let alone embracing social media.
From personal experience I’d discussed the effect of social media on PR with my then boss, who assured me that it was just another fad and ‘nobody cares what I’m doing every minute of the day’. That kind of summed up the traditional PR agency approach at the time, which is why my co-founder and I decided to get out fast and set up our own consultancy that would embrace social media and any other medium that helped us to embrace a more community driven and conversational approach to PR, rather than the hard sell and ‘who cares what a few nutters think’ approach that had done so much damage to PR over the preceding years.
Admittedly, over the first year or so it was trial and error with social media, but wasn’t it, and in fact isn’t it still, the same for everyone? Clients were not as willing to invest in social media and generally experiments with projects were as far as we were allowed to take it with many brands. The main issue was education and evidence, the move from traditional marketing to understanding a social environment was a huge leap and the good old ROI question became an excuse not to engage in some quarters, rather than a real search for measurement as it is in many others, even though the ROI of traditional PR was questionable at best.
As brands became more comfortable, saw more success stories and understood the benefits of engaging with their communities the debate moved beyond making a case to prove social media, at least for the pioneers, and leaned more towards experimentation and development to find the best way of building campaigns. In reality there was and is no handbook, no real experts or gurus who have it nailed, although some like to label themselves as such, what we have is development and learning, those with more experience and those with less.
What has changed is the belief in social media and the hunger to get involved. Now the cynical may say that the explosion of those people offering social media services, from web developers to PRs, to social media specialists to SEOs to digital agencies, advertising agencies, and their mothers, over the last year or two is because there is money to be made, and the simple economics of the situation would back that up. However, in too many of these cases each person/agency/company that has a rightful claim to be involved in developing a relevant element of social media is in fact trying to stake a claim for ownership, even though they know in their heart of hearts they can’t do it all. Social Media should belong to PRs/digital agencies/SEOs/ (delete as appropriate) well it shouldn’t, it doesn’t and it won’t.
The one thing that social media has proved to me over the years is you can’t fake it, at least not for long and those that are trying to own social media are missing the point. To understand social media and therefore operate with in the spectrum of skills required to run relevant campaigns you need multiple skills, not just marketing/PR/digital/search/content but all of it.
That’s where I believe the evolution will take place over the next three years. Not in one sector taking ownership, but a new sector developing, not just of people who ‘get it’ but of those that forget ownership and build skill sets not just departmentally but as individuals, who understand PR/content development/search/digital as a whole and those that can become actual social media consultants not just pushing budgets towards their slice of the social media pie.
So, I said at the beginning that this post will be a look back at the development of social media and PR over the last three years, and I’ve banged on about social media in the main, mostly because I feel that is a large part of the future of PR. Traditional PR, in my opinion, will still be relevant, just as search and the many other digital disciplines will remain relevant, but as a part of the wider offering. The confusion begins when we refer to social media as the online aspect of the campaigns we run, the conversations we have and the development of community only online. At its heart the social aspect doesn’t have to be online. One of the most natural parts of human behaviour is the need to be social and communicate, and not just online, the theories are relevant to communications as a whole.
This is where I believe we are heading, to a new space outside of petty bickering about who is right and who started it and who owns it and blah, blah - who cares? It’s really not a hard concept: we listen, we understand we get involved by being useful and develop relationships and reputation. I think that’s a pretty relevant description of social media online or offline. Although it probably will become redefined, relabelled and rewired, that’s where we need to be heading as communications professionals, be that online, offline and everything in between.
Will we get there in the next three years? Probably not, but we’ll keep experimenting and improving.
Tags: liberate media, PR, Social media
