Social media from a PR’s perspective
November 21st, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton
I stopped in at the NMK Beers and Innovation: ‘Clients in the wild’ event last night and it was certainly an enlightening evening for a number of reasons. Ian Delaney and the NMK team put on an interesting panel discussion, featuring: Will McInnes, co-founder Nixon McInnes, Sarah Ogden, MD Midnight Communications and Drew Benvie from Hotwire, who all waxed lyrical about social media, or blogging in the main.
There were some pressing questions put to the panel by the great and good of the PR industry that were in attendance, including asking how the panel would have handled the Northern Rock crisis and Facebook’s recent targeted ad launch.
Overall I felt the crowd were quite guarded, me included, either because they we not confident on the subject, or probably because they were surrounded by their competitors. This is an all too familiar problem in the PR industry and the issue seemed to surprise the non-PR panelist, Will McInnes, who had kicked-off by asking who among the PR attendees could measure the results of their campaigns, to which he was greeted by a deafening silence.
Will made a number of good points, but the one that stuck in my mind was his analogy relating PR to the web, confirming PR cannot continue operating in a web 2.0 environment with a web 1.0 approach. For me this encapsulated the most poignant issue that we as PRs face in a social web environment.
The PR profession as a whole is guilty, to some degree or other, of trying to place the social web into a nice little ‘channel’ box. We continue to apply traditional rules of control to a long since departed way of communicating. On last night’s evidence it seems we’re all still struggling with the concept that communications is going through its most rapid stage of development to date, let alone devising new strategies to cater for it.
Of course there are exceptions, and some of the leading lights that attended last night certainly added to the discussion with examples of their own insight. However, I noted that much of the discussion was based around tactics – I.e. blogging, rather than a strategic conversation based on communicating in the current environment, which would have been more revealing.
At the end of the day, I think NMK did a great job to pull the PR crowd together and this shows there is an appetite to learn, which was the main point of the event after all.
Technorati tags: NMK, PR, social+media, innovation
Tags: innovation, NMK, PR, Social media
November 21st, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Hi Lloyd, it was great to meet you last night. I found the evening very interesting, but apart from some frank statements from a few panelist I agree the room was guarded. NMK did a great job as the style of the event was perfect for an area that is user driven!
November 21st, 2007 at 11:58 pm
First of all, thanks so much for coming along.
That ‘guardedness’ comment is really key, too, to carrying this forward. I think that broke down in the bar conversation afterwards (once you south-coast softies had gone!) but nonetheless, I share your view about the earlier discussion.
We aren’t used to that at NMK - digital agencies, creative agencies and developers are generally keen to share good practice. And that’s what our events and courses thrive on.
I had a good conversation with Lorna from Octopus afterwards and she agreed that this competitiveness is holding back the industry.
Hopefully, we can put on similar events more and more to break this down.
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:01 am
(when I said “share good practice”, I should have added “and terrible mistakes and what they learned from that”, which is what was missing)
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:48 am
Hi Giles,
Good to meet you finally too! Agreed, NMK did a good job to set it up, but it’s down to us as PRs to drive the conversation from there, which is the real challenge.
November 22nd, 2007 at 10:04 am
Thanks Ian
I agree - competitiveness is holding us back to some degree. The traditional agency rivalries make it difficult for participants to really open up in such a forum. But that has to change as we can certainly accelerate our learning using each other’s experiences.
I’d be interested to see if we can break down some of these barriers in the next forum and hopefully the rest of the south-coast softies will join me.