Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Todd Deffren’s SWOT analysis for the PR industry makes for interesting reading. The first thing which pops off the page for me is:

“the single biggest weakness of PR in the Social Media age is related to scale. As I noted back in June 2006, ‘[How can] PR practitioners possibly find the time & energy to create, monitor and nurture the hundreds of relationships that might (or might not) aid their clients?’“

This is something which I’ve had a bee in my bonnet from a commercial perspective for a while now. Ultimately if clients are to embrace the Internet as a communications channel, it must be managed in-house. The PR agency’s role, as it should be, is to play devil’s advocate and provide strategic advice.

The second interesting point to draw from Deffren’s analysis is his opinion that:

“Social Media is either the end of PR or its biggest opportunity…For the first time in Marketing’s history, the “sizzle” is less important than the steak. PR sells steak. PR not only has a unique opportunity to step into the light and interact directly with consumers, but in so doing is gaining the authority to guide the overall corporate communications approach. Tactically, PR has an unprecedented chance to lead on the content creation side, as well. Used to be press kits and releases were the sum of our effort. Today we can help devise blogging strategy; produce podcasts and vlogs; participate openly via microblogging platforms like Seesmic, Utterz, Twitter, etc. In addition, in part via its content creation experiences, PR is also gaining a stronger hand in SEO approaches (and we all know Search is king).“

This sounds all well and good, but creating content is a lot harder than it sounds, but more importantly PR agencies need to be thinking about content creation from an integrated communications approach rather than simply social media. What I mean by that is whatever you are creating to get customers talking should have talkability that can be exploited in any situation, whether it’s on Twitter or in face to face conversations.

On a related note to this, Ben Ayers points out an interesting video of Vint Cerf, Google Vice President and ‘Chief Internet Evangelist’. Ayers notes that:

According to Vint, we call advertising ‘advertising’ when it’s something we are not interested in. When we are presented with something we are interested in, we call it ‘information’. This of course is the secret of Google’s success and why the company is so valuable - the ability to target users with information that is relevant (so it’s no longer advertising).

Ultimately PR professionals need to emulate this from a communications perspective. There are numerous challenges to overcome, not least of which is a basic understanding of the new tools emerging on the Internet. Words like blog and Facebook are part of today’s PR professional’s vocabulary, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily understand their role though. What’s more important is identifying communities and understanding how to tap into them. On this note, I flicked through Neil Perkin’s PowerPoint presentation on slideshare recently which I’ve embedded below. Slides 27-29 are the most important ones for me. People are obsessed with creating communities, when in fact as Mark Zuckerberg’s quote in the presentation points out that “communities already exist. Instead, think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do.”

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