Should PR Own Social Media?

Published on 12/30/2008 in Profound Thoughts. Comments

Increasingly the discussions around marketing and social media move towards which team should “own” the social media toolkit. On the one hand, advertising with its huge budgets and teams of designers and code-monkeys seem to be the right home for online communications. But increasingly there is a call for social media to fall under the relm of the public relations team.

Kristin Maverick has a good post laying out the rational for this point of view, and cautioning (correctly):

But, as social media has changed the way we think, the traditional PR agency will also need to adapt to the new ways of handling these social media requests. While PR may be the right man for the job right now, it’s also important for PR to include others to help get it done. From partnerships with other specialists to new technologies and advancements emerging everyday, the acceptance of all things changing will only help create successful outcomes and ensure social media success.

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I’m inclined to agree, both with the notion that social media is part of public relations, and that traditional PR agencies will have to grow and change their ways of doing business to get the job done. I suppose this is one of those challenges for 2009.

Aside from just “getting it,” whatever your definition of “it” might be, PR agencies are going to have to be a lot smarter on the nuts and bolts of how the Web and social media work. For one thing, to look at many agency web sites, one would be excused for believing the industry is trapped in the late 1990s. Too many agencies have flash intros or sites built entirely on Flash. Too many agencies tout their social media starts but don’t have blogs, or even RSS feeds for their client news. And too many agencies are treating social media now like they treated online communications in the 1990s – as something separate from the “real work” of media relations.

Most of all, PR agencies have to drop the habit of viewing each new social media tool as a means to shout their clients’ messages to as many people as they can grab.

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  • Educating your staff so that they will get involved in social networking, for indirectly a commercial purpose. Will it elevate to a stage where social-spamming gets out of hand?
  • Answer in my view - no. Why? No one owns social media or can within any business, impossible to do so or for one part of the business to say what and how things should be done as the flow keeps on moving and changing. Your people will be all over social media even if you ban it in the office.

    Education is important from within the business and externally - look at what peers are doing. Educate your staff to be useful to your business in this space as more business will be done this way.

    PR, well that will have to change it's name not only how it does things.. PR is dead
  • Great post and I agree with you David. The question is if traditional PR-agencies will unlearn and relearn what social media is all about in time.

    As I see it there are so many fields coming together in social media that I wonder if we shouldn't consider to let go of traditional breakdowns in PR, advertisement, marketing etc. For the next years to come I'd wage on the need for a new renaissance social media man - a jack-of-all-trades - rather than verticals of focused specialists.

    The reasons that many PR-agencies wave with new applications in the faces of their clients is probably that they have become redundant. You no longer need the connections with the journalists to the same extent as before and being human qualifies you to communicate with other people. All you need is to now what options and possibilities you have.
  • Facebook User
    What, the owning debate isn't over yet? why of course PR should own social media because...because... I'm in PR.

    Actually, the reason I actually feel that way is that PR is communications, and conversational media seems more readily adaptible to that. Advertising? If ad people can adapt to the 2-way model (and I don;t mean just interactive chickens) then ok, make an argument. our fair cousins in Marketing? Just don't treat fellow facebookers or Tweeters like lead-gen targets or direct-mail statistics and you could be fine.

    Customer service? that's a bit closer-- you could argue that somewhere in it's heart, customer service is a form of PR.

    that said, I agree there is still change and evolution ahead for most Pr practitioners. The industry as a whole is a big, slow-moving beast. I suspect the movement in the right direction will slowly continue (and stop well short in many circles).

    Would love to hear Marketing and Ad's cases for "owning" social media.
  • Yes, I agree with both of you, Michael and David. Education is key for both our firms' teams and our clients. But more importantly our clients must understand up front that social communities are about investing in the future and building the strong relationships that can carry their organization through economic times like today.

    Great blog post, David. Thanks.
  • What's missing here is one word: EDUCATION. A lot of what needs to happen is good, solid education about what social media is, how it works, and more importantly, how it doesn't.

    I agree with you that it's not about using the next new shiny tool to shout out a client's message. But too many clients feel like they're paying a LOT per month in billings, and dammit, they oughta' be getting something in return for it. It's incumbent upon PR agencies to explain to their clients that social media is not as simple as "insert X to get Y" and that it's more about building relationships and connections. It may not translate well on a monthly billing spreadsheet, but it will certainly help in the long run.

    Terrific post and thoughts. I tweeted it.
  • Retainers are going to have to come down to earth. And agencies are going to have to invest a lot in education.

    Organizations like yours and work like I am involved in goes a long way to help move the ball. But I don't think we're going to see much change until the market forces agencies to change the way they do business,
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