The Future of PR and Social Media

by jill ~ November 19, 2008

Blogs and other social media outlets have created a new channel for client coverage - and it’s changing how the public relations industry works in some ways; in others, not so much. 

This blog entry, “Social media will not kill PR, but it does expose industry weakness” on ZDNET from last week is a very interesting summary of this.

I don’t understand (literally - no comprendo) the firms or professionals who do not embrace the online medium.  With the popularity of blogs, there are more options - more outlets to target, and more opportunities for coverage.  This is a good thing for us.  And I don’t think that social media changes everything, exactly - and in a lot of ways it makes what we do easier, but also more complex. 

In the last several years, bloggers have changed from renegade truth-tellers to… well, to reporters.  The top bloggers are now beholden to some of the same editorial guidelines as those of other traditional media outlets, but since the news cycle for a blog can be immediate, it just speeds up the process.  Bloggers still research stories, conduct interviews and report the news - but in some cases the standards aren’t as high and the lead time certainly doesn’t exist anymore. And bloggers have a tendency toward snarkiness - it’s a throwback to the renegade days of being cynical and trying to cut through the clutter of corporate messages to see the truth - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In a conversation I had last week with a client, I said that they needed to treat the blogs as traditional media outlets.  You must talk to them and provide information; you can’t ignore their existence and shut them out from the conversation - because in many ways, they are responsible for creating the conversations today that lead to other traditional news media coverage. 

The biggest complaint about blogs I hear from my clients is that even when a positive blog posting about their business is published, the comments can be brutal.  The comments made on blogs are unfortunate - and in a lot of cases, unfair.  But they are the voices of the people.  And “the people” have their own agendas and an unlimited number of opinions - to varying degrees positive, negative, cynical or just plain mean.

This is what makes our outreach and cooperation with blogs so complex. 

My tendency is to reach out in the same way I do with other media outlets - without consideration for the opinion of the people; something that you can never control - and nor would I want to. 

If you can stomach the comments, you can understand the people you’re dealing with on a much more intimate and genuine level.  Take what they say and learn from it.  Correct inaccuracies and falsities perpetuated on the blogs and you become even more respected in their eyes - because you are responding to real people’s fears, thoughts, or misperceptions.  It’s the first time in the history of media relations where we know immediately what real people think and it can be used as a tool to make our positions better received and more in line with what consumers actually want.