What follows are my notes from the luncheon that Bryce Gruber and I held last week for public relations professionals:
The Real Opportunity for PR Firms Right Now
Businesses and brands know they need to get acquainted with social media marketing. But they aren’t keen on hiring untested and unproven social media marketers. PR Firms already have the client relationships. They have trust and experience. Yet they have so far failed to wrap social media into their services in any tangible way. At the most they’ve paid lip service.
The reason for this is because they don’t know social media marketing themselves. They don’t know the tools, the services, the networks, the protocols; one could argue that most of all they don’t understand the philosophy behind social media. This is because social media operates in almost diametric opposition to what they do know which is controlling the message, broadcasting a brand surgically, and using their access (to journalists, tastemakers, cultural arbiters) to promote their clients.
But as more brands and businesses get comfortable with social media, with their needs and budgets and time constraints, they want guidance. PR firms are much better situated then someone like myself to service their clients. And anyway, I don’t want to take clients away from anyone. I am not good at PR. You are. But I have skills that you need. So learn them. And let me teach you.
The New Tools of Public Relations
Managing the needs of clients has never been easier with some of the tools that have been developed. Tweetdeck, Social Mention, Klout, Seesmic, HootSuite, Co-Tweet. All of these services didn’t exist two years ago, and now they are here changing the way millions of people interact with technology. They make everything from work flow, to brand monitoring, to identifying influencers to marketing incredibly easier.
On top of that, there are great open-source blogging software that enable anyone to have a blog up and running in about 20 minutes. It’s really that easy. And it’s free. WordPress is by far the easiest blogging platform that businesses can use. And yet, in order to get the most out of it, it does require some new knowledge, basic HTMLand CSS to start. This is going to require PR firms to bring in open-source developers or at the very least liaison with them frequently.
Search enging optimization is a no-brainer and yet people frequently throw the term around in a way that lets you know they don’t really understand what it is or why its important. SEO, as the term is referred to, is nothing more than optimizing your content so that it can indexed and found by people looking for it. That’s it. In practice, it is as simple as spending two minutes adding keywords and tags to a blog post or video or image. The results are fantastic.
Your clients will soon be getting the hits they are looking for. And there are even some new tools on this end emerging that literally tell you what keywords and tags to use. Scribe SEO is the best out of these.
Community Managing and Social Media
PR Firms are well-organized and optimized to run the digital and social efforts of their clients. One of the things I have repeatedely run up against is the inability of many clients to handle their social media needs. They few it as something that can be done for ten minutes a day. It can’t. But it doesn’t and should not dominate your schedule either. PR firms are working with their clients anyway to work on corporate copy, press releases, working on placements; it makes perfect sense for PR firms to also handle all social copy.
A few collaborative blog posts a week, the managing of a Twitter account, and synchronization of the brand identity across social networks: Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, etc. Community managing takes time, and it takes a person who has the freedom and creativity to represent a brand, to develop that internal voice as blogger, tweeter and customer service rep. PR firms need to start offering this, NOW. They will find lots of new business if they do.
Social Media as Crisis Management Tool
Social media is one of the most natural crisis management tools available. Imagine a restaurant getting a mediocre review in the paper. With a fully functional social media platform embedded within the businesses strategy, client and PR firm can activate their community to protect themselves. They can leverage their relationships and BYPASS THE CRITICS.
You can highlight your successes and positive reviews. You can point potential customers–who if they didn’t know about you before the crisis, surely have heard of you now– to specific areas of your organizations. If you’ve been blogging for awhile and building up a lengthy list of dynamic content, then when people start googling you to find out what this is all about, they’ll find your content. And lots of it.
And if a client has been engaging social media for awhile, they’ll have found and fostered their native community, that group of fans and clients, who will come to their defense, pointing to their own positive experiences. This can deflate criticism before it grabs a hold of a business.
Social Media Measurement and PR
PR firms are better exhibitors of metrics. They talk in the client’s language. Have you ever tried to talk to a social media consultant about metrics? Page views, uniques, absolute uniques, retweets, shares, mentions. It never stops. And the reason is never stops is because measuring success in social media is nascent. You can have all the page views in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to more sales then what good is it? Not much. But what about brand equity? Sure, that counts, but businesses and brands are going to continue to build brand equity where and how they know how. But PR firms also need to get in the game and start offering social media measurement as part of their analysis, whether internally or client-side. Don’t spend a lot of money on flashy software. There is no point. The free tools are just as good and reliable. Everyone else is using them as well.
Conclusion
Right now PR firms are exquisitely positioned to capture a lot of new business and add-value to existing business. No one doubts that social media has changed the game. It has, and increasingly, online spend is where the growth will be. PR firms need to be in that space, about ten minutes ago. If you aren’t yet, get on it. If you need to know how, if you need to craft a strategy, you know where to find me.
The best way for a PR firm to start adding in social media marketing into their portfolio of services is to start one for themselves. That is, they should be blogging, they should be on Twitter and Facebook. They should be communicating on social networks as a firm. Identify people in your organization who can and want to do so and let them take the lead. Then rotate different people into the community managing role so that as many people as possible get some exposure. When blogging and tweeting becomes part of your job description, it is that much easier to convince a client to do so, and to point them to your own successes.
Would you trust someone with your social media who doesn’t do it themselves?
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Image Source: The Cleveland Kid on Flickr
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