January 21, 2007

public relations is “getting social media all wrong”

2 Comments

decommodification.jpg
Stowe Boyd tells it like it is. It seems most PR folk are STILL pretty clue­less about Social Media:

Please, please, please don’t talk about audien­ces when you are theo­re­ti­cally pro­mo­ting social media. As Jay Rosen has sug­ges­ted, we are the peo­ple for­merly known as the audience. Blog­ging is not just another chan­nel for cor­po­rate mar­ke­ting types to push their mes­sa­ges to mar­kets, eyballs, or audien­ces. Social media is based on the dyna­mic of a many-to-many dia­lo­gue bet­ween peo­ple. Yes, peo­ple: that’s the word that should have been used. Not audience.

Agreed, the blo­gosphere is not a good place to “push” cor­po­rate mes­sa­ges.
That being said, the ‘sphere does have its uses for cor­po­ra­tes, the same way it does for indi­vi­duals. As I see it, the ‘sphere is the world’s lar­gest “Idea Incu­ba­tor”. It’s a great place to seed ideas. It’s a great place to test which ideas have trac­tion, which ideas are “Beyond Lame”. Which con­ver­sa­tions get people’s atten­tion, and which con­ver­sa­tions make peo­ple roll their eye­balls.
If your ideas have merit, blog­gers will talk about them. If they don’t, they won’t. This lets you know what to expect when you finally unleash your ideas for real on the big, bad world. Without spen­ding a king’s ran­som fin­ding out the hard way.
It’s sim­ple and bru­tal and it works.
None of this is roc­ket science. And the PR folk have no excuse. All the rele­vant infor­ma­tion is easy enough to find, if one takes the time to actually look.
The fact that lots of them aren’t bothe­ring to take the time, well, that’s another issue alto­gether.
[Afterthought:] If you wan­ted to find out more about the future of social media in the PR industry, you could do a lot worse than by giving my friend, David Par­met a call.
[Bonus Link:] The story on Techmeme.

2 Responses to “public relations is “getting social media all wrong””

  1. oliver Franks says:
    January 21, 2007 at 10:10 am

    (rolls eye­balls)

  2. Eric Eggertson says:
    January 22, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    True. The blan­di­fi­ca­tion of lan­guage that has taken place over the past 50 years in the cor­po­rate world doesn’t work very well in the blo­gosphere.
    Anyone who has given up the fight against the law­yers and accoun­tants and others who veto straight talk and crea­tive expres­sion of ideas will find their cor­po­rate mes­sa­ges don’t stand out much in the crowd, and their methods of get­ting atten­tion aren’t as effective.