I don’t know if it is just me, but I have noted over the past few weeks a heightened level of competitive trash talking about the agency world and the social media prize.
A few weeks ago, B.L. Ochman commented in the post The Yawn of the Social Media Release about IABC’s plans to take on the work of promoting and standardizing social media releases:
…this IS a competitive industry. Go ahead fellow "PR people" and focus on the social media release. Invent your own cool name for it and price it aggressively. In the meantime, we’ll be keeping our eyes what the folks at WOMMA, the Web Analytics Association and other organizations steeped in 21st- century marketing are doing to reinvent the larger marketing industry.
And, on the subject of PR and social networking, Ad Age writer Michael Bush opined in his article about Social Networks and Marketing:
Social networking is all about relationship building, and while that may be in the DNA of the public-relations industry, it has done a poor job of claiming that birthright
Just yesterday, Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media had a provocative post, Why Social Media Leadership Won’t Come from Public Relations Teams, which was in turn inspired by Steve Rubel’s post Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist (Social Media Consultant is one such career according to Steve).
Jim cites pop marketing philosophies about divergence, and how the incumbents are never leaders in new areas:
As the world progresses, it gets more complicated, not less. And with every split in the tree branches, there is a new leadership opportunity. It’s almost never the brand leaders who cause the split and almost never the brand leaders who emerge as leaders in the new area.
He goes on to say:
It would be unnatural for public relations firms to provide social media leadership. Just as we have SEO firms… so shall we have social media agencies and social media specialists. Website development should have/could have been “owned” by advertising agencies, but we saw web development leadership in the late 90s come from new fast growth companies.
Social media is one-part public relations. But it’s also one part SEO (not PR agencies’ strengths), one part usability design (not PR agencies’ strength), one part programming (again, not), one part customer service (ditto, although arguable) and one part anthropology/sociology (which PR people can be pretty good at). To do some blog posts, or blog pitches, or leave comments in social networks, you can be a PR person.
I’d like to thank Jim (on behalf of an entire industry) for explaining in clear terms what PR is and what it isn’t. I also really appreciate the kind "props" on our anthropology and customer service skills.
Look, with all due respect, Jim is asking (and answering) the wrong question. This has less to do with platitudes about divergence and more to do with who is up to the ask of embracing and leading change. The agency world is much fuzzier then the tidy world of product marketing, which Tobin references to make his point about diversification, and how incumbents in fields can’t be leaders.
It is not what type of agency will show leadership in social media that clients care about – it is who will go forth with programs that tap into the latest methods for working with new and existing media – the big picture. Ideally, I would think, they don’t want silos, they want an entity that can put it all together for them, with extra points thrown in for doing this in an integrated way.
Although Jim makes some good points, and there can be good arguments for hiring specialists, I feel that defining a field by its technology or other physical characteristics is intrinsically short sighted – technologies change quickly, indeed the definitions of social media and Web 2.0 are fluid, and there seems to be new developments every day that change the equation.
As I said in my post The Best of both MSM and Social Media and PR Worlds,
Let’s not forget the power of big media to marshal the attention of vast audiences and shape national dialog.
Consider that many if not most big stories driving buzz originate from various forms of "traditional" media (I use quotes here because I include online components of major publishing brands). My post about Digg’s Leaderboard said more about this.
In conclusion, MSM and social media are all part of the attention puzzle. PR folks need to stay attuned to evolving filtering mechanisms that boost signal and reduce noise. And agencies and strategies that treat social media as a separate entity – the only thing that counts, or the most important thing – will be less effective than integrated programs that take into account both MSM and social media.
