The Inconvenient Truth

I’m All Ears…. But What Was That Last Part?

The Internet is evolving! It is no longer a source of solely information gathering or communicating via email. Web 1.0 that’s the past, the future is all in Web 2.0 now. Brain Solis acknowledges that ‘social media has democratized influence, forever changing the way businesses communicate with customers and the way customers affect the decisions of their peers’.

So obviously I whole-heartedly agree with both Ashleigh Smith and Ashleigh McLennan, that public relations has become PR 2.0 and the communication approaches have developed from a one-way approach to audiences transforming into two-way symmetrical models. No longer do we depend upon direct means of communication mediums rather it is a social interactive and integration system.

It is quiet evident that in modern society public relations practitioners are utilising platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and many more different types of social networking sites, as a tool to more efficiently interact with their publics. Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing consumers to talk up products online (Etailing survey of 117 companies, September 2009) used by 78% of company respondents.

However, with advances and convergence in technologies and widespread integration of communication, are we really listening to what consumers want or are we just flooding the ‘market’ or ‘community’ with public relation practices and content?

Social media has enabled companies to directly market to their publics, as they never have been able to before, bypassing all traditional filters previously put in place to regulate quantity and quality of material pushed into society, for instance editors for newspapers. Talk about power!

This break down in filters has ‘open the flood gates’ as they say for everything and anything to infiltrate the digital public arena. If I may, I would like to use RealWire’s metaphor of environmental pollution. They associate ‘online pollution’ as irrelevance, aka CLUTTER! This clutter wastes time and money and causes MAJOR frustration for audiences.

In all the clutter it is nearly near impossible to disseminate the information in a timely and effectively manager to find the ‘good stories’ tailored to our needs, hence our message is lost in the clutter, with three out of four people receiving press releases that they are irrelevant to and half of these have taken action in blocking these unwanted emails.

Public Relations industries are one of many who are the causing of this pollution. This ‘pollution’ is damaging public relations influence on their audience through social media because people are now, just like paid TV, blocking them out.

They think we are junk? Are we just too intrusive? Old public relations communication was about networking within the industry through journalists or editors. However, online public relations have taken a 360 turn approaching publics with a ‘hands on’ mentality. Public relations is all about establishing and sustaining influence. Online this is achieved through;

• Listening
• Being accepted on the audience’s terms
• Having relevant and quality content
• Engaging people and building relationships
  

So if we are indeed listening and not just ‘polluting’ our virtual environment, should we be giving the public what they want? Are people just ‘bitching and moaning’ about anything and everything for no purpose at all? Or if we assume they know what they want, there is a big difference between what customer says they want and what they really need/want. Also, if we give them what they want, then will it end up backfiring? As the wise proverb goes be careful what you wish for, or in this case ask for.

In saying that, it must be noted that it is not wise to solely listen to what the customer wants, but to integrate the needs of the organization and research conducted and gathered to develop a successful public relations campaign.

BY JESSICA HODGES

It Was PR That Did It! PR Stole the Publics!

During my research I managed to find the audio of an radio interview between Mr. Media and the co-authors of the book Putting Public back in Public Relations, Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakingbridge.

Throughout the interview they make some interesting points, perhaps one of biggest claim they make is that it was ultimately PR that took away the publics from PR. While some parts seem a tad irrelevant, overall the interview makes for an interesting listen. I definitely took something away from it. It’s a great way to understand what the book is about and grasp the main points of interest without having to read it. They also touch on the future trends of public relations and social media.

The interview goes for about 30 minutes and doesn’t require your complete undivided attention, so I advise that you listen to it whilst doing something else.

Hope you enjoy.

Ashleigh McLennan

http://mrmedia.com/2009/05/brian-solis-and-deirdre-breakenridge.html

The Social Revolution: Its Happening Right Here Right Now!!

Just some food for thought.

BY JESSICA HODGES

The Future - What's next? (Ashleigh Smith)

Continuing on from Ash M’s great comments – the future – what’s next?

Ash M has just explained how social media works, the definition and how public relations seems to be coming dependent on this medium to express a dialogue with publics.

Fill et al (2009) states that Interactive marketing communications systems enable customers and marketers to engage in commercial dialogue. That now these days’ traditional media are converging with new media to fulfil the current needs of audiences and organisations. In 2006, to enable marketers to ‘engage’ with their consumers and potential consumers 3 general strategies were proposed when using new media.

1. Interactive media must capture the audience’s imagination with a good story
2. Participatory media must focus on the target audience
3. Organisations have to know how to behave when involved in the conversation

How else is this achieved? Social Media! It captures audiences imagination through its creativeness from online sites/layouts/links/animations(online); it is directly placed in front of where audiences are sourcing their information/entertainment (online), and lastly, through researching and understand behaviours and attitudes of their publics, can identify the best way to communicate with them.

PRP’s have to master social media and use it strategically to be effective.

In the above graph, it displays PR Trends in 2010 – aka The Future of PR. (Falkow)

Falkow (2010) points out that searches for public relations have been declining since 2004. Interest in social media and social networking started to pick up in 2006, grew slowly through 2007 and 2008 and gained ground in 2009. In December 2009 searches for social media and social networking passed the number of searches for public relations. It appears social media and social networking are neck and neck in news volume, and although the reason for these searches are unknown – it does give us an insight on what people are interested in – social media.

As well, as a recent survey “Enconsultancy report on social media and PR” found that only 13% of respondents were ‘very satisfied’ of their agency’s level of social media and online PR knowledge.

From this – it reveals to us, that PRP’s need to shape up and become comfortable with the online realm. This means not only writing for traditional media, but also including in their daily tasks social media releases, video news releases, twitter feeds, rss feeds to name a few. Transparency is one of the core elements that drives online public relations (Phillips & Young, 2009), the others; internet agency, internet porosity, richness in content and reach. These are also mediated by 3 other components: the platforms/devices we use to access the internet, the growing channels of communication and the context in which all these elements come together for people to enjoy. Transparency, as it implies, suggests openness, communication and can be seen through – this is in the sense of both the media and public. How both can be receptive to the message at the same time and involved and encouraged in the communication process.

I think that new media does not kill off old media, but rather influences how to change it for PR. In an instance of a crisis, I would think the quickest method of action is social media as a proactive response. It is quick, easily accessible and coming from a credible source and cuts straight to the point. There are no journalists to twist a story in print; it is information direct from an organisation reaching out to its stakeholders and publics about the issue.

To end on a side note – an example of social media (twitter) and PR and just how involved and reputational and important to know how to use it, is a recent case between Kevin Smith (Hollywood actor and Director) and Southwest Airlines. In summary, Mr Smith was told he was “too fat” for his seat and was told to get off the plane from air staff. At the time they did not know who he was until minutes later he posted this on his twitter "Dear @SouthwestAir - I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?" Smith posted several follow up tweets, and as result Southwest Airlines responded back directly apologising. They did this through a blog on their site. I find it quite interesting that no formal means of media (e.g. press release) was used when this situation is quite damaging to the airlines reputation seeing Smith’s status and influence power. McCarthy (2010) stated that “This may be the best example we’ve seen yet of how Twitter and other forms of new-media mass communication are shaping that old industry known as public relations....PR and customer service are two different divisions of a company. But this incident shows how, in the Digital Age, the two are increasingly overlapping. With Twitter, many companies are conducting customer relations in the public eye, and a company’s response to a high-profile disgruntled customer may require dispatching the PR team. Good communication between the two is obviously key.”

-Ashleigh Smith

References

Falkow, S. (2010). PR Trends in 2010: The Future of PR. Retrieved online 12 April, 2010 from http://www.proactivereport.com/c/pr/pr-trends-in-2010-the-future-of-pr/

Fill, C., Wells, W., Russell, T., Clow, K. E., Miller, R., & University of Sydney. (2009). New and Fragmented Media. In The Media and Marketing Communications. (2nd ed. pp. 243-259). Frenchs Forest, N.S.W.: Pearson Australia.

McCarthy, C. (2010). What Kevin Smith means for the future of PR. Retrieved online 12 April, 2010 from, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10454328-36.html

Social Media and the future of Public Relations

Though unwise to predict the future in general, it is foolish to do so in a world that is forever changing due to technological advancements. Nonetheless, it is possible to anticipate the future relationship of social media and public relations by researching past and current trends (Wilcox & Cameron, 2009). Bianca and Ashleigh S. have both examined the idea that social media has recently influenced public relations professionals to re-examine publics, and thus traditional communication methods. However I believe we need to take a step back and understand the process as to why this trend has occurred. I wish to clarify the definition of social media, and why it has it has influenced the future of public relations.

Social media can be described as the online technologies and practices that enable people to share information, content, experiences, insights and perspectives (Weinberg, 2009). Over the past few years as the Internet has shifted from an informational to social medium, social media has become increasingly significant in the both the online and offline world. Examples of social media include blogs, forums, message boards, social networking sites, social bookmarking, picture sharing, video sharing, wikis and podcasts. These user-generated tools have broken down the geographic walls that had once divided individuals and have reunited like-minded people all over the world. So what does this mean for Public Relations?

These web-based tools operate on a high degree of user participation and user generation of content. This essentially provides publics with a platform to express their opinions and experiences freely to millions of people worldwide (Weber, 2009). The introduction of social media has been a daunting prospect for most public relations professionals as publics now readily posses the tools to demote a particular product, brand or company almost instantly. As communication and public relations students we can understand that communicating to publics is based heavily through media outlets, arguably suggesting that public relations is foremost about media relations than actual public relations. However the development of social media has put a spin on this idea. Public relations professionals who once purely focused on managing media content are now facing the management of public generated content, hence putting the public back into public relations.

David touched on an interesting concept that in order for social media to be putting the public back into public relations, one point the public and public relations had to be separate. Though he disagrees on this idea, I would like to argue otherwise. Whilst I don’t believe they have ever been completely separated (as public relations would otherwise be extinct), I do believe that the introduction of mass media forced publics to become distant from public relations. Lets take a look at Grunig and Hunt’s four models of public relations.

• Press agentry model – persuasion through publicity and celebrities. Accuracy and credibility is not important.
• Public information model – distribution of organisational information through one-way communication methods e.g. press releases. Accuracy is important
• One-way asymmetrical model - persuasion and influence to manipulate the audience attitudes rather than the organisation. Research undertaken but not acknowledged.
• Two-way symmetrical model – Research and collaboration with audiences to review organisational practices. Dialogue, not monologue.

The first three models are based on the idea of one-way communication, which aim to disseminate information to publics via media outlets. While all these models note the existence of publics, they operate more on the idea of managing media to reach publics rather than directly managing publics. Where as the two-way symmetrical model promotes the use of communication to negotiate, resolve conflict and promote mutual understandings amongst publics (Wilcox & Cameron, 2009), which is essentially is the purpose of social media. Social media is about participation and collaboration hence the reason as to why public relations professionals are now moving away from one-way communication models and are embracing the two-way symmetrical model. Thus reuniting publics with public relations.

Though this debate could continue, I think now that we have acknowledged social media has put the public back into publics relations we should consider the future prospects. Social media is still in its developmental stage and with constant technological advances it is uncertain what the future holds. Such ambiguity asks me to questions such as: Do we continue to use traditional communication methods in this social sphere? How do we adapt our practices to develop a positive online presence? And is there the possibility that social media could bring the end to public relations?

Lastly I would like to encourage everyone to check out the official facebook page for the book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Putting-the-Public-Back-in-Public-Relations/138575275211?ref=ts It has some great links to articles and other blogs that are exploring the same topical issues as us.

Ashleigh McLennan

Weber, L. (2009). Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Weinberg, T. (2009). The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. California: O'Reily Media.

Wilcox, D & Cameron G (2009) Public relations: Strategies and tactics (9th Ed) USA: Pearson

Social media as public reinforcements (Ashleigh Smith)

Social media and PR can now be seen as an important relationship to help build and maintain communities and networks to engage audiences. Dave – I see you say that it was actually PR responding to audience markets, rather than the other way around.

In reference to Dave's comment “"Social media putting the public back in PR" - that implies that at one point the public and PR were entirely separate, which is simply not true” . I’m not so sure that this suggests the public were ever separate due to the recent movement and use of social media. Public Relations is exactly what the name is – relationships with publics, and how else do you have a relationship without some sort of exchange? In this case, this is through information which is used to send out knowledge and send in feedback. Perhaps now in the 21^st Century, it’s social media REINFORCING public interaction with organisations. As prior to the breakout of internet use, it would have been definitely harder to for organisations to research and understand their audiences without the ease and quick nature social media brings. Possibly we can now appreciate social media as the flagship frontier for public democracy? Or at least aims to do so?

Fill et al (2009) states that the ascension of Internet and mobile moderated media comes at a time when the television has lost status as ‘the’ dominant foreground type of marketing communications to consumers.

According to the attached video, to reach 50 million users it would take:

• Radio 38 years
• TV 13 years
• Internet 4 years
• ipod 3 years
• Facebook – added 100 million users in less than 9 months
• ipod app downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months

This highlights how social media has helped open the reach and community receptive to PR. Not only is this just a public (community, state, nation – as per Bianca’s definition), it is a GLOBAL public. The video also states that if facebook was a country, it would be the 4^th largest, behind China, India and USA. That is a huge online community which is reachable with a computer.

The power of social media is that so many people can participate in it, however once something is out there, organisations have no control over it.

Back to my thought of public democracy, if we were to reference the 2008 Obama Election Campaign, would he have been so successful in securing votes without the aid of social media? The fact his campaign was able to utilize this medium to their benefit, united thousands, even millions of Americans (and to those Aussie’s like us watching/reading at home) to be proactive, have a voice and support a cause. Without the public being involved on blogs, Youtube, Facebook support groups (which I myself even joined) – the name “Barrack Obama” may not have had such a strong impact on the younger generations who were the ones online throughout the campaign. This is an example of public involvement (with social media) at its finest for Political Public Relations.

- Ashleigh Smith

References

Fill, C., Wells, W., Russell, T., Clow, K. E., Miller, R., & University of Sydney. (2009). New and Fragmented Media. In The Media and Marketing Communicsations. (2nd ed. pp. 243-259). Frenchs Forest, N.S.W.: Pearson Australia.

YouTube. (2010). Misskatodins ‘Benefits of social media – PR’. Retrieved online 11 April, 2010, from http://www.youtube.com/user/misskatodin#p/a/u/1/6td3tM8xr-g

PR is dying.

So really the two topics that we're discussing so far are (1) the definition of PR and (2) how social media is changing it.

First up, based on the information I've absorbed below PR is: kind of like advertising, largely focused on events, unpaid space, comms management, “spin", mass communication and relationship management...wow! Truly, this industry is an enigma wrapped in [as Bianca said] an identity crisis. Can you imagine for a moment what kind of turmoil the world would be in if other industries/professions were so convoluted? no economy would have ever gotten off the ground.

Traditional PR is fighting for it's life, the market has changed it's just not enough anymore. But why has it survived this long? Audiences began changing well before the introduction of social media into the arena. PR has survived so far because it has been changing parallel to the market and the audience for decades. In recent years though the changes in the audience have been occurring at an exponential rate largely because of the tools of mass communication that social media makes readily available to the individual.

I therefore do not think that it's a case of "Putting the public back in PR" - that implies that at one point the public and PR were entirely separate, which is simply not true. This topic could be better framed as "Can PR keep up with the public?."

The fastest medium used to be Radio, but now anybody can communicate to a mass audience faster than a Radio Station by using twitter, facebook or one of the many other easily accesible online social platforms. In order to survive PR MUST keep adapting to changes, it must follow the market, and follow the audeince or it will become extinct.

Part of the reason that there is no single definition of PR is that many common PR skills can be used in non PR contexts, which broadens the number of tasks that can be done by a PR professional and ultimately convolutes/dilutes the profession further, and you can only dilute something so far before the flavour becomes washed out entirely. When you hire a PR professional you’re hiring someone that will confidently say, “I haven’t done that before, but I’m willing to give it a go” to almost any new task given to them. Core PR activities like media relations, event conception and staging and stakeholder relationship management are now only a small part of what PR professionals do. The role of a PR professional has now expanded to be part practitioner and mostly consultant.

The point of difference that must be noted between a practitioner and a consultant is that practitioners do the ground work (writes strategy, press releases etc) where as a PR consultant [a much broader role] can use core PR skills to analyse a client's existing communiqué (advertising, marketing collateal, internal comms etc.) and make recommendations based on experience and applied knowledge.

Based on the above thoughts, perhaps PR could be better defined as simply the outsourcing of applied confidence and communicational competencies?

Original thoughts & ideas by Dave Goodfellow.