Ed Lee is a four year veteran from the front lines of PR and now an Account Director at Internet communications consultancy, iStudio.
An Englishman living and working in Toronto, Canada, he runs Blogging Me, Blogging You in an effort to spread the good word. His view is that, while social media is just another channel, it is an increasingly important (almost vital) one.
This wasn’t so much an interview as a chat – in fact, it was a chat, because Ed was over from Canada for a few days and we met up at a local Starbucks. It was fascinating talking to a blogger I’d never actually met, and Ed had some real insights into how PR and social media can fit together.
So, this takes a slightly different format from the interviews. No questions, no answers, I’ve just isolated the main issues Ed and I talked about.
Disintermediation
Imagine plugging your head into the web and everyone else being able to download your thoughts instantly. This is obviously not where we are now – nor are likely to be! – but qualitatively, we’re in a similar place with social media. Anyone can say pretty much anything online, instantly, and anyone else can read that.
This hits communications companies with something of a double-whammy. First, you have people out there who can publish material about your clients that is untrue or unsubstantiated and, in turn, this is because they’re unaccountable and subjective. Second, if a company decides to start its own blog, the usual filters and controls of editorial process may not be in place. In short, they may say something they later regret.
However, the same dynamics of mass communication that cause these problems also provide the solutions. OK, so you can say bloggers are untrained and unaccountable but eventually people do get wise. In the same way bloggers can quickly become authorities and influencers, they can lose credibility just as quickly. Ed and I have both seen this happen.
In other words, mass communication also allows self-policing. We can see this with Wikipedia, which as far as we know hasn’t completely collapsed by being riddled with errors. Far from it. Wikipedia seems if anything to become more accurate and more sophisticated the larger it grows.
As for saying something you later regret, well that’s probably because there was something wrong with your message in the first place. The ability to throw something into the blogosphere and listen to the echoes come back is unprecedented in enabling messages to be optimised.
Network effect vs broadcast effect
The traditional channel model uses the broadcast effect – messages ripple out one way only, from source to audience – and increasingly, they’re not even making it as far as the audience because the audience ignores them.
Social media gives us the opportunity to exploit the network effect, in which messages permeate the network and recycle. We can listen ‘behind the wall’, tune in to the network and find out what these messages are – what are, in essence, the ‘real’ messages.
Ed testified to the surprise some of his clients has shown when presented with the sheer breadth of the online conversations about them. But this is where so much opportunity lies. Take the example of Diet Coke and Mentos, in which the explosive mix was demonstrated in an online video which spread across the web. Coca Cola Corp initially disowned the antics as unsuitable for the brand personality. It has since bought the kind of publicity PRs can only dream of, with Coke and Mentos both realising that the brand personality can change. Indeed, they wound up sponsoring the originators, Eepybird.
It’s the fear of the unknown – and quite possibly the truth – that plagues some organisations. Ed quoted the case of the Canadian governmental department which banned Facebook. And yet Facebook can be a brilliant way of putting together focus groups and polls, as well as communicating with the younger generation. Similarly in the UK, we have the BBC litigating against someone from providing knitting patterns for Dr Who characters. This is clearly a situation in which the lawyers should have spoken to the marketers.
Sometimes it’s ok to let the messages evolve. Let the brand find its own personality. Use the network effect.
Online and offline work best together
When talking about blogger influence, I’m often asked to account for why a top blogger might have, say, a few thousand subscribers when a journalist working for any national or even local newspaper might have subscriberships in six or seven figures. So why should PR approach bloggers?
Ed gave a nice counter. Firstly, of those millions of subscribers, how many read that journalist or even that column of coverage? Given that the journalist, and article, is to an extent buried within the newspaper, and that newspapers tend to have general coverage, you can safely presume that the actual number who read that column is much lower. A blogger, on the other hand, has subscribers who really want to know what he or she is saying. There is a real interest here.
And what happens after the newspaper is read? It’s possible the reader might talk about it with someone, but generally, no. Online however, people can share stuff readily. Just vote for it on social news sites or tag it on social bookmarking sites, and other people can and will pick up on it. So while the newspaper is binned – both literally and metaphorically – the online item lives on.
However, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for the offline, ‘real’ world. There’s a tendency for social media fans to believe that the whole world is on Twitter or Facebook. It isn’t. Things exist. So the so-called ‘traditional’ PR – that is, working with media, raising awareness, building relationships – can and should work alongside online for the greatest effect. You just have to employ the right tactics for the right audience and objectives. Sounds familiar? It’s PR!
Continuous improvement
Ed was very optimistic about how online campaigns can become more sophisticated through time. All communications – indeed, virtually all activity with capital at its heart – segments audiences. We all want to appeal to the right people. But with social media we can get better at this.
Email is peculiarly well-suited to this. With the appropriate systems in place you can see who opened the email, who forwarded it, whether they opened the plain text or HTML version and so on. You can zero in on what people read and the formats they prefer. Once you start to create segments within your subscriber base, you can also start to design content for each segment – which leads to a more personalised, more engaging contact point.
Linked to this is the idea that yes, relationships can scale. This is a particularly hot topic right now, as people who work with PRs publicly add them to blacklists because they seem incapable of providing useful information in a non-intrusive manner.
With social media we can segment our audiences further and further until we give them what they want. Right now, admittedly, some PR companies are fast and loose with the way they handle journalists, and some journalists are drowning in the overflow of information. But all we need is time, goodwill – and the network effect – to correct this.
Exciting times
We live in an age where anyone can say anything and anyone else can read it; in which we can ‘tune in’ to these conversations and improve our messages; in which we can improve the way we work through the synergy of online and offline tactics; and in which we can continue to improve in quality as well as quantity of information.
Our conversation ended with Ed telling me about how he’d been speaking recently to an experienced PR who testified that the industry has changed more in the past four years that Ed had been working than it had in the previous 20 in which she had worked. Indeed, we live in exciting times.
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