Comments on: Social media and online PR- specialist or not

By: Eamon

Eamon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:28:13 +0000

Just throwing this up (I am certainly not an expert on social media which is why I am coming to places like here to learn more) but isn't the key to social media good content? There might be lots of people who are savvy from a technical point of view / understanding the architecture of social media. But that isn't enough either.
I just think the problem with some PR people is that they are just reluctant to get involved in social media, in the first place (not that they aren't technically savvy.

By: Eamon

Eamon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:27:25 +0000

By: Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:17:20 +0000

This is a fascinating debate but lets be honest, I guess most of us are social media savvy and feel that it should be a mainstream skill set?

The majority of PR people are classic newspaper and magazine jockeys and most clients/brands/organisations are fearful of spending money on areas they don't understand or haven't used before.

For this reason specialists are necessary. But equally there's a lot of agencies putting out press releases using the latest buzzwords without really having a clue - they need to recruit some specialists!

By: James Warren

James Warren — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:39:49 +0000

Stuart, hi. I started writing a comment here but it got so long, the working day expired. I carried on drafting it on the train and somehow it turned into a giant blog post all of its own. My twopenneth after the jump.

(Please accept this isn't a cynical traffic-driving exercise, I just don't have the time right now to unedit the post back to a comment. Hope you understand...)

By: Doug Haslam

Doug Haslam — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:47:07 +0000

Looks like I a merely putting a log on the fire, but I'll add anyway– I always scratch my head at agencies that try to sell a separate social media practice. In PR, our expertise is the communications, not the channels. Agencies who orphan these practices may be doing it as natural evolution (perhpas that is best kept as an internal evolution, invisible to the client?), or as a crass attempt at upselling clients– pay us more if you want us to do blogger relations.

Yes, it is more work to add more media and sources, but I think more and more clients — those who are paying attention– do not see social media relations as a completely separate and unrelated program.

By: David Brain

David Brain — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:57:39 +0000

We think our digital specialists are like a pretorian guard ahead of the main bulk of us. They are better socially media educated technically and we use them where we need high input, but the agencies that win out will be the ones that make as much of these skills mainstream as possible as qucikly as possible. We have been training, training, training people at this for a while now and spending quite a bit of cash on research to back this up. Social media (and digital) is just the channel through which a very new democratised society is emerging and that is putting new challenges in front of all clients and all agencies will have to grasp this if they are to be in a position to properly adise their clients. Shandwick's structure is much like ours in this and makes total sense.

By: David Phillips

David Phillips — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:55:33 +0000

This is quite an interesting debate. One of the problems that any account team has is keeping up with the combination of client and competitor news and activity, developments in PR practice and the evolution of social media. Add to this the heap of research that comes out every week about the media (of all genre), new and developing forms of monitoring, analysis and evaluation and the implications on daily practice and one feels that there is a need for some organisationational capability that can be relied on to help everyone keep in touch with developments.

There is a need for specialists who are well grounded in practice to contextualise all this stuff.

What is happening is that PR is moving from a cottage industry to a professional practice which includes specialists to cover off the wider domains of practice as well as core competence (including a pretty good understanding of internet mediated PR).

Today, there is a need for expertise in the use of semantic sciences to be capable in networked communication. Last year it was not even on the horizon.

This is a fast moving environment and there is a place for specialists to spread the knowledge.

By: Paul Wooding

Paul Wooding — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:28:01 +0000

At the risk of kicking all this off again, I don't follow the argument that Social Media relations is an application where as AR, crisis etc are specialists.

You work with analysts in a completely different way than you do with the media and likewise you work with bloggers and end users (as so much of social media relations is direct to consumer) in a very different way than you do working with traditional media.

At Weber Shandwick, far from being in a silo, the fact that we have a social media team means that we can have dedicated specialists working across the agency. Quality rather than quantity wins every time in my book.

Still, I'm going to stop prattling on about this now as the head of the practice at WSW is far more adept and articulate on the subject. I'm just an account grunt.

1-2-3-4 we love Marine core.

By: Ross Brown

Ross Brown — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:13:12 +0000

Hi Stuart – thanks for the definition of colloquial.

You definitely saw something in the post that I didn't because the post I read was essentially "why don't hotels do blogs?".

Other than that, there was a single mention of Second Life – but nothing 80/20.

I didn't raise the point to be a smart arse (though as I'm off ill today, it probably does mean my 'smart arse gene' is more to the fore), merely to make the point that not even "us experts" always get it right. Yet!

By: Lauren Vargas

Lauren Vargas — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:19:34 +0000

Agree completely about social media becoming part of the core skill set. I am still distressed over basic pr functions not being performed correctly. We need a blood infusion horizontally.