This blog post started as a comment on Stephen ‘Wadds’ Waddington’s thought-provoking article about ‘The public relations industry’s confidence problem’, but it was so thought-provoking the comment rapidly became too long.

His central thesis is that public relations is too introspective and needs to have more confidence of the role it plays in the broader economy. I’d go further and say public relations doesn’t just play a significant role in the economy, but also in politics and society/social. The first three of the PEST analysis, which are all being changed by technology.

If advertising and digital agencies don’t eat PR’s lunch, then management consultants might

Wadds says there is a “turf war taking place between advertising, public relations and digital”. Another war that Wadds hints at, but doesn’t mention, is when he talks of “earns the place that it deserves as a management discipline” is with management consultants. Public relations professionals are not the only people to recognise that public relations should be a serious business discipline and that means we’re also competing with the big global management consultancies.

I think a major reason for public relations’ confidence problem is its identity problem. Public relations practitioners aren’t even sure and can’t agree on what it is we actually do. Worrying how we define ourselves seems introspective, but it’s hard to be confident about who you are if you don’t know yourself. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that others do ‘define’ public relations, usually incorrectly in narrow and derogatory ways. Too many public relations practitioners don’t do our business any favours by perpetuating the myths about what PR really is.

PR is not just part of marketing

If we are to be seen as a true management discipline as Wadds asserts then we can’t allow ourselves to be defined as mere publicists or as simply part of marketing. Public relations and marketing are totally different disciplines and the confusion arises because both will often use some of the same tactics. It’s quite legitimate for public relations to use paid media. It’s not even new, I did it 20 years ago with full-page display advertisements in trade press across the world, as part of a corporate restructuring.

Part of the challenge we have as public relations professionals is that we don’t start off with the same budgets or even ‘share of mind’ within clients as some of our competitor disciplines do. Advertising and digital agencies typically have bigger budgets so can afford to experiment. Using a small percentage of their existing spend they can try something new to see if it works in this time of massive change in society and media. In contrast you’d need a bigger percentage of most public relations budgets which means you don’t have enough left for the tried and trusted. Therefore the leviathan advertising agencies can ironically be more agile than the theoretically smaller more nimble public relations consultancies.

Wadds’s example of a retail brand working with a peer analytics firm such as Klout, Kred or PeerIndex to identify and target online influencers could be done by an advertising agency simply pulling one or two TV slots to find the budget. A PR agency might need to significantly reduce the time it spends working with influential journalists in order to spend that budget on working with the new influencers.

The challenge from management consultants is that their consultancy day rate frequently dwarfs the day rate of a public relations consultancy. This in turn means they pay bigger salaries and get better people. That’s not to criticise public relations people, but the fact is that many of the best do it because they enjoy it. They are bright enough people that if they’d entered a better paid profession such as management consultancy, law or accountancy then they’d earn a lot more. They chose public relations because they enjoy it. But this makes it hard for the public relations profession to attract the brightest and best graduates.

Is PR too introspective?

Wadds claims that the public relations industry is too introspective because it is obsessed with “inward focussed issues such as whether it is a profession and the issue of measurement”.

So what’s the answer? I think Wadd’s blog post perhaps starts to provide some of them. He’s right we need to win the professionalism debate through action. Despite being a Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) member for my whole career I didn’t complete its continuous professional development scheme until 2012. That’s wrong and I know I should become a chartered practitioner, but I’m not afraid to admit that the time involved still makes me hesitate. As a newly elected CIPR council member I feel obligated to at least complete CPD, but really I should also complete the accreditation to become a CIPR Chartered Practitioner.

He says that solid work is now being done by organisations such as AMEC to improve measurement and evaluation. This is one area where public relations could be more confident. Public relations is perceived as not being very good at measurement and evaluation. The fact is that we’re getting a lot better. The dirty little secret of much of the advertising and digital agency world is that they might be better at measuring stuff, but much of their evaluation is just as flawed as that used for public relations. Public relations needs to start being confident about what it can measure and evaluate, rather than worrying about what it can’t.

“The debate about who owns social media is flawed…”

… says Stephen as “The future will be owned by the practitioners that define it”. And he’s right. It’s also a sterile debate as social media doesn’t necessarily need to be owned by anyone. The fact is that social media needs to be used by human resources, legal, customer services, marketing, IT, public relations et al. As well as using social media itself one of the main roles of public relations is to ensure that others within the organisation don’t abuse or use social media badly, which will inevitably lead to reputational damage.

Public relations therefore has a dual role with social media. Firstly to use if effectively itself. Secondly, to coordinate and lead its use by others. In most companies and organisations public relations has a unique 360 degree perspective because reputational issues can arise from anywhere. That makes PR uniquely placed to lead on something that also has a 360 degree impact on the company or organisation. The danger is that there are disciplines out there, such as marketing and advertising, who might want to ‘own it’ and those disciplines are far more narrowly focused so while capable of doing brilliant work won’t necessarily sufficiently get the wider implications. That’s what we need to guard against.

It’s time for public relations professionals to take the advice of Mark Borkowski and Stephen Waddington and “find our swagger.”

It’s hard to achieve cut through at international property conference MIPIM in Cannes as cities vie with each other in ever more extravagant ways to attract the attention of investors and real estate professionals. But I think Stockholm achieved it with this fabulously innovative presentation by two Swedish magicians using seven iPads. It’s worth watching for entertaining, education and inspiration.

Today Econsultancy published its new State of Social Report 2011. It make interesting reading. Thanks to Econsultancy I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview and was able to provide some comments on its findings. I’ve published my comments at the end of this report, but if you’re responsible for any aspect of social media strategy or management then I’d recommend you head over to the Econsultancy site and buy a copy, it’s only £250 or you can join for £295 and get access to all of Econsultancy’s reports.

There are further signs in this State of Social report that the business is maturing, but still isn’t there yet. It finds that 64% of respondents have moved ‘beyond the experimental phase’, but that still leaves a lot who haven’t started or are still experimenting.

Probably one of the most alarming statistics for me is that 60% of organisations have not yet implemented internal social media training and governance models. Given the numbers that claim to be be using social media this is a very dangerous approach that has serious reputational and legal risks.

In 2008 the Consumer Protection Regulations were introduce, this year the ASA added social media to the Code of Advertising Practice and the CIPR updated its social media guidelines. These are just some of the legal and regulatory issues that companies need to include in their social media guidelines.

Then you’ve got recent legal cases such as Crisp v Apple which highlight how essential it is to have effective social media policies in place. And for most companies it’s not just one policy. You need one for all employees that helps them understand what they can and can’t do and helps them to be able to do it. Lack of knowledge and education about how to use social media safely and effectively is probably the main reason why things go wrong and issues turn into crises. You also need a more detailed one for use by employees who are using social media officially on behalf of the company. This includes any PR, digital or advertising agencies that involved in social media on your behalf.

Another section that caught my attention was the question about ROI and the number of companies that aren’t or can’t measure social media ROI. Not surprising in my opinion as if you’re trying to measure social media ROI then you’re measuring and evaluating the wrong thing. The best way to measure social media ROI is to measure the ROI of everything else – your advertising, answering the phone, people chatting in the pub etc – and what’s left is the ROI from social media! As I said in my quote in the report it’s a reflection of the immaturity of social media in business that the question is even being asked. The same scrutiny isn’t put on things that ‘have always been done’ as if it was then you’d discover it is just as hard to measure the ROI of them. The other culprit is PR agencies and digital agencies who go in and deliberately mislead clients about what ROI is and how they can measure it.

This year’s report found that 70% of respondents say social media is owned by marketing department. One issue I had with this question is that it didn’t give an option for public relations or corporate communications, which would have potentially changed the results. There is also the issue of how representative is Econsultancy’s audience, which might go some way to explain the far higher proportion of marketing than you’d expect.

The predominance of marketing might also explain some of the other more worrying aspects of the report, such as the lack of proper social media governance as marketing tends to take a more myopic view than do corporate communications or legal who both have far more holistic business wide responsibilities and visions.

One question I’d like to explore a lot more is ‘How interested in social media is your organisation’s most senior management (c-level executives)?’ The fact that 15% are ‘more interested than in other marketing issues’ and 26% are ‘very interested indeed’ is a welcome sign that c-suite and board level directors recognise that social media goes far beyond just marketing. However, it’s also interesting to note that the response amongst agencies for ‘very interested indeed’ is just 8%. Does this indicate that agencies and c-suite are thinking and talking about social media in different ways. The focus for agencies is on marketing and sales – and how they can make money out of clients from it – and the focus for clients is broader across the whole business operation.

Michelle Goodall makes an important point when she says ‘If customers and stakeholders choose to engage with you in their chosen channel about a product/service issue, potential jobs or your sustainability policies, then you better be ready.’

Depending on how the wider debate on the State of Social develops I might expand on some of these or other points later.

My ‘Voice of the expert comments:

Disclaimer, as a contributor I received a free copy of the report – would have been rather hard to comment if I hadn’t!

Just catching up on last week’s PRWeek and Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of Brand Republic’s marketing titles, wrote a great op-ed on the growing importance of corporate affairs directors.

A top corporate headhunter told me this week that corporate affairs directors had, without doubt, gained in influence compared with marketing directors over the past few years.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on which career path you have taken, but it is certainly grist to the mill of all those corporate reputation advisers who have been arguing for a seat at the top table.

Indeed, many CEOs are now insisting that ‘reputation’ is among the top three items on the board agenda.

As Marketing, the bible for marketing directors, is also part of my Brand Republic Group portfolio, I’ve certainly got no desire to see either role diminished. On the contrary, in enlightened organisations, the two functions work in harmony, with corporate and product brands integrating to form more than the sum of their parts.

But I would argue that having corporate affairs reporting to a chief marketing officer is rarely a good idea.

This is welcome news, but as Danny also points out it also highlights an alarming skills gap. There are far too many public relations professionals who still struggle to think outside the limited marketing box. You still find lots of 20+ year veterans of the industry who just don’t actually know or understand what public relations actually is and struggle to get beyond media relations, publicity and promotion.

I’d go even further than Danny and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that a corporate affairs or corporate communications head should report into marketing. Just because some public relations tactics and skills are an essential part of the marketing communications mix doesn’t mean that it all is. To have corporate affairs report in to marketing is to ignore all of the other essential elements of the role. For those that argue about the importance of sales and profit, I’d counter with that in the long-term sales and profit will be damaged if corporate affairs is part of marketing.

After decades of agonising, the age of 360-degree stakeholder relations has arrived. In fact, the recession may even have accelerated this process. Firms that are ‘up against it’ have been forced to see the value of both tactical and strategic reputation management.

But all this means the corporate affairs role is becoming more demanding. Where once such advisers could specialise in media relations, with comparatively long lead times on issues, true stakeholder relations require so much more.

With more regulation, government affairs is growing in importance; the connected world means internal and external comms must be seamless; and social media crises come out of left-field, at sickening speed.

If some corporate affairs professionals aren’t fully versed in managing all these stakeholder groups, you’ll find even fewer corporate affairs professionals who truly understand the impact that the social web is having on the actual fundamentals of their business and organisation. This goes far beyond simply using social media for marketing, but its impact on the attitudes and behaviour of all stakeholders.

The social web truly does mean that corporate affairs professionals must focus on the reality of public relations which is behaviour and what you do, which is what ultimately has the biggest impact on your reputation.

Image via Wikipedia

Online public affairs and using social media and the internet for analysing and influencing public policy isn’t as well advanced in the UK as it is in the USA where Washington lobbyists use it far more than public affairs professionals do in Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels.

Last month I ran a training webinar for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations on ‘Public affairs and social media’ and I’m also currently writing a skills guide for the CIPR as well as a longer white paper on online public affairs and lobbying.

One question that hass been put to me privately be several people is doesn’t the latest fiasco regarding Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and Bell Pottinger Public Affairs (BPPA) show that public affairs and social media don’t mix well?

For those who aren’t familiar with the story I’ll do a brief recap, although PRWeek has the full details. BPPA chairman Peter Bingle – perhaps the UK’s most prominent lobbyist – revealed on the Bell Pottinger blog that Eric Pickles had enjoyed a five-star dinner at BPPA’s expense where at least one firm in attendance was awaiting a planning decision from the minister’s department.

This has resulted in extensive national media coverage and questions in the House of Commons.

Not surprisingly the Bell Pottinger Dispatch Box blog has been ‘shuttered’ and is now ‘open to invited readers only.’

So is that case proven, public affairs and social media, never the twain shall meet?

Not really. This was just the usual story of social media not being used very well. In fact, being used quite badly. The blog post in question wasn’t done as part of a properly planned public affairs programme, it was simply appears to have been a marketing blog for Bell Pottinger Public Affairs that went wrong.

It simply isn’t a good idea to have a corporate blog in a sensitive sector and then use it to publish quite personal, opinionated and revealing articles. Some of the content in this case should probably never have been published anywhere by a member of the team. Other content would have been perfectly fine on a personal blog of a team member, but not the official company one.

All of these problems could have been avoided with the right planning, training, content management and implementation.

It also doesn’t get to the core of the issue which is to do with greater transparency and openness in the public affairs and lobbying profession. If we open ourselves up to scrutiny and demonstrate that we are above aboard then we shall have a far better chance of avoiding inappropriate and over restrictive legislation and controls. Social media has a vital and central role to play in that transparency and openness, but it requires public affairs professionals to get to grips with how to use it far better than most have at the moment. Public affairs professionals lag behind their communications sector colleagues in public relations and marketing who are mainly ahead of them in the digital learning curve, although many still have a long way to go.

One final thing that it does highlight is the absolute importance for every public affairs consultancy and in-house team to have in place a social media policy and training programme for its team. This was a simple mistake that could have been avoided.

I haven’t had chance to read it yet, but many of the Econsultancy reports that I have read have been full of interesting and relevant facts and knowledge.

Econsultancy will turn this into a case study and publish the results, so we’ll all be able to understand exactly how well it worked.

Incidentally it’s with reports like this that tablets really come into their own. I find it hard to imagine ever buying an electronic book, it just doesn’t match up the real book reading experience, but for free reports like this it’s ideal. Before my tablet I’d frequently find and save this type of thing, but then never get around to reading it properly. Now I can take a quick look whenever I’ve got a few spare moments.

The full text of Ashley Friedlein’s email about Econsultancy’s content marketing experiment is below:

We’ve just published a 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy briefing which is free to download. It analyses five key current trends: customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.

It’s a bit unusual for us to make something like this free. It’s an experiment in ‘content marketing’ – a hot topic in digital marketing and something we examine in the briefing itself.

Of course we’re interested to see how many visits and downloads we get, the tweets and social mentions, but we’re most interested in getting links to this page (ideally with the link anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy) to see how this impacts our natural search rankings for the phrase ‘internet marketing strategy’.

Currently we’re nowhere near the first page of Google, or other search engines, for this competitive search phrase. But could we be with a bit of ‘content marketing’? And what value might that drive to us?

We plan to publish a mini case study with the results of this experiment which hopefully you’ll find interesting and which might help put more concrete value to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of ‘content marketing’.

You can help with our experiment…

Of course we encourage you to download and read the briefing itself (we think it’s very good) but, ideally, you would send a link to this page (not the file itself – little SEO value there…) to relevant contacts or, even better, you’d link to the page from your blog, via social media etc.

In an ideal world you’d even use the anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy to the link to the page.

I’m sending this email to around 30,000 of Econsultancy’s members globally so, if you do your collective bit, then we should stand a good chance of building some great, and relevant, links…?

Will we shoot up the rankings as a result? Or get punished for the suspiciously quick build-up of links with the same anchor text? Who knows… watch this space.

Obviously we’re not incentivising you to do this in any way because that would be ‘paid links’.

All the best and thanks for any help.

Ashley

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
Econsultancy

Judging by some of the events I’ve attended and an increasing number of blog posts I’ve read recently it could well be.

Let’s start off with the fact that it’s yet another ‘social’ term that’s been stolen by those who appear to think the world started with the internet and that social media changes everything. If it existed before they did, then it can’t have been that important. Just like social marketing had a specific meaning before the advent of social media, so did social business. And neither has anything whatsoever to do with social media.

Social marketing has actually been around for at least 40 years and one of the earliest accepted definitions was by Kotler and Zaltman in 1971: Social marketing is ‘the design, implementation and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution and marketing research.’ The UK’s National Social Marketing Centre defines it as ‘the systematic application of marketing, alongside other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioural goals, for a social good.’

Social business also has a well established meaning:

‘Social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective.’

This one comes courtesy of Wikipedia, the social media gurus’ favourite font of all knowledge, so it must be right!

The new social business consultants want you to be astounded about how disruptive social media and social networks are and what gargantuan effects they are going to have on your business. They want you to think that only they have seen the light and that only they can take you by the hand and guide you into the future.

This is flawed thinking on two levels:

1) Social business isn’t actually that new or different. Business has always been about people. ‘People buy from people’ has been true since the dawn of time. What’s changed is the means of interaction between people and organisations. It’s now easier for people to talk to other people, and for you to listen and talk to them.

2) They don’t have the experience or expertise to provide worthwhile consultancy on everything.

Now that’s not to say that social business can’t also be defined as ‘a business designed around social tools, social media, and social networks’ (also courtesy of Wikipedia). It’s hardly rocket science to realise that businesses need to adapt to the changing world around them and that a huge part of that is the rise of the ‘social web’.

But the critical thing is that the last person you’d want helping you to change is a social business consultant.

Personally, I’d run a mile from anyone who claimed to be a social business consultant. What you’ll probably find is someone who has failed at something else and spotted a new niche where they hope to make a quick buck; or someone who iss actually very good at what they do, but isn’t satisfied with that and wants to be recognised for being bigger and cleverer than everyone else.

The people you actually need to help you build your social business are the actual real experts in their field.

You need a technology expert who ‘gets social’.

You need a human resources expert who ‘gets’ social’.

You need a research and development (R&D) expert who ‘gets social’.

You need a marketing communications expert who ‘gets social’.

You need a public relations expert who ‘gets social’.

You need a market research expert who ‘gets social’.

You even need a finance expert who ‘gets social’.

You ‘get’ the message?

What you don’t want is to hire any one of the above and let them be your social business consultant.

And what you definitely don’t want to do is hire a social media expert and let them be your social business consultant. By their own narrow definition of themselves they are going to be least able.

It’s ludicrous to think that a PR consultant or marketing consultant has enough experience and expertise across your whole business. But beware, they might be very good at persuading you they have. They’ll use phrases like ‘paradigm shift’, ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘social convergence’, ‘conversation cloud’… and so on. Mostly meaningless twaddle, but it impresses some people. The clients they attract are just like the Emperor in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale who bought an invisible suit and didn’t want to admit he couldn’t see it for fear of being seen as unfit, stupid, or incompetent.

If you are going to hire a consultant to help you change your business to become a ‘social business’ then the consultant that is most likely to help you blend all of the appropriate experts together is the good old-fashioned management consultant.

So the only bit of ‘social business’ that I and my consultancy can help you with is public relations, corporate communications and how ‘social’ impacts on communications, behaviour and reputation management. It also means we’ll get involved with the communications and public relations elements of human resources, marketing, finance etc. But when it comes to providing advice on actual market research, or actual human resources then we’d prefer to introduce you to or help you find someone who actually is a real expert rather than someone who just knows about social media and social networks.

So if you come across a social business consultant then just remember the Emperor’s new clothes.

Related: An open letter on social media evangelism

Created by johnst.com (found via @Chris_Reed and others).

Who owns social media? The answer is nobody, because it’s the wrong question. Or rather it’s far too simple a question.

That was one reason why Benjamin Ellis ’won’ the Social Media Week debate that I took part in on ‘Who owns social media, PR, SEO, marketing, digital?‘ He won because he wasn’t trying to win it. I always faced an impossible challenge as I don’t actually think public relations should ‘own’ social media.

The first issue is you’ve actually got to define what you mean by social media. Technologists might define it by the technology platforms, marketing people might say it’s about the conversations people are having about your brands, public relations people could say it’s about what people think about you.

There isn’t even a consistent answer to that amongst people in the same industries or professions. Fundamentally it is about communication, the transfer of information from person to person or people to people.

Social media is having a huge impact on every area of businesses and organisations. Everyone has to get to grips with how it affects theirs. And the very nature of social media means that their bit is becoming permeable and the traditional silo structures are becoming increasingly untenable.

So IT needs to own its bit of social media. So does marketing communications. So does research and development. So does public relations. So does customer relations. So does human resources. So does legal and risk. In fact so does everyone. What truly matters is how each of these different people use it to achieve their own objectives, without negatively impacting on what others are trying to do.

The two bits of italics emphasis are very important, because they are why I strongly believe that public relations should have an overall strategic and coordinating role. Public relations is about reputation. It’s the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. That means we are probably the only professionals with a truly global view on every aspect of communications right across the whole organisation or business.

That definitely doesn’t mean that we should be involved in every element of delivery and implementation, but we absolutely must have a role in defining the strategy and overseeing its implementation. We shouldn’t be the people ‘doing’ customer service on Twitter or Facebook, but we should be the people helping to decide who does. Public relations professionals with a responsibility for reputation wouldn’t be as foolish as to let the the marketing people ‘own’ Facebook or Twitter so that they can use it for ‘campaigns’ or ‘conversations’ about what matters to them, rather than what matters to consumers and stakeholders. There are some things that marketing folk can do with social media far better than PR people can. Likewise there are lots of things that PR people can do with social media far better than marketing or digital people can. It’s time for everyone to start recognising this and stop trying to get a slice of the other guy’s pie. Social media isn’t going to kill public relations, marketing or advertising because they’ve all got a big role to play.

That doesn’t mean that the role for public relations is just strategy as there are a host of areas where PR professionals have the most experience and expertise to actually do the implementation. The very core of public relations is about two way conversation so blogger relations, community engagement and issues management are all well within the fold of public relations.

Most of the time when you hear people arguing against public relations taking the lead on social media it’s because they don’t truly understand what public relations actually is. If you’ve always known it simply as media relations or event management then you’d be absolutely right to question its role in leading social media. But if you use a more intelligent and accurate definition then it becomes far clearer what its central role should be.

And finally even the media relations component of public relations has changed fundamentally. No longer is it all about getting your story into print and broadcast media. Today online is just as, and in some cases more, important. One of the rapidly growing areas of business for Wolfstar Consultancy is modernised media relations, helping in-house corporate communications and PR teams to change the way they work to become far more relevant to the needs of modern media.

Tomorrow I’m speaking at a debate as part of Social Media Week London where I’ll be putting the case for public relations. I’m not going to give my arguments away in this blog post (although I will do another one later in the week after the event). However, the gist of my case will be about who absolutely shouldn’t own the space as that’s a no-brainer – it’s the digital marketing agencies and SEO specialists. The case for who should ‘own’ it is far more nuanced.

It’s not the first time I’ve done this and the last time I did a did a big public debate on this was in April 2009 at the NMK (New Media Knowledge) ‘What happens to online PR‘ debate. That one was a bid odd as I was debating against two other public relations people, albeit one who worked for a digital agency and another who ran an ‘online PR and social media agency’.

At the ‘Who owns the social space (or should)’ I’m up against:

Digital Marketers: Charlotte McEleny, NMA (New Media Age)

SEO specialists: Kevin Gibbons,  SEOptimise

Social Technologists: Benjamin Ellis, Redcatco

Social Media purists; Anke Holst, Speak for Yourself

It’s on Monday, February 7 at the Centre for Creative Collaboration and doors open at 16:30 ready for the debate to kick-off at 17:30.

The hashtag for the event is #ownSMW.