10. The Future of PR and Social Media
Where do you go from here? Eight new practices for the PR professional is only just the beginning. When social media met public relations, communication techniques advanced, additional practices surfaced, and your roles and responsibilities changed and grew in importance. You cannot control communication. You can only guide and shape experiences, which require a flexible and open frame of reference, and the need to embrace knowledge, skills, and the practices that ready you for new and exciting challenges. “Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled,” states an Altimeter Group Report titled, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” which discusses how companies must follow pragmatic steps to manage public conversations and a multitude of brand touch points through social media participation.1 As a communications professional, you must be a proactive and strategic part of the pragmatic approach and the process.
A long time ago, companies never actually had control of their brand communications. Even when they thought they did, in the years pre-Internet, consumers were talking. What was once considered the water cooler chat conversations at break time, or even “private” talks between friends in the lunchroom, have now turned into enormous, connected, human-sharing sessions in a network of peers, with “no holds barred.” People prefer information from the people they trust. They love to share their positive experiences and take the negative experiences right up the chain of command to the CEO of the company...because they can. Welcome to your future.
There’s no shortage of PR and Social Media predictions. Change is the new constant. The PR predictions in the years to come are based on consumer behavior and the technology that facilitates how people want to be entertained, educated, informed, recognized, and connected to others who impart similar passions. Of course, technology improves with every year to make consumers feel even more a part of their connected worlds. They’re joining a much bigger movement, and so are you. Communication is expanding in your human networks and keeping you more closely connected and even busier on a daily basis.
At the Mashable Media Summit, Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore discussed what was on the horizon for consumers in the years ahead, both inspiring and overwhelming. As consumer behavior and culture changes, media has to be ready to capture individual preferences and deliver news, information, entertainment, and so on in a customized and more personalized fashion. By the nature of our profession, we have to stay close to media and know how news, information, and entertainment are consumed.2
Whether it’s a complete touch experience through a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or smartphone, or a family sitting in the highly connected living room and experiencing Google TV, connecting their online and their offline TV worlds, what consumers experience and how they share will always be at the forefront of communications—at the forefront of our practices. The communication professional’s job is to capture attention through meaningful experiences (no more mass messaging) and for company messages to reach the public and be considered highly relevant. Communication, and the technology that facilitates the interactions, must resonate as a valuable part of the lives of the people your brands serve.
Now for some refreshing news: PR and social media have the attention of the C-Suite. Studies reveal executives are realizing the importance of public relations. A study by MWW and PRSA released in December 2011 found, “97% of business leaders surveyed think CEOs themselves should understand the role of corporate reputation management.” The study also discussed how approximately 98% of business leaders realize the importance of corporate reputation management and having more seasoned communications professionals responsible for protecting the company’s credibility.3 If you have senior leadership’s attention, then it’s time to take the next steps to educate, build, and deliver impact based on the new practices.
Public Relations is being redefined by organizations including PRSA, the Institute for Public Relations, the International Association of Business Communicators, and the National Black Public Relations Society, which is a further indication of how social media and its growing proliferation has changed what we do.4 Social media is reinventing and propelling the public relations industry forward, as well as creating awareness about the greater need for PR education on a higher level. For this reason, organizations and professionals are lobbying for PR courses to be included in Masters in Business (MBA) programs at colleges and universities across the country. We’re starting to raise the bar, which means we have to put our new practices to use personally, as well as how we approach PR in our own organizations.
As PR rises to new heights of awareness, and the C-Suite visualizes valuable outcomes, it is up to PR professionals to help carry the value forward. At the same time, internally, senior-level executives are learning how social media can answer their questions and build a stronger organization. A Forbes article discussed how CEOs become frustrated when they need quick answers and they don’t always want to rely on their own expertise. A common “mumble” mentioned in the article is, “Darn, I’m positive someone in our company knows how to answer this.” The article goes on to say how enterprise software creates the communication connections CEOs and other leaders often need to get their answers quickly and efficiently. With social media and PR, there are no more grumblings about not being able to find smart solutions; you have a team connected and ready to share from the local to a global level.5
If CEOs realize social media and PR is better for internal communication, then you can also steer them to the realization that this powerful combination can serve many other important business functions. This is your opportunity to begin planting the seeds of strategic communication and employing your new PR practices. Social media, like any other type of communication, is planned and requires resources to monitor and measure, develop policies and training, protect reputation and mitigate crisis risk, introduce better technology usage for increased productivity, and analyze how to create stronger relationships with target audiences. Communication practices, which result in case studies of exceptional public communication, building the brand’s credibility, delivering information based on the consumer preference, and truly understanding how to personalize and customize media experiences, usually starts from the inside out.
It’s your job to not only plant the seeds, but also to help create the communications infrastructure and grow the roots to form a collaborative company culture, long after you’ve moved on or retired. Three simple words “Public Relations Expanded” is the greatest opportunity of your time. When social media became a part of your PR world, you had one choice: to open your frame of reference to learn and embrace new communications practices, as well as the knowledge and skills that came with the territory. You did not have the option to step back and say, “This is just a trend...I don’t really have to dig in.”
Because you’re reading this book, it’s fairly safe to assume you see how PR has expanded and how the new practices apply to you. Of course, social media adaptation is different for everyone. Crawl. Walk. Run. It starts with your own passion and how much you experience social media communications on your own time. Then, when you feel you’re championing your personal approach, making connections, and sharing valuable experiences with your peers, you know you’re ready to take social media and PR into the organization and tackle communications challenges there.
A major point to always remember: You’re not alone. There are champions around you at every corner, whether you know these people personally or they are new acquaintances. Social media is about like-minded peers, and they congregate everywhere. No matter how large or small the organization, there are others who are out there connecting, sharing, and using social media with passion. Jay Baer summed it up nicely in his interview in Chapter 4, “New Practice #4: The Communications (COMMS) Organizer.” He said social media starts with people who are not necessarily the executives in the company. It’s not about a title and a person’s position. That’s not why someone should “own” social media. On the contrary, it’s about the people who just naturally want to participate and love to experiment. These colleagues are actively joining in conversations and using new media, and they just “get it.” When you discover other champions, together you can lead the charge and build the team that plans and strategizes. As you start implementing new and better practices, you’re influencing others and also moving toward your Change Agent status.
Being a part of the social media and PR movement starts with you. You must first visualize where you are with social media and your own participation. Ten years ago, many PR goals focused on being the handlers and facilitators of communications. Perhaps your success was defined as working with third parties, such as the media, for positive endorsements to raise the image of your company, or even your own professional brand. However, the goals of the PR 2.0 champion are different. These goals require professionals to climb a new ladder to building relationships directly via new media.
When Forrester released its Technographics Ladder, it was a call for PR professionals to view the average consumer’s social media behavior against their own. The Technographics Ladder represents how the average consumer participates in social media by moving up the ladder through distinct levels of participation (from the bottom rung up to the top), including their participation as Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics, Conversationalists, and Creators.6 It’s important to note where you are on the ladder and then figure out your own goals to reach the top. It’s the steps from Inactive to Creator that prepare you to take your social media knowledge and skills into your own organization. How do you advise the C-Suite about the strategic direction of PR and social media? You need a strong grasp of social media and how the average consumer collaborates, shares, and innovates. If you don’t roll up your sleeves and get involved in social media, how do you instruct others?
Of course, taking social media into the organization is a process, which requires time and a clear path to move through the steps to integrate it with not only PR, but also with marketing, as well as other areas in the company (that is, Sales, HR, Legal, IT, and Customer Service). As a communications professional, like your peers, you start with little knowledge of social media, and you’re solely practicing in a traditional communications world. However, as you step it up a level, you begin to take a Hybrid Professional approach to communications because you begin practicing traditional communications where it makes sense and also supplementing with social media in web communities to reach different target audiences.
Moving up another notch, the Hybrid Professional becomes skilled in areas you weren’t familiar with before, including web marketing, analytics, video, SEO, and so on. Now you’re speaking a new language and can work with other marketing and digital professionals in the company. At this point, you have raised the bar, and you’re working with other departments too, feeling more integrated with your communications efforts. When Public Relations takes the Hybrid Approach, both in traditional and new media, and also moves outside of the PR silo, you touch more areas of the business. At this point, by the nature of your own collaborative connections, you are involved strategically in communications across the company. Now, you can sit at the strategy table with the senior-level executives (see diagram of the Hybrid Approach in Figure 10.1). When you climb to the highest level, as a Communications Strategist, you are also introducing and implementing your new PR practices.
Figure 10.1. Your Climb to the Hybrid Professional
Social Media and Public Relations presents eight new practices for you to learn and embrace first. You also must be a Hybrid Professional to rally others around you to adapt. Your climb can start slowly with one, two, or even three practices. If you’re very ambitious, then you choose to work on all eight practices at once, because you’re the Complex Change Activator or the True Change Agent. In this case, the support you need is in place to forge ahead with new communications infrastructure. With each and every practice, you’re creating new processes, shaping company culture, building influence, and focusing on PR and social media strategy, which result in positive outcomes for the long term.
Social media and public relations cannot be static when technology evolves and changes communications everyday. Changing methods of communication are recognized when the CEO of Best Buy, Brian Dunn, takes to his blog, “D Corner,” to address negative press.7 If you were still practicing in a completely traditional communications world, then Dunn’s public address regarding company criticism would not have been a part of your strategy. You wouldn’t have advised your CEO on the public blog address, a transparent and human approach, with the speed to face timely issues. Perhaps, you would have been focused on the traditional CEO’s statement, rather than discussing some controversy in the public forum. Another example is the Dominos Pizza debacle. If this were your company, and you weren’t a Pre-Crisis Doctor (PR Practice #5), then how would you know to match the appropriate message with the appropriate medium? YouTube video crisis calls for YouTube video response. Your PR practices must reflect how communications unites with technology.
The information presented in each chapter is not tactical, although that doesn’t mean you won’t be involved in the tactical implementation of your communications programs. The eight new practices are a way for you to plan, build, and create good communication practices on the inside first and then take your own sharing, collaboration, and innovation to shape better communication experiences externally with the public. Of course, as a part of your climb to expand PR and social media, you need to quickly verbalize the strategy behind each practice. Solid purpose and strategy can lead to better understanding and support.
Today, you see how important it is to communicate clearly the value of public relation to business executives and to the public. In a similar fashion, you must communicate the value of your new strategic social media and PR practices to rally support for greater initiatives moving forward. These are the efforts to benefit employees internally, as well as the organization’s stakeholders. The following sections show why each of your new practices is strategic and deserves C-Suite attention. This is your 30-second elevator pitch.
Practice #1: The PR Policymaker
The PR Policymaker spearheads and participates on a team of social media visionaries and strategists in the organization. As a member of the Social Media Core Team, the practice includes conducting social media audits, establishing policy goals and objectives, guiding the team policy development process, communicating policies to employees, and measuring policy compliance. The PR Policymaker creates and maintains the social media policy to protect the reputations and the privacy of the company, its employees, and the public.
Practice #2: The Internal Collaboration Generator
The Internal Collaboration Generator realizes good communication starts on the inside of the organization. Beginning with the communications department, the new practice focuses on a strategy to get employees sharing and innovating for more productive programs. The Internal Collaboration Generator audits the sharing needs by researching current communication behavior, answering “sharing questions,” and determining department(s) sharing needs, from simple collaboration to tapping into existing enterprisewide sharing practices. The Internal Collaboration Generator develops the strategy to inform and educate employees on new sharing processes.
Practice #3: The PR Technology (Tech) Tester
Technology enhances the communications experience. Using technology fosters better communications programs internally, as well as externally with the public. The PR Tech Tester creates a strategic program to identify, evaluate, and test technology for greater collaboration and to build stronger relationships. From evaluating social media monitoring resources and identifying influence tools to enhanced news release sharing and collaborative platforms, the PR Tech Tester is focused on finding the best technology for more communications impact with increased learning and business outcomes.
Practice #4: The Communications (COMMS) Organizer
The Communications (COMMS) Organizer develops a more structured and productive approach to internal communications and collaboration in departments and between departments in the organization. Taking a strategic approach to collaboration requires a plan that gathers customer intelligence and routes it to the appropriate professionals in the company, develops content curation by taking a two-prong approach, creates departmental as well as universal employee content-sharing processes, maps to a better system to host social media account information, and finally, creates innovative ways to educate employees on new procedures.
Practice #5: The Pre-Crisis Doctor
The Pre-Crisis Doctor plans for all levels of crisis escalation. The practice includes developing a system to identify key members of the company who are involved in social crisis, building the shell of messaging for different social media channels (from Facebook and Twitter to Google+ and YouTube), testing technology tools when the conversations are still positive, building a detailed Comment Response Chart based on gathering conversation intelligence, and a listen/evaluate/respond approach, integrating the social crisis plan with other departmental plans, identifying key bloggers and media for support during phases of crisis escalation, and making sure measurement is set (with benchmarks) and ready to capture negative comments at all times.
Practice #6: The Relationship Analyzer
The Relationship Analyzer takes the practice of relationship building several layers deep to increase brand loyalty and advocacy. The practice requires developing extensive audience profiles, analyzing the growth of relationships based on culture, sharing habits, and social connections, defining the nature of the relationship and how to move it to new levels, using technology to visualize the depth of the relationship and to further grow its potential, and to use social media to create enhanced experiences.
Practice #7: The Reputation Task Force Member
With reputation on the CEO’s mind, the Reputation Task Force Member must focus on a plan to build the human face of the company and teach the brand’s core values. The practice also requires a program to capture sentiment monitoring and measurement to reveal positive, neutral, and negative sentiment at all times. Members of the task force are the relentless auditors who know their job is a combination of ethics enforcer, brand police, and the “social voice.” The goal of every Task Force Member is to proactively support the brand reputation through social media and to grow the task force from the communications department to every department and employee in the company.
Practice #8: The Master of the Metrics
Strategy requires measurement. The Master of the Metrics is focused on a program that offers executives the measures they need based on business outcomes versus what departments require to see social media progress. The practice includes a strategic view of metrics, breaking them down from the simple to complex engagement. The Master of the Metrics creates measurable social media objectives (benchmarked over time) to clearly communicate ROI for the executives as well as sets up a six-step metrics program for departments to track. At the same time, it’s necessary to differentiate between high-level versus low-level metrics on various platforms.
Your new practices can ready you for business communications now—and in the future. Learning to adapt to the highly connected customers’ world starts with your own efforts, moves into your communications department, and then to every department or person across the company to work congruously. Businesses today are required to deliver messages, stories, and experiences to people who have strong preferences, and to those who want only relevant information from trusted sources. Your eight new practices were developed to help you prepare for the further proliferation of social media and communication changes, and the resulting affects on a business. As a result, the strategies you devise can lead to higher levels of engagement and brand impact, and valuable outcomes through your communication touch points.
The PR professional’s use of social media requires a new mindset, as well as knowledge and skills outside of the PR silo. However, you can also apply many of the skills and abilities you already possess. The PR person is a natural liaison, educator, writer, planner, and critical thinker. When combined with competence in using technology, relationship building, flexibility, and adaptability, you are poised for recognition. Companies need people who look at social media and move beyond themselves and the PR silos erected over the years. You need to cross borders because with social media, the boundaries have changed. Social media and new PR practices, and the union of communications and technology, open up a world of education, collaboration, and innovation. The results are advocacy, loyalty, good will, and public confidence, and ultimately greater relationships from the local and regional level to national and global alliances. Don’t stop with the eight new practices; keep climbing to new PR heights. When social media meets public relations, eight practices are only the beginning. Look inward. Go upward. Then reach outward. The future of PR and communications—your future—depends upon it.