In the realm of Social Media, conversation is king, and only active engagement and listening can lead to meaningful relationships. This is the new era of influence, and you have the tools and channels to emerge as a new influencer. PR 2.0 is rooted in democratized content, strengthened by enthusiasm and market intelligence, and powered by conversations.
As much as we talk about how to participate in Social Media or PR 2.0, it’s meaningless if you don’t take a few steps back to remember that, regardless of the technology, beneficial conversations are about trust, respect, mutual benefits, and positive experiences. We also can’t stress enough that the most rewarding dialogue has always been one-to-one rather than one-to-many (a.k.a. spam or broadcast PR). Spam is taboo, and for us the terms spam and Public Relations don’t belong in the same sentence—but unfortunately, they usually are these days.
PR, as we know it, is usually associated with the process of creating messaging, distributing it via wire services such as PR Newswire, BusinessWire, or Marketwire, and sending messages to “beat” reporters and analysts via e-mail (usually generated via a list service). And although one-to-one relationships still exist with key influencers, those relationships don’t scale in a way that encourages PR professionals to spend the time necessary to embrace those who aren’t “A-listers.” Psychologically, it’s the same in almost every organization. If you invest in one-on-one relationships—meaning you call or meet your influential contacts directly—it’s because you feel you need to. And if your relationships are solid, you feel confident that you can leverage them when needed. You also do things differently for them (for example, taking the time to prepare the story in a way that matters) because you don’t want to lose the relationship. However, we don’t see this across the board.
Although you should make things personal, you might not because you perceive the less-influential voices as, well, less valuable. So you decide to send them information in the hopes that they’ll receive it and publish it because you took the time to send it to them. Unfortunately, things just don’t work that mechanically. Reporters, regardless of their authority, are inundated with messages from hopeful PR types who believe that their news is “newsworthy.” There’s just not enough time in the day to cover, let alone respond to, every inbound request.
And now you have the realm of Social Media, in which user-generated content is becoming influential in its own right and, in many cases, more significant than many traditional reporters’ messages. So if reporters who are classically trained in the art and science of journalism are already experiencing fatigue and intolerance, how do you expect to integrate PR 2.0 philosophies and tactics to reach people directly? After all, these are the last people who want to be showered with superlatives and hyperbole. They want things that matter to them because that’s what helps them in some way. PR 2.0 is about becoming the resource and “go-to” organization because you understand that you’re not really a PR or marketing person all the time—you’re a human being with interests, needs, questions, and aspirations just like the next person. PR 2.0 is about people to people and long- and short-term relationships. You must realize that the metrics for transforming one person into an evangelist far outweigh the resources required to repeatedly throw spaghetti on the wall in hopes that it just might stick.
That’s an almost overwhelming sense of responsibility and transformation required for most people. But that’s why you’re here. Reporters and analysts are at one end of the media landscape and A-list bloggers (regardless of industry and marketplace) are at the other. The “magic middle” of the blogosphere is the disparate group of underlying influencers who truly represent the people who talk to your customers. When they blog, they don’t individually send an immeasurable or insurmountable volume of traffic or cascades of riches. However, the magic middle collectively forms the foundation of long-term customers who are looking for specific solutions. This is what’s described as the Long Tail of niche markets, as documented by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail.
You also have people who might be both generators and great democratizers of content. Many of these individuals represent the magic middle and also carry to the right of the bell curve. These folks represent your target demographic at every stage of market adoption. PR 2.0 recognizes each unique congregation, whether they’re edglings, early adopters, mass market, late-market majority, or laggards. People now have access to Social Media to share their insight, and they’re recognized for it.
New PR understands its importance in the grand scheme of influence, sales, service, and evangelism to fold these necessary and valuable contacts into our relationship strategies. One-to-one PR is a completely different game from what we’re used to playing. We’re usually measured by the hits we generate rather than the relationships we forge—and the value each has to the corporate bottom line. Instead of just targeting a person individually, perhaps through e-mail instead of a mass blast, you need to investigate that individual’s preferred form of communication, his or her likes and dislikes, and, most important, the topics that individual usually covers and why these subjects matter. As a communications professional, you should be familiar with how to gather this type of information—how to do your “homework” on each contact, similar to what you would do in your traditional media relations work. It’s no different with PR 2.0.
Remember, the genuine conversations that we are discussing can also be a form of strategic marketing without it being a marketing initiative in itself. You can’t expect to speak through messages using a news release to people who are willing to listen patiently every time. As Chris Heuer says, “It’s not conversational marketing, though. It’s not something we do to people. It’s what we do with people.” Heuer is absolutely correct, and we couldn’t agree more.
For example, the micro blog Twitter (www.twitter.com) is one of the most powerful conversation tools among early adopters (a.k.a. edglings). A blurb from “David Carr Is Lost in a Dream of Yesterday” (March 2008) on Stowe Boyd’s blog (www.stoweboyd.com) describes a little about the edglings:
The people formerly known as the audience, we, the edglings, have decided that the newspapers (and other old school media) are not going to manage the news hole for us. We want to decide how many inches to apply to McCain and Obama today, or how many inches to use for the NCAA finals. The formulas and incantations of newspaper people have less and less meaning, here, on the Web.
A-list tech blogger Robert Scoble recently publicly posted his frustration with e-mail on Twitter, requesting that people (especially those in PR) pay attention to his ideal methods of contact. Scoble also asked PR people to examine other tools and creative approaches to catch his attention. Scoble wrote, “It’s amazing that in this age of Twitter that people still send email. I hate email. I hate direct Tweets. I hate Facebook messages.” He then immediately followed with, “PR people are the worst in the email regard. Speaker planners are close. I don’t answer a lot of my email anymore.”
The line that resonated most with us was Scoble’s view of PR people: If they were forced to do their work in public, their entire method would change. Scoble’s words are a strong reinforcement for PR people to consider the best way to start the relationship. That means understanding how busy, influential people want to engage in conversation. He’s absolutely right. For too long, PR operated behind the curtain, hurling over news bits in waves instead of focusing on individual conversations. Social Media and user-generated influence change the very foundation on which PR is built, forcing communications professionals to step from behind the curtain to engage with the people they’re trying to reach.
The beauty of communicating through certain forms of micromedia (tools such as Twitter, Seesmic, Utterz, Jott, Pinger, YouTube, Flickr video, and so on) is that your content is intentionally and forcibly truncated. For example, with Twitter—a tool for sharing short updates with friends and followers—you are forced to summarize your story in 140 characters at a time. (Just to give you perspective, the preceding sentence is 155 characters, counting spaces, or 27 words.) Some communicators can’t cut down a 700-word news release, let alone edit their message down to a fixed (low) number of characters.
Many of you might not be able (yet) to imagine developing strong, meaningful messages in 140 characters or less. But even if you take Twitter out of the equation and replace it with Jaiku or even Facebook, all these social networking platforms share a preference for brevity. If you can summarize your story in a way that’s compelling and specific to the audience, you can do it across the board, regardless of limitations or platform. The practice is invaluable because it helps you condense your story into a value-focused package that is specific to your targets, without insulting the public along the way. This is how you put the public back in Public Relations and truly start to push forward a 100-year-old industry that has persevered without resistance until now. This is how you truly communicate with the right people, at the right time, in the right way: with meaningful information that they require, understanding that influencers might be traditional reporters or analysts, bloggers, and other people who happen to represent the communities you want to reach.
To help you understand Scoble’s concern about the best way for people to reach him, we have included highlights from his conversation on Twitter. Normally, Twitter conversations start from the bottom of the dialog and work their way up. The conversation includes tweets from:
• Kami Huyse, APR, the principal of My PR Pro. She frequently writes about Public Relations and communications. Her background is in crisis communication and reputation management, executing Social Media campaigns, conducting focus group research, and media relations.
• Francine Hardaway, a PR veteran and principal at Stealthmode Partners. She is an avid pundit and user of social tools and an exceptionally riveting blogger on the subject of Social Media, politics, and tech.
• Todd Defren, a principal at Shift Communications, a $10 million firm with offices in San Francisco and Boston. He is best known for his founding of the Social Media news release. He also debuted a Social Media newsroom template in 2007.
• Robert Scoble, a well-known blogger (if not the most famous) and technology evangelist, and the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. He is also recognized globally for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to fruition during his tenure at Microsoft. He currently works as a video blogger for Fast Company.
• Chris Brogan, who advises businesses, organizations, and individuals on how to use Social Media and social networks to build relationships and deliver value.
• Rick Mahn, an independent IT infrastructure and services consultant, and an avid tech and Social Media blogger.
• David Parmet, a Public Relations professional since the early 1990s. According to his blog, he does everything from conventional media relations to work with bloggers and other Social Media denizens, business development, and strategic planning.
What you just read is the conversation, and it’s taking place with or without you. Scoble’s discussion with his followers is an example of how you can ask a direct question that will lead to honest answers from your peers. These types of “tweets,” or public messages, enable the transparency necessary in a blog, micromedia, or any social network or community that makes people adhere to the rules in the community. Scoble provided excellent information for PR people who want to build relationships with him and get prompt answers. If you listen to the conversations and follow the rules of engagement, the relationship will grow from there. In this instance, it’s clear how Scoble and Defren felt about contact with PR people and how lack of transparency leads to “crappy PR.”
The most important lessons here are that you should:
1. Pay attention to the wants and needs of the media and citizen journalists.
2. Shift your daily routine to observe those who matter to the brand that you represent as it will evolve.
3. Determine the preferred method of contact for each.
As a PR professional, you can no longer rely on the databases to which your PR teams subscribe and the profiles and preferences they purport. You’re not in the broadcast spam or mailmerge business. You’re talking, reading, and listening to the very people you want to reach, whether they’re bloggers, reporters, pundits, or customers. You need to watch and listen to the people with whom you want to interact. If you want to reach people, you need to figure out what they want to see and where and how they want to see it. And you must be intelligent, informed, and genuine in your approach. If you want to see a positive reaction, show that you did your homework.
This is Social Media, which means that every aspect of media, from creation to reading, to sharing, is social. And, as in any social setting, you must observe and respect the community you want to join and contribute to. In many ways, you become a sociologist and market expert so that you can not only observe, appreciate, and understand how to immerse yourself in a community, but also intelligently participate in the ongoing conversations that matter to you. This is a shift from pitching to participating, from selling a story to telling a story.
This is how you build relationships. As mentioned earlier in this book, PR 2.0 requires PR professionals to participate in the communities they seek to influence and learn from. In fact, participation is the foundation to establishing a relationship with any community. However, old-school PR practitioners often find it difficult to initiate such participation, and some want to reject the concept itself. We refer to this as cultural voyeurism. Marketing and PR professionals are reluctant to engage in the conversations for many reasons, usually because they don’t know how, don’t believe they need to, or they are not empowered to do so. If you don’t engage, you can’t get to the reward—the relationships that build great alliances, support strong communication, and take brands to new levels of awareness.
About a year ago, Brian wrote an article titled “Social Media Is about Sociology and Not Technology.” The recognition of people versus the tools is more critical than ever. Many people understand and present existing and emerging social tools for us to use as mechanisms for “engaging” in “conversations.” And although we’ve said that participation is marketing, let’s add another level to that statement: Informed, mutually beneficial, and genuine participation inspires relationship building.
However, many purported Social Media experts and communications professionals are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism, at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means they don’t really understand what, where, or why they’re “participating.” Instead, they are “jumping in” only because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. Unfortunately, this is a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media marketing. To keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders, it’s time to reevaluate and study the sociology of Social Media.
The future of communications requires the consideration of sociological principles when integrating Social Media into the marketing chemistry. This is one of the most important points where you simply need to stop and think about things. As in all marketing, the most effective campaigns start with listening, reading, watching, and observing. In the world of Social Media, this is not an option. It’s dependent on sociology and the study of people and cultures online before you even think about engaging them in conversation.
“Listening” is the key to engagement in Social Media, and sociology refers to it as observation. By observing, either directly or virtually, you become a social scientist so that you can feed back intelligence and insight into the marketing loop. We consider two basic types of observations:
1. Unobtrusive—The observer is detached and does not take an active part in the situation:
• Observer as participant—The observer’s role as a researcher is known to the community, and the observer participant interacts with the participants but makes no pretense of being a “real” participant.
• Complete observer—The observer hides his true identity, but participates without divulging his intentions.
2. Participant—The observer joins a group and studies it as an inside member:
• Complete—The observer hides her identity. This type of observation can raise concerns, including what some view as ethical dilemmas. The most common concern is that observations might become compromised because the complete observer participant is more likely to become sympathetic and lose objectivity.
• Participant as observer—The observer does not hide his identity and is truthful about his goals and objectives.
In most Social Media marketing initiatives we have observed (whether we were asked to assess a company’s program specifically or just watch a very public campaign as a “student”), we haven’t seen much more than the “latest and greatest” tools that can get them in front of bubbling and active social networks and communities. This is the equivalent of setting up camp next to a village just because you can (that is, just because you have the tools to do so) and expecting the village to integrate you into its society. It just doesn’t work that way.
Sociology provides you with an understanding of how social forces shape individual attitudes and behavior. Sociologists study society and social action by examining the groups and social institutions people form. In Social Media, these communities take the form of social networks and the communal groups within them. People form their associations, friendships, and allegiances around content, objects, products, services, and ideas. How they communicate is simply subject to the tools and networks that people adopt based on the influence of their social graph—and the culture within.
Sociologists also study the social interactions of people and groups, trace the origin and growth of social processes, and analyze the influence of group activities on individual members and vice versa. The basic goal of sociological research is to understand the social world in its many forms. Social Media, and marketing in general, can only benefit from intelligence. And at the very least, it removes the risk of “marketing at” people and instead naturally shapes a more honest, intelligent, and informative approach.
Quantitative and qualitative methods represent two main types of sociological research:
• Quantitative methods, such as social statistics and network analysis, investigate the structure of a social process or describe patterns in social relationships.
• Qualitative methods, including focused interviews, group discussions, and ethnographic methods, reveal social processes.
Social Media is much more than user-generated content. It’s driven by people within the communities where they congregate and communicate. They create, share, and discover new content. They’re building online cultures across online networks and using the social tools that they learn about every day to stay connected. And the societies that host and facilitate these conversations cultivate a tight, unswerving, and mostly unforgiving community and culture. What traditional marketing and PR standards might consider harmless activity is completely reset and highly discouraged in the world of Social Media—driven by the community rule that proactively strives to flag disingenuous content. For example, if you try to leave a promotional comment on a blog post as it relates to a competitor, send a marketing message to a topic-focused group on Facebook, or anonymously defend your brand with “campy” and hollow message-riddled responses, you’ll quickly understand the meaning of unforgiving used earlier in this paragraph.
As Shel Israel, co-author with Scoble of Naked Conversations, describes it, people are populating global neighborhoods, and the power is moving from institutions to the people.
Technology is just that: technology. Tools will continue to change as software applications and technological infrastructure advance. Networks will continue to evolve. The number of media through which you can distribute content will grow. Through all this change, however, the people you want to reach likely won’t change.
PR 2.0 requires you to realize that the communities you want to reach are more than just “audiences” that you can observe from a distance. You simply cannot get answers or run a meaningful Social Media program through cultural voyeurism. Social Media marketing requires observation that will dictate your engagement strategies. In the beginning, you’ll use a combination of social and traditional tools to discover, listen, learn, and engage directly with customers to help them—not to market to them. But you should assist them in making decisions and doing things that they couldn’t do or didn’t know how to do before. Most important, the lessons learned in the field should be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real-world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.
Everything starts with information and the empowerment you gain from being informed. Traditional PR practitioners present a story to specific media that reaches prospective customers and work with that media outlet to get a message to an intended audience—hoping that the particular media outlet will be motivated to act in the traditional PR practitioner’s interest. However, you’re no longer limited to such “butter churn” traditions. Instead, using the principles and practices of PR 2.0, you can also search the blogosphere using tools such as Technorati, Blogged.com, Google BlogSearch, and the blogrolls of other bloggers to identify those citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) who are actively writing stories relevant to your market. These folks might not be journalists. In fact, they might be your customers and peers who just also happen to blog. However, don’t pitch to either reporters or bloggers. Instead, read their earlier work and observe their patterns of coverage to effectively package your story to best fit their preferences. Relationships are built on interaction, and sustainable relationships are always mutually beneficial. Therefore, don’t rely on pitching as your only interaction with these precious contacts. Instead, be sure to comment on other articles they have written, offer assistance with other related stories, and even contact them when you don’t need something (perhaps just to check in or share ideas, unrelated stories, or updates).
Yes, this is the way it should have been all along. PR 2.0 only opens you up to a new layer of influencers who choose to be contacted in similar ways to their traditional predecessors. So PR 2.0 is a return to basics—placing the public back in Public Relations. Remember, however, that this is a necessity: You must put people at the center of your activity. If you don’t, the conversations will take place without you. And if you do it wrong, you’ll find a very public and prominent backlash against you and the brands you represent.
Social networks are where people communicate directly with each other in the particular online communities in which they congregate. Popular networks include Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, hi5, Ning, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jaiku, and content social networks (such as Flickr for pictures, YouTube for video, Utterz for multimedia, Digg for stories, Delicious for online bookmarks, and BrightKite for location-based networking). Each network has myriad subcultures within it and requires social observation before connecting with the network (and its subcultures) directly. Before jumping in, participate in these networks as a person, not as a marketer. Doing so will enable you to get a sense of the culture through immersion. Do not, however, get trapped into cultural voyeurism.
To determine which communities are valuable to you and your brand, search relevant keywords in each of the communities to see where and how they’re discussed. This helps you learn where and how to focus your time and activity.
It’s time to put aside the pitch and focus on relationships with people—a practice that can bring unprecedented interaction, personalization, and value. The only way to truly succeed with New PR is to become a reliable resource—one of information and knowledge for those who either directly or indirectly affect your brand’s bottom line. Relationships will enable you to earn the trust, respect, and online friendships that you desire.
According to Social Media and PR 2.0 marketers, conversations are markets, and markets are conversations (and, therefore, the foundation for conversational marketing). Conversations are feeding communities, and communities are markets for relationships. In PR, relationships are the currency required to prosper. For these relations to increase in value over time, they must be cultivated from both sides.