Brief ramble on oversharing…

I’ve been thinking a lot about oversharing lately – you know, when someone only needs a certain amount of information but you continue to explain yourself anyway. That’s an overshare.

Particularly, it’s been on my mind whether social media causes us to become ‘oversharers’ in other areas of our lives, too. We become so habituated to sharing the whole story – even if it’s in fits and spurts – that we continue to overshare when we step away from the keyboard.

Oversharing is obviously a rampant problem on sites like Facebook. I’ve done it, you’ve probably done it, and we all hear stories of the person who did it much too big ‘that one time’.

Perhaps a ’stop the oversharing’ PSA is in order…

Media relations put out to pasture?

Is it time, yet? Can we viably say that as traditional print publications start going the way of the dodo that media relations as the core competency of a public relations practitioner is on its way out, too?

One thing that still makes me upset and frustrated with former colleagues and clients is the inability to move beyond measuring the ‘value’ of a media hit. It’s tempting, I know, because it IS something you can clip and paste – you can make a book and see if it’s thicker than the year before. If it is, good work, you’ve still got a job! Less? Please explain.

Just as Brian Solis has been arguing now for years, it began as PUBLIC relations and to such shall it return. Day by day the PUBLIC are becoming the beacons of information, the central hub of sharing and knowledge. It’s true, we’ll always have to work hard to find the right members of the public, but we can’t rest on the bylines of newspapers and magazines anymore. We have to talk to people, eat our own dogfood, get engaged with the product and it’s consumers!

I’m not in social media because I love the bright shiny new toy. I’m entering social media because I think it’s eventually going to be the ONLY place for someone like me – someone who loves to communicate and build bridges between people in companies and people in streets.

Where is PR headed?

I’ve been really intrigued this week by the discussion of the future of public relations.  I think that the discussions that have unfolded are crucial to making a long-term stand for our industry, since with increasing convergence in media we will obviously witness increasing convergence in communications roles out of necessity.  

There were two posts that sparked me on this the most:

1. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research who had an intriguing idea which helped fuel much of this conversation 
2. Todd Defren of Shift PR (a social media PR firm) who mounted what I thought was in the larger case a spot on counter argument regarding the business principles 

There are some differences I see, however, as someone working on the front-lines.  My points are these:

 

• PR council is expensive – if I’m not wrong, PR is more expensive than customer service by quite a bit, that’s why companies have warehouses of customer service people and offices of PR people (or hire outside firms, which might cost even more)
   
• Basic social media monitoring and response skills are pretty similar to instant message or e-mail based customer service – so why pay PR people to do your customer service when you can have your customer service people do your customer service?
   
• If you’re worried about handling ’special cases,’ monitoring tools are coming to the point where they’re sophisticated enough to raise the alarm for ‘flagged’ influencers you may want to give special care to *
   
• More and more, PR efforts with social media are less like media relations OR like customer service and more like marketing (at least from where I’m sitting)

 

My conclusion, then?  Customer service will wind up with the social media piece of the pie at some point down the road; maybe the PR or social media experts will slide to those departments and customer service procedures will change up a bit.  In the long run, media relations will still exist as a specialty with one hoary old coffee drinking, cigarette smoking ex-journalist working in a paper-filled office alone
.  The rest of the little PR girlies?  They’ll be swallowed up by the marketing department and out working events and pushing samples and test drives (which, funnily enough, is part of the monetizaton and metrics strategy I hear for social media firms).

 

*(though that kind of takes the transparency out of things, doesn’t it?  It would be best to let customer service have enough information and freedom to serve everyone equally, but that’s likely not going to happen with people like Robert Scoble making a fuss as Defren pointed out in the post I reference above)

Will your social become your work?

This is me doing a bit of crystal ball reading (the chai was a bit too murky for review of my tea leaves, so we had to find a fall back , but the more I read about companies taking formerly internal functions and ‘crowdsourcing‘ them, it makes me wonder about the function of ‘work’ in our future.

Reading a post by Todd Defren (PRSquared) on relinquishing control.  He opens with a discussion of Intuit moving to fully crowd-sourced customer support and Procter & Gamble canceling all internal efforts on R&D, relying instead on a pull economy in which they follow requests and produce based on tipping points of demand.  There are lots of other examples, growing quickly, such as Microsoft’s developer community.

Questions this causes me to ask:

• What jobs will be replaced by free crowd provided work? I think there will always be a place for hard goods and services (I don’t think you can use crowdsourcing to get food that no one’s taken the effort to actually grow or live in a house for which no one has produced building materials).  Perhaps more of the creative work of production will move to a pull model in which crowds request (or demand) and then support (post-purchase)?

• What will happen to the replaced jobs? Will we live in a world where you earn money by participating in crowdsourcing such that the creatives and communications types are all freelance, SAH(M/D)’s who earn a living by contributing to group projects in a digital space?  There are already places like CrowdSpring where you crowdsource a job proposal, though for the time being it leads to a hire at the end. (Tom Foremski asks these questions and then some in his article on Intuit’s crowd-sourcing move here at ZDNet)

• Will all work become production of some kind? Will everyone continue to participate in crowdsourcing as a past-time and have a job in which we are responsible for some aspect of the creation of an atom-based (or palpable) item? I could even see a movement like the ’slow food’ movement against crowdsourcing, in which people decide they’d rather have things that are produced nearer to them or in a way that values quality over quantity, again. Perhaps an anti-assembly-line movement? Or maybe a return to house calls? Who can say…
• Getting really crazy… What if no one had paying jobs or careers anymore?  What if our level of cohesion because of the internet grew so big that each person spent time doing things they liked doing and we reverted to a barter system for the things we need but didn’t produce ourselves, though on a more sophisticated and global scale?  Though the economics are hard to understand, but what if John Lennon was right?  “Imagine there’s no countries; imagine no possessions”

We’ll see what happens as the arguments for bits vs atoms become more apparent.