Connect the spots

Twitter - meet Chain Letter

While attending Twiistup the other week, I caught a panel discussion on social media and music.  The part that really got my attention was the point – made by Chamillionaire, a rapper and forward-thinking, social-media-using entrepreneur – that social media tools are useless unless you’re building your ‘lists.’  Whether that’s a list of Twitterati to reach out to, an e-mail list (still like gold ’round these parts) or a list of names and mobile phone numbers, you can’t let these communications go to waste.

As a communications person, I want to act on this, I want to keep track of my fans and customers so that I can do a good job of connecting them to the information they’ll find interesting and will help me make sales.

But what to do? Social communities are replacing e-mail (social communities were more popular than e-mail according to a 2008 Nielsen Online study).  So how long will e-mail lists still be the gold bullion by which all other digital currency is measured?

Will we ever find a way to actively gain and use mobile numbers? Consider research detailed by MediaPost which describes that mobile users find SMS marketing messages “invasive” but will welcome point-of-sale messaging which doesn’t lend itself to list building.

As a frequent subscriber to new services, new tools, new things online in general, I personally tend to find that e-mail marketing is done so poorly that it provides less value to me than the Twitter Chain Letter I pictured.  Receiving almost daily updates (or in some cases, strike the almost part!) from catalogs, stores and other outlets that I logically know cannot be adding new content or product at that rate is aggravating and, yet, almost impossible to unsubscribe from.  But I’m also one of those mobile users who find mobile marketing invasive – my phone is the last bastion of marketing, the one which I will fiercely defend from receiving advertising, as much as I like to use it in my own purchase pursuits.

For my own efforts, I’ll probably be sticking with old faithful in the e-mail list building, while keeping my eyes open and ears to the tracks for feedback on my methods from my fans, followers, subscribers and friends.

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)