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)

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

As a requirement for my Introduction to Online Communities course, I’ve been asked to do a video response to something.  Considering the only video option I have is the built-in iSight on my iMac, I’ve grudgingly (not grudgingly reviewed, but rather included myself in any form of video) put together a brief cameo of myself reviewing the book “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky.  This effectively kills two birds with one stone (as a review of the piece was also required for this week).  Please also scroll down just a bit further to view an interview with Clay that’s far better than my talking head.  :p