Social Media — KevinBehringer.com

March 28, 2012

The problems with PR (and what to do about them)

Of all the professional skill groups that can be included in the marketing toolkit, public relations is the most ridiculous (PR is also used for public affairs and other non-marketing activities). Filled with backwards unethical and untrained professionals that consistently spam people and promote attention metrics instead of actual outcomes, the PR profession can’t help its poor image.

I really can’t agree with Geoff’s broad brush characterization of the PR industry. He picks a few specific instances in the article and then uses the old, “And there’s more where that came from,” tactic. The problem with that tactic is, you can do the same for any industry.

Are there less-than-stellar PR people? Without a doubt. But I don’t know that it’s a matter of ethics as Geoff characterizes. He seems to say that their tactics on social media are not up to his standards, so they’re unethical and doing it wrong. Everyone can agree that there are people from the PR profession that see social media as an opportunity for spam. But, you can say that about marketing, advertising, sales, business developement, you name it.

What is the problem with PR?

I don’t think that PR is without its issues, though and I think that the problems come down to one main thing. PR, as an industry, is trying to find its place in this new world of business communications because the outlets many PR pros had learned to use are going away quickly. It’s no longer as simple as contacting the local paper, TV station or radio station to push our agendas. More than ever, PR pros need to think like publishers and realize that the mediums available to them are not to be used for spam, but for true communication with the markets they are trying to reach. We can’t depend on a reporter or editor to take our bullet points and craft them into something interesting because we are now filling both of those roles.

While public relations has for quite some time been synonymous with “media relations,” the developments in online communications demand that practitioners put the “public” back in public relations.

One of the leaders in bringing PR into the new world of communications is David Meerman Scott. If you want to know how PR has changed and what a savvy practitioner must do to change with it, look no further than Scott’s books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR and Newsjacking. Both of these books show how the traditions of PR aren’t nearly as effective as they once were and outline strategies to properly use the new tools available to reach customers in ways we never could before.

What to do about it?

When it’s all said and done, there is a reputation for spin and slickness that PR still needs to overcome. We need to realize that our communications need to be authentic and personal. We need to see that there are amazing communication tools at our fintertips, but those tools carry with them great responsiblity.

People are communicating more than ever and are easier to reach than ever. Unfortunately, for many PR people, that means the opportunity to beat them over the head with a message is easier and cheaper than ever. Those people who see things simply as a number game and don’t care about the long-term effects of those short term tactics (as long as they get X responses) are hurting all of us. People are willing to listen and engage…it just has to be on their terms.

Ultimately, we need to take posts like Livingston’s to heart and realize that if we have a message worth spreading, there are ways to do it without raising the ire of those in the markets we serve. In the long run, that’s where the sustained success resides.

ReadWriteWeb is just wrong. (Five reasons you still need a website)

There’s a piece today by David Strom on ReadWriteWeb asserting that, given the many other outlets on which to publish your thoughts, content, etc., you no longer need a corporate website.

I can’t think of any other way to put it…David is just wrong.

According to Strom:

The days of building community are happening outside of your own dot com. It used to be that you created brand awareness and a destination for your customers by having your own site. No longer. Now, there are plenty of others who will do it for you, and often they will do so without you having to pay them. Remember the phrase OPM? It used to mean other people’s money. Today it means Other People’s Marketing.

While I agree that a lot of the community building and conversation is, in fact, happening on centralized webistes like Twitter, Facebook and the like, I strongly disagree that this negates the need for your own website.

Strom does admit that we need “something for potential customers to bring up in their browsers when they type in companynamedotcom,” but he qualifies the statement with anecdotal evidence by talking about his wife’s interior design business.

Yes, she does have her own business website. She does need it to give her business a sense of legitimacy and purpose. But that site gets dozens of visitors a week, rather than the hundreds or thousands that the other sites do. She is using OPM.

Great. So the sites where she writes in discussion forums, comments on other posts and interacts with people get more traffic than her site does. But, that metric is misleading. Does he really mean to imply that each of the hundreds or thousands of people who visit these more popular sites will see what his wife writes and be moved to work with her? Sure, the site may be getting more traffic than her site, but is her content getting more views? That’s the real meausure.

Five reasons you still need your own website.

As Chris Brogan has said, you need to have a home base. A place to house your content. A place where people can learn about you. A place that is yours.

Why? A few reasons.

1) Not every customer will be on every social network you target

Let’s say that you decide that you’re going to forego your own website in favor of posting on forums/social media/etc.

Which networks or sites? All of them?

As the number of sites grow, so does the amount of effort necessary to stay up to date on all of them. If you are trying to build a business on the back of another site or network, how do you know it’s the one your potential customers will choose? You could miss out on a ton of opportunity by choosing the wrong network for your business.

The other option is to try to repurpose your content on all the major (and some minor) networks.

Not only is that time consuming, but you’ll upset people who will be seeing the content two and three (or 10-15) times.

Better to use those networks as tools to point to the content on your site.

2) SEO

Now, I know that the popular thing to do is dismiss SEO practitioners as slimy, dirty, evil marketers who are ruining the web. And, in some cases you’d be right.

But, people still use Google to find things. Even with all their recent missteps, that’s not going to change any time soon. So, wouldn’t you want your content to be findable?

Even if you are able to get it to rank on those other sites, you are helping someone else’s site rank by using your content. Plus, if you try to post on their site and link back to yours, it’s very likely that that link juice won’t follow – giving you no benefit from a search perspective.

3) The image you present – especially first impressions

David does address this when he says that his wife has a nominal website, but what image does that present?

If someone comes to your site and wants to learn more about you, get a sense of what you’re about and, potentially, purchase from you, what do you think it’ll tell them if they have to go to Facebook or Twitter to get that information?

Your website should be the repository of all that information and show what you are capable of and give a clear picture of who you are.

Taking it further, you can’t control what’s around your content on those other sites. What if an ad pops up that you disagree with? What if someone posts a vulgar post or comment right next to yours? You have no control of the context in which your content appears, which can be devastating.

4) Do you know that network isn’t going away?

Say you spend days/weeks/months building your content on another site because they get more visitors. You build your business on the back of a network, spend hours creating content to reach visitors to that site and then the site is sold and shut down. Then what?

When you trust another site as the sole repository of your content (especially if you have no connection to the owner or any stake in the future of the site) you’re playing with fire. Tomorrow could be the day that all your hard work evaporates into the ether.

5) You want to build your brand, not the network’s

There’s a reason I titled this post, “ReadWriteWeb is wrong.” Even though they didn’t write the article; David Storm wrote it. It’s his content. But, it’s on the ReadWriteWeb site, so he’s effectively building their brand, not his own.

How often do people completely look past a byline on a post? Especially if it’s a site that aggregates from numerous different authors?

I’m guessing pretty often. They see the content as that of the site, not the individual author.

So, David spends time writing an article that he feels accurately represents his opinion and ReadWriteWeb gets all (or most of) the credit.

Yes, he will likely get more readers (or at least people that skim the article) than he would on his own site, but at what cost? If he writes a great post and people attribute it to the site on which it’s contained, he’s lost an opportunity.

So, the article is where?

One thing that struck me as interesting later in the article was this:

Here is another situation. All of us writers at ReadWriteWeb participate in varying degrees on Twitter too. We post and repost links to our stories and that of our colleagues, and many people follow us as a result. All well and good. But wouldn’t it be better if someone else posts a link to our stories on their Twitter account?

Where would people send those links on Twitter to? They have to direct people somewhere. Do you want it to be a site you control or someone else does?

Ultimately, those networks are great for outposts, but you need to have that homebase to send people to. That’s how you build something that lasts.

Times are changing…just not that quickly

I understand that we are in the throes of an enormous sea change in the world of marketing, business, the web and online publishing. The avenues to express an opinion are more numerous and widespread than ever before.

That also means that the competition for readers is more fierce than ever.

Everyone says that step one to building a presence online is to create great content. I just don’t understand why you’d want to help someone else build their site with your great content.

While it’s important to “be out there” and interact in the places where people are, I disagree that we no longer need our own website. I think that, as things get noisier on the various social networks out there, having a place where we can stand on our own is more important than ever.