I get the impression the PR firms are currently in the middle on a painful transition from being broadcasters to conversationalists.
By this, I mean that PR folks come across as being good at helping companies determine what their public message should be in order to build trust and sell products or services. While that's fine, a new version of this is quickly becoming hard to ignore.
It's a tough concept for many traditional PR people to understand, but that doesn't make it any less valuable. The term I use for it is, "listening."
While sitting in a boardroom and deciding what customers want to hear over a bagels and coffee has its place, it's hardly as effective as listening to what actual customers are saying about your company's products or services in real time online.
I get the impression that some PR firms have caught onto this concept and are now providing their clients with reports on "what people are saying about you online." And, I get the impression that these updates are provided at regular intervals such as monthly.
That's a good start, but it falls way short of what should be happening. What needs to happen is real time reactions to comments rather than simply aggregating pissed off commentaries. You'll still need to do the aggregations, but you'll nip a lot more PR disasters in the bud by proving that business can listen and respond.
1. Posted by: porridge on August 20, 2008 11:13 PM:
Good post, Ed. I'd love to discuss your initial take on PR as a "broadcast" function.
I believe PR has always been a management function about enabling communication between an entity and its publics. Altruistically, I push for that to be authentic, transparent and relevant to those publics, which means the communication must be educated, two-way and interactive. That's what I see really shifting these days.
My firm has a proprietary approach for what we call Digital Advocacy (it's actually trademarked), that includes the steps: Identify, Monitor, Tune, Participate, Produce and Measure. As part of monitoring, indeed, we recommend clients do a lot of listening. A LOT. We have clients who do daily -- sometimes 3 times/day, sometimes hourly -- monitoring of what their stakeholders are saying about their brand, industry, trends, etc. We also recommend a full benchmark landscape analysis and quarterly benchmarks to get a macro view of issues, sentiment, advocates and detractors.
From there we talk through next steps to participate and produce. To your point, you're not done once you launch a microsite, message board, blog or leave a follow-up comment to an angry Tweet. That's when you're just getting warmed up!
Love to grab a beer sometime and continue the conversation. -G.