Ed Lee is a four year veteran from the front lines of PR and now an Account Director at Internet communications consultancy, iStudio.
An Englishman living and working in Toronto, Canada, he runs Blogging Me, Blogging You in an effort to spread the good word. His view is that, while social media is just another channel, it is an increasingly important (almost vital) one.
This wasn’t so much an interview as a chat – in fact, it was a chat, because Ed was over from Canada for a few days and we met up at a local Starbucks. It was fascinating talking to a blogger I’d never actually met, and Ed had some real insights into how PR and social media can fit together.
So, this takes a slightly different format from the interviews. No questions, no answers, I’ve just isolated the main issues Ed and I talked about.
Disintermediation
Imagine plugging your head into the web and everyone else being able to
download your thoughts instantly. This is obviously not where we are
now – nor are likely to be! – but qualitatively, we’re in a similar
place with social media. Anyone can say pretty much anything online,
instantly, and anyone else can read that.
This hits communications companies with something of a double-whammy.
First, you have people out there who can publish material about your
clients that is untrue or unsubstantiated and, in turn, this is because
they’re unaccountable and subjective. Second, if a company decides to
start its own blog, the usual filters and controls of editorial process
may not be in place. In short, they may say something they later regret.
However, the same dynamics of mass communication that cause these
problems also provide the solutions. OK, so you can say bloggers are
untrained and unaccountable but eventually people do get wise. In the
same way bloggers can quickly become authorities and influencers, they
can lose credibility just as quickly. Ed and I have both seen this
happen.
In other words, mass communication also allows self-policing. We can
see this with Wikipedia, which as far as we know hasn’t completely
collapsed by being riddled with errors. Far from it. Wikipedia seems if
anything to become more accurate and more sophisticated the larger it
grows.
As for saying something you later regret, well that’s probably because
there was something wrong with your message in the first place. The
ability to throw something into the blogosphere and listen to the
echoes come back is unprecedented in enabling messages to be optimised.
Network effect vs broadcast effect
The traditional channel model uses the broadcast effect – messages
ripple out one way only, from source to audience – and increasingly,
they’re not even making it as far as the audience because the audience
ignores them.
Social media gives us the opportunity to exploit the network effect, in
which messages permeate the network and recycle. We can listen ‘behind
the wall’, tune in to the network and find out what these messages are
– what are, in essence, the ‘real’ messages.
Ed testified to the surprise some of his clients has shown when
presented with the sheer breadth of the online conversations about
them. But this is where so much opportunity lies. Take the example of
Diet Coke and Mentos, in which the explosive mix was demonstrated in an
online video which spread across the web. Coca Cola Corp initially
disowned the antics as unsuitable for the brand personality. It has
since bought the kind of publicity PRs can only dream of, with Coke and
Mentos both realising that the brand personality can change. Indeed,
they wound up sponsoring the originators, Eepybird.
It’s the fear of the unknown – and quite possibly the truth – that
plagues some organisations. Ed quoted the case of the Canadian
governmental department which banned Facebook. And yet Facebook can be
a brilliant way of putting together focus groups and polls, as well as
communicating with the younger generation. Similarly in the UK, we have
the BBC litigating against someone from providing knitting patterns for
Dr Who characters. This is clearly a situation in which the lawyers
should have spoken to the marketers.
Sometimes it’s ok to let the messages evolve. Let the brand find its own personality. Use the network effect.
Online and offline work best together
When talking about blogger influence, I’m often asked to account for
why a top blogger might have, say, a few thousand subscribers when a
journalist working for any national or even local newspaper might have
subscriberships in six or seven figures. So why should PR approach
bloggers?
Ed gave a nice counter. Firstly, of those millions of subscribers, how
many read that journalist or even that column of coverage? Given that
the journalist, and article, is to an extent buried within the
newspaper, and that newspapers tend to have general coverage, you can
safely presume that the actual number who read that column is much
lower. A blogger, on the other hand, has subscribers who really want to
know what he or she is saying. There is a real interest here.
And what happens after the newspaper is read? It’s possible the reader
might talk about it with someone, but generally, no. Online however,
people can share stuff readily. Just vote for it on social news sites
or tag it on social bookmarking sites, and other people can and will
pick up on it. So while the newspaper is binned – both literally and
metaphorically – the online item lives on.
However, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for the offline,
‘real’ world. There’s a tendency for social media fans to believe that
the whole world is on Twitter or Facebook. It isn’t. Things exist. So
the so-called ‘traditional’ PR – that is, working with media, raising
awareness, building relationships – can and should work alongside
online for the greatest effect. You just have to employ the right
tactics for the right audience and objectives. Sounds familiar? It’s PR!
Continuous improvement
Ed was very optimistic about how online campaigns can become more
sophisticated through time. All communications – indeed, virtually all
activity with capital at its heart – segments audiences. We all want to
appeal to the right people. But with social media we can get better at
this.
Email is peculiarly well-suited to this. With the appropriate systems
in place you can see who opened the email, who forwarded it, whether
they opened the plain text or HTML version and so on. You can zero in
on what people read and the formats they prefer. Once you start to
create segments within your subscriber base, you can also start to
design content for each segment – which leads to a more personalised,
more engaging contact point.
Linked to this is the idea that yes, relationships can scale. This is a
particularly hot topic right now, as people who work with PRs publicly
add them to blacklists because they seem incapable of providing useful
information in a non-intrusive manner.
With social media we can segment our audiences further and further
until we give them what they want. Right now, admittedly, some PR
companies are fast and loose with the way they handle journalists, and
some journalists are drowning in the overflow of information. But all
we need is time, goodwill – and the network effect – to correct this.
Exciting times
We live in an age where anyone can say anything and anyone else can
read it; in which we can ‘tune in’ to these conversations and improve
our messages; in which we can improve the way we work through the
synergy of online and offline tactics; and in which we can continue to
improve in quality as well as quantity of information.
Our conversation ended with Ed telling me about how he’d been speaking
recently to an experienced PR who testified that the industry has
changed more in the past four years that Ed had been working than it
had in the previous 20 in which she had worked. Indeed, we live in
exciting times.
