Beyond the guff, is all this social media stuff just advertising and PR in disguise?
Posted by: Alex Erasmus
I went to an NZ Marketing Association event this morning that featured the head of Facebook for Australia and New Zealand as well as the Online Editor team at Rugby World Cup 2011.
It was interesting to get an update on what Facebook can offer and it was also good to hear the inside story on how the Rugby World Cup is being promoted.
The talk did, however, raise a few questions in my mind about the ongoing role of social media.
Social media is all about sharing and it’s all about user-generated content (70% is the target according to Facebook) and…you’ve heard this before so I won’t bang on about what it is.
Driving Facebook followers or ‘likes’ is mainly achieved through advertising. Seeing as social media’s based on non-advertorial pledges, isn’t this oxymoronic?
What’s also interesting is how social media success is often defined by traditional media results. If a digital/viral/social campaign or stunt gets on the news, then it’s gone mainstream. Like what happened when a T-Mobile got a bunch of Londoners to dance in a train station, flash-mob style.
Both of the above show how advertising and PR still hold a place in the digital landscape. Maybe the problem is in the names. Advertising has connotations of the traditional model of broadcasting, which is now seen as antiquated because it’s all about the two-way conversation. PR as a moniker has negative spin-offs (excuse the pun) because people don’t want to be fed information from brands. They want to be engaged. Maybe us PR folk should just change our titles to ‘Digital Engagers’. Please shout if you can think of anything better.
Changing your title is just a single act, it’s not a change in overall practice or behavior. But, does it need to be? Brands will always try and influence your thinking because they want you to buy stuff. And social media is becoming more controlled by brands as they understand it better. Through seemingly meaningless tools like Twitter Lists, brands can monitor the interests of followers. Facebook is already full of ways to track your interests and so are the other platforms. Check out Holden’s page for an example.
Perhaps social media is actually giving us less choice about what we do and what we buy because it’s influencing our subconscious in a more subtle way through our networks recommending stuff to one another.
As PR practitioners, we need to remember that adding value will become essential to social media not losing its relevance. Brands need to genuinely improve people’s lives, even in a small way, to make social media relevant. Giving someone a free coffee after they ‘check-in’ at a café X number of times is adding small, but real value; pinging out inane tweets about something tenuously linked to the brand (e.g. ‘the weather where we are is great today 
’), is not.
(Image courtesy of Rory Sutherland: http://twitter.com/rorysutherland)
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I have wondered about the expression ’social media’ for some time. In the context of marketing communications (into which I would include publicity/pr/comms), where the imperative is commercial then it simply resides under the broad heading of ‘modern marketing’.
In many ways the rhetoric of social media is identical the age-old tropes from advertising…for example ‘the consumer owns the brand’ and ‘it’s a conversation’. I have been rehearsing these lines since I first studied Advertising and marketing at the dawn of the 80s.
The tools and some techniques are different today - wonderfully so…but the humanist principles that have driven the best marketers and marketing communications professionals since its rudimentary days persist. People who like and relate to others will tend to be more engaging - as they always have been. Good listeners will always be better conversationalists. Likewise those who listen and can discern the wheat from the chaff are also more like to arrive at useful insights.
The main difference is that we now have the technological tools to enable participation and offer utility to people -who now can actively unlock the value of our brands, rather than simply consume them. By becoming media outlets themselves people move from being consumers to potential advocates or evangelists…but as with the marketer side of the coin it is only the technology that has changed. People have gossiped, complained and shared their experiences since Adam was a boy.
Oddly enough I think the shifts will negatively affect marcomms practitioners who never really cared what others think will be the ones who don’t survive. And that is a good thing.
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