Several good ones:
Rich Becker — great discussion in the comments on social media concepts…
Brian Solis — Do we need to redefine “influencers?”
Chuck Hemann — What impact on social media use/adoption does organizational culture have ?
Paul Seaman — The Excellence theory says PR is about fostering relationships. Paul disagrees.
In the political firestorm that engulfs the United States, one side claims the other has no principles, whilst the other claims their opponents show a slavish devotion to ossified beliefs that make no sense in modern America. Moral relativism, one side’s rhetoric goes, has brought our society to the brink of destruction. Outmoded thinking, the other side’s speaking points read, has made our country a cruel, Darwinist dystopia, where “survival of the fittest” is played out in policy. For some reason, the ongoing debate of tea parties and new Fascism makes me think about public relations.
The collapse of centralization of news and the growth of social media is fueling a similar decamping in our profession. On one side, those who believe that social media is an incarnation of evil, bent on destroying the concept of objectivity and authoritative sources, not to mention the homicide of the public relations industry. On another side (there are more than two), those who see social media as the democratization of information and the dissolution of concentrated media power, elevating ordinary people and adding to the diversity of voices in the media mix.
The ethical questions percolating for me these days relate to our role as PR people in participating in social media. In the sense of the “Excellence Theory,” social media should represent the triumph of two-way, symmetrical communication; active engagement of organizations and their stakeholders, seeking mutual benefit. But it seems to me that organizational participation in social media is still largely an asymmetrical game of persuasion, of message sending rather than dialogue. Marketers dominate the conversation online, devaluing PR objectives regarding reputation in favor of metrics focusing on revenue generation. Organizations continue to struggle to find applications for social media inside the enterprise (speaking broadly here; fully aware there are exceptions), as despite efforts to embrace openness and multi-directional communication, command and control is difficult to release.
The dilemma for practitioners is especially acute for agencies and suppliers, and the ad value equivalency debate is an example. AVE has been discredited for years, but is still in common use because many clients demand it. They understand it, and AVE provides a shorthand description that they find useful. The Institute for PR Measurement Commission recently condemned the practice, with one member writing that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right. When a client pays an agency and asks for AVE, we should say “no,” goes that argument. But the fear is that, “If I don’t give them AVE, they’ll go find someone who will.”
On the social media side, should all organizations use social media? What is our ethical responsibility here? I’d be hard pressed to say that everyone should embrace social media. I cannot make that claim, that is, if I care about giving good advice to my client. It’s not much different than telling a client reflexively that they need an intranet, or a newsletter, or a video. I need to understand the client’s objectives before I jump to tactics.
That doesn’t even address the more serious ethical challenges represented by social media.
Look at the Astroturfing issues, from fake blogs to agency staff commenting on client products. Is the free market of ideas and caveat emptor sufficient to rein in those who have no compunction about engaging in such tactics?
I have always been an idealist with respect to media, seeing the years between Edward R. Murrow and Watergate as the pinnacle of journalism, heroic reporters, courageous editors and committed publishers digging for The Truth, all with peerless ethical grounding. The disappearance of even the pretext of objectivity in journalism (reaching its zenith — or nadir — with MSNBC/Fox News/The Washington Post/New York Times) has disgusted me, even as I admit that objectivity was a goal, not a reality according to my own journalism professors. We could aspire to objectivity and embrace fairness, something few media outlets now even attempt, at least by my crude measure.
Certainly the outright failure of the trust equation (media, government, business all suffer), should be laid bare here. One must evaluate the media’s biases and objectives, and caveat emptor reigns there, as well.
People determined to do wrong will find a way if their personal ethical compass permits. Maybe that’s the scariest part of all of this. We’re relying on individuals to manage their own ethics in a time when ethics are subjective, not objective, and right and wrong are relative concepts.
“The Wall Street Journal” closes its Boston bureau. “Forbes” lays off a couple dozen this week, with rumors flying of more to come. “The New York Times” is looking for 100 buyout exits. Conde Nast shutters “Gourmet” magazine, and “Cookie,” “Elegant Bride” and “Modern Bride.” It’s a lousy time to be a journalist, eh? But what about being the PR people who pitch these pubs?
With advertising spending falling (or at least reclassifying from print to broadcast and Web), “getting media attention” in the right segments continues to be a critical element of PR activity. But the burgeoning social media market is threatening to change that calculus, if you believe the doyennes of blogs, Twitter and similar platforms. And why wouldn’t it? If we were pitching Modern Bride before, why can’t we pitch Classic Bride, Becoming Mrs. Jones, or The Broke-Ass Bride?
Does a company that makes bride dresses, or wedding catering, or domestic partnership photography have the time necessary to build relationships in social media? Or do they just need a quick ad with a special phone number that offers 20 percent off, a mention in a popular blog?
How many of us will the new behemoth integrated agencies need to help facilitate these processes? Who’s going to pay us to tell them to talk to a bride blogger in Madison, Wisc.?
This is only part of the puzzle — I have written before about the lack of independent and authoritative content in new media. Unless many of us suddenly become willing to pay a subscription fee for such content, it’s going to go away. Perhaps crowds really are wise, and not mobs. Perhaps over time, Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, notwithstanding being horrifically inaccurate at the moment we need factual information, or openly manipulated.
Any of us who care about this topic will need to develop our own ability to engage in social media, build our reputation for accuracy and probity, and somehow compete with the fakers, liars, and spammers. That’s not an easy task.
Make a note. It takes practice to handle two conferences in five days’ time. Of course, maybe my energy level would have been higher if I’d been speaking at them instead of attending one (live-Tweeting my way through a couple of days), and introducing speakers and serving as sponsorship chair at the other. Anyone who knows me will aver that I’m a fairly well-smoked ham, so being at the center of attention is exciting for me, rather than exhausting.
But the stress of pressing the flesh, talking to new people, and simultaneously trying to stay engaged in a sudden spate of potential business opportunities turned out to be rather a bit tiring. I also wondered whether the evil humours surrounding new friend Richard Bagnall and his lovely friend Marian might have attempted to seize me, but as it turns out, a couple o’nights of good sleep returned me to fit-as-a-fiddle status. Just ask my students if I lacked energy 22 October in class… Hah!
But now, devoid of excuses, I’m faced again with the ever-growing list of things to do, with ideas for a paper roaming in my head along with the still-warm and previously mentioned business opportunities. Oh, and I do need still to write a final exam and figure out what I need to do when I teach “Face to Face Tactics” at Kent State in the next semester. I also had slowed the pace of my blogging, owing to the madcap hilarity of the past couple of weeks, but accelerated the Twitter-ing at #iprms09. The social media experiment continues.
So it seems that indeed, I’m finding a bit of normalcy amid the falling leaves and gathering chill. Providence willing, I’ll soon have a fall more complicated — this time by billable hours.
One terrific side benefit of teaching PR Theory and Ethical Practice at Kent State University this fall has been reading a whole lot of interesting work from outstanding PR scholars. William Kennan and Vince Hazleton of Radford University contributed a chapter on internal PR that got me pondering certain aspects of the Social Capital Theory as it might apply to social media.
Two items in particular in their discussion stood out. 1) The existence of a network of connections and its effect on relationships and related outcomes; and 2) Identification, the extent to which people see themselves as connected to others.
The network, the opportunity to send and receive messages that contribute to the creation, maintenance and expenditure of social capital, is a pretty obvious bridge to social media. A fair number of people think that the network is the outcome of social media use, rather than a tool for some other purpose. But let’s stay on target (we could amble down that path for hours…). My own use of social media has focused on this purpose — expand the network and see what effect it has on my ability to forge a new business. The social capital theory indicates that the network itself takes on a role apart from its human factors; that the existence of the network influences relationships and relationship outcomes.
We can see this effect in action when members of one person’s network interact with each other and cross into other networks — not for the specific purpose of dialogue toward an outcome, but merely for the sake of discourse. That discourse creates additional meaning — leading to different understandings among network members.
Secondly, identification might originate with some kind of common interest or purpose, either large or small depending on the specific subject. The organization typically wants its employees to identify strongly with the organization, to feel strongly connected to it — that’s the heart of much employee engagement activity. Social media users appear to identify with other users — being “in the club” commenting on Twitter gives the users a sense of belonging that they find important or pleasurable. That may be one reason, as Mark Schaefer observed, there seems to be cronyism among the social media mavens. Heck, there seems to be cronyism among users of social media in general.
This all leads me to reinforced suspicion about whether social media can replace mainstream media. With a tendency to see social media use as a measure of self-worth (and therefore to see people who don’t use social media as somehow inferior — “they don’t get it!”), the ability of social media to adopt a third-party objective perspective is compromised. We can debate whether any media can be objective — if you have a strong perspective, people will know where you stand, rather than guessing about it — but making caveat emptor work requires some amount of transparency.
Authenticity can’t be a mask, it needs to be real and grounded in personal ethics so that one can judge the source and properly execute “buyer beware.” Otherwise, the identification among members of the network becomes more important than being honest.
Mark W. Schaefer writes a great blog, and today there is a terrific discussion there regarding the echo chamber surrounding social media’s expert class, the Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Julien Smith, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund slate. Namely, Mark observes that we are lacking strong dissenting voices.
Obviously, there are a few people out there who are refusing to drink the social media Kool-Aid — @amandachapel the most notable. My own experience with social media as a user is putting me in the class of skeptics, not outright refuseniks, but I have been asking about the value of social media in PR and bemoaning the lack of objective, independent research to evaluate the often breathless claims of its moral superiority.
At the [grow] blog, commenter @tamadear offers this important proviso:
Nobody responds well to “You’re wrong; I’m right” dissent, to those who dwell on our weaknesses. It makes us defensive and unwilling to listen.
This is very true, and is why in virtually all of my consulting (both inside and outside organizations) I always assume that I may be wrong and use language accordingly. There are far too many pronouncements, baseless and unresearched, in all of public relations, but especially in social media. I have used the term “self-described experts” many times because I have no visibility into the qualifications of the speaker (or writer). Many of them could be literally anyone, and will even call out their lack of qualifications as a benefit of working with them. From Drudge’s refusal to be called a journalist, to Chris Brogan’s declaration that he is not in public relations, I’m often left wondering why I am supposed to regard these people as authorities.
With a tip of the cap to @amandachapel, it’s “caveat emptor” in the world of communication these days — there is big money to be made (a worthy effort that I share the desire to attain) and precious little objective information to help the consumer evaluate claims. There are also few best practices that include true outcome measurement of the sort Olivier Blanchard describes in his excellent slide show, “The definitive social media ROI presentation.” My only beef with the esteemed BrandBuilder is that such end-state ROI calculations performed without care lead to assuming that correlation equals causation. We would love to see revenue increase and expenses go down concurrent with our social media campaign, but what percentage of the improvement is due to social media and how much due to other factors, including simple continuous improvement?
This is the point of the dissent discussion — for every Olivier and Mark there are five people claiming that the action of participating in social media IS the return on investment. That’s just not going to fly, and the more the experts try to convince people otherwise, the worse off we all are. The “conversation” MAY be important — it always has been prior to all of this Web. 2.0 stuff — but aside from questionable research by the people poised to benefit the most from its findings, there simply isn’t much data at this point to declare the social media discussion closed.
What’s your view?
Barron’s this week says that “Digital media and subscription TV are likely to see sizable gains in ad spending as a recovery gains…” A graphic shows that adverts on mobile phones and handhelds are estimated to increase by 33% from 2008-2013, Internet ads will rise more than 10% and pay TV ads by more than 7% during the period. Of course, another chart shows a “U-Shaped” curve for that spending increase, flat through next year. They don’t talk about any of the newest ad ideas though, showing that the social media revolution is still at the fringe of business consciousness regarding driving sales behavior.
Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal talked about the use of Twitter in crisis situations, sharing stories from wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk (@corkd), who got hacked by unsavory characters, and Scott Townsend from a Bartlesville, Okla.-based uniform company who tweeted after an ice storm, and a few others. I can see the application for this type of activity clearly — and I know that my Web traffic increases when I Tweet — so sharing news is great, provided you’re followed. I’ve gotten the most benefit from Twitter to simply meet people and see what others say during Twitter meetings, such as #prstudchat and #icchat. Whether this is building sufficient awareness to help me generate business, I have no clue! Heaven knows I spent enough time Twitter-ing today.
Tuesday at Kent State, the class I’m teaching got into the community theory of PR being advanced by Dr. Dean Kruckeberg of University of Northern Iowa. Fascinating discussion ensued as we investigated the implications of the theory, which holds that organizations are part of society and therefore owe society as a member of its community. I’m too new to this academic stuff, but this challenges me — I tend to be a garden variety capitalist, believing that a company’s only logical responsibility is to its owners, its purpose to make money lawfully. I need to think about this a while…
Following a long weekend of being unplugged in the lush green hills of Pennsylvania, I came home with real work to do — an excellent lunch with a colleague, a great meeting with a prospective client and then teaching the third day of class at Kent State. The rest of the week includes a client meeting, a group meeting with another prospective client and the arrival of a friend from out of town, plus a panel discussion with PRSA Akron and teaching. When exactly do I have time to blog or tweet?
I confess that I am wondering about the value of social media — it requires a significant time commitment (especially if one wants to be helpful by finding interesting posts and tweeting them out rather than just trumpeting one’s latest personal ruminations.) I know that this same question, from the reader’s perspective, is being asked in companies all around the country (at least…) I see great value in establishing connections, using the social media tools as a part of an overall outreach strategy, but thus far I’m not certain of the marketing value, perhaps because it’s been such a short time since I launched Communication AMMO.
There is no doubt that making personal connections with prospective clients will require employing other tools — I’ll attend the Institute for PR Summit on Measurement next month, as well as the IABC Heritage Region Conference here in Cleveland in hopes of broadening my business network. But with most of my Twitter followers being consultants and providers, and my blog readers coming mostly from my existing network, the need to expand beyond social media is readily apparent. Where are the clients? Are they not using these tools?
What’s your view?
Forrest Anderson, ace researcher and stakeholder relationship expert, writes in a recent blog post that organizations need to ensure they have clear strategic objectives in place before launching a social media campaign. Otherwise, he says, “social media is a tactic in search of a strategy.”
Forrest is a founding member of and a colleague on the Institute for PR Measurement Commission, so evaluating the effectiveness of PR campaigns is part of his business foundation. His statement brings to mind a similar sentiment I read just yesterday from Terry Morawski, who blogs at TMo’s Garage:
Companies used to desperately need a web site, but they weren’t sure why. Today, companies want a social media presence, but they aren’t sure why.
Strategy answers the why!
Social media has been an experiment for me these past few months, and one thing I have gained is access to new thinking, new perspectives and new people. Twitter helped me discover professional colleagues I didn’t know existed. My blog has been a source of fascinating idea exchange. But I still am not sure whether these personal satisfactions are helping my nascent business.
One reason for that is likely that I haven’t established key performance indicators — specific objectives against which to evaluate my social media activities.
Looks like I’ve got some work to do.
Erstwhile commentator David Murray (recently named editor of Vital Speeches of the Day; congrats!) has written about his struggles with the demands of social media, the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and gosh-knows-what’s-new, appealing to Internet pioneer Shel Holtz for help. Shel answered David’s flare and David has since replied on Shel’s blog. The conversation briefly examines the need for social media measurement, and I’ve added a comment to the polite fray.
The substance of my offering is that social media measurement should not stop with output, or the immediate result of the output (Web traffic, comments on postings, etc.) It should, as with any other communication activity, show some kind of impact on business objectives, whether financial or reputational.
Read the Murray-Holtz material and weigh in — is it reasonable to hold social media to similar account as other communication tactics?
Follow David on Twitter @TheMurr; Shel is @Shel. I’m @CommAMMO.
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