PAN Communications prSPEAK

June’s elections in Iran brought social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube further onto the world stage. Social media continues to penetrate politics – its power being evident in President Barack Obama’s use of the medium as a major campaign tool in the 2008 presidential election. In the case of the Iran protests, ordinary citizens provided play-by-play journalism since traditional news organizations were shut down by authorities.

Dean Wright, in a blog post he wrote for Reuters, made an interesting argument. He pointed out that verification is a major issue. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said that content being shared might not be what it appears to be, either because of sloppy information from the person posting it, or deliberate deceit, either to create mischief or for political or other reasons. Dean warns that news outlets need to be extremely careful about what is written and said about material accessed from social networking sites – not taking it at face value.

So that led me to think about “verification” from a PR perspective (of course). While social media tears down the proverbial wall between the outside world and the companies that utilize these tools to communicate and interact with their following, how can we be sure of the validity of the message? Again, “not taking it at face value”, as Dean puts it.  

It comes down to a few things. Companies need to engage in conversations that may or may not have a direct link to their business, but offer something of value to the industry and or community, customers, partners, prospects, etc. We’ve all heard this before, but it really is a give-and-take. The more frequently companies engage in social media conversations and the more transparent the communication is  — no contrived marketing jargon that is – the more likely they are to build not only a network of followers, but invested participants in their business and industry.

An important way for companies to be seen by the outside world as a legitimate expert and resource in their space is to leverage existing partners and customers in more open social media platforms like industry forums, blogs and portals. There is power in numbers. A single real-time repository of shared expertise has a greater chance of being perceived less as a marketing or PR tool and more as a go-to resource, which can go a long way toward improving brand reputation, recognition and bumping your company up in the Google search rankings.

But what about leveraging interactions with existing customers to further validate the social media message and build brand loyalty? I’m not talking about simply responding to a disgruntled customer via Twitter to provide him/her with a rapid and satisfying response, though this certainly has merit. I’m talking about using social media to constantly evolve the brand, educate potential prospects to real-time challenges and best practices and offer solutions all based in on-the-spot analysis and interpretation of current customer interactions taking place. In today’s competitive marketplace reacting is a weakness. Companies must proactively anticipate to turn heads and break through the noise. By utilizing interactions with those closest to the business and its products (customers, partners, shareholders) social media content is built on transparency, a free flow of ideas and a genuine investment of one entity in another, whether it be company to customer, company to prospect, customer to customer, partner to prospect … well, you get the idea.

In 1964, author and media pundit Marshall McLuhan introduced a controversial concept that would forever alter mainstream media (and subsequently, our role as PR practitioners): “The medium is the message.”

In his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan writes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways and argues that any given medium affects an individual’s understanding of its content.

Without getting mired too deeply in his media classifications of hot/high definition and cool/low definition media, much of McLuhan’s theory revolved around the senses receiving the communication: sight, sound and touch.

As PR practitioners today, our job is ultimately to ensure the successful receipt of our clients’ messages by their target audiences. Far too often we labor first and foremost over the content of our message—be it a press release, bylined article, white paper, blog post or tweet—while relegating the message’s delivery and medium to an afterthought.

While there is consideration for the medium, the decision is generally influenced by the content and target of the message, e.g., “We want to reach young adults, ages 18-24 who earn less than $60,000 per year… let’s Tweet!” or “Our buyers are teenage guys… let’s do a YouTube campaign!”

Of course, I’m making generalizations here, but the truth is that many times we choose a particular medium based on the statistical, demographic information of its audience rather than taking the time to understand the effectiveness of the medium for influencing the “aha!” factor.

Successful PR is more than having a great message. It also goes beyond delivering that message to the right recipients. From start to finish, it involves a series of decisions that, as mentioned above, ultimately ensure that the right message (read: understood the way it was intended) is received by the right audience, leading to the right response or action. In a presentation to the staff recently comparing various wire services, junior associate Adam Novak comically quipped, “If a press release goes out over the wire but nobody sees it, did it really go out?”

Obviously, the medium is going to impact the successful delivery of a message, but let’s not forget that our job is not just to deliver the message. Rather it is to make sure it is received and interpreted the way you, or your client, want it to be.

We have tools at our disposal today to create and distribute content quickly and easily over any medium imaginable, and at PAN, we’re finding that clients are eager to make these a strategic part of their message. Where “pitch” and “press release” were formerly limited by pre-defined parameters, PR practitioners around the world are now enjoying the freedom and creativity to reshape the way we do our jobs.