Why PR is Ruining Social Media

I remember when social networking was about sharing personal content with family, friends, and colleagues. Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of inauthentic brand communications littering my streams with noise.

The Conflict

I do ‘like’ certain brands, and want my friends to know which brands I have a particular affinity for. However, I don’t want to get spammed with creepy questions, or comments from a brand spokesperson. (or Brand Ambassadors)

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM3.png

Branding and PR are intrinsically linked

I subscribe to the idea that it’s possible to create and maintain a brand through social media. I don’t believe PR is the most effective way of doing that.

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM4.png

The Dell Example

I like some of the stuff Dell’s been doing, but think some of their more recent initiatives have been misguided.

Richard Binhammer (@RichardatDELL) according to this interview, Richard was involved with a team that intended to build Dell’s presence in communities around the world, and was subsequently asked to interact with bloggers.

It’s important to note that I think Richard is doing a great job at being a part of many communities, and establishing dialogues with influential people around the web.

That said, I don’t believe attaching a friendly, well-spoken, public face to the brand is addressing the root cause for needing a friendly, well-spoken, public face. – Don’t get me wrong, I think Richard would be a great member of any community regardless of whether he dropped the “atDELL” or not.

The real question is: Why are so many negative Dell conversations occurring in the first place? Sure, you can make use of fancy PR strategies, but it doesn’t correct the underlying cause.

The Dell Social Media Listening Center & DellCares are recent initiatives that are, seemingly, intended to monitor the entire social web & respond when appropriate. Again, this is just my opinion, but I think this is one big PR stunt. If you check out this article, you’ll see a couple people behind a glass door, in a dimly lit room with about 10 large monitors displaying all kinds of data. Its reminiscent of that command centre Jack Bauer visits in 24. It looks cool, but information about what they do with the data they collect doesn’t seem to be available.

From visiting the @DellCares Twitter account, it looks like they’re a customer care centre that reacts to brand mentions. Although I see the value in customer care via social media; Twitter’s inherent 140 character limit makes helping users somewhat difficult.

Again, the big question is: Why are users so frustrated that they resort to posting negative information about Dell? Not to say social media isn’t important, but why aren’t traditional customer care channels working? As a user of a Dell Laptop; if I needed customer care I would definitely use Google to find self-serve support first, check-out their .com site second, make a phone call third, and only post negative information if I finally gave up.

To be clear, I’m not saying what Dell is doing is wrong, I’m saying it seems like a PR play to mitigate how far negative brand mentions travel. In doing this, they’ve subscribed to a method that’s ruining social media.

Noise & Authenticity

Here are my two big concerns with PR gaining a foothold in social media.

1. PR causes brands to create a lot of noise. As I said earlier, ‘liking’ a brand is very different from wanting to receive a status update in my news feed, every day from a spokesperson from the brand. If a brand has something real, something important, or something beneficial to say to me, I’d appreciate hearing it. But don’t clutter up my news feed just for the sake of engaging with your audience. This is the big reason I don’t think social media PR will ever be as successful as social media marketing initiatives.

Side Note: The best social media marketing initiatives are either entertaining or useful. This is, generally, a polarized scale; meaning, the most useful things don’t focus on entertaining you, and the most entertaining things don’t focus on providing utility (and by utility, I don’t mean usability.)

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM2.png

PR, generally, falls in the middle. Most of it isn’t useful or entertaining. I’d suggest upwards of 90% of it gets ignored completely. Within the next two years, I think social media filtering will advance to the point where community members will be able to ignore brands attempts at meaningless engagement, and pay more attention to their family, friends, and colleagues. I also think this evolution will regress many business from focusing on social media in a PR respect, and focus on creating provocative, engaging content that allows users to share initiatives amongst themselves.

2. PR is often unauthentic. Although I like & appreciate RichardatDELL, and DellCares, there’s a strategic business reason for bringing them into existence. I believe Dell is a smart company, and has very smart advisors, but they are using their understanding of communities, and human nature to improve brand perception. I’ll say there’s some utility in having customer service available through Twitter, but I don’t believe it’s more useful than an easy to use, salient, chat portal on Dell’s .com site. It seems to me that disguising true intentions of PR is less authentic than marketing initiatives. (For instance, I expect marketing initiatives from Old Spice; when Isaiah Mustafa’s YouTube responses were introduced, I had no question that he was an actor that was representing Old Spice. The content was entertaining while involving the community. Additionally, my news feed wasn’t spammed by him, and I developed brand affinity.)

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM5.png

Conclusion

I recently read a post by David Armano on his blog Logic + Emotion that suggested a framework for creating a social business plan. I felt that he hit all the right points, but then I read this related presentation “Community Engagement: Managing Communities Across Digital Embassies” and started questioning long-term value of this framework. Slides 11-20 seem to directly speak to reasons I believe PR is ruining social media. Specifically, slide 14 that talks about ambassadors and envoys. In many cases they’re the same person, the community manager or community management group, and they’re the ones doing this low-level “Social Engagement” as an attempt to facilitate low-level “interactions, communications, and participatory behaviours between individuals”.

That said, I’m not completely discounting David’s framework. In fact, it’s just the implementation and examples that were provided in the presentation that make me feel that some of these deep insights are being misused. I agree with the principles of embassies, outposts, ambassadors and envoys, but think they should be used to support social media marketing initiatives. Well crafted marketing initiatives, that use rich content and employ an iterative brand equity framework can be much more effective than more frequent low-level engagement methods.

In the end, I don’t want to be friends with the majority of brand spokes people; and they don’t really want to be my friend either. The fact of the matter is that they get paid to interact with me and they have a set of goals that motivate them. If businesses are planning on becoming truly social, they’ll need to do something they probably won’t ever do – stop being afraid.

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM6.png

For instance, if Dell really cared about me, they’d put a lot more weight behind their “Ideastorm” platform. There are hundreds of fantastic ideas on there, many have been implemented. Making this system more robust, interactive, and creating a community of “ambassadors” and “envoys” who actively seek out this type of information & follow-up with community members would be a great way to use social media resources. Maybe one day product development, and beta-testing can be facilitated through social media. Obviously, the issue with no stealth product development is that first-to-market benefits could potentially be reduced. (i.e. If Apple told everyone a year in advance that the iPad was coming, and how beta-testing was going, it might have made the iPad v1 better, but would have shown their hand to companies like Samsung, Dell, and Microsoft.)

To those in social media public relations

I’ve worked with several large PR firms over the years, and appreciate the work you do. I just don’t think you should be leading social media activities. I think many marketers have taken your advice, and have engaged you to lead some initiatives, but I strongly believe you’re ruining social media for everyone. Please let content & creativity lead marketing initiatives, be more transparent, better understand what members of social networks expect, and stop getting brands to use spokes people that actively try to make us believe they want to be friends. [example: JenniewithAXE is an employee who could care less about what my new years resolutions are, so why is she asking me like she’s my best friend? What would be more expected is if you created an iPhone app that tracks how well you’re doing at achieving your new years resolution, and allows users to post their status to Facebook & Twitter. It could potentially be made more viral by tying into a leaderboard that shows who’s doing the best at achieving their goals, and allows other community members to add supportive comments that spawn push notifications on the users iPhone. – like “Way to go!”]

http://thejordanrules.com/IMG/PR_SM1.png

I know the friendly spokes person tactic tends to work short-term, and it removes any barrier to participation, but keep in mind those status updates appear in my news feed. You’re participating in my network, if you keep hitting me with messages that are perceived to be irrelevant, it’s less likely I’ll pay attention to you at all. The response rate isn’t that grate anyway: considering the AXE Facebook page has about 730,000 fans (which would translate to over 1M with the halo effect) having 150 likes is about a 0.02% response rate; is that worth frustrating some of your fans?

I’d appreciate any comments, questions, or feedback you might have. If you don’t think PR is ruining social media, let me know what you believe. If you post a comment here, or ask a question on twitter, I’ll definitely respond. Happy 2011. @thejordanrules

Permalink

| Leave a comment  »

Leave a Reply