Social Media over reliance reflects strategic PR dilemma

July 17, 2009

Recently in the wake of a bad press, a large corporate house handed over its crisis management to the PR agency which suggested the exclusive social media solutions, since the target audience has been net savvy. This made me introspect as to whether the social media is fast taking over the prime time or there is a strategic PR dilemma which is leading to over reliance on this new age medium. As a practitioner of brand management I am also a proponent of social media, often speak endlessly before the client to convince as to how social media is valuable. But the role of social media is effective only when we make use of a prudent media mix, including the traditional media, television and social media.

Unfortunately, what is happening is that like in the early days of Web design, SEO, PPC, email, and banners before it, there’s too much swooning and not enough thinking about social media right now. PR professionals are so engrossed in “how to use it” that they often don’t even think “why to use it”. The philosophy of relying on the exclusive use of social media under the pretext of the target audience being net savvy is in my opinion an anti-thesis of branding. This is because the very ethos of branding suggests that the brand is built by audience far greater than those who actually use the product. But at times such quick-fix solutions seem to be a win-win situation for both the agency and the client, since this agency also quotes the least price in the competitive pitch.

It seems the US Presidential elections and the emergence of the Social Media President in Barack Obama has made the public relations professionals across the world vouch for the use of new age technology to spread the awareness campaign. In almost all the competitive pitch where we have presented our PR plan, I feel we are not just obsessed but also suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder as far as the use of social media is concerned. While it is true that the American President’s use of the social media will go in the folklore of the PR history for the participation and communication with all American citizens, the question remains: can every PR campaign or brand recreate this kind of two-way conversation in every society?

The question becomes all the more critical in India since there have not been very many scientific studies to understand the audience’s concern which is always critical to the success of any PR campaign. As a practitioner of the trade, my understanding is that it was the overall PR strategy and not mere social media tactics that was critical to the success of the American President’s campaign. After all, it is the PR strategy that defines the success or failure of any brand or campaign and Barrack Obama’s success has been no exception.

Public Relations strategy is all about the process of identifying what is top of mind in a community and relating your brand, product, organization or campaign to what is most relevant to your community. That process is really all about listening to your audience and making what you have today relevant to their concerns. PR strategists have to first of all become true marketers to understand that what consumer wants, what they get, where are the gaps and how their product can fit into that gap. The same logic goes true for the foot soldiers of PR who deal with the media on a day-to-day basis.

Many of the PR practitioners today would lead you to believe that social media is ready for prime time and that you should forsake all other forms of publicity. That is probably a wishful thinking which is too ahead of its time. While consumers clearly want to engage with brands in social media, the number of social media users, though growing fast, is not yet overwhelmingly large. Moreover, the fallacy of “we’ll engage with our customers and let them do our publicity for us by telling their friends” reads well in a marketing plan, but is exceptionally difficult to execute unless your brand is compelling in a way that most simply aren’t.

What has become fancy but unavoidable today is that more for our own convenience than any strategic reasons we often try to convince the clients for the use of social media. This saves the agency from the dirty job of dealing with the journalists who belong to the traditional media. Social media channels can be highly effective public relations tools, but they can't replace traditional media entirely. Successful public relations programs meld social media and traditional media with other communications tools and techniques.

The best part in the business of branding is that there are no rules for a successful path. What worked for Barack Obama may never work for you or me. So, don’t be shy to get back to the old-fashioned PR ways of laying down your ideas on what to do in order to get people to learn about the brand, how to identify business with your brand, how to create awareness, how to create a viral campaign, how to interact, and how to manage a crisis (when someone talks bad about your company or product).

Social Media has the potential to penetrate deep into the target audience but it is finally PR Professionals who have to position themselves as the best qualified to oversee the extent of social media mechanisms an organization uses to communicate with its stakeholders. This is essentially because public relations puts a high priority on the whole organization-stake holder relationship than marketing or advertising does.