This frustrates me immensely as not only is it often true but I’ve always thought the PR industry has the most potential to rock social media strategy. PR is all about word-of-mouth right? [Reference great ad explaining the differences between PR, Advertising and co.]  So, why the bad rap?

I’m dedicating this week to a series of posts on where it went wrong and how to fix it. Starting with…

Campaign strategy vs. Brand strategy

Social media has tended to be funded on a campaign by campaign basis – short term activity.  Social media work by nature relies on building community and generating conversation – longer term commitment.

Traditional PRs cultivated their community, a.k.a. journalists, year round. A skilled PR could have a useful conversation any day of the week with a handful of key influencers they’d established a trusted relationship with.

Social media comes along and boom, the list of potential influencers suddenly grew by hundreds.  The tools needed to identify, sort, and categorise them are slow to appear

Slow and steady wins the race

On top of that,  categories fragmented further. Instead of being able to talk to people who broadly cover ‘Consumer Tech’, ‘B2B tech’, ‘Mobile tech’,  or ‘all of the above’, you need to be able to recall contacts with an interest in location-based service applications specifically for Symbian devices with a love of LOLCats and such like.  Sometimes there’s entire communities you’ve never heard of and it’s hard to define who, if anyone, would even be interested in a new Symbian LOLCat app.

It’s not possible to build trusted relations and have brand conversations in the short-term. Three months, the traditional quarterly budget or common campaign cycle, is not long enough.

If PR does succeed then what happens after the campaign has gone? Who looks after the abandoned profile or answers requests from a new blogger ‘friend’ who has suddenly moved down the list of importance?

The effort it takes to conceive and execute a social media campaign vs. investing in a longer-term brand strategy strikes me as a false economy.

I personally turn down a lot of short-term project work these days because I think it’s not possible to achieve much beyond securing a few blog posts. I also don’t like hearing from bloggers and community contacts that they weren’t looked after beyond the life-cycle of a specific campaign – I’m not in this industry for the short-term.

PR agencies with numerous mouths to feed don’t necessarily have that luxury but for their own sanity I hope they’re moving clients away from achieving short-term online objectives now. For in-house PR … what are you waiting for?!

Who could fix this?

1. Clients: Stop giving piecemeal social media projects to agencies
2. Agencies: Don’t let being competitive hold the industry back. Be brave and say ‘No’ sometimes

SOLUTION? Banish the term “can we get it out to some blogs?” from your vocabulary. Identify your most relevant communities [and not just blogs] from the start of your social media strategy and make that strategy brand-wide. Later you can build out to support campaign tactics.

Crib notes:

• Develop ongoing and long-term brand relationships
• Suspend traditional expectations like coverage
• Add value: Ask not what can my community do for me but what can I do for my community?

If your business needs to change direction and target varying communities manically throughout the year then your problems are probably bigger than social media.

Image: Rennett Stowe