Social Media and PR

The word social has lost meaning.  Reminds me of what happened to the word network.  Nobody knows what I mean when I say ‘network’.  I have to Dymo broadcast or wireless or neural modifiers to it to be understood and I still won’t network with anybody or thing.  How long before the word social becomes a verb?  It’s already too close.  A friend recently promised to socialize me to a business associate.  This is business jargonization at its finestization and it sounds unpleasant.  I wanted to ask instead for an introduction but I didn’t want to out myself for the out-of-it goof that I am.

So now I need to know what social media is.  Is there another kind of media?

So.  I’ve been toe-dipping into the PR world (again… on and off every few years) and I am already ready to pronounce: nothing is changed except the topic.

I take it back.  This has changed: PR is more thoroughly out of control, whether you are client or agency, than it ever was.  At the same time, you are encouraged to believe that PR of a kind never before possible is newly possible thanks to ’social media’.  This is either true and truly enervating or crap and nothing is changed.

What is new is that PR people are being encouraged to believe that social media technologies and networks are together a thing that was conceived in PR heaven just for their use.  This is just silly.  Social media technologies belong to the kids who create them.  And they create them just because it occurs to them to do so, like a primal urge.  (Which makes me think of a  metaphor: PR is the act of rubbing clients’ balloons against walls of primal urges and making the one stick to the other, which effect wears off pretty quickly.)

I’ve gone too far but this much is true: social media is the topic and the fearful chatter is about the loss of control.  Again, this is silly.  Control.  Right.  It’s a primal urge: the urge to control.  Convince me that I have it and I have satisfied a primal urge.  The classic Press Release with pick-ups can be convincing.

The era of the well-crafted message delivered by the well-coiffed talking head is concluded.  Thanks to social media technologies, things are fully and finally out of control, just as any good and interesting conversation should be, and that’s what it is out there.  It is a conversation, or, better still, it is many millions of conversations

You can look at it this way.  Social media is a (potentially) monstrous conference call.  You can tell them anything you want and, realistically, respond to a few questions but then everybody on the call goes away to think, say and do whatever the hell they please.  Nothing has changed except that there are (potentially) millions on the call which is, of course, a good thing.

My snippy attitude will abate, I’m sure, and Toronto’s Social Media Group has already shown me enough to convince me that I should stop right here.  That outfit has found a good way to leverage social media technologies.  They are rubbing their client’s balloons against the walls in the places where the conversation has already started.  It is still about 1) the audience and 2) the creative and they know this but they have found a way to nourish the conversations with and through social media.  (There.  I used the phrase without backhanding it.  My snippy attitude is falling away.)

In a confused nod to McLuhan, I’ll stretch to the close with this: It is still about 1) the audience and 2) the creative so don’t be duped by any technologies, the best of which are wonderfully creative and exactly fitted to their audience (like balloons rubbed against primal walls.)

I did say ‘confused’.

Later
–B–

~ by brettmcateer on November 13, 2008.