Social Media and PR 2 – The Membership Is The Medium

What of the social media technologies and networks and wikis and widgets and wombats and so wan?  What are PR folk (and straight-up marketers, for that matter) to do with this thing called social media?

By way of an answer, I have another confused nod to McLuhan (see prior confusion) that I think nuggifies things nicely:

The Membership Is the Medium.

Let me deconstruct:  Social = community, and medium = conveyance.  Ergo and truly, when the community conveys the message = the membership is the medium.

You already knew it.  You know about viral marketing.  (I might argue that there is no such thing as viral marketing, not as an act of will, anyways, but I wouldn’t argue it in this tavern.)  Word-of-mouth is a better name for it because it removes me, the talking head who is not to be trusted, from the scenario and that brings me to the sub-text for this post: “Hey, PR!  Get out of the way!”  Words travel on the tongues of people who care enough (well or badly) to talk about whatever it is that is keeping you up tonight.   They’re doing the talking.  Listen and try to be helpful but for Marshall’s sake, stay out of the way.

What are PR folk to do with social media?  My prescription follows.

The community is your audience.  The members of the audience (none of whom are paying much attention to the hired messenger, by the way) carries, delivers, receives and repeats the morphing amorphous message through a million conversations.  When we say we must know our audience I say we must first listen if we are to know.  Listen (PR Job No.1), add the juice (the creative), and then find a way to drip feed the conversation play it back (PR Job No.2).

Why the drip feed?  Because nobody really wants to hear from the talking head.  (Speak into the microphone, man.)  The audience is deep into their own conversation and has neither the time nor an interest in a lecture, so show some respect.  The fact is, they’re doing your job.  They’re talking about your clients.  Get out of their way.  Do not wave your hands.  Do not jump up and down.  Instead, do the new job of supporting the conversation: put the facts, stories, angles, beauties and sorrows within reach.  If it is trustworthy and genuine there will be uptake.  And if it is a spitball and a fraud, there will also be uptake, but you won’t like the spew-back.

I watched and learned that the membership is the medium when I had the good fortune to contribute to the growth of a property called TravelPod.  That property is now the property of Expedia but back then, it was the spawn of Ottawa-based social networking pioneer Luc Levesque and here’s what happened.   Luc built a social networking platform to first support his own wandering communications needs, opened it up to others and, in time, became noticed by one, then another and then another assignment editor.  TravelPod got some nice coverage on its own merits and every instance generated a surge in membership registrations.  You can appreciate that a committed (as demonstrated by the fact of registration) travel-oriented social networking community would represent a coveted audience for advertisers, and that was the business model.  I became involved to help bump things up a notch; to induce some more of those registration surges, grow the membership/audience and enrich the property further.  A few press releases had some impact, but the story wasn’t changing, really, and I wasn’t getting it done.

Then, during one of those long drawn-out business conversations, an obvious fact became a crystallized concept.  The kinds of folks who blog do it for readers.  Their rewards are the comments; their best reward a mirror, or better, many mirrors: mirrors they will hold up to friends and family and strangers on the bus.  I think we always knew these things—always knew our audience—but we had not been doing the right things to serve and support what the audience wanted to do.  We made some changes.

Here’s a good example.  I had been producing the monthly newsletter and I was trying to write such compelling travel material (from my basement office, of course) that the members would immediately Send To A Friend and every friend in their contacts folder.  It was around that time that I began to understand that I was a talking head to which no one was listening.  It was also around that time that we realized that the audience relly wanted to hear and read about its own self. 

We turned the mirror on to the membership.  We mined members’ posts and photos for the best of the best and lined them up with a decent theme (i.e, travel destination) for each issue of the newsletter.  We asked for and gave credit for advice and tips.  We ran contests and glorified the winners.   We did all of these things in the newsletter and every newletter went out through email and remained a prominent link on the homepage.  We made it so easy to see, share and subscribe to the newsletter that it grew daddy long legs.  Eventually, the mirrors were migrated on to the site itself.  Membership soared (as travel blog sites go) and the acquisition followed.

When the membership is the medium, it can happen.

Later,
–B–

~ by brettmcateer on November 14, 2008.