In short, while there is no right and wrong answer, my view is that you need to do both. All PR consultants have to embrace social media as part of broadening their skills in building and managing relationships and engaging with influencers.  At the same time there are certain skills which are important to the development and execution of really strong communications campaigns which traditional PR people just do not have.

In the future, I would expect PR practitioners to continue to provide top level counsel, understand their clients business and markets intimately, to use all their skills to craft stories and to then sell those stories into all the key influencers in a given space. Social media channels have become a hugely important part of the influencer outreach and as such firmly sit in the domain of the PR professional. In some ways, I think about this aspect of social media as ‘social media relations.’  It is doing what we have alway done but using the new channels that are open to us. (In many ways we can probably start dropping the word ‘social’ because there are very few media outlets that do not have a social element. Maybe we should just be talking about ‘the media’ again, albeit a media that has undergone a huge transformation – a subject for another day).  

However, social media, or rather the internet itself, has opened up a whole new way of communicating directly with the consumer rather than through the classic third party influencer. This is the area where I believe traditional PR practitioners could benefit from getting access to some specialist skills, as brands take on the role of communicating directly with the individual through these digital channels.  Specifically I think the areas which require investment in new skills for PR agencies are as follows:

-          Skills and a technology platform to provide data, analysis and insight to help focus campaigns on the most influential nodes of any single client issue or discussion. This requires analytical skills more closely associated with the advertising, direct marketing and the search world’s than it does PR.

-          Individuals who can develop digital strategies based on the insights gleaned from the above, but also using an understanding of how to use digital channels to maximize the engagement with the individual through every touch point within the organization.

-          The skills to create rich digital assets. The ability to develop web properties, create data visualizations or a highly interactive and immersive experience on YouTube is a very different skill all together.

Again referring to one of Todd’s posts  (I have always had a huge amount of respect for Todd and Shift since they created the SMR template – a genius piece of marketing),  it is very hard for a PR agency to bring all of these skills in house because not all clients will need them all of the time. That being said, I think that is where as a group Next Fifteen has an advantage in as much as it has six fantastic PR brands representing some of the best blue chip brands in the world.

Any PR agency that doesn’t bring all these skills in house can still deliver fantastic campaigns if it works closely with the clients’ other marketing agencies. It is the integration of these skills, not whose office they sit in, which is the important bit. However, there is one other thing that needs to happen, and that is a clients’ willingness to try to integrate the different skills more closely. Ultimately regardless of what an agency may provide, it is irrelevant if the buyer still wants to buy in silos with the PR person buying social media relations and the marketing person buying a shiny new web property.

The good news is that there is certainly no shortage of opportunities to pursue, the difficult bit is working out what are the specific skills and capabilities an agency needs to overlay on top of all the services a traditional agency would deliver. I saw a recent post from Todd Defren  where he was asking a very similar question.

His question was asking “what you would do differently if you were setting up an agency from scratch today.”  As I gear up for my new role within the Next Fifteen Group, I am going through this very process right now and have been giving it a lot of thought. That being said, I am coming at this from a slightly different perspective, in that we are looking develop a consultancy that provides complementary (not competing) services to Next Fifteen’s existing PR brands: Lexis, Text 100, Outcast, Bite, MBooth and 463.

I think it is sometimes easy to jump straight into thinking about the specific services that a progressive communications group needs to deliver rather than thinking about what are the broader drivers among our clients (and indeed our clients’ audiences) which require the evolution of our services. I won’t pretend I have captured them all here but I think there are three key drivers that I consider the most important:

1. Organisational change: As the digital landscape changes, companies are struggling to understand how the different digital channels should be leveraged across not just the marketing function but every single function in an organization.
2. Data Explosion: PR has never been know for being particularly scientific or being driven by data. The free availability of data and the ability to capture and analyse data demands that we leverage data much more heavily in our quest to influence an audience
3. Rich Digital Content Is King: Stating the obvious, but communications is now highly visual and as such is centered around ‘social objects’ which can be everything from a video to a game or widget.

One thing I do know is that for traditional PR agencies, the  media is as important as ever not least because of the power of digital channels in propagating this content. On top of that, the core skill of building relationships with key influencers will continue to be a prized asset of great PR agencies.

We won’t be launching our new consultancy until later in the year but in the meantime we have the exciting challenge of working with our sister companies and our clients to determine where we put our initial focus.

Kathy Cripps from the Council of PR Firms gave an interesting presentation sharing some of the data from a recent survey (which I understand is confidential). However, it confirmed what I think we all know: the end of last year and the beginning of this year was horrible, most firms looked at, and in some cases took, fairly drastic measures to reduce costs and clients wanted more for less. (If you haven’t seen this video it is a must – courtesy of Tod Defren’s PRsquared blog, which is where I first saw it ).

There were a couple of other elements of the discussion which struck a chord with me.

First for new business. There were definitely mixed feelings about the current number of leads out there that however there were four things that everyone wanted to get off their chest:

1. Clients who don’t give some sort of budget as part of the pitch process are just not helping the process
2. Many clients are selecting from very long “shortlists”
3. The selection process seems to be getting more and more drawn out for even the smallest accounts
4. It is just plain rude when, after having spent $$$$ pitching, when the prospect doesn’t even call to tell you the result – trust me, it does happen

In  a bid to help smooth the RFP process, the Council of PR Firms has produced an RFP builder to help clients choose the right agency by following a best practice blueprint – great job!

And now for social media. Anyone who knows me, will know I am passionate about our role in the fast changing communications landscape (I would actual argue that we are almost at the point where the ‘social’ can be taken out of ‘social media’ but that’s another story.) There were three conversations among the group that confirmed my own experiences:

1. As an industry we need to bring on people who are more visual in their thinking (creatives, TV scriptwriters, designers)
2. Digital is a huge incremental fee opportunity for us to secure fee from other marketing disciplines and it really is happening
3. Successful agencies are the ones that will seize the opportunity digital gives us to use data to deliver against marketing metrics (traffic, clicks, purchases, downloads and ultimately customer acquisition costs)

Overall a very useful temperature check and being relatively new to the Bay Area in PR career terms, it was great to meet some of the people who we compete against but until today have never met.

Previously published on BiteMarks.

It was interesting to see some of the latest findings in a study entitled 2009 Digital Readiness Report, released by iPressroom. It highlights the fact that PR is ‘leading the social media revolution inside an organization’ which is great to hear. It was also interesting to note that PR lags marketing in just two disciplines: email marketing and SEO, but leads in the disciplines of blogging, social networking, social search and micro-blogging. There is a great post on Jason Falls blog discussing the report in more detail.

I am clearly biased but I am passionate about the fact that the discipline of PR, which is routed in influence, should be the rightful owner of social media. In so doing, we can transform PR into a discipline that cuts across all departments within the organization.

However, if we are to succeed, I think there is one big obstacle we need to overcome – how we use data. If you look at the two disciplines where the PR profession is lagging marketing they are the two areas which are also driven by data. If we are to succeed it is imperative that we become masters of data and how we use data to drive campaigns.

There are lots of great companies out there which are helping to provide the industry with the tools we need to put data at the center of what we do. (I particularly liked BuddyMedia who I met last week in New York).

Yesterday I had another reminder. The ad agency of one of our clients made a grab for a part of the tactical execution of the Facebook component of a campaign. The rationale, according to them, was that they hold all the data analytics for the web site so “it makes sense.” The great skill we have as PR professionals is that we understand how to create and drive content that influences and engages people. However, that will only take us so far unless we show how we then turn that engagement into paying customers.

We are making good headway as an industry but the battle over data is still far from won. 

*Also posted on Bitemarks

We have recently been grappling with simplifying the development of a comms strategy down to its bare bones. It is sometimes easy to lose track of the ultimate goal in amongst the bewildering array of channels (online and offline), tactics, and monitoring tools.

I am sure there are more than three, but if we can answer these three questions then we are 95% on our way to develop a campaign that changes perceptions about a product, service or company.  So here are the three questions:

1. What conversation do you want to be associated with?
2. What are the key conversations your customers care about?
3. What are the most influential points (online or offline) of these conversations?

If we can answer these then everything else flows from them. The secret is knowing how to get the answers! Again there is no right and wrong way of getting the answers, it is more about just using the best available tools and applying a logical approach.

We all know that work and home lives are converging as work practices become more flexible and as so-called millennials become an ever increasing proportion of the work place population. Consequently, it is only natural that our use of different communications channels becomes increasingly blurred. On top of that, if you look at how leadership philosophy has changed, it is now considered to be just as important for people to know you as a person as it is for you to be able to make the right strategic decisions.

Against this background, I must confess to being somewhat surprised by an article with Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn in the Sunday Telegraph, in which he blankly refused to answer some fairly straightforward questions such as: what is your favorite holiday destination? favorite car?

I certainly understand the need to keep some elements of professional and home lives separate, but equally it is important to know a bit about the personal story of people behind the business. I think LinkedIn is a great tool and I use it fairly heavily for work. However, it struck me as odd, the CEO of LinkedIn, taking the ‘social’ completely out of the ‘professional social network’. Maybe LinkedIn really is that serious a business? With a valuation of $1bn, it is obviously doing something very right.

And then I saw this video which made me laugh out loud. If you work on the agency side…enjoy! If you work on the client side….enjoy!

I picked up my new magazine and while I had seen a few of the stories online, I certainly hadn’t read a couple of the features in full. I was pleasantly surprised. I actually thought it was really good. Not too much news because I see all of that online, but a good mix of interesting features and best practice examples. I had to smile at the piece showing the sample organizational chart of the comms function of a well known brand (I can’t remember which) but those of you who have been in PR for a while (especially if you have worked for a Korean or Taiwanese company) will no doubt have had numerous requests from clients for ‘best practice org charts from their competitors or from well known blue chip brands. Those of you who have been charged with pulling one together equally know how hard they are to come by.

So why am I writing this? As you may have guessed from the time lag, I should point out it took some courage because I am not sure praising a print title is in vogue right now! Firstly, it isn’t every day I feel moved to praise PR Week.  Secondly, I genuinely think it is a good product. Thirdly, the irony wasn’t lost on me that I actually got a chance to read the feature on digital and another article on Digital. What was even better, we got a hardcopy press cutting for Bite. Cutting books…those were the days!

*Also posted on Bitemarks

The whole process of putting together the presentation was fascinating because we suspected that the digital agencies would pitch ‘building a shiny object’ on the basis that “if we build it, they will come”; the competing PR agency would pitch engagement with existing audiences in existing channels; and the measurement company would probably do loads of data analysis up front and at the end, but were unsure what they would do in the middle.

What struck me more than anything during the process was that it was a futile exercise arguing the rights and wrongs of the different approaches because a successful campaign will probably comprise all three elements which is why we are seeing so much change in the overall agency landscape right now. Last week saw another raft of announcement as Voce acquired a web firm.

In going through this process, what occurred to me is that there are an awful lot of people claiming to be social media experts (very eloquently argued here by Brian Solis), but the real experts in my mind are the ones that are communications experts who can transcend channels and disciplines. Having a social media expert who understands how to use Twitter or Facebook is a bit like having an expert who understands how to use the telephone (you get my point – it is just a channel). However, a communications expert that understands how to use the power of multiple channels (both old and new) in tandem is really valuable.

And the result of the pitch? I don’t know yet. But it did have me leaving the room thinking…I wonder what background the social media experts were from? Are the real social media experts not the ones who are the real communications experts?

*Also on Bitemarks

The reason I mention this is it made me think of our organization and the degree to which we are driving change through the organization, asking everyone to embrace ‘2.0 thinking’ in everything we do. When people ask ‘how do you make Social Media scalable in an organization’ (link to previous post), the answer lies in not only helping the organization visualize a future where digital thinking is embedded in every facet of the business, but most importantly making it relevant to everyone by helping them see what the future looks like, whatever their role.

We have yet to encapsulate the impact the PR agency of the future will have on our people and on our clients into a single ‘putting a man on the moon’ statement, but regardless, it is a pretty exciting time to be running an agency right now. What we need to think about is what do we want our clients and Biters to be saying about us in 2012? But maybe more importantly, what do we want our clients’ customers and partners to be saying about us in 2012?