Public Relations Strategery

This article originally appeared in PR Daily.

If you work in the marketing industry (“social media” is not an industry), you’ve probably either read or heard about this anonymous piece in Digiday and either scoffed at or empathized with the author’s plight.

If you haven’t, here are two of the most resonant points:

I sat in a brainstorm. We came up with a bunch of content ideas for our brands’ social channels—images, GIFs, and lines of witty copy. I went back to my desk, opened a container of leftover lo mein, and realized I’d wasted the last four years of my life.

And:

The underlying issue is that social departments place too much value on engagement. Those “likes,” “comments,” “shares,” “re-tweets,” and “pins” are the metrics that social content creators use to (1) judge success and (2) dictate what future content looks like. Here’s the catch. The people who are engaging with that content are predominantly worthless.

As someone who works at an agency that provides similar support to our clients, I empathized. I’ve been that anonymous author. I’ve lived that life. I feel your pain, anonymous author.

Here’s the thing, though: Empathy and pity aren’t going to solve the problem.

Instead of going back to our leftover lo mein to come up with more variations of “Keep Calm and Carry On” posts while questioning our life choices, I figured it would be more productive to offer tips on how to get out ourselves and our clients out of this rut. (Unless your job and/or bonus depends on amassing more “likes,” fans, and followers—in which case, have I got a lead for you.)

First things first—stop taking yourself so seriously. You’re managing Facebook and Instagram, not performing brain surgery. Stop thinking your customers are waiting with bated breath for your content. They’re not.

Stop treating your social media like paid media, and start treating it for what it is—a place for brands to come out of their ivory towers and interact, listen, talk, and share with their customers. Experiment. Be on your customers’ journey with them. Try new things. Engage in actual conversations. Act as though you actually care about what your customers need and want rather than what will get the most “likes.”

“But,” you say, “my client/boss wants to see the ROI of our efforts and if I can’t show the numbers going up, our budgets are going to get cut/I’m going to get fired!”

Here’s where you change the conversation. Review the metrics you’ve been using, and throw them away. Build a new key performance indicator chart, one that’s actually tied to your business goals.

If your goal is to increase e-commerce sales, show how much traffic is coming in through your social channels. If your goal is to improve your brand’s online reputation, point to the quality of the search results. If your goal is to increase awareness, point to the total number of mentions across all media channels. If your goal is customer service, track how many cases you’ve resolved via social media. If your boss/client gives you a hard time about wanting to see more “likes,” comments, and pins, that’s because you haven’t given her any other metrics from which to judge success. Figure out what role you think social media should be playing for your organization and measure against that.

You also should work with everyone in the marketing mix. Figure out what role social media plays in that regard. Figure out how you can use social media to help advance the other areas. Figure out how they can help advance social media. As a component of marketing, social media does not exist in a vacuum—and neither can you.

Rather than fighting for more dollars, headcount, or attention, look at the bigger picture and take a realistic view of where social media can and should fit in. It’s quite possible you’re stuck in this never-ending loop of crappy content because you have a much bigger budget than that of other areas and your clients (internal and external) want to get their money’s worth.

Don’t be afraid to look at the bigger picture and say: “What if we took some of the money we have allocated to Facebook ads and reallocated that to PR so that we can get some more earned media coverage? That would, in turn, drive more social engagement, because we’d be tapping into those publications’ social media channels, too.”

Finally, be ready to find and create content that makes your brand/organization unique. Everyone and everything has a story, so instead of following some social media guru’s best practices formula for online content that will increase followers, friends, and comments, think about the story you want to share and the conversations your customers actually want to have.

When building your social media content calendar, create and share content about your organization’s history, or the “why” behind some of your business decisions, or your organizational culture, your causes, or new product uses. Maybe it’s just to ask them what they think; you might be surprised at what you find out. If you’re scared of how your “fans” will react, you have problems that go beyond social media.

The Digiday piece struck a chord with so many because we’ve let our excitement for these channels overtake our better judgment. All is not lost—let’s not resign ourselves to a fate of leftover lo mein and crappy content. Let’s admit our faults, adjust our mindsets, and push forward.

Image Credit: Matt Becker

“Can’t see the forest for the trees” –> An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole.

Remember this scene in Major League (great movie, BTW) when Willie Mays Hays keeps trying to hit the ball out of the park even though he’s the fastest guy on the team? His manager comes over and tells him to hit the ball on the ground and leg out his hits because that’s the role he plays on the team.

Or this scene in Miracle when Herb Brooks says he’s “not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones”?

Makes sense, right? Anyone who’s ever assembled a team – sports, work or otherwise – knows it’s about the sum of the parts, not the individuals. A team of superstars is great for fantasy football, not so much in real life.

Maybe you’re not as big a fan of sports movies as I am. In that case, think about your group of friends. You likely have a friend you go to when you have something serious to talk about. That same friend may not be the person you’d choose to plan your bachelor party. You, like both of the movie coaches above, realized that each player or friend played a different role when viewed in the larger context of your life.

I share these analogies because I’ve had quite a few recent conversations with clients, colleagues, and friends who were obsessing over the performance of an individual blog post, Tweet, or Facebook status. What was the reach? What was the clickthrough rate? How many times was it shared? It made me want to ask about the performance of that lunch meeting with a mentor or that single in the softball game last night. Did you compare that lunch to other lunches you’ve had and kick yourself for not fully optimizing it? Did you swing for the fences your next time up because why accept a lousy single when you can crush the ball over the fence?

Very little in life can be measured in a vacuum. A home run is better than a single right? Then why not fill your team up with huge guys who crush the ball every time up? A crazy weekend in Vegas is better than a night at home playing trivial pursuit, right? Then why not head out to Vegas every weekend? Well, for starters, you’d end up with a team of players who do this and a life that resembles this. But it’s also because the success or failure of anything has to always be considered within the larger context. A crazy weekend in Vegas is great, but sometimes you just want to chill out at home. A home run hitter is great except when you need someone to run down that fly ball in the outfield. 

The same thinking applies to brands and their use of social media. Just because that cat GIF you posted reached more people and had more likes than the post where you talked about your organization’s community service efforts doesn’t mean it was any more or any less “successful.” Just because that Tweet of your staff party wasn’t retweeted 100 times doesn’t mean you should stop sharing that sort of content. Just like the home run hitter and the base stealer, each piece of content plays a different role in your overall strategy and needs to be measured as such. Your goals for that content should be driven by you, not by the social platform. In some cases, you may be trying to drive traffic to a website, or to drive shares of a piece of a content, or sometimes, it’s just to show a different side to your organization. Your social media content and conversations are not banner ads so stop evaluating them that way. 

Continue to be a slave to the metrics these social platforms use and you will soon become part of their business strategy, rather than the other way around.

Oreo’s “blackout” tweet. Arby’s tweet about Pharrell’s hat, Nintendo’s Wreck-It Ralph Tweet. These are some of the go-to examples of “real-time marketing.” You can’t watch a live event now without being bombarded by branded messages, all of which are meant to associate the brand with the real-time event and become part of the conversation. Unfortunately, participating in these conversations in real-time is substantially more difficult for big brands than it is for you on your couch. 

Sure, a Tweet is only 140 characters. And yes, you may crack the same jokes as the ones you see brands make that then blow up on Twitter. But for a brand with thousands of employees and with legal, marketing, and PR departments, even a 140 characters can easily get caught in a mess of red tape.

On Tuesday, April 29 at 10:15 AM, join my social media supervisor Jeana Anderson and Joe Giallanella, Associate Brand Manager for H.J. Heinz at WOMMNext here in Chicago. They’ll be giving a “behind the scenes” presentation on how Heinz used social media to supplement their Super Bowl commercial and participate in the global conversation. Check out this interview with Jeana for more details on the session.

If you want to hear their happy and realistic session, register to attend the WOMMNext conference. Until then, connect with her on social personally at @jeanaanderson or through her company @cramerkrasselt and session co-speaker, Joe Giallanella @HJHeinzCompany/@HeinzKetchup_US.

This article originally appeared in the April edition of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) magazine, Communication World. 

For years, marketing, advertising, and public relations folks fought over budgets, scopes of work, ownership, and talent. It was an inefficient, yet accepted dance at organizations of all shapes and sizes. There was paid media, and there was earned media — and for the most part, everyone understood their role.

If only things were still this easy. Today we have Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Managers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysts, Digital Analysts, Community Managers, Content Marketing Specialists, and way too many social media ninjas, gurus, and rockstars. There’s paid media, earned media, owned media, shared media, and something called omni-channel media. The traditional buckets of marketing, advertising, and public relations seem so quaint now.

Customers don’t care about your org chart, your P&L, or which of their agencies are managing which channel. They just expect you to move seamlessly and consistently from channel to channel and device to device, whether that’s using paid, earned, or owned methods. And increasingly, the clients don’t care about these artificial lines of demarcation either. According to a recent Forbes survey, 68% of CMOs and marketing executives put integrated marketing communications ahead of “effective advertising” (65%), when they were asked what the most important thing is that they want from an agency.

Some of the biggest marketing and PR agencies are already adjusting their business models and organizational structures to better optimize their efforts in this new environment:

• Edelman has recently created a position – Global Director of Paid Media – responsible for defining their approach to paid media and for integrating it into their accounts.
• Earlier this year, FleishmanHillard restructured to be more channel-agnostic, integrating paid, owned, and earned media. In 2011, they placed $250 million worth of ads in paid media. In 2012, that number increased to more than $1.2 billion.
• Weber Shandwick created MediaCo, a new unit focused on content marketing, native advertising, and digital media buying.
• Cramer-Krasselt, my employer, while traditionally seen as an ad agency, actually uses an integrated structure that aligns PR, social media, advertising, paid media, CRM, search, and paid media under one P&L that allows us to create seamlessly integrated campaigns across all forms of media.

PR professionals know, of course, that their job is to build meaningful relationships with their stakeholders. However, doing so today means reaching them through paid, earned, owned, and shared media — understanding how all of these channels work, the content each requires, and how to piece it all together into an integrated plan. Clearly, PR is no longer about just getting “ink” in print or pixels. It’s about developing multi-channel relationships with a variety of stakeholders. It means learning more about paid media and how to incorporate those costs into budgets. It means integrating social ads, sponsored content, and syndicated content into strategies from the very beginning. It means the PR pros with experience in paid, owned AND earned media are going to become much more valuable.

If the traditional practitioner wants to remain relevant in this multi-channel environment, he or she is going to have to stop looking at only media hits and impressions, and  start thinking through the entire customer journey across all channels. For example –

• That reporter at the New York Times just called and said he’s doing a story on your brand! Will he blog about it too? Will he share it with his 100K Twitter followers and Facebook fans? Is your brand willing to retweet his story? How can you use your owned channels to drive more traffic to that story?
• The blog content you’re publishing is relevant, valuable, and engaging yet no one is reading it. What’s the right syndication partner to increase your audience size? Should you use paid search links to drive additional traffic? How will the increased traffic impact your bounce rate?
• What’s the hashtag for that event you’re planning? Should you even have one? How will you create shareable moments during the event? Who’s serving as the digital emcee?
• Your brand is doing a large paid media buy with one of your target publications. How does this impact your pitch to the editorial staff? How segregated are their advertising and editorial teams?

Building and maintaining stakeholder relationships today is very different than even a few years ago.  Thankfully, the tools used to manage them have evolved also. The reach and influence of some organizations’ owned channels rival that of some traditional publications. Some publications offer sponsored content hubs that mirror the look and feel of their editorial content. The social media newsfeed has become a mishmash of sponsored and organic content and they’re often indistinguishable from each other.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rasta Taxi

Knowing when and how to pull these paid, earned, owned, and shared levers could make the PR pro a multi-channel quarterback because we best understand our stakeholders’ information needs, media consumption habits, and user journeys. As the lines between paid and earned media disappear, the PR pro has to be more proactive and get more involved across the entire marketing mix. Whether that’s being part of the creative team brainstorming the new commercial or working with paid media to create more effective media partnerships, one thing’s clear. The PR pro is going to have to figure out how to get more involved in other channels or risk being left out of the process entirely.