FINN

The results of this recent survey by Buddy Media got me thinking about why marketing and not PR is considered in most companies to be the preferred partner to run the social media channels.

Instinctively, PR professionals feel that social media is a PR channel more than an advertising or marketing channel. Ideally, social media is not an outbound or broadcast medium. Social media is about forging sustainable and durable relationships with stakeholders, based on a set of corporate values and business goals. This is what PR has always been about (that, and managing the occasional reputation crisis).

Social media behaves a lot more like earned media than paid media: followers, fans, interaction and engagement are dependent on how relevant your communication is. Producing relevant and timely content is what PR has always been about. It’s also very clear that listening and monitoring is an important part of social media. This, too, has been a practice in PR since the very beginning: what is the current buzz around our brand, how can we influence the perception?

And still, in a lot of companies, social media management is entrusted to the marketing department or the external advertising partner. The ‘broadcast’ squad, as it were. I can feel in a lot of blogs by PR professionals that they feel uncomfortable about marketing and advertising people encroaching on what they consider their terrain.

I think it’s rather the other way around: I think the PR way of doing things is moving into advertising. Paid media is starting to feel more and more like earned media, because it feels more human and objective, because it's real. For instance, take Carglass, that features real employees (and their accents) in paid media ads. No wonder it goes viral:

Or Dovy Kitchens, which managed to go viral because it’s so quirky and so deliciously “real”. It also managed to propell Donald  Muylle to Chuck Norris-like fame in Belgium. This is essentially a PR pitch translated into a paid media:

Grimbergen’s new campaign is a history lesson about the Grimbergen abbey, as told by Jan Decleir in 1 minute and 30 seconds. This is a press kit in video format!

Marketers and advertising pro’s are being forced to learn to think like PR pro’s, to adapt to this new era of relevance and timeliness. And they seem to be embracing it. Old school PR pro’s on the other hand are missing one important skill that marketers and advertising pro’s do possess: confidence in the power of the brand.

Companies spend thousands and sometimes millions of paid media euros on creating strong brands. Marketers and advertisers know how powerful good branding is. See the Coca-Cola Facebook page, which is very effective with utterly simple messages, like, “If you want to feel happy today, why not drink a Coke?” And these messages work: they are being shared, liked, commented on like crazy.

PR pro’s, especially the ones who have a journalistic background such as myself, have been trained to look beyond the brand. They are trained to disregard the brand altogether and to focus on “what’s really going on”. It’s time to add a love for branding, and trust in the power of branding to your skill set if you want to see PR in the driver’s seat of social media.

Got great examples of PR-like content in paid media? Send us a tweet   @kris10vermoesen and we'll add them to this blog post!