From the category archives:

Public Relations

Listen and thy shall be rewarded

by Helena Makhotlova on December 8, 2008

in Public Relations, Social Media

copy-of-listen

 

There is a great article in the last week’s Advertising Age by Freddie Laker “The Paradox of Interactive Marketing “. He warns against polluting potentially optimal interactive platforms with bombarding users with too much of social media goodies – ads, apps, widgets, contests, games and so on. His main point is that even if the conditions are close to perfect to engage the users in ‘brand experience’ – the user gets so overwhelmed with the choice of interactive opportunities and imposed attention that they get turned off instead. What can be done to stop this over saturation of social media platforms, and how can we make our community to stay with us?

The marketers need to aknowledge the fact that as both quantity and quality of information on the web are increasing, the users’ attention span limits are dramatically decreasing. The new marketing hype these days is the user generated content – but just how many UGC-contests can we participate in? As a result, there is a clear trend that users are leaving not only traditional media channels, but also their favorite websites.

Another problem is that most of the companies who engage is social media, do so quite passively. They might have a presence in form of a group on Facebook or Flickr, or YouTube contest – but it usually ends there. The social media spiral doesn’t take off, but usually just hangs as an unfinished circle, with not much $ to show for.

Now I know this will sound kind of dramatic, but maybe we should stop focusing so much on our products, and ourselves. Maybe we should just listen to our market segment. Ask questions. Give advices. Be there when they need us. Treat them just how we would treat a friend. No selling, no imposing, no campaigns - at least for a while. If we don’t have time to listen to them – why would they listen to us? If we don’t have patience with them – their patience for us is limited to 1 minute per website.

There are a lot of rewards in listening. Imagine that you can get to know your audience like your own pair of hands. Then you can segment even further, and craft even more personalized and relevant messages.

Being there all the time means nothing in comparison to being there exactly the moment when your audience is open for your suggestions.

 

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Symmetrical communications model: time to say good bye?

by Helena Makhotlova on September 25, 2008

in PR theory, Public Relations

Following the discussion on PR Conversations, Bill Sledzik made an intriguing reflection in his post “Symmetrical PR meets the Cluetrain Manifesto”. There he compares the Cluetrain Manifesto postulate with concepts of two-way symmetrical communication model.

I’m a big fan of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I have to admit I do not look at it from the 2WS-perspective. Don’t get me wrong: I passionately believe that having ongoing conversations with publics is the ultimate way for businesses to succeed in the future. But I just don’t believe in their symmetry. Moreover, I don’t think it’s healthy to focus on it, rather than focus on the very relationships. Relationships are rarely, if never, equal, or symmetrical. People are not masses, they are individuals with different social, economic and symbolic powers. Still we perfectly and, not the least, mutually beneficially, exist together in the complicated web of social relationships, be it with our parents, peers, governments or businesses.

In case of big corporations with multiple stakeholders, sometimes millions of them, symmetry is further not possible due to the human attention span limits, so well defined by Clay Shirky in “Here comes everybody”. As I wrote in my previous posts, no matter how open and democratic the digital social sphere si, it is not possible to listen, not even mentioning respond, to every voice out there.

It’s time to acknowledge that as great as it sounds, symmetrical communications is not a realistic implementation, for better or worse. However, getting to know our publics, and by that, forming relations with them based on mutual understanding and good will, now that is not only possible, but also necessary for success. Internet and social media tools present an unique opportunity for businesses, and public relations industry in particular, to focus on buiding these precious relationships with our audiences.

In fact, maybe for the first time in history, we should become their audience. After all, it’s us who depend on them, not the way around.

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Challenges of defining PR

September 21, 2008

This weekend I got engaged in the discussion on PR Conversations, started by the controversial article by Heather Yaxley: A Radical view of PR. Discussion unveiled to assess the Excellence theory, and Dr. J.Grunig gave us an honor by participating in the conversation. This is a great discussion to take place due to EUPRERA conference coming up [...]

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Social media presence: the future license to operate

September 8, 2008

Recent annual Forrester research on Interactive Marketing conducted among 333 marketers reveals that 68% of companies are willing to try social media strategy only after it’s proved that it works.  Indeed, the effect of marketing and figures for ROI on most of the social media platforms, including mobile phones, is hard to measure. The number of clicks on digital advertisements (which a [...]

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