Keeping it Real with Social Media PR

My inspiration for this post was Dave Chappelle's hilarious series of "When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong" sketches, and a number of recent posts, thoughts and observations about communicating in this new age of social media (how's that for a  juxtaposition?)

If the growth in PR blogs is any indication, and judging by recent chatter about SMRs (social media releases), most in the PR business have finally woken up to the fact that social media won't simply go away and leave us to the tidy and orderly lives we once new.  It has never been easy to grab and keep the attention of the media, but at least it was fairly predictable and the lines were drawn and rules of engagement well established.

Now, in this many-to-many, any-to-any communications world of democratized media and user driven content, all bets are off.

One topic that is front and center for PR folks is: how do we communicate?  Do we treat blogs as just another form of media and add them to our segmented lists?  Do we trick out press releases with Web 2.0 bells and whistles, optimize them for search engines and call it a day?  Do we all launch our own blogs, or blog for our clients?

Further, what are the related ethics, that govern, for example, blogging under an assumed name?

So many questions. While this post does not claim to to answer all questions or be the final word, I will try to tie some of these loose thread neatly together under a general philosophy called "keeping it real."

First, and I have said this before, I don't think it is as simple as rolling forward old metaphors. Strategies that aim to treat social media as just another media segment miss the fact that new times call for new communications tools, and that social media is affecting many attributes of how we communicate - not just the wrapper for our stories, that is most obvious, but also tone and style of our words and the mechanics of how information is dispersed and accessed.

When clients ask: how do we deal with the blogs, my answer is BLOG!  The media megaphone is available to all, you can comment, start your own blog, you don't need to be A list but you do need to be out there, make sure your voice is heard, and even more important, listen first.

 

This brings us to the proper role of the communications professional.  And, finally, the Topic Du Jour, Keeping it Real.

The one rule in the blogosphere that we ignore at our peril is to approach blogging as an exercise in artificial rhetoric.

You need to keep it real, keep it genuine, know what you stand for and blog in your own voice.  The blogosphere does not suffer shills gladly and quickly outs posers.  The hive mind and its corporeal blogging nodes quickly regurgitate hucksterism, hype, gobbledygook puke and other swill.

As Ajit Jaokar said in his recent post on the OpenGardens blog (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Blogging But Were Afraid to Ask) "almost no one asks … What do you stand for? And long term .. it may well be the most important question you have asked yourselves."  He further writes that one of the top three characteristics of good bloggers is to have "A sense of humanity and individuality – being an individual – even if you work in a large company."  I would add "or a PR agency."

That is why I think strategies that seek to use PR people as ghost bloggers are doomed to failure.  I also feel that we need to take care to disclose client ties, should not blog under fake names, and that (except in rare circumstances) we should not blog, comment or otherwise post anonymously.

So what does that leave us with?  Plenty.  What better role than the communications professional to track conversations, figure out which ones count and help clients craft compelling stories?  And to help clients find the best words and messages to tell the story? Last time I checked there was nothing unethical about this, and perhaps brings PR into a more trusted light by in fact shining light, leaving the mystique behind and working in the spirit of transparency that the blogosphere gave us.

Nothing wrong at all with blogging under our own names for clients, advising clients how to best use these technologies and help them work on their stories.  Note the line I am drawing: working with a client on their story is not the same as writing their story and "speaking" for them.

We need to be real and teach our clients to establish their digital identities and find their blogging voices, much the same as when we media train them to be effective in interviews but applied to the written word.

I can hear people reacting: isn't a PR professional blogging about a client a shill if not by any other name, not to be trusted and quickly "regurgitated?"  This gets back to the "keeping it real" part, and the need to be sincere and genuine.

As an example, I point to the NY Times article from a week ago: At State Dept., Blog Team Joins the Muslim debate. It mentions that the U.S. government has hired bloggers to appeal to "swing voters" on key Islamic websites.

"The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al Jazeera or charismatic Muslim figures like Amr Khaled, as well as Arab news sites like Elaph.com. They choose them based on high traffic and a focus on United States policy, and they always identify themselves as being from the State Department.

They avoid radical sites, although team members said that jihadis scoured everywhere.

The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting. But so far only the webmaster at the Islamic Falluja Forums (www.al-faloja.info) has revoked their password and told them to get lost, they said."

The relevance here is that they are engaging on the issues.  Negative reactions have focused on the bloggers' positions, and who they represent; not the fact that they are "shilling."  The bloggers are Arabic speaking, in fact Arab-Americans, and are blogging, at least apparently, from the heart.

We can build "credibility equity" by knowing who we are and keeping it real.  We overdraw on that equity by posting too frequently and too loudly on behalf of one issue and one client, especially if the views seem to be artificial, hypey, and at odds with who we are.

"Cred. Eq." will be the one single asset that will become increasingly important as we move ahead.  It will increasingly define our digital identities, and be available for all to see at the touch of the Google search button.

Comments

[Jill McCubbin]

I agree. Respond to a blog with a comment or in a blog of your own. And, if you are looking for favorable mentions of your company or product in outside blogs, ensure you are contributing to the conversation in a blog of your own.

Bloggers thrive on and respond to communication from as many angles as possible and so they have more motivation to blog about other bloggers' ideas and products than they have for non-blogging entities' suggestions.