Photo: Phil Sheard

Last Tuesday NMK ran a debate entitled “What Happens to Online PR” – it was packed full of the great and good of ‘Online PR’ and, aside from the debate, it was a great to have a chance to catch-up with everyone.

The evening has already been covered in depth by Roger Warner, Jed Hallam, Jo-Rosie Haffenden, Drew Benvie, Sarah Beavis, Lloyd Gofton and the organiser Ian Delaney, but the point I made in my intervention on the night seems to have been lost.

Much to my delight, the PR industry seems to be taking a very myopic view of the current state of play (as evidenced by PR Week’s coverage of the event). It fails to realise that there is a great game afoot, one that involves all of the advertising and marketing industry, that will be merciless on those that fail to adapt.

Above the line, digital, PR, direct marketing and even media agencies are converging towards the same place, and due to the rise of digital, the battle has been raging for a few years now. Up until recently, the PR industry has been relatively immune from its effects. This will not continue. Agencies of all colours are realising what the future will bring, and are making plans to adapt.

However, just as over the last ten years digital agencies stole a march on above the line agencies by building bigger, better and more motivated specialist teams, thereby innovating faster and developing a critical mass of best practise that accelerated the gap between them and their offline competitors, so conversation agencies will do the same to PR agencies (and, I have to say, to the digital and other agencies also trying to catch-up).

To use ourselves as an example, who else has a team of twelve entirely focused on innovative, creative and effective social media marketing and communications? Each day and each new hire widens the gap between us and those in pursuit.

To quote from Roger Warner’s write-up of the evening:

The people who will write the book are those who make the first convincing moves and are happy to invest and invent. We’ll be delivering best practises in beta mode whilst Big PR is watching on the sidelines.

Update: PR Week finally wakes up:

PR agencies are facing up to a growing threat from the adv­ertising sector after the car giant this week picked MindShare to handle [...] digital PR and social media strategy.

‘The advertising industry is focusing its guns on PR bud­get, so our industry is def-in­itely at a crossroads,’ said Katy Howell, MD at Immediate Future. ‘We must step up, educate our clients and widen our reach to include marketing and digital departments.

‘If we do not, there is every likelihood that the PR industry will not exist in five years. We will become a commodity within the bigger, more powerful, media and advertising organisations.’

Update 2: Brian Solis has some further thoughts:

By now, many organizations realize that the success of their brands will be determined online. Yet other than this almost universal consensus, little else about digital has been decided. Its scope is constantly expanding and its growth potential has every marketing discipline jumping to adopt some part of digital as its own turf. “There is all kinds of competition popping up [for digital] and it’s putting a squeeze on communications professionals,” says Brian Solis, founder and president of FutureWorks, a digital PR agency. PR, ad, and direct marketing agencies are all looking to carve a niche in digital as their conventional channels become increasingly irrelevant. With traditional ad revenues decreasing in value and news outlets shuttering, the most viable avenue for future revenue is digital. But the race to capitalize on digital has pitted many of these agencies against each other, especially as the boundaries between marketing, advertising, and PR blur online.

Update 3: Campaign, the advertising industry’s bible, chimes in:

Digital advertising and social media are quickly converging and, while PR is reaping the rewards inside this new space, how long will it be before others muscle in? Already, Beattie McGuinness Bungay, DDB and VCCP are among UK agencies fine-tuning PR and social media offerings and others will quickly follow.

The latest Nielsen report’s “Global Faces and Networked Places” highlights social media as the global consumer phenomenon of 2008: two-thirds of the world’s internet population now visit a social network or a blogging site and social media accounts for 10% of the overall internet time. So much so that social media has now overtaken personal emails as the 4th more popular activity online.

In December 2008, out of every 11 minutes spent online globally, 1 minute was spent within social media (1 minute out of 6 in the UK!). And we’re not just talking about students sharing photos of their parties on Facebook. As social media is becoming more mainstream, the average age of users is also shifting: one third of the Facebook audience is now within the 35-49 years old bracket and one-fourth is over 40. It’s also nice to hear that although Germany arrived quite late to the social media party, they’re now catching up with their European counterparts – good timing for our German website!

As the time spent interacting in social media is growing, the share of time held by other sectors is diminishing and so is the effectiveness of traditional online advertising.

The report rightfully points out that:

Advertising must be a conversation rather than a push-model. The point that social networks members are co-creators of content [...] means advertising should be about participating in a relevant conversation with consumers rather than simply pushing ads on them. After all it is social media. Advertising shouldn’t be about interrupting or invading the social network, it should be part of this conversation.

Marketing carried a piece this week looking at whether brands should advertise in people’s Twitter streams, prompted by the appearance of ‘services’ like Magpie and adCause. Clearly, the short answer is no, but if you want the long answer:

Robin Grant, the managing director of social media agency We Are Social, warns against brands jumping in feet first. ‘Twitter is all about conversations and what these ad networks are trying to do is insert ads into that conversation stream which is inherently inappropriate,’ he says adding he won’t be advising any clients to advertise within Twitter streams.

Let me know if you think I’m being a little too simplistic…

Update: So perhaps I was being a little too simplistic – it’s worth reading Brian Morrissey’s thoughts on the subject.

Update 2: ReadWriteWeb looks into some use cases of Magpie (in a fairly negative light) and Graeme Wood follows up pointing out that, without disclosure, this sort of advertising may be illegal under UK and EU law…

Mark Cridge, the founder and CEO of glue, is a man who We Are Social owes a lot to, both figuratively – through the example he and the rest of the team at glue have set over the last ten years and quite literally – up until our move last week, he’d been kind enough to let us base ourselves in glue’s offices. He’s also a man that knows what he’s talking about regarding the tectonic shifts that have happened in the marketing and advertising industry as digital has made its presence felt.

So, even though we’ve been talking about social media’s rise as a distinct discipline ourselves (and it was mine and Nathan’s belief in this that led us to found We Are Social), it’s pretty gratifying to hear what he has to say in this week’s New Media Age:

‘If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.’ This wonderfully captures the feeling of dismay those in digital have felt when they saw their traditional counterparts wade in, uninformed, and claim, “This digital lark, it’s all just more screens, innit.”

In fact this was a useful argument as the nascent digital industry carved out a role for itself, distinct from traditional advertising, emphasising the need for a new approach, a distinct set of skills that, coincidentally, only a digital agency could provide.

Clearly, as the traditional industry rapidly gets its act together, it would be naive to think this state of affairs will last much longer. It’s interesting, then, to experience a sense of déjà vu as we see social media rise as a distinct discipline, again requiring a unique set of skills and experiences

You can’t simply take the old ways of doing things and apply them to any new medium in exactly the same way. This is especially true within social media, which is as different to the digital of the last few years as that was to traditional channels. Just as digital types complained that traditional sorts shouldn’t treat online as a mass broadcast channel, so the same is true with social media, where you can’t expect the rules and behaviours of traditional or even digital to work in the same way.

A great (but manageably short) presentation from Mike Troiano, formerly the founding CEO of OgivlyInteractive, on his concept of ‘scalable intimacy’:

More intimate relationships than are possible through broadcast media, at sufficient scale to impact the enterprise.

He echoes nicely what we’ve been saying for a while – those we reach with the work that we do for our clients end up a lot more engaged with our clients brands, and therefore we can achieve meaningful results with much lower initial numbers than marketers are used to ‘reaching’ through traditional advertising.

So after being on the front page on Marketing the week before last, this week we’ve hit the pages of Campaign, with our inclusion in a feature article about, you guessed it, Twitter:

Three years into its existence, the recent media frenzy around celebrity Twitterers, including Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, and Barack Obama’s successful use of the medium in the run-up to the US election, has seen the popularity of the “microblogging” site increase 27-fold in 12 months.

Advertisers could learn a lot from celebrity Twitterers using the site to shape their personal branding, creating a close, one-on-one relationship with their fans without constantly filtering their thoughts through a PR sieve.

Robin Grant, the managing director of the social media agency We Are Social, which advises Fry on his use of Twitter, explains: “The advice we gave to Stephen centred on being himself and having genuine conversations with people. It’s the same for brands. It’s about being human, showing your real personality and allowing people to connect with you on an emotional level.”

The article then gets quite bizarre, with Flo Heiss, the creative partner at Dare giving this advice about who should sit behind a brand’s account:

It could be a real person, such as a receptionist, or character made up by yourself

How about an imaginary friend who’s a receptionist, Flo? On to David Bain, an ‘internet marketing consultant’:

it’s cleverer when you don’t anthropomorphise it. What if an inanimate object was to Tweet, for example?

Why is it cleverer David? And what would it say? Amelia Torode, managing partner at VCCP:

It has to be a friendly, chatty brand. A brand such as Coca-Cola would be too large in its entirety. You need to work less at a higher-brand level and go down to the actual campaigns or smaller brands under the umbrella in order to start up the conversation.

Not quite as unhinged as Flo and David admittedly, but I’d point to the examples of brands like Burger King, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods, Starbucks, JetBlue and even VCCP’s client O2, who are having meaningful and useful conversations at the higher-brand level. As usual, our friend Faris Yakob talks sense:

Previously we had a model of buying attention from media companies. Now we’ve got direct relationships so we have to earn that attention – we have to earn it by being entertaining, useful and also nice.

To be honest, there is no ‘right approach’, but there are some general principles that apply (as expressed by myself and Faris above) and then there is the hard won experience at the coalface, learning what works and what doesn’t, that brands doing it themselves (and the agencies like ourselves helping them) have acquired. Most importantly your approach should be built around, yes, you guessed it again, the business objectives you’re trying to achieve.

This diagram from Fallon’s Aki Spicer of six different potential participation strategies brands could use is a useful thought starter (each of which of course might be used in combination or not at all), but even the approaches I deliberately ridiculed above could be valid in the right circumstances. Fictional characters can work really well as part of a campaign as VCCP’s own Compare the Meerkat work shows, and I’m sure at least one of Zappos’ receptionists is on Twitter. Even inanimate objects might have their place – in fact I’ve been trying to persuade Kew Gardens to get their plant life on Twitter for a while now.

But deciding on a strategy is only the first and easiest step. The hard work is the day after day of micro-interactions with real people, and striking the right balance between the opportunities and risks presented by having a real person as the voice of the brand, which I touched upon in the hotly debated post on learning to speak human. David Armano brilliantly investigates this dynamic in The Age of Brandividualism and his recent follow-up, Battle of the Brands (both of which are required reading here at We Are Social towers):

For each brand on Twitter, there’s an individual (or individuals) behind that effort. It’s both business and personal. The two have become one. The tactic comes from a fundamental truth when it comes to the social spaces on the Web. People want to talk to other people. They want transparency. They want to know who they are talking to.

The potential reward of course, is the ability to spread surprise and delight, turn negative word of mouth into positive and to really engage people with your brand at an emotional level. There is no greater prize…

Alan Wolk in Adweek:

There’s a phenomenon whereby normally intelligent people at both digital and traditional agencies decide that people will embrace their new widget or app simply because they’ve built it. It’s as if the Internet were a giant cornfield in Iowa and the mere presence of yet another branded widget or app is enough to get thousands of people clicking.

But Field of Dreams was just a movie. In the real world, if you build it, they will not come. Not unless you give them a reason to do so. That reason has to be pretty compelling. Branded widgets and apps compete for our attention with a score of very well done unbranded ones. And yet I rarely hear anyone – on the client or agency side – asking, “Why would anyone want to use this thing?”

That delusion is part of a mind-set left over from the days of “push” advertising, where the consumer had no choice (short of changing the channel or flipping through the magazine) but to hear the advertiser’s message. We didn’t get to actively choose which ones we wanted to see.

And that’s a critical difference that bears repeating. With the push method of advertising, we must take action in order not to see the ad. With widgets, apps and other online vehicles, we must take action in order to see them. People don’t stumble upon widgets and apps by accident. Which means they need to be judged by a completely different set of standards than push advertising like TV and print, the primary one being: Would anyone actually go out of their way to use it?

Make something people like and would want to use even if it didn’t have a brand logo attached to it. If that sounds like an overly trite platitude and more than a bit obvious, that’s because it is. But agencies and clients who assume a far greater degree of interest in and love for their products than actually exists often ignore this basic tenet of marketing.

Alan is right (especially his last sentence), but we should also remember that however good your branded app or widget is, you still need to get people engaged with it and talking about it for it to succeed – which, of course, is where we come in…

The idea that ‘markets are conversations’ dates back to the The Cluetrain Manifesto, which if anything, is more relevant today than when it was first published:

I remember it seeming so revolutionary when I read it in 1999, articulating for the first time what those of us involved in the internet felt about the coming change it was bringing. That change has taken longer than we thought it would, but the tenets of the manifesto still hold true.

One of its most important points is that real conversations are conducted in a human voice and it gives good advice about how companies can learn to speak human. Our friend Adriana Lukas has more:

It’s something that’s all too easy to forget when subject to corporate groupthink, and something we try our best to help our clients remember…

Update: Jonathan Hopkins reminds me that similar things have been said recently about being nice and being human by our friends James Warren, Faris Yakob and James Whatley. It’s well worth reading all of their posts. I’ll leave you with a quote from Mr Whatley:

Social Media isn’t about Technology, it isn’t about being online or offline. It’s simply about being Human.