Is There a Cat Fight Between Social Media and Public Relations?
I got defensive over my industry yesterday, It’s something I’m prone to do when PR, always a ripe target for bullies, gets picked on. A prominent and respected social media consultant, in a valiant effort to compliment one PR person, tweeted that PR people don’t “talk about driving leads.”
I wasn’t the only one who voiced my annoyance – a few other public relations practitioners joined in. While PR has never been considered a direct response medium, I, like many other good PR pros, can very clearly illustrate where our efforts had a measureable impact on sales. While he argued that as a former PR pro he had a right to point fingers, I hardly think that entitles him to make blanket statements on the skill of an industry.
I also realize I’m guilty of the same overarching statements – having declared before how I want to bang my head into a wall every time I hear a social media strategist say conversation is the only thing that matters and you can’t measure engagement and blah blah blah. I’ve even blogged about it.
I’m not the only one having these arguments as likeminded sentiments erupted on my Facebook page when I ranted on the topic. So why the tension between social media practitioners and PR people? Is this a cat fight over who’s doing the best job of measuring efforts? Is it a tug-of-war over who owns social? Is it a struggle on both ends to legitimize our efforts and our roles in building marketing strategy? Since we’re all focused on the end result, should we spend less time arguing and more time solving our clients and companies problems? Technically, we’re all on the same team, right? I’d love your thoughts in the comments below.
Awesome post. And there’s always angst between factions of industries in some regards.
The only problem with your argument is that I (Assuming you’re talking about me and my tweet.) am not a social media consultant. I am a public relations and marketing professional. I have been for 20 years. And while I’’ll give many PR pros a lot of credit for maturing and realizing clips isnt a good measure of business success over the past five years or so, the sad fact is most public relations pros have never been good at measuring what they do and connecting it to business outcomes.
There are still well-respected, seasoned PR firms winning business based on clip counts an ad equivalency. So to see a fellow PR professional talking about how you can drive leads and measures that have a direct impact on the bottom line, when for 100-years few were doing so, yeah … I tweeted a ”Thank you!” message.
So there’’s no cat fight between anyone. And there’s no fighting for territory. You’ve created a scenario where people can debate and discuss, sure, but my tweet was simply this: A PR pro was throwing out an honest criticism of his industry. Are there exceptions? Sure. But it would be short-sighted to act like measuring leads and business outcomes in PR is commonplace. It isn’t … Yet.
Jason,
Thanks a lot for your input, and I am aware (which I wasn’t yesterday) that you got spent a lot of time in the PR world. However, to be fair, your Linkedin profile (which I’m assuming you wrote) says you are a “Social media speaker, consultant and resource.” So, that should make it fairly clear where I determined you considered yourself a consultant, in addition to the places on your website where you provide a way for prospective clients to hire you for social media strategy. It’s neither here nor there to me what you call yourself, but just want to clear up any confusion that I made a mistake!
Anyway, your tweet did inspire this post and had me a little fumed yesterday, but the broader thinking was not about you it was about the social media experts who poke holes in the PR practice. I’ve seen it from SO MANY over the last few years, which always makes me laugh considering the social media expert role has been highlighted as snake oil more than PR ever has. So I’m acknowledging there’s a little pot meet kettle happening here.
And yes, clip counts (which my agency reports) and ad equivalency (which we don’t), are metrics PR agencies use. We also measure on tone, accuracy, audiences, web traffic etc… As you know, PR is not a direct response medium and that’s why I love social media because were getting some better ways to trace our activities. You should know that it is dangerous directly correlate a strategy meant to generate longterm awareness and change in perception in number of leads. We need to find a happy medium there. But a lot of us are making some awesome headway!
Anyway, I’m talking from both sides now, but there may not be a cat fight between me and you, but I still believe there is a cat fight between PR and social media.
Rachel