By Quentin Langley
The problem is this: if you have thousands of critics and you are just a single organisation, how can you engage? How can an overstretched PR department monitor and keep up with the social media conversations taking place all over the world?
And if Jeff Jarvis is right, that there is an inverse relationship between control and trust, where does that leave the role of PR planning? The traditional PR plan, with its key messages and clear discipline is precisely what people engaged in social media will no longer trust.
The first thing to say is that engagement in social media is still, very much, a PR function, not a sales, marketing or advertising function. If you are aggressively engaged in sales, you will soon be blocked or hidden from people’s feeds. That is not why people engage in social media. It is all about two-way interaction. It is about conversation. An advert is, by its nature, a one-way phenomenon. This is all about the management of reputation. This is where PR has always been: using media relations and sacrificing control for credibility.
Brandjack News 