While with branding and advertising we expect a promotional approach, public relations has been held to different standards - up until now.
It seems to me that in new media we have more of a blurring of the lines and that communications, whether of the promotional or informative kind happens along a continuum.
Have you been on the receiving end of a press release or a pitch? Then you'll know how promotional some of those messages can get. The best ones are those that follow up because you didn't respond the first time.
Balance is not simple, and it's situational. That's probably one of the reasons why platforms like Twitter are capturing attention. There are so many use cases of success you can look at. Except for when you dig a little deeper and see how fragmented they are. Marketers want to sell, communities want to tell. Can the two meet in the middle? What is the role of PR in all this?
Jason Falls tackled the balance of promoting and sharing recently at Social Media Explorer:
An independent consultant can be somewhat self-promotional and it is expected and understood since it’s his or her livelihood. There might be less tolerance for the CEO of a company to throw around the same types of drivers in conversations.
In his post he provides tips on asking, telling, and answering. It's a fact that before you can ask and answer, you need to build a community big enough to have a conversations, so you might be doing a lot of telling and sharing what you know. Does talking to yourself feel uncomfortable? It does to me. Brands may be used to it, but I believe that we're moving past that phase and into a more interesting one.
I'm thinking that the premise might be what throws us off. The whole social aspect of media where users are in control, which changes by degrees of acceptance depending on the medium. As an example, many accept to add and be added on streams easily for Twitter, but may have other criteria for Facebook friending and LinkedIn connections.
The lines between personal and professional have been forced to blend for several years and we might be seeing a backlash of that in people pushing back on promotions within networks and circles they perceive to be their personal space.
Many organizations will have a very controlled approach to all of this, preferring to deal with mature PR grounds like mainstream media even as new media. Message consistency may be one of the reasons why. The other is the fact that what is accepted one day, may be rejected the next in a new community and there is a need to handle with care.
Can PR in the form of thought leadership help?
By promoting not the company, but the key issues, values and the work that support providing a product or service and empowering the people it serves with real value. Umair Haque writes about economic value - which is at stake for business and communities alike in different ways.
Haque writes about thin and thick value. Is the difference what will bridge the distance between business and communities?
I prefer to look at it in terms of outcomes. In that case, it's worth participating to find that community that benefits from the outcome brought by having a conversation with a particular business. Even permission is conditional and value depends on context. I've been thinking about the question more than formulating answers.
The meaning of the transitive verb promote is also to contribute to the growth or prosperity of (Merriam-Webster). Is it a matter of changing the focus from the entity or person doing the promoting to the person who is or may be in the room?
What are your thoughts? What have you seen working - or perhaps worked with you - and why? PR2.0 is not simply the same old PR through new tools, is it? Will diplomacy, the ability to negotiate a conversation with a community be more in demand?
[example of promoting by sharing with design]
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Related posts:
Will Google Wave Eliminate the Need for PR as Media Relations?
Interestingly, a crucial difference between thin and thick value is not outcomes, but processes. Processes that focus on allocating rather than creating, companies that expend resources to extract value rather than create value, timeframes that focus on the short-term and neglect the long-term, accounting methods that undercount costs and overestimate benefits, efforts at local maximization that result in global minimization.
What's PR's role in that? By taking a holistic view, by giving more information, by helping people understand the full societal costs and benefits of their individual decisions, by educating and illuminating rather than obscuring, by adding context to content. For a start...
Posted by: Taylor Davidson | August 02, 2009 at 02:53 PM
Click!
Back in late 2002, I joined an online car community. Back in those days, we called our social media "forums." Forums are still around and I'm still a participant, but they tend to be very focused and specialized. Groupthink has it's ups and downs.
When you start out in a community, you spend most of your time following the conversations of others discussing subjects of interest to you. As your experience increases, you begin to share as well. As you said, Valeria, telling others what you know.
Once you're participating in the conversations, you are what I consider a "member" of the community. You recognize the value obtained from participation and feel compelled to pay it forward, helping others where you can. There are some, however, that I consider "users." These people walk in, get what they need, and walk right back out. For whatever reason, these individuals lack a desire to participate.
Regardless, there comes a point where those who have been around and seen the unwashed masses come and go form a bond with their fellow community members. They see that their participation in this community has gone beyond simply knowing how to work on this one car. Now they have friends in other professional fields located all over the world whom they can tap for information on a number of subjects.
With this new appreciation for what is truly possible through participation in the community, these most senior members begin to tailor their information to not only provide the answers the newcomers seek, but to provide those answers in ways which encourage the seekers to think more in depth. Why do I want to do things this way? Why am buying this performance part? What do I want to get out of my car when I finally complete this project? WHY?
We join communities seeking answers to our questions. Initially, we are only concerned with our immediate needs, but in the best communities, the information is shared in such a way as to foster learning. You need to facilitate those basic answers that bring people in the door, but you need to tailor the information in such a way that it creates a thirst for more UNDERSTANDING of the answers. This all comes from suggesting (sharing) the WHY and HOW with your community.
Give your community an understanding of theory and reasoning and you empower them to contribute. Empower your community to contribute and you will see them take up the torches to promote what is now THEIR community as well as yours.
Posted by: Brian DR1665 | August 02, 2009 at 06:04 PM
@Taylor - you make a very important distinction in focus. We should think about creation more and allocation less. Allocating is far easier to measure than creation, which doesn't have a proven or known outcome, yet.
@Brian - I love how, with your story, you helped us progress with you in communities from why people join, why they stay, and how to facilitate that process.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | August 04, 2009 at 12:07 AM
Taylor makes some excellent points, which I also discovered in researching the evolution of chat rooms and forums in the field of amateur astronomy (Sept 2009 issue of Sky & Telescope).
I especially agree with the need to support the measurement of outcomes (behaviors) over outputs (clicks). However, don't expect the intermediaries to do this, will need to come from clients and funding agencies.
Posted by: Laura Kinoshita | August 04, 2009 at 03:01 PM