Chris Brogan recently posted a question about whether Social Media is more for PR or Marketing. It’s a great question and one that brings up points of confusion for organizations seeking help and support in launching social media campaigns.

Who do they go to? In my experience they go to everyone. Their PR firm, marketing agency and branding agency.

The reality is – there is no clear choice.

The Reasons:

1. PR firms should be doing this as it’s a basic communications and relations function, but they have little understanding of social media and see it as a place to get “hits” or mentions. They are still focused on outreach, rather than conversations
2. Marketing agencies don’t know get out of their own way with “marketing speak and messaging” that is blatantly exposed in a social media platform. One whiff of an unauthentic campaign and it’s game over and the damage could last for years.
3. Branding agencies can’t really think beyond slogans. Don’t set me off on how companies drink the brand juice and try to explain how the blue in the logo represents spacious opportunities – barf.

Three key areas of expertise agencies must provide to emerge as the go to source for Social Media:

1. The ability to track, analyze and monitor conversations. I’ve made a plea in my Fire Your PR Firm paper for PR agencies to create a position called a “Communications Analysts” who’s role it is to tap into to the current conversations and trends and advise their client on where to engage. The key here is the PR person themselves is not the one engaging in the conversation – they lead the client to water. This hurdle is easy to overcome with some knowledge of RSS readers, or outside reputation monitoring services like Collective Intellect.
2. Understanding how to tie ROI to social media efforts. This is the big one right? Without the ability to track, analyze and apply an ROI model to the effort, then organizations are blindly accepting the advice of the “expert” and hoping for the best. This brings another issue with PR Firms. They are terrible at measurement as most firms still operate in an age old model of Ad Value Equivalency which means nothing.  This is a most certainly challenge and requires an understanding of how to baseline the program and implement the tools (web site analytics, RSS subscription data, conversion pages) to capture the data needed.
3. Technical programming capabilities. Based on point two above, this is the one that fragments the decision. Most PR Firms couldn’t even tell you where their own websites are hosted. So how are they going to provide expertise to building conversion mechanisms such as form captures, online demo registrations, customizing blog or podcast sites or managing RSS feeds.

In the current state of PR and Marketing agencies, the reality is not good for clients seeking professional and competent help. In order for that to happen these professions need to evolve quickly.

I know of a number of PR agencies seeking to hire Social Media directors and can tell you first hand from participating in intervewing some of these “qualified candidates” myself that competent candidates are hard to find. Unfortunately, someone with minimal social media expertise can talk their way through an interview process with a PR agency, because the agency itself doesn’t know what a truly qualified candidate is. I can only imagine the same scenario exists in the marketing profession.

It make take a while to see a victor emerge. In the meantime, we recommend agencies and companies spend the money and time to get their people trained and competent in social media.

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