Todd Defren recently posted a fictitious conversation between a PR rep and an creative ad guy, on how social media is not really the ‘thing’ of advertising agencies. Its quite funny, no doubt, but I guess we’re drinking too much of the PR koolaid.
I’m in PR (I’ve also briefly dabbled in advertising) and a good part of my job involves selling social media programs to our PR clients. I also consider that PR has the best fit to sell and run social media outreach programs, compared to advertising agencies. Todd’s post nails the reason quite well – in essence, it is about sustaining the communication than planning a one-off burst.
But, think about it – what we do is ideally media relations and only now, with the social media scene, are we really getting to do ‘public’ relations. Our ‘relations’ are primarily with media folks and not with the ‘public’ – we use the media to reach the public, while advertising reaches the public, albeit as a paid spot.
Our language is completely dictated by the client’s corporate guidelines, our own idea of what the client may like us to say and our assumption of how best we can help the journalist in question. The advertising agency scores considerably better here – their language is intended to draw attention, from a group which they quite aptly call, target audience.
The world still complains about the jargon we throw at our press releases. Well, they are jargons that our clients own and our retainers will be in trouble if we try changing them. Advertising agencies seem to have a much better sway with the choice of words, since they demonstrate a much better grip on the client’s target audiences.
For a PR firm, the content we create rarely makes it to print as-is. It is either altered/ re-interpreted by journalists/ editors or is placed under the name of a client executive, in the case of contributory articles. Advertising folks get their words mostly as-is, since that is entire purpose!
So, there’s obviously a lot to learn from advertising agencies. The language and the tone of communication is critical in social media outreach programs – every Facebook update/ tweet/ message board comment has to be interesting enough, since it represents a brand and has a purpose, unlike our personal ‘cat rolled over’ messages. Advertising techniques come really handy here – if you think about it, we actually write creative copy in every tweet to attract readers.
Where we do score is in knowing how to sustain a relationship over a period of time. We had a smaller circle when it came to media relations. Now, with real ‘public’ relations, its a much larger group that we need to sustain relations. Naturally, PR agencies are learning to scale the level of sustained communications and our media relations experience is keeping us in good stead. Advertising agencies, however, as Todd notes, may not really enjoy handling the sustained communications.
There’s a lot of overlap between PR firms and advertising agencies, when it comes to learning the art of handling social media outreach – the relation part is our forte, even though we need to learn to scale it up. The creative content part is an advertising agency’s forte, even though they may not be keen to exercise it for a tweet, of all things…and to do it consistently.
And there’s enough work for both sides since we’re merely scratching the surface here. So, can we stop getting the koolaid to our heads and put those heads to do some better work?