Is PR Missing Out on the Mobile Revolution?
Posted on August 16, 2010 by Tac Anderson — 2 Comments
PR, as an industry, is not known for being a group of early adopters. Social media has been a bit of an exception. While the entire industry may not have adopted social media early on, many of social media’s early evangelists came from the field of PR. The argument is that there was an obvious benefit in the way PR approaches working with influencers and building relationships and building online communities and working with online influencers. It hasn’t been a seamless relationship but what relationships are seamless?
There’s a new revolution happening in conjunction with social media and that’s the rise of mobile. Mobile and social go hand in hand (no pun intended) but how marketers approach each couldn’t be more different.
Social media has been incredibly disruptive for marketers because no one is really sure where it belongs. Does the PR team drive it? Customer support? What about the digital team? There is no right answer here but you rarely here advertising brought into the conversation. Not that they don’t belong, they just haven’t done much yet. Although that is changing and thanks to the Old Spice guy we’ll see a lot more changes.
But now mobile is causing the same kind of disruption in marketing orgs and I hear similar battles going on. Does mobile marketing belong in advertising? Digital marketing? Interactive? But you don’t hear any mention of the relation-based groups like PR or customer support.
The easy answer is that one’s an approach (social media/PR) and one’s more of a platform (mobile/advertising).
I think that this is a mistake and PR people will soon be playing catch up to advertising if they don’t find a way to leverage mobile beyond just the social media applications.
Twitter and Foursquare do not a mobile strategy make.
Dan Robles on August 16, 2010
Tac; yes, I believe that there are a few right answers. First, nothing economic can ever happen until people get together (geolocate) to build something. In Social Capitalism “productivity” includes building relationships, communities, art, music as well as ipods and jets. Second, Time is the basis of social currency; it is the scarce commodity, not easy to counterfeit or debase, but real easy to steal. Many PR experts talk about meeting the customer where they hang out – then wasting their time with MOTS. Instead, brands need to demonstrate that they save, create, empower, improve, amplify, and augment the customer’s productivity. Unfortunately, most products are designed to do the opposite.
So perhaps PR should become “Private Relations” – a vetting mechanism that can help the brand meet the priorities of the medium instead of trying to get the medium to meet the priorities of the brand.