DWPub Sporadic

CIPR social media guidelines - welcome but missed the point

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has issued it's Social Media Guidelines document.

This is a very welcome development from the CIPR which up to now has been a little slow on the uptake with such issues. However, having had a quick scan at the document I feel it fails to communicate the major challenge that social media represents to the PR industry.

The documents focuses mainly on ethical issues, it's main theme being a list of 'do nots'. Yes - the ethical side of social media and PR is all very worthy, but there isn't much point talking about ethics when in five years time the PR industry may have all but lost its voice.

The critical issue is that the PR industry needs to educate itself en masse about how to use social media for the benefit of its clients and start putting online PR techniques into practice. The CIPR should take a lead in this process. If this is not done the PR industry risks losing the communications agenda to other disciplines such as search marketing, direct marketing and advertising.

Guerrilla PR - can it crack B2B?

I attended the latest in the Leeds Metropolitan University PR open lecture series last night (see also Richard Bailey's blog), and very good it was too despite the last-minute change - scheduled speaker D-J Collins from Google couldn't make it.

My four-hour drive up to Leeds from Brighton was not wasted as a director from local agency Ptarmigan PR stepped in to do an enlightening presentation on guerrilla PR.

He provided some entertaining case studies, but I noted that they were all for consumer clients and seemed reliant on a stunt with some sort of physical presence - be it sand castles in the shape of a Mini car, logos projected onto public buildings or massive graffiti murals. This is all very well when your target audience is a local consumer, but what if your client is B2B with national customers? Guerrilla PR appears much more challenging in a B2B context as it seems to inevitably revolve around a local event.

I got a few ideas from the presentation though, I'll be trying them out on you!

Is there a future for PR agencies?

I'm in the process of writing a whitepaper about online PR and my perspectives on the state of play, with particular reference to the impact on the PR agency. It's been a valuable exercise just to gather all my thoughts on this subject.

Before I started putting the document together my belief was that the majority of PR agencies have failed to appreciate how online media is changing the behavior of their audience and therefore the significance of online media to their business. Having got draft number one of my whitepaper out and shared it with a few people, I am even more convinced that the PR sector is lagging dangerously behind on these issues.

The risk is that search marketing agencies (also known as search engine optimisation agencies) will steal PR's thunder. Sounds radical? Consider this: eight per cent of all press releases posted through the Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire in January came from search marketing agencies rather than PR agencies. I actually thought that number would be a little higher, but I can guarantee that during 2007 it will rise considerably.

The final version of my whitepaper will be out in a few weeks. Email me if you want an advance copy.