PR gets back to basics

October 9th, 2009 by Sharon Harper

No doubt the dawning and evolution of social media have transformed the way PR practitioners and companies engage and communicate with key audiences, including journalists.  However, it’s easy to get swooped up by the wave of excitement and what these platforms perceive to promise, and—along the ride—forget that these tools are not the be all and end all.

The Martino Flynn PR team had the opportunity to hear a who’s who in the PR and social media world speak on the topic. Instead of divulging all the secrets of how to effectively use social media, Peter Shankman claims there really aren’t any, and backed this up by sharing his four “rules” of common sense:

• Transparency: No one is perfect: everyone is going to make a mistake at some point. And with all the social technologies available, it’s especially important these days to be upfront and transparent.
• Relevancy: We’ve become a society of microjournalists, where people are “experts” on every topic you can think of. This makes it all the more important to know with whom you’re communicating.  Why not ask your audience directly what exactly it is they want and need—and how they wish to receive it?
• Brevity: The average attention span for teenagers in the 80′s was 3 minutes—or the length of a music video. Now it’s only 2.7 seconds, or the time it takes to read a 140-character tweet. 
• Customer service: It’s all about karma. “Make your customers addicts” by working your network. Make a consistent effort to reach out to a few people in your network on a daily basis—whether it’s wishing someone a happy birthday on Facebook or simply phoning to say hello.

The latter point resonated with me the most.  Shankman cited a few examples of noteworthy individuals who took a few minutes of their time to do this simple, but smart exercise.  It paid dividends down the line when various contacts recalled the person they felt they already knew and trusted, and got in touch to do business. This was Shankman’s very impetus for creating Help A Reporter Out (HARO), a free exchange between journalists looking for sources on deadline and more than 100,000 worldwide sources—largely PR practitioners scouting opportunities for their clients—who are looking to be quoted in the media.

In reality, social media are best utilized when they complement existing communications strategies. What’s even better is getting someone to do your PR for you. How can this be done, you ask? Forget Facebook [for a moment] and get back to basics: focus on customer service. Ask them directly about what it is they want and need, and then give it to them. Your good karma will come back around in the form of positive PR.

- Sharon Harper

This entry was posted by Sharon Harper on Friday, October 9th, 2009 and is filed under Business, Communication, MF, Public Relations, Social Media, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.