I
went to the latest NMK ‘What happens to Online
PR’ debate on Tuesday. In the trendy Shoreditch area numerous new media
luminaries gathered to debate the point (paraphrased) ‘that PR has lost its
capability to guide its clients through the new media landscape’. Predictably
the motion was voted down, as would be expected in a room full of PR people.
But
I left feeling the debate hadn’t really been furthered to a huge extent. Last
year’s ‘Clients
in the wild’ event and various other such meetings I have been to, continue
to bring up similar themes and arguments. The industry appears to be going
round in circles on the whole ‘new media’ debate.
What
can be drawn from this? Firstly that there’s a lot of guff and ‘I know more
than you’ talk bandied around where new media is concerned. And secondly, many
professionals are ready to or have already moved past the debate and
experimentation phase and are ready to properly guide and succeed for clients
in this space. James
Warren of Webber Shandwick especially and various questions from the floor
belied a weariness with the central subject of the debate. As one lady astutely
put it “I’ve been doing ‘online PR’ since 1994 when websites were cutting edge,
why don’t people just get on with it!”
And
that’s what most of us are doing. James Warren, even after a few glasses of
wine, managed to convey the argument most astutely with a kind of ‘yeah we’re
already doing it’ tone. He also came up with another especially salient point. One
area that will continue to grow in importance is facilitating conversations
wherever they need to occur between an organisation ant its stakeholders. I’ve
long been a proponent of this view that PR should facilitate the
company-ousider interface wherever needed. A good example would be highlighting
to a company’s technical department that hundreds of angry customers are
occupying a previously unknown online forum. If their enquiries are too
in-depth to be dealt with by PR, then it’s our job to locate and involve the
appropriate company person, help them engage, allaying the problems and create
happy customers.
I
managed to plump up the final question of the night but unfortunately it was
time to move to vote so no discussion was had on the matter. The question, or
statement depending on how you look at it, was that:
- Firstly there was
only one in-house practitioner at the event. This is obviously partly
because of the way that the
London consultancy network communicates with each other and the fact it’s our job
to stay at the cutting edge of the profession. However, you’d hope a few
more in-house interests would have been piqued. It’s clear there is still
a lot of education to be done in-house as to what can be done and what
actually matters for clients online.
- The second
observation, picking up on the event’s theme that there is a ‘race’ to
claim the digital communications prize. I ventured that the industry is in
danger of confusing the industry as to where they should go for different
communication services. Advertising or ‘free advertising’ was an easy
split, with digital marketers, ad agencies, digital PR, ‘normal PR’ and
SEO companies all offering useful parts of the overall whole, it’s
important we communicate exactly who does what, how and why.
The
final point I’d like to make is about capability. There was a feeling from some
attendees, and in the initial contrary motion, that somehow PR’s capability to
communicate is diminished or falling behind other innovators from other areas
of marketing. This is simply not the case and is a massively sweeping statement.
Capability and skill sets are the preserve and responsibility of individual
consultancies, those that move forward will have continued success; those that
don’t will become increasingly irrelevant.
It is up to each and every
one of us to understand what can be done, work out how to do it (sometimes
internally, sometimes in partnership with specialists) and then inform our
clients where and why it is relevant to them.
Other speakers at the event included:
Mike Nutley (Chair) -
Editor-in-Chief at New Media Age.
Stuart Bruce - MD and
founder of Wolfstar and
leading PR blogger.
Antony Mayfield - Head of Social Media at iCrossing with a blog at Open.
Roger Warner, founder and
MD of Content and Motion.
