Social Media & PR

A view from the bridge

simon collisterLondon College of Communication,

University of the Arts London

PR industry “missing the boat”

“Within minutes of PRWeek's interview starting, Grant is lambasting the PR industry for 'missing the boat' on digital, allowing advertising and media agencies to steal a march.”

- Robin Grant, Global Managing Director, We Are Social - PR

Week, 24th May 2012

Current challenges [in a nutshell]

1. Increasing commercialisation of social media

2. Rise of the ‘social business’ or ‘social organisation’

3. Data-driven communications

What’s happening to Facebook?

1. Post-IPO social interaction within Facebook is becoming increasingly commercialised

2. Shift from ‘organic’to paid communicationpushes Facebook more intothe domains of mediaand ad agencies

3. Similar happening withother platforms, e.g. Twitter

Commercialisation

• Facebook:– Newsfeed not ‘open’ communications channel– Determined by Facebook’s ‘EdgeRank’– Visibility determined by Affinity, Freshness &

Weight of ‘edges’, e.g. links, photos, videos, etc

The word from within Facebook

• ‘While news feed posts are fine for everyday engagement, businesses should consider using ‘Sponsored Stories’ [i.e. advertising] to ensure business critical information reaches users’

– Advice from Facebook employee

The Rise of Social Business

Social business strategy absorbs all

Who owns social communications?

Big Data?

• Commonly applied to the vast quantities of data being generated by contemporary socio-technological systems whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time

– Bollier 2009; boyd and Crawford 2011

What is Big Data?

• Search engine marketing performance• Digital ad acquisition metrics• Website analytics• Email communication performance• Online surveys • Social media conversations• Media content

Tracking big data

• Database of 20 billion social media conversations• 8 million new posts archived every hour• Social media and news

sources gathered

SOURCE: Sysomos MAP

Impact on PR?

• “Metrics driven communication, advocacy and outreach efforts are now becoming the expectation.”

– Big Data comes to the Communications Industry

• [Political] campaign planning now “involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread”

– The Age of Big Data

Future for PR…?

• Much more complex landscape blurring boundaries between traditional industry sectors and organisational models

• Strong opportunity to adapt, presuming PR can fulfill its role as a strategic business function

• However, need to consider:– Big rethink in terms of skills of PR practitioners – Big rethink in terms of organisational structure and roles– Greater leadership from industry bodies

Questions?

www.simoncollister.comsimon.collister@gmail.com

@simoncollister

References• Bollier, D. (2009) The Promise and Peril of Big Data. Extreme Inference:

Implications of Data Intensive Advanced Correlation Techniques. The Eighteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, Aspen, Colarado, The Aspen Institute.

• boyd, d. and K. Crawford (2011) Six Provocations for Big Data. A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society. Oxford.

• Lohr, S. (2012). The Age of Big Data. New York Times, 12 February. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-world.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

• Luker, S. (2012) Robin Grant: Man on a Digital Mission. PRWeek, 24 May. Available: http://www.prweek.com/uk/features/1133323/robin-grant-man-digital-mission/

• Olsen, C. (2012) Big Data Comes to the Communications Industry. Huffington Post, 13 March. Available: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-olsen/big-data-comes-to-the-com_b_1343310.html