Drew B's take on tech PR

Is social media killing PR

An article just up on ZDNet covers a recent event about the social media / death of PR issue. It makes interesting reading, as anyone who works in PR knows social media is bringing change, and the event that the article covers includes a star slot from top industry analyst, Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang. Conclusion - social media exposes a weakness in PR.

Here's some of the article and Jemeriah's good bits from the event: 

During the panel, both [Susan] Etlinger and Owyang handed these issues to the audience on a silver platter. Specifcally, Owyang made the critical points that yes, PR is changing, and it’s more important now than ever that PR engage 1) beyond corporate communications 2) throughout the customer lifecycles and 3) with a new and improved skill set. And, most important, PR needs to fix its own reputation (Owyang expands on this in detail on his blog).

In his own account of how the event went, Jeremiah's blog goes on to look at the opportunities that face PR firms, presented by social media. He says that there are four business opportunities for the evolved PR firm. 

First, enhance existing functions. Look at how to communicate with press, analysts, customers, media, bloggers and so on direct and through one another. If PR doesn't get its head around all these channels and doing it in an evolved way then it will be bypassed. 

Second, differentiation. Jeremiah says that PR people should become part of the community they serve, regardless of the client they're working on and become known as experts in their industry. 

Third, extend the customer lifecycle. PR firms must look beyond media relations and develop a variety of ways of accessing audiences direct for their clients. 

Fourth, fix your own reputation! Jeremiah says PR firms should be using social media more to tell their own stories and also let their clients advocate their people and services more.

 

It's not rocket science and for PR firms already in social media it's a bit of a case of nothing new there. But good to see an independent analyst putting down their thoughts of how the industry as a whole can and should adapt to the opportunities on the table. 

Catching up

Over the last few weeks it's been a bit busy over at number 33. A couple of trips to the US, some nice big juicy campaigns that have come out after a lot of work, and we're in heavy duty planning mode for 2009. And then a bit of time off unexpectedly this week, which wasn't so nice. But as there's been so much stuff I would've written about on this blog but haven't had a chance, no better time to pick things back up again than now.

• Last week the great Andy West joined Hotwire - more on my new colleague here in the PR Week write-up. Nice to have you here Andy.
• Two very cool projects I've been working on have come to fruition - the relaunch of FT.com and the unveiling of O2 Litmus and the O2 Digital News Centre
• Stuff I've seen and liked include a very intriguing stunt pulled in New York where a flash mob of activists gave out 1.2 million fake copies of the NY Times, Coke does a tongue-pearcing piccy collection (via Justin), and some familiar thoughts about the media attention crash, observed by a Bite blogger from a Steve Rubel presentation
• I went to Paul Walsh's event with Sarah Lacy last week. She told stories about how obnoxious Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was, who her favourite Silicon Valley rich kids are, and stuff like that.

That's it for now.