Social media is now part of the mainstream. Last week's conference about strategic social media, run by Don't Panic, confirmed how much has changed since I attended one of Don't Panic's first events on the subject, the University of Sunderland's Delivering the new PR in 2006.
Don't Panic's Andy Wake has written an excellent account of the changing impact of social media on the Eventualities blog. (See also this comprehensive post by Adam Burns.) Those early events included workshops explaining what a blog was, and encouraging PR people to try their hands at blogging and social media. No such introduction is needed now, as the BBC's news bulletins regularly cover Twitter and Facebook. (Perhaps excessively, as I suggested in a blog post about the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones last month!) Corporate communicators are now judged on how their organisations are engaging with social media as well as traditional media.
Yet we should take care not to treat social media as a bandwagon. The best presentation at last week's Don't Panic event was by Martin Thomas, the co-author of Crowd Surfing. Martin mocked the idea that companies need a social media strategy. I totally agree - a social media strategy suggests a synthetic response to the changes that social media is prompting. (My boss recently posed the compelling question: why he should have a social media strategy but not a newspaper or email strategy.) Instead, we should apply the lessons of social media (that transparency and authenticity are crucial) to all our communications efforts. It's telling that many senior communicators regard Twitter as a way of pushing out corporate messages. That's completely wrong. In the same way, too many corporate communicators only tweet when they've got a news release to sell. That's not going to win them many friends.
The other refreshing presentation was from Stephen Waddington from Speed Communications, who gave everyone a copy of the Beano. (Thanks to Don't Panic's Andy Wake for the photo of Stephen and his son reading the Beano in the background.) This wasn't as eccentric as you might think: Stephen's point was that great content is always a winner, whatever the medium. He contrasted the hopeless online efforts of Britain's biggest regional media groups with the SR2 blog, an extraordinarily compelling website run by Josh Halliday, a journalism student in Sunderland.
I'll end this account with a plug for a brilliant piece of viral marketing for Blackpool, described by Sarah Lundy from Visit Lancashire. I've a particular interest here as my father was a pioneer of local government and tourism PR in Wales and London. I was thrilled with the success of Blackpool's J'aime La Tour video, which confirms Stephen Waddington's view that great content wins.
I've included below links to my blog posts about the Don't Panic events I've attended. Social media has dominated!
CIPR Northern Conference July 2006: PR embraces blogs
November 2006: Delivering the new PR
June 2007: Delivering the new PR 2.0
January 2008: crisis communications
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