Public Relations and the Social Web

How to Use Social Media and Web 2.0 in Communications

Rob Brown

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780749457327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

The effect of the internet on public relations is the single biggest subject of current conversation in the public relations industry. As the world of communications changes beyond recognition, those seeking to communicate must revise and revolutionise their approach. Public Relations and the Social Web explores the way in which communications is changing and looks at what this means for communicators working across a range of industries, from entertainment through to politics. The book examines emerging public relations practices in the digital environment and shows readers how digital public relations campaigns can be structured.Including information on new communication channels such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and SEO, Public Relations and the Social Web is essential reading for public relations practitioners, students of public relations, and those who work in related areas such as journalism and web construction and design.

1

Something has
happened to
communications

We are in the midst of a communications upheaval more significant than the introduction of the printing press. The change began in rarefied academic circles in the 1960s, gathered pace with the emergence of the world wide web in the 1990s, but exploded into its most decisive phase in 2004 with the arrival of Web 2.0. The term was coined by Dale Dougherty of the US publishing company O’Reilly Media and it was first used for the highly influential Web 2.0 conference run by the company in 2004. In reality, Web 2.0 had begun much earlier, but with the beginning of a new millennium, it gathered pace. The web has always been regarded as free but a new unregulated frontier was opening up in cyberspace. In the beginning, the ‘coders’ – computer programmers – had ruled the environment. Later, the graphic designers arrived and made their mark on the space. Now the web was finally opening up to anyone. Those with a spirit of adventure were staking claims to this virtual new territory.

Web 2.0 has a variety of definitions. It can be described simply as the version of the web that is open to ordinary users and where they can add their content. It refers to the sites and spaces on the internet where users can put words, pictures, sounds and video. It is a very simple idea in theory. In practice, it signifies the transfer of control of the internet, and ultimately the central platform for communication, from the few to the many. It is the democratization of the internet. The names of some of these spaces, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia are now familiar. There are many thousands of others.

Nothing fundamentally changed in 2004 from a technological point of view; all of the tools that were available to create Web 2.0 environments already existed. What changed was the way that people started to view the internet. It was an organic change and it was driven as much by ordinary internet users as it was by large organizations. In fact, a number of those ordinary internet users created Web 2.0 environments that mushroomed into hugely valuable corporations and brands in a staggeringly short space of time. Bebo, the world’s third-largest social networking website, was sold for £417 million to internet company AOL, just three years after being set up by husband and wife team Michael and Xochi Birch.

The impact of a changing society

The way that the internet has changed is a reflection of a much wider change in society. For a number of years leading politicians and social commentators have been talking about the ‘end of deference’. In the Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law on 25 October 2007, Jack Straw, then Leader of the House of Commons said:

There has been another major shift in society that is also relevant to this debate. The structure of British society, which developed during a century and more of industrialization, has rapidly been transformed as a result of changes brought about by economic globalization. This profound period of socio-economic change has helped to shift public attitudes. It has encouraged the rise of a less deferential, more consumerist public. In this more atomized society, people appear more inclined to think of themselves and one another as customers rather than citizens.

Historically, we were encouraged to believe that our best interests were served by accepting at face value what we were told by people in authority. The Central Office of Information for the Ministry of Health made a number of public information films in the middle of the last century that were so patronizing that they now appear to be spoofs. The following comes from the voice-over of a film entitled Don’t Spread Germs:

Now, let’s get this quite clear; you sneeze into the handkerchief, and then put the handkerchief into the bowl of disinfectant to kill the germs not in with the family’s washing. Got it? Sure? Good! Remember: Don’t spread Germs.

If you want to see the clip and others like it, they are available online in the National Archives at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1945to1951/filmindex.htm.

The tone is extraordinary and quite different from modern public health messaging. The UK government’s current campaign to get people to use tissues rather than handkerchiefs is all about advice and persuasion – offering people packs of tissues in exchange for handkerchiefs. Another modern case in point is the government’s quit smoking campaign. The film is almost all about fellow smokers who have decided to give up. It is all about empathy and shared experience with the minimum use of an authoritative voice.

Web 2.0 is both a reflection of these changes and a major instrument for the acceleration of this shift. Consumers have the ability to talk back and to share their views and opinions with other consumers. They no longer implicitly trust what they are being told and this has major implications for the ways that brands communicate. Historically, organizations would decide on the image that they wanted and on how they wanted their various audiences to view them and then it would fall to the PR advisors to make that happen. What has happened is that the organizations have lost control of the agenda. In order to influence how they are seen they have to participate in conversations. Whilst for some this might appear to be a frightening change it is highly beneficial for the consumer and ultimately for the enlightened organization as it will draw it much closer to the people who use its products and services.

Independently of the changes that are happening in digital environments, we have seen the emergence of organizations and businesses that have a more democratic and inclusive culture than those that preceded them. One of these is innocent, the fruit smoothie-maker and the epitome of a modern brand. Its packaging actually invites people to call the office or even pay a visit.

How communications has changed

Communications is undergoing a radical change. Every aspect of how we exchange information is feeling the impact of the technological revolution. Changes are taking place in the way we use the media channels that have been available to us for many years. Totally new communications channels are emerging. The PR practitioners of the 21st century must understand all of these and how they are controlled and influenced if they are going to adapt and survive in this new environment.

Newspapers and magazines

Newspapers and magazines gave PR practitioners their first taste of the evolving media landscape. The early web versions of offline titles were essentially mirrors of the printed versions but they started to create opportunities for extended PR coverage as they rolled out revised websites that contained content that was unique to the web. As they started to refresh content more frequently, something significant changed for PR. The web news pages effectively killed off the concept of the embargo. The structured announcement of PR stories to ensure that a key monthly title could carry a PR story on the same day as a daily paper came to an end when news organizations could release stories literally within minutes of receiving them.

Major newspapers are in the business of reinventing themselves as brands. Their future role will be to disseminate news across a variety of platforms. When the Guardian relaunched itself in the smaller Berliner format in 2005, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, said at the time that the Guardian website was cannibalizing newspaper readership and that this was a factor in the prior fall in the paper’s circulation. He also said something else that provided a fascinating insight into the future of national daily newspapers. The new format required the purchase of new printers at some considerable cost: £62 million, £12 million more than the paper had budgeted. The editor apparently said that he thought they would be the last printers that the paper bought. Given that the lifespan of these presses could be as little as 20 years, this suggests that for some national papers the future will not involve paper at all. In fact, if you want to keep up to date with modern media trends, one of the best places to garner information on new trends is part of the new age Guardian. Media Talk is the Guardian Unlimited media podcast hosted weekly by Matt Wells and available via iTunes.

Television

There are a number of significant changes happening to the way we watch television. One of these is viewer scheduling. Innovations like Sky+, BBC iPlayer and TV content on iTunes mean that we can watch favoured programmes when it suits us and not just when they are broadcast. Incidentally, it also means that we can choose to skip TV adverts. The iPlayer and a number of similar platforms also mean that we are not just watching TV on the box in the corner of the living room but we are watching it on PCs, laptops and mobile devices, including iPods. Major manufacturers have cottoned onto this and have developed attractive-looking compact PCs that come with remote controls and are designed to operate through your TV. In 2008, Philips launched the EasyLife LX2000 computer with no monitor, designed to be attached to your TV like a DVD recorder and optimized for TV and video content viewing.

The natural conclusion is that content from broadcasters and from other sources including those that incorporate user-generated content (UGC) will start to converge. Moving from BBC iPlayer to Sky to stored content on your PC or streaming content from the internet will all be done in the same way that we used to channel hop. This means two things for the PR practitioner. The first is that there are more direct routes to market for TV or video. The second and related point is that the content needs to be genuinely engaging. In this new environment, content is king of kings and viewers will watch what they want and not just what they are fed.

There is another interesting issue that anyone involved in content production should consider. Big TV screens in the living room will become ubiquitous, the quality is improving with better high definition and the costs are falling. At the same time, TV is starting to appear on iPods and mobile phones. These two concurrent developments create a dilemma. Will something that works on a 52-inch screen also work on a 2-inch? Not always.

Finally, as the TV and the computer finally converge, the opportunities for integrating the functionality of Web 2.0 and the engaging nature of good TV should prove exciting for communicators in every field.

Radio

Due to the greater simplicity of radio and the lower ‘bandwidth’ requirements, radio has been available across a range of platforms for some time. Radio downloads that aren’t ever broadcast in a traditional sense are becoming increasingly popular. We just don’t call it radio; we refer to them as podcasts. In fact, the Director of the Radio Academy, Trevor Dann, is in no doubt that radio and podcasts are essentially the same thing:

The Sony Radio Academy Awards has a special category for the internet radio programme and I think it’s important that it’s called an internet radio programme and not a podcast or audiostream because we shouldn’t define the content by the form of delivery. (Trevor Dann speaking on BBC Radio Five, 24 March 2008)

Podcasts are incredibly cheap and easy to produce and simple to make available. The key, however, is content once again. It is an easy mistake to assume that because it is a low-technology environment anyone can do it. As PR people we should continue to value the skills of people who have developed their art and technique in the highly competitive broadcast environment to help us create podcasts that our audiences will choose and want to listen to.

The internet

Is the internet a medium at all? I really don’t think that it is – it is far richer and more complex than any of the traditional media channels. At one level it provides a platform that to varying degrees allows the traditional channels to migrate their content and reach different audiences. On another level it delivers a series of new media platforms and has created the forum through which the consumer and the brand can interact. For example, Facebook, as the leading social networking site, has characteristics all of its own. In fact, it doesn’t even regard itself as a social networking or social media site; it describes itself as a social utility. It is also a perfect example of how platforms on the internet mesh and mash up with each other. For example, YouTube provides a great deal of content for Facebook. Essentially, the way Facebook works is to draw content and applications from the widest possible range of sources. We will explore these internet-based platforms in more detail later in the book.

Whilst this book concerns itself with the growth and evolution of new digital channels it is important not to approach these channels in isolation. I believe that the distinction between digital and offline will gradually disappear. The distinctions will become blurred, as we are starting to see with radio and television, and the number of platforms will grow. For example, the growth of hand-held mobile channels will create new opportunities as we integrate location and content. Knowing where our audience physically are at any one moment will have a dramatic influence on what we want to say to them.

The other important consideration is that traditional media will not go away. In that regard I am entirely persuaded by the view of Gary Carter, President of Creative Networks at FremantleMedia and Chief Creative Officer, FremantleMedia New Platforms. In a keynote speech at the National Association of Television Program Executives conference in Las Vegas in January 2007 he argued the following:

The simple historical fact is that mass communication technologies are never replaced by newer technologies. They coexist, while continuing to evolve. We still have the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, and the movies, despite the fact that each of these was at the time of introduction viewed as the beginning of the end for the other.

The only mass communication medium in history to have been replaced by another is the telegraph, a service which began ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1: Something has happened to communications
• 2: The implications for communicators
• 3: The lunatics have taken over the asylum
• 4: The new channels
• 5: Digital PR and search engine optimization
• 6: The power of the new media
• 7: The new ethics
• 8: The blurring of channels
• 9: The battle for influence at the digital frontier
• 10: Horses and courses
• 11: Digital PR architecture
• 12: Tools of the trade
• 13: Evaluation and measurement
• 14: Dodging bear traps
• 15: The major players
• 16: The next big thing
• Index