The True & Remarkable Fate of Public Relations
About a week ago, the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble announced that his family was expecting another joyous care package from the stork. (Congrats, Robert!)
Shortly thereafter, he tweeted:
“State of marketing on Twitter? FAIL. Not a single company got back when we announced our pregnancy. This is a good thing but won’t last.”
Let’s ignore the weird logic of simultaneously complaining about being ignored while at the same time saying it is “a good thing” that the twitterstream was not polluted with marketers. (If P&G had quickly tweeted an offer for “free Pampers,” would you have been surprised to see Robert vilify them for cheapening his wholesome family news?)
Let’s focus instead on this possibility: Consumers may increasingly expect that their online ruminations will be monitored and responded to in real-time.
As Robert’s tweet and Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post about “community representation” suggest, the day may be coming when consumers — singly or in ad-hoc special-interest groups (SIGs) — demand instant satisfaction from corporations.
This represents a monstrous scalability problem as the hordes increasingly move online. For the firms who figure it out, though, the karmic and revenue benefits could be equally monstrous.
Imagine this scenario:
You bought a lightweight laptop. Just 3lbs.! But the powercord that the manufacturer shipped it with? It’s another 2lbs. So much for alleviating your achey shoulder! You blog about it. You post a Flickr photo of the laptop and cord tipping the bathroom scales at over 5lbs. You tweet about it. A handful of your online buddies commiserate.
… And not long after, the manufacturer reaches out to you publicly and offers a lighter-weight powercord if you’ll just ship back the original two-pounder.
That laptop-maker just made a customer for life. They’ve birthed a new evangelist who will sing their praises online; who will defend the manufacturer from other consumers who complain.
Now imagine you arrive at the airport only to find that the flight’s just been delayed by three hours! You’re peeved. You tweet about it. Suddenly you get a tweet from a rival airline: they’re taking off for your destination in the next terminal, in 90 minutes — and they will save you a seat, including a free upgrade, if you can hustle over there. Now that’s worth eating the change fee! And, again: a new fan-for-life is born.
This is the new, hybridized service/marketing dynamic that ComcastCares and RichardatDELL are striving to achieve. As such examples become less hypothetical, we’ll pity and hiss at the companies that DON’T listen and respond in real-time.
PR does have a role in this new world order. Though, unlike Jeremiah Owyang, I don’t foresee SIGs banding together to pay PR to intermediate with brands (the brands are better off treating directly with the communities).
However, I do see PR sometimes serving as a stopgap between Corporation and Consumer: PR already does a ton of monitoring and analysis of both media and socialstreams. We can vet the issues; alert clients to rising customer angst; analyze which users need to be ushered into the red-carpet service channel; defend against frustrated claimants; etc.
Isn’t this the business of Customer Service? Not marketing or PR?
That’s more debatable than you might think, in a world in which every consumer is becoming a standalone media outlet, indexed by Google.
The stakes are too high to allow direct public interaction with online consumers to outsourced foreign workers or underpaid college kids. PR becomes the middleman — escorting the disgruntled to the right Customer Service resource and soothing the crowds at the gate in the meantime.
(Not to mention getting hits in the mainstream media, and all that traditional stuff. We’ll be busy.)
I can tell you that this future is coming because I’ve seen it happening with our own clients. Not necessarily every day, but such services are on the rise, almost by necessity. Pissy tweets must not languish unanswered. Not anymore.
Is that the future you saw for yourself when you joined the PR industry? Probably not. Is it a role you want? Is it appropriate? Do you see an alternative path?
UPDATE: Loic LeMeur also recently wrote about a similar topic.
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To use a sports comparison, the manager of a big soccer club in Europe no longer deals with tactics and formations as much as massaging egos of superstars and working with the media to combat the latest rumors of their demise.
It is was it is. I’ve learned this myself from “being a brand” on Twitter and encountering the situations you used as examples above. It works both ways, good and bad.
Patrick
@patrickRevans
Just as a parent doesn’t react to every single demand of a child, brands shouldn’t feel compelled to jump at every negative opinion. We need filters and aggregation.
I wrote that report that Jeremiah references about a year ago with Mary Beth Kemp. We included a timeline of how this would play out from 2008 – 2013 that looks like it could still hold true.
Agreed, Peter – and I am arguing, in part, that PR can be that filter/aggregator.
Feel free to send me a free copy of that report. I won’t tell anybody.
Great post Todd.
We have been encouraging PR pros to put a stake in the ground with their clients as brand champions among consumers and media alike. Now is the time for PR to take a bigger piece of the marketing pie away from traditional advertising agencies. Branding is as much about outreach and engagement as it is about marketing speak and flashy ads.
On a side note re Scoble – I tweeted when we found out we were having a boy, and when our son was born just 3 weeks ago. Companies on Twitter sent my wife some Outdoor Clothing designed for expecting mothers, a book about traveling with kids, as well as a handful of great resources and websites. Why? Because most of my followers are PR pros. This is indeed a branding opportunity fostered by PR.
Exactly. It need not ALL be about “disgruntled” consumers; PR will do EVEN BETTER as we help companies REWARD and SURPRISE consumers who might have a relevant interest in their brands.
PR is part of customer service now, if you’re doing it right. In my two corporate PR gigs, the PR team was closely involved in customer service. Not just when a customer was a member of the press, either. If we heard a customer that wasn’t happy, you never heard, “let customer service deal with it.”
And yes, as customers can be more vocal easier and via other channels than their local consumer affairs reporter, that responsibility grows for us.
I concur…it is something that I’ve learned and embraced in my own communications role, but also see it throughout many roles and groups in the organization. It’s not going away, so understand it and learn how/when/where it can be so valuable.
Article on the fate of Public Relations. Is response via Social Networks up to Customer Service or PR people?
Your post makes a lot of excellent points that go above and beyond PR and touch upon Twitter etiquette, pitching vs. spamming, and knowing where and how to draw that line.
I’m a pregnancy book author and I’ve only once sent a copy of one of my pregnancy books to a pregnant celebrity. It was someone to whom I felt a personal connection. (I’m a major fan of that person and had been for years before she announced her pregnancy. That gift was a gift from the heart.)
It wouldn’t seem genuine for me to send a copy of my book to Robert (even though I follow him). He might feel like I’d be asking him for an endorsement down the road; and I’d feel like I’d be intruding on a private event in his life. This is because, at this point, I’m *just* following Robert. We haven’t had the opportunity to build up a rapport. In fact, he hasn’t got a clue who I am.
I think that Twitter works because its based on relationship-building and an understanding that people want to get to know other people, not hear endless product pitches.
If people start using it as the opportunity to toss products at someone based on the content of their tweets, people will stop tweeting. Or they’ll have to block even more people (those who don’t understand the difference between tweeting and spamming).
Isn’t that part of Twitter’s beauty? The unfollow.
As usual Todd, you are making sure to raise issues that far to many are ignoring and doing so in a fashion that any brand can understand.
I’ve been through this personally with a brand and I can safely say it DOES work. While you won’t be able to always fix the problem, most consumers when they do throw something out like this just want to be heard and listened to. At a minimum you must do this and let the person know you are listening.
Brands saying they “don’t have time” isn’t something they can say right now. Customer Service is more critical today then ever and as the economy continues down the path it is on right now and people are even more cautious about where they spend their money they are going to spending it with people and companies they trust and build a relationship with. NOW is the time to do this or your competition will do it for you.
Amen, hallelujah, and of course, thank you for the kind words, Mr. Chapman.
Todd – very interesting read. Here’s the weird thing for me, though. I agree wholeheartedly, yet don’t know how I feel about it.
I’ll try to explain…
I agree that this will be a necessary but difficult area to navigate moving forward. It’s interesting that Scoble expected free stuff at the mere mention of a need and I fear this mentality will spread to a point where we all feel entitled to whatever free goodies we want just because we dropped a tweet or updated our Facebook status.
That said, I agree that companies who can take advantage of some of these opportunities will benefit. I’ve already told several non-Twitter friends about what Rockport did for @unmarketing and how @unmarketing is singing the companies praises across several social outlets. That’s a very good thing.
And, I agree that you can’t outsource this to a foreign country or underpaid, couldn’t-care-less college kids.
So here’s where I’m not sure how I feel about it. It seems like a glorified customer service role to me, however important. Many PR pros get into the business because they want to be strategic communicators. While meeting these opportunities would be strategically thought out and planned, those executing against it are really just glorified customer service folks.
I speak from offline experience. My name was the only actual human being’s name on the web site for a former client – a Fortune 500 company. I got a decent share of calls from customers who wanted to talk to a PERSON. I spent about 15%-20% of my time getting these calls, funneling them to contacts, etc. While it was an important function, it was what I liked least about the job because it really disrupted forward progress on larger, more strategic initiatives at times.
Maybe the answer lies in this being part of the community builder’s role – a la Amber Naslund and others – and more companies setting aside money and resources to create that position within the organization. Because it IS important. I mean, I’m an advocate for calling PR “people relations” because it’s becoming less focused on “publics” and more focused on “people.”
At the same time, though, I don’t know that I’d be excited about spending 20%, 50% or 100% of my time executing it tactically. Maybe I’m looking at it too individually, though. I wouldn’t be excited about spending my time doing the very important job of financial communications, either, so I don’t do that. People who are passionate about it do. This will probably be the same way.
“I don’t know that I’d be excited about spending 20%, 50% or 100% of my time executing it tactically.”
Few people WOULD be excited by that prospect, David. A senior-level PR pro would be wasted on this assignment. This could be one part of a junior PR person’s role … but JUST ONE PART (i.e., it will be spread out amongst many colleagues), *and* they would need to be highly trained in advance.
I think it’s an intriguing question. It does point to the necessity of creating more cohesion between companies’ PR & customer service & marketing departments – without each understanding the others’ role in working directly with the public (whether through call centers, retail shops or the blogosphere) it can become unnecessarily confusing and create unproductive division between departments.
I have always maintained that there is (or should be) an important distinction between public relations and media relations efforts. Everyone who works for a company is involved in that company’s public relations – their actions or inactions make an impression (favorable and profitable or unfavorable and unprofitable) on the people whom it tries to capture as customers. I think if media professionals do a good job of maintaining credible relationships with reporters, bloggers, etc. AND if they can demonstrate the value those relationships bring to overall public relations’ efforts the time spent will be more valued by leadership within an organization and more appropriately resourced.
My presentation at the Business of Community Networking conference in Boston last Thurs. touched on many of the same themes.
Companies have to bridge the artificial divide between marketing and customer service — for example cross functional teams so the functional organizations are better informed of the other’s social media plans/responses. We divide the functions from perceived organizational imperative, but the customer sees one product.
We don’t want her to have one experience before the sale and a completely different one afterward. And not just whether it is “good” or “bad” A huge social media presence in the marketing process, but the only was to reach customer service is the phone or maybe email is just as much of a disconnect.
Great point, Susan. Wish I had thought of that earlier!