In September last year I drew up the above framework in a series of 3 blog posts looking at the coming extensions in PR that are coming and will come over the next year. You can catch up on the posts if you want to quickly: The New PR, PR, Static Wine, and Dynamic Wineskins, and PR 2010.

To help you quckly get up to seed, the above diagram illustrates a host of media that find themselves in different places with regards to their ‘spreadability’ and their ‘relevance’. Facebook, due to it’s alogorhthyms and such, is individually relevant and highly spreadable because there are fewer restrictions on it than there are TV, which is more mass market and less individually relevant, and has more restrictions. There’s more about it here.

I’m bringing this up again today as I have a bit more to add to the discussion, as I’m sure you do.

To Start, A Local Example

I was providing some consultancy through my company Aaron+Gould this last week on an event that wishes to extend it’s offline experience through Social Media. They wanted to do this to sieze the opportunity of engaging with the tens of thousands of people using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc who are their target audience, in order to get them excited about the event, involved in the community aspects of the event, and ultimately attend the event along with their friends.

When they showed me the numbers, it was funny to my Social mind to see such Broadcast thinking. Number of press releases for last years event – about 200 or so. Instances of other media (whether status updates, tweets, and blogs) – about 50 or so.

Of course most businesses are thinking like this because press releases are the way it’s always been done, but stil as much as I wanted to help them understand that a press release does little for the general public, they wanted me to understand how is one of their core ways of distribution information.

There must be room for both public relations and personal relationship. Whilst press releases and other traditional PR activity is mostly handy for communication with media partners, the press, and peers, if consumers are going to be engaged directly, then with Social Media we have a way to communicate through a dynamic channel in a far more meaningful and effective way, as per the model above.

(Let me just point out quickly that SEO is an agenda for most PR agencies today – so there is a diffusion of technology happening – although it is all still around the broadcast side of the Social / Broadcast Matrix, not so much the social side.)

4 New Faces of PR

I want to see local examples like this to start embracing their actual target markets with personal, individual interaction as well as the overall reach stuff, and I think it can be done. I see a scale to help us:

Public Relations. What we already have – a high level overview that sees a range of connections, media, press and channels. It is pretty must broadcast up here – pushing the message out to those who will push it out to others.

Public Relationships. Like events which broadcast social, this level is the mass delivery of relationships rather than relations. We are creating strategic relationships with key demographics by using Social Media (among other things) to broadcast our social content. This isn’t a press release, which the public will not engage with – this is supplying social content that the public will engage with: videos, blogs, Facebook advertising, showcasing opinion leaders. All of this as content must build upon the idea of Social Authority (consider again Facebook’s universal like button.)

Personal Relations. As we drill down, we now begin to connect into communities and smaller clusters by targeting information for them. Schools, workplaces, local demographics, social groupings.

Personal Relationship. Through community and Social Media management, we get down into the smallest block of maintaing personal relationship with individuals. This has to be social. There must be listening, responding and initiating. At this grass roots level, listening is an invaluable way to gauge how the public are perceiving you from the members of the public themselves, rather than the distant reach metrics that our level of Public Relations used to go by.

I’m really only providing a few thoughts here. If you really want depth on this subject, Brian Solis has a very thorough blog on the subject, followed by John Cass who is another excellent writer on the subject. On UK soil, Claire Thompson writes regularly as a PR consultant on how she is seeing the shift into Social.

The Main Point

Mix your PR strategy to be wide as well as deep – but width here means engaging the general public. Don’t just perform ‘public relations’ also work your way down into ‘personal relationship.’ The new social mindset of consumers means the general public will respond favourable to this.

Your Leading Questions

• Can you provide an example where you were engaged with personal relationship by a brand / event / campaign? Let’s dissect it.

So there’s lots of buzz right now about Eurostar’s mass travel delays following a train failure mid-Channel Tunnel, and the subsequent issues surrounding the handling of their Social Media presence by self-called ‘Conversation Agency’ We Are Social.

I am not intending to repeat much of what’s already been said, nor lay out the background of the situation, which is neatly summarised at TechCrunch. You can read what I have found to the best articles on the theme of this being a Communications problem as opposed to a Social Media problem at BrandRepublic, Digital Stuffing and at Rob Fenwick’s blog, with thanks to Mack Pack for pointing me there with his good summarising post. My aim is to discuss the flawed view of the majority that is held towards Social Media.

Before I begin, I’ll say that this is in no way an attack on We Are Social. They have chronicled their trials and tribulations in the last days on their blog, and as they state, had no agreement in place with Eurostar for crisis management. The reason why I’m tackling this case study is because it’s current, and because it reveals what the majority mindset is.

So here are the flaws that Social Media Agencies and their Clients are facing that have been highlighted by the Eurostar situation:

Flaw 1: Conversations, not Communications

We Are Social are a ‘Conversation Agency‘, and if that’s what they are selling, then that’s fine. But the misunderstanding for many is that Social Media is just about conversations, and this is where problems set it in: because it’s not. First of all, Social Media is communications (of which ‘conversation’ is a part), and secondly, not all conversation, nor communication, is verbal, or written, or video, or audio, or links.

The fruition of this thinking means Social Media doesn’t do anything outside of ‘Conversations’ which is often code for ‘soft-sell marketing’. As we have seen, and as many are writing, this Eurostar debacle should illustrate once and for all that Social Media is not just about marketing – and any campaign that does so is an unbalanced and doomed campaign, because people – your users – are always going to ask you about things that are nothing to do with marketing, such as customer support – why? – because it’s a communication platform and that’s how they see it.

Neilsen identified 5 areas of use for Social Media (Customer Service and Support, Insight and Research, Product Development, PR Reputation and Influence, Marketing), all of which require both internal and external communications, which are probably managed by Social Media (you know, email, basecamp, etc.) This means communication infrastructure needs to be built – more on this later.

My other point is that thinking about ‘Conversations’ as a one-size-fits-all is another flawed mindset. Sure, Social Networks are a place for conversation – but users talk with their friends – not incessantly with brands. At Like Minds Immersive: Developing Social Media Strategy I pointed to a lack of profiling one’s actual Social Media audience as hit and miss quicksand. Just because a demographic will have a conversation with others about you doesn’t mean they want to have a conversation with you – perhaps all they want is a discount code? Correct profiling should prevent you from overestimating their participation with you. Also when we look at Social Media as Communications, we can stop thinking that the only lexicon we have is ‘engagement’, ‘conversation’, ‘participation’ and ‘discussion’.

Flaw 2: Little or No Strategy

We Are Social’s plan for Eurostar was a low-level, introductory experiment called ‘Little Break, Big Difference‘ (again they discuss this on their blog.) The site looks quite nice, but when I also consider their Twitter account and Facebook page, I am left feeling that there is little strategy here. I don’t get how this really connects with their audience, or in any way lifts restrictions to provide their audience with previously unrealised value.

This lack of strategy is now common place for Social Media campaigns. For me, I consider a large contribution to this is the lack of strategic frameworks for Social Media programs. Perhaps people are too busy trying to Social Celebrities. Anyway. Very few people seem to make frameworks and models, and most are really not that beneficial but just tactics. I’m sure it’s very arrogant, but I think this is something I do well. I’ve drawn up a number of frameworks that don’t just point out tactics but help you identify what strategic approach you should take.

Basic questions that should be answered by a good strategy:

• What purpose do the Social Media profiles have? Which of the 6 presence types are you using?
• How are your profiles lifting restrictions for your target audience?
• What provision are you making for non-conversation activity?
• What levels of participation is your audience profiled at?

We’ve all said it, but let’s say it again: tactics aren’t strategy. So please, Mr. I-Did-A-Twitter-Course, add some strategy to your understanding of the tools. And this goes for the agencies too!

Flaw 3: Little or No Integration

When it comes to Social Media you’ve got to know that, being a communications platform, people will tweet you for things that a marketing agency can’t resolve. If you view your Social Media activity as purely marketing you are stuffed. Case in point: people still reply to @SkyNews  with questions, even though it clearly states that it’s not there to provide responses and is automated.

Integration goes to your 360 degree management structure – who reports to who – where to go for information – classification of engagement to ensure correct responses and subsequent internal communications – ensuring that each message is systematically resovled.

Look at Eurostar’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and there is apparently none of this. Wall posts with no resolution (as per image above), Tweets with no responses – and if they are being done in private, then why aren’t they being done in public?

Where is the linkup between PR, Marketing, Support, C-Suite and Social Media? Who integrated this? Who thought ahead and considered some worst case scenarios?

When I work with clients at Aaron+Gould, we create guidelines that detail exactly how we execute everything and how we report, including classification of Tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, scales of urgency and response, complete with the entire procedure for resolution and sample 140 character updates to use. Over time I’ll be sharing a lot of this with you, but if you want some great advice on crisis management and Social Media, read this article from FreshNetworks.

Flaw 4: Non Experiential

Question: do you think the user cares that, on the Eurostar Twitter, it says “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding”

Answer: no one cares. In fact, few even read it. People just want answers – like I’ve said three times in this post on the same point now.

There is a real problem with delivering user experience for most Social Media campaigns, like this case above. I find it highly ironic that, seeing as We Are Social believe that, we, the people, are social, then why on earth is there a complete lack of Social Support? The message from We Are Social and Eurostar here is clear: “When it comes to marketing our message to you, we’ll talk and we are social. But when it comes to solving your problems that we marketed you into buying, then sorry, we’re not social anymore.”

So…

That’s my take on it. Like I said in starting, this isn’t an attack on We Are Social – and I really do feel that they have received the unfortunate brunt of what was a problem out of their control. But they had not architected a Social Media strategy correctly, and it is approaches like theirs that continue to muddy the industry and create further ‘conversationalists’ who lack any care for integration that actually benefits organisations and users in the long run.

What I haven’t done is said what I would’ve done. Firstly, because it’s too easy to say it, and secondly, because I think the correct actions fall into place when we change our thinking about Social Media as I have tried to do above.

Thoughts?

“I want things to change, but I don’t have the money and time to pay for it. What do I do?”

Recently I’ve been hearing this over and over. So today, without a buzz-worthy title, and without any chatty meandering, I’m going to get down to some straight talk on firstly what is wrong with this question, then what the right question to ask is, and finally, what the answers are to that right question.

Before anything else, spoiler alert: the answer is People2People (P2P) thinking, what proceeds is just how to get there. So best go and read Olivier Blanchard’s manifesto here, and then come back.

Ok, done? Let’s get to work.

First: What’s Wrong With This Question?

In two words: factory thinking .

As I discussed yesterday, this old thinking is one of mechanics and processes that are managed and optimised. And if a business is run with factory thinking, then it needs factory solutions: better parts and better processes – both of which require money to acquire the upgraded parts and pay for the skilled mechanic who installs them.

Thing is, most companies today aren’t made up of tangible mechanics. In the P2P world, companies recognise they are are made up of tangible people who work with intangible assets. P2P thinkers also realise that people, unlike parts, don’t need upgrading: they need developing, and they desire leadership – and good leadership will develop them to levels a paid upgrade couldn’t, whilst granting them invaluable experience en route, without the hefty price tag.

Imagine of factory full of parts that intuitively develop themselves to become more effective – that’s P2P – if the people can just be allowed to do it! There are offices around the world with this incredible potential that is not being realised because the people are managed, not developed, and the processes governed, not guided.

Therefore, the question is not one of lacking money and time.

What’s The Right Question?

Here it is: “Given the people that I have, what can I do to enable them to change things?”

Your greatest asset is people. And get out of thinking that people = staff. It doesn’t. People is your employees, your customers, your brand advocates, your influencers and connections, your c-suite, the door man – everyone. To quote God, “what is that in your hand?” – who are the people that you are already connected with?

The next trick is to move from connection to action. This action, of course, is not governed it is guided. So going back to yesterday:

Guidance requires leadership, and leadership requires influence, and influence requires meaning.

Meaning is the motivation of P2P. So let’s look at the tools of P2P that create meaning. Yes, they’re intangible. Interestingly enough, they are also free – because they are intangibles.

Where To Start

1. Cause
   This is the beginning of meaning. People unite around three things: a common person, common cause, or a common enemy. When it comes to P2P, community is built around the common cause, that is perpetuated by the common person, in resistance to the common enemy. What is the cause for your company? Why do you exist? How do you impact the world beyond products and services? Why should people want work for you? What is the mission? P2P employees don’t ‘go to work’, they ‘go to purpose’. Like Mr. BrandBuilder says, “People would sell their grandmother to work [in P2P] because it is known to be a fantastic place to work, learn, and build lasting professional and personal relationships.” That’s deeper than 9-5.
2. Language
   Change your language to express your cause. This is the simplest thing to you can do motivate people but also one of the most effective. Once you’ve decided what language to use, it’s also free. Language is one of the most fundamental steps towards culture change – it makes intangible ideas somewhat tangible – meaning that this language becomes, in many respects, the company guidelines.
   Note than language does not mean buzz words. But it does mean using words more accurately, and allowing weight to be attached to words you use frequently. When the word experience roles off of my tongue, there is a weight to it through my continual use that gives it more meaning that just the dictionary definition.
3. Experience
   People are emotional and react to experiential products and services. We were careful, for example, to make Like Minds an experience, as opposed to just a ‘conference’, and it paid off. We did the little things, like picking the speakers up, making sure they have water and coffee at all times, providing plugs for laptops – and, we did the big things like making it a ‘show’ as opposed to a ‘conference’, and ensuring there was Wi-Fi the whole day, and having people clap and shout out. The result is an emotional attachment.
   Give your language life by staging experiences. Show your employees what your language looks like in the flesh. P2P companies are exceptionally experiential to work out – checkout the Zappos offices, for instance. And when you work in that office, how can you not deliver great customer service?
4. Leadership
   Seth Godin wrote that Tribes are waiting for people to lead them. True. P2P realises that management is for constants like machinery that might go wrong. People, who are variable and full of potential, need leadership to develop them. They also need passionate leaders who embody cause, language and experience. Leading by example is the key here – so that others can follow the example.
   The founder of any business had the strength to lead themselves to running their company. If they haven’t forgotten what that leadership felt like, then they have it in them to begin leading others. People are the company’s greatest asset – they have the ability to develop, initiate and put intelligent thought into the life of the company, as well as motivate others around them, who in turn, motivate others, and so on. This snowball effect is activated through leadership, not through a pay check. Make meaning.
5. Relationship
   It’s all about people. This isn’t just mantra, it’s truth. A decision therefore needs to be made to focus more on people – not just face to face, but through social technology. And this isn’t just from office to office. This stretches across the whole company, across departments, across companies and across customers. The relationships are a large part of the motivation behind P2P, obviously. People must not only be allowed, but encouraged to continually make connections with like minds, get excited by talking with envisioned people, and seek out new people who can partake of the cause, and in turn, extend the company’s reach. The light that shines the furthest shines the brightest at home, and the creation of advocates and influencers because of these relationships gives the company massive indirect reach to more people.
   We all know that “it’s not what you know it’s who you know” – but this saying tends to mean knowing people who will help you raise your own profile. P2P turns this on it’s head, and knows that it’s important to know the CEO, know the customer, and know the doorman. PR is redefined to mean Personal Relationship. Social media brings a more level playing ground. Hierarchy works according to influence and who is actually doing the job – and they release that the ‘higher you go’, the more relational you need to be.

So, yeah, Olivier, the conversation has been started

Interestingly enough, I wrote this at the exact same time as Olivier yesterday. Talk about like minds!

In actual fact, as you listen to these wonderful people appearing at TED, they continually reduce incredible things down to things of the heart. Emotion.

As I first stated yesterday, and refined with help from @Claire_Sloane , the successful social media practioner is a master of relationship before they are a master of ROI. Everyone who successfully uses social media is doing something different from the businesses that don’t get social media – they are aiming to add value, not aiming to sell stuff. We all recognise that business is about relationship – especially with small businesses – and social media is simply an enabler that magnifies and intensifies this. You can check out and use my framework that looks closer at this on the concept of lifting restrictions here.

Consider Maz Nadjm‘s work at Sky Community (watch the Like Minds keynote here). Why, essentially, does it work? Because people care about their entertainment and information. Consider Like Minds itself – the success is in providing a platform for people’s passions around social media and innovation. Consider Dell’s $3m profit from social media – they weren’t just churning out tweets – they were listening to people who had problems, and fixing them. All value.

The out of the blue hard sell and incessant ‘buy our products at this great special rate’ doesn’t work with social media because people choose to follow you and can choose to unfollow you when you make too much and don’t provide any value. And even when you do release the tweet or make the status update that does add value, I’ve got news for you – a wave of noise will come shortly after, flushing your message out of sight. And another news update: playing the percentage by volume game will take an awful long time to work, and will ruin your reputation in the process.

The need, then, is for engagement to elicit emotional response: happiness, interest, help, pity, joy, anger, frustration, relief, curiosity, etc, etc. And you can’t do this with one tweet. You must either increment a reputation and relationship, or provide relief.

The 6 Types Of Social Media Presences You’ll Meet In Heaven

Let’s clarify what different methods for maintaing a social media presence are, with a view to generating revenue by adding value: (assuming you are starting from scratch. Also note, I haven’t included model’s that people use but don’t work. This is just the good stuff.)

1. Leadership. You use social media as a recruitment tool to unite people. People unite around either 1. a common person, 2. a common cause, or 3. a common enemy. You must fulfil one, preferable two, and a gold star if you get three. Examples:

• Guy Kawasaki unites people around himself.
• Chris Brogan unites people around himself, and around the cause of social-social media.
• Barak Obama united people around himself, the cause of a new America, and the enemy of the old regime (notice on MyBarackObama the words ‘It’s About You’ – that’s uniting people.)

These people, in my PRE  triangle (personal, relational, expertise), typically have less personal and more expertise. The emotions that are elicited here are very strong. You generate income from small amounts from many for sovenigners (like £25 for a conference), and large amounts from few for specialism (like £150 for consultation).

Important to point out that a crowd attracts a crowd. Your leadership grows quicker the more it grows.

2. Active Authority. You talk about your economic offering, provide a small level of leadership for the few (normally your clients and/or staff). You actively cultivate awareness, and this works very well when tied to geographical area (don’t listen to the lies, geographical still makes a huge difference.)

You talk about your area of expertise, as small businesses are very relational, and to gain extra love, you are quite personal. The trick to doing this without hard selling is through a rhetorical technique called paralepsis. This is the art of saying something without saying it, i.e, “I had a great time helping a client with their WordPress install today. I love what I do” tells your followers that you offer WordPress services, without saying that.

You also display thought leadership and act as a knowledge holder. This means you tweet / post articles on your chosen area of expertise.

Revenue is generated by you being the active authority on your expertise in your locale. The best revenue streams attached to this are providing services and products. You are the ‘go-to’ when people in your locale need your expertise – but probably not before they need it. Therefore, you must reveal the pain points that make them feel they need your expertise.

Further non financial impact comes after translating online engagement into an offline sale, which will create a new brand advocate for you, because your new client will be so pleased that, in their mind, ‘they found you on Twitter.’

3. Solution Support. In a small business, the MD is often the Active Authority, with staff taking the role of Solution Support. The Active Authority role is visionary to a degree, and that person will often lack the time to enter into deeper solution support. This role encapsulates those who are more personal and relational than expertise, but they step up to the plate when a potential client is seen having a problem that they can resolve.

This role cannot work in a vacuum, where as the first two often can create something from nothing in order to fill the vacuum. This role does not provoke strong emotions, not does it ‘build’, but rather ‘solves’ and ‘restores’ things, either back to their original state, or to a better one. An example of Solution Support is spotting the person who is having “trouble with getting categories to work in WordPress.” Either the potential client is restored to their original state, or moved to a better one.

This person is known in their own right, but as I said, this role is supportive to the Active Authority, and as such, rides on part of their stature.

4. Passive Presence. Let’s say you’re having problems with your WordPress installation – if a company has a Passive Presence model set up, you can Tweet or contact them through this. It is a contact point that alerts you, but is not actively engaging. By providing public customer support, this generates awareness as others can see how good your customer service is. This is how it generates revenue, along with also being another touch in your multi-touch strategy.

5. Passive Publishing. An announcement and broadcast solution that typically only your followers will follow. Many businesses accounts become this, because there is no person, cause or enemy to unite people around, and so the social media profile becomes stale. This rarely generates revenue, but is effective at generating awareness because people will still see the updates. @SkyNews  is an example of passive publishing – it generates no revenue, but is effective at generating awareness.

6. Monitor. This is a response-only approach that monitors keywords, and initiaties engagement based solely on them. PayPal and BT do this. Revenue is generated by catching someone in their moment of pain or query, and offering either a direct paid solution, or providing a free half-solution with a paid upgrade. The tactics here are very simple, using free tools such as Twitter Search, Google Blog Search and CoTweet.

Wrapping It Up

You can see that I have written far less about the last three because they are less relational. And guess what – they are also less profitable – except in the case of Dell who found, through monitoring, that they could find immense pain and frustration, and deliver an immediate pain-relieving solution.

Your homework: establish which ones you can offer. As you climb up the levels, the need to be more emotionally engaging is necessary.

Who attended the event? I personally knew not even a quarter of the attendees. Through our social media marketing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and both the official blog and this blog, we had 188 registered attendees, and 561 online viewers.

We were even featured in the Express & Echo and the Western Morning News – but again, only through the efforts of other social media practitioners, whom we had engaged with through social media.

Ignore the fact that this conference generated buzz and rode on the back of the social media fad, the point is that probably 90% of the 188 attendees, 10 speakers, 561 online viewers, and undetermined number of hashtag followers were marketed, generated, and connected to solely through social media (except for a handful of students who we invited to come, via an email.)

Hey, even if it was only 50%, what an astounding case study. And again, let’s remove the fact that it was about social media – because a good deal of people in that room were not existing social media practitioners, nor were they existing Twitter users, which was where the majority of the marketing was carried out. This means, and I know it because many have told me it was the case, that our social media engagement translated into the spreading of offline word of mouth through the brand advocates that we created (and BTW, that’s a secret to the success right there.)

As I tweeted – frequently – in response to those asking for ROI – it was all around them if they just had the eyes to see it.

So let me say it again: if you turned up, you proved the ROI.

And if you need more help with understanding ROI, check out Olivier Blanchard‘s Social Media ROI.

The Bigger Issue

I have to tell you right now that you can be a master Social Media ROI guru and have every answer for every measurement qustion, but unless you know how to

1. develop a strategy, integrate it, manage it and measure it, and,
2. how to connect with and motivate your target audience to action,

then you will achieve nothing.

Social Media suffers from the same signal-to-noise issue in the regular marketing space: in other words, if you think the magazine rack is full of noise, then you don’t want to go near a Facebook or a Twitter feed. There is content from all angles, and it doesn’t matter how much you know about ROI, unless you know about people, and how social media must be used as an enabler for connecting with them, then you are probably just another horrid, soulless PR agency waiting to die.

This new form of media requires engagement that motivates people to act, and you are constantly up against a wall of noise that is flushing out your message every minute. When you get that message to your target person, it must fulfil its purpose. Therefore:

The successful social media practitioner is not a master of ROI, but a master of people.

That’s the bigger issue. And that’s why so many are dodging it – because they are awful with people.

I find it funny that everyone is amazed by the spreadability of Like Minds (many are calling it a ‘movement’ already), but few have bothered to ask how we did it.

If I were wanting to integrate social media into my marketing mix, that’s the question I’d be desperate to ask. Just a thought.

If you’ve arrived at reading my blog for the first time, or the first time this week, then you’ve come in the middle of a discussion on what I’m currently calling New PR, probably until a far buzzier word gets made up. This diagram above is how I see New PR working in 2010. Let me explain.

Metrics: Spreadability and Relevance

We all know that word of mouth is a not a marketing technique, because you can’t create it. You can only create the environment for it – by giving words for mouth, making something remarkable, etc. Spreadability therefore replaces reach, because as the volume of channels increase, the volume per channel decreases, and we therefore need more than ‘reach’ in a channel at one given time, we need spreadability over time and across channels. In many ways, this is value over volume.

Relevance is the difference between personal relationship and public relations. The former is dynamic (as per yesterday’s post), the latter is static. The former is homemade, the latter is manufactured, or factory made. What this also means is public relations is mass distribution, whereas personal relationship gains uniqueness through mass customisation – by being personal, it is unique and not one-size-fits-all.

Two Sides Of The Same Triangle

We don’t want to sacrifice the old wine for the new (again, see yesterday). We want to preserve static, whilst adopting dynamic.

The right side of the triangle is traditional public relations – it is centrally governed. This means the message is sent out via a press release, onto TV, onto radio, but at every point the message is governed, entrusted to editors, camera men and reporters to use what has been provided, make their edit, and then we approve. In TV, for instance – and I have been on the TV sets – everything is checked to ensure it is in line with the message, i.e. governed.

The left side of the triangle is personal relationship, which is centrally guided. The message is put out, but all along the way, like a chinese whisper, the message is adapted, changed, retold, updated, and a whole host of other synonymous activity. This change is guided, not governed. You cannot control it, only guide it. Therefore the ability for the message to preserve its original intention is determined by how clear the message is. Continually, the conversation is guided through the beauty of realtime media. But note again, it is guided, not governed. Think: retweeting, posting on walls, reblogging, trackbacks, pings, etc – all of this is adaptation of the message.

Working The Triangle

By the very nature of governance (the right side), the message is restricted to safe and controllable channels. This is a hands on approach. Take TV as an example. The production team produce something that is within the guidelines, according to a script, with roles that are cast. The programme is televised on a fixed channel that can’t be shared or retweeted, commented on, except when the programme is discussed using those digital forums, or even through a ‘did you see this last night’ conversation. But none of this is real time – production, airing, and review are all asynchronous.

This form – traditional TV – as far as I am concerned, is the most spreadable static medium because of widespread adoption – i.e., who doesn’t own a TV. No static medium has more spread, and in order to gain more spread, TV has to become more dynamic, hence this capped corner in the triangle.

TV that is aired live, with phone in interviews, etc, begins to move from the static to the dynamic – such as reality TV that envoke mass public hysteria and text-votes. However, even then, to see the programme one must be watching their TV device, and that particular TV channel – at the exclusion of other TV channels being watching simultaneously.

TV has now gain increased spreadability by becoming more dynamic and personal through the likes of YouTube and the iPlayer. It breaks the governance of channel, device and time by becoming on-demand. Better yet, the spreadability of YouTube through the left-hand channels of Facebook, Twitter and email enables the programme to swiftly move past thousands, millions, and hundreds of millions of eyes, as in the case of Susan Boyle and all the others. No surprise that the news today, then, from Brand Republic is online spending is now greater than traditional TV spending.

In order to progress up the left side – centrally guided – one must take a hands off approach and allow users to edit, adapt, mash and spread the message through the channels and in the methods that they please. You simply cannot have your hands on the message. As long as you do, it is yours, and it can’t become personal to the user, and homemade. To be personal to another, you must give it, or share it at least. The reward is far larger spreadability because the message has become personal, not public – this of course is basic community building, where the cause has to become personal to the individual – they have to make it theirs.

Taking Your Hands Off

How does the New PR consultant, who desires to guide personal relationship (not govern public relations) do this? In fact, take a step back – how does the company / brand / business muster the courage to relinquish their governance, in the fear of mis-guided efforts? This article on Social Media Today lists the Top Six Reasons Companies Are Still Scared Of Social Media – a pertinent reminder of what the fears are. However, when I talked through the social media strategy that the board of a charity had paid me to lead, I found the same fears. It was both interesting and striking to see how many of their concerns were either ignorance, or imaging worst case scenarios. Petty things like ‘Can we moderate comments’, were both almost insulting and hilarious – ‘Of course?!?!’ was my response.

Our aim then must be to remove ignorance, and prove the rarity of worst case scenario by proving the abundance of good and even great scenarios.

Having worked through those fears and tried to think it through from the other side, I’ve worked on a framework that can be reproduced for yourselves or your clients. As with the above model, this is a draft, so feedback is appreciated.

1. Voice. Establish the core of your message, and in turn, your market differentiation. This is pretty much a branding concern. This must be potent to your audience, and your voice strong enough to be heard even when others have mashed your message up. However your message may be edited, adapted and redistributed along the left side, your voice is still heard because it is that distinguishable to your audience.
2. Listen. This helps you identify the advocates who will help spread the message, as well as identify the needs of the market, enabling to you to build a far more accurate:
3. PRE. All copy, images, tweets, comments, blogs, discussions must be personal, relational, and show your expertise in your market. This means, practically, that you create a 140 character PRE bio. You have a PRE paragraph, PRE about copy, a PRE avatar, and a full understanding of PRE is to your market, written down, for those who are later going to PRE tweet.
   PRE will also determine what is Not-PRE – the non negotiable things that you do not do, based on impressions that you do not want to create.
4. Multi-touch strategy. ‘Users are stupid’ is a useful thought to keep in mind (no offence, BTW). They use odd search queries, they often don’t think with initiative, so a multi-touch strategy takes your message to them, or at least has your message in the place that they will find it. Practically, it means creating a Facebook page/event/group, LinkedIn company/event/group, Twitter account (keep it PRE – a person, not a business), having a blog that has share buttons, etc. These must all be synchronised – use Facebook notes to import your blog, use Twitterfeed or Twitter Tools for blog to Tweet publishing, etc. These also build better SEO.
   All these social media outposts (thanks, Chris Brogan), use the 140 PRE bio, the PRE paragraph, the PRE avatar. And again – use personal names who represent the company or brand.
5. Multi-sense strategy. Different people have different prominent sense. Therefore you need video, audio, micro-media, blogging, events, and yes, press releases. All your social media outposts above should clearly link to all your content, making it simple for anyone to access anything you are producing, from any channel that they access it. Easily said and very obvious, but seldom done right.

PAUSE. Up until this point, this is already performed, in large or in small, by existing marketers, PR consultants, etc. Setting this up should therefore be easy, as you are working with what is mostly already existing content, but re-expressing it through PRE. Therefore, this is still somewhat goverened as opposed to guided.

What comes after here is guidance. In the same way paid production staff, under an employed director, edit and produce governed content that is ‘signed off’, guided content is mashed up by unpaid users, under an influential socialiser, and the content is ‘handed off’.

New PR creates the role, not of consultant, advisor or ‘contact’, but the role of a socialiser, who here after guides personal relationship. So;

1. Inject and Infect. I completely agree with Seth Godin’s Idea Virus and I’ve successfully used it for years. Here you must inject your ‘idea virus’ (the message) into sneezers (advocates) who infect whole hives of people on your behalf. You have to know who the opinion leaders are, and infect them first. They will then do a bulk of your marketing work for you due to the influence they have.
2. Add. As everyone mashes up your content and message, the best thing you can do is add to it, not subtract. The socialiser guides the spreading by adding value through PRE.
3. Escalate by Sharing Your Voice. As new mashups, and new influencers come to the fore, you must escalate the level of relationship with these influencers, and also escalate the mashups by linking to them on your blog. You must share your voice with those who identify with it in return for their support. Remember, these are the people that are informing others’ with their reviews and opinions.
   These people are easily identifiable: they comment, they retweet, they blog, they use your language, they initiate contact.
4. Measure. It is too easy for social media, and will be even easier with its successors, to lose track of time and not measure your effectiveness. Combat this by measuring social media return on investment and measuring your metrics bi-weekly. To learn how to do this, visit Olivier Blanchard‘s http://smroi.net, or attend Like Minds next month.
5. Review, Adapt, Extend. Adaptation happens almost daily, but you must also adapt and extend your strategy from a higher level than the way you write your tweets. This reviewing looks at new markets, new channels, new methods, and even changing this framework.

How To Get The Boss Or Client To Go With It

If you are either a social media savvy person in an organisation, or an agency trying to get clients to look at social media, then my advice is thus: Use a small, containable project, and ask for a small part of the research and development budget, to use the above to create a proof of concept. Document it fully, review each step and then provide a review to the powers that be on the return on investment.

Phew!

Its taken me a long time to thinking this through, develop a diagram, and write it up – and I’m fully aware that this is not comprehensive, has holes, and needs to be reworked. Leave your comments, please, as I’m very interested to know what ya’ll think.

Now, with all that thinking and writing, it’s time for lunch.

Yesterday I started a little fire, on the subject of New PR. We all agree that social media (Facebook, Twitter, the mobile web, and the concepts behind them) is bringing about change in marketing, PR, advertising, etc, and amongst much hyperbole my point was, and I quote;

Companies are no longer able to procure their voice through paying an agency to write distant, removed press releases and expect them to connect and engage with their customers. Why? Because the press doesn’t form opinion anymore.

What followed was some great discussion, mostly contrary to my point, which you can read here. Today is part 2, which is in part a response to the comments, and in another part it’s that uncomfortable middle movie in a trilogy. Oh well.

Static and Dynamic

It is the case that the world is full of innovation. Something is created, and is fresh and new. But over time, thinking happens, abilities increase, and a new thing is made, that eventually over takes the old thing. Note that it doesn’t necessarily replace it, but it becomes more prominent. Think radio and TV. Think horses and cars. Think caves and houses. Think paper and computers. And if you’re Gen Y, think writing and typing.

It is also often the case that the first innovation, if it is a breakthrough, creates its own language that even outlasts its own life. The printing press gave birth to ‘The Press’ and ‘Copy’, language that remains despite its antiquity. Even ‘Script’ which predates the press has outlasted all its predecessors.

It is my observation that this innovative process also follows a pattern of increasing dynamic. Each new innovation grants new flexibility, new dexterity and new adaptability that renders the old thing somewhat static. And what fresher example to illustrate that the advent of social media. Static webpages give way to dynamic blogs and posts. Static  updates give way to instant messaging and status updates. I’m sure you can fill in the gaps, which allows us to skip right to this:

Press is static. Social media is dynamic.

And you don’t put static press releases into dynamic wineskins.

All agreed. None of yesterday’s commentors would disagree. It’s obvious, right? Then why oh why are PR agencies, and other companies and firms, literally filling blogs with press releases? And why are the blogs they maintain devoid of names, and their Twitter accounts lacking faces, initials, or anything relationally accountable? Why are faces absent from their websites, their content lacking any differentiation or hint of personality?

Why is the dynamic being filled with the static?

The answer: they believe that social media equals public relations.

But it does not. Social media is the next curve. In mobile technology, it is the merging of offline and online, that will eradicate the difference between them. Everything is becoming connected – dynamic. Truly dynamic digital. As marketing, advertising, PR, new media, all begin to merge and the lines become blurred – this dynamic digital is not a successor, but a whole new innovation with new guidelines.

The New PR, the one that will become more prominent than the old PR, is personal relationship. In some ways, we’re not there yet. But in many ways, we’re certainly already there. Dynamic, personal interactions, like this example from Sarah Gilbert, or another on LinkedIn from Exeter’s own Sophy Norris.

Practitioners must begin to divide between the static and the dynamic, and the wineskins that they belong in. And I can tell you right away that social media is not a static wineskin. As we begin to divide the two, we can preserve the press release, and not muddy the blog.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss a framework that we can run this through.

In case you didn’t know, PR is changing. Companies are no longer able to procure their voice through paying an agency to write distant, removed press releases and expect them to connect and engage with their customers. Why? Because the press doesn’t form opinion anymore. Because customers have taken matters into their own hands, and found a way to get their reviews and opinions from real people with real experience.

Personally, I find it insane and insulting that companies think they can connect with me through cold and calculated statements that I might happen to read. PR needs to be reborn. Press Releases are antiquated remnants of a broadcast age and printed media. We need a rebirth for the engagement age of social media and beyond.

Allow me to introduce you to the New PR: Personal Relationship.

Say it to yourself, let the saliva flow. Let every rip-off PR agent quake in their boots. Let the Removed CEO‘s blood run cold. Because it is true. Personal Relationship. The public has no interest in a lifeless press release. PR is dead. Long Live PR.

Now breath. Let newness of life fill those lungs. And let it dawn upon you: the customer wants a personal relationship. Not quite a back-slapping relationship. Maybe not a share your lip gloss relationship. But they do want a relationship, and they want it to be personal.

In Case You May Have Forgotten

Whilst enjoying the booms of profit and becoming more and more distant from your customer, you may have forgotten how to be personal and have a relationship. So I’ll help you out.

1. First of all you have commonality. That’s what started your relationship with the customer friend in the first place. Remind yourself what you have in common, and build on that. Perhaps through your commonality, you and your friend will find more common ground, or even adapt to be more like each other. But it starts with commonality.
2. It takes more than things to be friends, and sooner rather then later you’ll need to contribute to the relationship. One sided friendship is abuse.
3. To earn trust, you will need to be consistent. Consistency is the foundation of trust. People who continually change can’t be trusted.
4. At this point, if you haven’t already, you care deeply for your friend. Emotions can go up and down, but after you have contributed and been consistent, this care transcends emotional whims and gets to the deeper parts of the heart. At this point, both friends in the relationship are prepared to put up with a certain degree of crap, every now and then – why? – because you care for each other. My friend, Apple, sure has let me down enough times. But I care for them.
5. For the relationship to truly last, as any married couple knows, you need communication. And any married couple knows that not all communication is a press release verbal. Remember, up to 93% of communication is non-verbal, according to our good friend Professor Mehrabian.

Personal Relationship. Simultaneously the simplest human instinct yet the most complex. Today I’ve discussed the change. Tomorrow, we’ll look at how we do this.