Melissa Attree, creative director at Cerebra, spoke to HumanIPO about social media as complementary, rather than a replacement, to traditional channels of public relations (PR).
Attree will be speaking at the PR-Net event on the intersections between social media and PR at The Fairway Hotel & Golf Resort, on Tuesday, May 14.
HumanIPO: What will you be focusing on in your talk on social media and PR?
Attree: I am going to be focusing on how social media supports the PR effort and how social [media] has become a new channel in terms of communicating to your public.
It has also become quite important in terms of how the concept of media changed. That is something that is quite interesting to a lot of people. So how do you define the media… how you put a face on media that changes kind of everyday in the digital world.
And [I will also talk] about how you can leverage your marketing and your PR and customer service initiatives by using social channels and just by opening up social conversations on the different platforms.
Do you think social media replaces traditional mediums of public interaction?
Not at all. Social should work in an integrated fashion and should work together with all those other different forms of media.
It just serves to open a different channel of media to customer services. You can then talk to them in an environment that they feel comfortable in.
Social media allows us to open up those different channels and to assist people to give them information to have different conversations on different platforms. That is probably the most powerful kind of aspect.
It also means that we reach different audiences. So where I still think the traditional PR is incredibly relevant, is it has a long term effect.
Things like long full reads and a magazine lasts longer than a website for example in terms of having exposure to different people. So the two need to work together. I think there is a way that it interlinks quite nicely.
So if you are in the PR space and you are not thinking about digital channels and talking to different influences and forms of media then you are potentially missing a different market that is not necessarily reading magazines, listening to the radio, watching TV.
How do you think social media management can achieve balance?
From a brand point of view, a lot of companies are still hesitant to go into that space because they say saw ‘people say bad things about us’ and they cannot do anything about that. People are saying bad things about you anyway.
At least this still gives you the opportunity to address that and to respond, to open up frank discussions around those things that you know are an issue. Then it starts to swing public opinion in your favour when we start actively engaging in those discussions.
The problem is when you open up channels and you don’t know what you are doing there and you don’t know why you are there and you don’t know what the benefits are and how it ties into your overall strategy.
It becomes an issue because then you don’t have any kind of strategy on when you respond or who you respond to or how you respond. And that leaves you wide open for attack and quite rightly so.
So just think it’s about having a clear, strategic objective from the outset and then say whatever you want this to achieve and how does this integrate with our existing communication efforts.
