Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
I got a very nice email the other day from Guy Kawasaki telling me that Media Culpa has been included in the Social Media section of Alltop. Alltop is a site that aggregates feeds from selected sites within different categories and then displays the headlines of the latest stories from these news sites and blogs.
Other sites filed under “social media” are great blogs such as Readwriteweb, Mashable and Problogger. Thanks Guy.
Tags: alltop, rss, social media, sociala medier, rss. Ping.
Communications professional, meet your new colleague, the mash-up communicator. This is the marketing student that has just graduated college or university, and who is equipped with a set of very different skills:
“Shrink, storyteller, financial wiz, global diplomat, used car salesman, communicator, community builder and code monkey are just some of the personas for a newly minted marketer to have handy (along with that MBA).”
Becky Ebenkamp writes in Brandweek: “In sum, this is not your father’s marketing career.”
I remember when I joined the Norwegian PR agency Geelmuyden.Kiese almost a decade ago (ouch!) that they made a big deal out of hiring people with vastly different backgrounds; journalists, marketers, economists, even poets. And they had a point. If you bring a group of people with diverse skills together they will probably be more creative and do a better job than if they are clones of each other. Sure there are professional services organizations, like management consulting firms, that operate with strict business models in which people are trained to work in a certain manner and where similar backgrounds and knowledge bases are an advantage. But for a creative profession like PR consulting there are clear benefits with variation.
The difference now is that these qualities need to exist within the same person and not just within a group.
“People who have cross-fertilization—both by function and by geography—are highly in demand,” said Jane M. Stevenson, global managing partner of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, Chicago. “The marketing executive who has been in a finance or sales role as part of their development, and, who maybe worked in Europe or Asia as well as North America. Those are the people who get paid the premium once they get to the top.”
If we look at the current media revolution there are still many PR professionals that have taken no or little interest in the new social media tools. I can imagine that communicators that choose not to embrace web 2.0 technology in a few years time will be seen as PR dinosaurs – creatures on the brink of extinction, not fit to survive under new conditions. Add to that a new generation of marketers that are multi-skilled, multi-experienced and who can multi-task like you wouldn’t believe. Now that will be an interesting sight. Last year one of the big Swedish tech compaines offered 1,000 employees over 35 (!) severance pay because they needed to get more young staff into the company. Wouldn’t that be something, PR agencies showing 35 year olds the door because their skills are outdated?
When the Swedish recruitment company Hammer & Hanborg surveyed 3,062 people in the communications business about their profession, a conclusion was that in 5-10 years time “the increased breadth of communication possibilies will force communicators to become more specialized in order to utilize all channels to their fullest potential”.
I think you probably could look at the classic “T-profile”, meaning that you need breadth in competence but also a field in which you are specialized. Can it be that within the next few years both the horizontal and vertical bars of the “T” need to expand in order to succeed in the communication industry? Your thoughts?
Tags: public+relations, pr, jobb, kommunikation, reklam. Ping.
Last week I attended the Disruptive Media conference in Stockholm with speakers such as Neville Hobson and Kristofer Björkman. The conference covered inspiring topics from online video advertising to blog monitoring and strategies for social media. Fredrik Svensson from Starcom also held a stimulating presentation with five tips on how to succeed with social media campaigns:
1. Start to tell the story but let the consumer finish it.
2. Make the consumer your media channel.
3. Create ambassadors.
4. See social media sites as partners.
5. If possible, go where your customers are, don’t force them to come to you.
During the day, the topic of blogger relations came up several times and although most agreed it is not rocket science, there were many examples of bad pitches. The most telling commment of the day came at the final panel debate about blogging. Roger Åberg, from the Feber blog network talked about how they get pitched with stories. He said that PR agencies are incredibly slow, when one of the Feber blogs blog about a story on Monday, the Swedish PR agency sends a translated press release on Wednesday. In my opinion, these PR agencies demonstrate at least two things:
1. They are not tuned in to the new media logic in which news are instantaneous. When everyone is a publisher, news can travel the globe within seconds. Online publishers in general and bloggers in particular don’t “save” stories to the next day or wait to get the local version. Instead they pick up ideas from around the world and publish without delay.
2. They are not monitoring the blogs they pitch. If they did, they would see that the story is already out.
Several PR agencies were present at Disruptive Media and I know there are a lot of smart PR people in Sweden who get social media. But apparently, many agencies still have a lot to learn about blogger relations. And clients also need to realize that news are global and that there is an increasing pressure to get stories out in most markets at the same time. It is no longer, if it ever was, a good strategy to expect the local agency to get ink on a story that is already out in the prioritized markets. Geography based launch programmes are not as effective in a web 2.0 environment.
Tags: digital pr, public relations, blogger relations, pr, public relations. Ping.
The Swedish based global kitchen appliance company Electrolux is more and more looking like the local leader when it comes to corporate use of social media. And maybe it can be the 800-pound gorilla that is needed to get more businesses to try out this space. The company has a social media news room, a presence in Second Life and is also present on Facebook via the Lunch Club application. In an interview on Resumé tv, Electrolux’s global Director of Communications Lars-Göran Johansson reveals that the company has a staff of 20 people that work with online projects, including social media.
Johansson describes how Electrolux has experimented with adding photos of the main office building on Google Earth. He also said that half of the members of the executive board are now members of Facebook. So, you might wonder, what are the results of these initiatives. Well, according to Johansson, 7 out of 10 customers search for information online before a purchase and one goal of many of these features is to drive traffic to the site. Last year the traffic increased by some 70-80% which must be considered a great achievement, although social media probably is not the only reason behind the success.
I recommend that you keep a close eye on Electrolux for further good examples on how corporates can embrace social media.
Tags: electrolux, social networks, facebook, electrolux, sociala media. Ping.
VirtualHosting.com has put together a nice list of what they define as the Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs. Some very good ones are on it (congrats Neville, for example) and others I haven’t read, but will check out. And perhaps if I rename this blog “Social Media Culpa” I’d have a shot at being included next time (I guess having a unique blog name wasn’t a criteria…).
😉
Tags: social media, social networking, sociala medier. Ping.
Swedish companies invest 288 million kronor (45.5 million USD) per year in social media campaigns. Well, actually they don’t. But it is an intriguing thought, if they did. According to a survey by Coremetrics called ‘Face of the New Marketer’, US marketing professionals spend 7.8 percent of their online marketing efforts on social media campaigns in Q3 2007.
During the same period, Swedish companies invested 924 million kronor (146 million USD) in online advertising (pdf). If the same percentage of the Swedish online budgets were spent on social media, that would be about 72 million kronor per quarter, or 288 million per year. Now, I don’t believe for a second that we are even near those figures yet but you could look at the number as the potential market for these services in the short term. Then you could start asking yourself questions like:
a) How long will it take for us to get there?
b) What will drive marketing professionals to spend on social media?
c) What type of consultants will capture the lion’s share of the spending?
And let me make a quick attempt to answer, just from the top of my head:
a) Probably longer than what is healthy for many brands
b) Communications agencies need to evangelize these services to clients, they need to show ROI and how to measure, and they need to show successful cases
c) I am convinced that PR agencies could be in the driver seat when it comes to social media.
Dagens Media’s editor in chief Rolf van den Brink asks this week whether PR agencies in Sweden are ready to handle the social media landscape. And while I think many agencies lack deeper knowledge about web 2.0, I disagree that advertising agencies should be better suited than PR agencies to tackle relations directly with customers. PR agencies are used to managing relations with different audiences and to deal with messages that aren’t directly in your control. Previously you needed to communicate via gatekeepers (read: journalists) that could distort, praise or ignore your message. In social media, your message is in the hands of the consumers. If any consultant would be able to advise clients on communicating in a transparent, chaotic, conversational media landscape, then it should be PR agencies. I don’t see advertising agencies excel in two way communication, do you?
Björn at JMW adds a few more arguments:
– PR agencies are good at assessing news value, which will also be relevant in new media.
– PR agencies are experts on producing content, which can drive the conversation.
But that’s in theory. How it is in practice, is a completely different ball game. Some agencies are already working with these matters, while others are many steps behind. So, who’s ready to make 288 million kronor?
Tags: social media, public relations, public relations, pr, sociala medier. Ping.