Public Service Announcement for Panicked PR Pros

By Steven Phenix, ViaMetric Principal

Attention public relations professionals:

When your CEO calls you into his office and asks you to help move the company in a Web 2.0 direction, don’t panic. Melvin Yuan has put together a PR 2.0 University with a great list of required reading. He’s included all the classics like The Cluetrain Manifesto, Naked Conversations, The Long Tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics, plus various articles, ebooks and PDFs. To his list, I’d also recommend The New Influencers: The Marketers Guide to the New Social Media by Paul Gillan. (Full disclosure: Julie Garcia of Austin Women in Communications is making me read this book for her President’s Book Club discussion tomorrow night.)

If your CEO expects you to have a program in place immediately — before you have time to read all this course work — well, it might be time to panic if you haven’t been a long-time student of social media in your spare time. And if you’re just beginning to dip your toes into all this Web 2.0 goodness, would you be comfortable putting your company’s reputation on the line while you learn on the job?

“Increasingly, Fortune 500 companies like Ford, Wal-Mart, Sony and Dell are embarking on social media marketing campaigns and blundering, big time.

“At best, they wasted a lot of money on ill-conceived campaigns involving blogs, video-sharing sites like YouTube, social networks like MySpace and other new media where users (horrors!) can actually create content.

“At worst, their futile attempts at old-style message control (masquerading as new media) did permanent damage to their brands in the very markets that will determine their future fortunes.”

-From B.L. Ochman’s What Kills a Social Media Campaign.

My advise: As tempting as new channels like blogs and massively-multiplayer environments may be for marketing, you should make sure you understand the needs, opinions and language of the audience before throwing your messages at them. If you don’t know this new world as well as your Rolodex of reporters, it’s best to hire a consultant.

Further homework:
Start a blog and run with the big dogs
Dell Quells HP Hell: What REALLY listening to customers really means
Note to PR Flacks: Lighten Up
PR is back, like Dawn of the Dead Part 2

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