Should PR "own" social media?

The PR industry seems to be trying to own social media. I wonder whether this is really appropriate?

Recently I went to a seminar on social media where the focus was heavily on traditional PR techniques.

Now of course some PR techniques do have an important part to play in social media. But you can go way beyond reputation management by seeding blogs and posting photos on Flickr in this space.

Social media can be used very effectively for many other things including:

customer service
marketplace analysis
new product development
search marketing, paid and organic
recruitment
customer retention
customer acquisition

None of these were covered in the seminar.

Perhaps that was because these disciplines are not central to PR.

In addition, PR agencies may be tempted to conflate social media with online PR techniques.

So at the seminar I was subjected to a lecture on SEO PR – which hasn’t got much to do with social media!

And I was told that the way to measure campaign effectiveness was to measure the effect of seeded blogs: with no acknowledgement of the need to track blogs that hadn’t been seeded.

Any advertiser looking at social media (and who isn't?) should understand that social media techniques can enhance many aspects of a business and are not only effective in the PR space.

Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director