I just finished mapping out the PR & Marketing Eco-System for one of my clients, and looked a little something like this:
I wanted to show how I, as a consultant, perceived Online Marketing activities of a given company. The arrows represent how one helps the other entity in the system, either by providing content or traffic. I conclude:
PR & Social Media campaigns repurpose content, leverage media relationships, and enhance SEO. Marketing campaigns typically increase SEO through direct traffic.
I guess you can sniff out my bias here. Not too hard to figure out.
This diagram is, of course, incomplete (we could add twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, other Ad campaigns, other PR campaigns, etc.) and debatable (see below).
I wanted to share the diagram mainly because its elements are highly debatable and the nature of debate and confusion reflect the mood of the Marketing industry today. PR and Ad professionals everywhere are having to evolve to the shifts in their profession, which seem to be merging and blurring the lines of discipline. Relevant questions are buzzing about, such as:
- Does Social Media belong under the traditional PR field or Advertising field?
- Is Advertising Dead? According to this book, it was dead back in 2004.
- Is Social Media merging PR and Advertising, and, if so, does that mean PR and Ad folk alike are blurring their own lines of expertise?
My two cents:
I believe Corporate Blogs, at the very least, are best handled by PR Professionals. I look at blogs as the Living Room Press Conference. The Corporate Blogger is a kind of Mascot, if you will. The tone is not as (or at least should not be as) formal and uptight as a Press Release, and the author is preferably someone genuinely passionate about his or her profession. Not “brand” not “message” not “products” – but profession.
I argue that the PR industry has more practice in conversations, while Advertising is about direct messages delivered top-down. Traditional PR has equipped its professionals with some inherent skills such as managing crises, garnering buzz for press events, and building relationships with media that are all very useful in Social Media practice.
However, this does not mean that PR Pro’s have nothing to learn from the bright minds of Ad men and women. Viral Marketing campaigns, especially those using video platforms, podcasting, etc. would benefit greatly from Advertising disciplines. Ad agents that know how to research their target markets, produce compelling content worthy of word-of-mouth contagion, and have the social networks in place to launch and sustain a campaign have great potential to succeed.
Maybe the set up isn’t so bad in the end. Sure, there’s a lot of feeling our way out through the hazy demarcation, but would it be so bad if the two disciplines learned the best from one another? I say nay. What’s bad is we learn the worst from the fields, the worst which could be best described as “telemarketer/spammer” techniques: pitching to the wrong reporter, phoning during dinner, email blasting press releases to journalists, viagra-emailing to your inbox…yeah that kind of thing; these have NO place in the social web. Luckily, the social web filter these bad eggs quite naturally.
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