best practice

Social Media – News Tweets And Measuring Impact

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Evaluation, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

(Just as an aside, could we dispense with the term ‘press release’, used to describe a piece of writing, carrying a message and sent to a journalist with the aim of generating media coverage? Could we not just say ‘news release’ or ‘media release’? Is it not time we broadened our horizons? Anyway.)

Today, blog snorkellers mine, I give you not one wonderful thing to look at – but two! And, as you know that I am not a great advocate of social media as business or marketing communications tools, you may be intrigued to hear that they are both social media ‘value-adds’. Of course, I will put my spin on both, but you can think for yourselves, can’t you,  and you might just go away with something you feel you can use. Never, as I have said before, never say I don’t give you anything.

First I give you muckrack.com. This appears, as far as I can see – and I can’t go very far into these things, as my eyes mist over, a sense of panic descends and I find myself forgetting how to breathe – to be a sort of happy journalistic tweety site, to which you, the hapless PR practitioner, can post (for a small sum) your press releases, in tweet form. (See what I mean about the use of ‘press release’? In an online medium? Or is it that ‘press release’ is a bit like ‘press gang’ – you read the headline and it hits you over the head and the next thing you know you’re waking up in front of your PC and you’ve written a rubbish story about some crappy feminine hygiene product. Hmmmm?)

Personally, I think Muckrack is a site too far. I think it’s the answer to a question that no-one asked. I think it’s someone, probably with the best of intentions, trying to make Twitter relevant to the communications/media industries. I think the content’s a bit poor and there isn’t really a context. I’m afraid that Muckrack is doing nothing to convince me that I ought to be any closer to ‘social media strategy’ than my current ‘not with a bargepole’ default state.

But ignore me. S’pose you pay a dollar a word to put your news tweet through Muckrack. How will you monitor its impact on the blogosphere and the reactions of consumers, competitors and stakeholders? How will you know whether you achieved an ROI or not?

Fear not – well, OK, be a little fearful, because I do not have a clue and frankly don’t think it can be done, but these guys over at VMR Comms do. Blokey here is talking about Radian6, ScoutLabs and Sysomos – and I have no idea what they are or what they do, but I’d say, if you’re serious about your social, then you should be checking it out. I also check this post because it puts forward a list of questions you may need to ask before embarking on a social media monitoring gig. And they are very good questions – so good I post them here:

  • Are you looking to compare your share of voice online versus that of your competitors and track that over time using easily comprehensible metrics that can be assigned a $ value?
  • Whose voice do you want to listen to? Key influeners? General consumer sentiment? Stakeholders? Traditional Media? Male? Female? In North America or worldwide?
  • Do you need a platform that can be used in focus group fashion to slice and dice general consumer sentiment, key influencer sentiment, and or journalist sentiment?
  • Do you need to know where the fish (your prospects and key influencers) are currently swimming (“conversing”) before you dive into or create an empty pond?
  • Would you like to track how well your PR campaigns have increased share of voice specifically among key influencers or among consumers at large?
  • What about your sales and customer services teams? Are they looking for the actionable
  • intelligence that a social media monitoring platform can provide? Will the monitoring platform you choose need to integrate well with a CRM like salesforce.com?
  • Which social media “venues” are you most interested in monitoring? Blogs? Traditional News Outlets? Forums? Linkedin? Facebook? Youtube? Blogtalkradio? Podcasts? (Check out the conversation prism below to get a better sense for what’s out there)
  • If influencing the influencers is important to you, do you need a platform that helps you identify key influencers by showing you inbound links, comment count, level of engagement?
  • Is yours a global brand where you need to monitor not only key influencer sentiment but also the so-called “Long Tail” of your marketing sales curve?
  • Is your CMO demanding specific and meaningful metrics that can demonstrate a clear ROI from your social media engagement efforts?
  • If you are monitoring global brands, will you need a platform that translates content and sentiment in multiple languages?
  • Do you have the resources, expertise and social media savvy currently to fully leverage the capabilities of whatever platform is best for you?
  • How much historical data will you need? Some platforms have absolutely enormous amounts of historical data. Is that going to be helpful to your PR and marketing teams? Or not worth paying extra for?
  • What about ease of use? Do you need a platform that multiple users in your organisation will learn quickly and easily, thus increasing their level of online engagement?

Social Media ‘Face Comms Defiance’

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Internal Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Once more, dear B-snorkellers, into the breach of all that’s rationale, sane and – well, normal – that is PRWeek. What’s the Industry’s Bible been up to now, I hear you moan in a gibbering, tortured fashion, that implies you’ve been scalded by the Week’s toxic nonsense before.

Well, in this post, I was going to reference this story from the Bible (issue dated January 22 2010), which carried the headline ‘Blogs and webcasts face comms defiance’. The story is about in-house comms professionals ‘steadfastly resisting the temptation to use blogs or webcasts as the main channel to communicate with staff’ and cites ‘new research’ from Melcrum Publishing which seems to back up their interpretation of the story.

So I thought I’d do a bit on internal comms and digital communications (not necessarily social media, but probably touching on the subject) and how, actually, I’m a great advocate of adopting digital tools in the controlled and clearly-defined arena that is the internal comms space. Like shooting fish in a barrel – if you look on your employees as fish, the workplace as a barrel and you’re in the habit of taking a gun to work. So not an altogether apposite metaphor, perhaps.

Be that as it may, just to reassure myself – why is it that I simply cannot bring myself to trust t’Week – I though I’d track down the Melcrum Publishing research and see if there were any further insights to be gained. And I came across this. For those snorkellettes who cannot be bothered wid de clickery, it’s a blog post, from Melcrum, entitled ‘Research reveals widespread adoption of social media inside the firewall’. I think you can probably already see where this is going.

Yes – it appears to be almost wholly contradictory to the wee story in the Bible. Now, either Melcrum did two pieces of research, the findings of which are completely opposed, and the laddie or lassie writing for the Bible picked on the wrong one – or, once again, PR Week has screwed it up. You decide.

Anyway, because simply having a go at the industry’s mouthpiece is a) too easy and b) not a good enough foundation for a whole post, here’s a few thoughts about digital comms in the workplace. (All of which come from, sometimes bitter, experience.)

  • Don’t, as Melcrum and PR Week seem to have done, confuse digital comms and social media communication. The two things are very different – blogs, pod and vodcasts, webstreaming – these are digital tools – social is Twitter, Facebook et al which arguably have no place in a work environment. There is, of course, Yammer, which is a social media tool for internal communications, but is something of a resource-sharing, experience-tapping, project-co-ordinating tool. Social media is social – does what it says on the tin. Work is not social – work is something you do, sometimes to the best of your ability, to earn money.
  • Digital tools are only as effective as the number of people who can access them and actually do access them on a regular basis. Encouraging participation is another factor. No point having a spanking intranet – with feedback forms, fora and comment boards – if only half your work force can access it and only five per cent use the tools. Do your research, before you commit time, resource and cash in creating stuff that adds no value.
  • Do not treat digital in isolation. It’s a mix – face-to-face, small groups, large groups, print, advertising, exhibitions and events – all of these are also part of the internal comms toolkit.
  • If you do decide to get all social on your employees’ asses, then you’re going to need a social media policy – because, as we all know (don’t we, kids?) social media will bite you on the bum as soon as lick your face. The Coca-Cola Company (who’d have thought it?) have a great – and recent – social media policy which I’ve mentioned in a previous post. Go and have a look at it, and then rip it off mercilessly, twisting it to your own ends. Go on.

Social Media – Best Practice Social Media Policy

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Crisis Management, Crisis Management Guides, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

This was first posted in 2010. Starbucks are still global coffee shop of choice and divide opinion in much the same way as political allegiance, ‘leave or remain’ and the debate over whether Wonder Woman is really a feminist icon and, if she is, why does she go into battle wearing wedges? And yes, I know the answer, which is ‘because she can and because she wants to’. And who’s arguing with a god?

The Coca-Cola Company are still displaying the document that I found so praiseworthy and, revisiting it, I still find it so.

Two firsts in one week – Starbucks display best practice in reinventing themselves through employee and customer care (yes, I know, I had difficulty as well) and now this.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. It is a document entitled ‘Online Social Media Principles’ from The Coca-Cola Company, and it is – dear blog snorkellers mine – as near to a best practice social media policy as you can get.

OK, it’s not quite draconian enough for me – I’d like to see a list of cruel and unusual punishments for those found to be in breach of the policy, but – hey – you can’t have everything.

What I particularly like about it, however, is that it’s not all evangelical. It doesn’t start from the position that social media is the biggest thing since the Bible, and that it is going to transform the world as we know it and everything in it. It is sensible, and considered, and everything I would not necessarily have expected, rightly or wrongly,  from Messrs Coca and Cola.

It also – beautifully – can be easily adapted and plagiarised. These guidelines could be applied to any business or organisation – go ahead, fill your boots. It’s also, as I’ve recommended on this blog before, something of an ’employee benefit’ – in that it advises employees on how to use social media in their personal lives as well as on company time. It demonstrates a duty of care – without ramming it down their throats.

Finally – another big thing of mine – it would sit very nicely in a crisis management plan, and provides a good basis on which to build the social media section of that plan.

It is genuinely brilliant. I’m lovin’ it.

(Oh – hold on……..)

Corporate Communications – The Power Of The People

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Last Wednesday, Starbucks, the coffee company, released its first quarter results. They showed a four-fold increase over the same quarter last year against, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, a fairly appalling economic background. You can read the commentary in the New York Times for yourself.

As someone who doesn’t follow the company, I find this renaissance absolutely extraordinary. The two most recent things I recall about Starbucks is the company (falsely) being accused of not supporting American troops in the Gulf, and the furore over wasted water from ‘rinsing’ taps being left permanently ‘on’ in stores.

Obviously, and I’ve done a little light research, there has been stuff going on behind the scenes – and the return of Howard Schultz to the top job has obviously paid dividends – but I find the reasoning laid out in this post (on the Corporate Eye blog) particularly resonant.

In brief, top-line summary, it argues that the Starbucks turnaround has been driven by paying attention to employees. It cites an HR Guru, Kevin Wheeler and his Five Steps to Making Your Company Memorable:

  • Gain perspective and know yourself
  • Define the promise
  • Develop a strategy
  • Create a “buzz” to communicate your brand
  • Measure your progress

More than this – and this where I find myself violently agreeing – it’s about applying these same principles to your customer relations. What works for getting and keeping staff, works for getting and keeping punters.

And as, of course, this wouldn’t be my blog without a quick pop at social media – Starbucks appear to have achieved this dramatic success without too much Facebookishness of Twittery (they have 5.6m fans and 765k followers respectively). Have a look at their Facebook page, and gauge for yourself the quality of the conversation – visit their Twitter feed and (sorry Brad) well, it’s not exactly a marketer’s wet dream.

No – my feeling is that Starbucks has achieved this through good ol’ traditional communication, traditional face-to-face and lashings of loyalty-building.

I never though I’d see the day when Big Coffee would become a case history. An example of best practice ‘how to do it’ des nos jours.

Hats off, blog snorkellers.

Social Media – The Next Big Thing For 2010?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Meanwhile, over at the super, soaraway Sunday Business Post (of Ireland), they’ve managed to track down Piaras Kelly (PR consultant of that parish) and teased out some thoughts on what 2010 holds, social-media-wise.

Why, you may well ask, blog snorkellers mine, would I bother with this rag of an Emerald hue, and the slightly-less-than-meaningful musings of one who is, after all, selling himself in the cause of promoting his employer. (Hello there, Edelman – see, Piaras, it works!) (How does one pronounce ‘Piaras’? I’m presuming it’s like other well-known Irish names like Aoife and Siobhan and Saoirse, all of which sound a bit like ‘Bob’.)

Well, two reasons.

One, it’s because Piaras had an attack of the honesties in his commentary, and says ‘people will start to realise that there’s a bit of the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome associated with social media’. Hallelujah, preacher.

Two, it’s because Piaras’ tips for trends in online PR (communications) in 2010 are Realtime, Lifestreaming, Location-Based Services, Augmented Reality and Segmentation. All of which may have some element of social media but, tellingly, either aren’t social media tools themselves or specifically reliant on social media to function.

I actually believe that what Piaras is trying to say – and, hey, his opinion is as valid as anyone’s – is calm down, social media hysteria has had its day.

In separate news, this post alerted me to research conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations (gasp), which shows that 89% of journalists polled turned to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites (eg Facebook and LinkedIn), and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter.

The survey then goes on to say that 84% said social media sources were “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media, and 49% said social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards.”  So they then go back to the old staple of calling the company to get the facts.

Social media may well foment a global conversation, where everyone has a voice and everything’s being discussed. But if it’s being discussed with the same depth of knowledge and regard for accuracy that characterised my discussions in the pub late last Saturday evening (yes, very nice, thanks for asking) then it’s of no use to man nor beast.

Social Media – A Definition of Compelling Content? Anyone?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , .

Knock-knock!

Who’s there?

So shall.

So shall who?

So shall media gurus continue to be idiots ripe for poking fun at.

Tell me, why is it so easy? Currently, the case for social has holes in it that James Cameron could fly one of those big helicopter-type things out of Avatar through. Those blog snorkellers who’ve visited me before will be conversant with my take on the whole social media issue, and will know that I remain wholly unconvinced that it is a valid marketing or communications tool. And don’t get me started on the concept of ‘conversation’.

Anyway (he wrote, ever-so-wearily) today’s breath of fresh nonsense is courtesy of Mashable (hi there!) with this piece on ‘How to: take advantage of social media in your email marketing’. Nothing wrong with that per se – if you want to further abuse the database that (I hope) you’ve carefully nurtured and achieved some sort of acquiescence from, (in terms of sending them the occasional piece of marketing collateral), by giving them a link to your utterly pointless social media group – well, that’s your prerogative. Although I think you’ll see a rapid increase in ‘unsubscribes’.

No, the real issue I have with this is contained within the following paragraph, which outlines what you might provide to these hapless punters if they’re stupid enough to follow the links. (I suggest that you don the mental equivalent of a welding helmet before reading this, to avoid serious and permanent damage to your sensibilities.)

“Beyond that, create compelling content that people want to share. While a good promotion might not be as viral as a funny YouTube clip, your business’ fans will be more likely to spread the word if there’s a specific call to action. Moreover, create content that’s not necessarily a direct sell, but provides value to potential customers in the form of information that’s useful to them. Between good content and easy social media sharing options, your e-mail marketing can become a powerful weapon in growing your business.”

Ooooh, compelling content. If I had one of your splendid earth Euros for every time I’d heard that phrase, I could have repaired my spaceship weeks ago. What the f*ck is ‘compelling content’? Anyone? And how does ‘compelling content’ serve the purpose of a business, brand or organisation?

(The purpose of which, contrary to what Richard Lambert might believe ‘is to make money and everything else must be judged against that criterion’.)

And it gets worse. A good promotion is not going to be as viral as a funny YouTube clip – of course it isn’t. The only things that actually achieve true viral status are either video clips of people falling off skateboards and injuring themselves severely, or adverts featuring someone in a gorilla suit, drumming along to Phil Collins, which is so far off brand message as to be ultimately pointless – in terms of product sales. (As an example – a Guinness ad, called ‘Surfers’, won the Big Gold Bastard advertising award (I forget what it was actually called) for being brilliant and popular. Did it sell any beer? No.)

Then. Create content that’s not a direct sell, but provides value to potential customers. Why? Why would you provide value to potential customers (for the hard of thinking, these are people who have not bought from you and may never do so) without some sort of link to your product or service (which constitutes, to my mind, a ‘direct sell’)?

Apparently, between good content and sharing options, your email marketing can become a powerful weapon. Possibly. Or it could transform your perfectly good business, selling products or services, into an entertainment portal, frequented by many, but delivering no value to you whatsoever.

And the moral of this rant?

Email marketing is a good thing. It has a role to play – but don’t be tempted to abuse your database or you’ll lose it – and I would imagine it took you time, effort and investment to build it up. Social media is not (necessarily) a good thing – it is over-hyped and over-valued. ‘Compelling content’ is a buzz phrase – no-one actually knows what compelling content is – most examples of ‘compelling content’ have been generated through pure luck and happenstance. Social media does not, generally, contain compelling content – or rather, it’s only compelling to those who have a specific interest in it. It does not grow your business.

Ultimately, social media marketing, if it exists, is not the same as digital marketing. Social media is simply a small part of the whole digital piece and, potentially and currently, one that can be sidelined.

Social Media – Reinventing Public Relations?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Today’s episode of the popular social media-themed soap opera “You’re ‘Avin a Digital Turkish, Ain’tcha?” revolves around a glorious piece of nonsense from someone who’s made the cut here before – a fond welcome, blog snorkellers, to Brian Solis, Principal at FutureWorks PR, San Francisco Bay Area. (As I may have said before, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys pulling their own ribs out and carving small netsuke figurines from them, then you can enjoy more of Brian here.)

It’s the blurb from his book ‘Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR’ and I reproduce it here in full, so that you too can enjoy the sensation of your brain refusing to believe its eyes and doing its best to hide under its duvet until the bad mojambo goes away.

“Marketing and communications, as is, are dying breeds. They’ve moved away from the public and instead concentrated on broadcasting “top-down,” disconnected messages to as many people as possible.

What we’ve learned and what we know are quickly fading into irrelevance and obscurity.

We now need to expand our scope of participation and outreach by also identifying, understanding, and engaging the everyday people who have plugged-in to a powerful and democratized online platform for creating and distributing information, insight, and opinions – effectively gaining authority in the process.

The very people we had always wished to reach through traditional channels are now the very people we need to convince and inspire directly in order to remain part of industry-defining and market making conversations. This is a new era of influence and in order to participate, we have to rewire our DNA to stop marketing at audiences in order to genuinely and intelligently humanize our story to connect with real people and the online communities they inhabit.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is a critical and mandatory process to shine in today’s social economy. It will help businesses forge meaningful relationships with those who will bridge specific benefits to distinct groups of consumers in order to cultivate a loyal, vocal, and hyper-connected community of customers and influencers.”

Did you enjoy that? I particularly liked how we must stop marketing at audiences (did he deliberately use ‘at’ instead of ‘to’ – it’s not clear) and how we must genuinely and intelligently split infinitives and humanise our story. And what (in the name of all that’s holy) is ‘bridging benefits to distinct groups of consumers’?

Obviously, different people, and different schools of thought, will have different takes on Mr Solis’s meanderings. Personally, I’m not a fan of social media evangelism, I don’t regard it as life-changing and I’m not even sure it’s actually – when it comes down to it – very important as a comms tool. Mr Solis seems to be saying that the future is community and collaboration, and that, through social media, the audience will dictate the shape and future strategy of the business.

I’m not saying this is untrue – in fact I think it’s been true for quite some time. I just don’t think that social media invented audience participation, nor do I think it’s the best way of getting the end user involved.

Look at Microsoft (‘I’m a PC’) and RIM (Blackberry ‘All You Need Is Love’) – both campaigns are all about community, but they didn’t need (and in one case, didn’t really use) social media to get where they are. They (sensibly) used market research.

And as for social media reinventing the ‘aging business of PR’. Please. PR (Corporate Communications) is what it is – social media is simply a new channel, and whether it’s good or bad has yet to be seen.

To put it another way, a new type of hammer does not fundamentally reinvent the way you build houses. Nor, usually, does it require the acquisition of a specific hammering skillset, or the hiring of expensive hammering gurus.

This is Shiny Object Syndrome at its worst.

Public Relations – Making News In The Digital Era – Or Any Era

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , .

Came across this today, which is a post containing ‘seven strategic steps’ to making news in the digital era. For ease, dear blog snorkellers, I reproduce them here. These steps, according to their author – a communicator of some note – focus the ‘news making’ process to ‘shed old-style communications practices, like press releases, that no longer work’ in order to ‘begin making your own news online in a compelling manner to engage audiences’.

Here they are:

  • Advocate change
  • Avoid compulsively marketing and promoting
  • Start listening and engaging in conversations
  • Embrace storytelling
  • Use plain language
  • Reach out to fewer to achieve more
  • Become the credible voice and face
  • Don’t be afraid to try something new

Initially, I looked at these and thought – here we go again – another set of Utopian guidelines for engaging in the global conversation, where everything goes with the flow and there are no real goals, objectives and outputs; where you’re not supposed to expect anything in return and virtue is its own reward. Not new-style communications, more the absolute antithesis of what lies at the heart of professional business communications.

Then I looked at them again, and realised that these steps are no more or less than a beginner’s guide to media relations. In point of fact, the press release has been dead for 10 years, and these steps are how you develop a relationship with your sector journalists (print, broadcast and online – but mostly print). These steps are your route map to a one-on-one live encounter with a hack who you hope is going to give your business/brand/organisation a good hearing. These are the seven strategic steps to running your conversation over lunch.

As such, they’re very useful.

Social media – Privacy No Longer The Norm

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Coming a bit late to this – although I have used it as a platform for my opinions on the validity of ‘the conversation’ (in summary, ‘the conversation’ is just another pair of Imperial undercrackers) – but, for clarity, this is Mark Zuckerberg’s much-vaunted assertion that: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

My personal take on this remains that simply because anyone with internet access (59% in the UK) has the opportunity to post to social media, this doesn’t mean that they’ve also been magically granted the capability to do so. There is – and I’m working on the laws of probability here – a vast swathe of users out there who simply do not understand what they are doing and have no concept of the implications of posting personal details on a free-to-access web portal.

Some people have ‘gotten comfortable’, others are neither comfortable with, or uncomfortable about, sharing information openly and with more people. Many, I’d wager, have yet to grasp that when you stick something on the net, anyone can see it and – possibly worse – there are all sorts of organisations, agencies and groups who are actively looking for it. So-called privacy controls on social media sites are, currently, no more than lip-service – not obvious, not understood, not used.

Anyway, that’s me – and here’s a post from a gentleman by the name of Ed Hartigan. The post sort of reiterates what I’m saying but, all credit to Mr Hartigan, he takes it a bit further. What is genuinely interesting, however, is his reference to VRM (Vendor Relationship Management for those few of my blog snorkellers who didn’t already know) which I’d not come across – as a specific discipline – before. Obviously, I’d given thought to some of the suite of VRM tools before, from a consumer’s point of view, but I’d not seen it as a specialism in its own right.

It’s interesting because it’s wholly the product of business’ inability to behave ethically and the consumer’s inability to deny themselves or consider the implications of their actions. VRM exists to combat CRM – which, after all and despite what its name implies, is a sales tool, wholly reliant on being able to prise a potential customer’s personal details out of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that in this age of social – which, let’s not forget, is all about openness and transparency and the conversation – where it’s all down to individual relationships and contracts – where brands have to humanise – that VRM mechanisms need to be put into place to protect consumers from rapacious brands that, given half the chance, will spam them out of existence.

But what really pisses me off is that because business cannot stop being business, and no matter what it says, will continue to try to use social media to turn a profit; and because Percival D Consumer cannot stop being a turkey and spilling his life history at the drop of a freebie, we, the sane minority, will have to start dealing with yet another new-consultant-on-the-block.

Social media gurus, meet the Vendor Relationship Managers. I hope you’ll be very happy together.

Social Media – Why Sell, When You Can ‘Converse’?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , .

Mark Zuckerberg (that’s the wee lad who gave us Facebook) says that privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’ – triggering panic selling of stocks in the net curtain and bathroom door sectors – and Robert Phillips (CEO of Edelman, a PR enterprise of some note) adds that “we, the people, have become media in our own right; and everyone………can now participate in the conversation, anywhere and at any moment in time”.

All well and good, but, unfortunately, the removal of privacy gives people an ill-advised sense of liberation and the belief that it’s OK to bare their souls (some of which must be, according to the laws of probability, dark, diseased, twisted, bitter and mis-aligned) and simply giving people the opportunity to participate in the conversation, does not automatically confer upon them the capability to do so. Worse, because of the insidious and ubiquitous nature of t’interweb, often it’s not conversation that we’re seeing – it’s more the foaming rantings of those whose extreme opinions stem from irresponsible journalism and too much free time.

You’ve only got to have a quick trot around the net to see that the vast majority of the ‘conversation’ is not worth the bandwidth it sucks up – it’s of no value to anyone except those involved in perpetuating it. To see that a large proportion of what those advising businesses on social media strategy would term ‘conversation’ is little more than Q&A – where can I get your product and what will it cost, are your trains running on time, can I get tickets to your sponsored gig – all questions that can (and should) be answered on a website. To see that even in those media where you’d expect to find value-adding debate, the conversations are fuelled by a lack of experience and a lack of knowledge – by the anti-privateers who believe that because they can, they should. To see that, even in 140 characters, it can still be all about them to the exclusion of everyone else.

Two things, from a comms perspective.

All of this new-age nonsense about ‘the conversation’ is simply an abdication of responsibility. From where I’m standing, it’s an excuse to give up trying to control the message. Lest anyone be unclear on this, the role of the communicator who is paid to communicate on behalf of a brand, business or organisation IS TO CONTROL THE MESSAGE, THEREBY ENHANCING REPUTATION, THEREBY INCREASING PROPENSITY TO ENGAGE (PURCHASE). All this ‘conversation’ crapola is the foundation of a nice new excuse for a failure to deliver hard, tangible, value-adding results. It – and all the wibbly nonsense that goes round it – is a nice way to get out of selling, which is, after all, what communications is. No-one likes selling and – eureka – now we don’t have to.

And as a reminder, ‘vox populi, vox dei’ is part of a bigger quotation. Which includes the word ‘insanitas’. Look it up.