Every Dot Connects

Note: The following article originally appeared in the May issue of the Marketing Watchdog Journal. A recent post by Mike Volpe of Hubspot on the role of PR firms reminded me I had not published it here.

While most business executives have never heard the term social media, PR and advertising agencies are adopting it as their latest buzzword, along with terms like conversation and community. These are powerful concepts that deserve attention at the C-suite level, so it is disheartening to see those with minimal understanding of the concepts attempt to cut-and-paste them into their marketing materials.

When used in relation to media or networking, the word social simply refers to people rather than computers. Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Ning and other social networks connect people via an unseen maze of hubs and nodes, much like a LAN connects a business’s computers. Through technologies and tools such as blogs, YouTube videos or iTunes podcasts, social media allows people to interact with content creators, and it allows the employees, customers and stakeholders of a business to co-create content and engage in discussions that can reshape a company’s product or service offerings.

PR professionals, whether internal teams or outside agencies, are being swept up in the maelstrom created by the collision of top-down messaging and bottom-up innovation—and there have been casualties.

Recently, Gina Trapani, author of the top-ranked Lifehacker blog, published a blacklist of PR agencies who had spammed her personal e-mail address with poorly targeted press releases. She wasn’t the first. Last year Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, did the same thing. Gina’s blacklist, however, went further: It included instructions on how to permanently block any e-mail address from a company’s domain name.

It’s important for companies to get coverage by top bloggers and online media outlets, but the practice of blogger relations is like navigating a minefield: You have to know where to step or you can trigger an explosion that will maim your campaign. It requires detailed knowledge of new and emerging media as well as old-school relationship-building skills.

Yet when it comes to PR and marketing campaigns, most of the executives responsible for decision-making have no personal familiarity with social media tools or technologies, let alone the culture or ethos of the blogosphere.

How can you tell if your PR team is social-media savvy? Ask these questions of the top people responsible for your public relations efforts—not the digital natives who are junior associates, but the digital immigrants who occupy the head chair at the conference table.

• Which blogs do you read regularly?
• Are you familiar with the popular feed readers? Which one do you recommend?
• Have you ever created a blog or written a post for one?
• How often do you comment on blogs?
• Have you ever uploaded a video to YouTube?
• Have you ever uploaded digital photos to a site like Flickr?
• What social networks do you belong to? Do you use them for personal or professional reasons?
• How do you use your cell phone besides making calls?
• Do you have accounts on any microblogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce?
• Have you ever had an audio conversation on Utterz or a video chat on ooVoo?

I’ll stop there because I’m sure you get my point: The people making the decisions usually have a total disconnect with social media and Web 2.0 technologies. They may be familiar with the buzzwords, but they have no hands-on experience.

Now, it’s not necessary for C-suite executives to be able to answer all these questions. The important thing is that they be willing to work with—and take advice from—those who know the answers. To bring them in at the inception of a campaign, not call them as an afterthought.

Some people are digital translators—those who can bridge the knowledge and experience gap between digital natives and digital immigrants in the workforce—and these are the folks you want on your PR team. They are old enough to have solid experience in traditional methods but have immersed themselves in Internet culture and practice enough to be adept at new technologies and open to innovative methods.

Like all translators, they are articulate communicators with finely-tuned people skills. At this stage they are not easy to find, but they do exist. Search out these people and nurture relationships with them if you want your PR efforts to remain relevant in the age of Google.