Influence the Influencers: The Role of PR Agencies in Social Media
While writing for a benchmark survey on social media monitoring and analysis, I learned that public relations agencies were among the early adopters of social media monitoring solutions.
It’s no surprise. After all, the role of the PR agency is to help clients establish a trusted voice in the marketplace. In part, that means understanding the sources from which consumers get their information and how the media environment is changing over time.
“The blogosphere came along and completely obliterated the models we had for knowing when our clients were being talked about,” says David Bradfield, senior vice president and partner, Fleishman-Hillard. “But it also created a lot of new opportunities. In the last two years, clients have been asking proactively about monitoring social media and that’s when we started turning to vendors for best-of-breed solutions.”
With expertise in understanding the subtleties of human relationships, including how they form and grow, PR agencies already possessed the core skills needed to derive insights from social media data.
“The conversation may be about the client or it may be a larger conversation about their category or any number of relevant issues,” says Ryan Senser, vice president of planning at Edelman Interactive. “We try to understand who the influencers are that are driving the conversation, as well as the tone and language they use.”
Davina Gruenstein, management supervisor at Publicis Consultants PR, agrees. “With the capabilities we have through our monitoring service, we’re able to build confidence with our own marketing team, to show them what’s happening on a positive, neutral, and negative tone,” she says. “That kind of data really helps them feel comfortable going into this arena.”
The biggest insights often come from consumers who have an issue with a brand. “They’re not necessary detractors,” says Senser. “They may simply be people who like your product but are stuck on something. There’s a barrier for them to move forward. If you understand what that barrier is, you can show them how to knock it down.”
Senser tells the story of a client concerned about its brand reputation because of a product issue it felt its customers were struggling with. When the agency investigated how the product was being talked about online, however, it found that the most passionate conversations related to an entirely different aspect of the product. The client didn’t even know about the problem because it hadn’t surfaced using traditional offline research.
“A whole community had formed around this issue and the company was totally unaware of it,” says Senser. “All they had to do was to listen.”
Listening drives responses. For example, an agency might discover the need to create a separate site for a client that speaks as an authority on a particular issue. The goal might be to engage the community on its own terms with solutions they need to maintain a positive relationship with that company and have faith that it will address future issues that arise.
Engaging a community means acting as an official spokesperson for the client, and that’s important from a PR perspective. It’s not just a matter of listening on a passive basis but of giving consumers the information they need about a product or service to participate even more passionately in the world of social media.
Jeff Zabin is a research fellow at the Aberdeen Group. Click here for the referenced report, Social Media Monitoring and Analysis.
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