Social media – it’s a team effort
We’ve been meaning to highlight a recent PR Week article from editor Danny Rogers. In it, he argues that companies mustn’t ‘make the same mistakes with this new, youthful incarnation of public relations, as they did with traditional media relations’. And we’ve got to say, we couldn’t agree more.
http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/opinion/942148/Danny-Rogers-Firms-need-measure-digital/
Only this week I took a phone call from a company providing a social media monitoring service.
Them: ‘Hello. I just wondered who looks after your digital and social media services?’
Me: ‘Erm... all of us?’
At Beam, we don’t believe in ‘social media experts’. Because social media is, simply, part of the PR package. It’s not something that can be separated out from the account teams, and left to the attention of some web wizard who is going to sit on Twitter all day – it’s an integral part of every new PR campaign and account team, and agencies / brands who believe that they can separate print, online and social media are missing the point.
Each member of the Beam team uses Twitter and Facebook, not just for our clients but for ourselves. We post twitpics about what we’ve been up to, and share our photos with friends and family via sites such as Flickr. Lots of us are handy with a Flip, and we spend as much time on YouTube as we do watching the TV and reading the newspaper in a morning. And your customers? Many of them do just the same.
And that’s why social media is so important. It’s here to stay – and any agency that fails to recognise that it’s part of the everyday PR process is in danger of making those old mistakes all over again.