What are the barriers preventing the take-up of cutting edge comms? Jon Barker reports

Quicker, simpler, cheaper, more interactive. The arguments in favour of adopting digital communication are drummed into us regularly. And yet it’s a bandwagon that a large proportion of the UK’s communications practitioners are reluctant to climb onto.

The findings come from a new report by search and selection agency, Watson Helsby, which probes the digital directors of in-house, agency and consultancy teams. The research points to ten barriers holding them back from really embracing digital. Fortunately, as we discover here, some have begun to overcome them.

Ignorance or scepticism?

According to Watson Helsby’s report, the level of digital adoption can depend on the participant’s age, the industry sector in which they worked, whether they operated at a group, brand or business-unit level, and whether they were in-house or agency. When it comes to embracing everything digital, many in-house communicators may be guilty of simply not ‘getting it’. But fault also goes to the digital agencies that are blinding them with science.

Paul Armstrong, director of social media at communications agency Kindred says: “PRs are already using Facebook and Twitter to disseminate some client information but there’s much wider scope for conversation beyond campaigns, which is not yet fully understood because of a lack of up to date knowledge on the opportunities that various tools and channels can offer.”

Kindred was hired by the government-funded School Food Trust (SFT). This was a body that was set up to combat rising childhood obesity by persuading school children to eat healthy school dinners, but had yet to adopt digital communications techniques. Kindred realised that, with such a range of ages and social ‘tribes’ to speak to, its strategy had to be multichannelled. Over a three-year period Kindred worked with the SFT, using spokespeople who engaged with the young people on their level and securing filmed support from Disney stars such as High School Musical’s Zac Efron for online broadcasts.

“From one campaign we were able to show them the power of blogs and microblogs through target group demographics, behavioural analysis, research and planning,” says Armstrong. “We are now working on their entire digital strategy.”

Dealing with a loss of control

Unlike traditional media, online content generally doesn’t have to pass any editorial control. As a result, there is a growing recognition that communicators can no longer control the news; rather it is increasingly all about shaping it.

But the tone and manner in which you engage the audience must appropriate to your relationship: getting this wrong is like an embarrassing parent trying to be “down with the kids” and it is this mismatch which often incites a negative response.

Take Skittles, the candy brand. Last year, it took steps to transform its home page into an online portal featuring a live Twitter feed alongside Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube content. Two days later the site was teaming with inane tweets – as soon as the public realised what was going on, they started hashtagging all sorts of things #skittles – and the stream was promptly removed.

Demographic apartheid

Watson Helsby suggests technical knowledge is frequently defined by age, where those over 40 are struggling to make sense of the new digital world. This is replicated both in communications teams and in the board room, creating a generational and cultural barrier to understanding and integrating digital communications in today’s organisations.

Fragmentation of the media

It’s a new media landscape. Gone are the days when a few large media outlets could monopolise news gathering and audience attention; the advent of digital technology has meant that there are now literally thousands of media outlets, from broadcast TV to blogs.

With audiences getting ever smaller and more niche, many media agencies are starting to embrace hyper-local models by taking blogging more seriously.

Take Birmingham City Council, for example. Press officer Geoff Coleman recently met with Andrew Brightwell, online journalist and blogger for ‘Grounds’ – a hyper-local experiment between Birmingham City University and Urban Coffee Company.

As Jon Hickman, lecturer/course director MA Social Media at Birmingham City University, explained: “The council is trying to ensure its press office can respond to the concerns of hyper-local bloggers. It’s refreshing to see how it is engaging with bloggers and giving them the same credence as local newspaper journalists.”

The speed of change

Watson Helsby’s report cites the need to continually keep abreast of the ever-changing landscape of digital communications as a further barrier to entry for reluctant PR practitioners.

In January, car manufacturer Toyota watched the hundreds of stories about its recall situation flow through Digg, the user-voted news aggregator, and saw the passionate conversations it triggered. Because of the speed of the crisis, Toyota needed a PR platform where it could listen and interact with consumers.

So it put forward Jim Lentz, Toyota Motor Sales USA president, for the Digg Dialogg interview series. Lentz was asked the unedited top 10 questions voted by Diggers from the more than 1,400 submitted over a three-day period: the live-stream interview generated more than one million views in the first five days alone.

“When you have limited recourse against the authors or the transmission of inaccurate information, you need to be in the conversation, shaping it from the start,” says Alex Pearmain, head of digital at Fishburn Hedges. “When once there were several hours before a journalist went to press, now there are just minutes before another blogger picks up a story.”

Rules of engagement

While the core essence of social media is grounded in openness and transparency, managing the reputation of a company is becoming increasingly difficult against a backdrop of blogs, online forums and stakeholder opinion. That can be hard to get to grips with.

“What we have recognised is that respect for your audience is crucial when engaging in social media,” says Anil Pillai, managing director at agency LBi. “For example, we carried out a campaign for the British Red Cross, to highlight the plight of civilians living in conflict zones through an alternative reality game. A significant volume of negative comments were generated about making a ‘game’ out of a serious issue, but the approach we adopted was to let the debate run on respecting the audience’s opinions.”

The audience reacted to the criticism by standing up for the Red Cross and its innovative approach – it also explained the concept to others. Ultimately this controversy resulted in increased engagement with the campaign and additional publicity.

“The key is to experiment,” says Drew Benvie, managing director at 33 Digital. “Learning by doing is absolutely invaluable; it’s what creates authenticity in digital. If you’ve already tried something you are already one step ahead.”

For example, last year Debenhams started engaging its customers via Twitter. Six staff members in the Oxford Street store became Twitter Assistants for the day, answering and responding to customer requests via the social network. Following its success, the retailer recently become one the first major UK brands to target consumers via Foursquare, the mobile social network, game and recommendation service.

Privacy and corporate security

New location-based tools like Foursquare are full of people ‘checking-in’ and broadcasting to everyone where they are. But as these become more mainstream users must be aware, for example, of the risks of burglary, when they broadcast their location away from home. Little wonder that communicators express security concerns.

The lack of privacy inherent in social media - the almost automatic ‘opt in and share everything’ ethos - means that organisations are struggling to protect both their employees’ privacy and their company’s. If organisations ask employees to engage online on the company’s behalf there is a real risk that it will compromise their individual privacy and expose them to possible identity theft or worse, especially under onerous EU data protection rules.

Finding good people

It’s a new communications landscape and, as such, experts are thin on the ground. In his book ‘The Nature of Marketing’ (2010), Chuck Brymer suggests that companies and agencies should appoint a Chief Community Officer whose role would be to “oversee the relationship between brands and their communities, not just in the narrow confines of how a consumer interacts with a product at point of purchase but also in how consumers interact with each other.”

At the very least, digital PR requires communications teams to be comfortable with and plugged into the digital environment and to be able to interpret online opportunities and threats and the initiatives or responses required.

Some get it wrong. Take the recent case of the Nestlé employee in charge of its Facebook page. Following a steady stream of abusive comments as a result of Nestlé’s feud with Greenpeace, the employee not only deleted user comments but responded to other users in an increasingly prickly tone – further inflaming the situation.

Chris McCrudden, creative director at Speed Communications, summed it up: “They just left the wrong person in charge. It’s not often you see a $195 billion dollar company behave like an 11-year-old during a playground brawl.”

Lack of effective metrics

The sign on Einstein’s wall read: “Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts.”

PR evaluation has always been bedevilled by a lack of investment and sophistication and the advent of digital PR has not, as was expected, provided any apparent solution; whether it be outdated evaluation methods used by external agencies, establishing what’s important to evaluate and what is just ‘noise’, who owns the information in an organisation or getting timely access to that information.

Take Toyota: was it a success because it embraced digital communication? March sales were excellent, but it had just introduced incentives and discounted leasing. Lentz’s Digg interview created little online buzz in the days before and after the event and the spike in negative sentiment had subsided – perhaps more a case of consumer fatigue than social media-based crisis public relations efforts?

Einstein was right – there is greater value to certain things than can be measured. And engaging with people digitally isn’t quantum physics. Whether via social media engagement or old fashioned press release; good PR always boils down to effective engagement and clear communication.

As Abigail Harrison, MD of thebluedoor, attests: “Digital is excellent because it is measurable – but we can’t go too far otherwise we undermine the value of the overall comms message. It’s important to see the value in a Mashable blog, for example, and not get too fixated on SEO and web metrics. The best digital campaign in the world won’t make a duff story fly. It’s another channel for conversation. Digital is essentially shared by people; those people get their vitamin D outside of digital too.”

Ownership of digital (land and revenue grab)

PR agencies and in-house communicators are being challenged over their role by others in the wider marketing mix. But social media is focused primarily on reputation management and prescribes skills in advocacy, engagement, conversation and third party endorsement – the traditional skills of the communications function.

Jon Silk, senior digital consultant at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, goes further. “Even though most PR heads have been given the goal of embracing digital this year, they haven’t been given additional budget to do it,” he says. “In these cases, the only way to do it is divert money from other areas of marketing, or try and manage and execute it all in-house.

“Most senior executives know the value that digital communications can bring – it’s all around them and many of them are active supporters of the approach. The final barrier to overcome will be in convincing board-level decision makers to put their money where their mouth is.”