Sometimes it’s useful to take a step back and have a look at the bigger picture. In just a few years, the PR and marketing worlds have been turned inside-out, upside-down and back-tofront by the advent of digital and social media. Or at least so it would seem by reading the reports of industry commentators. Everyone recognises that Web 2.0 and the resultant swarm of citizen journalists through blogs, forums, Facebook pages and more have made the average consumer more powerful than ever before. There are undeniably many and great opportunities for companies to enter into more meaningful relationships with their customers, offering the chance at long term and repeat business and, of course, the possibility of securing and maintaining often fragile and fickle customer loyalty.

 

It will surely come as little surprise to learn that nigh-on 100% of companies, both agencies and client organisations, have already done something to embrace new media channels. Many, if not most, are still very much in the experimentation stage, but surprisingly large proportions of agencies have invested in opening digital departments (10%), subsidiary specialist agencies (20%) or taken on board new capabilities like video (33%). Indeed, it might be argued that this marks the beginning of an evolution of all such companies – PR, advertising, brand consultancy and marketing – into multi-service agencies. However, before this can really happen there is still a large education battle to wage. Eight in ten PR consultants say that educating clients about the potential of new media has been a significant challenge to date (Chart 1) and two-thirds (62%) of clients commented that the challenge lies in educating their own upper management (only one in three has a board-approved new media strategy). Education expectation clearly lies with the agencies, since over three-quarters of in-house communications professionals say that they expect agency staff to be more knowledgeable than they are on the subject of new media.

 

But for all the buzz around social media, caution is needed too. More famous by far than the successes are the spectacular ‘digital’ communications disasters that have dogged organisations’ first hesitant footsteps into this brave new world. Those responsible have, for the most part, taken their lumps, and I won’t revisit specific examples here, but the post-mortem dissections have been interesting in the extreme for a research agency that has served the PR and marketing industries for well over a decade - not least because everyone can tell you the fatal flaws and explain how and why they would have done it differently. Hindsight, as they say, is 20:20, and so my firm decided to take a look into the hard facts behind the stories to see what learnings – if any – we could take away.

 

Rather worryingly, half of all PR consultants have had a client that has experienced a (digital- or social media-related) crisis management situation in the last 12 months; perhaps obviously, the more involved a company is with digital media, the higher the chances of a catastrophe. So much could also be said of ‘traditional’ media communications, but with fewer public forums available for the customer, this is surely only true to a certain extent. The telling factor is the risk-reward ratio: are social media communications inherently more dangerous to engage in, or is it simply the case that failure is easier to measure than success?

 

Of those digital crises above, 71% of PR consultants were quick to point out that social media played a significant role in igniting the crisis in the first place and the same percentage of client-side communications practitioners said further use of social media only exacerbated the situation. This would seem to suggest that dabbling in digital communications is like kicking a hornet nest, and that fighting fire with fire just does not work.

 

Nonetheless, PR consultants are undaunted in their attempts to really get to grips with social media - 43% of them are busily trying to build relationships with bloggers, which would suggest they are trying to regain what control and influence a free forum for the exchange of opinions will allow. And if they are off to an arguably rather bumpy start in this journey, what social revolution has not suffered some false-starts? Let’s not forget there have been great successes however – the number of wildly-popular, self-replicating viral campaigns that have crossed language and geographical borders the world over, in even the last six months, are ample evidence of this. What a Brave New World it really is. I see huge opportunity for the communications industry in the coming months and, yes, years. Client organisations have already made it clear they look to the agencies when embarking on digital campaigns – even for selfeducational purposes – for expert advice, and agencies are always looking for a way to add strategic value to their clients’ marketing and business strategies. With nearly a third of PR consultants thinking they’re involved with the strategic business direction of their clients but only 14% of clients agreeing (Chart 3), digital media is both the challenge and the solution as the traditional market continues to mature and (as is the nature of all things) become commoditised.

 

Of course digital and social media communications need to be handled with care – so do all communications if we wish to avoid the possibility of misunderstanding. However, the chance for communications to make a valuable difference to the bottom line, not just reputation in the media, is what makes digital not a danger, but an opportunity.