I never considered myself an ad girl. When it came to publishing I was all about the editorial, the center well baby! Early in my career I took a job at Time Inc's Custom Publishing division, and though I had an editor title, it felt a bit dirty building editorial that fit brands' needs. Today I am grateful for the experience because I learned how to play nice with brands AND create compelling content. I learned that content providers can be verry verry precious people, and that sometimes really good creative that also accentuates, or aligns, with brand messaging ain't a sin.
Today there's migration coming from the other direction--PR and advertising folks are building content in order to achieve that same alignment. They may or may not be going to publishers to achieve kismet, they often seek out the content themselves. Bloggers are a primary source, though agencies are still getting up to speed on how to treat content providers. Do they pay for engagement, or do they request "organic" endorsement (a.k.a. hope for a favor?)
Back in the day when I was in custom publishing, brands understood that they paid for content, but there was no debate about the content itself; they had to pay for it as-is, and that made it a clean transaction. For instance, if I was working on a publication for a bank, and I pulled an article from Money magazine that was down on a product the bank sold, I couldn't/wouldn't edit that part out of the article; I would have to exclude that article, period. Nor could I go hunting for other writers who might feel differently. If the brand wanted content from a writer at X publication, that's what they got, not an endorsement or a say in that person's informed opinion. The only edits required were fact-checking updates. I couldn't remove a fact that was accurate, but unflattering, to a brand.
Likewise, if I, as a publisher commission a blogger to write a review for a brand, and she writes something unflattering but factually true, it cannot be edited out. If she writes unsubstantiated facts, "This diet drink will make your eyebrows grow faster," I remove it. Or I don't publish the piece altogether. Brands cannot leverage the blogger's traffic and only the postivie bits of her message, nor can bloggers be irresponsible with brands. It's a two-way street.
So, with agencies now navigating waters that editors used to, I suppose the role of the agency is changing. And the role of the publisher is changing. It makes sense that we publishers, who have been cultivating relationships with distributed sources (long-winded term for social media), can provide influencer outreach in a much more insightful and scalable ways than the agency because we've been cultivating these relationships en masse with users' own content.
Does this mean that agencies, PR in particular, are no longer necessary? I think they are, but not in their former incarnation.
In a recent iMedia article, Sean Cummings writes:
No longer does the client feel that one shop can handle all their needs, because in reality, no single shop can. But there is something being lost by all of the expansion: message and brand cohesion. Since your "main" agency is no longer the idea shop, and since that message has inherent problems cascading throughout so many communication channels, why have one?
Cummings argues that while one of the major functions of a creative agency was to develop "big ideas", this is no longer required because media's distributed model renders the top-down model of messaging useless.
The most important message, he says, comes from consumers. Their opinion dwarfs the agency's. And the messages that come from consumers change according to the medium, whether it's mobile or Twitter.
Perhaps, then, an agency that CURATES these messages and increases their exposure will do better by their clients.
This week I had conversations with two senior PR people, and their description of recent projects sounded to me more like what I would hear from a digital shop: Both were building online communities for their clients. No messaging, no press releases, no outreach. For that last piece they were coming to publishers and puttting their energy elsewhere.
*Note: I don't mean to infer that PR agencies should be in the business of building branded Web communities. In some cases it makes sense, but in more cases, where eyeballs are so distributed and upstarts have an increasingly harder time of obtaining share, it makes sense to support targeted communities that are already vibrant.
So then, what are the functions of an agency that is successful in the social media space?
- They are curators of conversations. They enable these conversations to take place, and if they fuel them. I've seen this work at the BlogHer Conference and also in well-developed sponsored online conversations.
- They extract the priorities and sentiment of these communities.
- They develop strategies for reaching communities based on these priorities and sentiment.
- They educate their clients on the habits and preferences of their target markets.
- They build relationships with communities not through mass email but through participation in and promotion of community ideals. Cause marketing is an example of this, but take it to the next level: determine what are the causes of a community, not what cause you may impose on it.
- Distinguishing alignment points, where a brand may provide solutions, share values, or partner with communities.
- They are consultants who are not just proficient in social media tools, but in what consumers increasingly expect out of brands--jargon-free, two way, communication.
This makes for one helluva job description for talent. I don't envy PR hiring managers.
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