According to a recent post on MSNBC, the Pope is encouraging priests to blog. This shows how “mainstream” social media has become. In my opinion, the Catholic Church has always been very aggressive in its marketing efforts. They have realized that people are online and that if you want to reach your stakeholders, you need to go where they are congregating (pardon the pun).
There is an interesting article in AdAge.com about the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s decision to continue to make a scheduled stop at a private resort in Labadee, Haiti. It’s a pretty strong article with a great deal of criticism from PR pros. As I was reading it, I was wondering where the other side was…there are no quotes from PR pros saying that they “get” why Royal Caribbean made the decision to continue to make stops in Labadee.
As I read the piece, I was thinking that I must not be reading this article right because I would have advised this cruise line to do exactly what they have done (I would have also prepared them to take some criticism about it and to be ready to solidly respond to critics with their rationale).
…Setting up a Twitter account or Facebook page is free. You can also get a blog set up at no cost. What does cost is the strategy, an audit, ongoing engagement, content creation and measurement. It’s much less than some traditional media buys, which has been one of the benefits of PR over the years—more credibility and less cost than ads. However, I think that we need to view social media as a component of communications and there are few people still out there who think that PR is “free.” There are similar comparisons, an organization doesn’t pay a reporter for editorial coverage, but to develop a media relations strategy, create a pitch, get it out there and connect with a journalist and follow through—that takes expertise, time and effort, which costs money.
The econsultancy blog has a great post on social interaction measurements. It’s worth a read.
Katie Paine also has another post worth reading (she has a lot of posts worth reading). Here, she talks about problems in calculating the value of PR, based on what the equivalent ad space would cost. Measuring that way is so out-of-date, it always surprises me that it is still used. PR is about relationships, educating people about an issue or cause and helping to inform opinion. Comparing it to what an ad would cost is of no benefit.
Measurement has always been a challenge in the world of PR. Back in the day, it was all about newspaper and magazine “clips” and the quantity. And a lot of PR professionals were forced to use clips to show success because that was the standard. At AHA, we have always approached measurement a little differently, and have been fortunate enough to have clients who listened to our rationale for why we did it our way.