PR Agency Pros — How Social Media Savvy Are They?

A few months back, at my previous company, I led one of those wonderfully fun agency reviews. One of the key requirements for our company was that the agency had to have social media experience. I was surprised at how many agencies we nixed right off the bat because they were still in the old school media relations world of dialing dialing dialing. Not that dialing isn’t an important component in a PR strategy, but these days there is a whole lot more out there when it comes to reaching media audiences. It’s no longer just about hitting the WSJ or C|Net or other major publications. There are also media influencers such as bloggers and industry pundits who are often best reached by a non-traditional means. At the time we eliminated several companies from the intial RFP because we felt that they really didn’t have the social media experience that we had hoped for within an agency that represents us. 

One of my current colleagues, Christine Needles, has a guest post on this topic over on Conversation Agent today.  She talked about her own experience working in agencies and the struggle that many PR pros have when it comes to using social media.

What interests me most is why some of us may be hesitant to jump in. How often are PR people encouraged to have their own opinion? We are counselors, skilled at developing messages and talking points our clients will deliver. Can we have our own opinions? Do clients want their agency PR team out talking about them? Does this create a new liability concern for agency management? Do bloggers want to hear from PR people (outside of the many conversations about our own industry)?

Of course, there are many very talented PR pros out there who are ahead of the curve. At my last firm I had several amazing colleagues who were blogging, podcasting and Twittering in their spare time about topics near and dear to them personally. But in my experience, this level of personal participation is far from the norm.

Christine points to an interesting conundrum…social media is about the self and about direct connections with others on topics of interest. When it comes to PR, who does the pro represent? In her article she mentions several great blogs by PR pundits, but what she doesn’t really talk about is the time that goes into learning about, following and using social media on a daily basis.

Once someone is up and running and understanding the power of social media, the time factor lessens. I usually take 5-10 min a day to check Facebook. I spend a few minutes here and there to monitor and update Twitter. Reddit and Digg are checked here and there every few days. My blogs are probably the biggest social media time suck, but I don’t always blog every day and some posts aren’t as deep as others. And to that point you can still be a social media expert and not have a blog…it’s really about understanding how it works, participating yourself and beinga ble to recommend to others, right?

The problem that agencies face is that they don’t have time to learn about or to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, etc.  Agencies rely on being billable, which means that all those hours spent at the agency are devoted to the client, not to learning about and using social media. I have found this to be true with my friends who are in agencies…on average, they are woefully uninformed when it comes to social media. They don’t have time to learn and they don’t want to spend their few precious offtime hours on the computer, etc.  In fact, one of my closest friends has been keeping social media at arms length — I’ve been bothering her for ages to join Facebook and she’s been resistant. After meeting this weekend though, she mentioned that she’s realizing that she really needs to get social media figured out as more and more clients are asking about it. What she faces is exactly what Christine was suggesting in her post — that learning about what is available may seem overwhelming to many agency professionals.

During that previously mentioned RFP process the one thing I did notice about agencies that professed to have social media experience is that they seemed to rely on just 1 or 2 people to talk about strategies and possibilities. Usually one person who was very passionate about the new technologies led those sections of the presentations and could talk to social media questions that came up from the RFP. Social media knowledge was not widespread throughout any of the agencies we looked at.  In my mind there is a social media component that can tie into almost any PR campaign so it was surprising to see that it wasn’t something pervasive throughout each RFP but was instead typically sectioned off into specific campaigns.

But, like my friend, more and more PR agency pros are realizing that they can’t push this off anymore. They need to become involved for several reasons:

• To understand what their customers are asking for when it comes to social media
• To build better/different relationships with media and media influencers
• To build better relationships with clients
• To grow their own personal visibility as well as the visibilty of their firm
• To reach and influence editors and bloggers who don’t read email pitches and don’t answer phone calls
• To better understand the client competition
• To have a stronger view of the industries they represent

If you are an agency leader/manager and you aren’t already encouraging all of your employees to explore, participate and understand social media, don’t wait. Get them training. The world of PR is shifting farther and farther away from the old model and no one — especially your clients, wants to be left behind.

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