Having a Social Media Strategy Trumps Having a PR strategy

In August of 2010, Vancouver, Canada’s Public Relations maven Mat Wilcox shuts her company down citing the new social media platforms and technology as the reasons.

The Wilcox group is no minnow in Vancouver’s Public Relations business. The Wilcox group was a multi-million dollar PR firm that deals with crisis management, special events, marketing, government relations and public affairs so when it shuts down, it sent shock waves throughout the PR industry. The founder herself, Mat Wilcox cited her reason that due to the emergence and proliferation of social media technology, the old PR strategies no longer meet the clients’ needs effectively.

In Mat Wilcox’s own words, the issues PR clients faced are that in this ever changing landscape, consumers expect information, 24 hours a day at the speed of light. PR clients are also unable to provide a metric to social media and are loathe paying for it.

In a crisis situation, companies are now expected to react quickly in the Twitterverse, Facebook posts and Youtube or Vimeo videos explaining or apologizing for the situation. That means bigger budgets are required to hire bigger teams to handle social media channels but that is something that PR clients would not or cannot see the benefit of paying PR firms for.

Increasingly, technologically sophisticated companies are now hiring social media communications experts on their own to on “community engagement” practices. These social media communications experts engage on a continuous basis with the companies’s own clients to deal with complaints or even just good reviews for the company’s own products and services. In a crisis situation, these social media communications experts are the frontline people to inform and communicate with clients or consumers instantly any information dealing with the crisis.

One of the biggest examples of such company is the US based Southwest airlines. Reputed to have the best social media presence and strategy, SouthWest Airlines actually employ a team of people to blog about their lives at Southwest Airlines, issues or people. They are clearly representing the Southwest brand and it gives the impression that Southwest Airlines is people-oriented. When a crisis happened, like a complaint against Southwest Airlines went viral, their communications team sprang into action almost immediately with tweets and phone calls to the affected customer and this has the action of earning them a reputation of ‘listening’ to their clients, something that any consumer facing company knows is extremely hard to earn.

This is not to say that PR firms are not capable of doing it nor are their business model the way of dinosaurs. What this means in this day and age of social media and data analytics, is that increasingly companies are already given the tools to be engaging with their consumers directly and on a deeper level through their own social media channels without intermediaries. It is a matter of the companies having the correct social media strategy and hiring people who understand the brand value of the company to engage with their consumers and to deal with crisis management when a crisis hits.

Companies will start to realize that having a social media strategy, controlling their own social media presence and using the tools that are available such as Twitter’s own analytics or social media tools such as Hootsuite to engage with their consumers are now the trend and that trend will grow bigger. By no means is this social media strategy only applicable to western companies because even in China, the Chinese have their own vast social media channels such as Weibo or RenRen. It is only an eventuality that Chinese consumer’s choices will be shaped by a company’s engagement level through the Chinese social media channels.