The importance of PR in a social media world

Hi everyone

As you may have heard, the excellent 'The Best Job in the World' campaign picked up the inaugural PR Gold Lion at Cannes last week.

It's a ground-breaking campaign for a number of reasons. Firstly, it wasn't won by a stand-alone PR shop, but by an integrated ad agency.

Secondly the campaign didn't fit neatly into any category but combined a range of marketing disciplines in an integrated effort. And finally the success of the campaign was driven as much by consumer buzz as by mainstream media.

In many ways this campaign highlighted why PR has become arguably the most important tool in making our brands famous in a globally connected, consumer driven, social media world.

So what can we as marketers learn from their success? Here's a few important lessons:

1. Accept that media is in every one's hands : To see the impact of the change in media landscape, you only need to take a look at what's happened with the influence of social media in the protests in Iran this last week. No longer can authoritarian governments (or brands) control the message anymore. It's in the people's hands now. Look at this fascinating overview by Clay Shirky about the new media landscape and its implications.

This social media power really hit home to me in the 'Best Job' campaign when I received video entries like this from my Thai friends, long before I heard about it from other media.

2. Let social media and other media to feed off each other: But that's not to say that we should forget about the influence and importance of 'mainstream media'. Major newspapers, blogs, twitter feeds and cable news all live side by side and play a role in getting the message out. In many cases the influential bloggers are also journalists, or the mainstream news site is getting its updates from Twitter.

'The Best Job in the World' created the virtuous circle of online feeding offline PR (Osama Bin Laden video entry), and offline news reports feeding online entries (News reports of competition).

What is important in this environment is that we have a plan to cover all media to allow this cross fertilisation and spreading of the message. Given this, It was worrying to read in Asia this week that many APAC PRs are ignoring bloggers. In a social media world, where Twitter can have as big an influence as CNN, that's a major mistake.

3. Embrace a human idea to generate buzz: The fact that people could create video applications for "The Best Job in the World' meant that the core idea for the campaign was also the main way of spreading the news around the web. Creating consumer buzz is not just a media choice, it's a creative choice. And that means now more than ever, your idea has not only got to be newsworthy for big media but also interesting enough and 'human enough' for everyone to want get involved.

At the heart of the success of the 'The Best Job' campaign was NOT the fact that it's Queensland, but that everyone dreams of a job on a tropical island getting paid to relax and have fun. Without understanding this human truth, the best use of social media ever would not have helped this campaign.

Many tourist organisations will rush to replicate this success, but most will fail for one simple reason. They will rush to push their brand first and forget about the very motivation people travel in the first place. They do it for themselves.

Cheers, Rob

Feel free to add comments below, or for further questions or advice contact me at rob.h@th.arcww.com