At its core,
Public Relations is the management of the face of an organisation and their
visible behaviours; managing their public actions in business. Traditionally,
this has been achieved through the creation of media relationships - the
writing of media releases, media alerts and other relevant information. While
these items remain vital to operation in contemporary practice, another medium
is on the rise. We’re talking Social Media...and Social Media is talking back
(well, sometimes anyway).
These past few
weeks in my internship have highlighted the extent of the importance of social
media to Public Relations.
It's not that I
don't understand the importance of posting current and engaging information
about a business, or that I don't appreciate how it can affect public
perception. I've studied it in theory and even maintain a social media presence
for a local café in Perth. However now I’ve had the opportunity to see real,
long-term planned social media undertakings on the scale that's necessary for
large organisations. So I've shifted from writing social media for a café in a
Word document each week to writing 13 weeks of social media content, 4 posts
per week, in an Excel spreadsheet where text, image and links are all detailed.
Writing week to
week, the task is a lot easier – each day there is something to talk about
that's happening then and there, be it a new menu item or wine tasting. Now,
compare that with writing 13 weeks of content in one hit for an organisation
where you have limited information to go on. Significant difference. I think
I'm developing a personal relationship with Google. It's become my workday
friend. I use it to search everything, from industry news that might
still be relevant in 13 weeks to random points of related interest to searching
#inspo on Pinterest.
I've had a
couple of interesting moments in my content creation journey. One piece of
content writing I completed for a client organisation's social media was
deleted because it asked the audience a question – so it involved a response. I
was genuinely surprised by this as my understanding of social media is that
audience engagement is desirable and might result in more individuals
discovering the page. But as it turns out, that was both its strength and
weakness; it required engagement. If the audience didn’t
respond it could be seen as a failed post and if they did respond it would
require further action which might be a drain on human resources or the action
might not be positive.
From a PR
perspective, the ability to maintain and control social media is vital in
modern day business because it's all about controlling the message. Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more - they all provide avenues to
portray desired images and present an array information of varying degrees of
interest and importance. Social media is great for launching products and
announcing events but it isn’t just a method of information distribution, it is
also an important method of maintaining a presence and nurturing an ongoing
relationship; 4 posts a week over 13 weeks is a significant commitment to that
relationship. Planned, created and curated with care, social media is all about
the success of the message and, for many businesses, that success is often
determined simply by the size of the audience.
Logging out
Bella
