What are the biggest challenges for PR in social media?

What are the biggest challenges for PR in social media? That's the question Jamie Burke, founder of the P2PR Ning Community put to me last week.
The video below has my off-the-cuff response.
Love to hear yours.


For the sake of transparency, Jamie and I work together at Brando-Digital, where we talk about this kind of stuff all day...

Goodbye Bauer Media - hello Brando Digital

I'm delighted to say I start a new job on Monday October 27. I'm leaving my role at Bauer Media (formerly Emap Consumer Media) to join the world's largest full service Social Media agency network: Brando Digital.

Brando Digital is a start-up with truly global reach, based in Camden, London.

I'm going to be Director of Social Media and work with a team of brilliant people to take companies, brands and organisations on their journey through and to the networked world.

I believe that listening to, learning from and participating in the networked world are the keys to understanding it, benefiting from it and becoming a humanised part of it - and so does Brando Digital.

You'll be able to learn more about Brando Digital on our website (Brando-Digital.com) when it goes live. It's a holding page at present - that's how new we are. Brando Digital is part of Brando World - of which more, here.

One of the big reason's I'm joining is the enlightened attitude of the organisation: They've been happy to recruit me on a four-days-a-week basis.
My fifth day (in a kind of self-funding google 20%-rule-model) can be used to take me outside the silo - doing my own consultancy work: from advice and analysis to workshops, speaking and conference organising. More about that will be published at http://fasterfutureconsulting.com when that url goes live in the next few days.

In the meantime, if you want to contact me about either working with the most faster-future-thinking, most globally networked* full-service social media agency there is (that's Brando Digital folks!) or about FasterFuture Consulting, drop me a line at: davidpcushman AT gmail DOT com

*Brando Digital has community and blogger outreach capabilities in EMEA, North America, Central and Latin America, Asia and Oceania; across English, Spanish (Catalan/Basque), Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese (Cantonese), Russian and Arabic languages.

P2PR theory into practice

Bauer Media (the company I work for) has a neat social media play called ditto.net (I would say that, wouldn't I? I've had a light-touch advice-and-support role throughout).

It's a human sorting engine, enabling crowd-sourced entertainment ranking through the simplicity of voting on lists. For the full story, listen to Colin Kennedy.

Anyways, a couple of months back Community Marketing Manager Dan Thornton and myself got our heads together to think of ways we might spread the word about ditto.net (image by Thomas Hawk via flickr)

What we came up with was a list to rank 'The RockStars of Web2.0'.
(You can read Dan's take on all this here).

We figured the inhabitants of this list would be people equipped to discover it and either be sufficiently intrigued/excited/embarrassed by it to perhaps point it out to the many people in their own networks of trust.

They, like all of us, will only pass on what they think their network will think is cool. That's a basic principle for me for how brands can adapt to the networked world.

Rather than bung them all a basic press release, we stood out of the way so they could (at least in some cases) make the discovery themselves.

And in a recent meme (emerging after we started this) that discover-it-yourself approach to PR seems to ring the right bells with the likes of Scoble, Arrington and, most explicitly, Steve Rubel (Does the thrill of the chase make PR obsolete).

We hoped they might even investigate beyond the list they appeared on - more discovery of their own. We trusted they were bright enough to make their own decisions about this - they certainly didn't need us to either lead them by the hand or tell them what to do.

Some I did contact directly, using networks of trust I have built up over time. That's the more traditional side of PR in a networked context. But others discovered ditto through P2PR - friend-adapted-pass-on.

Dan and I both blogged and tweeted about the intitial gathering of the list. We hosted posts where our own networks could contribute suggestions before the list for ranking got created on ditto itself. That stirred a little initial buzz.

And when the list went live, he and I posted and tweeted again. We didn't take it, or ourselves too seriously. Neither did those we contacted directly in the good old fashioned way.

And one way or another the list, and ditto.net, got pointed to by and on Stowe Boyd's /Message (that one really was down to my personal network - I also blog at /message!), by Joseph Jaffe, Euan Semple, Jonathan Macdonald, Richard Millington and, today, by the legend that is Doc Searls.

(Dan's list is way more complete than my own).

And that's without tracking the twitter retweeting (of which there has been plenty) or other social sentiment measures.

Even Jason Calacanis has involved himself in a discussion about it - after discovering (there's that magic word again) that he's languishing at the bottom end of the list!

On each occasion, the conversation continued. And continues. This isn't a boom-bang flash-in-the-pan firework display, it's the release of a (spin-free, upfront) message to be spread in the way the adhoc communities of purpose who discover it choose to adopt and adapt it. It's up to them if they find it useful and how they find it useful.

P2PR is working right here, right now. We haven't done the marketing to them, they choose to do it to themselves.

From broadcast PR to P2PR

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: new networks)

PR: It ain't broke, but it does need fixing

There have been some wild stabs in the dark (back?) at PR over the last few days - notably from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble.
Steve Rubel has been questioning the value of PR altogether in a world where we thrill in the discovery of the new for ourselves (we get more of a kick if this experience is NOT mediated).

And I've joined the fray with comments in mutliple locations. It's time to draw them together. (Image by candiceedicnac)

PR ain't broken. At least, it's no more broken than the next way-of-doing-things the mass-media, broadcast world presents us with.

Anything which involves mediation has to be rethought in the context of a world where communities of purpose can form at next-to-no cost - where control is simply routed round by people seeking their own co-created solutions;

PR is no more broken than broadcast media, than the music industry, movies or print.

It's no more broken than traditional visions of economics, politics, education or the law.

ALL need reconstructing to take account of the fundamental shift from a broadcast to a networked world.

To pick on PR is to miss the point. Everywhere there is mediation, the network will disrupt and is beginning to disrupt.

In the case of traditional PR, the kind of stuff that bugs Scoble et al (and frankly any traditional journalist since PR began) is the irrelevant.

PR, when driven from a broadcast mindset, aims for quality at the cost of relevance: A fabulous press release sent out en masse? Spam for everyone for whom it is not relevant. Relevance always beats quality.

PR has to take the same kind of approach as anyone wishing to spread or seed a message in the networked world (hello marketeers, advertisers, politicians, service and product providers?).

It goes a little something like this (those familiar with Why Traditional Ad Models Won't Work in Social Networks, And What Will, may recognise its evolutionary path!). See below. Relax. It's just 10 slides.

From broadcast PR to P2PR

View SlideShare presentation (tags: p2pr pr broadcast networked)

This speaks to some of the ideas we kicked around with the notion of P2PR.

But to dismiss traditional PR out of hand is at best link-baiting and at worst commercial suicide.

There's still huge swathes of value to be derived from taking traditional routes, reaching out to those who still broadcast in the hope of reaching their (ok dwindling but) still very large audiences.



No wise PR effort would do without it. And getting back to the basics of good human relationships with your intended broadcaster, so that you know what is relevant for them, will win you prizes here, too.

PR + P2PR = :-)

P2PR : The real online public relations

Had a brief chat with an interesting chap in online PR yesterday. He reckons the industry needs some good PR of its own - and that could be aided by the right language.
How do you distinguish between people doing traditional PR using digital means (ie sucking up to bloggers rather than print or digital journalists) and those who get the disruptive fundamentals of the power of network and understand how messages spread now.

Why Traditional Ad Models will not work in social networks (and what will...)

view presentation (tags: advertising networks social marketing)

I have a thought: Instead of sitting in the Online PR silo, perhaps the new kids need to distinguish themselves with the descriptor P2PR.
I can't be the first to put those letters and numbers in that order, surely?

Whatever the case...

What does P2PR stand for? What would the group you are reaching out to like it to mean?
Peer-to-Peer Relations(hips),
Person-to-Person Relations(hips),
Publisher-to-Publisher Relations(hips). (We are all publishers now!)

The Online bit is way less important than the P2P bit of PR anyway. It's all about the people and what they do to each other.
Marketing (of whatever form) is not a process of doing things to people. It is what they do to each other.

So, for me, P2PR is the right approach for the networked world.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.


Don't bother trying to register the url. It's already rather tediously taken... but I have squatted on the blogspot address!