By Chris Lee

The role of public relations professionals has been dramatically revised by social media. No longer do they simply deal with members of the press, but now often handle everything from social communities to online reputation management and blogging.

With more than 630 million people active on social network Facebook it’s no surprise that many thousands of brands have followed them on there with pages managed by public relations departments and agencies.

According to Daniel Stein of San Francisco-based content marketing consultancy Evolution Bureau in his recent blog post, the pervasiveness of PRs is “making social media a very boring place”.

Stein wrote: “The advent of social media has (theoretically) allowed PR shops to skip the middleman and “join the conversation” directly with consumers. The problem is that in social media, as in life, a conversation isn’t engaging unless there is something interesting to talk about. No one wants to listen to an endless, aimless stream of dialog about a brand or a company, which is what you get from a strategy that focuses on news, offers and the occasional contest. That’s where PR-led social strategies wind up because those are pretty much the only arrows in PR’s quiver.”

Good PR means good content

According to Gordon Hector of London-based PR agency Fishburn Hedges, good PR companies can create and seed the right kind of content to be successful in social media.

In his blog, Hector reposed: “It’s just factually inaccurate to say that PRs (good ones, anyway) can’t do content. Not only that, but we also understand why brands need content online – because, as the post argues, you don’t build fans, nurture advocates and grow support unless you have compelling content.”

Social media consultant Darika Ahrens added: “Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) media is converging rapidly online between paid, earned and owned media, but the humble PR agency and their associated tactics haven’t caught up. Stein quite rightly points out that ad agencies are still busy making media but traditionally PR agencies worked with media owners direct to develop their content or media, thus ‘earning’ their place in conversations.”

Integration is key

Roger Warner, managing director of online PR consultancy Content & Motion, told NMK that specialisation is the only way to guarantee the success of social PR.

“There's a marriage of convenience happening right now which, worst case, is selling brands and customers short,” Warner said. “Ad agencies do creative, traditional PR agencies do distribution.  Put them together and you get a half-arsed social media strategy: nice ideas built for different media that are pumped without a great deal of thought into the world.”

Warner, whose high-profile clients include sat-nav maker TomTom and clothing firm Hackett, concluded: “Specialisation wins (from both an agency perspective and a brands perspective).  It's the only way to make Social PR anything more than just blah and noise.  This takes integrated planning and brand marketing managers with a bit of guts, vision and the will to take some of the work in-house.”