Quantity vs Quality & Activity vs Results
Browsing along blogosphere, my attention got caught by a PR blog writer's lamentation alluding to shortsighted managers who are keen on measuring quantity and activity in PR exercises but fail to establish innovative measuring tools for the quality and results of the same. This set me thinking, and finally sharing my thoughts on social media PR exercise goal and implementation processes.
Social media's success lies upon " Community-building". It achieves little success through individual targeting. We see so many lone advertisements or mentions about products and services in our day to day life they mostly go unnoticed. We are much rather to give in to " community-endorsed brands" rather than lone brands.
Now how do we go about building communities that would endorse our brand? It is an extremely demanding activity in a real world but virtual world makes it doable. Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and blogging...... facilitate an orbit of fans, friends, sympathizers, users, empoyees, ghost commentators to evaluate a product/ service and crown it or trash it. It is so much possible to establish your brand's fiefdom only if you can get your staff/ employees and agents to start blogging. Those with loftier ambitions actually organize competitions, announce prizes and utilize other innovative paraphernalia to keep their social media sites busy and, in demand.
However, one must not loose site of the process of "community-building" or else, this will remain a "virtual PR activity success" rather than real success. In order to build communities, you need to cater to the "needs" of your target audience, not stuff them with what you deem fit for them. This fact holds a lot more importance with the non-profit organizations' communications framework.
One good example is Canada's growing multicultural advertising industry. Canadian Communication experts not only talk multicultural but also multilingual!
To build a community, we need to touch the hearts of people around us. Its not about churning loads of communications material, its about establish a connection. And once, we have established connections, coalescence is only one step away. Coalescence is the combination of quality and results.
The challenge here is to pin-point a strategy that envisages Coalescence as its goal!
A bien tot!
you are right, Ms. Ultimate Connections but the problem is: most of the company heads in INDIA don't like to wander any further than what they already know. They are not open to new ideas.
ReplyDeleteThey prefer to advocate for their own policies and PR methods and then nagg us for results.
:(