In the business of managing reputations and promoting messages among audiences, most all PR agencies are deep-seated in social media. Will they take completely take over the discipline? Right now, I don’t think so. There are few true full-service social media firms, and they have an advantage.
Many agencies continue to promote social media as “earned” media, but that’s a long-term goal and not really true. Social media has lots of hard costs involved:
Technology: Listening and monitoring technology is expensive, complex and rapidly changing all the time. Not every agency is prepared to continually invest in this area.
Media Buying: Building followers on Facebook is vastly quicker with paid ads; this requires online media buying expertise which is a completely different skill set and may even conflict with a media agency’s domain.
Creative: Creating really good, high-quality creative content such as viral videos demands a different skill set. Good production can get expensive.
Reputation Management & Customer Service: The constant monitoring and response requires dedicated resources. It’s a big time sucker but someone’s got to do it; there’s still a real cost associated with that.
The biggest challenge PR firms face is a limited budget. Typically, PR agencies work on fixed retainers with some out-of-pocket opportunistic budget. If PR is going to take over social media, budgets will need to grow significantly.
How deep a PR firm becomes ingratiated in a company’s social media activities will depend on their capabilities, the organization’s internal resources and other agency relationships.
I believe creative, advertising agencies and social media firms still have a big part to play. It’s the same old story with totally new players; the agencies will have to work together to best serve a company’s interests.
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