What PR hasn’t figured out about social media

(Sorry – non Hanoi related social media work thought occurred to me that I had to write down)

For decades PRs have been writing press releases – often on topics suggested by a client who is far from objective about their employer.

So we’ve supplied pages and pages of words and thousands of photos about accounts gaining a new accreditation certificate or the latest appointment to the sales team. It’s a reflection of how desperate newspapers became for copy that this appeared in the media at all.

When it didn’t appear we blamed news editors or journalists.

Now we have our own platforms. Facebook pages, Twitter and company blogs and we can take all of this content we pretended was interesting and publish it ourselves.

Then we wonder why it’s ignored.

There should be a dawning by now that the newspaper news editor wasn’t the enemy. The reason they didn’t publish these releases was, as we privately knew, they are monumentally dull.

Newspapers could afford to include some of our worst output because they had space to fill and there was enough to sell the paper elsewhere in each publication. But, on our own platforms, we now have to weigh up interest in every single tweet, post or update.

In short, our platforms have to be even more strict regarding content than traditional media. Sure we may work in a different niche, but that doesn’t make the story about Bob from accounts attending a training course any more interesting.

To put it another way, on personal Facebook pages we instinctively know what is interesting enough to share with friends. When it comes to corporate pages we ignore that instinct. We shouldn’t.