Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Social media isn’t really that social - for PR at least
Tim Hoang emailed me this morning with an influencer map of the UK PR community on Twitter that his team at Porter Novelli has developed. 
Tim Hoang emailed me this morning with an influencer map of the UK PR community on Twitter that his team at Porter Novelli has developed. The team used my Top 50 list of PR people on Twitter as its input.
The map is incredibly dense and centred around a core. It shows that we’re all talking to each other, but aren’t reaching out to other communities.
According to Hoang, in real life you’d see loads of small groups linked by a couple of connections. In fact, compare this map with others that the Porter Novelli team has posted on its Flickr stream.
There is an important lesson here. The PR community is having lots of conversations, but with each other. We're all telling each other how great we are, reinforcing our own propaganda, when we really need to reach out to other audiences and communities.
I would congratulate Porter Novelli on such a thought provoking piece of work, but then I'd be reinforcing the results of its own work.
Comments:
This is precisely why many people are, I think, so sceptical of the urgings of the various UK social media thought leaders - you're all so busy talking to each other and confirming that you're all absolutely right that it's easy to forget the wider community, which is full of inconvenient types who read newspapers, think Twitter is crap, and would rather eat their own socks than download Friendfeed.
I'd love to see a meme where we shared links to non-core blogs and widened the community's sphere - start commenting on some new blogs, bringing new voices into the debate.
I'd love to see a meme where we shared links to non-core blogs and widened the community's sphere - start commenting on some new blogs, bringing new voices into the debate.
Those visualisations are super cool!
I think this is representative of the whole of Twitter, not just PR though. And it's natural to have loads of overlap - shared experiences, social interaction and all of that.
Recently I've been growing really tired of the repetition and reconfirmation of things we all know. I'm probably guilty of doing it too, so my new year's resolution for 2009 most definitely will be stop talking, start doing. And I think that as an industry that would be a good thing too.
I think this is representative of the whole of Twitter, not just PR though. And it's natural to have loads of overlap - shared experiences, social interaction and all of that.
Recently I've been growing really tired of the repetition and reconfirmation of things we all know. I'm probably guilty of doing it too, so my new year's resolution for 2009 most definitely will be stop talking, start doing. And I think that as an industry that would be a good thing too.
I'd be interested to see the actual data that they generated, because as you say, it's pretty thought provoking. However, if I had to draw a conclusion from the chart, it would be more that PRs and journalists have formed a close-knit twittering community, rather than PRs and PRs.
Aside from purely being sociable, there's little real value in following your PR contemporaries on twitter. The people I follow on Twitter are a mix of PRs, journalists, friends and people I find interesting.
I read a paper by danah boyd (et al) recently on use of social media by young people, and she mentioned that usage is largely interest-driven or friendship-driven - and twitter amongst PRs / journalists seems to fall roughly into the same divide. We follow our friends, and we follow people we're interested in / journalists we work with.
But I do agree to some extent, widening your boundaries is usually a good experience. On the flip side, I think it would be handy to provide more than a 67 word exposition on something so complex (http://tinyurl.com/6g492z).
Aside from purely being sociable, there's little real value in following your PR contemporaries on twitter. The people I follow on Twitter are a mix of PRs, journalists, friends and people I find interesting.
I read a paper by danah boyd (et al) recently on use of social media by young people, and she mentioned that usage is largely interest-driven or friendship-driven - and twitter amongst PRs / journalists seems to fall roughly into the same divide. We follow our friends, and we follow people we're interested in / journalists we work with.
But I do agree to some extent, widening your boundaries is usually a good experience. On the flip side, I think it would be handy to provide more than a 67 word exposition on something so complex (http://tinyurl.com/6g492z).
Wadds,
Cheers for the name drop. Sally is completely right. I've changed very quickly from the whole "social media is the only thing that matters" to "social media only matters if it is relevant".
I'd encourage any one starting out in Pr and looking to get a slice of the digital pie to look beyond following those who are already talking about it loads.
On another note, I observed with interest her debate about some journos only using pitches via Twitter. Are they mad?
Jonathan, I'm just putting together one for the PR bloggers. Let's see what it throws up.
Tim
Cheers for the name drop. Sally is completely right. I've changed very quickly from the whole "social media is the only thing that matters" to "social media only matters if it is relevant".
I'd encourage any one starting out in Pr and looking to get a slice of the digital pie to look beyond following those who are already talking about it loads.
On another note, I observed with interest her debate about some journos only using pitches via Twitter. Are they mad?
Jonathan, I'm just putting together one for the PR bloggers. Let's see what it throws up.
Tim
Nice work Tim, and all good points made.
I agree that the important move for this bubble of people is to take that knowledge out to different groups - in a relevant way obviously. I've made my next job role slightly away from PR for this reason, 'to get a slice of the digital pie' from elsewhere as Tim would say!
Erm...I'm just compounding the echo-chamber by commenting here aren't I? Oops, sorry :-)
Maybe I should take Wadds out of my reader!
I agree that the important move for this bubble of people is to take that knowledge out to different groups - in a relevant way obviously. I've made my next job role slightly away from PR for this reason, 'to get a slice of the digital pie' from elsewhere as Tim would say!
Erm...I'm just compounding the echo-chamber by commenting here aren't I? Oops, sorry :-)
Maybe I should take Wadds out of my reader!
Hi,
Delighted to hear some common sense on this thread.
Social Media isn't an either/or discussion. I firmly believe it should be considered as one part of how we communicate online and offline. I think that this is one of the issues that is holding social media back.
As you point out Stephen people spend all their time talking to one another, which is absolutely fine, but restricts the value of social media in the mainstream.
This isn't a PR community issue, I think it's across the web.
Social media presents great challenges and great opportunities, however, my belief is that we're nowhere near "mainstream" at this point.
Great discussion!
Tom
Delighted to hear some common sense on this thread.
Social Media isn't an either/or discussion. I firmly believe it should be considered as one part of how we communicate online and offline. I think that this is one of the issues that is holding social media back.
As you point out Stephen people spend all their time talking to one another, which is absolutely fine, but restricts the value of social media in the mainstream.
This isn't a PR community issue, I think it's across the web.
Social media presents great challenges and great opportunities, however, my belief is that we're nowhere near "mainstream" at this point.
Great discussion!
Tom
Without sounding arrogant I had the same concern a few years ago:
http://www.prblogger.com/2006/04/tip-increase-your-social-sphere/
And I've been following my own advice since which is why I have quite a lot of non-PR online contacts.
It's too easy to reach out to your peers. It's tempting too because you have a lot in common and they might be able to sort you out on a good job at their agency, but like in the real world a good PR should be connected to various parties and not just those that agree with them.
http://www.prblogger.com/2006/04/tip-increase-your-social-sphere/
And I've been following my own advice since which is why I have quite a lot of non-PR online contacts.
It's too easy to reach out to your peers. It's tempting too because you have a lot in common and they might be able to sort you out on a good job at their agency, but like in the real world a good PR should be connected to various parties and not just those that agree with them.
@Wadds, @Jonathan -- "I think this is representative of the whole of Twitter, not just PR..."
I think you're right and we should be cautious about jumping to conclusions, or using this map as a jumping-off point for broad statements about Twitter. Some caveats:
- when we made this map we were testing a particular function of our mapping tool that lets us crawl only one site. That necessarily makes this a different map to the others that you see on our Flickr stream.
- what we were using the tool to do was identify relationships between the top 50 twitterers (actually, we'll need to develop a modified version of the tool to do this: something that we'll be working on over the next fortnight.) This means that we may not even be asking the right question from which to draw these conclusions.
Thanks for the kind words about the maps, though: I'll make sure we send you the results of our next twitter PR trawl
And thanks for the excellent list of top PR twitterers! We were really pleased to be able to use that as the basis of our first crawl!
I think you're right and we should be cautious about jumping to conclusions, or using this map as a jumping-off point for broad statements about Twitter. Some caveats:
- when we made this map we were testing a particular function of our mapping tool that lets us crawl only one site. That necessarily makes this a different map to the others that you see on our Flickr stream.
- what we were using the tool to do was identify relationships between the top 50 twitterers (actually, we'll need to develop a modified version of the tool to do this: something that we'll be working on over the next fortnight.) This means that we may not even be asking the right question from which to draw these conclusions.
Thanks for the kind words about the maps, though: I'll make sure we send you the results of our next twitter PR trawl
And thanks for the excellent list of top PR twitterers! We were really pleased to be able to use that as the basis of our first crawl!
To take a positive perspective on this, I think it's actually rather good that PR people are communicating with each other and sharing ideas. This was not the case 18 months ago when many seemed to have their head in the sand regarding digital media.
Yes, it's not a case of either/or when it comes to digital vs traditional media, but there is still a lot of learning to be done and Twitter is a good platform for sharing ideas within a specific industry.
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Yes, it's not a case of either/or when it comes to digital vs traditional media, but there is still a lot of learning to be done and Twitter is a good platform for sharing ideas within a specific industry.
