Posts that suck - on the Firehose - and the future of PR

Read this piece on Techmeme re Brands on Twitter:

Do companies think about or even care what people are saying about them, their products or services on twitter? If they don’t, then they are about to be rudely awakened soon enough.

Brands and businesses have a huge opportunity to reach out & extend their brand and create evangelists. There are over 20 business use cases that we have document for twitter. We will be posting soon on brands that are embracing twitter and the several use cases that we are seeing emerging that are quite interesting. Some of these use cases on the twitter social network by companies are ok, some are crappy and some are simply amazing.

Some are good, some are bad, some are ugly - who would have thought

But there is a serious point here though - as any social network gets above a certain size, the stuff said on it starts to influence significant numbers of people, so anybody who is worrying about reputation needs to be onto it - and Twitter long since hit that sort of threshold.

Another issue is brandjacking, where cybersquatters register a brand on a new social net long before its hit any radar. The article shows about 30 brands that are on Twitter but have been hijacked. This is because early users are wise to the joys of cybersquatting and get in early (people are grabbing squats on Friendfeed at the moment, join the goldrush) so what is a brand to do? There is no way it will be able to cover everything, there are hundreds of small social nets, and monitoring them all is very hard and time consuming. .

Answer is there none, though, apart from monitoring every startup and grabbing your name on it first - in the real world there are laws to stop this sort of thing, but its far less enforceable in cyberspace. We would like to see a "use it or lose it" code of practice, and also some form of "reverse prior art" argument - ie you can claim say "Coca Cola" as your handle on Twitter or Friendfeed, but will be bumped if they dispute because Coca Cola is already trademarked

Anyway, on with the show:

Some might argue that a brand just publishing their newsfeed and saying they are on twitter is fine. I think if you just publish your news stories or blog/rss feed updates through twitter; then you suck. Why? I have a feed reader and don’t need your noise on twitter.

Now the obvious answer here is "don't subscribe then" but it does highlight another vexatious problem for Brand pimps on Twitter, in that it is a pure pull medium - I choose to follow you, and if I don't I can't hear you (la-la-la) even if you follow me. In other words, on Twitter (and to a lesser extent on other Social Nets), Brands actually have to work at being attractive, typically via bubbly personality community managers (expensive and time consuming) or benefit giveaways (typically cheap to produce early event information now, but we suspect arms races will make it more expensive over time)

What does work is people in companies interacting on these services - in a genuine way. Flacking is seen through quite fast (you can fool all some of the time etc etc). But this is expensive to do (although we have suggested ways to automate this, over here)

In fact this is a microcosm of a bigger discussion today, on the future of PR (thanks to Drew Benvie's article for the discussion and links). Drew points on to Steve Rubel, who notes that trad PR (as in stands for Push Randomly or Press Release) is ending:

They are doing what has always worked for them and I guess continues: sending out lots of email pitches in hopes that some stick. But those days are coming to an end.

It's my view that increasingly, bloggers (and maybe journos too) simply don't want our help. Many bloggers - particularly those who cover tech - love to discover new things and experience them on their own, unaided by PR. Exhibit A: Robert Scoble. Note the joy of serendipity in his post. However he's not alone by any means.

I know that when I write about news (which is not as often as I used to), I mostly do so if I discovered it on my own - as I did twice over the weekend. If I didn't find it on my own or stumble upon it early myself, I don't bother. I actually like the thrill of the chase and serendipity. I want to be first. This is something that has fueled the egos of reporters for years - partly because it sells. Heck, count me in.

Now you've heard all that for at least 3 years, so what's different now? Simple - its penetration, especially of the Yoof market, who most of the Brands want to reach. I read yesterday that there is now a total inversion of media consumption - Yoof are 1/3rd broadcast, 2/3 online and Fogies are 2/3 broadcast, 1/3rd online - and if you add Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook etc etc that is now a big lump of people's attention.

And its damn hard to reach them in these "pull" based media - broadcasting on SocNets doesn't work as noted above (look at the CPMs on SocNets - pennies), there is increasing resistance to datascraping, so the media has to adapt the message to the new medium. Hence the need for PR - the traditional media/message massagers - to restructure themselves.

Update - Jeremiah Owyang has left a useful response to this post over here. In short he notes most of what I have said (but in more detail) but also notes something that I forgot to put in this post:

ROI unclear
What’s the ROI from Twitter? A very difficult question to answer, yet you’ll find the solution if you can also measure: “Whats the ROI of a conversation in real life”. Since many brands have an objective (return profit to shareholders or owners) ensuring this is a high priority task will be difficult for many corporations.

Economics. That cost of engagement in these new mediums, with uncertain return, makes the biz case very hard to sell early while there is time. Its the standard problem of all large companies facing new entrants - its typocally not worth getting out of bed until more than c 10-15% of market share is threatened, but if the entrant is fast growing (as many Web Co's are) thats too late.