My friend called me in the morning.
“Did I upset you? I got this weird message from Facebook about the birthday photo asking me to take it down.”
“Well yes,” I said. “I’m sorry about that but I tried to remove it myself and I couldn’t and I don’t look very nice in the photograph. I would hate anybody to see it I haven’t seen for years (read ‘ex boyfriends’).
My friend understood and took the photograph down. I spent a lot of time in those days trying to understand Facebook. I literally snorkelled over the top of it, looking at people’s posts and wondering, aghast at their brazen self promotion.
It seemed so unnatural – fully fuelled by ego and showcasing grandiose statements about their lives - a bit of a shocker.
One of my clients caught on around the same time.
“We need to get into this social media stuff,” he said. We all agreed it was a good idea and he sent us all a book on it so we could read up.
I used to read it at nighttime and it mostly put me to sleep. The concept was interesting but it didn’t translate to my world of press clippings. It didn’t fit into any category I could understand, certainly nothing I could imagine working with.
So I left it for a few years. In the meantime, the digital marketing agency was born. At meetings, ‘social media boy’ was rolled out.
“Josh and Julie are social media experts,” clients would say with a sigh of relief.
Josh and Julie would run their PowerPoint presentation and everybody would nod at the right times, a bit like sitting in a French class at school. You could kind of grasp the jist of the conversation but you’d better not be asked to remember any of it – or worse still, get tested.
The Josh’s and Julie’s did very well for a while, blinding everybody with jargon and charging a fortune for it. Clients dug deep and found extra dollars because it was ‘important’ and ‘necessary’ and ‘everybody else was doing it’.
Then slowly, something else crept in. Content. Now you’re talking. They were calling it ‘content’ but it’s just ‘story telling’ - what PR’s have always done. Suddenly this social media thing started to sink in. And the phone started to ring.
“Can you write a blog? Can you re-write my website copy? Can you put together a social media calendar that resonates with my target audience?”
“Yes, no problem – of course we can do that!”
“Can you fix my SEO?”
“Oooh well. We can do key words but get you up to number one. No sorry, we don’t do that. But I can write you a blog or two, I can re-write your website copy to make it sing, we can tidy up your social media content so it aligns with your brand personality. We can write you some great media releases and get you on TV. But SEO, no we can’t do that, sorry.”
“OK – just do all of that and don’t worry about the tricky SEO stuff – I can get someone else to do that.”
“OK, no problem.”
Fast forward 6 weeks, several TV appearances, a scattering of press and radio interviews and many blog articles later and voila – my client hits number one in her ranking on Google.
She called me up laughing. “You know – when I took you on, you said you didn’t do SEO but you actually did do it – and you saved me thousands of dollars.”
The world of PR is changing. Has changed. How fascinating. How thoroughly interesting to be learning on the job and seeing it all unfold at my finger tips, using my existing long established skills in PR, doing what I love and seeing the results play out in a different way, not just press clippings, but rankings, engagement, conversation, excitement and still, always, making a positive difference. I feel very lucky to be part of this industrial revolution and ever curious to see how this changing landscape will continue to affect the way we operate and communicate now and into the future.
