Human Complexity Lab

In Response to: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/13488.aspx

The 7 Reasons why Social Media should be pulled out of the clutches of PR: 

1) Building your  Book is not equal building a Community. 

-Understanding game mechanics, feedback loops, rewards, integrating community features and understanding group dynamics is just not a PR function. 

2) Despite every Social Media Fluff piece, Social Media is not 1 to 1, relationship building, its building communities or Brand armies. 

-To manage the onslaught of messages coming in you must build armies or communities to segment, score and analyze that kind of mass communication. A well crafted message does not work, it requires implementing messaging systems, triggers, and rewards that only someone who understands community technologies and applications should handle. 

3) PR is about building a 1 to 1 single contact that can broadcast to many, Social is about building 1 to 1000's. 

-I apologize for all the fluff you have read in the last five years on social. But enterprise social media is not about 1v1, if you are receiving 10-20K messages a day or even 2-3K a day, you are not responding to every post or tweet. But I doubt any PR rep would not return the email of an established Blogger or Newcaster, or Reporter... 

4) Social is about Big Data, PR is not, placement and reach is just a sliver of similar data points shared with PR, the majority of Social now is Social CRM, PR has no place there. 

-Social data is being stored, it is being pulled into e-commerce and consumer acquisition models, campaigns are being designed to capture social data, wrangle that data, and push that data into columns and charts where decisions can be made in real-time. This is not what any PR expert should be expected to do. 

5) Social Campaigns, are about building Brand Advocates, not identifying Brand Experts or significant New Media Outlets. 

-Simply put If an individual node aka person or enterprise has 100K followers in which you want to reach that is PR. If you want to marshal 1,000's of nodes that have less than 500 connections that is Social Media... Period Stop...

6) Social Media provides the heartbeat, blood pressure, and temperature of your brand in real-time, PR media reports while important are about how established thought leaders respond as opposed to complex social networks. 

-The analytic tools used by Social Media today, are not needed by PR. From segmentation based on product Affinity to Demographics about gender, age, location, content contexts, and etc are designed about developing resonance within a community and segmenting that community. The social media message changes per segment, so its about the voice of the community, not PR which is about the Voice of the Brand...

7) Conclusion: Whereas Social Media has been the ugly step-child of PR, Marketing, and Support, its role in providing real-time analysis, instant response, campaign conceptualization and management is too critical to be left to a seasoned PR rep with a great set of contacts.. PR is critical for the enterprise, but it is not a Social Media function...