I went to the inaugural meeting of the DC Chapter of the Social Media Club last night, hosted at the local offices of Fleishman Hillard. Those of you who have been following for a while already know about my frustration with going to these events which purport to discuss the impact of social media (whatever that is) and then turn into Blogging 101, in which some old fogey has to be taught what a trackback is, or that it is indeed possible for a company blog to link to a company press release.
So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I went in to this thing, hoping against hope that it would be valuable and interesting to someone like me, who has been blogging for several years in one form or another, and who is interested in the applications of it from some perspective other than, “You mean people WRITE? On the INTERNET?”
I was not disappointed. It was a roomful of people who “get it,” to, I suspect, varying degrees, but who nonetheless could contribute meaningfully to the conversation, whether from the individual blogger perspective, a marketing perspective, or a public relations perspective. Refreshing. I’ve been saying for quite some time that it’s as if DC woke up 8 months ago and figured out that the Internet was useful, so it’s nice to see that DC has been a quick study.
I work most commonly with the kinds of clients who were represented in that room, so it was also helpful for me as a third-party-recruiter to learn more about a business that I have otherwise only the barest of backgrounds in. Dinner afterward was equally educational- a couple of advertising/marketing/PR types sat around with beers in their hands, talking about their work. Very interesting, and I hope they weren’t too offended at my BLATANT listening-in.
My major food-for-thought from the evening’s conversation was this:
PR and marketing have a terrible reputation among people, and bloggers in particular. Fundamentally, however, they exist so that companies and public figures have the opportunity to have their side of issues heard, and to match the value of a product or service with the people who will benefit most from that value, respectively. These are intrinsically reasonable, and even beneficial goals. The problem is that so much of PR and marketing has become about “message control” and “driving the conversation,” when the whole joy of “social media” is that the conversation is much less controllable now. We’re people, we don’t LIKE having our conversations driven by others, after all.
But that said, what DO we want from PR? Are we prepared to stop freaking out every time someone in PR or marketing wants to engage with us? We don’t want control, but aside from that, we can’t really tell PR and marketing what we DO want. So maybe we ought to dial-down the knee-jerk hatred a little bit long enough to ask ourselves what we would prefer? If blogging is supposed to help companies engage their customers directly, we should, you know, figure out how to let them.