| 8th December 2006
One in eight in house PR practitioners already consider blogs, RSS and online communities to be part of their mainstream PR efforts, whilst 1 in 4 see them as a growing aspect of their communications. However, the majority have yet to embrace these emerging channels of influence: 27 per cent are just experimenting and 26 per cent have not yet investigated it. Eleven per cent reported that social media was not an appropriate PR tool for their organisations.
These are the findings of research among 70 in-house PR teams, undertaken by Harvard PR, which uncovers increasing adoption of social media techniques in the technology, media and telecommunications sectors. The research results reveal take-up of social media to be approximately in line with a typical adoption curve – with the innovators and early adopters making up the majority of users currently – but they do highlight that for many social media remains a topic of interest and experimentation rather than an integrated element of communications campaigns.
The research went on to investigate some of the reasons for this. For many (44%) the main reason for not utilising blogs was that they were unclear of the benefits and nearly one-third (31%) stated that they didn’t know how to use blogs to their company’s advantage. Other barriers to using social media were lack of resources (37%) and time (27%). Qualitative comments suggested further issues relating to the value and addressability of the social media community:
“2006 has been a year of hype for social media, but we wanted to get behind the hype and find out who was really using it and why,” commented Ben Maynard, client services director at Harvard PR. “Our findings suggest that whilst an increasing number of people are integrating social media into their communications plans, the majority are either just experimenting or have not even investigated. Most would agree that social media is relevant and important, but many struggle to make rational, value-based business cases for engagement. The social media champions have done a good job this year in raising awareness, but have done little to show real organisations how to make the case for engagement.”
Responding to this demand for a simple, clear and structured approach to social media, Harvard and its parent company Bell Pottinger, have developed a three stage process to help organisations make sense of social media and engage with it effectively. The MapMonitorEngage approach helps organisations to; map the social media landscape, identify the key points of influence within it; effectively monitor what these influencers are doing and saying; and engage and interact in an effective and appropriate way. With this information organisations are much better equipped to make decisions on when, where and how to engage. Harvard is already applying this approach with a number of its clients and has outlined the process in its white paper ‘Map, monitor & engage’: an approach to understanding and harnessing the power of social media networks”.
“Many of the respondents to the survey, as well as clients and other players in the TMT sector to whom we are talking, know that they should be doing something with social media,” continued Ben Maynard, “What they struggle with are the first steps – finding who has influence, understanding where most value can be gained, being prepared for crises. The MapMonitorEngage process provides real data to help make these decisions and provide a practical route to doing so successfully.”
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