Have you ever got an email / phone call from a random advertising creative director asking you to watch their new TV ad and ask your mates to watch it as well? Probably not.
Perhaps it’s because ‘digital’ or social media marketing still needs to prove itself, or maybe it’s because we ‘live’ the conversation and it feels natural for us to tell the stories or our creative work?
But there are too many cases (myself included) where we go out of our ways to promote the work we do for clients which occasionally turns us to online PR whores and/or free media agents and that’s not what we are being paid for.
There is nothing wrong with being proud in your creative work and self-promoting it, but in many cases I’ve seen recently you start loosing the sense of who is the real owner of the work. You read about the work in blogs and blog comments and emails and while it does good job at helping the story get out there, it also detaches the work from the client/brand.
That brings me to another related point. When traditional PR people use their contacts to promote their clients it is usually exchange between mediators or media owners (I’ll get you into the papers etc); it’s all done behind the scenes and you understand the value transaction - there is nothing personal.
In online PR this can easily go wrong. If brands are keen to engage in real conversations with real people they should go and do that themselves or at least give the impression that they are doing so. When social media consultants become the carriers of the conversation, they risk loosing authenticity and context for their clients.
I’m interested to hear more views on this one - what do you think?
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