No social media for workaholics?

As I already noted in the last post, it seems that I missed a whole lot of interesting things in March. Since I enjoy the luxury of not having to breathlessly post about the newest fad six times per day, I can occasionally link to “old news” and pretend it’s hot stuff - especially since you may well have missed this one before.

Last month Philippe Borremans reported on the EuroBlog 2007 and about a survey that the organizers Philip Young, Swaran Sandhu and Ansgar Zerfass conducted among PR professionals (full report as PDF available here). A few important points noted by Philippe:

The 3 biggest challenges for PR Professionals to use blogs in their organisation are:

* having time to blog regularly (83%)
* reacting to comments/feedback from the audience (83%)
* creating content and ideas for posts (80% !)

The 3 biggest opportunities for PR Professionals are:

* environmental scanning, keeping a finger on the pulse (81%)
* fast reaction time to issues (74%)
* opportunity for authentic (!), personal communications (77%)

Two thoughts immediately popped into my head when looking at these points, especially the challenges. I’ll start with the less significant one.

PR professionals are generally experienced writers who can whip up a press release on the fly and know how to write informatively and economically. They are familiar with conventions and rules for the “right” way of writing and they know how to deliver a precisely tailored message in a predetermined format.

But that’s not what blogging is.

Now, before you’re worried that I’ll give you a tiring lecture on what (business) blogging is - I won’t do that because there is no one single answer (but have a look here if you’re curious). You can interpret blogging to be anything that’s published via Wordpress or on Blogger regardless of how it’s written or by whom, or you can associate a certain way of writing, comments, etc with blogging, regardless of the technology used to publish something. It comes as no surprise that the technology is usually the heavier indicator: if it’s on LiveJournal you’re more likely to call it a blog than if I spray paint it on a wall, irrespective of the words that I use.

But even if we accept that there are many different ways of writing a blog, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a typical way of blogging. And because the style and tone of that approach have evolved outside of PR and have not yet solidified into a fixed form, PR people have trouble adjusting to such a game, where the rules are suddenly different (or, even worse, where you make up your own rules). Publishing is not communicating. Text design changes drastically when you understand blogs as conversations (and yes, I know that metaphor has been used a thousand times) because the social component of an exchange is strongly emphasized in conversation, while it is usually de-emphasized in publishing.

Another issue relates to the origins of social media. The term social media implies a new or somehow special kind of media, but that is actually misleading, because it tempts us to see the whole thing in the familiar old media frame - new technologies, different and perhaps more contributors, but basically the same process. But it really isn’t, when you think about it. Social media at its core is an egoistic communicative behavior, in the sense that individuals do it (a) for themselves (b). It’s a combination of personal expression and social grooming and without the interpersonal dimension it is stone dead. The trouble is that the P in PR stands for PUBLIC, not for PERSONAL RELATIONS, and consequently the mode of expression that this industry has perfected has always been geared towards the mass, not towards the individual.

That can of worms is big enough, but let me finally get to the much simpler issue, one that relates to who is making social media.

What do people have who check for new messages in their countless groups on Facebook several times a day? Who redesign their MySpace profile every week? Upload hundreds of clips to YouTube and let us know that they are looking out of the window right now on Twitter?

Time. Lots of it.

And that is the main difference between college students and professionals in most industries - especially those with an 80-hour workweek. My personal impression is that having to learn how these things work is not nearly as effective as learning them naturally because you have the time to experiment with them. It’s not a question of age - at least I don’t think so. It’s a question of having the right amount of leisure time to adjust, adapt and come up with something original (when we’re talking about blogging, at least) and that is something you need more than five minutes for. It’s also not a question of “not getting it”, or of companies being generally incapable of integrating the social media into their communicative behavior. It’s about learning to socialize in public. And that is something you’re likely to have trouble with if you’re used to socializing privately in the little free time you have.

Now, I know that I’ve been equating business blogging with the much larger category of “the social media”, but even assuming that the goals in that area are more clearly defined, the problem remains the same. You don’t learn to waltz by downloading a ring tone. And you don’t learn to communicate effectively through a blog unless you spend a lot of time reading blogs and blogging.

Perhaps there should be blog-writing courses in subjects like MassComm and Economics to better prepare students for their future careers. Academics can be expected (hopefully!) to know a thing or two about blogging, at least if they’re in the Humanities.

After all, we get to lean back and think idle thoughts during our work hours a lot more than those PR people do…