1. Social Media & PR
A view from the bridge
simon collister
London College of Communication,
University of the Arts London

2. PR industry “missing the boat”
“Within minutes of PRWeek's
interview starting, Grant is
lambasting the PR industry for
'missing the boat' on digital,
allowing advertising and media
agencies to steal a march.”
- Robin Grant, Global Managing
Director, We Are Social - PR
Week, 24th May 2012

3. Current challenges [in a nutshell]
1. Increasing commercialisation of social media
2. Rise of the ‘social business’ or ‘social
organisation’
3. Data-driven communications

4. What’s happening to Facebook?
1. Post-IPO social interaction within Facebook is becoming
increasingly commercialised
2. Shift from ‘organic’
to paid communication
pushes Facebook more into
the domains of media
and ad agencies
3. Similar happening with
other platforms, e.g. Twitter

5. Commercialisation
• Facebook:
– Newsfeed not ‘open’ communications channel
– Determined by Facebook’s ‘EdgeRank’
– Visibility determined by Affinity, Freshness &
Weight of ‘edges’, e.g. links, photos, videos, etc

6. The word from within Facebook
• ‘While news feed posts are fine for everyday
engagement, businesses should consider using
‘Sponsored Stories’ [i.e. advertising] to ensure
business critical information reaches users’
– Advice from Facebook employee

7. The Rise of Social Business

8. Social business strategy absorbs all

9. Who owns social communications?

10. Big Data?
• Commonly applied to the vast quantities of
data being generated by contemporary socio-
technological systems whose size is beyond
the ability of commonly used software tools to
capture, manage, and process the data within
a tolerable elapsed time
– Bollier 2009; boyd and Crawford 2011

11. What is Big Data?
• Search engine marketing performance
• Digital ad acquisition metrics
• Website analytics
• Email communication performance
• Online surveys
• Social media conversations
• Media content

12. Tracking big data
• Database of 20 billion social media conversations
• 8 million new posts archived every hour
• Social media and news
sources gathered
SOURCE: Sysomos MAP

13. Impact on PR?
• “Metrics driven communication, advocacy and
outreach efforts are now becoming the
expectation.”
– Big Data comes to the Communications Industry
• [Political] campaign planning now “involves the
computer-automated analysis of blog postings,
Congressional speeches and press releases, and
news articles, looking for insights into how
political ideas spread”
– The Age of Big Data

14. Future for PR…?
• Much more complex landscape blurring boundaries
between traditional industry sectors and organisational
models
• Strong opportunity to adapt, presuming PR can fulfill
its role as a strategic business function
• However, need to consider:
– Big rethink in terms of skills of PR practitioners
– Big rethink in terms of organisational structure and roles
– Greater leadership from industry bodies

15. Questions?
www.simoncollister.com
simon.collister@gmail.com
@simoncollister

16. References
• Bollier, D. (2009) The Promise and Peril of Big Data. Extreme Inference:
Implications of Data Intensive Advanced Correlation Techniques. The
Eighteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology,
Aspen, Colarado, The Aspen Institute.
• boyd, d. and K. Crawford (2011) Six Provocations for Big Data. A Decade in
Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society.
Oxford.
• Lohr, S. (2012). The Age of Big Data. New York Times, 12 February. Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-
the-world.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
• Luker, S. (2012) Robin Grant: Man on a Digital Mission. PRWeek, 24 May.
Available: http://www.prweek.com/uk/features/1133323/robin-grant-man-
digital-mission/
• Olsen, C. (2012) Big Data Comes to the Communications Industry. Huffington
Post, 13 March. Available: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-
olsen/big-data-comes-to-the-com_b_1343310.html