Werbewoche: Nowadays, PR no longer just means writing press releases that are rewritten three times by the company's board of directors before being released, maintaining an Internet presence and perhaps answering a few e-mails. PR 2.0 is dialog on all channels, often with very short response times. What does that mean for public relations staff?
Marie-Christine Schindler: This means that public relations staff today follow somewhat different rules when they prepare information. They no longer have to follow the rules of the media and journalists alone, who have very precise ideas about how they want information to be prepared, namely as neutrally and objectively as possible, as a basis for their work. In addition, companies today have the opportunity to shape information the way they want it and to build up a flow of information. This does not mean that media work is dead. But social media are a complementary way for companies and organizations to make their mark online.
When a PR department has to react quickly, for example to tweets, it's impossible to go through various approval loops. Will bosses and boardrooms have to have more trust in their PR team in the future? Allow them more room to maneuver?
The position of PR officers has changed several times and has become very complex. This is because broadcast communication, in which press spokespersons issue messages on behalf of companies, is over. Multiple voices from within the company are now in demand. There is a growing awareness that each employee is a part of the whole and each is an expert in his or her field. This does not mean that every individual in the company becomes a communicator. But more than ever, the various departments should designate a social media-savvy employee and encourage them in their communications. This makes coordination much more challenging, because the meticulous clarification of posts is no longer possible. This is still possible with the original text and the core message. Once the text is published, the reactions from the social web can no longer be controlled and require flexible action.
So in the company of the future, several people will take care of PR, and there will no longer be one person in charge over whose desk everything runs?
The PR or communications manager still exists. He or she has two tasks: On the one hand, he or she must hold the threads together so that everything that is communicated interacts well and makes sense together. To prevent everyone from doing what they want, a company needs an authority that controls the overall appearance. On the other hand, the PR person must assume a kind of coaching function. He should teach the people, who can report and give answers much more authentically than he can from their field of work, what the company's goals and messages are, how communication works on the social web, what to watch out for and what to avoid. The biggest challenge is to make the employees linguistically fit as well.
For example, in a large company with several thousand employees, most of whom have a technical or engineering background, are there people who would be willing to take on such a communications job?
I think that has yet to be proven. We don't have that experience yet, because it's only this year that companies are really starting to realize that they should be active on the social web. I hope we're now past the stage where it was, "We'll make a Facebook presence and then it'll be fine." Companies and organizations have realized that more planning and, above all, a strategy are necessary to succeed on the Web. You can't demand an additional communications task from all employees, but in executive positions, it should gradually become part of the job profile to represent the company to the outside world. Under certain circumstances, however, this is a generational question; it certainly won't happen overnight.
So is it always the head of department who becomes the PR officer in addition to his professional work? Or can it also be any person from the department?
This can also be a person from the department if he or she enjoys the trust of the management, is equipped with the necessary competencies, has the desire to do so and is loyal to the company. It does not have to be the head of the department - he or she is the person most likely to be expected to take on such an activity as part of his or her duties. In any case, everyone should not have to communicate, because that also has something to do with personality. There are people who do not want to be seen on the Internet. You have to choose the employees in question with a lot of sensitivity. But I believe that if people see a benefit, they will also be more willing to contribute their share to communication on the social web.
Is a certain corporate culture necessary to operate convincingly in social media?
People always talk about openness and transparency. But the most important thing is actually management's trust in its employees, trust that they do what they do well. There needs to be a culture of reinforcing strengths rather than harping on weaknesses. And employees need to be able to take their cues from their managers and hold on to them. If everyone is allowed to do everything, that's no good either. There needs to be a middle ground between giving freedom and setting limits. And, of course, management has to find out who is actually fit for communication on the social web. Not everyone can do that, and not everyone has to be able to do that. By the way, I recommend defining the do's and don'ts in social media guidelines and training key people.
What additional qualities and skills do PR people need today compared to PR people of the 1980s and 1990s?
Besides holding on, also letting go. Today, it's also about enabling other people to communicate. PR people have always needed curiosity, but today they also have to be very flexible and agile. Of course, they also need a certain standing, because there are always situations where you have to react quickly and can't ask anyone for advice. By the time you reach the board, a topic on Twitter may have long since run its course. We still need very well-trained PR people who know what overall communications are all about. Then social media is simply an additional dimension that the company can shape in line with everything it has already done.
Does the work of in-house PR people differ from that of a PR agency?
Both must have an equal understanding of the craft. At the moment, there is simply a danger of acting on the basis of little expertise. In the start-up phase, it's good to get an agency on board that has people who have already gained experience and have dealt with the subject in depth. It's important that the agency doesn't go into a company and say, "Now everything is new and different. What you've been doing is no longer state-of-the-art and not good enough." You have to approach people very carefully, because they have thought about everything they have done so far, and they are proud of their work. After taking stock, you can then look together at what the company could achieve with social media. For the start, i.e. for strategy development, topic setting and resource estimation, a company can get knowledge from outside. But when it comes to the subsequent implementation of content and, above all, language, an agency can't do that in the long run. Because it doesn't get to see the subtle movements in a company, it can't hear the grass grow and can't respond quickly and sensitively enough to reactions on the social web.
Is PR more difficult today than it used to be?
Yes, PR is much more demanding today. If you want to position yourself as a company, you have to operate quite a few channels, are confronted with a huge flood of information, and there are no clear courses of messages. Added to this is the time pressure: people exchange information when and where they want. A company that communicates on a topic that extends into leisure time cannot work from Monday to Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and on weekends there is radio silence. After all, its readers and customers are mainly active on weekends. Whereas I believe that a company has some control over managing expectations. It's perfectly within its rights to have something like opening hours on the social web, too. If it's not exactly a hotline that should be available if there's a fire somewhere, that's OK and is also accepted without any problems at the moment, at least in our latitudes.
Nevertheless, it can be a problem for a company if a heated discussion about its business practices or products develops on Twitter or Facebook over the weekend and it doesn't respond to it until Monday.
That's true, communication crises have tended to build up over the weekend in the past. But you have to distinguish between observation and action. Every company must observe what is being said and reported about it on the social web. Responding to that is a second step. Nevertheless, you notice the difference between an account without an owner and one that is monitored, but where the person responsible decides that someone has a problem that can still be solved on Monday. If, on the other hand, something is brewing, the PR person should react quickly. But even then, he doesn't have to have the solution ready. It's often enough to signal: "We heard you and we're taking care of it. There is also good self-regulation on the social web. If there is justified criticism, a service does not work, etc., then the company must ensure an adequate response to the complaint. However, if criticism is not fair or is made up out of thin air, it is not uncommon for other users to react to it. For example, I followed a case where a company had announced a competition and a user commented that he had not won anything and would now no longer buy anything from this company. The company just let that stand and it didn't take long for two other users to come forward to make it clear how ridiculous that reaction was. This regulation comes relatively quickly.
So then, in some cases, it may be more clever for the PR officer to delay his response a bit?
Yes. Sometimes it's not bad not to react immediately. You also have to give people the opportunity to reflect and contribute their own opinion. You prevent that if you always acknowledge everything immediately. Of course, it's challenging to figure out when speed is needed and when you should wait a bit.
How can the PR manager keep track of everything? It could be that he regularly checks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but a discussion on a blog passes him by.
You can get a good grip on this with professional monitoring - which still doesn't mean that you always see everything. For monitoring, there are various tools that you can put together yourself or buy as licensed products. With the same search specifications, however, completely different results can emerge. That's why a company has to take a close look at which tool it can work best with.
The social web is almost uncontrollable: anyone can write anything about anyone at any time. Should companies and organizations not even try to intervene here in a steering and controlling way? What do you recommend?
I would advise every company without exception - and every person - to monitor themselves. That is the minimum. You should look at what's being said about you and what's going on in your environment; that's a mixture of observing the competition, continuing education and planning for the future. Incidentally, this also determines which activities make sense on the social web. Because not everyone needs to have a Facebook or Twitter account. If, for example, I notice that my audience is discussing my topic in a very differentiated way in special forums, then it makes sense to become active there as well. You shouldn't choose certain tools just because they are talked about a lot, but you should decide where to engage based on the content: What is being talked about, where are we in demand, where can we profitably join in the discussion? Companies must cleverly stage the world of experience around their brands and weave this content into the exchange on the social web. Consumers don't buy certain brands just because they like the products, but because they associate something with the brand. Companies can and should take advantage of this.
How much preparation time does a company need to cut a good figure on the social web?
PR on the social web starts with listening. I would allow six to eight weeks for the development of accurate monitoring with the appropriate keywords. How long it takes in total depends on how far a company has come with the preliminary work and what activities it is planning on the social web. But it will certainly take six months to a year for a company to establish a standing, for employees to learn how to use the social web and to build up a routine, until they have figured out which information to place in which channel and how to interlink the channels. For those who will later be in charge of communications, it's not a bad idea to practice all this on a private account first in preparation. The best thing for them to do is to pick a specialist topic or a hobby that they can talk about with others. That way, they develop a feel for how the social web works.
You advise companies on their PR entry into the social web. How do you go about it?
Before I make a presentation in a company, I preferably take the six to eight weeks I mentioned to first find out where the company stands. A certain period must have elapsed for a picture to emerge. Then I try to find out what the customer wants and evaluate the next steps: In the past, a customer came in with his media release and wanted us to send it out. Then it was our job to make sure the customer did his homework. We would ask, "What exactly do you want to say? What do you answer when journalists ask? Have you selected contact persons and are they prepared? Have you prepared visuals?" And it often turned out that the media release was not the right choice at that point. When it comes to a presence on the social web, a company must also ask itself: what do I want to say? What do I want to achieve? It's not enough to simply want to be present in the media again. My starting point is not measures, but goals. That's why it's important to me what a customer has done so far, why he wants to be on the social web, what his motivation is. Some simply want to be there, others already have clear ideas. You can see how realistic they are, and monitoring helps here as well. At the moment, we're in a phase in which we still have to explain exactly how the social web works, how people talk there, and what mechanisms exist. My customers are often not even aware that conversations really take place on the social web and how interconnected the various channels are: that blog posts are commented on Twitter or Facebook, or a Facebook or Flickr post can reappear on Xing. To clarify this interconnectedness, I'm talking about social web, not social media. A company can even make its mark with a YouTube account without ever uploading its own videos - simply by compiling posts. Curating knowledge is something very important on the social web. But many companies don't realize that either.
There is always talk of THE company. But of course there are individuals who tweet for a company, look after the Facebook account or are active in blogs. Should they appear with their name and a photo, or would it be better for them to remain anonymous behind the company logo?
It's always said that you can give the company a human face on the social web. But that's a platitude - because how do you imagine the face of Swiss, for example? If the Swiss press spokesperson tweets or faceboots, then of course he can appear with his name and picture. But what does Swiss do once he leaves? Or how does it manage it when several company representatives communicate? Does it have to introduce them all now? Here, it's a matter of weighing things up.
This is likely to be a strategic decision on the part of the company. Because as you say, if the person to whom the communication is linked quits, the company literally loses face. Does that mean that a company should distribute communication on the social web among several employees right from the start?
Yes, definitely. Because it's much more authentic, it's more broadly distributed in terms of knowledge areas, it's more lively, and there's a diversity in the language as well. In social media, there is not such a clear corporate language as in the rest of corporate communications, apart from certain terms. So everyone communicates in a slightly different style, and users are addressed differently. They like that - after all, everyone has different preferences. Dividing communication among several shoulders also takes the pressure off the PR people. If a small company shows all its heads, that's OK, because often the team consists of just two people. But not every company should show all its communicators. On the one hand, not every employee wants to see his or her photo on the Internet, and on the other hand, human communication is already done through language, so you don't necessarily need a face. On the radio, you don't see the face either. The situation is somewhat different when it comes to support and advice, where the consumer naturally likes to have a contact person. As soon as you have a case together, it is advisable to have at least an abbreviation.
Swissair's former press spokeswoman Beatrice Tschanz made a name for herself with her open communication during the company's grounding in 2005 - not least because she was able to control exactly what information leaked out and when. Do you think Tschanz would have done as well if social media had already been an issue back then?
Yes, I think so, but she would have been even more challenged than she was then. Tschanz had a decisive advantage: she was directly attached to the CEO. Today, it's more important than ever to have backing and full trust from the top. You have to be able to coordinate quickly with the boss, but you don't have to coordinate every detail with him. Tschanz was able to portion out the information, but she had to be very quick. She simply had the right mix of intuition, experience, humanity, support from the boss and freedom of action.
Is it especially important to be present on the social web when it comes to crisis communication?
I wouldn't necessarily push a crisis out into the social web. But you can assume one thing: When there's a crisis, it's on the social web in a flash. The killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, spread first and foremost on Twitter, even before Obama had a chance to speak out. But if you have the special case that there's a crisis that hasn't hit the web yet, I wouldn't push that either. Today, crisis communication is much more sophisticated. In the past, you could pull back, clarify facts, advise on how to formulate a statement, and then inform. Today, the first photo of a plane crash is already on the Internet before anyone in the company has really understood what happened. Today, companies are forced to adopt salami tactics. Because they are expected to communicate in real time: They have to provide ongoing information about what is happening, which is enormously demanding in complex cases. What you should definitely do when people are discussing your company on the social web is signal, "We heard you and we're working on it."
Social media are a huge challenge. Are there organizations or companies for which it is fundamentally not worth investing energy, time and money in Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like?
Every company has to make a minimum effort for monitoring, there is no way around it. If you want to be perceived in public with your services and offers - and this will apply to every company - you can and must assume that people will talk about you. I also say "may" because people don't always just talk badly. People don't really want to criticize, they want to be left alone. As a rule, they only complain when there are really serious shortcomings. At any rate, I can't observe people on the Web simply looking for a fight. Quarrelsome people are quickly cut off. The important thing is to take a lot of things from everyday life and approach them with common sense.
How do you monitor your success on the social web? The number of fans and followers is probably not meaningful.
Fans and followers alone are not a good indicator, if only because they can be bought. One sign of success is the exchange with users. If a company only provides information on Twitter without links, it appears isolated. If it links, the communication goes a little further. But there should also be interaction beyond that, on Twitter, for example, through @username, which indicates a conversation. An exception is media that is about spreading news - in this case tweets or posts are only justifiable with links. But with any other company, I don't understand why, if they have followers, they don't follow anyone back. To me, that says, "We don't want to talk to you, we want you to listen to us." Another mark of quality, of course, is when a company's messages are retweeted and shared.
What are the three most important rules for successful PR on the social web?
First, the company must know what it wants to say and achieve on the social web. Second, it must be willing to let go. Once a piece of information is out there, it's a matter of listening to how users react to it, what their points of view are, and responding to them. And third, the company must remain authentic. The social web is neither a cheap marketing tool nor a transmitter of brand messages, but an opportunity to distinguish and share content in its own way that adds value to the target audience.
How does a company or organization find the right person or agency for their PR on the social web?
In our book*, we have listed some points to look out for when choosing an agency. The person who takes care of it should already have their own experience in the social web, but also understand something about overall communication. I don't think much of agencies that only offer social media - I don't think that's the right approach. A solid communications education, experience in the social web, the ability to listen actively, analyze what you hear and implement it conceptually are all part of the core competencies for me. Ultimately, it is crucial that the chemistry between company and agency is right. What's important is a relationship of trust that allows for an open conversation and in which both sides work together to find out which path the company could take in the social web.
How long will it take for PR on the social web to become more professional?
That will develop over the course of this year. Last year, you could still experiment around, as an agency and as a company. That time is now over. Companies can no longer go into the social web without a strategy.
Interview: Anne-Friederike Heinrich
In a nutshell
Marie-Christine Schindler is an independent PR consultant and Master in Writing and Corporate Publishing. She worked for eight years at the international PR agency Trimedia Communications, where she served clients such as Mövenpick, Federal Express, ABB, Lufthansa and Zurich Insurance. She then spent 14 years in PR education, including at SPRI. In 2010, Schindler founded her PR agency mcschindler.com. www.mcschindler.com
*Reading Tip:
Marie-Christine Schindler / Tapio Liller (2011): PR on the Social Web - the handbook for communications professionals. O'Reilly-Verlag; 36.20 francs.
