Social Media: A Question of PR Leadership or Ownership?

The Council of Public Relations Firms “Firm Voice” blog post, “Owning Social Media” (October 12, 2011), raised some excellent points about taking responsibility for managing the social media function in the marketing and public relations sector. The post’s author, Widmeyer Communications Senior Vice President Barry Reicherter, issued a cogent call for public relations professionals, who need to assess the elements of their social media inventory in order to increase the effectiveness of their communication programs. However, I urge readers to think beyond Reicherter’s call for sole “ownership” of social media and consider the more important issue of strategic leadership in public relations.

Barry Reicherter

I am a public relations advocate but I’m reluctant to support Reicherter’s claim, “If public relations practitioners can acknowledge the primary elements that comprise social media, we can successfully claim ownership.” I agree that public relations practitioners (and students) need to develop expertise in social media tactics. Digital communication has become a core requirement in our profession. However, as they become more senior, public relations professionals should look beyond the tactical elements of social media and develop the expertise required to lead and manage the ways that social media activities are integrated in global marketing and communication programs at the strategic level.

Sabrina Horn

In another “Firm Voice” blog post on March 9, 2011, (“The Future of Talent: Building Best-In-Class Account Teams in the Social Media Age”) author Matt Shaw wrote, “The rise of social media and the erosion of boundaries between public relations and other marketing disciplines is rapidly creating the need for a new kind of public relations professional." According to Horn Group President and CEO Sabrina Horn, quoted in the blog post, that new kind of professional has to possess more than digital skills. “We’re already looking for people with a more well-rounded communications background—generalists who are capable of doing many things and floating between specialties, with digital skills as a central core area of competency,” Horn observed. “But the talent we hire just has to understand marketing strategy, because our clients are demanding that level of thinking as to how to build audiences.”

So, today’s public relations professionals (and certainly current students who will become our future professionals) must broaden their portfolios beyond expertise in individual functional areas. They must also be able to work with and manage other functional areas (marketing, business, research and analysis, etc.). Hence, social media might have many “owners” in a large corporation organized by departments or divisions (public relations, marketing, employee relations, executive communication, analyst relations, etc.). While public relations should “own” social media within its own functional area, I believe it’s more important that public relations “own” responsibility for integrating, coordinating, and leading strategic communication efforts (including social media) that span organizational boundary lines. This requires expertise in leadership and management as well as social media planning, tactics, and measurement.

ADM Mike Mullen

Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, an active user of social media, once warned about focusing too much on individual communication tools or concepts and not enough on the overall communication context and process. In 2009, then serving as the U.S. military’s senior uniformed executive, Admiral Mullen wrote, “As someone who ‘tweets’ almost daily, I appreciate the need to embrace the latest technologies. But more important than any particular tool, we must know the context within which our actions will be received and understood.”

In conclusion, I suggest that Reicherter add to his call for expertise in social media by encouraging public relations practitioners to develop expertise in managing individual tools, integrating social media activities, and leading communication programs that accurately communicate context and promote understanding of an organization’s actions.



Marshall McLuhan

As a postscript, I also wanted to comment on Reicherter’s A Clockwork Orange analogy that “social media is both organic and digital — humans connecting with technology as a conduit.” I’m a big fan of A Clockwork Orange, but, with all due respect to Anthony Burgess, I prefer Marshall McLuhan’s 1960s prediction of what’s happening today with social media. I believe that social media have become more than a connection between humans and technology. In fact, I think social media have become extensions of our human personalities, senses, and experiences. For as McLuhan described in The Medium is the Massage (1967), years before the launch of the Internet, “[Social media] are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”