Can we really fly blind and expect to be effective?

By Robert Wheatley

There are those great moments of clarity when something hits you. Often it can be something you already know, but your perspective and its horsepower (importance) will get injected with an entirely new level of “amen” when understanding adjusts or elevates a bit. Sorry to be oblique – this happened today while reading Brian Solis’ great book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.” Yes, there’s a point here and a recommendation.

The emergence of social media has changed the game for PR communications, to be sure. For instance as we’ve heard from virtually every social media pundit, conversation is better than any attempted monologue in brand communication strategy. Frankly its just wayyyy more difficult these days to push messages at people and get any traction. So communication that’s truly effective is no longer one-way.

That means PR people no longer sit solely on a “dissemination” platform (press releases, editor desk-sides, spokesperson media tours) to move messages outward through various channels of non-paid or earned media.

Now relationships and dialogue with influencers and other forms of “democratized” media have to be layered into the brand outreach recipe. What over-arching strategic issue does this immediately recommend? Listening.

Let’s look at the fundamental “best practices” involved in relationship building. If the best conversationalists are always the best listeners, and if brands must form relationships with their best users based on behaviors that approach similarity to what we would call real-world friendships rather than “transactional” relationships, does it stand to reason we should be hearing our best customers?

If relationships are to work, they’re built from a foundation of shared interest. And as covered many times in this blog, we know that brand relationships are earned based on what a marketer does to correctly discern and understand the consumer’s passions and concerns. And then operate as an enabler, facilitator, educator an community builder.

Furthermore if the media landscape is littered with self-published content created by customers, then it only makes sense to know what they’re saying, good or bad.

So listening jumps to the front as an integral part of fundamental PR strategy in the digital age. Right? Yet more often than not it is at the tail end of consideration in plans and sometimes the first to fall off the budget truck when pressure builds to make some cuts.

Of course formal Web-based listening tools should be employed and made integral to PR plans. They should also, however, receive the priority they deserve to be preserved when sacrifices are targeted on the spending front. This takes understanding on both the agency and client sides of the table about the value of it. To do less in some respects is to say that pushing messages outward remains the first and most important path.

Relevant communication springs from understanding. And that’s an outcome of getting quiet for awhile, and paying close attention to the conversations going on all around.

I for one will feel more comfortable as we work harder and with greater resolve to build the listening tools into the front end of the campaign strategy, and not a final layer that almost invites elimination due to its perceived lack of priority.

What do you think?