“Social media is turning the PR professional into a content marketer.” So says Joe Chernov (@jchernov), global director of communications and social media at marketing automation software company Eloqua.
I had the opportunity to speak with Joe by phone for a news release (Eloqua Among First to Tap Vocus for Social Media Monitoring) my employer issued earlier this week. From a corporate philosophy, (“Eloqua is a ‘measure everything’ company”), to punchy quips like social media monitoring absent sentiment analysis is merely “clip counting 2.0,” I found him to be an engaging and even inspiring interview.
Two comments that didn’t make it in the news release, but well worth sharing were Joe’s thoughts on how social media has changed public relations. Here are two bullet points from my notes:
Content marketing. PR’s job is to take all of the corporate “sourced” or created content and figure out where on the social web that information belongs and how best to promote it, for example should it be gated or ungated? (Think: registration.) He drew a distinction between “sourced” content, such as a white paper that Eloqua might pay an analyst firm to write, to content that’s developed by their PR firm, best practices team or their demand generation team, such as special reports or infographics.
Social outposts. Eloqua will “create trends” by tailoring content for each “social outpost.” Social outposts include for example, SlideShare and Amplify among others. In this way, as a PR professional, he’s become more of a publisher, than a pitcher, meaning the traditional media relations role.
In what ways do you think social media has changed PR? Please share in the comments!
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