Depth interview with Melanie Seasons

I just conducted my first of hopefully three (maybe more) depth interviews. Melanie Seasons very kindly gave up 40 minutes of her afternoon to talk to me about her take on PR in social media. Thanks again Melanie!

The discussion continues to suggest to me that PR can and does benefit from leveraging word of mouth in social media.

Melanie viewed PR and relationship management as pretty much synonymous. Regardless of stakeholder group, it is a core objective of what we do as PRs. So in social media terms, she explained that a large part of her role in digital communications is building credibility to win over stakeholders, putting information out to key influencers in the blogs and on social media. Instead of the traditional media model, in social media with the emphasis on user-generated content, the influencers become the journalists, so it is them that PRs need to be developing one-to-one relationships with to enable effective message dissemination.

Importantly though, at least at Melanie’s agency, social media is still an “add-on” to traditional campaigns. I didn’t really explore with Melanie whether she sees that changing in the longer term, but we did discuss the benefits of social media over traditional. For her, and I strongly agree, it’s all about the trust. Which brings us round full circle to it being all about word of mouth – and leaving the community to share ideas.

What I still can’t quite understand is therefore why in an environment where practitioners are using WOM, and are using it successfully to carry out relationship management, why is there nothing in the academic literature that discusses this within Public Relations?

WOM is not just a marketing-driven thing. There are real tangible benefits for PRs to make use of it.

Finally quick reminder about the survey – very very very low uptake so far, and I need to write up my results next week, so please fill it in or pass it on if you’re reading this!!!

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