PR damned with faint praise by US marketers
StrongMail’s survey of marketer’s spend intentions for 2010, in a flat market, shows the upstarts email, social media and search continuing to cannibalise poor old direct mail and events while advertising remains unmoved.
PR comes in fourth, with a small net gain – damned with faint praise, which begs the question, where does PR fit in an increasingly online world?
Do marketers see PR as just about media relations, just more online than in print these days? I suspect yes. Certainly I don’t think they see PR as the natural place to look for social media or email content, definitely not search, yet these should be natural areas for PR people.
While many marketers say they are going to spend more on social media, they are still going to have a hard time negotiating a separate budget for it, which leaves the door open a crack.
So long as the traditional PR budget remains inked in, PRs could steer it towards social media and other online activities, if and it’s a big if, they can come up with a credible strategy.
If not, online agencies will continue to eat more of what could be PR’s lunch.
Ross, thoughtful and intriguing post. I am seeing what you are seeing, too, however, I am also seeing that there is more than a crack in the door for PR. I blogged about this last week. The only people in the marcom continuum who understand true conversation (which is what social media is all about) are PR professionals: http://www.wordwritepr.com/blogstorytelling/?p=44
Most of those clamoring for control of the social media space on the agency side remind me of the rush of intriguing yet unsupportable business concepts from the dot com explosion/implosion: they have cool, geeky software and “new” takes on the world, but they are not the right people to handle this brave new world because they do not understand the principles of conversation, another topic I blogged about recently:
http://www.wordwritepr.com/blogstorytelling/?p=6
Once again, thanks for a thought-provoking post. Look forward to more.
[...] the sludgy single digit percentage growth of traditional PR as predicted by December’s Strongmail survey, how about a a piece of the triple figure rocketship that is social media marketing [...]