Today is part two of my interview with Brian Morrissey of Adweek. I posted it on Monday here. This is a continuation of the interview where he discusses Twitter, PR and social media. Thank you Brian for being so gracious with letting us interview you!
Why Twitter? What got you started there?
I was skeptical about Twitter for a while, but I joined last summer, I think, as a way to keep in touch with a couple friends. I think someone from Agency.com followed me, which then led to a few others. Like any network it grew from there. I never started using it with any set plan.
Are you hoping PR people will learn something from your missives or are you merely venting (i.e., are we beyond correction)?
I don’t know, probably both. Since Max wrote that story, I have a lot more followers from PR. That’s cool, but I never started using Twitter as some way to vent about PR. I guess probably 5 percent of my posts are about it. One of the evolutions that I’ve found with Twitter is my audience expanded to include a lot more people in the marketing industry. One of the raps “traditional media” gets is it’s inaccessible, unlike blogs with comments and more personal commentary. I started to use Twitter as a way to bring people into the process a bit, from shaping story ideas to learning the frustrations reporters have with editors, companies we cover and, yes, PR people. That’s probably the biggest overall goal I have with Twitter now, if I have one. It would be great if new tools like Twitter enable reporters to close the gap between what we do and the people who read it. What I don’t want it to become is my lectures on PR. It’s not for me to tell PR people how to do their jobs. I’m only giving the perspective from my end.
Where do most of the conflicts come from?
The biggest thing that frustrates me is that there’s a disconnect between what PR people say they do and what they really do. There’s this idea that they’re there to “help reporters,” but that’s not true. Their goal, as I see it, is to make their client make good, control information and act as gatekeepers. Those are often in conflict with what I’m trying to do. On top of that, there’s too much spam coming from PR people. Trust me, I could write all day about the untargeted, useless stuff I’m bombarded with. Some people say “it’s your job,” but it’s not my job to get spammed. It actually detracts from my ability to do my job because of the time it takes and how often I’m interrupted. What’s most frustrating is the majority of PR people really have no idea what I do. If they did, they wouldn’t be wasting my team with some press release about an industry I don’t cover. Yet it seems the industry is in many ways predicated on “hits,” so the mentality, like advertising, favors bombardment.
You recently wrote about ad agencies not getting social media. That survey focused mostly on “traditional” agencies from what I could tell. Do interactive agencies suffer from the same problem?
I wrote about a study that found clients don’t think their agencies “get” social media.It’s a hard thing because social media is such a nebulous thing. I mean, we’re talking about conversations. Those conversations have applicability to all parts of a company, from marketing to product management to public relations to customer service. I find the debate of “who will own social media” utterly silly. Nobody will — not marketing, not PR, not customer service. I think it’s going to change how companies organize themselves.
The other side to that question, what do you think of PR agencies use of social media, are we using it effectively? What would you change about it?
I don’t know enough about how PR agencies use social media. I’ll say this: I’m impressed — or maybe alarmed — at how many PR people are on services like Twitter. (I kid about the alarmed part, btw.) It sounds corny but I’m a big believer that to really understand it, you have to do it, whether you’re an ad guy, PR person, reporter or whatever. It’s a tricky thing; getting your hands dirty is absolutely necessary. The question I have is how PR agencies end up “using” the channel. A lot of my frustrations with PR people stem from the same spray-and-pray approach used by ad agencies to bombard us with commercial messages. I get 150+ PR pitches a day by email and probably a dozen just-following-up-on-an-email-I sent calls. That’s why I don’t want Facebook pitches on top of that. Will these social media avenues just become another venue to promote the hell out of a client? I hope not. And I think it’s reassuring that many PR people use Twitter, because they’ll be less likely to pollute environments they use because they’ll empathize with regular users.
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