Just in time for the weekend Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) was able to serve up a classic case of a successful PR agency suffering the public embarrassment of some public miss steps in the social media field.
As is often the case we found the comments in posts like this to be riveting. In particular Rachel Kay (that’s @rachelakay) had some wisdom to bring to the conversion.
So let’s start there. Let’s start with Rachel’s insight.
Rachel said;
Interesting post Mark. I know Ketchum is a great agency. You don’t grow to that size and boast that kind of client roster without knowing what you are doing. I’ll also give them credit for hiring someone to lead social media efforts – it sounds like they may need some extra instruction there and they see that.
I agree with you that she should ask for DMs if she isn’t following anyone – doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’d suggest she be more liberal with who she follows back. While I’m just a small shop – I make new business connections on Twitter all the time. I doubt if I closed myself off to intimate conversation I’d experience that. You can find value in some expected and unexpected places.
Mark’s reply was good too. He said;
Thanks Rachel. This isn’t really a question of how good a PR agency Ketchum is. It’s about the perhaps growing perception that their employees regularly bungle the art of relating to people using social tools.
As for them creating a position that deals with social media and digital strategy, as an outsider I feel this should have been an obvious thing to do about a year ago (at least). So, big whoop in my humble opinion. (And their job description could be summarized as – Do everything digital!)
So what was all the fuss about?
You can tell from the comments that we’re talking about PR giant Ketchum here. Ketchum wanted to hire a VP of Social Media. Perhaps the first thing to note – not something discussed in Mark’s post – is that Ketchum thought they needed to look externally for this post and couldn’t full it internally.
What really caught Mark’s attention was the way Pamela Rocco Von Lehmden, a Senior VP at Ketchum, went about recruiting the role via Twitter. She wanted people to DM her if they where interested in the role. Pamela only follows 120 or so people on Twitter and so only those 120 or so people could DM here.
Mark lists this – and other wiggles in Pamela’s approach – as fails. It wasn’t that much of a job ad as hardly anyone could respond.
That’s why Mark’s response to Rachel is interesting. He’s not calling into question Ketchum’s PR ability. He’s suggesting that the people at Ketchum might not be the best at coping with social media tools. Vital looks like Twitter.
That’s a fair point to raise but it does also assume a lot. It assumes, for example, that Pamela’s tweet was intended to be a wide call to action. She may well have intended it only for the 120 or so people she follows.
Interestingly, Pamela’s intentions may not matter. Mark called it as clumsy and a scan of Twitter Search throws up more than a fair few retweets on the matter.
Just as Sasha Cohen’s Bruno movie seems to be living or dying by the first wave of Twitter responses it seems likely that the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ may pass sentence and judgement on a myriad of other issues.
What do you think? Does this illustrate that traditional PR agencies like Ketchum are staffed up with people who’ll struggle with online? Does Mark have an axe to grind or is this just a storm in a tea cup?
July 19, 2009
PR, Twitter