Social Media as a Public Relations Tool: The Student Perspective

By Aubrey Levinstone, senior, public relations

(original article: http://advertising.utexas.edu/PublicRelations/news/PROD75_024181.html)

"I joined Facebook to become connected with friends from high school and college," says Torey Lopez, a senior in public relations at The University of Texas at Austin.

"I started receiving group invites for companies that I have never heard of, and I think it is really annoying."

Lopez sounds a familiar refrain of student Web users, suggesting that when companies create fan pages and event invites to promote themselves and their products, they may be tarnishing rather than burnishing their image.

Connie Reece is the founder of Every Dot Connects, a social media consortium located in Austin. "PR professionals, whether internal teams or outside agencies, are being swept up in the maelstrom created by the collision of top-down messaging and bottom-up innovation -- and there have been casualties," she writes in her article "Is Your PR Team Social Media Savvy?"

Reece, a recent winner of a Texas Social Media Award, says PR professionals sometimes create profiles on Web sites or communicate with bloggers without the proper knowledge of how to interact in Web 2.0. She also says that this problem has become so troublesome that blacklists have been created to stop agencies from spamming E-mail addresses with badly targeted press releases.

Bloggers are not the only people complaining about this phenomenon.

Students like public relations major Angela Valente say they are often targeted on social networking sites they visit on a regular basis, such as Facebook.

"I am part of the Facebook group Friends of The Blanton Museum of Art because I love going to the museum," says Valente, also a member of the university's chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America.

"I would have ignored the group invite without viewing the profile if I wasn't interested in the company, which is what I do with most businesses that want me to join their groups."

Experts say that businesses that want to engage social media need to learn the basics of how to interact or they will annoy or be ignored by their student audience, or any audience for that matter.

"Listen first. Then, listen again," says Todd Defren in his blog PR Squared. "You may find that the big plan developed six months ago is no longer relevant, since this space moves so darned fast."

Defren says some companies either create profiles without doing their research first or wait too long and their topics lose significance. This is where the audience begins to disregard the messages altogether.

Each company needs to research and listen to the conversations before they actually engage with their target audiences, Defren counsels. The more they know about audience segments and this new type of media, the better chance that their messages will be received positively and at the correct time.

"For my internship, I continually update band profiles and events on Web sites like Myspace and LastFM," says Ashlee McRae, senior in public relations. "We listen to the fans and then update the profiles with some of their requests."

"I also use blog aggregating tools, such as Technorati, to see which bloggers are talking about the bands," she says. "I think it is important to see what people are saying before we start using social media tools."

Although many companies do not know the rules of interacting in Web 2.0, some do it well.

Communication Career Services at the University of Texas at Austin uses social networking tools to give students information relevant to them.

"They have a Facebook fan page and a blog to send out news to the communication students," Lopez says. "I like that I can find out information about the job market without having to go into the office all the time."

Lopez says that social networking sites offer a "unique way to present information," suggesting how effective social media can be when used well.

"I would rather read their blog than look up the information on their Web site," she says. "It seems more personal and important when the author of the blog is discussing an issue."