Agencies have nowhere to hide in social media land

This is a post that I wrote earlier this week and that was originally published on Reputation Online

Infighting looks set to break out again amongst PR agencies. A blog post late last week from Wolfstar PR’s Jed Hallam cast a (perhaps envious and rather harsh) stone at Paratus Communications – the PR agency that has (to the industry’s surprise) recently acquired the full Vodafone UK PR brief.

Jed’s beef is with a series of emails that were sent by Paratus on behalf of Vodafone yesterday all in the name of blogger outreach:

“Today the entire Wolfstar office has had two spam emails from Vodafone’s new PR agency. Now, we’re a pretty online social bunch, as you’d expect from a public relations consultancy that’s got a reputation for doing online PR. But, even if you’re generous, there’s only really two or three of us that might cover a mobile comms story. And you’d be better off pitching us by approaching us personally, not BCCd into a humungous list.”

Adam from Paratus has this morning posted a response in a move that could have even come from Wolfstar’s own ‘101 guide to social media crisis comms’; it’s a good reply – quick, transparent and honest.

Now, I’m not going to cast further accusations. But, I do think this incident raises two interesting points about the nature of social media outreach and the potential reputation issues this can create for agencies and their brands.

Firstly, the ‘leg-work’ that agencies do is now totally open to scrutiny. In the good ol’ days of traditional media relations, PRs in general had a pretty bad relationship with journalists, who accused them of spamming on a regular basis. But this bad feeling simmered below the surface and, perhaps because of this, agencies continued to enter into bad practices.

The ‘democratisation’ of media changes this. Bloggers and ’social media influencers’ aren’t afraid to name and shame, and their power is potentially venomous.

Secondly, as Jed alludes to, this storm in a tea-cup will probably be taken up by the so-called ’social media agencies’ that feel they have another nice example of why PR agencies aren’t suited to this new digital world. But the fact remains that PR agencies have the skills and experience to really ‘get’ this new digital space.

Yes, some PR agencies ’spam’ journalists. Some agencies (of all flavours) will still try and spam using social media channels. But, the sad fact is that they will all eventually become unstuck. There are plenty of PR agencies out there (and I have no reason to think that Paratus aren’t one of them) that have been doing it right and are still doing it right and are taking every effort to ensure that the reputation issues the PR industry faced with journalists, isn’t repeated in the social space. I’ve argued before that I think the industry needs to work together to combat these issues, not turn on itself and backstab.

We are all learning. We will (even Wolfstar) make mistakes. But agencies, more than ever, need to think before they act, both to preserve their client’s reputation and that of themselves.

Danny Whatmough