Certainly, I’ve been more bored in my life. Usually, as a journalist, I’m being paid to be bored to death. This time, at this conference on how health care industries can use social media to enhance their public relations and marketing, I had paid almost two hundred bucks to observe massive piles of old news.
There was, of course, the gigantic movie-style screen on the center of the stage of the auditorium of the midtown facility, showing endless PowerPoint slides.
Bullet-pointed. Of course. The speakers (almost all white males, like the organizers, which surprised me) wore those nifty clip-on mics that make it impossible to move your neck without losing audio pick-up. There was a smaller screen, stage right, with a live Twitter feed of all the participants, which was much ballyhooed, to show the hipness of the organizers. This resulted in a frenzy of people not paying attention to what was being said and shown and instead typing madly on their iPhones and Droids so they could get their names on the big stage before the big names.
And there’s the rub.
Far too many organizations are rushing to make ‘social media’ — be it Facebook, Twitter, or whatever, the centerpiece of their communications plan. These sites shouldn’t be your nucleus. Your message should be the point; everything else should be a delivery system.
A major pharmaceutical company whose name may or may not have begun with the letter that follows ‘O’ and precedes ‘Q’ got that. The company’s communications director was funny, which is a marvelous way to connect with a mass of people. It got my attention, because I didn’t expect funny from a pharmaceutical company. He spoke in punchy, quick, understandable sentences. He didn’t rely on the PowerPoint. He even finished speaking early, allowing more time for questions! How’s that for understanding the heart of communicating via social media? It’s not me, me, me. It’s I’m listening to you.
For a company that’s doing it all wrong, let’s look at a firm that may or may not be synonymous with a moisturizing agent one rubs on an infant’s ass. Its thing was talking about ‘sustainability’. This, apparently, is the new ‘green.’ If I were a pitched a story about how sustainable a company is being I would yawn and delete it. But this company thinks it’s the most awesome thing ever. They created a video that ran about three minutes, that the communications director plans to make available via social networking outlets, that shows mostly white people wondering aloud what sustainability is. Cut to an African child crawling in the mud for water. Cut to swirling flow charts. Cut to links to web sites. It was beyond cliché. It was extremely 1995. The two people responsible for this catastrophe stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, staring up at the giant movie screen, slight smiles on their faces. No one clapped. I was amazed a company, in this economic age, had that kind of money to waste on a message consumers simply don’t care that deeply about. Would you spend three minutes of your life staring at a video produced by a company, and then flounder about on their overcrowded website? I didn’t think so. I almost got up and asked, “So…what’s the point?” during the question and answer phase, but I decided to behave myself as I am job hunting.
The Twitter screen, the video, the insistence that something must be Tweeted, or Facebooked, or Flickered: that is noise. That is not communication.
When it comes to public relations and marketing, social media should be easy. It should be quick. It should be relaxed. It should do something for your target audience. It should feel new. I should be able to stand on the threshold and see the clear and blue horizon. Not 1995.
