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Social marketing and social PR: never the twain shall meet?

By

Neville Hobson

•

Webinar

Earlier this month, I took part in a one-hour interview about social media marketing and social PR for a webinar organized by Cision UK and Vocus UK (both, incidentally, now part of the same enterprise).

The event was promoted as “The Big Christmas Grudge Match: Social Media Marketing vs Social PR” although I saw it very much as comparing and contrasting the two elements that, in many respects, are different sides of the same coin.

Whatever you call it, I thought it was a terrific discussion. Moderator Paul Miller, head of digital at Cision UK, did a great great job at leading the conversation along a clear path to address five key specific points:

  1. Can social PR ever be more than outreach to journalists/bloggers/etc conducted by social media?
  2. Are there particular channels which are better suited to marketing or PR?
  3. What about PR and customer service – and to what extent does that make social PR “a cost of doing business”?
  4. What are the consequences for social marketing/PR of the recent issues around display inventory? What about the Oreo product placement ruling from the ASA?
  5. Public relations (more than) suggests engagement with the public, but traditionally any engagement was filtered through third-parties (eg, journalists, analysts). To what extent does social technology allow PRs to go direct to their publics, and (to what extent) is the technology still acting as a filter?

I prepared some talking points for the five questions, mainly to help me stay focused on those questions in order to address them fully. You can read them in the embed below, or download a copy from Scribd.

Cision Vocus Webinar 9 Dec 14: Talking Points by Neville Hobson

The interview was conducted live as a webinar, in which I gather well over 150 people listened in, with a further few hundred registered and who will hear the recording, now available.

As we concluded our discussion, Paul asked me which would I pick as key, if I had to choose between social marketing and social PR. You can listen to the recording to learn the answer :)

Thanks again, Cision and Vocus, for a worthwhile discussion on a broad topic that does attract lots of different views. We had quite a few questions in the live event – some of which were tweeted via the event hashtag #SocialPR – and quite a few more that I will be commenting on that Cision and Vocus will publish.

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23 responses to “Social marketing and social PR: never the twain shall meet?”

  1. Where does social marketing end and social PR begin? – NevilleHobson.com

    […] December 21:] My thoughts about the webinar: Social marketing and social PR: never the twain shall meet? Cision and Vocus have posted the webinar […]

  2. Louisa Clack avatar
    Louisa Clack

    London PR is a media relations agency working with a wide range of consumer and B2B clients from across the UK and beyond. See our website and social media sites for more info!

    http://www.londonpragency.com

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