Public relations is in the midst of unprecedented change. Traditional media relations, while still important, has been equaled, if not surpassed by social media. Indeed, we’re seeing more and more clients ask about word-of-mouth. How does one inspire, motivate and encourage a prospective or current customer to ‘recommend’ an organization’s product or service to a peer? The answer to that single question contains the key to the future of marketing communications.
Like many forward-looking organizations, we’re grappling with how one goes about ‘encouraging’ or ‘enabling’ recommendations. We don’t know the full answer, but we have some ideas. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we’d like to get your perspective as well.
So, if you don’t mind, click the survey link below and let me know what you think. I promise to share the findings in a future blog that, I hope, you’ll highly recommend to others.
Thanks for taking the survey, Ray. I do appreciate it. I share your concerns about the many bogus people, places and things on social media but, like you, I find that social media-based recommendations from friends carry enormous influence with me. I’m hopeful the survey results will provide some clarity (assuming we have a large enough respondent pool).
After taking the survey, I realize that I trust social media the least, but use it the most. I have a selective list of blogs and Twitter accounts that I follow regularly, but I’m wary of posts that come from users I’m unfamiliar with. My discontent with Twitter is that it’s cluttered with impersonators, hoaxes, and cryptic shortened links that might lead to something unexpected… Though I’m a big advocate for social media, it’s definitely raised my level of skepticism.