A recent experience with a new client leads me to believe that many companies could be making a mistake by assigning responsibility to create content to social media specialists.  It’s been my experience that these are two distinct disciplines with little, if any crossover.  Simply, PR folks often don’t understand  social media mores.  Reversely, social media specialists are not trained to create compelling PR content to build relationships and help spur call-to-action.  This can result in stagnation and frustration.  We have definitely moved into  a new era of dynamic social media content; authenticity, transparency and  accountability are important.  According to Ross McGammon in a recent Entrepreneur article regarding social media content,the way to market content without sounding like you’re marketing content is to not market content. He says the test for good content( until we come up with another word), is: Would I care about this if someone said this to me?  McGammon believes everything should be rich and smart and efficient. And occasionally amusing.

The reality is that in order to meet such a high content standard requires a PR professional.  I counsel our Thomas Center clients to collaborate with us on content to highlight how their products and services provide solutions to common business challenges and/or opportunities.  These short, news based stories can then be handed to social media for distribution.  This process ensures content to capture the attention of target audiences.  Even more important, PR content will help to present a consistent set of brand messages across all content distribution mediums.

Moving forward with this new client, I will own all content and collaborate with the social media specialist to provide content that is rich, smart, on message, efficient and yes, occasionally amusing:)