Why Internet Likes Are Flawed PR

Is the PR trade going to increasingly rely on data partly scrubbed from social media before it gets to work/makes recommendations to clients?

And if so will that make for better results

I’m going to go for definitely yes – and quite possibly not.

At the workaday end of the PR trade, press releases based on Google searches are everywhere – a load of people looked this up, so my client’s product deserves a plug, is the gist of them.

At the highest end data analytics are going to be as about as important in PR as they already are in football.

For football, the data about players isn’t flawless, though the race to get the slightest advantage means it will only become more influential.

The PR industry seems different to me – and more likely to get it wrong, to bypass hunches from skilled business people who really do know better than the public what they want.

The most famous example of this is the Sony Walkman. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted a device to listen to music while travelling for business.

A prototype l was devised. And market tested. And the reaction was: forget it.

Why would I want to be able to listen to music just while I’m walking around, said millions of people.

Sony went ahead anyway – it was right, the public and all of the marketing and PR expertise in the world was wrong.

At the moment, any company seeking approval for its work – this includes newspapers – likes to brag about how many “likes” it has on social media.

Since there isn’t a “dislike” button, this method is plainly flawed.

Elizaveta Konovalova in the FT makes the case for the introduction of one here.

She says the “like” function “can also play a cruel joke on companies that rely on social media to taste test new products or concepts. The imbalance of online feedback might create a false perception of how the public will react to a marketing campaign.  Is the solution to introduce a dislike button? If so, why haven’t social media companies done so yet?”

Well, perhaps because, social media has become such a hotbed of conspiracy, monetisation and weirdness it is essentially ungovernable.

The high end of the PR trade would say that its methods are far too sophisticated to be mistaken for an intern mucking about on Tiktok.

Clients who use social media as much as anyone else are going to ask for increasing proof of that, rather than trusting that their internet “experts” really know what they are talking about.