Are our Swedish PR agencies hiding from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Well, read on to find out.
A few hours ago I got the stupid idea to check out how many of our Swedish PR agencies had a presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I figured I couldn’t check out each individual that works for them in order to decide, so I had to check out their official presence instead; where they talk with a rather unified voice – trough a single account and under their brand.
Method: I first visited each agency webpage to check if they had any links. When they didn’t, I used the following approach: Twitter; I searched for the agency name in “People”, when that didn’t generate any results I resorted to using Google’s advanced search. Abbreviations where used when I couldn’t find the original name. The same method was applied for both Facebook and LinkedIn.
Results: I couldn’t find an official presence of many of the agencies. Out of totally 63 agencies searched, 39 were absent – or couldn’t be found – in at least one of the three major social media platforms. Reasons for this may be 1) there wasn’t any presence, 2) the agency name wasn’t unique enough, 3) the agency name was changed from its original name, abbreviations had to be applied for example, 4) when the name had to fight with other names, no logo was present to identify the agency and 5) the agency name shared the name with another PR agency.
What I also found was that among the agencies whom had a presence, only a handful integrated or even linked to the social media platforms from their webpage. As a last note, many agencies received a YES, meaning they had a presence. But to tell you the truth, I was thinking about giving them a NO since the presence was so weak. For example one agency had a twitter since 2009 but only wrote a handful of tweets since then.
Dicussion: I am very well aware that most of the PR people have their own personal accounts. They manage their own personal networks and communication. One could say that my results would imply that the PR agency social media presence in Sweden is rather fragmented or at least somewhat autonomous. Someone may tell me: “Well, I could find them, you suck” but then I would probably answer “I may suck, but they suck for not letting someone who sucks on finding things find them. What if they just missed a potential customer?”. End of discussion.
Here are my results:
YES = Presence was found. NO = No presence was found.
March 30th, 2011 at 10:03 am
Well, here is a good Twitter list recommended by @elwirakotowska http://bit.ly/ik8nAm
Apparently I missed one PR agency (Agent). I think that’s an ok error.
March 30th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Absent or not, do you see any reason for PR agencies to use social media?
One of the key values of social media is the constent interaction with followers but who will wanna follow an agency and what will it have to interact about?
March 31st, 2011 at 7:20 am
1) Creating brand equity and heightening the image of the agency by providing news, interaction etcetera targeted to different publics.
2) B2B purposes by keeping track of prospects, but also current clients. Interacting with them on their own terms. Employed a lot more by PR agencies in the U.S. then Sweden.
3) Transparency reasons. Being transparent about the work done at the firm, thus heightening the image and the acceptance of the PR field. This can be done by reporting on current clients (if they don’t wish to keep it a secret), update on tasks done or deals struck etcetera.
April 3rd, 2011 at 5:32 pm
[...] Själv sammanfattar jag diskussionen på min egen blogg, Doktor Spinn. Och PR-byråerna, då? Många har hemläxa att göra. [...]