San Antonio Corporate and Community Leaders Elevate Public Relations

Jaime Castillo, Office of the Mayor talks as(pictured left to right), Mike Bennett of the American Red Cross, and Dan Decker, SeaWorld San Antonio look on during in a social media discussion at the PRSA-San Antonio August luncheon at the Bright Shawl.

· SeaWorld San Antonio saved $2.6 in advertising costs when it opened

its 100-foot tall Journey To Atlantis rollercoaster several years ago.

· The American Red Cross raised $38 million dollars in donations by using a text

message campaign to help the Haitian earthquake victims.

· The Mayor of San Antonio invites a video blogger from the San Antonio Express-News

and documents his first day in office.

These three examples are indicative of the major shift social media is leveraging among San Antonio’s corporations, non-profits and government.

At the August PRSA luncheon titled, “Empowering Communicators,” Jaime Castillo, Senior Policy Analyst for Mayor Julian Castro, Dan Decker, SeaWorld of San Antonio President, and Mike Bennett, American Red Cross, San Antonio Chapter, CEO, discussed how social media tactics are crucial to their organizational success.

SeaWorld’s Decker said his bottom line is to sell more tickets. SeaWorld’s communications team is using Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and bringing in more people. Castillo says the Mayor’s Facebook page , with 4400 friends, is an integral part of their public relations tactics. “We know reporters are monitoring it,” he said.

“Exposure is good but what we want is a move to action. We get that when people send in checks to help or call in to volunteer,” said Bennett of the American Red Cross.

Randy Escamilla serves as Vice President of Public Relations for the San Antonio PRSA Chapter. He is the new Director of Communications for the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. You can reach randy by email at randye@sahcc.org.

Print Media Learning Readers Have Value

Print journalism may not be dead, but print media is going the way of the railroad. That was the message from Bill Conroy, of the San Antonio Business Journal at the June PRSA luncheon. In the years before social media, according to Conroy, media dominated one way communication. Conroy noted that Marshal McLuhan’s mantra “the medium is the message” served to reinforce the power of the press. He referenced this relationship as the hypodermic syringe model, a painful one for the audience to absorb.

Now with Facebook and Twitter and thousands of other social technologies dominating our lifestyle, everyone has journalistic power in the new two way communication model. This is difficult for media companies to accept, but Conroy was confident that the money stream will catch up to social media because they are perfectly poised to deliver quality content.

Conroy told the audience that print media still draws advertising revenues and cited some statistics that show health in his own paper, but said that the ad revenue structure is still changing. He suggested that media outlets “have to have a message that makes you a must-read.”

Offering the gamely suggestion that objectivity has been used by the media as a smokescreen because they owned the conversation, Conroy believes that a more symbiotic relationship with audiences was needed. He even went so far as to say that “the people that matter most are the readers, and frankly, we forgot that in the arrogance of (wanting to) dominate the market.”

For public relations practitioners who have always struggled with this arrogance, it seems like a fairytale ending that local print media actually acknowledged the power of readership. Conroy continued by saying that media need to have a more symbiotic relationship with audiences, giving them stories in the form they want it. And he even suggested that media will need to offer “less lecture and more dialogue.”

One thing Conroy said will not change for print media are the principles of fair reporting, honesty and lack of bias. This is an important statement to public relations practitioners who often suffer at the hands of newer, citizen journalists who don’t play the rules of the game between news media and PR folks. Time-honored principles like full disclosure, embargoes, conflict of interest and ethical behavior have not necessarily been adopted by the online community in the devotional way to which the public relations community has grown accustomed. It’s anyone’s guess if some of those principles will carry on in the new world of journalism.

America's Companies are NOT Hiding Social Media Efforts

In her “What’s Next blog,” BL Ochman calls out America’s top companies for hiding their social media efforts. She even lists the top ten, the chief criteria being whether or not social media places like Facebook and Twitter were listed on the company’s homepage.

She suggests three reasons why these companies aren’t engaged, although none of the companies seem to have contributed to the story. Ochman’s top three reasons were: fear, lack of internal cooperation and legal pressure.

As a public relations practitioner who has spent most of my career in corporate communications, I would like to suggest an alternate viewpoint.

First, the fact that social media is not present on the homepage of each company, in and of itself, is no reason to categorize companies as “hiding.” If, like many large companies, they are using a stakeholder model of communications, their efforts might be considered niche to a stakeholder(s) who would not necessarily be reached by the corporate homepage.

One example of this is on the landing page of the new Chevrolet Volt, which includes links to Facebook and Twitter, a Community link and numerous blog posts about the 2011 product from General Motors. It’s targeted to the audience and it’s front and center for that product.

Are America’s top companies really afraid of social media? I doubt it. What they are afraid of is failing at social media, and most large companies know that the stakes are high. Ochman cites lack of cooperation between internal channels as a cause for the top ten not engaging , but I would venture a guess that integration is a tough issue for organizations. What should you integrate? Who should be responsible for the integration? Is it part of everyone’s job? Should marketing own it? How about the Communications department? There are human resource issues as well.

Large issues are at stake here: education about social media and ethical principles of using it across diverse employee and customer populations. This takes time for larger companies to populate and includes educating legal teams too. Companies are certainly on a journey which will lead to empowerment in social media --- it’s hard work for companies and it doesn’t happen overnight.

I would not categorize America’s top companies as hiding. Rather, I would say they are struggling with ownership, integration, education and empowerment issues. Let’s give them more time to get it right. Perhaps it would lead to permanent, sustainable change.