Facebook might refer more traffic to news websites than Google these days. But any digital marketer ignores Google’s search engine at their peril.

Yet there are still many that are oblivious as to how Google’s Pagerank works. Is this video I explain how PageRank works.

Google themselves defines their ranking system, called PageRank like this:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

Note Google does not talk about domain rank. It largely ignores domains – like wewillraakyou.com – but looks at the value of individual pages like wewillraakyou.com/hoes-does-google-page-rank-work/

Every page has a value merely for existing on the world wide web. When a page links to this page it transfers Pagerank to it. If a page has two links it splits the value it can transfer between these two links.

Google's PageRank formula - makes the web a meritocracy

In other words, links are like votes. But not all voters are equal. Voters that have received many links themselves can transfer more voting power.

Therefor the BBC site, which has a lot of amazing content and to which many people link, has pages with tremendous PageRank. If one of these pages link to your webpage, you are guaranteed to get a major Pagerank boost.

This system has meant that web search acts largely in a meritocratic fashion. If somebody does something remarkable, it tends to rise to the top.

It also means that if you have a mediocre website, content, service or product you will have to spend top dollar to get eyeballs. In other words, just as with social sharing the rule applies for search: advertising is a tax on an unremarkable product.

RAAK is proud to announce our latest project. We helped conceive and then built a creative platform (Guided Collective) that we think might just be a major sign post on the road of change creative agencies are hurtling along.

Ever since Unilever’s crowdsourced Peperami campaign, debates have raged (Brand Republic) about the future of crowdsourcing and its potential to encroach on the domain of agencies. On the other side of the pond, people like Bud Cadell have even wondered if the future needs an agency at all (Whatconsumesme).

Guided Collective is a hybrid between a traditional agency and a crowdsourcing platform. It is driven by a collective of top freelance creatives from all kinds of disciplines that use an online collaboration platform to pitch and collaborate on creative briefs.

The platform is invite-only, so we can't show what really is under the hood of Guided. But included in this post are some screengrabs that we made with dummy briefs & content

One of the main arguments for opening up the creative team is the range of skills now required when seeking to speak to consumers. Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer of US agency Mullen recently blogged (EdwardBoches.com):

“You can make ads with a writer and art director. But if you want to
conceive and execute platforms, utility and experiences, you need IA, UX, technology, connection planning and social media working together. This is a significant change for many agencies but one that is absolutely essential. It may come with pain and resistance but what choice to you really have? The post digital days are upon us.”

But crowdsourcing as the panacea is not without its detractors. It is argued that it does not take into account important agency functions, like account management, coordination (in particular with large transmedia campaigns) and long term strategic planning.

A second criticism is that it exploits creatives in a competitive free-for-all environment, where their chances of winning work are slim and the remuneration is paltry.

The Guided platform tries to address exactly these two issues. The platform itself is invite-only and restricted in size. It aims to have the UK’s best creative talent, across a number of disciplines. From copywriters and bloggers, to iPhone developers, social media strategists and directors.

Guided comes with an in-house account management team. Clients are familiar with that kind of dedicated attention and service.

And importantly creatives can earn money three different ways:

1. One is by coming up with a winning concept.
2. Secondly – and this is unique – part of the budget is ring-fenced for collaborating on a winning concept; to make it even better or by giving input that makes the idea go transmedia.
3. Lastly, creatives can win all or part of the actual production of a concept.

Sam Reid, founder of Guided studied research on crowdsourcing when planning the collective:

“When it comes to solving specialist problems, research shows that numbers are not necessarily the solution. They are great for simple yes/no stimuli but become quickly overwhelming for complex tasks. For this it’s better to have a range of different skills within a smaller network.

We have a heterogeneous but small crowd. This is a doubly good, because besides having cross-discipline inputs, creatives who are part of this crowd won’t feel like a number. And happy creatives means good work.”

So what did RAAK do? We helped Sam conceptualise the Guided way of working as well as the Guided platform. RAAK then went and built it.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

The platform consists of two types of functionality. One set of functionality is community orientated, including what must be the sexiest ‘activity feed’ and member profile pages in any social network. But what really makes this platform significant and unique are the collaboration features.

Guided has bespoke functionality geared to make creatives happy, which is too often neglected. When we conducted focus groups, it was clear there was a concern amongst creatives that their peers could steal their ideas. So we included functionality to allow them to make their ideas visible only to members in other specialities than their own. So a director’s idea won’t be seen by other directors, if they so wish, but everybody else will.

Is the Guided platform perfect?

No. But it’s a very good first take on how we might source creative work to engage with customers on behalf of brands in the future. And we’ll be improving it constantly as we go along and discover more about collective and social creativity.

More about how Guided works in this lovely animation.

You follow me I follow you back?

Don’t be fooled.

If somebody that’s following you on Twitter follows 10,000 other people, don’t expect to have a meaningful tete-a-tete with them. And if you’re following 1,000 people on Twitter, don’t even pretend that you will notice half the stuff they are saying.

Social media is full of misconceptions, confusion and unexamined clichés. That social media is about conversations is one of these. Yes, conversations are part of social media, but this fixation with conversation misses the one core element that makes it truly different from other media.

In truth, the basic rules of media and messaging have not changed at all.

• It’s still perfectly possible for one media outlet to speak to thousands of people;
• We also know that people have a limited attention span;
• And we know that we can’t have a two way conversation with many people at the same time. When I worked for Lycos for instance, celebrities like Natalie Imbruglia were invited to do chats with fans. These chats never really took off. The stars could only reply to one person at a time, leaving many chatters frustrated.

None of these things have been altered by social media.

What has changed is that technologies have dropped the entry-level for publishing or talking. The barriers have dropped so low, that everybody can potentially be a media outlet of both the conversational and broadcast kind. Often whether they become conversationalists or broadcasters depend on their talent.

As we explained in a previous post social media is not new. In the past we also had forms of so called interactive or two-way media; your phone is a good example of two-way media.
Still, conference calls, with its potential for multi-way communication, only form a minute part of telecommunications. That’s because conversations don’t scale well.

But why then the success of Facebook, who just surpassed Google in the US in terms of usage? Because conversations are only a part of Facebook’s picture.

Technology has allowed companies like Flickr, Facebook and Youtube to provide services where users can share stuff. Facebook has been particularly good in turning even the smallest bit of activity on its platform into content, i.e. its Personal News Feed. I ‘friend’ somebody, you find out about it because you’re my friend.

Jeff Jarvis calls it ‘the wisdom of my crowd’. Sam Leith calls it ‘the Reuters of inanity’. Fact is that the stronger the bonds of friendship, the more likely I am to engage with your ‘content’. And like conversations, friendships don’t scale.

Still, everybody has friends – and the most inane thing a friend has done is often more interesting to them than Gordon Brown’s bullying.
This is one of the key differences between Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is asymmetrical. There is no requirement of mutual friending. And the result is that Twitter allows for broadcasting, on top of ‘conversations’. Facebook is now trying to change its feed to be more Twitter-like, with mixed success.

This difference explains why Twitter is not as big as Facebook. Like with blogs, only a small percentage of the population have the drive to say something ánd make it so interesting that it goes down with a faceless audience. As Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace said, if you have a thousand friends, you’re broadcasting, you’re an entertainer.

The problem for broadcasters, and with I mean all broadcasters, is that, unless we’re talking mass live events, their ‘content’ will rarely match a person’s love to natter with their buddies. AT&T is still a much larger company than Google or Time Warner in terms of revenue. The world’s big telco companies dwarf the media, computer and entertainment companies in terms of revenue. Simply because people spend a huge amount of money on their phones.

Which brings me back to my original point. I rarely follow people on Facebook I don’t know or want to know. I don’t normally expect people I follow on Twitter to follow me back. I rarely follow people on Twitter that follow more people than they have following them (I immediately think they don’t have much of interest to say). I don’t get excited if somebody follows me on Twitter that follows a 1000+ other people? What’s the chance they’ll see what I’m Tweeting? What’s the chance I’ll be retweeted?

That’s why for me, the perfect follower follows 300 people while 10,000 follows them. I.e. they get little input but puts out to a lot of people.

It’s almost trite to say that you need to be found and ranked highly by Google. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is very important. Many of even the slowest moving parts of the traditional media and marketing sectors industries, like PR and advertising, now see that too.

Google SERPS now include real time

But for some time now I have wondered about the added value of traditional SEO practices, and whether in fact SEO as a discipline is not in terminal decline.

SEO is being being replaced by another practice. Let me explain why SEO is in decline and what will replace it.

The SEOBOOK blog also recently wondered about the future of SEO:

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious – where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

But they continued:

“In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

* Agency model: people offer services to others for a fee.
* Affiliate model: people gather traffic and funnel it somewhere else for a performance fee.
* Content model: people generate content and make money off advertising.

The last model is, I’m guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now. “

That most SEOs will make their money from content may come as a startling prediction. But not if you consider these three developments killing traditional SEO:

1. Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed;
2. Some activity does not happen on the open web – take Facebook – and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet). Take Twitter as another example.
3. The most successful long term SEO technique is called Linkbait and it’s got little to do with SEO.

Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed

Are you doing eCommerce? Magento is one of the great new eCommerce platforms and it does what you would want SEO wise. Each product has its own page and link and the Title, Headings,… tags are sorted in accordance with SEO best practise.

Matt Cutts, head of search quality at Google reckons Wordpress is the best search engine optimised blog platform and in a video he tells exactly why it is a fantastic SEO choice. Wordpress is of course now the platform of choice for much more than just blogs.

What about other web publishing platforms? I’m no Joomla expert, but as far as I can tell it is also SEO-ready without too much additional effort.

Put frankly, anybody building such a CMS, blogging or eCommerce platform that does not integrate SEO best practice is foolish. See how the mighty Flash is struggling for survival today. There’s only one reason. Search engines can’t make sense of Flash in spite of lots of people trying to make it SEO friendly.

It is fair to say that only when building a completely bespoke website or when significant mods to existing frameworks are done that SEO expertise needs to be on hand.

Some activity does not happen on the open web and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet)

Facebook is huge. Facebook wants its members to be more open and expose their users’ Walls, Status Updates and Photo Albums to the open Web.

Facebook - coaxing users to be more open

But it is a tall order to get users to change their habits when part of Facebook’s success was the exclusivity of interacting only with your crowd.

The majority of activity on Facebook is still hidden from Google and despite Facebook’s best intentions this is unlikely to change soon.

And outside Facebook there are other problems for search engines. Says the SEOBOOK:

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it’s the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

And then there’s the problem of the real time web.

When Michael Jackson died, Google was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Wikipedia for a couple of hours. So far the real time web remains out of SEO’s reach. Yes, Google now integrates Tweets into its results, but are they ranked? No. Then it’s outside the domain of SEO.

Conclusion? SEO is still very important but its reach does no longer cover everything.

The success of Linkbait – Linkbait is not SEO

The highly respected SEOMoz blog recently evaluated the continued significance of Linkbait as an SEO strategy even when other techniques are failing or changing.

“There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.”

But hang on – what the hell is Linkbait? If you’re thinking it’s some uber-complicated strategy requiring sophisticated technical know-how you’re very wrong.

British SEO expert Patrick Altoft explains what Linkbait is:

Linkbait is the practise of adding content to websites with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take various forms, from a unique tool, or a breaking news story, to a well written article to a controversial image.

This simple definition should send bells ringing. No, the definition is not wrong. But what kind of people do you want to hire to create so-called Linkbait? SEO experts?

A good journalist smells of Linkbait. A film director reeks of it. Calling Linkbait an SEO strategy is like calling war a kind of politics. Perhaps it is a kind of politics, but it does not describe the kind of things that happen in a war effectively. In a war you need a different set of skills and mindset than in vanilla politics.

Why does Google like Linkbait?

Because it follows the model of how Google’s search works. Namely that it’s a meritocratic selection engine, which treats links likes votes. Not unlike Digg if you think about it. In short, search is a social form of voting and good Linkbait respects that model.

In this video – which we have posted before – Matt Cutts, head of Search Quality at Google explains Linkbait and how effective and cheap it can be to use.

Linkbait encourages creativity

What kind of Linkbait has proven to be successful? A recent SEOMoz study asked this question in the context of blogs. This is what they found:

* Content is the most important thing to a post, but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
* Adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of (Independent Linking Domains) ILDs by good percent.
* Posts with videos will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
* Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

To summarise it. Content attracts links. And content that’s well organized attracts even more links.

If you want to play the Linkbait game really well you’re going to look to hire copywriters, journalists, photographers, editors, animators, videographers and yes even media-savvy programmers – the so-called creative technologists. (The New York Times recently laid off staff and hired two dozen programmers.)

In short, Linkbait requires content skills, not search engine optimization skills.

But is SEO’d content itself really all it is cracked up to be?

I’m going to – reluctantly – drive one more stake through SEO’s heart. Pay special attention if you are in the business of publishing.

The Guardian recently featured an interesting article on why SEO should not be the only driver in site design. It featured the opinion of Matt Kelly, the associate editor of the Mirror, responsible for their recent successful forays online.

According to Kelly, “users” are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere.

“Often they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. Result? Users don’t care about the websites they visit, and as a consequence, advertisers are less willing to spend their cash to be associated with our content.
–
“We are to blame for allowing ourselves to be talked into believing that search engine optimisation is the be-all and end-all of successful website design.”

But, said Kelly, accumulating increasing numbers of unique users is of no long-term value. It is an “absurd metric that values one visit from one random Google News user as highly as daily visits, for an hour a time, from someone who treasures the content we produce.”

He argued that the “quest for a gazillion unique users from wherever, and for however little engagement, has been responsible for denuding many of our newspaper sites of the great brand and value and character that actually differentiates what we do, from all the aggregators and cheap, worthless news sites out there.”

Yes, an SEO’d site can drive users that don’t know your service or business. But you need to make sure they love what they find.

We all know how important publicity is, especially for a new company without brand recognition.

London Blogger Katie

But in the current media climate – do you know how to get it? Ah yes, bloggers are a sure fire way to get good targeted eyeballs. But have you tried approaching them?

RAAK built a social media ready SEO enhanced website for fashion brand WHERE (Full disclosure: Their designer Laura Villasenin is my partner). It’s a new fashion brand that needs all the exposure – awareness and word of mouth – it can get.

But we knew we wanted it to be featured in one of the huge fashion blogs. They can drive massive amounts of traffic, increase your Google Pagerank, and a blog recommendation carries a lot of weight.

A blog like Stylebubble would be perfect. But Susie of Stylebubble is a very busy lady these days.

But then we read Brian Solis’s piece on the so called magic middle bloggers:

The best communications strategies will encompass not only authorities in new and traditional media but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve, because they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly, in a true peer-to-peer approach. The Magic Middle is defined as the bloggers who have from 20-1,000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail, and its effects on the bottom line are measurable.

Brian made the point that the star bloggers of this world – are so busy, so famous – that they are no longer approachable. And even if they feature your product its often a once off. This is because they are also hard to build a relationship with. And building a relationship with a blogger can take you so much further. Especially if it’s a blogger on the up.

So we went for a magic middle blogger – and it worked big time.

Now I have to confess that RAAK actually did very little in this instance than provide some good advice. Laura did the rest herself. Here is how she got blogger relations spot on:

1. She did her research and found an up and coming fashion blogger – Katie that writes What Katie Wore.

Katie’s blog is popular, she routinely gets 20 plus comments on each post – times that by at least 100 to get an idea of how many visitors she gets to a post. But she’s not in the league of Fashion Toast (yet).

2. She followed Katies’s blog and Twitter account – and listened.

She liked what Katie did, and thought her sense of style was a good fit with her designs. she found out they lived around the corner from each other. Match!

3. She contacted Katie herself. There was no agent involved.

Bloggers don’t want to be approached by marketing and PR types that are far removed from a brand. They want the real deal. If you’re a fashion company the designer is as good as it gets. If you’re a company like Hewlett Packard that make electronics goods, and you’re blogging about photocopiers – it’s probably the photocopier product manager that you want to speak to. Why? Bloggers want knowledgeable people that are close to a product or service. They wan’t a marketese free environment. This is supposed to be a conversation remember.

4. Laura had a good product which she sent to Katie to check out.

A nice face and a great personality might get you far, but if your product is a lemon, don’t waste your time. This is word of mouth media, and the recommender’s (In this case Katie) reputation is on the line.

5. She had a website that could cater for the inevitable traffic rise that a blog would send, and we tried to maximise the viral effect – a social home base.

The site had Wordpress’s Super Cache installed, just in case it was hit my a Tsunami of crazed shoppers. And we installed Tweetmemes Tweet this button. Ride the social wave.

And hey presto, look at the result!

These days, everybody in the marketing and advertising industry is talking about giving people ‘experiences’, rather than shouting at them with advertising messages. Or at least the smart segment of ‘everybody’ is talking about it.

It requires the kind of thinking that starts from the ‘audience’, not from the brand. What do they get out of it?
Seems obvious to me. When I’ve had to come up with a brief-specific idea, I’ve always used 2 criteria to test ideas. Will it keep people entertained? Or is it useful; will it make people’s lives easier and/or can they learn something from it?

Anyway, the shift in focus means that recently, there’s been some interesting examples of ‘experience advertising’. Either online, where it can go viral. Or in real life, where it gives people a fun, exciting,… experience.

A much talked about example of the first is the Puma Index, a fun idea in these drab economic times that links the stock market to some PUMA-wearing models. If the index goes down, their clothes come off. Pretty clever, but a bit boring when the indexes go up.

A good example of the second category, real-life, is the piano stairs campaign that Volkswagen did in Stockholm. Overnight, the steps of a tube station’s exit were turned into piano keys, which made people take the stairs rather than the elevator.

At first it wasn’t 100% clear as to why VW would do this, but it turns out it’s all part of the Fun Theory ‘campaign’, a website dedicated to the idea that fun is the easiest way to change behaviour. Financed by Volkswagen, I presume. As BBH Labs’ Mel Exon puts it

“(I’m) wondering whether brands should stop marketing themselves and start marketing the good stuff they believe in.”

Or, rather than creating new content, brands should start attaching themselves to existing niche content content curators. Sort of like sponsoring, indeed. There’s an interesting discussion going on about content curation Rohit Bhargava’s blog.

And I just wanted to point out a 3rd example, which combines a transmedia approach with good old excitement anticipation. It’s an Uruguyan campaign for Axe, called ‘Day & Night‘, where guys were asked to send an SMS, after the watershed of 9PM, to receive the missing body parts of a ‘naughty’ print ad. A smart, playful way of making your target audience think about you all day long.

And if you want more: 2 days ago @GuyKawasaki tweeted about this BoredPanda blogpost that lists 33 creative ambient ads. Some great work in there from all over the world. Still semi-shouting, but I must admit more than one of those examples grabbed my attention.

Proof once more that people are becoming media channels in their own right. We’re working on a blogpost about why content is now the king it’s always promised to be, so more about later.

A few years ago I had a chuckle when a friend of mine and co-founder of Cow Africa – Donald Swanepoel – told me about experiential marketing and PR companies like Cunning Stunts. Ha ha! Funny name.

Yesterday however, the importance and role of experiential marketing hit home to me.

Everything we do, we do within a framework of our understanding of how digital media has opened up the media landscape to everyone. One of the obvious conclusions for some time now is that word-of-mouth marketing and therefore by extension, product, is key. This is especially true online. Google beat Yahoo!, Altavista and Lycos to be top dog because of their product, despite their competitors’ massive marketing spend.

It turns out that this principle holds true in a wider sense as well. We recently met Jonathan Baskin, ex-brand manager and author of Branding only works on Cattle. He argues that even brands like Nike were first built around superior product before anything else. Digital media just throws this truth in much sharper relief.

Anyway, Gerrie and I were in Brussels yesterday where we dropped in at Demonstrate (their website does not do them justice) under recommendation of Stefaan, copywriter and blogger behind Knotoryus. Demonstrate is one of the largest experiental marketing ‘agencies’ in Europe.

They occupy a huge warehouse on the northern outskirts of Brussels. One part of which is just that, an area called The Platform that’s full of props, toys and gadgets – the tools of their trade. Half a football field of the stuff. I kid you not.

And then there is a creative hub, off to the side, where strategy, account management and the creatives reside.

But what we found truly interesting was the chat with Kate Stockman, Demonstrate’s creative director.

Kate speaks fast. No need for her to ponder or um and ah, because she’s been there and done it.

“We don’t do PR stunts for PR stunt’s sake. Publicity is not why we plan an event or an action. We plan it around customer experience. “

If it generates publicity, it is not an unwelcome by-product, she ads. But it’s not the aim. The aim is to get the customer to try the product. If it’s a drink, get them to taste it. Simple.

Or it could be added value. She explains how they rigged a mobile bar where punters could learn how to pull the perfect pint.

On the web all the talk is about how to move away from advertising to product or if not that to content, i.e. offer some real value and sponsor it. Is this not exactly what Demonstrate is doing in the streets?

Also consider this. Online, music and video are ubiquitous. It’s easy to copy information and content. Being there -  the live experience – will become more important and not less.

This week a flurry of interesting bits of news flashed across my screen. Like this tweet:

US study of PR hiring – knowledge of social media, blogs SEO, now as important as traditional skills http://bit.ly/En6rF

…and this one

@MajorPlayerJobs: RT @DanGoldgeier PR agencies poaching creatives? ;- Interesting trend, see my take here http://tinyurl.com/lm5pq4

…and this one today…

@TessNeale: Is it time for companies to hire a Social Media Administrator? http://is.gd/3kOTl | by @dmscott – we have, and highly recommended it.

The holy grail: Creative technologist Aaron Koblin

Media guru Jeff Jarvis predicted a short while ago that the upheaval that has beset journalism will also hit advertising and public relations. That process now seems well on its way.

“Advertising is failure” he says.

I myself produced a presentation, now a year old, which asked – Will PR inherit the social media earth? (Included at the end of this post)

Because if PR is about public relations (and not press releases as Brian Solis puts it so eloquently) then it should be the part of the industry geared to make most of these social technologies that lie at the heart of digital media.

But this outcome – the paramountcy of PR – has been all but certain. Simply because of inertia. Many organisations never change until they have to. And then it’s too late to change.

The problem is part generational. I have been asked to speak at large PR firms on social media and PR (what I thought was a detailed analysis and compelling argument why PR must embrace social media), only to hear the head of brand PR state: “We can’t believe what we read on the internet!”, and “We Brits will never give up on newspapers, we love them!” Ahem! I had to take two steps back and start again.

But it’s clear, underlined by the tweets above, studies and blog posts doing the rounds now, that some are asking the questions about the best way to staff the agencies, businesses, and organisations of the future.

The agency model in itself is coming under pressure, as the internet does not like middlemen. In the one link above David Meerman Scott elaborates on Jim Stewart’s idea and explains the need inside companies for the role of the social media administrator.

…there is a need for this new role, much like in the late 1980s we developed the need for a System Administrator (Information Technology department people responsible for computer networks) and the 1990s brought Webmasters (responsible for company websites).

I see the Social Media Administrator not as someone who develops content and participates in discussions on social media (although they could certainly have a business related personal blog or twitter stream).

This is not the senior leadership role for social media in an organization but rather the coordination point for company activities. The role would be someone who manages and provides consistency with an organization’s social media presence. Of course, to be done well, the skill set of a Social Media Administrator would need to include deep knowledge of tools like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

I think this is wrong. The social media person inside needs to be senior. How else could they get things done?

But I digress. I will deal with the slow decay of the agency model in another post. (We, by the way, don’t call ourselves an agency, we plug-in to you.)

There will still be a need for advice and cutting edge development and production skills. There is a role for PR and Ad people if they embrace the change brought on by digital media.

But why are PR firms hiring creatives from ad agencies – as one tweet alludes to – you may ask? Should they not be looking for a spotty programmer, or even better – the glamorous spotty programmer 2.0, aka: the social media expert? (We’ve also come across the term creative technologist recently. Presumably a ruby-on-rails genius that moonlights in an electro band and directs music videos when he has a spare moment. Aaron Koblin springs to mind).

Lorraine Barker, Head of PR at Major Players – a big marketing recruitment firm in London – claims that PR is looking for the ad creatives:

In the last 18 months we’ve seen a substantial increase (200%) in client requirements for Planners and Creative Directors (At PR agencies)…

To keep from being drowned out in an increasingly crowded media space, PR agencies are evolving. Creative Directors are being drafted in to inject fresh thinking and bring a new dimension to campaigns, while Planners are delivering consumer insights and developing rigorous strategic frameworks to underpin the big idea. The result is a focused PR offering that stays on brand, on tone and most importantly – makes people stand up and take notice.

So they are looking for archetypal coke snorting ideas factory & story geniuses with a certain je ne sais quoi?  Turns out no.

The newer roles are different from the traditional planner or creative you might find in an advertising agency and while some PR agencies are happy to consider above the line candidates, many don’t want the chin-stroking musings of the storyboard creative.

We’ve found that the most successful among those we’ve placed are candidates who have had a high level of involvement in the creative or strategic planning process – not only candidates from account planning, but account handling, research & insight and new business. However, it’s equally about the candidate’s hunger and passion for all things media and the latest comms channels, trends and cultures.

Mmm… ok. It seems the PR agencies are looking for content producers, experts, researchers and social media fundis?

Brian Solis – who has written extensively about the need for change in PR – defines his future roles for a new media team:

There is no doubt in my mind that eventually all PR agencies and consultants will follow suit and transform from publicity firms into New Media marketing and communications firms rich with in house and contracted content producers, digital sociologists, research librarians, community managers, digital architects, connectors, and industry experts or strategists.

Brian goes on to define what each of these roles would entail, it’s worth a read.

The reason why researchers, trend watchers and industry experts feature in both Brain Solis and Loraine’s list is easy to explain. Digital is bullshit allergic. You have to know your client’s business inside out. You have to keep up with the medium.

You can’t tweet for a client if you don’t tweet yourself.

PR ranks social networking, blogging skills highly

But of course the other categories Brian mentions will be key as well, including the content producers and what he calls digital architects (creative technologists).

Now research – also mentioned in an above Tweet “Study: New PR Hires Must Blog, Tweet & Use SocNets” confirms what he said:

In what marks a dramatic shift away from a mainstream-media approach to public relations, PR hiring managers in the US now say it is nearly as important for prospective hires to have social media savvy as it is for them to have traditional media-relations skills, according to a survey by iPressroom.

All very exciting, all very scary.

What we can be sure of is that come September 2010 neither PR nor advertising will look the same as now.