Why content is still king in good PR - part 2

Thanks to social media, I often get that quesy feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in my inbox.
2.0 allows anyone to post whatever they like on blogs, Twitter and discussion boards with no quality control whatsoever. Twitter is the classic example. The advice from Twitter pioneers to the uninitiated who couldn’t understand why they would want to be bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from random strangers they had decided to follow, was essentially that you have to jump and experience it before you will get any value from it.
No one can possibly read all of these messages so why would you want to receive them? The answer, ultimately, is content. Amid the avalanche of dross from the morons who will follow anyone on Twitter and post meaningless trivia about their lives and their pets, there are real nuggets of extremely valuable information. The reason it is valuable is because the sender has put some thought into and decided it would be of interest to like-minded people.
Some examples. Mashable, the Social Media Guide, tweets like crazy all day. The last time I checked this afternoon they had posted 17,243 tweets and they have 1,187,803 followers –it will no doubt be more by the time you read this. The reason so many people follow them is because they are delivering a really valuable service sharing with the world everything they are finding out that might interest those of us into social media.
Andrew Ballenthin is another social networking guru who is worth reading. He has more than 500 LinkedIn connections and his blog attracts between 4,000 and 7,000 pages views every week because what he writes is worth reading.
Dublin Airport has started Tweeting as well. What a fantastic idea to send instant messages to those who are interested about flight delays. I follow BBC Scotland because it gives me regular news updates all day. A restaurant in New York tweets table cancellations. That way, regular customers might get a last minute reservation, and chances are the place is full every night. That’s a sensible business use of Twitter and those who follow that eatery value the information they receive.
Bit of a conflict of interest here, but my partner in Breen Media’s specialist insurance and reinsurance public relations firm rein4ce, Mairi Mallon, tweets as reinsurance girl. In just over two and half months of tweeting, she has attracted 99 followers (and it would be many more if she didn’t delete many of the nutters who follow her at random). It’s not an astronomical amount, but she is very successful. Why, because in her tweets she regularly shares information that is of genuine value to those in the industry and rein4ce is communicating regularly with influential people in our market.
That, at the end of the day, is what separates those public relations practitioners who are using social media innovatively from the pests. Those who perform a real service to their online community by trying to help out by posting high quality content are worth reading and following. Their reputation as experts among their peers grows, traffic to their websites increases, and the long-term effect is more contacts and more business.
So the lesson for PR people remains the same: even in the fog of social media, content is still king.