Juice Digital, Making you Digitally Famous

We’ve often been called a social media ‘experts’. What does that mean and how shallow a concept is it?

The word ‘expert’ signifies a total understanding, a successful track record and someone who has made all the mistakes along the way. That is something that is not really possible in a media landscape that is rapidly shifting.  We explore and use social media from the perspective of digital public relations but we would not claim ‘expert’ status.

Social media expert or guru status can only be awarded to a tiny group of individuals, people like Digg and Facebook founders Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerburg.  They’re about as close as you can get to a social media ‘expert’.  Anyone else claiming expert status is in danger of making themselves appear ridiculous.

Any decent Digital PR practitioner worth their salt understands social media along with other practical applications like buzz monitoring, blogs, SEO, email marketing, semantic mark-up: even basic HTML. The best marketers and PR practitioners are fluent in all media and able to develop ideas and content that engage and are re-used.

Great Digital PR itself is not about the platforms it uses, but about the ideas.  Any platform or technology are merely enablers and, while an understanding of the platform is important, good practitioners will already have mastered social media.

Mastery of social media is not that unique or valuable. It might seem so at the moment because of a current shortfall in digital literacy: it will not last that long.  I know this seems obvious but I think it needs to be restated:  what is valuable is the ability to produce strong PR and marketing for tangible results.  It’s that simple. And those results are increasingly measurable with buzz monitoring tools.

It can be argued that digital literacy will become more universal and the digital divide will disappear. It can even be proposed [http://thefuturebuzz.com/2008/09/21/just-how-large-is-the-business-worlds-digital-divide/] that an educated person’s ‘literacy’ – in an educated sense – will come to include programming and an overall capability in digital media. We call people who are proficient in mobiles, PCs and game consoles geeks. In reality, they are just more ‘literate’ than other parts of the population.

Marketing managers and PR professionals should be fluent in creating successful ideas and working with media and tools on all platforms.  That is the basic requirement of success in Digital PR. This fluency will include what is possible in Web application development, from strong writing, blogging,  branding campaigns, working in modern CMS and email marketing platforms, SEO, semantic mark-up, manipulating digital images, through to podcast technology, relationship-building and everything in between.

Demonstrating proficiency with the tools themselves is a necessary but relatively widespread skill.  That’s not where the talent exists: everyone should have a basic knowledge of working with the tools in the digital toolbox.

Creative agencies that are slow to adopt skillsets and immerse themselves in new techniques have always been susceptible to sudden exits. Remember the first Apple Mac and how typographers and reprographic professionals initially decried its capabilities? Marketing and public relations agencies need to be digitally literate.

The bottom line is this:  thinking in terms of tools or platforms is the wrong viewpoint (even within Web-based tools) as their use is only limited by your creativity. An educated person in Digital PR should not claim to be ‘expert’ in all the fields and skillsets required but they should have mastered what is palpably becoming a vital part of today’s marketing communications platforms.