Tyranny of the Social Media

By Niran Adedokun

One of the greatest challenges that traditional Public Relations practice currently faces is what I call the tyranny of the Social Media. I don’t know if it’s just me, but things have moved so fast from those days when, as reporters, we relied on those fixed land lines provided by the almighty Nigeria Telecommunication Limited (NITEL) to get our stories across from all over the country. I mean, that may look like yesterday but a couple of things have happened since then.


After the days of the telephones, we moved into the fascimile (fax) era (I wonder if anyone still uses that now). Shortly thereafter, we took to the electronic mail otherwise known as email. It is interesting to note that when the email appeared in the mid 1990’s or thereabout, it was the best thing that many of us had seen at that time and the email did not fail us. Before long, it put a final nail on the coffins of the fax machines, or so it seemed, even as it relegated the use of postal services to the background. In Nigeria, It would appear that these two organs of information dissemination are yet to fully recover from the blow dealt them by the email!

What we have witnessed in the past nine years is, however, still a wonder to me as a journalist and a Public Relations consultant. It, certainly, still seems like yesterday when representatives of Public Relations agencies travelled across the city on a regular basis to drop off well-enveloped press releases in newsrooms. Well, the revolutionary email has saved account officers the trouble of that entire journey, so much so that from the comfort of their offices, they could email press releases and follow them up with a simple phone call. Work has got that easy and we really have seen quite a lot of technological inventions.

The dramatic change that has happened in the nine years after American Mark Zuckberg launched thefacebook.com from his hostel at the Harvard University has, however, shaken our world more than anything else that the art of communication has seen in three decades! What was launched in a student college room in 2004 has now become a tool which players in the boardroom cannot afford to do without. Facebook hasn’t just become inseparable from business and pleasure, but in its tow have also come siblings like twitter, YouTube, instagram and millions of blogs among others. LinkedIn, which was launched a year before Facebook, has also risen in popularity. Now we all have to pander to the social media craze, whether we like it or not.

 Traditional newspapers modes are withering, television channels cannot be all traditional anymore; otherwise they face the threat of declining audiences.  Meanwhile different social media platforms have continued to prosper in followership. At the moment.  Facebook users are said to be about 1.1billion monthly while there is an estimated 101 million tweets daily!!  The implication of these is that traditional news media  organisations may have to depend less on reporters as anyone could report for them from anywhere in the world. As a result, PR practitioners and allied professionals must consider using the social media as effective communications tools for their clients.

 And many clients now understand this. It is amazing how every client that comes the way of the Public Relations Consultant these days insists on the use of the social media in their campaigns, even when some of them do not even understand what they are talking about or how it would all turn out. But they are right anyway. Apart from the fact that the client is king in our situation, clients actually have a reason to believe in the efficacy of the social media as a PR and marketing tool.

I can give you three reasons that I have found in favour of the social media as effective tools for public relations straightway. The first is that they provide a two-way channel of communication in real time. They take us from the "drop-the-speech, talk-at- them" situation, which traditional public relations offered us to a situation in which we can get instant-audience feedback. You have a conversation with the customer and can actually benefit from ongoing improvement or refinement process while you do your job. They make your clients appear "hip",  "trendy" and more personable and may invariably appeal to the emotions of customers and get them attached to the brand.

The social media have also saved us from having to wait for the clock to go all round a 24-hour period to be able to hit our target with whatever information we have for them. With the social media, information is relayed possibly all over the world within a few minutes. This could however have a flip side, especially in the management of crises. An organisation now has to respond much faster than the traditional golden 24-hour window hitherto available to it.

The social media platforms provide an incredible volume of information for immediate personal and business use. We are, truly, in an information age!

The social media, however, also pose a lot of challenges to the PR practitioner. One very worrisome problem is the fact that information unleashed on the social media is usually out of the control of even the giver of that information, as it goes viral. It is also possible that some part of the information contemplated by the professional may be lost or distorted in the course of its transition from hand to hand. Lastly, it would appear that practitioners have no way of auditing accurately the impact of campaigns done on social media currently, a situation which may be counterproductive.
What I find most problematic about this social media phenomenon however is that every practitioner, who plans to be on top of his art and give his client the best at all time, must not just be familiar with each platform, rather, practitioners must actually master them. In this totally connected world that we live in, the social media are a set of tools that one really cannot do without, whether or not one likes it,  and that is what I consider the tyranny of it all!

Now the ball is in your court. What has been your experience with the social media? Port in and let's keep the conversation going. Have a great week, people, and remember to post your comments.