It’s interesting that PR has reinvented itself from being once about boozy lunches and plenty of glad-handing to taking the lead in defining the path that advertising needs to follow. Perhaps, even, PR is the new advertising? (as one wise old owl once said).

Reaching out to young consumers through social networking services and social media is just the “done thing” in advertising circles these days, but few are actually able to move beyond “getting it” to “doing it”.

John Bell (Ogilvy PR) provides a useful insight into why that is the case.

Many brands and businesses want to take advantage of social media - influencer outreach, activation of networks or communities and radical visibility - to fill out their marcom plan. They are not ready, or maybe even suitable for organizational change. They need to launch a product, boost sales this quarter, or demonstrate that they are innovative. We see this with many consumer package goods companies (CPGs). They are sales machines. Often their brand leadership is transitory at best. The brand managers move from brand to brand within the organization as they conquer challenges. Short term gains - those that get measured in no more than a season or a year - are the key driver.

In his blog Digital Influence Mapping Project  he alludes to 3 presciptive suggestions to encourage the adoption of social media within brands through “the other way” (ie the short term halfway house within agencies focusing on dabbling with competitions, facebook etc that will create the necessary internal momentum):

1. It lets brand marketers try some of the techniques of social media and activating WOM before going any deeper - a move that might require business or organizational change that just won’t happen at the brand marketing level.

2. “Light experimentation” is shared across the organization, across brands in a typical multi-brand universe. The stories of social media success spread through the halls pretty quick. This pushes the learning across more brand teams.

3. It forces a measurement discipline on WOMM. These marketers live and die by KPIs (key performance indicators). If the WOMM effort doesn’t compare well to their advertising or PR metrics, it’s going to be hard to repeat 3 times (sometimes institutional memory is short in a multi-brand marketer just due to the churn of brand leadership and teams)