Heavy Chef: PR gets social

I said in my last post about World Wide Creative’s Heavy Chef Sessions that they were fast becoming my favourite networking/info sharing event. I love the spirit of collaboration and fun (along with the Perdeberg wine and Corona ).

So I was waiting with bated breath for the first session for 2009, which was held earlier this week. Entitled Social Media and the new tools of PR, it did not disappoint.

That feisty female Beverley Merriman was first up, chatting about the building blocks of social media using a cool Lego analogy. Very useful if you have come across things like Twitter, Facebook, bookmarking sites and so on, and are not sure how they all fit together.

Grab Bev’s presentation here.

Next up was Catherine Luckhoff, talking us through the Rocking the Daisies Campaign, which is one of the finest examples in South Africa, if not further afield, of a truly integrated campaign.

Being the first to do anything, you are constantly learning on the job, and Cath generously shared a lot of the learnings the MANGO-OMC crew underwent.

You can download her presentation here, and it is far too detailed to do justice to in a 300-word blog post (I work with the MANGO-OMC team so know just how much went into the campaign). I’d recommend taking a look, and instead will share with you my biggest take-away.

What I was left with, is that in a country as varied and diverse as South Africa, you absolutely need to use as many channels is necessary and appropriate to reach your market. It’s so easy to dismiss the smallish number of bloggers or Tweeters or people with broadband in South Africa. But it is clear that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts – the buzz in each channel starts cross-pollinating and contributes to strengthening the overall impact of an integrated campaign.

Last up was Kaz Henderson from Total Media, taking us back to basics with an overview of traditional PR tools, and how these are changing and adapting. One the one hand my feeling is that the more things change, the more they stay the same: writing press releases news article style so that busy journalists can do a cut and paste job; it being all about relationships; knowing what people are saying about you (so much easier nowadays thanks to the tangled social media web and tools like Brandseye).

It’s important to keep up to date with the new, bright and shiny; but don’t throw the basics out the window, and be realistic about which tools you need to use, and in which combination.