Shel Israel and Geoff Liv­ingston’ are com­ment­ing on Dave Fleet’s ques­tion: “Where’s the line between PR pros par­tic­i­pat­ing in social media and PR pros exploit­ing it? Who draws that line?”

Recently I pre­sented Social Media to 50 PR pro­fes­sion­als on a panel at a Busi­ness Wire break­fast. This morn­ing I attended a PR Newswire event on Social Media. I also work in a startup that shares office space with a lead­ing PR agency. In each case, it is reveal­ing how wide the gap remains between Social Media users and the PR indus­try. For exam­ple, ques­tions this morn­ing included:

“what’s the dif­fer­ence between del.icio.us, blogs, and RSS?“
“what’s the dif­fer­ence between Twit­ter and Netvibes?”

Besides shak­ing my head while Twit­ter­ing these remarks, the obvi­ous real­iza­tion set in that there’s no way around it: you have to use the media by becom­ing a blog­ger, micro-blogger, social book­marker, social net­worker and so on to under­stand it. There are no short­cuts and it takes time to become part of the com­mu­nity. Unfor­tu­nately, career PR pro­fes­sion­als seem to be stuck in a “let me pitch this to you” one-way broad­cast mind­set and they’re try­ing to fig­ure out the angles to keep on doing the same thing using Social Media. And they will get burned: Sorry PR peo­ple: you’re blocked.

Another obser­va­tion is that the newswire ser­vices are teach­ing about press release opti­miza­tion for search engines. That’s fine, but it doesn’t get at the root prob­lem of under­stand­ing how to inter­act and com­mu­ni­cate with bloggers.

I agree with Fleet: “As a com­mu­nity, let’s develop a best-practice social media 101 train­ing pro­gram.” Please check out his Social Media Train­ing wiki.

Tech­no­rati Tags: shel israel, dave fleet, geoff liv­ingston, chris ander­son, social media, ethics, pr

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