Why Everyone Is Now a PR Person

As social media continues to grow, it’s worth reminding everyone on your team that today, “public relations” isn’t just for the PR Department. Today, everyone is a PR person. Now, anyone has the ability to influence his or her followers, and it’s time we realized the responsibility that involves.

We live in a world where a housewife in Oklahoma can bring down a major corporation just through the momentum of social media. Everyone today has a megaphone that reaches enormous numbers of people – it just looks like a mobile device.

That’s why you need to remind everyone on your team that the messages they send out can have an enormous impact – for good or bad – when it comes to your business, church, or nonprofit.

The simplest inappropriate tweet can create a public relations crisis, and likewise, positive social media messages can turn around a negative story. That’s why you need:

1) A strategy for how to use social media effectively.
2) A meeting (or series of meetings) with your leadership and influencers to teach them the importance of what they share via social media.
3) A vision for how social media can impact your business, church, or nonprofit.

And don’t get me wrong. Working with professional PR experts is more important than ever.  But also, your team’s understanding of the role they play in getting your story out there can make an incredibly important (and positive) difference. Because of social media, I actually know organizations where a secretary has more influence than the CEO, a guy on the loading dock has more influence than his boss, or an intern with more influence than her supervisor.

Today, because of the power of social media, everyone’s a PR person.

Social media doesn’t care about titles, seniority, or salaries. So find your organization’s influencers and get them on the same page.