Sarah Palin: going rogue again?

On his CNN Politics blog this week, Peter Hamby reported that Sarah Palin has decided not to immediately replace her media spokesperson, Meg Stapleton, who has resigned effective the end of this month to spend more time with her family.

As a professional communicator who left a challenging (OK, not quite that challenging!) corporate position so as to be able to spend more time with my own young daughter, I completely understand – and admire – Stapleton’s move.

What I don’t understand is the second part of this story: that Palin has decided not to immediately replace her media spokesperson, since, in the words of a reported “source close to the Palin family” mentioned in Hamby’s post, “the family, which takes pride in their Alaskan identity, are comfortable speaking in their own voice.”

Bad move.

The, let’s call it, “difficult” relationship between Sarah Palin and the mainstream media is no secret. She clearly feels the media are biased against her, and the media clearly enjoy exploiting every contradiction and foible she exposes.

But can she just decide to “go rogue” and refuse to play ball?

Glynnis MacNicol weighs in on mediaite.com:

"Crafty or crazy? Palin is, obviously, one of the most talked-about women/politicians on the planet, and a lot of that talk is not nice. I suspect “responding in her own voice” actually means one of two things. Palin has decided that answering questions from actual reporters is very last decade and is either going to let a combination of her Fox analyst appearances and the take-no-prisoners Fox News PR team speak for her (one can dream). Or! She has concluded, and not without good reason, that her one-way Facebook mouthpiece is all the public access she requires. It’s worked so far. Why bother with the fourth estate at all when all you need is a catchy Facebook note to derail an entire health care bill."

Well, I think that might be an option if you only ever need to reach people who are already listening to you. Palin’s following on Fox News and Facebook is inarguably considerable – but if her agenda includes any kind of debate at the national level, she’ll soon find that you can’t make much progress increasing the size of your following when you only ever talk to the people already listening to you.

Reality check interlude: we have to remember that Palin’s camp hasn’t said she doesn’t intend to talk to the media at all – just that she’s not “immediately” replacing the spokesperson who would facilitate making that happen.

If Palin does indeed want to persuade Americans to see the world as she sees it, and to support her as she works to make changes at the highest levels of the government, she will need to gain some support from people who don’t support her now. Those people may not follow Fox News, and are unlikely following her on Facebook, unless they do for entertainment value.

Social media has indeed been the catalyst for an evolution in public relations, as it allows organizations (and political figures) to talk directly to their audiences better than ever before. But the beauty and the challenge of social media is that it requires you to have access to your audiences before you can talk to them. They have to self-identify as being interested in hearing from you, to a degree at least, or their friends have to.

If you want to reach people who don’t already agree with you, or who aren’t aware of you, you need to go where they are to reach them.

And, like it or not, Ms. Palin, many of them are consuming mainstream media.

Facebook is making us the gatekeepers

In PR, we have traditionally referred to the mainstream media as "gatekeepers;" since they controlled the most credible mass media, they decided which information was communicated to mass audiences, and in what way.

Now, Brand Republic is reporting this week, Facebook may be turning the tables.

Research by Hitwise suggests that Facebook has become the fourth-largest distributor of online news content, behind Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

That means that, increasingly, we are deciding what news to read online based on what our friends recommend. Our friends -- and we, to our own followers -- are becoming the gatekeepers who determine which news outlets get the audience.

Given the competition mainstream media are facing from online sources, they need readers/listeners/viewers now more than ever; and, if Hitwise's findings suggest a trend that will keep growing, social media users will play a major role in determining which ones survive.

Feeling empowered?

Think mainstream media is dead?

Think again.

Yesterday morning, many Winnipeggers (myself included) started the day with a bit of a challenge: how to get ready for work/school/whatever with low (and in some cases, no) water pressure. According to this morning’s Winnipeg Free Press, at around 7:30 a.m. a power outage affected three of the city’s water pumping stations, which caused the problem.

In my house, our first instinct was to check our own pipes (no problems). Second: check the street to see whether there’d been a water main break (no apparent problems). Third: call 311 (busy signal: uh oh, this must be a big problem – it’s not just us if 311 is overloaded). Wait it out, and rinse off.

But others had different ideas.

Call CJOB!

As I drove in to work listening to local radio station CJOB, I heard morning show host Richard Cloutier (who’d been at work long before the water problem) say that at the station, they’d noticed a momentary problem with the power, then their email system went dead, then the phones lit up with calls from listeners with shampoo in their hair – I’m sure both wanting to know what was going on, and wanting to complain about it.

Don’t discount mainstream media

These days, social media is the darling of PR conferences, webinars and professional development meetings; it’s our shiny new toy. There are people in our industry quickly re-branding themselves as social media experts, ringing the death knell for mainstream media, and recommending all-social media communication strategies to their clients.

For some clients, whose audiences exist uniquely in the online and social media space, that might make sense. But for the rest (who, I’d suggest, constitute the majority out there), it’s important not to ignore the power mainstream media continue to have to communicate with our audiences.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a social media evangelist, and I firmly believe that its tools give us unprecedented access to certain segments of our audiences – both for sharing information, and for building relationships. From my perspective, social media opens the door for PR to do what it has always strived to do: to establish and nurture two-way relationships with its audiences (at varying levels, of course).

But social media isn’t the be-all and end-all for strategic mass communication – at least, not yet. Many of our audiences are not using Twitter, and aren’t influenced by those who do. Many (it seems, more and more every day) distrust Facebook. Many don’t read blogs, or spend much time online at all. Many others do participate in social media, but aren’t able to determine whom to trust – and turn to mainstream media to make sense of it all.

These audiences rely on mainstream media, among other more traditional communication channels (e.g. calling customer help lines), to inform themselves about the issues that interest them. And as long as they do, good strategic PR will continue to take advantage of those means of reaching them.

As more amazing and revolutionary technologies come along, smart PR people will engage with them, will investigate them, will understand their strengths and weaknesses, and will figure out how to employ them to help clients reach their communication objectives.

But the really smart PR people will always remember to go where their audiences are.