The future of PR & Social Media – Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

One of my students posted the following tweet as part of a class assignment.

Obviously I think social media is important to PR but the nature of the message was enough to get me to click through – after all, wouldn’t we all want to know “Just how important?” (My compliments to Elizabeth, good choice of persuasive language?)

The article on the other side was about trends in 2010, specifically about how social media is no longer a fad and the writer backs this up with some “cold hard facts” using google trends. The originaition of this chart was actually from another writer (isn’t social media grand in its ability to share content…?) who contends searches for public relations have been declining since 2004 and interest in social media and social networking started to pick up in 2006 gaining ground in 2009 where they passed the number of searches for public relations. The original author actually uses Google Insight to prove his point.

But something didn’t seem right in all this so I did some checking of my own. I verified their results but messed around with a few other Google tools to see what others were searching for within the context of each search and it became obvious. Not “Public Relations” but “PR” is what folks search for. So I ran the numbers again and guess what I found?

In the context of the original conversation it seems that we are light years away from social media overtaking PR and PR may even be gaining just a bit although when you evaluate the last twelve months both seem flat.

So now what?

A few takeaways from this:

• The value of social media is huge but so are the risks. Two authors sharing information which isn’t completely true passed along by a student. Elizabeth, by the way, is a dynamite student, one I would hire in a heart beat to be part of any PR team. She wasn’t alone in her tweeting of this article. My research shows it was tweeted about a dozen times, most recently back in May.
• Don’t always believe the stats especially when they are someone else’s interpretation of those stats and most definitely when they have something to gain by those stats supporting a specific position. Look at the raw data yourself. Back in my corporate PR days I worked for an old stats guy who was always quick to challenge just about any stat I tossed out which supported my argument. I had to make sure nothing could negate them, most of all other stats.
• Always make sure the stats provided to support an argument are even reflective of the position. Full disclosure on the stats above – I would argue both are really a bit of a red herring.  Yep, I proved folks search for a lot of things. But can we extrapolate from a person’s search that something has value or that a particular tool or strategy is going to overtake an industry?

Thoughts? Challenges to my stats/position? Please post them below.