Is the Nexus of PR and Social Media Found in Content Strategy?

Content Strategy, PR & Social Media: the Holy Trinity of Brand Marketing

Your content strategy is, at its core, a messaging platform.  That platform should ideally dictate both your social media and PR programs: after all, the main difference between social media and PR at this point is simply one of channel.  Whereas PR looks for earned media in traditional media outlets – newspapers, magazines, television – social media looks for earned media on social media outlets, which is to say the personal Facebook page or Twitter stream of an individual.
The line between PR and social media has been getting incredibly blurry over the past 8 years, and that line continues to blur as we marketers look at brand advocates and online influencer strategy and try to determine where the line is between PR and social media.  The advent of content marketing has arisen in parallel with content curation tools being the trend for the everyman, and that trend is our signal as marketers: our content strategy needs to identify influencers and spur engagement, regardless of channel.  Your Mom is being trained by vanity and conversion metrics that are the same metrics we social media marketers have been using for years to measure our social media ROI.  This means that we are in a new age of influencer marketing, and it’s one that rolls up pretty neatly under a solid content strategy.
My PR colleague Marc Cowlin and I have long been talking about the convergence of social media and PR as marketing disciplines; at a foundational level, both disciplines have the same basic program structure.  That groovy little infographic that fronts the post sums that up.
What makes PR more powerful than social media is, quite simply, reach: media outlets like the New York Times have a lot of eyeballs for us.  But what makes social media more powerful than PR is the share: by spurring engagement on a social channel, there is an infinite number of people that can be reached by your content.  In a perfect PR program, the actual article that was written is then shared on a social channel, leading to increasing return; and in a perfect social media program, a reporter decides to share or write an article about your campaign.