See public relations differently: How the NAACP uses social media to publicize a movement

Perception is everything, and in today's 24/7/365 global news cycle, it can change in an instant. For public relations teams navigating this often turbulent environment, the insights gleaned from social media can be a guiding light—illuminating how your audience feels and how you can best position your brand in response to timely issues and breaking events.

The human behind your social handle is the most public and agile person in your organization, making the partnership between them and PR vital.

Vanessa Mbonu, the NAACP’s Vice President of Digital Marketing & Communications, shares how social works in lockstep with the PR team–aligning on everything from the seemingly mundane to the highly polarizing and using insights from social as a barometer for broader brand awareness efforts.

The last few years have been transformative for the NAACP. What sparked that transformation?

VM: The NAACP is the first and largest civil rights organization in the US, so we work to achieve equity for the Black community and other communities of color.. In the Spring of 2020, those communities faced what we call “twin pandemics:” COVID-19 and Jim Crow era-racism.

Of course, COVID-19 wreaked havoc on all our communities, but in the U.S., African Americans and Asians were bearing the brunt of the crisis as there were greater health and economic risks.

At the same time, unfortunately, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd sparked a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which reopened a very important national conversation about the history of unjust policing in our communities.

As if this was not enough, there was misinformation spreading about both the coronavirus and the U.S. presidential election, specifically targeted toward the Black community.

America was undergoing a reckoning where people really started paying attention to the Black community, our plights, our needs and our issues.

This increased the need for trusted voices more than ever. It was so important that the Black community had an organization and leaders to turn to for trusted, credible information. We saw ourselves as the providers of such information.

How would you describe the NAACP's approach to social and PR before the events of 2020?

VM: Pre-pandemic, we took a traditional approach to PR: Write a templated press release with our standard logo and boilerplate, pitch it to journalists, follow-up, light a candle, say a prayer, follow-up some more, repeat.

This approach leads to a lot of rejection, so you really have to keep at it, but fortunately, we were getting traction.

We approached social media similarly. We planned and scheduled content, went through approvals, posted, engaged with our audience, and then repeated that several times a day.

During and post-pandemic, business as usual was just not working anymore. So we married the two to become social media relations.

What exactly is social media relations?

VM: We're an advocacy-based organization, so we always want our message to reach as many people as possible. I spend a lot of time on the internet, trying to figure out how the NAACP can get from point A to point B quickly.

With social media relations, we can make our statements faster, bolder, louder.

I personally noticed what would turn into our social media relations approach on MLK Day in 2019, when former Vice President Mike Pence compared President Trump to Martin Luther King Jr. Regardless of your political opinions, those are very different people, so we Tweeted a quick reaction, calling it an insult to Dr. King's legacy. The engagements speak for themselves.

This is an insult to Dr. King's Legacy. https://t.co/tJ6jTfweIJ

— NAACP (@NAACP) January 20, 2019