Flack's Revenge

Three New Tools to Build Blog Moxie

There are a couple of tools I have started working with that seem to have lots of potential.

One is a sharing widget from MadKast.  Seems to be an easy way to add viral and social components to your blog - via the nifty the green icon that you now see at the top of my posts, which enables easy sharing via email or social bookmarking / meta news sites.

Please, I encourage you to feel free to Share Away! (and let me know how you like it and if it is not working for any reason).

Another is BlogCatalog. Originally just another directory of blogs, they have recently added social networking features that make it easy to connect with other bloggers and build site traffic.

They're doing some interesting things in the area of blogging for causes, see the  Bloggers Unite in Acts of Kindness video.

I have signed up, am exploring functionality, and will likely be writing more about it.

One other thing, with all the buzz over social media releases and meatball sundaes, I have (admittedly belatedly) updated my news radar, which you see to the left.

I produce my news radar using MySyndicaat, which makes the process of adding news to your site extremely easy.

Die Social Media Release Controversy, Just Die

This is getting good - did everyone see the dust up between Brian Solis and Greg Jarboe over Meatball Sundaes, er, make that social media releases?

It started with Jarboe's amusing SearchEngineWatch post Is the Social Media Release a Meatball Sundae? (Seth Godin's definition of two great ideas that don't go together well).

Brian Solis issued a point by point rebuttal here.  Both gave as well as they took.

I think the controversy is becoming a little tired and self conscious.  I know I have contributed to the noise because I have blogged about social media releases quite a bit (I was pretty skeptical at first, but more recently have warmed up to the idea and have been introducing it to clients).

But I try to stay pragmatic and avoid getting too religious or doctrinaire on this or any topic.

I have always maintained that we (the PR world at large) and our various tools should not be the main story.  I am a techie at heart, but there is a real danger of killing things with technology kindness.

Reading through some of these posts takes you down a rat's hole, an acronymicom of complexity, and there is a lot to be said for keeping things simple (see my post PR Blinded Me with Science)

Anyway, I digress. At the end of the day, the %#@!!&&  things either work or they don't.

And it should not be that hard to prove (not impossible anyway, this actually would take some effort): just launch the same news through different distribution mechanisms (standard wire service, social media distribution) and different wrappers (standard press release, SEO press release, social media release) and see which of the combinations come out on top, by various measures:

1) Coverage in mainstream media

2) Coverage on news sites

3) Coverage on blogs

4) Search engine rank

5) Coverage on the social news sites

Lastly, and most important (but hardest to measure): which moved the needle the most in terms of business outcomes, e.g brand awareness amongst buyers, or sales lead generation?

To be really scientific one would need to be clever in designing the experiment so that the coverage could be traced back to the specific source.

PR's Existential Meltdown

In what could be "A Tale of Two PR Realities," we have conflicting views of the state  of the PR profession, courtesy some of biggest and brightest names in the business, in recent pronouncements from the UK.

Will McInnes, blogging after the Nov. 20 NMK confab, said the world has changed, PR agencies haven't .

 

The event, which gave an opportunity for the UK-based PR industry to put its insecurities up for discussion on a very public stage, covered all the different areas that make the world today, and way forward more uncertain for PR: encroachment of digital agencies and advertising on PR's turf, defining PR's role in a disintermediated, social media dominated world, and the question of how we measure results.

The wrap on the NMK blog included the following excerpt:

Chair Roger Warner of Squiz and Velocity Partners kicked off the discussion by remarking that in the four years since he’d left corporate PR, the landscape of the industry had become almost unrecognisable. ... What exactly has happened?

What’s happened, Will McInnes responded, is disintermediation. This is quite an issue for PRs, since their business, for some time, has been ‘mediation’: placing themselves between the client and the world at large, feeding messages to the established channels. Nowadays, though, everyone’s got access to their own printing press, and - if they have the ability and/or the authority - an audience as influential as those of mainstream journalists. At the same time, companies have felt the pressure to start exhibiting a little more transparency. Dell, for example, has moved from a position where it churned out products from its secret R&D labs and refused to comment on complaints about customer service to a point where it’s a very different company. The Dell blog allows members of the public to hear from and talk to senior marketing and product managers, while the Ideastorm site takes suggestions from customers and turns them into product offerings.

Then, in roughly the same time frame - and as I mentioned in one of my posts last week - Sir Martin Sorrell of advertising giant WPP said that "revenues from PR are growing strongly and... " the  reasoning behind it is to do with social networking and the web.

 

So, you have head of a large advertising group - WPP, for which PR is presumably only a drop in the revenue bucket - giving props to PR, due to social networking and the Web.

 

And a raft of agencies having an existential crisis over the same.  What gives?

I thought I might do a reality check on the health of the PR biz by checking out the reported numbers of the publicly held firms.  I quickly realized that this is no small task, and in any event does not tell you much as far as fresh data because YTD quarterly filings of large conglomerates (most agencies that are public are operating units within more diversified marketing and advertising driven entities) do not break out results by line of business.  Oh well.  I now see why stock analysts make so much money, and real reporting is not easy.

Anyway, not one to give up too quickly, I did unearth this relatively recent press release from the Council of Public Relations Firms, which reported the following results of a survey last month:

More than three-quarters of public relations firms in the survey reported revenues ahead of last year’s 3Q numbers. Additionally, nearly half (48%) of participating firms claim that bottom lines will likely best their original 2007 forecasts; 27% of participating firms expect revenues to come in below their initial forecast...43% responded that they expect budgets to increase [in 2008]

Other findings from the survey included:

• More than half (53%) of survey participants author a blog
• A majority (57%) of firms have or follow best practices related to working with bloggers

Perhaps the glass really is half full, and the current and emerging landscape offers opportunities as well as threats.

PR Golden Turkey Awards

Well, it's that time of year, and I have a sudden hankering for some golden fried turkey.

Yes, that's right, delicious turkey deep fried to a golden crisp in a three phase, 1000 Amp combustible turkey fryer; none of that healthy, scrawny, skinless oven prepared turkey you lightweights love, thank you.

 

In celebration of the impending holiday, I thought I would follow up my Gaffies Awards post with the PR Golden Turkey Awards (yea, I know, I am the 100th person at least to do Turkey Awards), a celebration of real bonehead PR maneuvers.

 

My head hurts from such weighty ruminations on the future of PR and I just thought I would give my readers (and me) a break, by poking fun at some fairly safe targets.

 

So without further adieu, here are this year's nominations - please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions as well as the ones listed here.

 

Dog Won't Hunt Award

 

Whither the state of the apology?  It used to be that apologizers could not actually bring themselves to clearly, directly and unambiguously apologize to the offended parties.

 

Now, people go overboard on overwrought apology tours.  I blogged about the disastrous consequences of Imus' apology tour.  Some of you may have caught Dog the Bounty Hunter's apology whistle stops on Hannity and Colmes and Larry King (YouTube video here), where he alternately cried and groveled regarding the outing of his racially charged comments that were recorded in a private conversation with his son.

At one point he gushed that he would gladly commit suicide if it meant redemption - at which point radio DJs Opie and Anthony promptly spearheaded a petition campaign among black listeners to encourage this.

 

Larry Craig TMI Award

 

(Note: Larry is also up for the Will He or Won't He Step Down and Let Me Explain this Until I am Blue in the Face awards).

Closely following the Apology Tour in ill-advised tactics is the Explanation Tour.  The week that Larry Craig (the Idaho Senator busted for soliciting gay sex in an airport) was hitting all the talk shows, I think I learned more than I ever needed to know about bathroom habits and "wide stances" of large people that result in tap dances that are decidedly not a gay mating ritual.

 

Hand in the Cookie Jar award

 

There is nothing quite so unseemly as the spinner very publicly caught in his own web.

 

Elliot Spitzer played the game masterfully as AG but the picture is quite different now that he is governor.  Talk about squandering PR capital and a swashbuckling, crusader (mostly positive, at one time) image. 

Back when he was NY AG, there were wildly mixed opinions about whether his targets were based on opportunism and blind ambition or the result of sincere concerns.  Many wondered if he was playing to the media with all his AG pursuits.

Now that he is NY governor the answer seems clear - if he and his team were all about the PR effect, and his concerns were calculated, he likely would not have gotten caught up in the Bruno sting mess as well as the immigrants' drivers license debacle  - an issue that just won't go away, and that is catching democratic front-runners Hillary and Obama up short.

 

Have You "Friended" a Journalist Today?

Are social networks the next frontier of media relations?  Based on conversations with a number of PR colleagues, most that I know are still feeling their way around and erring on the side of caution, which goes to show that we are not all opportunistic pitching machines.

Protocols are evolving with no clear cut rules.  What it means to be a friend on social networks, and the etiquette of "friending" - these topics are still very much up for discussion. 

Also, there is the effect that "the machine," i.e. technology has on us... see my earlier post about how it is in some ways changing the nature of friendship and relationships.

Journalists have said time and again that their preferred mode of interaction with PR people is to build trusted relationships that result in the productive exchange of info over the long term.

So what better forum to burnish PR / journo relations than these forums? Regardless of profession, people are increasingly taking to the social networks to make connections and get the info they need.

Despite the lack of clear cut rules of engagement, I think there are some general rules of thumb that we can all do well by heeding:

Consider the mores of the specific social networks you frequent; some might be more appropriate for professional relationships and others all about "fun."

So, get to know the social networks you are interested in, first and foremost listen and watch and learn, and build out your profile, explore functionality and how people engage.

Avoid gratuitously requesting friending - the best standard is that if the journalist recognizes your name and has had positive experiences with you then it is fair game to engage.  Otherwise, if they are obviously seeking information or sources that you can help with, sure, why not.

The topic of social networking and PR seems to be very much on people's minds, here are a couple of posts I caught today:

Brendan Cooper's post If Social Networking is PR the Revenues will Show it referenced Sir Martin Sorell's (head of advertising giant WPP) comment that PR revenues are growing due to social networking and the Web, and also observed:

Put bluntly, social media isn't an adjunct to PR - it  is PR, or will be before long.

In Good Use  of Social Networking Sites in Business, Harry Chen blogged about an entry from another site in which the commenter observed that social networks have become a kind of portable contact management system and PR machine:

I’m feeling pretty empowered, because on the day I launched my new company, about 800 key contacts in my network were immediately notified when I updated my profile. It was better than a press release, because the people who really mattered were the ones that were first informed.

More Good stuff on Social Media PR

I spotted several excellent posts over the past day or so.  Business Pundit blogged about Understanding the Stochastic Success of Social Media Tactics (Sounds kind of geeky, I remember the term "Stochastic Processes" from my years in engineering school).

At any rate, the post echoes some of the things I said about the challenges of predicting hits and the success of viral campaigns in my post Welcome to the New, User generated Non Stop Media Whipsaw (although I came at  the topic from the angle of emergent behaviors). 

It takes the idea a step further by offering specific recommendations about how to plan and budget for social media campaigns, and what kind of results (or likely lack thereof) to expect.

 

Greg Verdino outlines some basic ideas for using social media tools and engaging online communities in his post SMPR to the power of 7 squared.  There is even a downloadable, annotated presentation in PDF format, 7 Principles for Successful Influencer Outreach. 

 

Lest I be accused of being PR myopic, I reference a post below that takes the journalist's perspective:  On MediaShift IdeaLab, Jay Rosen's post Thirteen Beat Reporters to Build Social Networks documents an interesting experiment:

My idea was to run parallel experiments to see whether "beat reporting with a social network" is a viable pro-am method in journalism-- or just an attractive concept.

I said I was trying to recruit at least 12 beat reporters and get their editors on board with a simple proposition...

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

I felt the only way to find out was to try it for a year, with different beats in different locales and different editorial settings. Now I'm back to announce that twelve beat reporters--and their editors, plus the bosses above them--have agreed to do just that.

He lists the journalists, and their publications and their beats, and continues:

You can follow their progress over the coming year at beatblogging.org, the compendium site that is also launching today. David Cohn of NewAssignment.Net will edit it.

It sounds like an interesting approach, and just goes to show that journalists  like the rest of us - regardless of profession - are gravitating to social networks.  I'll be writing more on this tomorrow.

Living off the Grid in Tech PR Land

So the NY Times had this piece (Too Much Information? Ignore It) about Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, who apparently is  a darling of tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen and other Silicon Valley types.

The main message was that you can save lots of time and work more efficiently by reducing multitaksing and information consumption.

The author is also an entrepreneur who has just said no to IM, text messaging, blogging and constant email (incredibly, he has outsourced the job of wading through his email to Indian workers).

Although voracious reading is an occupational hazard in PR (i.e. if you want to be any good at it), I have often pondered how much extra time I would have available if I just ignored all, or a good portion of the stuff I feel compelled to read every day - and Western civilization likely would not fall.

I think these thoughts as I embark on a two day business trip without a cell phone (coincidentally, I just lost mine, it is not a sign that these ideas are taking hold, at least not consciously).

It is a very unsettling feeling.  You tent to feel naked and anxious when these things happen, not unlike the feeling you get when you lose your broadband connection at home or can't get to email.

I doubt I am alone in experiencing intense anxiety when cut off from various forms of electronic communications.

Could a new DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) manual entry be not far behind?  Or perhaps a novel murder defense?

Stand well back, I am in no mood :)

The New PR Way - Mad Scientist meets the Scientific Method

 

What will separate the winners from the losers in the New PR Way is the willingness to take risks and experiment.

 

We need to become part mad scientist, part hacker and full time students of changing communications methods and shifting media landscapes.

 

What works best?  What new tools can be leveraged?

 

I know most people - myself included - quickly tire of philosophy and prognostication.  We want to know what works best and we want it now.  We have been trained to be time aware and not waste time.  We have been trained to maximize biilable hours and stick closely to carefully crafted plans.

 

Who has time to endlessly surf social networks, blog, micro blog, explore virtual worlds, etc. etc.?
And how do we convince clients to allow us to allocate part of the PR budget for these purposes?

 

Isn't this vast Web supposed to fulfill our every information need, and serve up "just the facts" on demand?  Aren't there people out there who have all the neat answers and are posting these to their blogs as they speak?

 

Perhaps I should just shut up and tell everyone what works best?

 

Ah, were it so simple.  The world is changing so fast and so radically that I would be very suspicious of anyone who claims to have it all figured out.

 

Just like any good tinkerer or scientist, you need to see what works in your playing field, for your employers or clients.  You need to hypothesize, test and verify results.  In short, you need to use the scientific method.

 

It is really really hard to figure this stuff out without the hands on past.  You need to make the time and take the risks.  You need to be an intrepid explorer and aggressive learner.

 

Last week, PR took a beating via Chris Anderson's post, which was covered pretty much everywhere, including on this blog.  The lesser known but equally important story is that email took a beating.  It is full of pitfalls and quickly becoming less effective.  Continue to play most of your chips there and don't explore the new communications tools at your peril.

 

So I don't have quick answers for today, but one thing I will say is that if you are in PR and you are not blogging, spending time on soclal networks, understanding how search and SEO works, and mastering RSS, you will soon be toast.  It sounds exhausting and actually almost impossible in light of all other routine stuff that needs to get done.  But do it well and you will be doing wonders for your career, your employer and / or clients, even though all the experiments won't work and some of the avenues of inquiry will be blind alleys.

Media R Us

I have a new post on the Fusion forum blog that kind of rounds out my previous discussion of a Publication of One (referenced below in my last post and introduced here back in February).

Not only is the world of media turning into a figurative Publication of One... i.e., the Web at large (and, secondarily, search engines, folksonomies and aggregation sites), but we - everyone who participates in online conversations and social networks - are becoming the media.

Read on!

Heavy Meta (PR Megatrends)

It was a sobering experience, and just goes to show you how fast things are changing, and how much they are changing.

Wanting to do some market research on the cheap, I asked my friend, a CTO for an online media startup, about his reading habits, and more specifically, how he stays up-to-date on the latest technologies.

 

Nominally, I wanted to find this information out for a new business pitch targeted to a vendor of high performance computing and storage solutions.  But I guess I was also curious in general, and a little afraid of his answer.

 

As it turns out, Scott no longer relies on the enterprise trades or really any print publication.  Instead he spends most of his time on Popurls, a mother of all meta sites.

Popurls gives you an at-a-glance look at the top stories and buzz of the day by showing what is being featured on sites like Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Google News, TechCrunch, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc., in a very digestible and easy-to-read format.

 

I pointed out to Scott that this site just aggregates information, and the articles he reads there, and relies on to stay informed about the latest Web infrastructure technologies, originate from some other source, be it a blog or publication.  This seems obvious to me, and likely would be to others in PR, but to him it was a minor detail and the name of the publication or byline was almost incidental.  In fact he could not think of the name of a specific blogger, reporter or publication that he favors.

 

I discussed this phenomena - the obfuscation of underlying sources due to how information appears online - in my post A Publication of One, although the example cited there was Google.

 

Although this was just one person, it seems obvious that PR people need to factor in news aggregation and sites such as Digg, Techmeme, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Popurls in the PR mix - what do these sites mean for the reading habits of our target audiences, and how do we deal with them in our PR programs?

 

The above is one glaring example of the impact of social media on tech PR.  Here are some secondary trends to watch out for:

 

Transparancy Giveth what Transparency Takes Away

Much has been written about how blogging is driving a new ethos of corporate transparency.  This is all over PR blogs and I won't belabor the point here (please refer to the famous book Naked Conversations about this trend).

 

To PR people, what this has generally meant is an upending of the communications equation as information becomes much harder to control.  It is harder than ever to stage the release of information and successfully execute exclusives or contain crises, as examples.

 

If you read this blog you know I am an eternal optimist and always try to find the silver lining in the clouds.

 

The silver linings here are the following:

 

Transparency is in general a good thing for businesses; it helps build trust and humanizes corporations.  Is it possible that the move towards increased transparency will lead to more of a laissez faire attitude towards customer testimonials?  When most of the denizens of Corporate America are buzzing on blogs or social networks about the products they use at home and at work, it becomes harder to justify the cloak and dagger secrecy most are sworn to uphold with regard to the press when it comes to the vendors their employers work with.

 

The flip side of the diffiiculty in keeping secrets is that those who can keep a secret will be at an advantage.  People want to keep their blogs buzzing and one step ahead of the pack, and if you have some juicy info that others just can't have, and you and your team have the discipline to keep the cards close to the vests, well that is a recipe for keeping people tuned in and guessing.

 

Who will be Your Next Agency Hire?

 

A top media strategist?  Someone with both agency and client-side PR experience who has the journalist rolodex and can write and speak well?

 

Increasingly, agencies will be utilizing new technologies and hiring people that can elevate digital content and help establish on line presence: people with SEO, Web design and database development and analysis skills.  This is already happening, and the forward thinking agencies are adding these people and bringing tech further into the PR mix.`