Flack's Revenge

Introducing the Mob Formerly Known as the Audience

Online media, blogs and 24 hour cable news have all contributed to drastically compressed news cycles over the past few years.  Now, new tools that give people ways to broadcast updates in real time or near real time are threatening to further quicken the pace of communications, challenging PR pros like never before.

This will force us to sharpen our skills and tools when it comes to measurement and monitoring.  Not all chatter is created equal.  How do we know if the chatter about our brand is idle, or if it will stick and spread virally?  Gone will be leisurely planning cycles and reactive campaigns that stretch out over days.

E.g., there was lots of coverage of the disastrous Sarah Lacy interview of Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest conference last month (see Audience Atwitter... on the Muckety blog).  The sidebar to the news was the role of the mob formerly known as the audience that twittered their dissatisfaction in real time.  This part of the story crept into the headlines and colored coverage of the main topic.

Peter Blackshaw  of ClickZ wrote a nice piece several weeks ago on the subject (Customer Service Meets "Lord of the Twitters"):

Tools like Twitter remove virtually all barriers to saying a product, call-center rep, or whatever trips you up sucks. If you feel it, release it!

Your mobile device is just as good, if not more cathartic, than your computer. Just say it! Write before you think! Don't wait, not even for a second. Oh, and don't waste time with fluff. You have 140 characters to work with, period!

If you're on the receiving end of such feedback, it's hard to dismiss or ignore...

Also, Matt Dickman had a good post on the topic just yesterday on the Techno//Marketer blog.  He wrote about the challenge and offers some excellent advice:

Search engines are indexing content within minutes, micromedia outlets like Twitter are delivering messages real time and blogging allows mass communication to happen with very few barriers. Rumors and leaks will never go away, but companies now have the tools to be the first to provide key, relevant information...

..Here are a couple of ways that I can see companies adopting new technologies to communicate more quickly and more accurately in the future (and some are already doing this today):

• Sales force empowered by micromedia. Go beyond names like Twitter and Jaiku to the core technology behind those services. Imagine a company that has a private version of Twitter to communicate in real time with their sales force. Price changes roll out in seconds, questions are answered quickly and customer service follow up is prompt.
  
• Internal communications blog. Some companies are using internal-only blogs, but more will definitely start. This is a great way to create a two-way dialog and communicate information and changes quickly and transparently. Once information is in the open, everybody feels like they're on the same page.
  
• Targeted blogs. Companies will start creating blogs that are focused on key audiences (investors, customers, employees) and communicate to each in a more open and rapid manner.
  

Tidbits from Vacationland

I am on a lighter than my typically light posting routine because I am on vacation here in Southern Florida this week.  Since I started blogging, my vacation routine of vegging in the sun for countless hours digesting the Sunday NY Times and other reading material has morphed into the same mixed with a not-too-strenuous dose of contemplating and formulating blog posts.

I'll let you be the judge of whether the result is brilliance or perhaps sunstroke-induced.

Forbes on WPP

The April 21 issue has a great article about Martin Sorrell and WPP, the global ad and PR conglomerate.  It might not be that groundbreaking for anyone who works for any of their PR properties (which include Hill & Knowlton, Ogilvy and Burston-Marsteller).

But I found it to be a fascinating story of how a bean counter built a global powerhouse - mostly through acquisition - and of how a big company can be agile and alternately balance and leverage the sometimes competing interests of its many and varied brands.

Going Viral, via Sunday NY Times

Streeter Seidell, front page editor for CollegeHumor.com, wrote an amusing and informative article last Sunday: I Waste People's Time Online....  It speaks to the futility of guessing and predicting which online content has a chance at going viral (a subject I have blogged about quite a bit).

Each day we wade through an ocean of submitted items, selecting only 30 or so to publish. In an age when Web sites increasingly rely on complicated algorithms to rank content, we pick our stuff by hand. This very newspaper said of us in 2007, “No one can accuse this site of not understanding Web video.” So we sure seem to know what we’re doing, huh?

To be honest, though, we don’t. Nobody in the online content business truly does.

...There are certain common traits of viral content that loosely guide our selections — it should be short, easily understood, universal, nostalgic — but for every hit sharing those qualities there are millions of similar failures, not to mention stuff that simply defies explanation. A 36-second video on YouTube of a doe-eyed Japanese girl silently staring into the camera before giving the peace sign has a baffling 2.9 million views. The Internet is a strange place.

Stepford Wonks

As I said in my post Influencers Gone Wild in the Blogosphere, it would only be shrewd to consider that there might be hidden allegiances and agendas amongst the bloggers and other influencers you seek to approach for coverage.

But it takes brilliance - dark brilliance - to stack the deck of these allegiances and exploit them to the advantage of your communications program.

That is exactly what the Pentagon and Bush administration have done, according to a front page article in the Sunday NY Times: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Agenda.

According to the article, first the Pentagon and then the State Department courted and groomed key "influentials" such as retired military leaders to influence TV coverage of the Iraqi war progress and policy. 

The arrangement was convenient for all involved. The network and cable news broadcasts got their military expert talking heads, the Bush administration got to propogate their messages and talking points through proxies, and the military analysts got access to the highest levels of the Bush Administration (as well as occasional TV consulting fees.)

Very profitable access, as it turns out, since it turns out that these experts also generally had close ties to military contractors - entities which could trade on and otherwise exploit the access.

Talk about an unholy alliance! 

How compliant were these analysts? According to the article:

...In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access....

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said....

...Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions...”

...Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena...”

You have to hand it to the Bush administration.  If they were half as smart formulating and implementing policy as they were Machievallian in influencing the headlines, we'd be in a much better place as a nation today.

Although the effort was deemed to be a sucess by a number of measures, one has to ask what was gained in applying lipstick to the proverbial pig, as they did.  We don't seem to be much closer to getting out of Iraq, I think most people still consider the policy and execution of it to be misguided, and real lives have been at stake.

Pitching Bloggers: Hold the Spin

There are many important differences between pitching tradional media and bloggers.  As I mentioned in my post Influencers Gone Wild, many bloggers have hidden agendas:

A danger in treating bloggers as just another breed of media or analyst misses the point that many have inherent conflicts of interest.  For starters, most have day jobs since blogging pays the way for a rare few.  Some consult, start companies, and take stakes in ventures related to the fields they blog about.

Most bloggers are not professional journalists.   Those journalists who do blog are not necessarily constrained by editorial guidelines.  It is hard to know where allegiances lie; and bloggers may well care less about the news of the day, depending on the focus of the blog in question.

A journalist who also blogs for her publication (a major online site geared towards marketers) came in recently and did a seminar for Fusion PR, the agency I work for, on blogging and pitching bloggers.

She said that another important difference is that bloggers prefer to come up with their own story lines, and not get recommendations on angles.   They apparently want "just the facts."

As I am writing this I am trying to reconcile the advice with my own experiences in pitching bloggers, and am wondering if it holds water or is too general a statement.  It would be great to hear about the experiences of others.

If it turns out that this true it would provide important validation for social media releases, which aim to serve up just the facts of news in a social media optimized format.

Endangered PR "Species" Continued

In my post Death of Media Relations I started a death watch list of "old school" PR tools and tactics that look increasingly out-of-step with some of the changing realities of these times.

Although I did not specifically call out pitching trade show briefings ("Not Dead Yet - feeling Much Better!" as the Monty Python crew might say), I do think they represent an "evil" that is sometimes unfortunately still necessary.

My post Trade Show Briefing Two-step on the Fusion PR Forum blog goes into more detail about the ins and outs of PR trade show tactics.  It includes a link to a recent ClickZ article Marketing to the Media about a journalist's wish list of PR tactics related to trade shows (and beyond).

I invite you to check it out, and share comments on any PR tactics that you feel are getting a bit long in the tooth.

When it Comes to Naming, Mind your Ps, Qs and TLAs

They say that using  acronyms as names is the last resort of the unimaginative.

In the Network World article Who's Minding the Acronym Store? Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler describe another reason to take care with acronyms: the potential confusion that can happen when the same initials mean different things (as one commenter correctly pointed out, initials are only acronyms when the letters spells something that can be read or spoken as a word, e.g. SCUBA, or LASER).

Here's an excerpt from the article:

For instance, consider the acronym “MAC.” For a LAN-oriented person, MAC means the “Media Access Control” layer, which used to matter before the entire world migrated to Ethernet. At the same time, voice-oriented folks thought that MAC referred to “Moves, Adds, and Changes.”

Yes, of course,  not to mention the Apple MAC.  And ATM the telecom protocol vs. ATM cash machines.

I don't know how often this happens, however I do know that a number of my clients over the years have wanted to use ill-advised initials and acronyms as names of products, features or technologies.

What has been your experience?  What is your vote for the worst acronym in tech (tough contest, I know)?

The Thrill of the Startup in Tech PR

I sometimes reflect on the types of client companies I enjoy working with and promoting.

No question, there is the "prestige factor" that comes from working with the largest companies.  The press are more open to pitches involving these companies and sometimes even beat a path to your door.

With startups and smaller companies come smaller fees.  You need to spend lots of time educating the media and explaining why people should care.  You almost always need to provide some form of validation out of the gate (in the form of customers who will talk, generally) before anyone will take you seriously and even entertain taking a briefing, let alone writing.

There is generally little room for error.  Often, the venture is betting most of its marketing dollars on PR.  At the end of the day your program will work or it won't - and if it doesn't, there is a fair chance your client will be toast.

In short, there is not much space between rubber and road when it comes to PR for tech startups.

Looking on the positive side, although there typically aren't lots of niceties such as deep marketing and admin. support benches on the client side, there is also less of a chance to get caught up in big company politics (unfortunately there are some smaller companies that act like big companies in all the bad ways).

Absence of an established brand means the opportunity to build brand and not be associated with preconceived notions and the baggage that is almost always there in some form or other.  Shiny and new is inherently newsworthy, it really rocks.

There is no greater opportunity to prove your mettle and put your skills to work - to move the dial and make a real difference in your client's success.

In short, there is no substitute for the thrill of the startup in tech PR (no worries, I love my large clients too and think any agency should have a balanced portfolio, as with thrills often come gray hair and volatility).

The Changing Nature of Influence

I have been writing a lot about about this topic recently, and did not realize I was missing a debate that was raging in this arena until I read the MediaPost Online Spin article: Peers vs. Influencers: What Marketers Need to Know.

Writer Joe Marchese said:

On one side is the idea that there are sets of people who exert a significantly greater amount of influence over others, typified by Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" argument. On the other side is a far more chaotic theory that rejects the concept of "influentials," stating instead that no one person has any more influence over creating a trend than any other person, put forth by Duncan Watts. If you are a marketer, the outcome of this debate should have you sleepless at night. How can you plan your campaign if you don't know whom to target?

In the Tipping Point, Gladwell categorized different types of hyper connected people, and describes the effect each can have in starting and spreading trends.

I have not read Duncan Watts, but I did allude to the roles of peers and chaos theory in influencing what songs catch on and become hits, for example in my post Welcome to the New, User generated, Nonstop Media Whipsaw.  In a nutshell my post said that peers interacting in complex systems make it difficult to predict which songs will become hits (this was proved in an experiment).  Given the same selection of songs, different ones emerged as hits over a number of trials based on how the first listeners voted in each.

Marchese cited a recent Fast Company article on the topic that prompted his post. He concludes:

What marketers need to do is operate in a world that is somewhere in between Duncan's chaos theory and Gladwell's influencer model. Keep in mind that everyone has influence, but not all influence is created equal -- and it's impossible to buy enough influence to create a trend that society isn't ready for.

Like Marchese, I think influencers and peers can both be important.  The tricky part is that social media and all types of online applications and websites are adding to the complexity of determining influence, and what will catch on and spread.

First, not all peers are created equal and some are becoming influenecers in their own right in the online world.

Areas as diverse as Digg, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and many different types of social networks give people ways to interact and build reputations and profiles - i.e. exert influence.  The WSJ article Wizards of Buzz awhile back described the phenomena pretty well for the social news sites.

Each system has its own rules, population of users and nuances, making it more difficult for the marketer and PR person to determine where to focus efforts and who to target.

One thing is for certain: with all its challenges and complexity, the changing nature of influence represents one of the most exciting frontiers in marketing today, and I look forward to coming back to this topic and exploring it further.

Death of Media Relations

As long as we are picking our figurative deaths (recall Tom Foremski famously proclaimed the Death of the Press Release) I thought it might be time to declare the Death of Media Relations.

Not as in the sense: "the media are not important, and it is no longer important to have productive relations with them."   But perhaps in the sense of: "it is time to send up a flare to question the 'usual' PR approach to the media."

I believe Press Management and Media Relations in the classical sense are quickly becoming obsolete.

I can anticipate my colleagues and clients stewing over this and wondering if I have lost my marbles.  Am I throwing in  the towel and saying the field is without relevance?

Not at all, just pointing out the obvious.  With news cycles dwindling to zero, and media becoming more fractured and democratized, old school strategies like making the time to meet with journalists and discuss pieces of news over extended periods of time seem ever more quaint and slow.  Journalists have their hands full just keeping up with an increasingly competitive marketplace for information.

Plus, they - just like everyone else - are finding new ways to get info, making the term Press Management seem like an oxymoron (yes, it is perhaps the "dirty secret" that some very good journalists get very good tips and story ideas from PR folks). 

But these days, with the pace of things, the results of "old school" PR look a day late and a dollar short.

Does this mean we give up on the battle of taking the time to get to know journalists, and educating them about issues of importance to our clients and employers?

No, it just means that the job is that much harder now.  And, given some other trends I have cited... the erosion of the 4th estate as a separate institution, and the fact that the same journalists, bloggers and analysts often wear a number of hats and play different information economy roles - I think journalist relations should become part of the larger universe called Influencer Relations.

What are your thoughts?

Next up on the "PR Deathwatch List"

Media Tours
Embargoes and Exclusives
Media Kits

PR for PR, and (social media releases)

I have not done an exhaustive survey,  but get the sense that the social media release is not registering much beyond a small number of forward thinking PR people and marketers.  I also feel that the PR profession  has some work to do in convincing people that we have strategies for dealing with the shifting and rapidly evolving world of media that lead to the results our clients and employers are seeking.

I'll share a few recent anecdotes.  A person who writes news stories and blogs for a fairly high profile online publication recently delivered a seminar for the agency on blogging.  She deals with lots of PR types, and is very savvy about tech.  After the seminar, a couple of us took her to lunch and I had the chance to question her a bit about the changing world of PR, including social media release (SMR).  The latter topic drew a big blank, zippo.

I got the same reaction when speaking at length about the SMR with a tech savvy A list blogger recently - someone who also deals with lots of PR and marketing types.  Ditto for many others, over the past months.

Finally, I introduced another agency - an events and online ad / marketing shop - to one of our clients.  We had worked with this agency before on a project at another account, and the collaboration had been a big success by many measures.  Examining the sell sheet the account person sent over (and copied me on) was a little like looking in a mirror - they apparently offer a number of the same  types of social media services that my employer does (yeah, shame on me for not being more informed about this earlier).

The larger point - and what I alluded to in my last post, Agencies "Trash Talk" over the Social Media Prize - is that we as a field cannot afford to be the proverbial "cobbler's kid  without shoes."

We need to demonstrate that we have vision, and can show leadership in the new Unmediated Media era.   Again, as per my last post, some people (albeit those with their own axes to grind) say leadership will not come from PR agencies, but from others, such as dedicated social media shops.

This vision needs to be grounded by proven methods.  The SMR has somehow gotten caught up in this and become emblematic to many of PR's response to a changing world.  As such, it is a great big Pinata and an easy target for criticism.  The jury is still out on the SMR; some intriguing cases have been documented, but as I said earlier, there is by no means a groundswell of support that I can discern beyond real early adopters.

In short, we need better PR for PR - not empty hucksterism - we need to constantly be questioning, innovating, testing, documenting and promoting results.