Flack's Revenge

Chasing the Viral Holy Grail

As I said in my post Rethinking the PR Pitch and Campaign:

What this boils down to is that the objective for your next campaign might not be to snag that briefing, series or briefings, or exclusive...

I also posed several questions, one of which related to the types of content you have or that can be generated to support the campaign.

Here, many people go down a rat hole that I call the viral trap.   Everyone wants to chase the holy grail of the You Tube video or viral Web site that catches on and spreads like wildfire.   Of course, precious few do go viral and become wildly popular.

Here it helps to remember some basic laws of marketing, business and also some cold realities that dictate how ideas catch on and spread.

First, as I have blogged previously, it is well near impossible to predict in advance what will become a hit.  Research has proved this.  There are complex systems involved, people are unpredictable, etc. etc.  That does not mean that you cannot boost the odds of going viral, and that there aren't common elements to popular content.  It just means that, all things being equal, it is still hard to predict what will rise to the top.

Second, your content probably does not need to go viral to call the campaign a success.   Assuming you are interested in some business result and not just trying to entertain a lot of people, the laws of ROI say that the return - in terms of increased traffic, name recognition, Web site registrations, sales, however you measure it -  has to be greater than the investment.

What you do need to do is consider the audience you are targetting.  You hopefully will have some kind of mechanism to monitor the progress and success of the campaign.  And you do need to consider what types of content or Web destination will be interesting enough to become popular amonst your target audience and help you achieve your business results even without any viral explosion.

Fighting PR's Public Relations Problem

Floyd Norris had a nice article in the NY Times last Friday about the state of the so called "death tax" New Life for the Death Tax.   Unfortunately he (probably quite unintentionally) took a broadside at the PR profession in the process.

He wrote: "Perhaps the greatest public relations coup of this decade was the persuasion of millions of Americans that repealing the estate tax was a populist cause."

So here we find ourselves again (see my earlier post: PR Wars and other Problems).  PR and its practitioners by association are positioned as devious instruments of persuasion.  Why not call it a policy coup, or ideological win for the right?  Although there may well have been PR people in the mix there somewhere, there were also politicians, political advisers, and other enablers (yes even some journalists) who probably ran with "death tax" versus "estate tax," thus framing the issue in a way that sounded populist.

In fact it was the right wing wordsmith and consultant Frank Luntz who coined the phrase "death tax" - not some PR firm or consultant in the traditional sense (see What is the Death Tax? on Nobosh Answers).

For those who think I am being too sensitive, please remember that one of the missions of this blog is to encourage better PR for the PR profession.  I wave the banner for PR, educate and help defend it when needed.   It is not called Flack's Revenge for nothing.  And, as I have written before, PR gets knocked through association with wars, coups and problems.

Floyd Norris is in good company, I don't mean to pick on him.   I thought I'd try a little exercise and search a periodicals database (Factiva, in this case) to determine how often the following offending phrases were used in the media over the past year:

PR coup: 674
PR problem: 501
PR war: 372

I haven't read through each article  (I do have a day job), but I would venture to say that in none of the cases was any blood actually spilled, or governments toppled.  And probably precious few problems that were caused solely by PR.

Zen and the Art of Tech PR

The Book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig was in the news recently because of new book (Zen and Now, by Mark Richardson) that revisited it.  I think there is also a documentary in the works.

Seeing these headlines made me remember the book, a great read that I first came across many years ago.  Part road trip and part spiritual journey, the semi fictional book recounts the story of a father and young son as they traverse the country on a motorcycle.  It is also part mind trip: an intriguing parallel plot brings the author from lucidity, to philosophical genius, to madness and back again.

In a number of asides throughout, Pirsig associates Zen philosophy with the otherwise mundane world of motorcycle maintenance (after all, he has to keep the machine fine tuned and running during the trip) to teach important lessons about life.

The book must have made an impression because I still think about it some thirty years later.  And I also think about the important lessons it can teach PR teams about the mastering the inner game of PR: the importance of quality, and of having the right mindset, tools and attitude.

Please see the excerpts below, and my notes on the relevance for PR:

In one passage, Pirsig explains how a repair shop did a hack job on his bike:

Why did they butcher it so?  These were not people running away from technology... these were the technologists themselves...  They sat down to do a job and performed it like chimpanzees.  Nothing personal in it... And I tried to think back into the shop, that nightmare place... to try to remember the cause.

The radio was a clue.  You can't really think hard about what you are doing and listen to the radio at the same time.  Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling... Their speed was another clue.   They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them.   More money that way.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions.  They were hard to explain.  Good natured, friendly, easygoing - and uninvolved.  They were like spectators... There was no identification with the job.  Whenever their 8 hours were in you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work.... They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.

Are your PR teams engaged?  Do they really care about their work, pride themselves in their craft, want to learn and improve and proudly carry the badge of the profession?

In another passage, the author describes the importance of enthusiasm:

I lke the word "gumption" because it is so homely and so forlorn and so out of style...  I also like it because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality.  He gets filled with gumption.  The Greeks called it enthousiasmos... which means literally "filled with Theos" or God, or Quality... A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things.  He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes.

If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.  If you haven't got that, you might as gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won't do you any good.

The same can be said for PR.

Are you and your teams filled with "gumption"?  Are they pumped up and ready to enthusiastically take on the many challenges of the work?

Even the teams that are pumped up and engaged sometimes run into challenges.  Pirsig called them "gumption traps."

Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools.  Nothing's quite so demoralizing...

Do you have the best possible PR tools at hand?  Are your media lists well researched and thorough?  Are the client's key messages up-to-date?  Do you have the information tools you need?

He describes other gumption traps, and also gumption-filling: the art of getting re-energized when you are unmotivated or run into challenges.

Again, a great read, I highly recommend it.

Rethinking the PR Pitch and Campaign: Three Key Questions

I have said that the PR pitch is dead.  As I explained in that post, the lumbering, one size fits all mass blast is an anachronism.  Further, the mindless flogging of information has no place today (not that it ever did, but it was tolerated back in the day).   Today, journalists are under the gun and neither they nor bloggers suffer fools (or doe-eyed PR newbies, who have blessed little understanding of the areas they are promoting) gladly.

But pitches as approaches designed to draw interest are very much alive.  They are, however evolving (or should be).  Let's take a moment and re-examine relevant trends:

• Retrenchment of traditional media means fewer reporters covering more beats, meaning it is harder for your news to qualify as "hard news."
• The growth in voices and online clamor means it is harder to get attention for your information.  People you are pitching want to write that headline that pops and soft news angles just don't cut it.  What does is the scoop, the intriguing rumor, and again the undeniably hard news. 
• These same trends means less time and space are devoted to thoughtful analysis.  Articles and magazines are tacking shorter.  This increases the pressure to to get your story across in the fewest possible words.  People are not going to take a lot of time to understand it or devote a lot of space to explaining it.
• More information coming at everyone at a faster clip and competition for eyeballs mean shorter shelf life for news and stories. 
• At Fusion PR, we covered some of these trends in our survey of the impact of social media on tech journalism.
• Millions of blogging soapboxes and many people discussing their work and personal lives in social networks means there are precious few secrets and it is harder than ever to control the release of information.   This means that exclusives and embargoes are more challenging to pull off.
• Finally,  the way information is consumed and delivered is changing.  Reporters get information from blogs, micro blogs, social networks and other channels.  Your pitch could be delivered in these channels, be a comment on their blogs,  etc. 
• Their are new websites for delivering pitches and news.  See NewsVetter, PRX Builder and PitchEngine.

The fact is that it is harder to break through the noise these days challenges those wishing to get attention for their ideas, information, products, and spokespeople.  On the other hand, as I wrote in my post about User Generated PR, there are more places than ever to get your content posted.

What this boils down to is that objective for your next campaign might not be to snag that briefing, series or briefings, or exclusive.  In rethinking the PR pitch and campaign you need to ask yourself several questions:

What is the potential market for our news?
Who is most likely to care or do something with it? Is it a seller's market (really hot information or hard news) or a buyers' market (everything else)?  The only way to understand this is to have a good sense of the the market you work in, competitive lay of the land, what has already been written / announced, and a sense of how your news relates.

What content, assets, etc. do we have or can we assemble that supports the story?
Self explanatory.

What key gatekeepers or influencers can make a difference in our campaign?
Who do we need to educate and convince that what we have is significant?  What audiences do they reach and what is their reputation with these audiences?

Dueling Tech Predictions

'Tis the season of tech predictions for next year.  Right on cue, tech PR people roll out their trusty (if tired) prediction pitches: lists of what trends, technologies and products are expected to be hot, guided by the expertise (and often influenced by the product offerings) of clients.  Similarly, reporters, bloggers and analysts issue their forecasts.

I saw a bunch of these types of articles this week and thought I would do this roundup.

One of the articles I cited in my last post (the WSJ story IT Spending Seen Decelarating)  mentioned a Gartner report and quoted one of their analysts as follows:

Software as a service, or on-demand software, and virtualization technologies, which help companies reduce capital expenditures on IT projects, are likely to benefit

InfoWorld's Lisa Schmeier also focused on economic factors in her piece Recession Proof IT Jobs . She cited a report from recruitment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas that predicted strong demand for IT jobs related to the following technologies:

• Virtualization
• VoIP and wireless technologies
• Systems upgrade and maintenance
• Web 2.0 technologies (especially AJAX and Ruby on Rails skills)

On SYS-CON's AjaxWorld News Desk, James Hamilton cited Lisa's article in his piece Gartner's Top 10 List is Incorrect and Stupid (I thank my colleague Heather Lukens for pointing both of these out to me).  He predicts good things for the following:

• Virtualization
• Cloud computing
• SOA (in its reincarnation as Web Oriented Architecture)

James takes issue with Gartner's list:

Gartner's Top 10 list is incorrect and stupid to include "Enterprise Mashups" and "Social Software and Social Networking" among the top 10 technologies for 2009.

Are they talking about new recession priorities in IT departments of businesses or unemployed sexual predator priorities?

I can't imagine a single company today having a spare team of programmers sitting bored in a room with nothing better to do than implement a "social computing" module to their corporate website, or my favorite, "enterprise mashups" for their management team.

I am sure there are those who would argue that social technologies are providing real benefits for organizations and will continue to grow.

Jim Rapoza took a contrarian approach in the Emerging Technologies article: Tech Most Likely to be Ignored in 2009.

(This article offers a counterbalance to his earlier piece Technology in 2009 - you will need to register to get this - in which he predicts the following will be big in 2009:

• Cloud computing
• Next generation Web platforms
• Open mobile platforms
• Semantic search)

He writes:

While sexy and heavily hyped technologies [like social networking] get a lot of attention, they often aren't addressing a serious problem, especially for enterprises. Given the current economic situation, vendors should really be looking at innovating in the areas that companies have to spend on instead of shiny new toy technologies that most businesses will decide they can easily live without.

Jim goes on to explain why the following should not be ignored:

• Security (What we need is a Security 2.0 type of wave, a radical rethink of how companies protect their systems and data and stop the bad guys in their tracks)
• PC hardware (Some major company needs to scrap the entire motherboard, processor, memory and hard disk paradigm and get to work on the future of computing)
• Internet Infrastructure (... when was the last time there was an important and innovative new web server release? Or a massive change in the way servers do anything on the Web?)

Reading the Financial Tea Leaves in Tech PR

Browsing through the headlines in the WSJ and NYT today made my head spin.  It reminded me of  a book I read when I was a child called Fortunately, which described events in the day of a little boy that were alternately fortunate and unfortunate.

I am no economic whiz, and am not sure what the following news items really portend for the state
of tech PR spending.  But they do sound relevant, so I thought I would share them:

Unfortunately...

Headline from the New York Times:  Gadgetry Takes a Hit as Nervous Consumers Plan for Lean Holidays

Sounds bad for those of us doing PR in the CE sector.

Fortunately...

Profits are apparently on the rise at Intel.  Intel is supposed to be a bellwether of the tech sector.  Its health and pipeline of business mean good things for other companies in enterprise tech, and hence enterprise tech PR.

Unfortunately...

NY Times Headline:  Profits Rise, but Intel Chief Offers a Gloomy Outlook

Fortunately...

According to this story in the WSJ - IT Spending Seen Decelerating - (sounds like an "unfortunately" doesn't it?):

While spending on information technology is being curtailed by global financial turmoil, the IT industry won't see the dramatic reductions that accompanied the dot-com bust, research firm Gartner Inc. predicted.

Yippee!  Let's party like it's 1999.

Unfortunately...

The WSJ also had a story with this headline today:  Marketers Cut Back on Digital Media

This does not sound good for those of us focusing on social media, an area that many have considered to be a hot spot for growth.

Go figure.

Making the Group: Carving out a Leadership Position in Tech PR

I blogged last week about the PR and branding connection, and the importance of weaving the facts that describe your product or service into a good story.

Last week I also described a client type who seemingly has no interest in brand building but wants to use PR exclusively to keep the sales pipeline flush.   Inevitably it is the people infected by this type of thinking who are irked when their company or product is not mentioned in roundups of their spaces.

"When reporters are writing about our space and mentioning our competitors, we need to be there too," they say.  Then they want us to go out there and make that happen by putting pressure on the media, often with little precious "air cover" from their side.

My response is that it takes more than your agency keeping after the media to ensure inclusion in roundups.   The media is under no obligation to mention every competitor in a given market segment when they write about it.   Bloggers have even more latitude to write whatever they want, as they generally don't make claims to fairness and journalistic integrity.

Making the group -  the top three or four players who tend to get mentioned in roundups on a market space - takes hard work and time.

Consistent outreach, and regularly meeting and speaking with right reporters are the most basic components of this.  But calling and briefing reporters may not be sufficient to get coverage in their stories.  A drumbeat of news is a great way to demonstrate that clients are on the move and making progress in the marketplace.    The media needs to see that the client is doing great work and convinced that they are a leading vendor when they rattle off the top two or three names in the space.  Augmenting news outreach with a steady stream of story ideas in which you position the client in the context of the hot issues and trends helps towards this end as well.

So, proactive thematic outreach combined with routine contacts across the media list and promotion of news will help to build mind share and coverage and help your clients make that vaunted short list.

It is by no means a science.   It is more a matter of perceptions and brand.  You could have the strongest balance sheet and highest sales.   But if the media is not aware of the great work you are doing and what your brand stands for - if they don't see you out there in the marketplace, with announcements that show traction and progress on technology, product and business fronts - then you have no right to expect them to mention you in related articles.

So it is more a matter of digging in for the long haul, not expecting to be annointed as a leader in the early stages of a program, creating a drumbeat of news, and making sure the story resontaes, and is breaking through and being heard, understood and appreciated.

Crafting Headlines that Pop

The proliferation of various forms of media has created a land grab for attention that makes it more critical than ever to be able get your message across in the fewest possible words.  Whether someone is looking through their email inbox, headlines in their news reader, or scouring search engine results, the only thing standing between them and your message is the headline, subject line or other descriptive words wrapped around your content.

Further the growth of IM, text messaging, and micro-blogging technologies like Twitter mandate brevity.  Another challenge is that people are writing for two audiences: human and search engines.

The upshot is that  punchy, concise writing and sharp headlines - that are both people and search engine friendly - are now more important than ever.  This is particularly true, and particularly challenging in the world of tech PR.  It is not always easy to boil down highly complex technology to its compelling and provocative essence.

Here are a few simple tips for getting the most out of limited word count real estate:

• Get rid of spurious words like "announces"
• Avoid repetition
• Use the most impactful words right at the beginning (if it is a heads-up on important news, say so)
• Use shorter words
• Avoid gobbledy gook puke
• Read the headline out loud to make sure it flows
• Test headlines - use your colleagues, friends and families as mini-focus groups
• Where practical, do real tests - vary the subject lines of pitches to see which ones resonate
• Include keywords - these serve both human readers and search engines.  For human readers who might not be familiar with your company, keywords provide important descriptors. They also help search engines properly index your news, and alert people to your news via the persistent searches they set up.

I have often debated whether it is better to be witty or straightforward.  The latter argues that you need to be clear, and besides, the subtleties of word play are lost on search engines.  They simply do not "get" irony and puns.

The former says you need to be interesting.  If clear but boring text means fewer people will open it, then favor the more eye catching approach (however if it is too cryptic - meaning, if it doesn't include descriptive key words - then fewer of the right people will see it because it will not place as highly in search engine rankings or trigger search engine alerts that are tuned to these key words).

Sometimes you can achieve both.

It is great if as many people as possible open and view your news.

It is even better to have the right people  - people who care, might write or be customer prospects - open and view your news.

So the ideal headline or subject line not only draws attention but the right kind of attention

Regardless of whether the headline or subject line is factual and straightforward or enticing and cryptic, you can still accomplish goals as long as you draw readers in.  Information is increasingly delivered in layers.  The headline or email subject line draws you in; the body text explains more, and includes links which provide additional information as well as some kind of call to action, or mechanism to register and/or request more information.

Bailout or Rescue Plan? Just Say the Magic Words

I wrote yesterday that branding happens, whether you set out to build a brand or not.

A corollary to this is that how you tell your story can just happen, too, unless you intentionally set out to pick the best possible words and story.

Some people cynically refer to this as spinning, and do so to malign the PR profession.  Apparently there is only one unvarnished version of "the truth," just waiting to be misshapen by evil flacks.

Well, news flash, the world is a bit more complicated than that.  And there is no better example of the power of words and a good story - and the high stakes that can be involved, and importance of getting your story right - than the current credit crisis, and our lawmakers' attempts to find a way out of the mess.

Some have said that the plan (note I am intentionally not using a modifier here) was doomed from the start because Paulson could not sell it.  I am sure his image as a swashbuckling titan of high finance did not endear him to a public that is getting increasingly disgusted with the excesses of Wall Street.

The NY Times said yesterday:

When the Bush administration announced its $700 billion plan to shore up the nation's shaky financial system, Treasury Secretary Paulson called it the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  Everyone else called it the bailout.  And, from that point on, its fate may have been set.

The article went on:

Since he unveiled the phrase on Sept. 19, it was used in just 23 television talk shows or public hearings transcribed in the Nexis database. By contrast, a Nexis search found 508 mentions of the phrase “Wall Street bailout” in that period.

In another article Lessons from a Credit Crisis: When Trust Vanishes, Worry, the Times said:

But there is good reason for the public’s skepticism. The experts and policy makers who so desperately want to take action have failed to tell a compelling story about why they’re so afraid.

When Bush decided to get personally involved in selling the program, his words were derided as a PR tactic in the Times article President Bush Calls it a Rescue, But Others are Sticking with Bailout.

In a stark example of the way language is used as a public relations tactic, Mr. Bush and other government officials have characterized the measure in positive terms — “rescue plan” and “asset relief program” — thereby carefully avoiding more loaded words like “bailout.”

The media, by and large, did not follow Mr. Bush’s lead. On Sunday, a Google News search conjured more than 157,000 results for “bailout,” and only 42,000 for “rescue plan.”

The terminology of the financial crisis is particularly important because of the emotions the words can stir in readers and listeners. The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, suggested that the bailout label was a “major reason why constituents flooded Capitol Hill offices with phone calls and e-mails, overwhelmingly urging lawmakers to reject it.”

An interesting perspective: the President's words are a PR tactic, yet the word choice  of those fighting the plan are not?

Some portrayed the failure of Congress to act as a crisis in leadership, and evidence of Bush's low popularity and waning power.  I think it was also an object lesson in what can happen if you don't get the story right.

Word of Advice: Branding Happens!

There is a flip side, and a potential pitfall to my post Turning PR into a Sales Lead Generating Machine.  The post counseled that tough economic times mandate PR programs specifically designed to boost sales, and offered tips about PR tactics that can drive sales leads.

The counter argument occurred to me during a recent PR planning meeting.  The client, a CEO with a sales and marketing bent, insisted on a fairly limited set of PR goals.  "We don't have the deep pockets of larger vendors to do brand building programs.  We need to drive sales, and do this in a very targeted way."

I can understand why budgetary constraints might limit a huge ad spend on image building, but PR can play a role in brand development as well, and PR budgets are usually much smaller than branding focused ad budgets.

What I should have brought up at the time - and want to emphasize here - is that branding happens, whether you intentionally set out to invest in brand building or not.

People will by themselves fill in the blanks you create when you don't talk about your brand (assuming they have any awareness of your company and its products).  Their perceptions will be drawn from and colored by a range of sources: peers, first-hand experience, articles, blog posts, analysts, etc.

Don't you want to have a say in this dialog?

I still think PR needs to do its share of short term demand generation.  However, I think most will find that using PR exclusively as a business development tool would be a mistake.  PR can and should play a role in building brand and company valuation.  It is more of a long term strategy, but should not be ignored or left out of the equation when implementing programs and calculating the ROI for PR.