Flack's Revenge

Serendipity: Not dead yet, not by long shot

Damon Darlin wrote in his NY Times article Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge that a downside of the Digital Age is a loss in serendipitous information discovery:

WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free...But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity.

Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people we have selected because they share our tastes. It won’t deliver that magic moment of discovery that we imagine occurred when Elvis Presley first heard the blues, or when Michael Jackson followed Fred Astaire’s white spats across the dance floor.

Although I think the nature of serendipitous info discovery has changed, I do not agree that it is dead - not by a long shot.  In fact, with growing info sources and increasingly diverse ways of receiving and digesting media comes even more opportunities.

I thought what I would do is illustrate this by describing recent jewels I have uncovered - articles and posts from different sources - and in the process show how information from a typical post on Flack's Revenge comes together.

I was casually going about my normal social media intensive day searching for mentions of this blog when I came across a false positive - a link not leading to a mention of Flack's Revenge, but instead to an article called The Revenge of the Flack - one that is perhaps a little dated in terms of being a year old but still extremely topical and interesting.  It is about taking PR directly to the people, and one that I found totally by accident during a Google search.

Not long afterward I was scanning headlines in my email in box to find the nuggets amidst the all the BS I normally need to wade through.  One headline from Ad Age fortuitously jumped out: As Media Market Shrinks, PR Passes Up Reporters, Pitches Directly to Consumers.

The trifecta of information discovery was completed when Andrew Fowler of Newsvetter shared a post via Twitter about diminishing news beats, and what this means for PR (this is perhaps less serendipitous as Andrew knows me and thought I might have an interest).  Nonetheless, the combination of affinity and serendipity led me to several related stories and provided fodder for a future post.

Damon's article assumes that the people in our networks are homogeneous and share the same narrow range of tastes that we do.  This is not true in general.  So, whether you see a Tweet with a link, see the results that surround your searches and search alerts, someone shares something unexpected, or yes watching TV and reading real mags which most of us still do, we are surrounded by info and it is harder these days NOT to accidentally discover something totally unexpected and interesting.

Clip Book of the Future

While assembling yet another new business deck with yet another array of impressive news clips, I got to thinking that perhaps this staple will soon be another relic of the trade, and deserving of a mention in my PR Death Watch series (if you are a new reader, this is a series of posts in which I kill off outdated PR trappings) and to wondering what will replace it.

The clip book has given PR agencies bragging rights for as long as there have been PR agencies.  They show our clients and prospective clients how we have been successful, generally by sharing examples of impressive placements in top media, in hard copy or PowerPoint.

New times call for new tools.  I thought I'd take a look at how the vaunted clip book can evolve in sync with the realities of the day - an era in which traditional media are taking it on the chin and social media is rising in importance.

Not to downplay the importance major media (I cannot foresee a day when you would not want to show off a national TV spot, or a major story in a national daily), but top tier is not what it once was.  Getting a high visibility placement can sometimes work wonders in terms of achieving PR and business objectives.  But mere mentions in major media are no longer as impressive, and with all the other distractions people are faced with, sometimes seem to barely register.

Below I have lined up traditional indicators of PR success and compare them with ones that are rising in importance:

Traditional (column A)                 Emerging (column B)
Major daily print  hit                        Major blog hit
Millions of impressions                   Millions of conversations
National network news segment      Millions of views of your YouTube video
Your news, across the trades         Your news, voted up on Digg or SlashDot

Now, if you are still with me, you might look at column B and say "well that is all well and good but how does column B get put into an impressive looking clip book?"

Stay tuned, I will be coming back to this topic soon.

Obama v. Media: Is Tiff with Fox well Advised?

There was a good article in the NY Times Sunday Week in Review, The Battle is Joined; Now What? about the Obama administration's much talked-about dust up with the Fox News.  According to the story:

Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

The article analyzed the situation within the historical context of past presidential media wars.  For example, it brought up the Nixon administration, one that was famous for its paranoia.  (To put clients in the right frame of mind in our media training sessions, we start off with famous quotes about the media; e.g. Nixon's "The press is the enemy").

The story included words from Nixon VP Spiro Agnew about the media (“self-appointed analysts” at the Big Three networks exhibited undisguised “hostility” toward President Richard M. Nixon), but did not mention his famous quote denouncing the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism," one of my favorites.

We all know Fox has it in for Obama but does it make much sense for his administration to publicly declare war? Why turn a cold war into a hot war?  The elephant in the "unbiased media" room is that everyone knows there are biases, left and right leaning, and everyone plays favorites (or opposite) in their media initiatives accordingly.  As the article says:

... pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics... the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

It also cites a rule of thumb in political PR regarding battles: People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones.

I'll add one more: Don't let them show you are sweating.  A president that is well known for his cool demeanor should not encourage his operatives to be so blatant about participating in media wars.

Flack's Revenge Relaunching as Cloud-based Service

I am pleased to inform my readers that Flack's Revenge will be relaunching as a cloud-based service.

I can no longer put off this move as the clamor for all things cloud-based has become just too great to ignore.  My focus through the years has been tech marketing and PR; tech clients seem to be increasingly all about the cloud, and I need to adjust and conform to client needs.

This may cause confusion for some, who have perceived Flack's Revenge as simply a blog and not a technology or a service that can be delivered from the sky. 

Rest assured, I will find a way to do this (for those who doubt me, please see my post Flack's Revenge Opens to Developers)

After all, what is PR if it is not about floating above the noise? Or about finding silver linings in events, people and products?  Or weathering the occasional storm?  About praying for attention to rain down?  About fluffy and lofty imagery?

There may be some who see this move as a cheap ploy, a PR stunt if you will.  To those I say, don't mess with clouds, dude, especially PR clouds.  We can muddle just as easy as we can enlighten.  We can rain on your parade.  We are Thor, catch this thunder bolt.

Crafting Stories that Stick: Be brief or go long?

We are in an era dominated by 140 character sound bytes and countless information sources clamoring for our attention.  As such, it has never been more important to keep your communications brief, interesting and on target if you want to be heard above the noise. 

But can there be such a thing as too brief?

On Harvard Businesss, David Silverman wrote in his post When Clarity is Not the Same as Brevity:

While it's true that shorter is often better, the soul of good communication is clarity. Cutting content may toss out the bathwater of wordiness, but it may also eject useful information into the electronic abyss.

In Don’t Tweet About Health Care, NY Times op ed  contributor James Othmer wrote:

The president’s old friends, Twitter and Facebook, helped him get elected and then betrayed him. Social media help stir up excitement for “change we can believe in.” They are a much less effective tool for articulating the extraordinarily complicated details of health care reform.

I have written about the importance of story telling in communications.  Telling a story often takes more than just a few words.  That has been one of my objections to the social media release, which aims to "strip the BS out" and reduce news to a series of bullet points.  (Incidentally, Search Engine Watch blogger Greg Jarboe, who got lots of attention two years for calling SMRs "meatball sundaes" revisited the topic recently by posting about research that showed that search engines and news sites can have problems with the format too).

My advice is to strip the story down to its barest essence.  Find ways to tell it, using metaphor or imagery that require fewer words and paint a picture if that helps.  You need to find the fewest possible words without watering down the message in the process of trying to streamline it.

CIO Magazine's website had a great interview with Carmine Gallo, author of Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which included the following relevant passage (this also relates to my post from last week on product categorization).

CIO.com: What's one thing that Jobs does, which very few people notice, that is critical to his presentation success?

Gallo: Jobs describes every product or new feature with a one-line description that can fit in a Twitter post. By doing so, he helps you mentally categorize the product. He gives you the big picture before filling in the details. For example, when Jobs introduced MacBook Air in January 2008, he could have said something along these lines: "Today we're excited to launch a new, thin, light ultra-portable notebook computer with a 13.3 inch wide-screen display, a full keyboard, a backlit display and five hours of battery life."

Instead he simply said, "MacBook Air. The world's thinnest notebook." If [a person watching] wanted to learn more, they could visit the Apple website after the presentation, but if they only remembered that one thing—world's thinnest notebook—it would tell them a lot. Now, Google for "world's thinnest notebook" and you will find more than 30,000 links to the phrase.

What to do when your innovation doesn't quite fit - 3 tips

A New York Times article (It's Brand New, but Make It Sound Familiar) discussed the importance of picking the right product category when it comes to marketing and introducing products.

This was Ironic, as I saw the story right after a client PR kickoff meeting in which we spent much time debating the appropriate category for the client's tech.  The client does indeed have a unique offering, and wanted to forge a new category to describe what they do and help develop the market for it.

It was a very lively discussion, and we were privileged to hear the views and war stories of the client management team, serial entrepreneurs with long track records involving some of the most well-known enterprise tech brands.  They brought up the names and work of Al Ries and Jack Trout, marketing geniuses who pretty much wrote the book on product positioning.

As the NY Times article said:

Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world.  So when companies develop innovative products and services that don’t obviously fit into established categories, managers need to help people understand what comparison to make. Without that step, potential customers might just walk away wondering, “What is it?”

As a starting point, it helps to understand some basic traits of behavior. When people encounter something they don’t recognize, they make sense of it by associating it with something familiar.

“What category you place something in has a huge influence on how you view its basic properties,” says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. “The category signals not only a set of features to expect, but at a more basic level, when and how you should use the novel item.”

Problems can arise if consumers can’t place innovations into familiar categories.

So, what do you do if you are a company with a product that doesn't neatly fit into an existing category?  The question is complicated by the fact that most people only recall a limited number of competitors for a given space, with one name typically occupying the leadership position.  In their book Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, Ries and Trout talk about the importance of owning your category, or at least occupying the leadership position.

I offer three possibilities below, with advantages and disadvantages of each, and cite examples from the world of tech.

Option #1: Position your product within an existing category

Advantages - Less education will be needed than if you are trying to establish a new category.
Disadvantages - You may need to deal with any baggage the category has, and justify the need for a new entrant in an established space.  It will be harder to convincingly position a new player as a leading one in an existing playing field.  Also, this would not make sense if the product truly is a first of its kind.

Option #2 - Invent a new Category

Advantages - Doing this will make it easier to be the brand leader because you are defining the category.
Disadvantages - It will take time and effort to establish and educate about the new category.  Since it won't neatly map to established reporter beats and analyst coverage areas, it might be hard to determine who the right influencers are, and to get them to care.

An example of a company that did this successfully was Cisco - before they called their devices routers, PCs and servers handled the task of routing Internet traffic.

Option #3 - Modify an existing category

A good middle ground could be to modify an existing category.  DEC did this when they introduced the minicomputer.  This helped them carve out a leadership position for their subcategory, amidst the larger world of computers, which had been dominated by IBM at the time.

The caveat is that people will not necessarily buy into your attempts to engineer positions and categories.  The more explaining you need to do, the harder it will be to get people on board.  People will call it as they see it and might dismiss your efforts as marketing opportunism.

For further reading on product categories and positioning, you might want to see my earlier posts:

New eBook by Rebel Brown on Market Positioning

Assume the Positioning: Words that work in Tech PR

Words that Work in Tech PR: Part 4

FTC Rules on Blogger Endorsements: End of Everything? (or monetizing conversations, anyway)

I am amazed about the sheer volume of buzz about the new FTC rules that cover paid (or otherwise compensated) blogger endorsements.

Although much of the focus has centered on product reviews, reading through the articles, Tweets and posts shows the range of issues and people potentially effected.

I have had many conversations with Anne Giles Clelland of Handshake 2.0 on the topic.  See my previous post on paid blogger plugs, and her post yesterday, which references the website's legal vetted authenticity policy.

CNET's article from Monday includes an interview with an FTC official, who emphasizes that the rules will apply to other forms of social media, e.g. Facebook fan pages.

PR Newser has a post on 5 Popular Types of PR Tweets.  Number three on the list is "non-disclosure" Tweets:

This is when someone Tweets about some a new product, service, or campaign, but fails to disclose it's their client. This now gets a lot more risky with the new FTC guidelines.

I am coming to the realization that these new rules are jeopardizing the vision many marketers have of monetizing conversations by tapping into users' social graphs (see my related posts on social graphs, If it Ain't Social... and How the other Half Networks).

Oh well, off to see my accountant and then shrink, to have some of the only types of monetized conversations that will still be allowable once the new rules take effect in December.

David Letterman, Stand up Crisis Manager

The media and everyone else continue to buzz about the Letterman affair(s).  I thought I'd take a few moments to share my perspective on it.

From a professional communicator's standpoint, I think Letterman has handled this masterfully.

In crisis communications, the  best thing to do is be up front and get the story out.  Otherwise you suffer death by 1000 paper cuts as it emerges in dribs and drabs.

Letterman told his side of the story last Thursday night, using his show as a forum to confront the crisis.  In doing so he took some of the edge off.  He had a supportive audience, a forgiving environment for this kind of disclosure (the titters were nervous laughter - people were obviously surprised and perhaps not sure if this was real or shtick).

He was up front, and matter of fact (one quibble: Letterman did not point out that he was not married at the time of the affairs, which is apparently true, although some might see this as a technicality).  He struck just the right tone. He deftly mixed self-deprecating comedy with serious-as-cancer realism.  Despite the forum and strained attempts at humor, it was clear that Letterman was being sincere and taking the steps needed to deal with the situation head on.

Last night, in his first public comments since last Thursday, he took a little more time to fill in some of the blanks by issuing an apology to his wife and staff.  Letterman killed with his monologue, with joke after self deprecating joke.  He is a likable guy to begin with.  Using humor in this way inevitably makes him more endearing and forgivable.

By its nature,  it is hard to predict where this type of story will go next.  What salacious detail will surface?  Who were the affairs with? Did he use his position of power to intimidate?  And of course Gerald Shargel, Halderman's counsel, will continue to throw stones.  Shargel claims that Letterman is a master at manipulating audiences.

As the NY Times reports, all may be well advised to settle the situation with a Halderman plea.

In the meanwhile, Letterman has proved that his show can be a powerful forum for telling a story, and staying ahead of one.

Signal vs. Noise: A Cadre of Content Creators does not a Social Media Strategy make

There seems to be a growing notion that Tweets or blog posts by the pound are an effective way to gain attention and drive website traffic.  The corollary to this is the old saw that "content is king."  Just hire bloggers or Tweeters to crank out content and you will be well on your way to accomplishing your marketing goals.

I was the PR suit in a sales kickoff meeting for a client recently.  When the topic turned to promotion and PR, one of the participants mentioned an acquaintance who was in a business that hired cheap interns to go out and Tweet on their behalf, resulting in quadrupling of their website traffic (I am skeptical, besides this on its face this could just mean an increase from one unique visitor per day to four). 

I have a cousin who has done some very impressive Web marketing work to boost his real estate brokerage business.  He told me that his most recent move was to hire a former journalist to launch a blog to help drive traffic to his site.  When I checked in with him to find out how it was going, he said he had not really monitored the effort and was pretty much letting her do her own thing.

Time Magazine had a story (thanks, Anne for pointing this out) that described the growing number of companies that are hiring people to Tweet about their brands.

The online world presents many challenges to marketers.  Where once we had more control over the message, and there was an orderly way for getting it out, today it is the Wild West by comparison.  There is much more noise, many more distractions, and anyone can be a publisher or influencer.  Amidst these changes, it is tempting to find easy answers.

To be successful I believe you have to reverse roles and put yourself in the shoes of the buyer.  As I often say, it is not a content game, content is a commodity these days.  It is an attention game.  You  need to be where your buyers are.  But that by itself is not enough.  You need to boost signal to rise above noise.

To better understand signal to noise ratio, recall the old vinyl records.  The music represented the signal, and the snaps, hisses and crackles from the scratches in your record and hum from the amp represented the noise.  Companies such as Dolby developed technologies to amplify signal and suppress noise.

Similarly, a way to get attention and boost your "signal" is to be vocal about issues that your customers care about - issues that reflect a knowledge of a market space - and impress customers that they can learn, solve problems or improve their experiences by listening to you, or consuming your content.

With all the distractions these days, and based on years of conditioning from email, consumers have a sixth sense about Spam.  They can easily discern the Tweets and blog posts that can actually help vs. the ones that just add noise.  The latter will do nothing for you, in fact they could tarnish the brand you work so hard to build.