Flack's Revenge

Extreme Media Relations: Artist Can't Stomach Coverage, Stages Hunger Strike

The New York Post reported today that an artist was so distraught over an article in the New Yorker that he has been staging a very public hunger strike, in an attempt to get a retraction. The strike is now in its 17th day.

According to the Post piece, Local painter John Perry was upset because he did not like the way that he was characterized in the New Yorker story, which detailed a dispute between Perry and 80s film star John Lurie.

The details are not all that interesting, but I just thought that the idea of media relations via hunger strike was kind of amusing.  I also love the quote attributed to Perry:

"I just want some acknowledgement from them that the evidence . . . is not completely in accord with what was written in the piece," Perry told The Post. "The last thing they want is for me to drop dead out here, because then someone will look over that article with a fine-tooth comb," he said. "It will call into question their renowned fact checking."

"The last thing they want me to do is drop dead..." - classic, will have to remember this line, and the dedication to pulling out all stops to defend reputation and change coverage.

What Marketers and Social Media Teams can Learn from Drudge Report

There are many applications for curation. PR and social media teams can add tremendous value by acting as a filter and finding the diamonds in the rough of all the Web noise: content that is timely and relevant, and can be used to inform marketing and help feed social media channels.

One obvious application for curation is the curated news site, and the best examples I can think of are Drudge Report and Huffington Post. The NY Times had an excellent article last week: How The Drudge Report has Stayed on Top (I learned about it through a list that is another example of curation, the NY Times weekly roundup of the most popular articles that appears on Saturday in the business section; and in this very post I am curating the original article by sharing the link and commenting).

At 14 years old, the Drudge Report predates the eras of social media and Web 2.0 - yet I was blown away by reading about the site's enduring influence. It draws about 12-14 million unique visitors per month. The article posed a question about drivers of traffic to major news sites and said:

Using data from the Nielsen Company to examine the top 21 news sites on the Web, the report suggests that Mr. Drudge, once thought of as a hothouse flower of the Lewinsky scandal, is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. 

So how does Drudge Report continue to remain so popular? And what can marketers leran from its success to build curated news sites that draw and refer significant traffic? Here are some tips from the articlle (iexcerpts are in italics).

Find the Hot Story, Craft a headline that Pops

...he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me,“the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.”

Use Pictures, and a Blend of Highbrow and Lowbrow

Underneath [a recent article] there were tons of links, news and pictures (Mr. Drudge has a real knack for photo editing) with all kinds of irresistible marginalia: “Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys from Peru Poor” was just above an article about what a prolific e-mailer Osama bin Laden was in spite of his lack of access to the Internet.

No Frills Retro Design Minimizes Distraction, Highlights Content

“The genius of Drudge is the simplicity of the layout,” said Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard. “Everyone else who tries to knock him off complicates that. There’s no tabs. There’s no jumps. There’s hardly any clutter...”...

Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of... But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.

B-M Fiasco Another Example of the Transparent PR Campaign

One week later there are still some rumblings about the Burson Marsteller Facebook fiasco. It is a spectacle that continues to draw attention and coverage.

If we look at the episode more closely, however, it becomes clear that all the hyperventilating is a bit overblown. Also, I'd like to take the story back to where it started, as a PR pitch made public, and question assumptions people may have about what has become a now familiar story line, namely the outing of PR tactics and pitches, and offer advice and context in terms of what this means for the field and the future.

I, for one, am a little tired of seeing the PR industry and our pitches swatted around like sport. When one approaches a journalist in confidence, the assumption is that the information and source will be protected. If they don't like our pitches, there are many options outside of publicly outing offenders and destroying reputations and careers - change the channel, hit unsubscribe, delete, filter, etc.

I'd also like to point out that in other fields the types of tactics employed by the B-M team are done all the time. E.g. in political PR, opposition research, planted stories - all in a day’s work in politics, and doesn't raise too many eyebrows. I am not justifying sleazy behavior, but just pointing out it is not at all that unusual.

In his post Hyperbole Meets Hypocrisy: Googlegate Jeremy Pepper also said, essentially, that the outrage is overblown, and that in tech too, there is a long history of competitive sniping and creating fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) - he is correct, but I have to say in my many years in the field of tech PR, I have not seen PR teams brought into the mudslinging and story planting all that often.

This episode (and others like it where PR pitches and tactics are outed) seems to show that we are entering an era of the transparent PR campaign. I pointed this out in my post Media Wonderland: Down a Rabbit Hole and Through a Looking Glass.

The best defense is to be good at your craft, focus on relationships and not transactions, deliver great and targeted pitches, and adhere to the highest level of ethical standards. As much as PR desires confidence in media interactions, it is safest to assume that your tactics and motives will be outed and communications will be thrust onto the public stage and held under close scrutiny,

Towards A More Refined Publicity Stunt

The publicity stunt is the carnival sideshow of PR.  Sure, they are used and sometimes get great results across many different types of programs and industries; having said that, I think most would agree that stunts don't show off the profession in the most positive, intellectual light.

However I got a different picture of publicity stunts in reading the New York Times Book Review recently.  Tony Perrottet wrote an essay about litrerary publicity stunts.  It is a great walk through the history of book PR.  I share excerpts below, and encourage you to click the link and read the entire article.

• The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. “For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed,” Balzac observed...
• Hemingway set the modern gold standard for inventive self-branding, burnishing his image with photo ops from safaris, fishing trips and war zones. But he also posed for beer ads.
• But the tradition of self-promotion predates the camera by millenniums. In 440 B.C. or so, a first-time Greek author named Herodotus paid for his own book tour around the Aegean.
• Perhaps the most astonishing P.R. stunt... was plotted in Paris in 1927 by Georges Simenon, the Belgian-born author of the Inspector Maigret novels....Simenon agreed to write an entire novel while suspended in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub for 72 hours. ... A newspaper advertisement promised the result would be “a record novel: record speed, record endurance and, dare we add, record talent!” It was a marketing coup.

 

Hypocrisy Rampant in "When not to Pitch a Story"

There has been quite a bit of back and forth about the right time to pitch a story. Some of the voices make the seemingly reasonable point that in a busy time for news, when a mega story is breaking (like it did this week), reporters are focused on a particular issue and it's not the best time to try to get their attention with other things, namely your clients' or employers' desire for ongoing media visibility and attention. Others suggest that trying to relate client stories to the current news and interject them is opportunistic and in bad taste (as an example that comes from within the PR world, interestingly enough, Ragan's PR Daily advised: PR Pros: Don't Even Try to Pitch a Story this Week).

In making these arguments it is easy to blithely go along with the story line that puts the press on a pedestal and kicks PR to the curb. But let's get real here. The above narrative casts media and PR as polar opposites - with media being the pure and noble heroes and PR being the shameless promoters.

I am not interested in picking a fight with the media - that would not be good for my career - but I do think it is important to point out that it is not such a black and white world that we live in. After all, the vast majority of media are profit-making organizations. They hire reporters to write great stories that have catchy headlines to build audience and revenue. In short, they do these things for some of the same reasons that we write press releases and pitches - to draw attention. News stopped being about just news a long time ago (witness all the coverage about what Katie Couric is doing next and the state of network news).

I do think that there is such a thing as good and bad timing, and good taste and bad. We as PR professionals owe it to our clients and employers (after all, we are an extension of their brands) to know when to hold our fire and recognize when a pitch crosses over from being relevant and topical to something that reeks of opportunism. But I don’t think we should bury our heads in the sand and apologize for doing our jobs

Research Reveals Roles of MSM, Twitter and Blogs in Online Info

In this third and final installment of my series of blog posts on research about how information spreads online, I cover the latest study from Stanford University, implications and findings for the tech sector, and offer general takeaways and advice for marketers.

First, here is a quick wrap on the first two posts: In my first post I discussed an article in the New York Times that led to my initial interest and interview with Jure Leskovec, a Stanford researcher referenced in the article. The second post describes the Stanford researcher's test bed and early research. The Stanford team identified six distinct popularity curves, i.e. information dissemination patterns that were functions of what type of site broke a story.

The third study is described in the paper Modeling Information Diffusion in Implicit Networks - it builds on the earlier research. The researchers wanted to see if it was possible to infer networks of diffusion and influence without knowing about the network topology.

Taking this approach was an important breakthrough. Using the viral analogy, it is possible to track a disease outbreak by seeing who gets infected - but it is very hard to know the source of contagion and exactly who infected whom, and in what order. Similarly, in the online world, it is relatively easy to see who is "infected" with a meme - that is, you can track who mentions something - but it is hard to know whether the person was first exposed to the information by reading a blog, hearing a news cast, talking to a friend on the phone etc.

The researchers wanted to estimate a popularity curve for each media type and see if it was possible to accurately predict how a story spreads on-line based on where it first appears. So they developed algorithms that inferred underlying social networks, and also discovered that the node can have a dramatic and predictable impact on how many others mention the same thing over time.

"If you can see who mentioned the news today, we can accurately predict how many will mention it tomorrow," said Jure Leskovec, the Standford researcher. This was pretty impressive, because, as Jure said, there are a "super exponential" number of possible connections and networks; developing such an algorithm was a real breakthrough.

Of course, there are other important factors that determine how far, fast and wide a story spreads.  The researchers were careful to take into account variables such as freshness of information, novelty, and imitation - i.e. a certain number of people or sites will echo information because they see that it is becoming popular. Also, they learned that influence can vary based on the topic, and explored relative influence for technology, politics, business, sports, nation and entertainment (see the chart below).

Research Conclusions and Source Data

So what data did the researchers review, which sites were most influential, and what can we learn from their work?

My second post detailed the test bed used. In terms of this latest paper and study, the researchers explored a massive body of Web data over time - 500 million tweets and 170 million articles. They categorized sites as newspapers, professional blogs (e.g. Salon, Huffington Post) TV stations, news agencies (e.g. AP, Reuters) and personal blogs, and tracked the influence of specific sites.

The team also evaluated how influence works on Twitter. They explored adoption of hash tags over a set of 10,000 users, categorized tweeters into 100 groups of 100 users each, and ranked them based on activity and volume of followers.

Here are some specific takeaways - the following bullets are excerpted from the paper

• ...These results suggest that there are a relatively small number of media sites that have large influence on the adoption of textual phrases
• ...[They] align well with the two-step theory of information flow ... as the information and influence “flows” from the mass media through opinion leaders to the public.
• ... the influence of bloggers tends to be lower at start, but tends to last longer (in particular for entertainment and technology). This confirms the intuition that blogs tend to be echo chambers while mainstream media play the dominant force in the news cycle.
• This is further confirmed by the fact that politics, business, technology and the nation tend to be dominated by news agencies. Professional blogs are the second in terms of total influence in politics and national news, newspapers are the second in business, and personal blogs are in technology.
• ...we find the strong influence of the USA Today on technology [edging out the New York Times and Wall Street Journal] to be surprising.
• ...We find the half-life to be 32.2 hours, which... suggests that people consume news on a daily basis.
• ...we find that the mainstream media holds the most influential position in the dissemination of news content.
• ...On the other hand, hashtags on Twitter are a very different type of contagion... our results... suggest that users with the highest follower count are not the most influential in terms of information diffusion. Rather, users with the number of followers of around 1,000 tend to be most effective in diffusion and adoption of hashtags.

The bottom line for marketers? I asked Jure this and he said: "Our research lets you see the effects of online media... we are making it a hard science, that you can measure and quantify precisely... the influence curve gives you some sense, depending on what topic you have, of where you may want info to appear so the story spreads nicely."

Lies My Social Media Guru told Me

I am starting a series of posts that aim to refute common social media myths.  One of the most persistent ones is that mainstream media doesn't matter anymore, and its corollary: anyone can be a publisher these days and take their stories directly to the people via social networks and media.

Certainly there are some elements of truth to the above statements.  Mainstream media has changed, and arguably has less influence in today's multi-tasking, short attemtnion span, media-saturated world.  And it is also true that anyone can start a blog or sign up for Twitter and start publishing to anyone who cares to tune in.

But it would be a mistake to write off traditional media, and assume that you can have the same impact by creating your own social media channels alone.  The folly of this type of thinking is illustrated by a post I read today on Social Business: Tech PR - Your Company Blog is not a Media Outlet and Never Will be.

Kate Schackei refers to recent Amazon cloud outage to make her point, and says:

As for your blog, maybe you’re widely read and maybe you’re not. Certainly many cloud customers knew to go to Amazon’s blog to see what was going on with the outage. But what impact did the blog have beyond the existing customer base? What impact would a post there have on the vast swath of potential cloud users who do not have the early adopter mindset — and may even be watching for problems now to determine whether the cloud is safer than it sounds? Nada. Those people went to read the New York Times blog, the Wall Street Journal article, or corresponding stories on ZDnet, ComputerWorld, Forbes, or Fortune. And you know what was said there? “Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.”

Blogging is important; but so is inviting questions from people who hunt for hot stories and bedrock truth for a living. And to get in that kitchen, you have to be prepared to take the heat. To imagine that your company blog takes the place of availability and openness with the press is to take a dangerously insular view of your audience and community. Which works, I guess, as long as you don’t want them to grow.