Flack's Revenge

RTFC - Reading your Way to Tech PR Success

Before I got into tech PR, much earlier in my career, I worked in technical support.

Back then, we had a saying for customers that did not want to take the time to try to figure things out for themselves - it was "RTFM!" which means Read the F--ng Manual (of course, we never said this to them).

Flash forward, and similar words of wisdom can and should apply to tech PR people.

Actually, reading was always good advice for us; after I joined the profession in the late 90's, and started climbing the ranks into management, I remember that we always implored the teams to pick up the publications and actually read them.  That was the best way to get smart about the magazines and the topics they covered (this may seen like common sense, sadly many continue to rely on databases of media contacts and preferences rather than read in detail their content).

It is worth repeating, and updating today, because the noise has only grown in the tech world, and all the interruptions from social media - and fragmentation of traditional media - make it all too easy to lose focus and skim the surface.

There aren't many freshly printed publications to pick up these days, lovingly thumb through and smell the freshly pritnted, glossy pages - but there sure is a lot of reading we can and should be doing.

So, why not resolve to RTFC (Read the F--ng Content) to be a better tech PR person?

This means:

• Read the publications, print and online, get to know their sections, editors and news appetities
• Read the articles that feature clients and their competitors - don't just skim, but read, and try to understand what it all means in terms of positioning, reporter biases, message penetration, etc.
• Read the gorpy client side stuff - yes dig deep into their white papers, decks, etc. - you will get invaluable product and company knowledge (but don't just "drink the Kool Aid" - apply your own critical thinking and square what you are learning with what you already understand).
• Read to improve your writing - see my previous post on this

RTFC done right means carving out quality, uninterrupted time, perhaps on your commute to work or in the off hours - and does not mean ignoring short form content, such as social media chatter; continuie to tune into and read what influencers are saying on Twitter for example - you will learn more about how they see trends, the competitive landscape, and your clients or company.

Turning the Web Din into a Vibrant Content Marketplace with Content Curation

My monthly Content Marketing column, which ran today, offers content curation tips that are based on how the pros do it (meanling professional online publishers and news sites).

The appeal of curation for content and social media marketers is obvious; after all, why take the time to come up with original ideas or create all content from scratch when you can simply riff off (or rip off) what is already out there? As the theory goes, you can up your posting frequency and perhaps even quality if you incorporate third party content into the mix.

That is the theory; however doing it well can be fiendishly difficult. The professional sites wrestle with all kinds of issues related to appropriate editorial practices, and the ethics of exploiting the work of others.

How much can you excerpt before curation becomes stealing?  Do you change headlines, or leave them intact?  And what about the tug of war between keeping people on your site vs. the obligation some feel to  send traffic back to the original source's site (since, let's face it, the curator is generally not paying for the content)?

I discussed these issues in my post about overcoming content curation challenges.  That post also covered a group that some journalists formed to spell out codes of ethical blogging and aggregation, headed by AdAge writer Simon Dumenco. (I met Simon at a NY content marketing event; he explained the difference between aggregation and curation; my post You Say Aggregtion,I say Curation discusses others' views on this).

Sadly, many curate do in a way that just creates more noise; I for one, am growing weary of of all those automatically-generated newsletters that clog Twitter and try to pass as clever curation.

The best curators filter Web noise and guide people to the best content. They have a keen eye for what really is interesting, informative and aligned with an audience.  They often provide an expert's view, adding value and not just mindlessly echoing content for their own gain.

 

It's the End of the Storytelling World as we Know it: My Interview with Doug Rushkoff

I am a big fan of author Doug Rushkoff, and have read many of his books, starting with Media Virus back in the late 90s.. 

Doug has a knack for being the first to spot and describe things which in retrospect seem pretty obvious. In particular, he likes to hone in on topics related to media, information, technology, how they are changing, and what this means for our culture. 

I met Doug at a NY Tech Meetup a couple of years ago, where he spoke about his book Program or be Programmed, He agreed to an interview, which I posted back then.

More recently I learned of Doug's new book Present Shock after seeing reviews of it it in the NY Times and WSJ. The title is an ironic twist on Alvin Toffler's classic Future Shock (classic Future, sounds like oxymoron, doesn't it?!).

Well, Doug has nailed it once again.  His new book eloquently describes what happens when we are eternally stuck in the present, a social media, 24 hour cable news, sensory overload-driven Groundhog Day kind of reality. He says, essentially, that we are llosing the capacity to put things in context and take the time to smell the roses, so-to-speak.

One of the most dramatic conclusions relates to something Doug calls Narrative Collapse. In marketing  and PR, one of the first things you hear  is that "you need to tell a good story..."  It is the mantra we repeat endlessly to clients and each other.

It seemed to me that this was something that should be explored further, and would be of interest to Flack's Revenge readers.  So I asked Doug for another interview, and he agreed.  Here  it is:

You seem to soak up lots of pop culture as you observe and write about the impact of tech on society; the first chapter alone refers to scores of movies and TV shows, ranging from Mary Poppins, Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead on up through to Sopranos, Real Housewives, etc. - do you really watch all this stuff (either not such a bad gig or torture, depending on what you like)?   

Well I don't watch it all at once, but I have been alive 50 years so there has been a lot of time. I saw Mary Poppins in the late 60's. Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head in the 80's, Sopranos in the 90's, and bit of reality TV over the past decade. You don't' have to watch every episode of every TV show to get a good sense of what they are about and how they work. You can't help but soak up pop culture if you are alive these days. But there's plenty of shows I've just missed completely. Or watched maybe one of, like CSI or something. 

In light of Narrative Collapse, why bother with your book – are long form content creators doomed to irrelevancy?

No, just because we are transitioning from a culture based in narrative to one based in more open-ended styles of media doesn't mean long form content creators are doomed. I'm not looking so much at the length of experiences as the quality. A fantasy-role-playing game lasts a whole lot longer than a game of Monopoly. And it is still narrative - just not in the closed-ended Aristotelian way. It doesn't have a simple crisis and conclusion. It just keeps going. 

So presentist entertainment can collapse narrative by being as short as a YoutTube video, or by simply refusing to drive towards a single endpoint.

Don't we need stories and story frames to understand the world?

We need stories when we want to understand the world as a story. Many of us still want to believe God is coming to save us at the end, or that the world is going to end in a zombie apocalypse.  In order to maintain the belief that there's a plan with a beginning, a middle and an end, then it sure helps to have a story. 

If we are ready to believe that the world keeps going - that there could even be sustainable solutions to the world's problems rather than wars we win and bad people we vanquish, then we might want to look at forms of context that go beyond the simple story. 

"You Need to Tell a Good Story" is one of the mantras of advertising and PR.  Do these trends portend the decline of marketing as we know it?

Yeah. But anyone half-way intelligent in advertising has known this for a long while. I'm not saying anything new here. They all know that the creative storytelling in advertising works better for winning Cleos than selling products. 

Brand mythologies were created to shield consumers from the realities of mass production. We don't want to know our cookies are made in horrible factories, so companies invent brand myths like Keebler Elves and the Snackwell's Cookie Man. Today, we care less about whether the cookies were made by elves in a hollow tree than what is really happening: are kids losing their fingers in a cookie machine? Is this made with corn syrup? Organic flour? 

Marketers these days have to convince companies to tell the truth about their products and processes. And if they're not proud of those things, then they have to change them. It's very very simple, but very hard: companies have to actually do stuff that's worth talking about. Then people will Tweet it all over the place. What's worth talking about? These days, it's as simple as not being totally incompetent. Just find one little area in which the company is not completely screwing things up and hurting people, and then trumpet that achievement. 

Does this mean we have to produce "Now-ist” content like much TV has become these days?

You don't "produce content" so much as help the company communicate its non-fiction, real creation of value. Surely the company is doing something for someone. It's asking for money for its stuff, right? How does buying from this company reflect my values? How does it extend my intention? 

 

Tempt - and then Reject - Your Best Customers: The Great New Way to Build Brand

If I told you there was a way to build your brand by tempting - and then rejecting - more customers; would you believe me?

The very idea might be foreign to tech marketers, but it is a strategy that seems to have worked well in higher education, according to an article in the WSJ. The Journal story caught my attention because I saw it right after a friend told me about the status of his son's college applications (my younger daughter is graduating from high school this year and also going though the process now).

He was surprised that his son's early action application was deferred by Northeastern University; the kid had high grades and test scores, etc., and should have been a shoo in. Here's an excerpt from the article:

In the past six years, Northeastern University has vaulted 42 spots in the powerful U.S. News & World Report college rankings. And not merely because it added programs, hired superstar faculty or built fancy facilities. The private school in Boston also has made an all-out effort to increase the number of applicants for admission, dispatching its 30-person recruiting staff across the country and sending hundreds of thousands of personalized letters and emails to high-school students. It persuaded more than 44,000 students to apply for one of the 2,800 spots in its fall 2012 freshman class—up from about 30,000 in 2007—a move that boosted the school's selectivity, illustrating a growing trend in college marketing.

The article discussed methods that Northeastern and other schools are using to boost reputation and ranking, draw better students and increase donations; these include advanced target marketing techniques, and influencing the influencers (e.g. college guidance counselors).

There might not seem to be many takeaways for tech marketing, e.g.tech companies won't generally limit availability of product. Yet the tech world has its various ranking systems and influencers. You can rest assured that other companies, perhaps right in your space are applying forward thinking strategies for target marketing, influencing influencers, moving up in rankings and brand perception - what are you doing to move the needle for YOUR company or brand?

Google to SMBs: Don't rely on PPC, use Search, Social and PR for Top Results

SMBs that have wanted to improve results through online marketing have often turned to Google and AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

There is no question that shrewdly planned PPC campaigns generate results and hard ROI. However, the growing popularity of this method means that there is more competition for the keywords; the most coveted ones get more bids, which increases costs, and makes it harder to earn a return on PPC search engine marketing campaigns.

The New York Times wrote about this in its Small Business column: Small Players Seek an Alternative to the Expense of PPC.. It discussed the rise of SEO, i.e. a technique that improves organic search results to drive traffic, and social media marketing.

Of the latter, the article explained how many SMBs are jumping into blogging - and some are using platforms such as HubSpot to improve results. Ironically, Google is an investor in HubSpot, funny, because, as the article says:

Even though Google is one of its investors, HubSpot cut back on its own pay-per-click expenditures after realizing that organic searches were accounting for 60 percent more traffic than paid searches. “Most of our paid efforts shifted to platforms like LinkedIn, where we could target for the right kinds of job titles in line with our target customer profiles,” said Dan Slagen, who is in charge of advertising at HubSpot.

The story also quoted Google as recommending multiple strategies, anchored by relevance to customers, and that span social media and PR.

Google does not dispute the accounts of owners like Mr. Udell [someone who scaled back PPC spending]. A Google spokesman released a statement saying that small businesses can compete by making their ads more relevant to consumers and that they should use multiple strategies to pursue customers: “search, social media, earned media and more.”

Attention Story Shoppers: Only 6 Pitching Days Left (NY Times Deconstructs Tech PR in Light of Apple News)

Our clients generally have very busy PR and marketing schedules. 

To get everything in, we try not to let external events dictate the pace. There are some obvious exceptions; you don't want to announce news on a major holiday, or shortly before or after one. If there is a major industry event, such as a trade show, and you or your client are not there, why compete with the noise of other announcements?

Then, there are the planned and unplanned events and news outside of tech that can steal the thunder from your announcement; You need to use good common sense and look at each situation, in general we are an aggressive shop and don't like to stand down if we don't have to (see my post Hypocrisy Rampant in "When not to Pitch a Story").

To use a real example, if you follow the world of tech or use an iPhone, you by now probably know that next week - September 12, to be exact - is when Apple is expected to announce iPhone 5 details.

The New YorkTimes covered how other vendors of consumer tech have adjusted their PR schedules in light of Apple, which does tend to suck the air out of all other coverage (see Rivals Jostle for Spotlight... and excerpts below).

Back when Apple was an underdog, it had an easier time shrouding its product announcements in mystery and perhaps catching its competitors off guard. But now technology companies are watching every one of Apple’s moves — and scrambling to get out in front of them.

Several major tech companies are cramming product announcements into this holiday-shortened workweek...

In past years it was common for technology companies to deliver product news at trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now some major companies have scaled back their presence at those conventions and followed Apple’s lead in running their own elaborate news conferences, hoping to grab the news media’s undivided attention.

Fall product introductions are important to companies seeking to generate excitement ahead of the holiday shopping season. The fall has become especially jam-packed with news in recent years as both the number of companies involved and their product lines have grown, with the addition of players like Amazon and its Kindle products as well as all the companies building mobile devices based on Google’s Android operating system.

VCs Wake up to the fact that PR Actually Works

In the tech PR field, we have an interesting and sometimes tortured relationship with VCs. Especially for those of us that work with startups, we value the financial muscle that they bring. We greatly appreciate it when they they introduce us to their portfolio companies.

On the other hand, things can get tricky when VCs try to micromanage PR programs, as I wrote in this post awhile back.

As a group, they have always seemed a bit impenetrable. Sure most of them are scary smart and understand all areas of business including PR. However, many have been reluctant to toot their own horns and use the tools of the PR trade.

This seems to be changing, according to an article in the NY Times yesterday, which highlights the success of Andreesen Horowitz (a firm that has not been shy about using PR), and the trend of VC firms to embrace PR and other forms of marketing.  Here is an excerpt:

It wasn’t so long ago that venture capitalists kept secrets...Self-promotion was shunned [by VCs] as crass.  Now, Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley is one long parade route. Venture capitalists are hiring full-time public relations experts to tell bloggers and reporters of their investing prowess. They publicize their every doing and thought on Twitter and in blog posts.

The self-promotion, branding and race to build an admiring Twitter following, people here say, is a symptom of the stresses on the consolidating venture capital industry...

But the biggest catalyst for the attention-seeking atmosphere, venture capitalists say, has been the rise of Andreessen Horowitz. The speed with which the venture firm — started by Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, and Ben Horowitz, a former executive there — has rocketed to the top ranks has served as a case study in successful self-promotion.

There's Gold in them Thar Apps - and App Developers

Forbes had a nice story today, The Rise of Developernomics.  It included a link to David Kirkpatrick's famous quote and article: Now, Every Company is a Software Company.

The article today was about the importance of software developers, and the economics of nurturing and keeping top talent.  The writer, a contributor named Venkatesh Rao, argues - very convincingly - that there is no better place to put your money these days than software developers:

Unless you are a professional investor (and probably even then), places to store surplus capital today where it will even be safe and/or not depreciate too fast (let alone generate a return) are getting incredibly hard to find.... But there is one safe haven, if you know how to invest in it: software developers.

Is it true?  Can developers really be that much in demand? As I read the article, I thought about all of my friends who have worked in IT consutling and software development - and the ups and downs they have experiencecd, particularly here in NY.  The banking industry turmoil and competition from offhsore outsourcing has taken a toll.

Yet, most if not all of these people are working today.  I also thought back to the NY Tech Meetup event that I wrote about yesterday - nearly every company that demo'd closed with an appeal for developer talent.

No doubt, one of drivers of software developer demand - and the reason that every company is turning into a software company - is because of the growth of mobile apps.

Indeed, Venkatesh cites the following example:

Perhaps you are a baker with a small business — you are effectively useless, not because bread isn’t important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage. If your bakery doesn’t have an iPhone app, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp.

Mobile apps need not just developers but marketing - and, on that note, I'd like to point out a post that I wrote for the Handshake 2.0 blog: Getting Your Apps in Gear.  The topic, and title (a play on the phrase from the desktop software world, getting hindquarters, or a synonym for this, in seats) grew out of conversations with Anne Giles Clelland (who runs the site) about app marketing and PR. It is about how to drive downloads and usage for your apps.

I encourage you to visit Forbes and Handshake 2.0 and read these articles.

Tablets Lead Way to Power News Consumers, and Apps for PR

More people are using tablets, and in some cases spending more time with them than other devices and media channels. What are the implications of this trend for the PR field?

For starters, tablets can update and improve on many applications and projects. E.g. in my series of posts we explored reinventing the clip book, turning it into a dynamic, electronic magazine (see this post for one solution, devised by team member Kesley Judd). I am sure there are other examples of tablet apps, and potential apps that have relevance for PR.

Further, our jobs have gone beyond simply getting a nice placement to also caring about how the hit is shared and read, and to playing more of an active role in keeping stories alive and increasing exposure through social media channels. If you look at the tablet within this context, and consider the results of recent research, then ideas for PR start to jump out.

Paid Content wrote about a new report from Pew Research that describes news consumption habits of tablet users.

Tablet owners read a lot of news… The Pew study was conducted in conjunction with The Economist Group and found that half of tablet users use their devices to consume the news on a daily basis.. According to the report, 30 percent are spending more time with the news than before they had a tablet, and one-third are seeking out new news organizations on their tablets they didn’t frequent on their computers or televisions.

The article and report revealed that tablet users in large numbers (40%) are reading news via Web browsers, and (sadly, for the news business) paying for news content only in small numbers (14%).

Further, according to Journalism.org:

Eight-in-ten tablet news users say they now get news on their tablet that they used to get online from their laptop or desktop computer... [a majority] say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59%) or as a substitute for television news (57%).

Also, it is not just about consumption but also WOM and social sharing:

Fully 85% of those who get news on their tablets said they had talked with someone about a long article they had read there. Some 41% of tablet news users say they share news through email or social networking...

The results point to the emrgence of tablet users as power news consumers; PR efforts need to align with this trend. We should be tracking how news gets on tablets, and exploring ways to get through to the tablet news consumer.

App Against the Wall (Yer Busted, and, Yes, There's an App for That)

It is tempting to think, wouldn't it be great if all of life's problems could be solved with a simple app?

This question occurred to me as I read a NY Times article yesterday; About to be Hauled off in Handcuffs? Press Send. It described an app, inspred by the Occupy Wall Street movement, that can help you if you are getting arrested. 

According to the article, the I'm Getting Arrested app:

... allows users to write a message and identify recipients — friends, family, a lawyer — in advance. Then... they can push a button to send a text message blast.

So, how is this relevant to PR? The rise of smart phones has led to a growth in apps (see my post It's an App, App, App, App, App, App, App World). Apps and tablets are now transforming how people receive, consume and share content. These trends mean big things for PR:

1. If you are in tech PR, you may have an app company for a client one day
2. New ways of computing mean new tools that can support our work
3. People are using these apps and tablets to receive and share news

No, there is not (for better or worse) simple apps that can solve all of our problems, including the challenges that we face every day in PR. However, through this series, I hope to help readers better understand the app and tablet world, and what this means for PR.

Please stay tuned for the next installment (and lots of bad app puns too!).