Flack's Revenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writer Joe Marchese said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know if it is just me, but I have noted over the past few weeks a heightened level of competitive trash talking about the agency world and the social media prize.

A few weeks ago, B.L. Ochman commented in the post The Yawn of the Social Media Release  about IABC’s plans to take on the work of promoting and standardizing social media releases:

…this IS a competitive industry.  Go ahead fellow "PR people" and focus on the social media release.  Invent your own cool name for it and price it aggressively.  In the meantime, we’ll be keeping our eyes what the folks at WOMMA, the Web Analytics Association and other organizations steeped in 21st- century marketing are doing to reinvent the larger marketing industry.

And, on the subject of PR and social networking, Ad Age writer Michael Bush opined in his article about Social Networks and Marketing:

Social networking is all about relationship building, and while that may be in the DNA of the public-relations industry, it has done a poor job of claiming that birthright

Just yesterday, Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media had a provocative post, Why Social Media Leadership Won’t Come from Public Relations Teams, which was in turn inspired by Steve Rubel’s post  Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist (Social Media Consultant is one such career according to Steve).

Jim cites pop marketing philosophies about divergence, and how the incumbents are never leaders in new areas:

As the world progresses, it gets more complicated, not less. And with every split in the tree branches, there is a new leadership opportunity. It’s almost never the brand leaders who cause the split and almost never the brand leaders who emerge as leaders in the new area.

He goes on to say:

It would be unnatural for public relations firms to provide social media leadership. Just as we have SEO firms… so shall we have social media agencies and social media specialists. Website development should have/could have been “owned” by advertising agencies, but we saw web development leadership in the late 90s come from new fast growth companies.

Social media is one-part public relations. But it’s also one part SEO (not PR agencies’ strengths), one part usability design (not PR agencies’ strength), one part programming (again, not), one part customer service (ditto, although arguable) and one part anthropology/sociology (which PR people can be pretty good at). To do some blog posts, or blog pitches, or leave comments in social networks, you can be a PR person.

I’d like to thank Jim (on behalf of an entire industry)  for explaining in clear terms what PR is and what it isn’t.  I also really appreciate the kind "props" on our anthropology and customer service skills.

Look, with all due respect, Jim is asking (and answering) the wrong question.  This has less to do with platitudes about divergence and more to do with who is up to the ask of embracing and leading change.  The agency world is much fuzzier then the tidy world of product marketing, which Tobin  references to make his point about diversification, and how incumbents in fields can’t be leaders.

It is not what type of agency will show leadership in social media that clients care about – it is who will go forth with programs that tap into the latest methods for working with new and existing media – the big picture.  Ideally, I would think, they don’t want silos, they want an entity that can put it all together for them, with extra points thrown in for doing this in an integrated way.

Although Jim makes some good points, and there can be good arguments for hiring specialists, I feel that defining a field by its technology or other physical characteristics is intrinsically short sighted – technologies change quickly, indeed the definitions of social media and Web 2.0 are fluid, and there seems to be new developments every day that change the equation.

As I said in my post The Best of  both MSM and Social Media and PR Worlds,

Let’s not forget the power of big media to marshal the attention of vast audiences and shape national dialog.

Consider that many if not most big stories driving buzz originate from various forms of "traditional" media (I use quotes here because I include online components of major publishing brands).  My post about  Digg’s Leaderboard said more about this.

In conclusion, MSM and social media are all part of the attention puzzle.  PR folks need to stay attuned to evolving filtering mechanisms that boost signal and reduce noise.  And agencies and strategies that treat social media as a separate entity – the only thing that counts, or the most important thing – will be less effective than integrated programs that  take into account both MSM and social media.