Flack's Revenge

Seems like ’tis the week for surveys.  My post yesterday cited a survey about PR and blogger relations.   Today I saw an article about a survey of executives at 350 technology companies from around the world, done by Eurocom Worldwide and Simpson Financial and Technology PR.

ENN, Ireland’s IT Newswire, reported on the results in Deirdre McArdle’s post tech execs are hot on search and cool on blogs.  According to the article:

While search engine marketing is regarded as a key investment for tech
companies, corporate blogging doesn’t quite have the same appeal. Just
one in three respondents said they or their company have a blog, with
47 percent saying they do not blog. Around 16 percent said they plan on
developing a blog in the next year.

That is not that much of a revelation, in my opinion.  Although blogging is disruptive in terms of the its impact on media, and hence PR, the direct benefits of blogging as a marketing tool seem a bit more nebulous.

PR was cited in the article as offering the second highest value among different types of marketing, just behind Internet marketing, and ahead of traditional tech industry gambits like trade shows and exhibitions.

A New Tool in the Box, by Ellyn Angelotti on Poynter Online encouraged me to update my post Have you Friended a Journalist Today?

The Poynter post discusses social networks from the journalist’s perspective, describing the technology as a tool that can help journalists make connections and develop sources and info for their articles.

Looking at it from a PR-centric view, social networks give PR people another way to engage media – that is obvious.  The less obvious part gets to the question that many in our field find uncomfortable: what is the proper role of PR in a world of increasingly unmediated media?

Social networks and social media give us ways to listen to and directly connect with people of all types – traditional reporters, sure, but also bloggers, new and traditional influencers, and the public at large.

Ellyn’s post outlined the need to proceed with caution and make every effort to ensure journalistic integrity.  Similarly, I think that the PR profession needs rules of engagement that help us maintain our professionalism while we use technologies like social networking to further the goals of our clients and employers.

These could include not using fake names, not gratuitously friending people, journalists, whomever – not spamming people.  These are things we avoid anyway, however as we get into the online world there are some nuances and perhaps more chances to get into murky ethical water.

for example one area that I think has tons of potential for PR, but is also fraught with peril, is the social graph (WhatIs definition).

Dion Hinchcliffe had a great post on social graphs back in January.  As the phrase implies, social graphs illustrate how people are connected in networks.

As I said in my Fusion Forum post, I am starting to realize that everyone who blogs or comments on blogs,
everyone who participates in online social networks – we are the media.
Advertisers will increasingly target us and try to tap into the trust
and influence that results from the relationships we establish and the
online reputations we build.

Hence, our definition of the word “influencer” will change . If you represent a client or employer in the field of Mobile Web 2.0, for example, perhaps you will find that it is no longer just the name brand analyst firms who are important to build relationships with.  Perhaps it is a mobile Web 2.0 blogger like Ajit Jaokar.  Or a consultant in the field who is doing groundbreaking work and also happens to have 1500 followers on Twitter, or 1000 Facebook friends / associates.

Marketers of all stripes are looking at tapping into so-called trust networks.  As the operators of social networks and advertisers struggle to find the right model, it is also important for PR to get this right as well.

My previous post Have a new Type of Product? Stake Your Wikipedia Claim advised innovators to leverage gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage by defining emerging (or at least, as of yet undefined) categories and subcategories of technology.

Peter Blackshaw’s article on ClickZ Ten Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention provides an excellent follow-on.  He talks about affirmation, which sounds something like the root metaphors I described in my post Finding Words that Work in Tech PR.

[Affirmation] refers to the consensus of positive or negative truths about a business or brand.

Blackshaw further says:

…Wikipedia is rewriting the marketing script, because it’s far and away one of the Web’s most potent and powerful affirmation drivers. Once the primary domain of A-list bloggers and Web 2.0 elite, it’s now unmistakably penetrated the online masses. Even those who don’t use it are impacted by the conversation it shapes, online or off-.

All marketers should think hard about why Wikipedia matters, starting with affirmation.

He goes on to list the Ten Reasons to Care  mentioned in the title.

It seems to me that one of the primary reasons PR folks in particular should care about Wikipedia is because it can provide a way to help defend reputations and brand.  When we define our space or our brand on Wikipedia we can try to make sure the truths are fair and balanced.

As Blackshaw writes:

If everyone else is defining you on Wikipedia, you should be part of the process, too. If you’re not monitoring your Wikipedia entry daily, start doing it. You really need to get early experience on the platform to prime yourself for fast turnaround.

Here are some interesting links and articles I spotted over the past couple of days.

PerkettPRsuasion had a nice wrap on last week’s Boston Social Media Club event, including SEO tips for PR prfoessionals coursesy SEO-PR’s Greg Jarboe, who also attended.

JobMatchBox brought to my attention Yahoo OneConnect, a service that aggregates updates from different social networking sites (and can even display these on cell phones).

Brian Solis blogged about similar functionality now found on BlogCatalog in his post about their Social Dashboard.

Am I the only one on the planet that does not get the need for status update and group messaging systems? Aren’t there enough other forms of communication and isn’t there enough noise? Do people really care about what I am doing from moment to moment, and vice versa

People, let’s differentiate between useful information and self absorbed chatter. Before we add more communication mechanisms, shouldn’t we find better ways to tame the current ones?

Oh Well, perhaps I am showing my age as I turn 48 today.

On the other hand, someone who clearly does grok it is Laura Fitton, as reported on the Tech War Stories Blog last month in the post (with accompanying podcast) Twitter Magic.

But Twitter has inspired a passionate following. Some people make it
their main online communications medium. It’s certainly changed Laura Fitton‘s
life. The Boston-based presentations consultant uses Twitter to meet
influential people, find business opportunities and answer everyday
questions. Twittering as “Pistachio,”
she’s amassed a following of more than 1,500 “followers,” who value her
ability to stimulate discussions with provocative questions and
comments that fit into Twitter’s 140-character format. She’s a poster
child for a service that is revolutionizing the way people interact
with their social networks.

Advertising Age has a nice article about social networks from a marketers perspective (What is Marketer’s Biggest Challenge…?)

In terms of which types of agencies have the most credibility here, writer Michael Bush says:

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.

Interesting viewpoint, but then it is Ad Age.

I have read various posts recently about ways to leverage Wikipedia when it comes to getting the word out about company and product info.  One or two suggested drafting entries defining the company in question.  This could work, however, according to Wikipedia:

… our notability policies and guidelines allow a wide range of articles – however, they do not allow any topic to be included. A particularly common special case of this is pages about people, companies or groups of people that do not assert the notability or importance of their subject, so we have decided that such pages may be speedily deleted

Let me suggest another method – one which might be less obvious but perhaps more interesting.

Especially for smaller technology companies that might  be breaking ground in emerging technology categories – or making a difference in (as of yet undefined by Wikipedia) segments of existing categories – why not start an entry under the name of the category?

(For a longer discussion about the relevance of technology categories in marketing and PR writing, see my post  Assume the Positioning. For my post about the importance of Google and Wikipedia to PR see A Publication of One ).

I have taken on clients recently who are doing really interesting work in areas of technology that are growing in importance, but as of yet the tech categories do not have Wikipedia entries.

To me, this seems like a yawning gap just waiting to be filled.  The PR plans advise that the clients show leadership by carrying the banner for the categories at large.  And what better way to do this than by literally defining categories on Wikipedia?

Of course, the entry needs to be written in a factual and neutral way – I am by no means advocating spamming Wikipedia or crafting an entry that hypes the client.  Even apart from a discussion of ethics, and violating the spirit of Wikipedia, from a practical standpoint there are legions of editors who would cut it back down to size and tone, if not brand the offender as a Wikipedia miscreant.

The gainsay would be indirect – via an entry that adds to the world’s knowledge on the category – and direct, because the client’s name could be mentioned in the body, and a link provided to the company’s definition in Wikipedia if this exists.

Again, to be neutral you should include names of other competitors in the space as well.  And, unless you provide links to disinterested third party sources (white papers, articles) validating the space, the powers that be might not let the entry stand.

Having said that, there should be a distinct advantage to being the first to literally define the space – you get to insert your world view, highlighting for example the issues in the space that the client feels are important and uniquely solves.

An article in Social Media Insider (Blogger’s Block…) reported on agencies’ adoption of social media (or lack thereof).

The reporter, Cathy Taylor, cited a study from Cymfony that concluded that agencies don’t get it when it comes to social media.

Although the report and her article focused primarily on ad agencies, it would not surprise me if some of the same realities also apply to the world of PR agencies.

The “news” that agencies of all stripes don’t really understand social media wasn’t exactly a shock to Cymfony Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Nail, either. “They can talk a good game …. but they don’t walk the walk,” he said. The study, which is the result of 71 phone interviews with marketing people in the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K., found that agencies are still mostly concerned with using social media as a viral blast technique, when, to some extent, the real action is in conversations, good or bad, about a company’s products and services.

I particularly liked this quote in the report from Eric Kintz, a Hewlett-Packard marketing exec and blogger: “I think they [agencies] are somewhat helping. But they need to show how social media has helped them further their own agenda. So if an ad agency comes to me, I’d ask if they have their own page on a social network site? Are they posting videos on YouTube? Do they have their own blog? And how has it helped them in their own business?”

The truth is, if you wanted to while away a few hours looking to see if agency senior executives have Facebook pages (besides the digital shops, that is), or MySpace pages, you’d be pretty frustrated.

Interesting suggestion, does this mean we will see some trash talking soon on PR and ad agency blogs as to who is the most (or least) social media drenched?

Not to defend laziness in the industry, or being behind the curve – both of which I have railed against on this blog.

But let ye who is without 10,000 Facebook friends cast the first stone.  We are not the story, the client is, and if clients picked agencies based solely on self promotion and networking, well they just may get very good self-promoters and nothing more.