Would you ban the Internet?

A couple of months ago, the IABC asked me to expand this article, Irony is a Social Network, into a longer piece. It lives behind the paywall on the IABC site, but here it is, for your reading pleasure.

If you could have instant access to the very customers, stakeholders and influencer that you, as a communicator, hope to influence, wouldn’t you want to listen to them? Interact with them? Read what they read, watch what they watch and gain an unprecedented insight into their likes, dislikes, hopes and fears?

Communicators have always wanted to get inside the heads of their audience; to find out how their constituents want to get their information and what messaging or positioning works best. And now they can.

Ethnographic Research

With the advent of social networks such as MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, communicators now have access to a focus group of some 25 million where they can perform deep, meaningful ethnographic research into their target audience.

Used in the correct way, social networks can tell you who the next great band will be, which politicians will win the next election and which brands are gaining or losing momentum. The same networks will also reveal insight into your employer or client’s brand and, more importantly, what that brand means to the people who use it.

On the Black List

However, more and more organizations, including the Ontario Provincial Government, are lumping social networking Web sites together with serial time wasters, productivity drainers and offensive material like YouTube, online gambling sites and pornography.

I agree that sites such as Facebook (my poison of choice) can be addictive, time consuming and a complete distraction from more important matters such as, well, work. But the lines between “work” and “play” are blurring. I can’t ignore the possible groundswell of opinion against my client or my employer within these burgeoning communities – anyone who’s read the Kryptonite bicycle lock case study will know that the company’s value tanked after one post on one forum mushroomed into a full scale assault on a key product.

Simply put, there are many, much worse, timewasters at work – the water cooler, the cigarette break, the long lunch, the conference calls, meetings, those interminable emails, that much beloved and possibly patented “desk perch” that your boss loves to do and something called the Internet.

Just because something could waste time, doesn’t mean it will. Just because you can black list a site doesn’t mean you should.

Irony of I.T.

If, as Marshall McLuhan is so fond of saying, The Medium is indeed The Message, then what message does banning such an important form of communication send to constituents? Does it communicate openness, accessibility and collaboration? Or does it give the impression of an organization out of touch with its audience and out of touch with the very people who provide its mandate to operate? More importantly, which of those messages would you have your organization put out?

As far as government is concerned, there is a perverse irony of politicians using Facebook to cultivate, aggregate and motivate their own supporters while the people who are supposed to be executing policy are cut off from the very people who are supposed to benefit from it.

As communicators, we should be acutely aware of what our constituents are saying and where they’re saying it. The best messaging in the world will be rendered useless if it’s directed to the wrong place. We need to be going where our audience is. We need to adapt to our audience’s changing media habits – what worked five years, or even five weeks, ago won’t necessarily work tomorrow.

Ignorance is No Excuse

If you’re new to social networks, and are feeling a little overwhelmed with the possibilities, here’s a quick primer of how they may change your day-to-day job.

1. More monitoring and reporting. Now you know they’re there, you can’t ignore them. Sign up to the network du jour and periodically perform vanity searches for your employer or your clients. I guarantee you’ll be surprised what you find. Did you know there are more than 500 Facebook “groups” dedicated to “Nike” and “iPod”. How many people are interacting with your brand?

2. More influencers. As with any community, there are people who lead the community’s direction. Luckily for you, these people are self identifying in a searchable and trackable manner. They’re only a few keystrokes away so why not find them and introduce yourself?

3. Your own community. There may be hundreds, even thousands, of unofficial groups you’re interested in, but there’s no substitute for the “Official” group. Try creating your own group, your own space for people to play with your brand on their terms. Give them the tools to express themselves with and content to discuss before stepping back.

Whatever your feelings on social networks and the Internet, as a communicator you have to be aware that your toolbox is growing and how you can take advantage of the new channels of communications afforded to you by the interactive Web.

This article first appeared in the always excellent IABC newsletter, CW Bulletin.

 

PR is the Experience Business

Care of “…the world’s leading…” blog comes news of the Intel Centrino Pro Challenge, a series of YouTube-ified videos that feature ZDNet Journalists (led by one Rupert Goodwins) taking on IT executives from Nexus in a University challenge style quiz.

The whole shindig is chaired by Intel’s UK CEO and was conceived by H&K’s London office. Kudos for executing what must’ve been a tough event to coordinate. Those journeys from London to Slough are tough…

I think the concept of the Pro Challenge is great and really goes to show that PR people are now in the experience business. The experiences of journalists we’d like to cover our client and, increasingly, the online experiences of people who want to interact with our clients.

The problem is that this project works extremely well in real life but doesn’t translate to an effective digital experience.

While this would’ve a great yarn for the beer hungry journos (Goodwins’ formula for media coverage depends heavily on the amount of beer you buy him involved in the briefing), Intel customers (no doubt to be quoted in a prominent upcoming case study) and Intel execs (see customers) I’m not sure why it needed to be broadcast on YouTube six times.

Yes there are a few funny moments, as twl points out, but it’s not a great viewing experience. Thank heaven for small mercies that the master clip was edited into smaller, more bite sized portions. 20 min of that would have been almost unbearable.

I’m a big proponent of great media experiences – FH Canada client Gatorade recently had a media hockey game and I caught this sponsored football match from the Talksport presenters a few weeks back.

But some word’s of advice for PRs -

More of this,

Less of this please.

If you’re reading this in a feedreader, please click through to read PR is the experience business and view the embedded videos.

Public Relations is…

about relationships.

Thanks Max Clifford, shyster extrordinare and the very definition of a snake oil salesman, for that one. Clifford is one of the reasons the Public Relations industry has such a bad name.

He’s the sort of person who argues that Public Relations practitioners do not have a duty to the truth. The man who the dregs of society go to if the want to extend their fleeting and utterly undeserved 15 minutes of fame.

I’m not denying that Clifford is good at his job. He is more connected with, and holds more dirt on, the media than anyone in the UK. He is a master publiscist who earns his money the hard way.

However, when your career is built lying to the press (the infamous “Freddie Starr ate my hamster” headline was a completely fabricated masterstroke) and selling “kiss and tell” stories to various UK rags, it’s easy to see why he may not be the best de facto spokesperson for an industry trying to recover its reputation…

It doesn’t help much when every mention of his name in the media is prefixed with the words “PR Guru”. I know of at least one magazine in the UK who retained a PR agency with the sole objective of replacing Max Clifford as the go to source for opinion on Piublic Relations issues.

Public Relations Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Here’s a snippet that didn’t make it into my Blog Herald column for tomorrow. **Update** The column is now up and, as expected it’s about the “leaked” briefing note on Fred Vogelstein. My take is about 800 words of “meh”. 800 very interesting words! Go read it…

We’ve all seen and had a bit of a guilty chortle about the Microsoft/Waggener dossier on Fred Vogelstein but today I bring you the Apple dossier on the Wired contributing editor.

**Update** Just to be clear, SJ is Steve Jobs…

Choice quotes include -

• Fred is physically unattractive and kind of a schlump. Try not to stare at him or make him uncomfortable. Do not make fun of his clothes or his haircut. NB: You will be tempted!
• Fred has been at Fortune for a couple of years. We expect he’ll suck up to SJ big-time in order to curry favor with Kirkpatrick and Schlender, both former concubines to SJ.
• Fred tends to “blow with the wind.” He’ll sing the praises of a company one day, then turn around and savage them the next. We predict in the future some blog like Valleywag will take him to task for this. Just remember, if he’s been nice to you in the past, that doesn’t mean he’ll be nice to you now.
• Fred’s mind works at a “majestic” (read: glacial) pace. He rambles. He says, “ah…” and “um…” a lot. For an idea of what to expect, zip into the future and view this video clip which Microsoft will post on its web site in early 2007. You will probably need Internet Explorer to view this, however.

Thankfully, he’s a good sport.

Venture Knowledgists

Or how the twitter bug is a few beats off key.

It’s certainly an exciting time to be working in the Internet space. Social media is bringing everyone closer together. RSS and widgets are making our lives more productive and there are some very cool web applications for people to mess about with.

Blogging, podcasting and social networking have clearly been game changes for how we, as marketing folks, do business. There are now new distribution channels for our messages, new markets and an increasing amount of invaluable niche audiences to communicate to.

Everyone wants to be able to use the new media, the social revolution to their own benefit and this has led to the rise of the venture knowledgists.

Definition

Venture Knowledgists are the ultra early adopters. The people who trawl the Web looking for new apps to try and then pimp to their colleagues, friends, family members and network.

Motivation

Their raison d’etre is to be able to say “I was one of the first people to use XXX” and they live to able to contribute some sort of critical mass for the things they have a stake in.

Payoff

Obviously their stake isn’t money; its ego. There’s no tangible return for being the first Twitterer or the the first Second Lifer. In fact, being first can often be lonely. Just try getting into your office/campus building at 7am.

Caveat Emptor

There is, however, one way that venture capitalists and venture knowledgists are incredibly similar – the failure rate. I’m no VC but I believe from what I’ve read, that if one in ten investments are a success then that’s a good success rate. VKs are in the same bracket.

For every Myspace, Facebook or Skype there are a tonne of useless Web apps that have been mercilessly pimped by the marketing industry. Things like Second Life and soon, I’m afraid to say, Twitter.

I’m not saying that we don’t need VKs — in fact they perform an invaluable purpose in uncovering new things — I’m saying that we should all be aware of their vested interests (do we need full disclosure?!) and put anything they suggest through a full level of scrutiny. Something all the young PRs/marketers should be doing anyway.

What to do?

So next time the Steve Rubel pimps the latest Google App or For Immediate Release breathlessly announces another user has been added to Second Life or Mitch Joel gives you his Twitter feed, take a step back and think why they’re pimping it and whether you can actually use it or not.

**UPDATE** Chris Edwards (not Green – see below), a journalist in the UK, has found another way for PRs to annoy the hell out of him. Yes, it’s Twitter which Charlene Li thinks will be dead before too long. I guess the backlash has started but I may see if the iStudio team can use it for project updates…

**UPDATE 2** http://twitter.com/edlee

Technorati tags: social media, web2.0, web applications, venture capitalists, venture knowledgists, facebook, myspace, skype, google, second life

What would you do?

The preamble

When I was at school, during the holidays I’d sometimes go and stay at friends’ houses. We’d get listen to music, play sports, get drunk, chase girls and for a lot of the time, watch TV.

One of my friends, James Biddle, had a dad who’d always keep us thinking. I remember one day we were watching an ODI and he came into the living room and sat down with us. After about five minutes he asked me “What would you do if you were captain?”

I was a little thrown but managed to come up with something about getting the bowler to put the ball in a certain spot and change some field placings. I got the feeling that Bidds got asked that question a lot.

Because the answer isn’t the point, the point is to always be thinking about how you would deal with a particular situation. In the same way as the salesman should always be closing, a worker in the knowledge based economy should always be thinking.

Cue Glengarry Glen Ross clip:

The Point

As a blogger, I often write about what’s happening, what I think about things and, sometimes, what I would do. I think that’s pretty much the same as most other bloggers you read.

But for the most part, nothing we talk about actually happens. It’s just more content for Google to index and sell search-based advertising against.

Anyway, now all social media commentators have the chance to shape the way one extremely esteemed offline publication’s online presence.

The Economist is bringing its Web site into the Web 2.0 space with “Project Redstripe”. The project team’s mission is to “develop truly innovative services online” – at least they’re starting big!

So, get over to their Web site and their blog and tell them how to run their business.

What would I do?

First off, I love The Economist. I don’t read it as much as I’d like, mainly because we don’t get it in the FH/iStudio office and partly because it’s expensive, but whenever I do, it’s funny, knowledgeable, insightful and slightly subversive.

There are clearly some incredibly smart people at the magazine but very few of the articles are bylined. In an era of transparency and of letting people all the way into your lives (ahem Twitter cough), that seems a little crazy.

So that’s the sea change that The Economist probably needs to undergo but what would this mean for you, the hopefully loyal reader?

Some tactics:

I want to read (when I can afford it) what these guys have to say, but I also want to hear their thoughts on the story. What interviews did they do that didn’t make the final cut? Danny Bradbury is great at doing this. What information did they find that was just mind blowing? What stories people are tracking?

Another thing I’d like to get is a view behind the curtain. The Economist was (last time I saw it explicitly mentioned in an article) pro the war in Iraq and pro legalisation of drugs. Why? Explaining the editorial policy would be great; drive engagement and all that great stuff us social media zealots spew at anyone who’ll listen.

All of this is based on the basic social media stuff – blogs and podcasts and maybe an insight into the del.icio.us pages the writers are using. Football365 just launched a new podcast (no permalinks so they have some work to do on it) that does pretty much all of the above; why not The Economist?

Comments would be a good thing too.

Mark Evans has been saying the newsroom is changing for a while, but the problem is that in this case, The Economist is not a newsroom. It already does the things Mark proposes: less news, more analysis, perspective and context.

So the question is how to change the game. Clearly The Economist’s prize asset is its content and how to sell advertising around it. The above ideas would all generate a huge amount of page views around the excellent product but what technical advance would revolutonise journalism?

Watch this space to find out what they would do, but use this space to let us know what you would do.

If I can indulge in some comment-whoring, I’d love to hear from my blogging journalist, and ex-journalist, friends Mathew and Mark

The Movie Industry: Doing Marketing Right

It’s Oscar night tonight and, while I haven’t watched many of the movies that have been nominated, it’s reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about.

Out of all the industries that depend on marketing, the movie industry seems to do it completely right.

If we go back to Al and Laura Ries’ flow chart of how to build a brand we can see that it should be built by PR and maintained by advertising.

Which is exactly what the best movies do.

• Show film to critics
• Chop up film into advert
• Wait for reviews to be published
• Overlay positive, third party endorsement over advert and add high energy music
• Pray the opening weekend goes as well as the reviews
• Rinse and repeat

As with all industries however, the “marketing” is only as good as the product - a pig is still a pig no matter how much lipstick you put on her.

My advice to the movie industry would be that to minimize the risk of the opening weekend going badly and not living up to the reviews (I’m looking at you MI:3), I’d open somewhere other than the U.S.

My A-level economics is a little rusty but I can remember the “perfect economy” depends on both perfect knowledge and being able to price according to supply and demand.

Therefore, for the movie industry to maximise its economics, they should go where the money for that movie is.

Don’t tie yourselves to the “most”, find the best market for your product. Add another facet to your story – the story of the “sleeper” hit that makes it big somewhere apart from the U.S. before it get’s released into the self-styled “biggest movie market in the world (TM)”.

————————-

And save a thought for the poor publicists working extra hard tonight. Guiding their clients through the perils of the red carpet, emailing the on-air talent who’s wearing their clients and making sure their clients’ sponsorship get the right photo op.

Technorati tags: oscars, movies, marketing, PR, Al and Laura Ries, branding, remarkable, publicity

PR=Propaganda?

The Official Facebook Public Relations Wall is providing some great content for me! I’ll have to do another blog just on the Facebook experience…

Omar Ha-Redeye, a student of Gary Schlee’s at Centennial College, posted this video from PR Watch on YouTube. PR Watch is a program of the Center for Media and Deomcracy, a nonprofit designed to strengthen participatory democracy by investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacy and citizen journalism, media “of, by and for the people.”

(Feedreaders, click through to watch the video)

PR=Propaganda?

Some of the claims in the video inlcude that PR=Propaganda. Propaganda, lest we forget, is defined (by Wikipedia) as:

is a type of message aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda is often deliberately misleading, using logical fallacies, which, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid.

I’d like to think that the majority of campaigns I’ve worked on have all been based on truth, not logical fallacies. In the post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, is there any other way? In terms of impartially providing information, isn’t it a media relations best practice to become a trusted source of information to media?

No Seperation of Church and State

PR Watch’s video goes on to claim that the media is in cohorts with PR (the propagandists) because of the money advertising pours into its coffers. I’m not sure if the Center for Media and Democracy has tried to leverage its ad buy for editorial coverage in Canada, but if it has, I’m sure it would’ve been given the same answer any frustrated rookie PR trying to do it would get. F@#! off.

The seperation between church (editorial) and state (advertising) is one of, if not the, reasons that the media is, and remains, such a trusted source of information. If the lines are indeed blurring, it’s why bloggers are quickly becoming the influencers and why some many people are trying to keep blogging pure and free from the advertiser’s dollar.

The Best PR is Invisible

…and therefore insiduous. The video lays out three of the big agencies – Edelman, Burson-Marstellar and Hill & Knowlton ironically missing out the biggest all, my (end) employer Fleishman-Hillard – as examples of huge agencies no-one’s ever heard of. I’m sorry PR Watch, but I’ve never heard of any of the huge media buying firms that pay for all of the shows on TV either. Does that mean they’re insiduous and evil propagandists too?

Yes a lot of PR agencies are invisible but there are plenty of PR people who are openly talking about what we do, how we do it and why we need to get better at doing it. Transparency is a fast becoming a must in this business.

A Quote

It is arguable that the success of busines propaganda in persuading us, for so long that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda acheivements of the twentieth century.

While it’s true that most PR’s are happy to take a back seat, isn’t that because we’re not paid to take the credit? Our mandate is to paint our clients in the most positive light in the eyes of their audience. Not to get barrels of ink spilled over what we’ve done. Advertising agencies get a decent profile but that’s because advertising is Big. Bold. Flashy. Expensive.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the system, as we have it currently, is pretty self regulating. The media is inherently weighted towards “real news” and to the story of the “underdog”.

The little guy’s story has as much, if not more, of a chance of getting their story told by a media that is constantly looking for compelling stories to tell to their audience. Is there a more compelling story than the proverbial David and Goliath one?

Are people smart enough to realise that for all the great free programs they see on public stations, they have to pay the piper in the form of advertising and marketing directed towards them? My girlfriend had a fit when I suggested her favourite program was simply filler for the next advert break…

Small is the new big, but don’t big companies have the right to have their stories told as well?

Questions; Follow Up

I’d be curious to know what other people, especially Strumpette Inc., think of this. Is PR as genuinely unethical as PR Watch would have us believe? If so, are all the advances we make in terms of transparency and ethical outreach, simply small fish in a very pissed in pond? Or is it, as most things are these days, six of “them” and half a dozen of that?

Technorati tags: PR, ethics, transparency, Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, advertising, marketing, media

Tough on blogs; Tough on the monitoring of blogs

Bill Sledzik, associate professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University, Ohio brings us news that 72 per cent of PRs have no formal way to monitor blogs. (Tip of the hat to Judy Gombita).

Statistics

Additional topline findings from the survey, conducted in association with media monitoring service BurrellesLuce, include:

72.3% of respondents say they have no formal procedure for monitoring the content of blogs that may impact their businesses. Another 8% aren’t sure.

Of the 18.5% of [respondents whose] organizations…use blogs: 78.3% use blogs to connect with customers and end users; 42.8% to reach news media; 39.8% to communicate with employees.

16.5% of respondents say they are aware of existing employee blogs that discuss work-related activities, but very few actually monitor those blogs.

My Take

While the business case for companies starting their own blogs is yet to be *conclusively* proved by Forrester, there should be enough cautionary tales out there (Dell; Kryptonite) to persuade PRs that they should at least be monitoring what people are saying about their clients.

Seem sensible? In theory yes, but in practice, no. You’re reading this very niche blog about a very narrow subject. You’re engaged in the blogging community either as a reader, commenter or blogger. You know all this stuff already.

The 72 per cent of PRs who don’t monitor blogs are blissfully unaware of how the phrase “dell hell” originated or who “kryptonite” is. They may know from conversational experience that Dell has lousy customer service or that some bike locks could get picked with a pen cap, but they don’t know the deeper stories and communications learnings behind these anecdotal tid bits.

Advice for Junior/Mid-level PRs

If your account director/VP doesn’t make you monitor social media, why not manage upwards and get her to see why it’s important? Don’t march brazenly into her office and demand the account becomes focused on the citizen journalist; do it in a more insiduous way.

Start monitoring by yourself. Get a feedreader, set up some Technorati/Google Blog searches. Set up Google News alerts. Use Google Trends to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and include the (free) graphs in your monthly reports.

See David Jones’ Squidoo lens for more free tools and how to use them for your account work.

We hear what they’re saying…what next?

You’ve successfully integrated blog monitoring into your account team’s repetoire and your client’s given you a mandate to reach out to key bloggers in your market. What do you do now?

I’d recommend doing what I did with the media when I moved to Canada. I worked out who the key journalists were for the accounts I worked on and gave them a call to introduce myself, my client list and to find out what they needed from me.

Do the same with bloggers. Work out the top…20 bloggers for a client. Subscribe to their feeds and read them for a month. Leave a couple of comments (with full disclosure of course) or introduce yourself to them by email.

Get their permission to send them  interesting news from the client and, if they agree, send them highly personalized notes. If they don’t want to get information from you, you’ve still got some 55 million other people who may and you’ve saved yourself and the client from an embarrassing entry in the Bad Pitch Blog. Congrats!

Analyze the results then rinse and repeat until you have a highly targeted list of bloggers who view you as a trusted source of information. It’s hard work, but it pays off eventually. Unfortunately, laziness pays off now.

Technorati tags: blogger relations, Bill Sledzik, Kent State University, BurrellesLuce, blog monitoring, PR, social media, junior PRs, mid-level PRs, David Jones, squidoo

Microformats

**UPDATE** – I chatted with Dave Knight, from iStudio’s technical team about this and have a revised, remixed and improved posting over on the iStudio blog.

It’s a cold cold Saturday here in Toronto and instead of going to the gym, I’m trying to get a head start on my Blog Herald column. Now that the furore has died down somewhat, I though I’d riff on the “Social Media News Release” or, as we call it at iStudio, the Optimized News Release.

One of the many questions I have around the development of a standard ONR is the issue of microformats, hRelease and hAtom tags.

My html skills go as far as embedding a link in a blog comment, and even that is a toss-up sometimes, so I’ve been struggling to find out what they do and, more importantly, why we need a standard.

Definition of the crowds

The Wikipedia definition of a microformat is:

…(a) markup that allow(s) expression of semantics in an HTML (or XHTML) web page. Programs can extract meaning from a standard web page that is marked up with microformats.

Existing XHTML (and HTML) standards allow for semantics to be embedded and encoded within them. This is done using specific HTML attributes:

• class
• rel
• rev

Adding microformats to a standard HTML web page allows machines to process HTML text and to possibly load data into remote databases. This would allow programs such as web crawlers to find items such as contact information, events, and reviews on web pages.

Layman’s explanation

So what does that mean? Well, I’ve started to think about it like this:

Most all of my blog postings have certain “tags” or key words that I use to describe them. These tags are, in turn, used to classify and group my posting in with others. So this post will be tagged “microformat” and, if you click on the link at the bottom, you’ll be taken through to Technorati where you’ll be able to see all other postings that have also been tagged “microformat“.

If that’s how tags are used, microformats are, as I understand them, used to identify and group pieces of information within the document.

With regards to the ONR, there is a standard format of what information needs to go where: headline; main copy; executive quotes; video etc. The microformats would allow PRs to tag each of these sections, not just the whole document, with relevant key words.

Practical application

How does all this help our core constituents, journalists like Mathew Ingram or bloggers like Mark Evans? Say I’m a real journalist and I’m writing a news story on SAS (an old client). I need some quotes to round it out but it’s the weekend and I can’t get in touch with my PR contact. Time’s running out and I need Dr. Jim’s word’s of wisdom ASAP.

One solution is to trawl through the many, many news releases hosted in the SAS news room. But there’s no time for that now. The microformat would allow you to go to a search engine (where ever that is) and look up all “quotes” tagged “jim goodnight” and “whatever I’m writing about”.

As long as SAS issues standardized ONRs and the PR/tech guys have done their job, a simple search would bring me up exactly what I need.

Caveat Emptor

As always, this is the utopian ideal. We’re hoping that

• the quotes are real quotes and not “franken-quotes”,
• that the microformats have not been abused or spammed
• the (as yet unwritten) standards are being supported by the major search engines like Technorati, Google and Yahoo! (an FH client)
• journalists give a damm

Apart from that we’re all set!

As I’m going to say on Friday, I think the ONR has a lot of potential both as a way of generating more coverage for a client (in the short and long term) and for improving the way in which PRs pitch journalists and bloggers.

There are, as always, many bridges to cross before we find ourselves there.

Technorati tags: microformat, optimized news release, PR, social media, online, marketing, press release, news release, media relations