Love it or hate it, email is one of the best communications vehicles we have.

This is the sort of post that is just too long for Twitter and no where near thought out enough for the blog. But here goes.

I have no idea why people (in this case the VW dealership) insist on being “faxed” documents and documentation. It takes me a good five mins to work out how to use our fax machine (do I dial “9″, did it go through, was it the right way up etc) and another 15 mins of worrying whether the person at the other end actually got it, or whether my fax rolled underneath the fax machine.

Case in point: I sent three faxes today, one of which was a duplication of the first and all of which contained some pretty important information such as passport number, DOB, work permit details and my annual salary. I have no idea whether the intended recipients got the fax or if my personal details are currently being sold to shady people in far-flung countries.

At least, I won’t know until I get my next credit card statement. <<insert tired joke about wife’s spending being higher than the ID thieves’ here>>

In the half hour or so I spent photocopying my documents, figuring out how to use the fax machine and then worrying about my data, I could’ve quickly and easily scanned said documents into a PDF and emailed them many times over. Sure, I would still be subject to the same data integrity woes (remember that email is like a postcard - anyone can read it, if they are so inclined) but if I got the wrong email address, I would be instantly alerted by one of those annoying, yet useful, bounce-backs.

Secondly, does anyone ever fall for that stupid fax spam? You know, the one sent by “Human Resources” to “All employees” alerting you to a great deal on holidays, cars, whatever. Or the one that has an offer on it that’s been marked up by “Doug from Finance” but sent to you by “accident”.

Clearly enough people do fall for it to make it worth their while, and the response rates must need to be much higher than email spam as, after all, spammers actually have to pay for fax spam in the form of telephone charges. Judging by the huge pile of paper piling up on our own fax machine, fax spam is a profitable business.

But what sort of person trusts a random fax sent to someone else? Maybe I should send a memo to them. Now…what’s their fax number?

A couple of months back I was approached by Dawn Leader, a student at Leeds University in the U.K., to answer some questions on citizen journalism for her dissertation.

Initially, I was pretty wary about the fact that, to an extent, my answers could directly affect Dawn’s dissertation mark and, therefore her degree and employment prospects. That was a two-foot wall  and once I got over it I was happy to help out.

Seeing as I’m a little short on time/inspiration, here are her questions, and my answers:

Dawn Leader: Do you think that the advent of Citizen Journalism has lead to a loss of control for PR practitioners?

Ed Lee: I think that PR practitioners are deluding themselves if they think they had “control”. PR is an inherently disintermediated industry where there is a lot of massaging of messages which are, ultimately, put into the hands of an impartial third party to spread that message. Sure there is a lot of control at the start of the process in terms of messaging, but by the time that message gets to the consumer, either through word of mouth or directly through the media, it has changed beyond all recognition.

Q: How much importance do you place on social media  (web-logs, RSS, social networking, citizen journalism) being a useful tool for communicating, when compared to traditional media?

A: From where I’m sitting, it’s obvious that the tools of social media are less important than the philosophy that they are built on - namely honesty, openness, transparency and the importance of doing something “remarkable”. An organization could adopt all the tools of social media but if it doesn’t act with those four principles in mind, it will be doomed to failure; especially when compared to a company that spurns social media tactics in favour of those four principles.

In terms of tactical execution, social media are *just* another communications channel for organizations to reach their stakeholders and should be considered complementary to the traditional public relations channels.

Q: Do you think the rise of social media/citizen journalism has influenced the way companies are communicating with their publics?

A: Social media is yet to affect the sort of change within organizations that the zealots would have you believe. But, more and more organizations are coming to terms with the fact that there is a giant throng of conversations going on, and, good or bad, that some of those conversations are about them. For marketers and PRs alike, social media provides additional channels to reach their publics but it’s up to the organization to experiment with the best to reach their audiences. Social media may or may not be the best way to reach your publics, depending on who they are, but it is another way.

Q: Do you think the use of social media tools has improved communications between PR organisation’s and their publics?

A: That’s a tough question. Social media is in such a nascent stage that it is impossible to say for sure. Social media has the potential to improve the level of dialogue between an organization and its publics but for every Direct2Dell type break-through, there is a Target-style break-down. Direct2Dell’s IdeaStorm initiative led to Dell machines being shipped with Linux while Target recently announced it did not respond to non-traditional media requests.

I can certainly say that social media is stretching PRs (both in-house and agency) to the limits of their resources as they realise that everyone could be a media outlet and look to determine where they should direct their efforts.

Q: Do you think that the prevalence of two-way communication has allowed for more transparency between PR organisations and the public?

A: The “public” still doesn’t really understand what public relations is and when they do have some sort of contact with PR, it’s either the media’s distorted view of PR or through some god-awful shill publicist like Max bloody Clifford. However, the amount of PR people who are blogging with transparency about a much maligned function will, hopefully, lead to a greater level understanding of what real PR is. And real PR in my mind is about dialogue and conversation rather than manipulation and spinning. (Even though that was one of the things that sucked me into the business after watching and reading the Michael Dobbs House of Cards trilogy)

Q: To what extent do you think consumers are influenced by what they see or read on social media sites?

A: Again, it’s hard to say. You look at an innovative initiative like Facebook’s beacon and the way people were not happy about it but then you read Edelman’s trust barometer and the number one most trusted thing is “people like me”. Social media will certainly offer the opportunity to connect with more “people like you” and it’s certainly allowing influencers to self-identify and create their own brands outside of the mainstream media but are consumers any more influenced by social media than traditional media? Who knows. One thing I will say is that social media, and blogs in particular, show up higher and higher in search engines which can only increase their influence.

Q: How reliable (trustworthy) do you find the information found on social media sites and blogs?

A: I think trustworthiness and reliability depend on the source, rather than the medium. Clearly, some “top ranked” blogs pride themselves on providing a high level of accuracy, while some are more concerned with breaking stories and not so concerned with accuracy. However, the beauty of the medium and the social media movement in general is that the cream will find its way to the top so if your blog/Web site consistently carries inaccurate and/or out of date information, then it is unlikely to gain in popularity and readership.

Q: Do you think having a public facing blog allows a company to develop a stronger relationship with its customers?

A: Absolutely! Social media has allowed for a complete 360 degree conversation to happen between an organization and its customers. With a blog, an organization can start conversations that are important to its mission and, even more importantly, get immediate feedback from its customers. If the social media ecosphere is like a giant conversation, organizations can harness this critical mass to access a customer research group of millions of potential customers.

However, this can only be achieved if the organization embraces honesty, openness, transparency and the importance of doing something “remarkable”.

Q: To what extent do you think blogging, citizen journalism and social media activities can effect the reputation of companies?

A: You only need reference the Kryptonite bike-lock crisis and Jeff Jarvis’s “dell hell” experience to see how this new medium affects an organization’s reputation. Blogs are essentially built for search engine optimization which means that a negative blog posting, that criticises an organisation, can appear above the organization’s own Web site. Considering search is the average user’s portal to the Internet (21% of users have a search engine as their home page), this can be very scary to organizations and to the communicators/marketers within it.

I was going to write a long and overwrought post building on Julie Rusciolelli’s comment in InsidePR #110 that “social media is about putting the public back in public relations”. Because, well, never a truer word was said.

I was going to write about how PR people no longer need to go through the media to get to their clients’ audiences.

I was going to write that blogging, social networking, collaborative work spaces, community marketing, word of mouth, email and search marketing are all allowing was for us, as communicators to speak with “The Public” on a real, personal level and create a direct, meaningful engagement between The Organization and The Audience.

But before I did, I did a quick Google search and found out many better, more qualified people than I have written about the subject. Like I had planned to do, they had spoken eloquently (more eloquently than I could’ve hoped for) about the “two-way street” that is opening up between our clients or employers and their audiences.

Reams have also been written about how people have been having conversations about your (client’s) brand since the dawn of time but now we can find those conversations, listen to the conversations and, more importantly track those conversations.

“They” have also talked about how the holy grail of past public relations campaigns has been to get our (clients’) products into the hands of “the influencers” so they could evangelize them to their circle of influence. But finding those influencers was so very hard. Now social media is allowing the influencers to self-identify, through blogs, through message boards, through social networks. Now we can find the influencers in any given sector quickly and easily.

So why should I put any effort into it? As one of my favourite quotes, from the simply fantastic movie American History X, says:

“someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them“

Rather than steal from them, here are some fantastic reads about:

Putting the Public back in Public Relations

Brian Solis, PR 2.0

Frank Ovaitt, PR Conversations

Rohit Bhargava, 360 degree Digital Influence

Steve Rubel, Micropersuasion (geddit)

Last week I shared a list I had compiled for an internal e-learning course and this week I wanted to share a fascinating piece of research.

I was asked whether email marketing was more effective than direct mail, and by what margin.

Based on some really cool work my colleagues and I have been doing with a client’s email communications, that I hope to go into more detail on later, I was hopeful that the ability to personalize, and measure, the email experience would lead to it being more effective.

The results were surprising.

First off, both email and direct mail marketing are really dependent on the content within the piece, the industry/sector the sender is in and, to a large extent, the relationship with the recipient. For these reasons, it’s very tough to definitively say “this is the benchmark to which you should aspire”. More accurately, we should look to gather as much data as possible, look to prove the ROI of your campaigns and look for increasing metrics over time.

That being said:

Direct Mail

The standard response rate for the first piece of direct mail sent to a recipient is about two per cent but a marketer could consider any where between one and three per cent as a “good” response.

Bearing in mind that a response to a piece of direct mail is a complex action - the recipient must open the piece, read the piece and then take action on it - two per cent sounds like a pretty good response rate..

However, this two per cent response jumps to between five and 35 per cent when the direct mail has been sent to a recipient for a second time (as a renewal).

Email

Measuring the effectiveness of email is much easier. We can track open rate and click-through rate extremely easily and, what’s more, we can use this historic data to tailor the content by the user’s interaction. So just by using the content, by clicking through on links I find interesting, the content get’s smarter and more personalized to my interest.

For a vanilla email, sent to an opt-in (as opposed to bought) email list, marketers can report an open rate of between 20 and 40 per cent combined with a six per cent click-through rate as average. Anywhere above that and you’ll be doing well.

See the graph below for more detailed benchmarks for your industry.

Because you can effectively and cheaply segment your email database by its past actions and by self-declared preferences (upon sign-up), smart email marketers can significantly increase both of those metrics.

However, you can only improve on what you measure so it was worry to find out that 18.7 per cent of email marketers, in a 2006 survey, didn’t know their open rates…

Conclusion

So, as expected, email marketing would seem to give the direct marketer much better ROI and much better metrics. However…

According to one article I found, both email and direct mail marketing tactics work better for non-profits (where better = raise more money) when used in tandem.

Interesting. In presentations and brainstorms, we always talk about the need for truly integrated communication plans where the online and offline components of a campaign truly tessellate. I’m glad to see that the quantitative, as well as anecdotal, evidence supports what I’m sure all marketers already suspected - no one tactic can reach all of your audiences.

My Fleishman-Hillard Digital colleague, Matt Dickman, has a great post up over at Techno//Marketer that encapsulates the dichotomy and divide between new marketing and old marketing.

Matt puts it in the form of two equations:

1. Message 1,000,000 to possibly reach 100

2. Personally reach 100 who influence 1,000 who influence 10,000 who influence 1,000,000

There’s the paradox. It’s easier to shotgun your message to 1mm people and just slap that number into your reporting than to research and cultivate relationships with The 100.

Easier to work on getting the messaging to the 1mm once, than work on the personal messages to The 100.

Easier to forget about the 1mm, once the message has been distributed, than to have to constantly work The 100 to get them to spread the message and evangelize you.

Twitter is a complete time-sink with very few business applications (that I can see) but it is a whole lot of fun.

As a result, I’m spending more and more of my time over on my Twitter account where I, in no particular order:

• Post interesting links
• Talk about pop culture
• Give some sort of commentary on how my beloved Liverpool are doing (including “breaking” the Twitter formatting with 140 character long celebrations. no spaces.)
• Banter with my online friends and colleagues
• Ask for (and sometimes even get) stats/research/examples/lunch suggestions

But I’m a snob. I follow people I find interesting and who I want to stay connected with. I try to keep the people I’m following to under 100 and I don’t follow other people just so they’ll follow me back.

For some reason, about 500 people have signed up to see what’s up in my life - which is a bit confusing/disconcerting. I’m not even interesting enough for my wife to want to know what’s going on with me, or even, and this is depressing, when Liverpool score.

I’m flattered by the attention and I do click through to every new follower’s profile to see who they are and whether I want to follow them. For me, following them is a completely arbitrary decision based on any number of utterly subjective factors most of which are probably too facile to even consider codifying.

However, if you really, really, really do want me to follow you, all’s not lost. Twitter means you can see what I’m doing and by inserting the simple “@edlee” you can direct your update/message/link to me. It’s a conversation, so let’s converse!

I’ve started following a good few people this way and uncovered some interesting people this way - it’s just that I won’t follow people just because they follow me. Sorry.

More on being a Twitter Snob

Mitch Joel is a Twitter snob.

This guy’s Twitter etiquette is absurd.

Does Twitter have business benefits?

Colin Carmichael can see the business benefits of Twitter. I can see the business benefit of having a “status” (a la Facebook) associated with your bio/contact details within your company’s intranet but,I can’t see the conversational nature of Twitter, specifically, scaling very well - especially in an organization as large as Fleishman-Hillard (c2,600 employees). For my money, all the “@s” would render such a system utterly useless - I’d look up what a colleague in London or Hong Kong was doing, to see whether I could call them and see them deep in a conversation with another colleague about whether, for example, Peep Show is better than Big Train or the Mighty Boosh.

[Disclosure, Super Channel, the TV network that carries Peep Show in Canada is a client][Double disclosure, Peep Show >>> Big Train]

Not so useful as seeing a Facebook style status update - Ed’s colleague is on vacation rather than getting an erstwhile Out Of Office notification.

However, as with all new social media, Twitter is worth following - or at least monitoring.

Tags: twitter snob social media

Something I don’t do a good job of on this blog is letting the reader into the inner workings of the iStudio office. Partly because I’m a pretty shocking blogger right now and partly because I think that’s more for the iStudio blog. Which I’m equally delinquent on.

So perhaps that should stop and for my first trick, some blatant link/comment baiting which adds no real value apart from to direct you, the reader to some super smart people and to thank them for providing great, thought provoking content.

I was recently asked to provide a list of my favourite PR/marketing blogs for an internal elearning course. As I’ve got everything in an easy-to-cut-and-paste format, here they are, in no particular order.

Thanks guys!

Note - * donates a conflict such as past/present colleague/client

Public Relations

Shel Holtz - http://blog.holtz.com/

Colin McKay - http://canuckflack.com/

Mike Manuel - http://www.mguerilla.com/media_guerrilla/

Origin of Brands (Laura Ries) - http://ries.typepad.com/ries_blog/

Jeremy Pepper - http://pop-pr.blogspot.com/

PR Squared - http://www.pr-squared.com/

*David Jones - http://www.prworks.ca/

Stephen Davies - http://www.prblogger.com/

Strumpette (although this falls in the “guilty pleasures” bucket) - http://strumpette.com/

Peter Himler - http://theflack.blogspot.com/

Brendan Cooper - http://brendancooper.com/

Paull Young - http://youngie.prblogs.org/

Richard Bailey - http://prstudies.typepad.com/weblog/

Dave Fleet - http://davefleet.com/

Leo Bottary (more client service but he’s a PR guy) - http://clientserviceinsights.blogspot.com/

*iStudio - http://blog.istudio.ca/

*High Road Communications - http://www.highroad.com/blog

*Martin Hofmann - http://www.martinhofmann.net/

*David Bradfield - http://navigatecommunications.com/

*Kristen Zemlak - http://zemlak.wordpress.com/

Chris Clarke would also be in there but a) he barely posts any more and b) his site is nearly always down

I also subscribe to the PR Voices feed for the “hottest” topics in the flak-o-sphere: http://prvoices.com/

Marketing

Andy Sernovitz - http://www.damniwish.com/

Sean Moffitt - http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/

Jackie Huba/Ben McDonell, Church of the Customer - http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/

Sean Howard - http://www.craphammer.ca/

Forrester Marketing - http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/

Joseph Jaffe - http://www.jaffejuice.com/

David Armano - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

John Dodds - http://makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com/

Kate Trgovac - http://www.mynameiskate.ca/

One Degree - http://www.onedegree.ca/

Seth Godin - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

Mitch Joel - http://www.twistimage.com/blog/

Douglas Walker - http://www.webwalker.ca/

*Matt Dickman - http://technomarketer.typepad.com

Good to see that this post from a couple of months ago is starting to come true.

I predicted that PR agencies would start buying up smaller digital agencies and bring them (and their talent) in to bolster their digital consulting and production capabilities.

And it’s happening. In Canada, as the Environics Group purchased Sequentia Communications and in the U.K. as Edelman acquired Spook.

No doubt this will continue apace as offline and online communications remain on course to be fully integrated into each other.

/smugness

**Disclaimer: Environics and Sequentia are both competitors to Fleishman-Hillard and iStudio in Canada, while Edelman is a global competitor to Fleishman-Hillard.

Engagement is a good thing. Having the 1 per cent of your passionate customers submit content for your brand is a good thing.

But, as many things social media related, these good things come with a caveat emptor: buyer beware. After all, when it comes to UGC, you get what you pay for.

Take Sky News back in the U.K.. What better way to add context and texture to an already engaging event like the London Marathon than to ask your viewers/readers to submit their photos from around the 26.2 mile course.

Well, not clicking on “approve” on every photo that comes in while preswatching the (enthralling) Liverpool vs. Blackburn and Man. Utd. vs. Arsenal matches would be a good start.

Check out some of the worst offenders I noticed while clicking though today:

(Check out the banner on the bridge)

(Erm, do you see something that’s inappropriately out of place)

(Can you spot a certain movie star?)

(Not out of the realms of probability, but I doubt the Tron dude is going to be watching the London Marathon)

Just another warning that while there is always the 1 per cent of passionate users who will willingly create content and drive the conversation forward, there will be a greater or equal amount of people willing to mess about with the cool tools you’re using and to abuse the trust you’re putting in them.

Blogging is a tough concept for a lot of clients to grasp, but when you layer in micro-blogging (Twitter, Jaiku, etc) on top of it, it’s a whole different ball game.

How can you coherently explain the need for people to communicate through a public (and searchable) interface to each other via 140 characters or less?

And this morning I realised that all you need to know can be found in Saturday Night Live.

Blogging is:

The sketches. As a blogger/sketch writer, you can develop your thoughts, introduce complex concepts and take a “deep dive” into your subject matter. You can give it some more cow-bell.

Micro-blogging is:

Weekend Update. A chance to informally throw out pithy comments, and have a dialogue on, anything that interests you. Found a link or had a quick thought? Want to add your insight to an existing conversation? Micro-blog it!

Micro-blogging means:

Micro-blogging means you don’t need to take that initial thought and spend the time to develop it into a full on blog post - although you could if you wanted to. (this post could’ve easily been a Twitter update.

Micro-blogging means no more boring “link posts” which no one reads anyway. Add some value to your community by Twittering your interesting links.

Micro-blogging means the chance to get immediate feedback from your social graph. No one reads your boring link posts anyway, and just a few more read your emails with links in. So why put any more effort into them? Copy, paste to Twitter and hit update. Quick. Easy.

So, if you want to get links to stuff that I’ve found interesting, to my “Weekday Update”, like this video, please feel free to follow me on Twitter.