PR Squared

You are Being Re-Directed to the NEW PR-Squared - Please hold a sec!

2006-06-16T17:37:00.000-04:00

Shouldn't take more than a second... ... ...

Bye-Bye, Blogger!

2006-06-15T17:37:00.000-04:00

This is the last official day on the Blogger service. We're moving to www.pr-squared.com. Let me know (over there!) what you think of the blog's new look. We're goin' for "edgy."

If you're a subscriber via RSS (thank you!), I am told that you're all set. Additionally, I am told that the re-direct we're setting up for this site will automatically direct browsers to the new site (after a millisecond blip).

I bemoan the loss of Technorati rankings (Technorati Rank: 12,109 --- 407 links from 162 sites; not sure how good that is) and Google juice, but it's time to upgrade.

As we depart this Blogger site --- 2 years & 2 weeks since it started --- one milestone I feel good about is the ~1,600 monthly visitors we've been trying to entertain, enlighten & (occasionally) enrage. Hope you'll all join us!

Even though my tech guy assures me that the re-direct will work quickly & seamlessly, I will probably cross-post to this site for a week or so.

Thanks for the memes --- err, memories --- Blogger!

Social Media Press Releases: Digging Deeper

2006-06-14T18:36:00.000-04:00

So far, the ## of downloads for our Social Media Press Release template hovers at approximately 3,500.

I've also learned through PR Newswire that almost 700 registered journalists took a look at our announcement.

Meanwhile, almost 80 bloggers have made note of the template, in some form or another, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

Pretty cool... but, some folks have raised some legitimate objections, so I want to see what I can do to sway them, a bit. To do so, we must dig deeper into the features, motivations and opportunities created by the new format.

The primary objection is best summed up by Susan Getgood: "The focus needs to be on content. Crappy content in a new form does NOT equal a good press release." ... (Special award for snarkasm goes to Brian Oberkirch of Ketchum, who talked about how we were merely "tarting up message points" --- great line!)

I am in whole-hearted agreement with these objectors. Even though the bullet-point format should minimize a lot of the "superlative" bad writing, the Social Media Press Release must be well-written. And, it does not replace the need to participate in on-going conversations.

With that said, please, explore with me. Let's take the time to examine some of the finer points:

As I mentioned at Susan's site, one benefit to the Social Media Press Release is that it could enable the widescale distribution of multimedia content that will be relevant not just to mainstream journalists but to bloggers, as well. Bloggers like pictures, to "tart-up" their posts (thanks, Brian). But that's one of the simplest of its benefits.

Now, think about the digg button on the Social Media release. Maybe no mainstream journalist covers your release, but, a few bloggers "digg" & comment on it --- and potentially a release that would have died on the vine becomes a full-scale meme ... which in turn leads to mainstream coverage! Such a scenario is possible for the first time, now. The Social Media release facilitates this scenario.

Dig deeper: I am increasingly excited about "Pitching 2.0". PR pros can become "stewards of the storyline" ... Rather than just get journalists to subscribe to our clients' pressroom RSS feeds, we might want them to subscribe to a del.icio.us site where we can "build" a story for them via links and our own notes/opinions. Essentially, the PR pro can become the journalists' and bloggers' Research Assistant, via on-going updates to the del.icio.us site. And how do you get the original access to the "purpose-built" del.icio.us page & accompanying RSS feed? In part, through the Social Media Press Release!

More to come.

San Francisco On My Mind

2006-06-13T16:58:00.000-04:00

I'm making an impromptu visit to our San Francisco office this week (Wed - Fri). The schedule is fairly light right now, so if you are a "PR 2.0" blogger/PR pro/zealot and you want to grab coffee or something, drop me a line.

WARNING: I am fiercely recruiting for Account Managers, Directors, etc., to support our growth. You may find a PR 2.0 chat evolving into a discussion about your career goals!

Big, Happy Surprises

2006-06-13T08:50:00.000-04:00

The single biggest surprise to come out of the launch of the Social Media Press Release template?

The ## of clients and prospects that have subsequently raised their hands to say, "Make us your guinea pig."

Heartening. I'm planning to take 'em up on it.

Mistakes will be made!

"Consumer Generated Media" Starts at Home

2006-06-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

To most pundits, "Consumer Generated Media" (CGM) means user-profiles at MySpace; karaoke videos uploaded to YouTube; bajillions of blogs; Flikr slideshows; etc. Every PR pro worth their salt is advising clients to "pay attention" to the crushing wave of brand-altering substances spilling out onto the Web.

But there's another form of consumer-created content, freely available to corporations who want to tap into it, which can provide a goldmine of actionable data.

It's e-mail. The e-mail that flows into a company via its customer service channel.

Most companies view customer emails as "trouble tickets." Fix the trouble, and the emails stop.

But imagine a company that took the time and expended the resources to data-mine these e-mails for trends. Imagine a day when these email trends could be correlated and cross-checked with the data they're scouting for in blogs and the mainstream media.

Example:

On Day #1, a new product debuts: The Widget. The mainstream media gives The Widget a warm reception. The CMO is pleased.

On Day #2, a spike of email & phone traffic flows into Customer Service. The Widget's doohickey breaks after several hours' worth of use. Customer Service reps navigate users to a solution that usually works. The CMO is not notified of any of this. He's thinking about how to launch The Widget, 2.0. (From a beach. In Hawaii.)

On Day #7, a blogger who waited for 45 minutes on the phone for The Widget tech support (only to be disconnected) blogs about how pissed-off he is about the doohickey's failings and cruddy tech support. His network of online friends pick up the strand. Other pissed-off Widget owners find out about this conversation via Google and Technorati searches on "Widget problems." They blog and comment accordingly. A meme develops.

On Day #14, a BusinessWeek reporter notices that "Widget problems" is high on the list of searches at Technorati. One user's makeshift "doohickey fix" is among the most commonly saved items on del.icio.us. The BusinessWeek reporter calls The Widget people for comment. The CMO is recalled from the beach. There's no SPF-factor lotion high enough to protect him from the "burn" he's about to feel.

Now imagine if the technologies that marketers now use to track online conversations had also been used to track the emails that flooded into the Customer Service department on Day #2.

The Widget-makers could have blogged about "potential doohickey problems and how to fix them;" and put out a traditional release; and, kept a close look-out for blog postings that they could have reacted to almost instantly, to keep the meme from becoming a "firememe" (like a firestorm, only "meemier").

"Social Media" is about the conversation. If your customers are trying to tell you something, be sure you have the capability to listen --- early & often.

Maybe We Need a Social Media DMZ?

2006-06-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Tom Foremski previewed today's SVW post in a note to me, Richard Edelman, Bob Angus (now @ Edelman) and Giovanni Rodriguez of Eastwick, among others, re: creating a group wiki to further the cause of the Social Media Press Release.

On the one hand I welcome this, obviously. But, it's the first time we've heard from Tom since we launched our template. And meanwhile, Edelman hasn't exactly proven to be an open-source partner on this Social Media stuff. I know Tom sure likes them. (And I admit, that worries me a li'l bit. I'm all for openness, but I also run a business. "Mouths to feed, rent to pay," and all that. We compete on innovation.)

Maybe we could all get together, at the NewPR wiki? --- if competing agencies are going to openly collaborate on this continuing evolution, I'd consider Constantin Basturea's workspace to be an acceptable DMZ.

The net of it is that SHIFT is happy to help out, on a level playing field, to advance the cause. Certainly, the conversation has already started. And we are proud of our role in moving it forward.

For the record, I am not saying anything in this post that I have not already communicated to Tom privately. In addition, his post contains some additional great suggestions about how the Social Media Press Release might be improved. Watch this space.

It's a Hand-Off, Not a Duel

2006-06-07T09:30:00.000-04:00

We recently took over an account from a competing agency. There was a "hand-off" meeting as part of the transition. I wasn't at the meeting, but my agency colleagues --- as well as the client contacts who were present --- were shocked by the displaced agency's graceless lack of professionalism.

Look, these types of meetings are never easy. I understand that our competitor lost revenue and prestige when the client decided to take a new direction. But that's business. Win some, lose some, right?

Consider how badly this one dumb move could hurt their business.

The client will never again consider calling that agency.
The client contacts present during the hand-off meeting won't ever call them into an agency review, when they invariably move on to their next gigs.
I will never recommend this agency in instances where we might have a newbiz conflict.

It gets worse. We talked about their poor attitude in an HQ staff meeting:

50-odd PR people in the Boston market now consider this agency to have a "black mark" against it.
They won't ever interview there as prospective employees.
They won't ever think to invite that firm to compete for their business, if they ever take an in-house marketing post.

All because some agency VP got pissy about turning over a few memos and databases.

Burning bridges is bad business.

I Create, Therefore I Market

2006-06-05T23:00:00.000-04:00

One of the tenets of the "2.0 wave" is that consumers are creating their own content. Does it follow that if we are all becoming content creators, we are all also becoming marketers?

After all, no one takes the time to envision, craft, and post a piece of content --- of any type --- without hoping for an audience to react to it. Even the gazillions of abandoned blogs that you run across were clearly hoping that their small voice would find a receptive ear.

If we are “all” becoming marketers, it follows that we are all also looking for “distribution” outlets. (Blogger is a lemonade stand. MySpace and YouTube are aggregators – shopping malls. Who’s got the best lemonade stand? What’s the coolest store to hang out in? Who’s the coolest kid at the mall?)

That's not to say that the content creator is marketing for a montary gain, necessarily. In the 2.0 world --- in which, let’s not forget, we are increasingly alienated from real-world communities and instead embrace our screens --- “marketing” for an amateur content creator may just mean that they are looking for validation, for authority --- not a pay-out.

By “marketing,” in other words, I am suggesting that a content creator is actively in search of an audience. If they fail, they try again: they make their content better; they post in a different forum. They are making tactical, thoughtful calculations about how to boost traffic/comments/feedback that validate their efforts. They take action in search of reaction.

Look again at the adorable kid in this picture. She probably spent an hour making those Play Doh sculptures. And I'll bet that she subsequently called out to Mommy to check it all out. She is clearly delighted that Mommy was so impressed that she ran to grab the camera! The li'l gal is a content creator who successfully marketed the value of her effort. With a click of the camera shutter, she closed the sale. Validation!

"Ya Say Ya Wanna Revolution?"

2006-06-05T09:07:00.001-04:00

This recent question by a PR student named "Lindsey" was too wrenching to let fester in the Comments section of a months-old post about "Fixing PR Undergrad Programs." The topic seems relevant all-over-again, with the increased industry-wide interest in "PR 2.o" themes. (Lindsey's comment has been edited for length):

"Maybe I am inexperienced and naive, but why can’t (your ideas) be implemented? As an undergrad majoring in PR, I am completely terrified that while the school’s reputation might add some attractiveness to my resume, my real-world skills will be terribly lacking. Internships only tend to reinforce the concepts that PR intro classes teach (like how to write a press release), but they fall short in terms of providing a meaningful connection with the professional world as a whole.

"So I’m stumped. If I can’t receive much significant in the way of actual, workable knowledge in undergrad, grad school, or internships, then it follows that the people providing the jobs should help cultivate me.

"If the PR firms and departments are dissatisfied with the pseudo-educated graduates flocking in for interviews, why don’t they have a right to work closely with colleges and universities? Why is this such a utopian idea, Todd?"

Wow. (Umm, Lindsay - call me 1st, upon graduation! Your thoughtfulness and sincerity light up your comment.)

To address the core question: "Why don't PR firms work closely with universities to ensure that their graduates are up-to-speed on both core skillsets and forward-looking social media concepts?" --- I think it's a combination of factors:

PR pros at-work in the industry are too dang busy to give the educators any assistance.
PR educators --- in the past, anyway --- were happy to ensconce themselves in the "ivory tower." They did not bother to reach out to agency employers.
It was easy for both educator and employer to ignore one another because it was "good enough" for agencies to get raw recruits who had at least demonstrated a legitimate commitment to the trade.

It's starting to change, though. I was encouraged when Boston University's Professor Edward Downes, of the prestigious College of Communication, started to teach our Social Media Press Release to his students. I am encouraged by Auburn University's Forward blog and by the work of Robert French, also at Auburn, who plans to "have (his) students create samples (of a Social Media release) in a wiki over the coming weeks."

Mostly, I am encouraged by y-o-u, Lindsey. You give a shit. That counts for something. And in all likelihood, the "MySpace Generation" needn't worry much about "grokking" the Social Media phenomenon --- YOU will push US (both employers & educators).

This is how revolutions are born --- through the student population.

PR 2.0 Learning Curves

2006-06-02T09:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I gave a "PR 2.0" presentation to about 40-odd PR pros, of various experience levels. I talked about the Social Media Press Release Template. I talked about "Pitching 2.0." About how the "one-too-many" approach to PR had become a virtuous loop between brands, consumers, and new/old media; about how each stakeholder is now interconnected, and (for the first time) equally impactful.

Heads exploded.

Many were intrigued and enthused. Some were intrigued but daunted. Some were skeptical. One asked, "Are you sure that this isn't a case of 'ready, shoot, aim' --- will the media 'get' this anytime soon?"

As an agency principal, I admit I'm daunted not only by the amount of time my own staff will require to get up to speed on all this stuff, but also by the amount of time it takes to make & sustain a valuable level of "connectedness." It's probably 3X the work. Will clients see enough value in these new models to boost their retainers? Not by 3X.

On the flip side, I honestly don't know how long it will take for mainstream media to "catch on" to this new paradigm. It very well could be a case of "ready, shoot, aim," into the forseeable future.

But I think that the days of Social Media PR are dawning. I think that if a few innovative agencies effectively execute a few PR 2.0 campaigns --- impressing some influential media via the use of traditional (pitch, relationship, email) and new (del.icio.us, multimedia) tools --- it will create a viral condition. It may take a while, but ultimately journalists will come to expect the higher levels of communication, trust, research, etc., implied by the new approaches.

Hat-tip to Brian Oberkirch at Weblogs Work for the inspiration. He's started a valuable conversation about the challenges agencies are already facing in their embrace (or not) of Social Media.

"Pitching, 2.0"

2006-05-31T12:30:00.000-04:00

Here's one idea on how Social Media might impact the editorial pitch process...

Among the newfangled tools that's most intriguing for its potential to impact Public Relations practices is "social bookmarking." Putting together the custom del.icio.us page for our template helped enlighten me to the fact that social bookmarks could literally help salvage PR from its critics. This is a place where PR can add legitimate value to the journalist.

"Looks like a bunch of random links to me," you say? Au contraire. Done right, these tools will make the PR pro more strategic, more subtle and invaluable. Let's examine The Old Way & The Social Media Way to pitch the press.

Old Way:

Craft a clever, custom pitch.
Convince journalist to take a meeting (and do the bulk of the pre-interview research on their own).
Offer to help-out with additional materials and "anything else you need..."
Maybe send a god-awful press-kit in advance of the meeting, knowing full well that there were, maybe, 2 worthwhile paragraphs in the whole kaboodle.
Follow-up too diligently, until article breaks.
Ask journalist's editor for an after-the-fact clarification to soothe pissy client CEO.

New Way:

Craft a custom del.icio.us page with lotsa links to relevant background info about client execs, market, products, previous coverage.
Annotate these links with the all-important "WHY," e.g., "this article from 6 months ago did a good job of summing up the market factors that spawned (client's) idea."
Craft a clever, custom pitch.
Convince journalist to preview del.icio.us page and get back to you with questions.

(Convince journalist that the best person to answer these questions is your client.)

Suggest journalist subscribe to the custom del.icio.us page's RSS feed, until the editorial process concludes, so that they can have 24/7 access to any relevant info that pops up in the meantime (courtesy of the PR pro's diligent, on-going research. ...More strategic!)

Conduct client interview & follow-up diligently.

But now, use updates (and associated notes) to the del.icio.us page to tap journalist via their RSS reader --- which means fewer of those intrusive, unhelpful "anything else you need?" emails. ... More subtle!

The PR pro is now as attuned to the story's nuances as the journalist, and ultimately is far better equipped to pitch new angles on the same story, to additional reporters. ...Invaluable!

If story sucks, reach out to journalist; but if all else fails and these inaccuracies could hurt the client's business, help the client to blog about the errors --- very, very diplomatically.

Again, I must add the caveat: this is bleeding-edge stuff and not right for 95% of your clients. It's also too advanced for 98% of the media, I'd wager. "Too new, too funky, what's an RSS feed, this del.icio.us thing sounds kind've dirty...blah blah blah." Lastly, this New Way will never, ever replace great writing nor a strong personal rapport with the media.

But caveats aside - NEW does not equal BAD. NEW is the future. Today, we just get to peek at it. And prepare.

How Many Downloads of the Social Media Press Release Template So Far?

2006-05-30T16:14:00.000-04:00

Back at the house but not "officially" back from vacation yet...but I got a few questions on this particular topic, so I wanted to share. Over 2,500 downloads so far.

Lessons Learned

2006-05-25T17:50:00.000-04:00

I am leaving for a quick vacation tomorrow --- without laptop, without Treo --- but couldn't say "good-bye" for the long weekend without a quick post on some of the "lessons learned" via this week's excitement about the debut of the "Social Media Press Release."

The PR blogosphere is very generous. The wisdom and enthusiasm, good wishes and constructive criticisms were amazing.

Most people could care less about "the press release." What they all truly hate is "bad storytelling." I agree. Part of the "Big Idea" is to get rid of some of the PRspeak that has come to take the place of good storytelling, by stripping the news to its core facts. Having said that, I do want to clarify, again: the "Social Media Press Release" was never intended to replace a narrative pitch, nor is it intended to replace a journalist's responsibility to do their own research and write their own version of the news.

The "Social Media Press Release" is more about making the media's job easier than it is about "being social." It makes their job easier by:

providing multimedia content that they can view (for education) or post (to generate more reader enthusiasm).
putting the basic facts on display, without extraneous hoo-ha.
enabling them to keep tabs on related news updates (via RSS).
putting all speakers' contact info front¢er.
putting lots of relevant content, in context, and with helpful notes, all in one place (del.icio.us).

I am particularly keen on the ability to use a del.icio.us page to "guide" journalists through a narrative trail. "Click this link to learn more about latest industry happenings... Click this link to see GartnerGroup's 'magic quadrant' about this space... Click this link to listen to a podcast by our CEO... Click this link if you want to check out our customer list and case studies... etc." Just as the Social Media Press Release provides remixable content, the del.icio.us page provides remixable research as well as access to on-going reaction.

It's (not necessarily) too soon for the "Social Media Press Release." Yes, it is bleeding edge; maybe too much so, for many folks in the media, among clients and in the PR world. Yet, as I noted in my last post, bits & pieces of this concept are already working their way into the PR world. I was contacted numerous times this week by corporate marketers and PR agency pros who are keen to try this. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.

No matter how often I tell folks it's spelled "SHIFT," all caps, they'll still use "Shift." Oh well.

It's been an exciting ride. Thanks to everyone at SHIFT and in the PR/marketing arena who helped out with this effort. Time to take a li'l time off to re-connect with the wife & kids.

After a week like this, there's only one place to go. Can you guess?

A Swift Kick into "PR 2.0"

2006-05-25T10:44:00.000-04:00

Among the challenges raised among the voices who reacted to the debut of the Social Media Press Release template: the sense of "unreadiness" among media, PR, clients, and the wire services themselves. Jeremy Pepper probably said it best: "it's all about baby steps, and I think this is too big a step for a lot of consumer companies."

I admitted at the start that this template may well be too bleeding-edge (for now), but frankly I've been blown away by the positive reactions among clients, media and PR pros; the positives far outweigh the negatives so far (and even the so-called negatives have been constructive). My in-box is flooded.

One journalist told me, "This is cool; there are less things for me to ignore!"
The director of PR at a billion+ dollar company (not a client) reached out to say, "This is just the kind of thinking that we need."
The prez @ bitePR let me know they were working on similar projects for their clients.

And that's just a sampling. Wow. Thank you, all! We'll see what happens...

A key lesson learned from this effort is that if anyone seems truly "unready" for the next-gen press release, it's the wire services. Despite their claims, it seems it's still "horse & buggy" time.

24+ hours turnaround, and only during business hours? Responsiveness? - slug-like.
Very poor knowledge or utility when it comes to Web 2.0 stuff like del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.
Formatting nightmares.
The multimedia nature of these Social Media Press Releases = more $$$. This will be a deal-breaker for some clients.

Interestingly, Mr. Buffett's pet, BusinessWire --- with whom we've enjoyed a warm relationship for years --- was worst of all. PRWeb was pretty good, but clearly not as up-to-snuff as they'd have you believe. Ultimately, PR Newswire was the acceptable middle ground in terms of functionality and breadth. Their MultiVu version of our release was the best of the bunch. I wouldn't hold them up as a shining example, though (mostly due to their pricing, and their 24-hour, business-hours-only policies, which seem out of step with today's 24/7 culture).

You can argue that this is "bleeding edge" stuff; you can argue that no one's touched the press release format in 50 years ... but, c'mon --- it also ain't rocket science.

Everyone has some hard work to do in this arena, and --- based on the reactions so far --- it seems to be work that's worth doing. Giddyap!

The "Social Media Press Release" Debuts - Download the Template Today!

2006-05-23T07:27:00.000-04:00

Today we debuted the first-ever template of the "Social Media Press Release."

This newfangled press release format has been baking since late February, thanks to the rantings of Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher. You can get the template in PDF form here, or at our website.

The template is 100% open to the PR/marketing community. No copyright baloney. We hope it can serve as a helpful guide to kickstart thinking about how we can evolve the PR sector. Maybe it can serve as a talking points memo to show to clients, to convince them to give it a try? Maybe you hate it? Maybe you've got some ideas on how to improve it? Let me know.

Love it or hate it, what is important is that the banal, unhelpful, cookie-cutter press releases of yore have outlived their pre-Internet usefulness.

So, to announce the "Social Media Press Release template" (and to show how it might look in the real world) we also put out what may be the first ever press release to use this next-generation format, via PR Newswire.

As noted last week, Edelman has their own plans in this vein (also inspired by Foremski). We look forward to seeing how their version differs from our template. No doubt that with Edelman's deeper pockets, it will at least have more multimedia components.

For now, we're not so much hoping to impress, as to help. "Victory" will be achieved if our peers in the PR sphere start to download the PDF and tack it to their walls for future reference.

As this concept evolves, it will be tracked at a purpose-built del.icio.us site. Please pay a visit, or subscribe to the del.icio.us RSS feed for the "Social Media Press Release."

UPDATE: Some kind words so far, from the PR blogosphere (thanks)! If you can, please do take a moment to look at the del.icio.us site ... not just to keep tabs on the concept but, more importantly, in order to spur some thought about how a similar strategy might work for your own clients' PR efforts.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how the first official Social Media Press Release looks in practice, click this link to the PR Newswire version.

Edelman + Technorati, Sitting in a Tree

2006-05-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

Edelman & Technorati are teaming up to better localize, track & translate the global blogosphere. The intimacy of the relationship between a major PR firm and a major search engine raises fascinating issues. Here's the official word a ccording to the Technorati blog:

"Technorati and Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm, are announcing a relationship that's all about supporting the international growth of the blogosphere.
"Technorati is accelerating the development of fully localized versions of our service in Chinese, Korean, German, Italian and French. These will be moving through development and testing over the coming months and will be complete, public products in early 2007. (Technorati today can show posts in 20 languages, but so far we've only done completely localized versions in English and Japanese).
"Edelman is providing support for this accelerated development effort and will have access to these new sites as they are in development and testing this year. They will be working with their international clients on how to listen to and engage the blogosphere. How to move away from one-way, command and control marketing towards the conversational era we've entered."

Certainly, Edelman is to be applauded - imagine the competitive advantage that this brings to the table when they are pitching for a global brand! Large consumer brands operate in a real-time, 24/7, global communications environment, and --- at least until 2007 --- only Edelman can now compete at that level.

I am a li'l troubled by this move on Technorati's part, though. Aren't all PR firms and corporate marketers currently "working with clients on how to listen and engage the blogosphere"?

Giving one agency an early, proprietary lead --- if that's what is happening (it is unclear just now) --- seems to go against the grain of our open movement...

Imagine if the recently-unveiled Google Trends had been exclusively available to Fleishman-Hillard, for a year before its public debut. How would that have made you feel?

UPDATE: More troubling questions about this issue raised at the LooseWire blog, by WSJ columnist Jeremy Wagstaff. Edelman's been keeping tabs on this conversation. But it's Technorati that has some 'splainin' to do, if you ask me. When will the Technorati folks respond to all this, I wonder?

Friday Fun: Insignificant 'R' Us

2006-05-19T14:01:00.000-04:00

Next time you find yourself frowning because your blog's comments are whisper-quiet, or your "Technorati This" button reveals no new links (kinda like the forlorn-sounding "No New Messages" on v-mail, ain't it?), just check out this link. Or this one.

It will make you feel much, much worse.

Don't have time to check the links? Lemme net it out for you (courtesy of this site):

...By means of analogy, we can see that our earth is but a speck of dust on the side of a grain of sand, in a sandbox that is about 20 feet diameter, with the closest sandbox being about 1/3 mile away, and our local group of galaxies would be but a collection of sandboxes in a space about the size of a small city, and that there are other cities with groups of sandboxes as well, expanding out to the whole earth, with billions of other sandboxes each representing other galaxies, each containing billions of stars.

Pretty humbling, eh, my fellow bloggers? Perspective is good.

But before you spin into the weekend feeling lost & lonely, alone & insignificant, here's a thought (from the same sitelink above) that may inspire us all:

(Humankind has) been given the ability to attempt to comprehend the scale of it all.

Edelman Pinches The "Press Release of Tomorrow"

2006-05-18T10:53:00.000-04:00

This is kinda' exciting. Earlier this week at the Syndicate conference, according to PR WEEK, Richard Edelman talked about...

releasing a "physical manifestation" of the reinvention of the press release in June. "It’s better to say, 'We’re going to give you a set of info with tags and you organize it as you wish,'" Edelman said. “We’d rather have it in pieces as if it’s a b-roll and let bloggers make the news judgment.”

If you just can't wait til June; if you want a physical manifestation of the Press Release of Tomorrow, today, just click this link and then hit "print" on your browser. ;)

I wonder what Edelman's version will look like. I wonder if it will become a new standard for our industry. I wonder what the clients will think.

Seriously, all self-aggrandizing bias aside (it was Foremski who inspired us, anyway), I applaud Edelman's move. I love it that a Big Agency is taking up the cause, and I love it that that Big Agency is an independent firm, not one of the intergalactic "marcomglomerates." If I could pick anyone (besides me) to be the 1st to pinch the cheeks of the "Press Release of Tomorrow" in the delivery room, it would be our industry's leading independent.

Hat-tip to Mike Manuel, and Josh Hallett, where I caught wind of these developments.

When Clients Want Out

2006-05-18T08:44:00.000-04:00

The idea for this post came from John Wagner. A few weeks ago, he was curious about other PR agencies' policies when "a client either wants out of a contract or doesn't want to pay for work that's been provided."

It boggles my mind when a client thinks they can disregard the contract. I don't understand how the question even comes up. I somehow doubt that our clients ever ask their lawyers if they "need to actually pay their legal bills?"

When a client doesn't pay their bill for 90 days, we stop work. To many folks, 90 days sounds like too long a time to wait, but, we work with a lot of start-ups, so it happens. We try to be flexible if there is a good faith effort to handle the A/P on the client's side.

On the rare occassion when a client simply refuses to pay, we send them to a collections agency, and usually to court. There's a clause in our contracts that provides a reasonable time period in which the client can dispute a bill for any reason, including (gasp!?) dissatisfaction. If they are not on record within that timeframe (which they signed off on originally, after all), we assume payment is forthcoming.

All of our contracts include a 60 day exit clause, so we assume that we are "always 60 days from being fired." Paranoia is bad for the soul, good for client retention.

In any case, a 60-day clause is seen by most clients as a reasonable compromise: "Let's wrap this up in 60 days." You need that time to tie up loose ends and transition things properly to a new firm or in-house contact.

Thankfully, our retention rate is upwards of 2 years (some clients have worked with us in some form or fashion for 8 years), so these issues come up fairly rarely.

Presumptions of Freedom

2006-05-17T14:44:00.000-04:00

In earlier blog posts I've speculated on how Consumer-Generated Media may impact journalism. But up above I do promise the "occasional rant," and reading articles like this one from ABC News' blog, "The Blotter," forced me to wonder (and fume) about the longer-term fate of the freedom of the press.

The domestic security czars have been using their newfound powers under the Patriot Act to spy on The Fourth Estate, specifically re: the CIA leaks/Plame investigation. But I thought we were ONLY targeting terrorists? (Dana Perino, deputy press secretary: all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.")

From The Blotter:

"FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA... Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information ...(via)... an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving (such a subpeona) for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government."

I've scrupulously avoided political musings on this blog, but when journalism is at risk, then PR is at risk, eh? Much more importantly, when a chill wind is allowed to blow across the freedom of the press (liberal, conservative or bone-headed), it does not bode well for the entire American ethos.

It boggles my mind when someone says, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, why would you care if they are spying on you?" It's BECAUSE I am not doing anything wrong that I DO care if the government is spying on me. Does the phrase, "presumed innocent" mean anything to you, My Fellow Americans, my fellow lovers of the U.S. Constitution?

From Daily Kos:

"The terrorists' most dangerous weapon isn't anthrax or planes or dirty bombs; it's fear. Fear is their most destructive weapon because it operates in a stealth manner. Fear is what has caused our government to turn on its citizens and brag that it does so out of courage in the fight against evil. And in that sense, by goading the greatest democracy on earth to view 300 million citizens as the potential enemy, fear has proved to be the most effective weapon of mass destruction of all."

PR Students: Read This Book

2006-05-16T21:39:00.000-04:00

A guy I like a lot also happens to be a client, Joe Chernov from BzzAgent. Last year he wrote a book that I consider a must-read for anyone new to PR.

I read through some of the reader comments on Amazon (rave reviews), and this one summed up my own feelings best:

"As a PR professional and former journalist, I've heard the old adage 'good, fast, cheap -- pick any two, many times.' With this book, you can get all three. The beauty of these tips is that the author has managed to condense what would normally take years to learn through experience and gives a consise and well written summary of pr fundementals. Not only would I encourage business people to read it, but for students interested in pursuing a pr career, it could help put you on the fast track."

I heartily agree. This is a quick read that will make any PR newbie sound like a legitimate pro. As Joe himself says in the book: "PR is not magic. It's a trade." If so, he's written a first-class instruction book. (For less than $10, even!)

There are No PR Pros at the End of the Rainbow

2006-05-15T12:15:00.000-04:00

I wish I had a nickel for every time a client or prospect told us: "If you do our PR for cheap, we'll increase the budget as-soon-as we get acquired or get the VC $$$."

Almost. Never. Happens.

Correction: Never Happens.

"YOU will get rich when the acquisition/funding comes through," I say. "And that's great; we're happy to help make that happen...

"But, WE don't make money when the 'lucky strike' happens...
What guarantees can you possibly make to us about this event?

"What if the CEO/VC decides to NOT increase the PR budget when the warchest fills-up?

"What if an acquirer decides to suspend all vendor contracts? - will you go to bat for us?

"When you hired us you suggested that you wanted to be primed for an acquisition/VC infusion - so, why should we expect a big retainer increase once that motivation is gone?"

Have you ever seen the polite grimace on a PR pro's face, as they listen to the delighted tale of their client's new-found riches? Have you ever seen a PR pro's jaws clench, as the client goes on to suggest that maybe, just maybe, "the great PR helped increase the valuation"?

Don't succumb to the client's pitch. PR agencies work very, very hard to promote their clients' successes, with no expectations of life-changing wealth as a result. Get paid for today's work today. "Tomorrow" will take care of itself.

The Press Release "Remix"

2006-05-12T10:12:00.000-04:00

From Shel Hotz's blog last week:

In (the May 9) edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Neville and Shel enjoyed a 28-minute conversation with Tom Foremski, editor of Silicon Valley Watcher, about online journalism, public relations, the relationships between the two, the future of the press release, and the impacts of change in these professions being brought about by social media.

This was a great chat, and yep, the "Press Release of Tomorrow" topic came up (yay!). Stuart Bruce subsequently responded, "The world - specifically, mainstream reporters - ain't ready yet."

I respectfully disagree.

Consider this: among the reader-submitted ideas that most intrigued the WSJ's editors, when they asked readers "to look ahead and describe for us the perfect news site, circa 2016," was this gem:

"Reporters … find out all sorts of things when writing an article or cover a business, but these don't always fit into the form of a news article. They should be dumped into an encyclopedia."

You know where that additional research/content/context/link fodder would come from? From the PR community! From the Press Release of the Future!

Here's the thing: the "Press Release of Tomorrow" (PROT) will still contain NEWS CONTENT, and arguably in a more digestible format.

The only "Big Change" is the recognition that all Internet users --- including journalists, as the graphic implies --- are now comfortable researching & working online, across many types of "remixable media" (hyperlinks, text, photos, videos, pdf, etc.) ...

At its essence, the PROT merely facilitates the journalist's job, by amplifying prospective source materials. "Here is the basic NEWS item. Here are some QUOTES from execs, users, etc. And, here are links to alternative news sources that provide CONTEXT and ADDITIONAL CONTENT for your consideration."

The PROT does not replace a well-crafted pitch. It does not replace the need to provide basic, factual news. And --- contrary to the opinions of the PR contrarians --- the format of the PROT is arguably as familiar to the journalist as the Tradition Press Release: it basically looks like a webpage!

It's a custom-built mini-site... that we can humbly call the Press Release of Tomorrow.

What Should Dan Blog About?

2006-05-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

Earthlink's Earthling blog caught some nice buzz when it launched back in December. This week, some PR bloggers have been invited to preview a new blogging effort by Dan Greenfield, Earthlink's vp of corp comms.

I am hoping Dan steps up to do some interesting things with his blog. Earthlink is a big company and if Dan thinks big, it wouldn't be hard for him to get some good Googlejuice flowing his way.

I'd like to hear about Dan's day. Maybe see a bunch of photos of Earthlink execs in their offices, at the coffee machine, in the Boardroom. Behind the scenes stuff. (He's a photo buff, after all.)

I'd like Dan to address Earthlink's own blog software futures. Will there be an Earthlink blogging platform? Why or why not?

I'd like to see Dan call in to Earthlink tech support as a "typical customer" and report back on the experience - how he felt as a user, and subsequently as an exec. (I used to be an Earthlink customer, and - sorry Dan - the customer service sucked.) I wonder if Dan considers customer service to even be a PR issue? If so, I'd love to hear about it. Can he make an impact?

Of course, I'd also love to see Dan blog about his interactions with the press and his internal PR staff and external agencies. It would be very interesting to hear Dan's thoughts about the competition.

Notice that few of these issues raise SOX issues. I am sensitive to the need of an exec within a public company to tread carefully. My point to Dan, and to any would-be FORTUNE-level blogger, is to add unique value to the blogosphere. What can Dan teach us that a typical PR agency blogmeister would never know? What can Dan teach other execs within other big companies about how to manage their perceptions, and even how to manage their agencies?

Re-reading this post, it sounds snarky to me. It's not meant that way. Honestly, I am rooting for this latest entrant to the blogosphere. It's a good & important sign when a Big Company exec takes this plunge. Good luck!

Germany "Hearts" Online Media

2006-05-11T14:12:00.000-04:00

This Google Trends stuff is neat. Not sure how valid this trendsearch really is, but what was fascinating was how much the Germans seem to looooove the "online media" theme.

Journalism's Forced March

2006-05-10T11:39:00.000-04:00

Early on, "Journalism" adopted this mantra: “Give comfort to the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable.” Journalism has been democracy’s watchdog.
You could argue that they fell down on the job during the run-up to the Iraq War, but that’s for DailyKos and others to debate. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that trust in the Mainstream Media (MSM) is at an all time low. Meanwhile, as has been discussed, traditional journalism is coming under siege from ever-more-qualified producers from the world of Consumer Generated Content (CGM).

If CGM supplants the traditional news media, it will likely start with the “soft stuff” – highly localized news; celebrity spotting and gossip; sports reporting – the content that is accessible to the layman.

One unassailable strategy for MSM's survival will come via a “forced march” to its Revolutionary-era roots as the gadflies to the powerbrokers. While “citizen journalists” assume responsibility for fluffy and micro-targeted editorial, MSM can once again become “journalists for the citizenry.” Think about it: Joe Blogger ain’t getting invited to no White House Press Conference. He isn’t going to lobby the CIA for documents via the Freedom of Information Act. If he is like most Americans, he doesn’t know the name of his mayor, much less his Congressman.

Meanwhile, the MSM's reporters have the credentials, resources, and privileged access required to bring us investigative reporting that must not only be HIGH VALUE (exclusive) but also LEGITIMATE (reputation is everything) and, CONTROVERSIAL (to sell advertising).
High value, legitimate, controversial reporting in the service of the citizenry will drive more traffic and trackbacks to their sites (profit); it will help MSM continue to drive the conversation (clout); and, it will hopefully produce a more ethical ruling class.

Benjamin Franklin would have been a great blogger.

OhMy! CGM’s Long-Term Impact on PR

2006-05-09T09:15:00.000-04:00

OhMy
News is a very popular South Korean news website with as many readers (700K
per day) as any large
U.S.
news outlet. It relies 100% on citizen journalists to report the news; OhMy’s only
staff is comprised of a handful of professional copyeditors.
Articles reach prominence digg-style, via
a user voting system.

To date, Consumer Generated Content (CGM) has been seen as
a wave of craptastic YouTube videos, easy-come/easy-go blogs, inane MySpace chatter,
podcasts, etc. Revere it or revile it, CGM is
a BIG wave; it cannot be ignored; its “wavelets” (content, producers, mediatypes)
will get ever-more sophisticated… But so far, CGM has not posed an outsized threat
to mainstream content sources (Hollywood,
MSM, MTV, etc.).

Except for OhMy News.
It’s as good as it needs to be.
It’s accurate, timely, popular, profitable. It’s
probably what the BBC 2.0 project strives to be; a model for journalism in the dawning
CGM era.

So here’s the

Question of the Millennium for PR types:
what if every journalism outlet in the
U.S. morphed into an OhMy clone?

First off, we’ll end our subscriptions to journalist-tracking
services like
Bacons.
You’re on your own, kid. There will always
be “professional citizen journalists” like

Foremski and a cadre of A-List bloggers to impress, but their ranks are likely
to thin out. The reporter you’ll need to impress
could be your dog-walker, or your pesky kid-sister, or the butcher...you won’t know
til it’s too late; the article is posted, amigo.

So what can we do to supplement PR's traditional capabilities?

A few ideas spring to mind, but we’ll need more:

Event planning – manufacture a buzzworthy gig

Word-of-Mouth Marketing – tell your friends! (And your dog-walker, butcher,
sister…)

Blogger Relations –

already underway

Blog Monitoring -

already underway

Purpose-Built Blogs (CEO, news-based, crisis-made, etc.)

Press Release-As-Content – for the media remixing needs of the media- and
blogopshere

Podcasts
– “timeshift your content”

Remixable
Media – it’s not just the press release; we can produce scads of cool content

Psychological Counseling – I am only half-joking; it will
not be easy for the clients to offer up their content in an easily remixable
format (to "set
it free"), only to watch their message and content get hacked & contorted
by legions of amateur journalists and bloggers!

What do you think YOU’LL be doing, 5 years from now?

CGM Ends the Symbiotic Relationship Between PR and Journalism

2006-05-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

Today the blogosphere – a subset of Consumer Generated Content (CGM) – regularly scavenges the Mainstream Media (MSM) for ideas on “what to write about.”

This is a testament to the influence and power of MSM, which for a hundred-plus years has served as the “official record” of our lives. MSM had the resources and the captive audience to cement its dominance. Until the advent of broadband and blogs (and, more recently, “social voting” systems like digg), consumers did not have the tools to crack open “broadcasting” through the power of “conversation.”

As our relationship to MSM evolves, we can predict a “paradigm shift” in terms of News Generation.

Today, in addition to coming up with their own ideas, journalists listen to PR pros “pitch” them, along the lines of, “This would be a great story for your readers because (fill in the blank).”

Because we do our research in advance, because we can tie a ribbon on a story by providing everything from statistics to alternate story angles to user references, PR folks have become pretty good at this aspect of News Generation. For the past 50 years, there has been a symbiotic relationship between Journalism and PR: we help develop the stories that we need them to write; they need something to write about.

But at its core, Journalism’s chief responsibility is to its audience. Journalism must report on what is of-interest to its consumers.

And this audience for the first time has the power to create and communicate their interests through their own content, their own news, their own likes&dislikes. More so than ever, the funnel has flipped: because this consumer audience is engaged in an on-going, real-time conversation, trends can develop much faster, and, importantly, these trends can be tracked.

Which means that as a meme filters from “wide/dispersed/unimportant” to “trendy” to “controversial,” journalists will be forced to report on it. No PR intervention required.

We’ve been trying to start trends by getting mainstream reporters to broadcast our concepts, and we hope the message resonates with consumers. While that’s still worth doing (for now), journalists are now looking OUTSIDE traditional symbiotic relationships, to the Blogosphere, to source ideas. They’re cutting out the middlemen.

We must widen our lens to make sure that the conversation about our clients starts in the wider world. We can no longer solely rely on the benevolence of the professional journalist.

Eternal Sunshine of the Blogosphere

2006-05-05T12:07:00.000-04:00

One of our more interesting clients is BzzAgent. BzzAgent is an acknowledged leader in the Word Of Mouth (WOM) industry. And that's the problem.

As part of our work with BzzAgent, we've discussed the fact that sometimes it's not easy being the media darling of a nascent sector: at this early stage of the WOM industry, there are many players scrapping for a leadership spot. Anyone who shows signs of gaining an "early lead" is going to get sniped at on occassion.

A positive review in the Holmes Report of BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter's Grapevine book led to just this sort of grumbling. (Paul Holmes responds, zingily, here.) Apparently the CEO of the year-old WOM industry group heard the grumbling and - as is natural for a guy in his role - engaged BzzAgent in a dialogue that (not so naturally) became quite public.

(In case you think that you don't have time to click the link, the phrase "Andy Sernovitz Thinks I'm a Dick" is part of the subject line. Now do you want to read it?)

This post isn't about the brouhaha, but about the way it was handled.

BzzAgent chose the transparency route: they had a tough conversation with the WOMMA CEO and (after reflecting on it all) subsequently told the world about it.

Negatives to this approach? Despite the candid good-will that is evident, the blog post could stir the pot even more, which is not necessarily a good thing in an industry that, as AdRants noted, has its fair share of critics.

Positives? Now that the issues have been exposed to the sunlight, any future fall-out in the relationship between WOMMA and BzzAgent will reveal that one short, tough conversation about a relatively trivial issue was a possible cause. As Forrester's Peter Kim noted, "It's strange yet entirely appropriate that this dirty laundry about WOM would be aired by WOM in a WOM channel."

Just one more example of how the blogosphere serves us all by being the "people's public record?"

Skype Continues To Change The World

2006-05-05T10:13:00.000-04:00

I know, I am a laggard, a luddite. I don't use Skype, yet. But, I know millions of people do, and I know that it is changing the world, and I know that "changing the world" is cool.

Skype is now previewing a new service, Skypecast. Also, very cool.

"Skypecasts are live, moderated conversations allowing groups of up to 100 people from anywhere in the world to talk to one another."

Why should we pay for expensive teleconferencing solutions anymore? This could change everything from "earnings calls" to run-of-the-mill press briefings.

I can't wait for some wise-ass financial analyst to ask a CFO, "You've spent much of this earnings call discussing how you are trimming expenses - how much did you spend with AT&T on this hour-long teleconference line? Why not just Skypecast it?"

Has it been long enough, yet? --- has the phrase "paradigm shift" been in the penalty box long enough that we can now dust it off again for the Web 2.0 era?

Hat-tip to B.L. Ochman.

The 5 Evils of Agency PR: #5 - Team Fatigue

2006-05-05T09:08:00.000-04:00

This is 5th and final post in a series that discuss the "Five Evils of Agency PR."

#1 - Employee Churn.

#2 - Measurement Misunderstanding

#3 - Budget Flux

#4 - "Small Fish Syndrome"

#5 - Team Fatigue

It happens. You’re sick of your PR team. They are sick of you. There’s a sense of restless desperation on the weekly calls. There’s too much idle, friendly chit-chat and not enough hunger on the agency side. The team started out strong... but now you feel like you’re the one with all the ideas: your creative whiz-kids have become little more than arms and legs. The ink’s harder to come by, too.

Meanwhile, of course, Agency management is trying to goad and wheedle the account lead to "keep it going for a few more months." This grows tiresome to the account leader, whose weariness and angst start to rub off on the rest of the team.

Now re-visit Evil Post #1, re: Churn. The cycle begins anew!

*** *** ***

Y'know what bugs me about these so-called "5 Evils?" That they're not new. These problems have existed for a long time. I hate to sound bleak & bitter on a Friday morning, but ...

Too many agencies have given up on improving the high-pressure, "churn & burn" mindset that wipes out staff morale. (Not everyone, of course - I loved this post, and this one.)
Too many agencies have allowed other vendors to decide the fate of PR measurement.
Too many agencies have given up on the idea of retaining clients for more than 12 months.
Or, worse, they've decided to put as much attention as possible on keeping a select few "anchor" accounts, and give short shrift to the remainder of their clients.

These bad practices have been bad for the reputation of the reputation industry. (Say that 5-times fast!)

I think it is important to note that hardly any of these "evils" related to "Ethics." I've found most PR folks to be highly ethical (breaches occur in every industry). These evils are sins of laziness and of mis-directed focus. We could better help clients if we could improve our business models and training practices.

To me, it's all about the flywheel concept promoted in Jim Collins's classic Good To Great. We know what our problems are... if each of us applied a bit of pressure to each of these challenges, slowly but surely we'd build an industry that deserved true acclaim.

The 5 Evils of Agency PR: #4 - "Small Fish Syndrome"

2006-05-04T05:38:00.000-04:00

This is #4 in a 5-part series of posts that discuss the "Five Evils of Agency PR." Specifically, the 5 prevailing reasons (in no particular order) for firing a PR agency.

#1 - Employee Churn.

#2 - Measurement Misunderstanding

#3 - Budget Flux

#4 - "Small Fish Syndrome"

You know the old saw, “If you have to ask how much it costs, then you can’t afford it”? The same is true of clients that wonder whether they’re getting their agency’s “A-Team.”

It’s fine to ask that question if you are a prospective client, as long as you know the right follow-up questions to ask:

“Wouldn’t the A-Team also be assigned to the agency’s biggest accounts?”

And, “If the A-Team is also assigned to the agency’s biggest accounts, how could we possibly get their attention & best work?”

If you know enough to ask such questions, than you don't ask 'em, cuz you know the answers...

What a horrible feeling for the client. Whatever budget they have to spend, it’s a lot to them.

The 5 Evils of Agency PR: #3 - Budget Flux

2006-05-03T08:32:00.000-04:00

This is #3 in a 5-part series of posts that discuss the "Five Evils of Agency PR." Specifically, the 5 prevailing reasons (in no particular order) for firing a PR agency.

#1 - Employee Churn.

#2 - Measurement Misunderstanding

#3 - Budget Flux

Most agencies prefer what’s known as the "Time & Materials" model (T&M). Simply put, clients are paying for the agency’s time and expenses. This model motivates the agency to load-up on time-consuming tactics regardless of what the client may really need.

Even if an agency has rock-solid ethical standards, the variability of month-to-month budgeting leads to disheartening discussions about $$$ every few weeks, and, the inconsistency of this system makes it hard for clients to create realistic budget forecasts.

SHIFT offers only one financial model: a flat-rate, expenses-included retainer. Clients get the same bill, every month. No surprises, no monthly chit-chats about money.

Yes, we often lose money on this arrangement, but yes, we keep our clients for a long, long time. It evens out over time.

The 5 Evils of Agency PR: #2 - Measurement

2006-05-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

This is #2 in a 5-part series of posts that discuss the "Five Evils of Agency PR." Specifically, we're talkin' about the 5 prevailing reasons for firing a PR agency.

#1 - Employee Churn.

#2 - Measurement Misunderstanding

Unfortunately everyone seems to have a different opinion about how to measure Public Relations success. When the client asks the PR firm, “How do we know if we are moving the needle?” they are probably frustrated by an answer that leads to a forlorn-looking clip-book.

What do you think about PR measurement?

Do you like the Ad-Value Equivalency approach? Do you like Share of Voice? Do you think that the Share of Voice model will gain more clout and sophistication, thanks to the rise of blogs? Do you think it is possible to help clients ascertain how PR impacted their inbound lead flow? Do you think that a fat clip book is enough? Do you think that the CMO will feel increased pressure to quantify the revenue impacts of each & every marketing program?

I will not use this post to go off on yet-another toot about tying PR to Sales. But I'll have a lot more to say on that subject, soon. Will you?

The 5 Evils of Agency PR: #1 - Churn

2006-05-01T09:48:00.000-04:00

This will be a 5-part series of posts that discuss the "Five Evils of Agency PR." ... Specifically, the 5 prevailing reasons (in no particular order) that clients use for firing their PR firm.

#1 Employee Churn.

After investing time and money getting a new agency up to speed, clients find it off-putting when one or more of the key people leaves the Agency.

They need to "start over" with a new team. Momentum is lost. Maybe it works out with a new team, maybe it doesn't. It begs the question, though: "If we need to invest our time and money in evaluating and ramping-up with a new team, we might as well review other agencies."

Can you blame them?

If you run a PR agency, and this issue resonates, then you might need to think differently about how to run things. You've probably heard the apocryphal Marketing 101 story: "The railroad barons lost the war against the automobile because they failed to realize that they were NOT in the railroad business, they were actually in the TRANSPORTATION business. If they'd realized that early on, they might have had a chance at re-architecting their business."

Here's how the lesson applies, at least at our shop:

SHIFT is not a PR agency. SHIFT is a TALENT MANAGEMENT AGENCY - whose talents just happen to be focused on Public Relations. It makes all the difference.

The Problem with Talking Dogs

2006-04-29T22:45:00.000-04:00

Charlie (pictured) is getting bigger and bigger. He must be tipping the scales at 120lbs. by now, with no end in sight. That's great: we love big dogs; the bigger the better.

Problem is, Charlie likes to talk. And Charlie's brain seems to run counter-clockwise.

When he is HAPPY to see you, Charlie GROWLS. When he yawns, Charlie likes to close the drooly chasm of his mouth with a fierce rumble. When he wants you to do something for him, like fill-up the water bowl, he barks menacingly.

His tail is always wagging and he appears to be "smiling" the whole time. You could walk right up to him while he is "growling" and he'll happily lean in for an ear-scratch while the motor's still running in his mouth. He's a perfectly sweet, harmless dude.

But as he nears his expected weight of 200lbs., we're a li'l worried that those "friendly growls" will scare the bejeezus out of ordinary folks.

"What a great, big dog! Can I pet him? ..... Whoa! (snatching hand back) Ummmm, never mind!"

That would be a bummer.

Friday Zombie Fun

2006-04-28T12:16:00.000-04:00

Don't watch this "sexy zombie chicks at the carwash" video if MTV fare is too risque for ya.

We're doing some work for GoFish and as part of my due diligence I was checking out their site and ran into this vid.

If this is the future of Consumer Generated Content, and I daresay it is, we may as well throw out da bums at the network stations.

PR: Out of Control

2006-04-27T09:58:00.000-04:00

Neville Hobson has a great post on the BBC's world-changing plans to embrace new media.

Maybe because I got dizzy about all the newfangled evolutionary angles, I found myself grounded by the to-and-from between Neville and Richard Bailey in the ensuing comments. The communications pros debated the semantics used to describe these "seismic shifts" in the mediasphere.

Richard asked, "Is it an obituary for mass media? Or is this the advent of 'masses of media'?"

Neville suggested, "I don’t think it’s the advent of 'masses of media,' just 'participatory media'"

Regardless of what we call it, this trend suggests massive fragmentation that will challenge the scale and processes of today's PR community. This is already happening. The BBC announcements are proof of an acceleration of the trend.

From a scale perspective, PR pros will need to exponentially increase their ability to target and reach out to emerging media channels. This suggests an investment in human capital and technology tools that could become onerous to mid-sized and boutique agencies.

From a process perspective, the "amateur" content creators will expect unprecedented levels of access and transparency. Every pitch is fodder for use, ridicule, etc. Every interview will become a platform for multimedia re-packaging within podcasts, blogs, videos, etc. Public companies who embrace citizen journalism (good!) will likely run afoul of the SEC (bad!) if they don't remember that these "amateurs" are not experts on NDAs, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.

All those "etc." from the previous paragraph mean only one thing: Control is gone.

The mediasphere is adapting: the folks at the BBC are essentially creating a hosted platform for media fragmentation, to ensure their survival. Will PR also be able to adapt to the loss of control implied by "consumer-generated content?"

I don't think we mind losing control of the message, all that much. We can talk a client through that. "If you love something, set it free," and all that. The scary part is adapting to the scale requirements, training, and newfound fuzziness when it comes to the basic how-to's of Public Relations.

The BBC is blazing a trail; other media outlets will follow; the mediasphere is submitting to the will of the masses. What we must fear most is a languid response on the part of the PR community.

Already Making a Difference?

2006-04-26T14:54:00.000-04:00

I received a note from the "rising star" staffer who's in the graduate PR program at Boston University, in response to the latest series of posts.

She wanted me to know that our "Press Release of the Future" (and Tom Foremski's inspirational rant) had been passed around and discussed in class, and that the professor recently informed his students that their Final Exam would include questions on this "PR 2.0" topic.

That's good news. Maybe the next crop of fresh-faced candidates will wow us all.

Fixing PR Undergrad Programs

2006-04-26T11:35:00.000-04:00

Some ideas to fix PR undergrad programs? Sure, I got a few.

#1 - Wouldn't it be great if PR newbies were versed in the basic PR tools used in real-world work environments, before they graduated from college?

How about if PR industry vendors such as MediaMap, Bacons, et al., provided free site licenses to the top 20 communications schools?

---Ever hear of the "seed & weed" concept? ---By providing their services for free to future PR pros ("seeding the ground"), these vendors can build a fanbase among tomorrow's PR decision-makers (and their resulting business would "grow like a weed").

Failing that idea, how about if a coalition of PR agencies and/or corporate sponsors pooled funds to provide these site licenses to the school(s) of their choice?

---Doing so would provide high visibility of these firms' brands to tomorrow's employees.

#2 - Wouldn't it be great if new PR graduates were on the cutting edge of technology innovations impacting the mediasphere?

---Colleges are supposed to be the training ground for our future leaders in all fields; the place where the cutting-edge is honed... so why do most college comms programs focus on press releases (dying!?) and PR plans? When was the last time anyone asked a new college grad to draft a strategic PR plan, anyway? I'd rather that THEY are to equipped to teach ME about cool new ideas like, how Search Engine Optimization, wikis and RSS might impact the PR realm.

#3 - Wouldn't it be great if new PR graduates had been taught "Business Etiquette 101" before graduation?

---Yes, Mom & Dad should have done this, but shouldn't the university take some responsibility for ensuring that its graduates are prepared to manuever the world of work? Why am I the one telling the greenhorns that they can't wear ripped jeans to client meetings?

#4 - PR people interact with journalists every day. Wouldn't it be great if the college's PR majors were tasked with pitching the college's journalism majors? And, why wouldn't Corporate America be willing to pay them to do so?

---Future PR pros could be pitching ideas based on the products and services of corporate sponsors, who would pay the college's PR dept. as they would pay an agency (at a discounted rate) for the chance of getting some ink in student-run newspapers/websites. After all, this is a primo audience for most consumer brands.

The PR students would not only be developing plans and pitches that would be vetted by paying clients; they would subsequently be tasked as well with reporting back on their program results to both professors and clients --- just as they would in the "real-world."

Education purists might fret about injecting corporate moneys into the curriculum, but the PR curriculum is commercial by nature --- it is tradecraft, not Liberal Arts. The agencies and companies that want to hire these grads would love to know that their prospective hires had some quasi-"real world" experiences.

#5 - Wouldn't it be great if PR grads had some training in the Business of PR?

---Today they often know nothing about retainers vs. time&materials models; congomerate vs. independent workstyles; the business cycle; international coordination issues; P&L statements; etc. As an agency principal, I'd like to rely on the university system to teach some of these basic agency fundamentals. Don't just teach the kids how to "do PR" but also how the PR business works. (Remember, kids, learning "math" never killed anyone.)

Why should we care about the state of America's PR undergraduate programs?

Back in the Boom Times, the industry paid top-dollar to a lot of overweening kids who expected world-beater career paths. Now that flush times seem to be dawning, the PR pros of the future are again graduating into in an ever-more competitive talent crunch. As an industry, PR should ensure that this time around, we get our money's worth!

The Trouble with PR Undergraduate Programs

2006-04-25T18:05:00.000-04:00

I used to loathe hiring newly-minted PR undergraduates. They had been under-served by their expensive educations, focused on old-fashioned PR concepts and tactics. Most simply had to be re-trained to fit the agency workstyle: it could take more effort to re-educate PR grads than to hire raw recruits off the street!

I've gotten over my trepidation about hiring PR degree-holders, but not my concerns about the state of PR undergraduate programs.

I recently asked SHIFT staffers: If you got a degree in PR, what do you wish they had taught you that was not taught at school? If you had to hire someone with a PR degree, what do you wish they knew before their start-date?

Keep in mind that most of our staff is culled from the finest communications schools in Boston and the Bay Area. The answers were revealing.

"I wish someone had taught us how to use basic PR database tools like Bacons, MediaMap, Lexis-Nexis, etc."
"I wish I'd been taught how to deal with clients. No one talked to me about how professional I would need to be, on the phone, in email, in meetings, etc. I wish someone had even told me how to dress for a client meeting!"
"I wish that we had had a chance to interact with a handful of real-world journalists to get a sense of how they like to be pitched."
"No one at school ever talked about the rise of PR 2.0 stuff like blogs, wikis, RSS & podcasts."
"I wish someone had taught us that there is more to 'PR writing' than press releases and PR plans that never went beyond the professor's in-box; I wish I had been required to write award submissions and speaker abstracts and pitches and even blog posts!"

Perhaps the best response came from a rising star at SHIFT who's in a graduate program at Boston University:

"I teach a class of undergrads. Most of them have no idea how to craft a pitch or write a press release though they can recite every work of Bernays’ biography. Interestingly, PR majors at BU are required to take media relations and learn how to best work with journalists (which, of course, I agree with). However, journalism majors are not required to take any PR-related courses to learn the flip side of the industry. This sends the message from the get-go that PR folks are a nuisance and there is no need to learn what value PR can provide. BU has the oldest PR program in the nation and if this institution can’t change things, then how will PR and journalism ever be seen as a happy marriage rather than a stalker-boyfriend relationship?"

Next post: ideas on how-to fix some of the problems in the PR undergraduate curriculum.

More Thoughts on PR's Future

2006-04-24T13:16:00.000-04:00

Some things struck me about Richard Edelman's April 14 blog post about the evolution of Mainstream Media (paraphrased throughout):

"Mainstream Media (MSM) on-line believes in the concept of 'entwined media,' where the same story content is used across platforms (video, audio, databases, analysis, print, on-line) ... consumer control (will come) not in terms of time shifting (the DVR concept) but in terms of media selection appropriate to need."

According to Edelman, some of "the implications for PR folks" include:

Reporters expect PR folks to send ready to use digitized content... Pictures matter more than ever.
MSM reporters are ambivalent about bloggers as a news source. Don't count on the bloggers being the on-ramp to stories in MSM. Most of the MSM reporters are not bloggers and are operating in walled gardens.
Don't be disappointed with a placement in the MSM on line version and persuade your client that in fact you may get more traction with this approach as first choice.

These thoughts intrigued me.

Re: "ready to use, digitized content" ... It seems Edelman is suggesting that PR folk become more like "story producers," who need to provide a multi-media package to reporters. This is akin to what Tom Foremski suggested with the "press release of the future" concept, e.g., "make it easy for the reporter to cut-and-paste their way to a pre-packaged story." If you follow the "producer" analogy, then reporters become the on-air anchorpeople for stories fully manufactured by PR producers.

That's all well and good (I think), but we need to send out 100's of pitches a day to get a handful of great stories published... PR folks can't prep too many multimedia-laden stories without some fairly immediate payback on their time investments (i.e., the reporter accepts the story for publication). Meanwhile, I can already hear reporters' complaints about how "PR people ssend me too much stuff, too many links, too much video - I don't have time for that!"

Ultimately, we'll adopt a hybrid approach: a quickie pitch gets a nibble and then the PR pro puts together a multimedia package that facilitates a professional edit-cycle by the reporter. To get there, though, the quality:cost ratio of professional-grade video production will need to improve, and, "Search" (with a capital S) will also need to become more refined, to ease the time crunch PR pros will face when putting together stories for their journalist peers.

Re: "blogger ambivalence" ... this does not surprise me; it heartens me that the MSM reporters are playing their traditional role of "editorial filter." Blog relations are aligned with "grassroots" campaigns. Not every grassroots campaign catches the media's attention, but at the end of the day, the news media reports on news: the blogosphere itself is news; thus, what catches fire in the blogosphere will become newsworthy.

Re: "online vs. print hits"... Good lord, is this still an issue? Online = forever. Print = birdcage liner. 'Nuff said.

Never Be Bored Again

2006-04-23T07:20:00.000-04:00

Even though I loaded it up in January, it's only since I've been traveling this week, with a little down-time between meetings, to check out StumbleUpon. Dang, it is fun. Really.

Let's face it - the Web is so freakin' enormous that it can be daunting to "just surf" like we did back in the Netscape era. Like most people, eventually I settled into a Web browsing pattern that began to grow stale.

If you, too, ever find yourself checking out the same-ol' websites day after day, you owe it to yourself to download this Firefox extension. It's kinda like del.icio.us, social-surfing-wise, but more automated. And weird.

You'll never be bored with the Web again.

I'm Not Mean

2006-04-19T19:40:00.000-04:00

A handful of friends & colleagues have noted that the "About Me" pic used for this blog makes me out to "look like a hitman." (One fella went so far as to say that he'd never ride in a Cadillac with me unless we'd gone through a metal detector first.)

Can I help it if the camera man suggested a pouty look?

Anyway, this pic of me & my family (and our old puppy) should prove that I am just a reg'lar PR Guy.

...Although, come to think of it, even in this photo I am wearing a black shirt. Maybe I am bad to the bone, after all.

p.s. - I am traveling this week, so posting will be light.

Women In PR: "Anything" vs. "Everything"

2006-04-18T22:47:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot going on in the PR blogosphere about women. (Kami Huyse, Susan Getgood, John Wagner, etc.)

The notion of "career" vs. "family" is an especially important topic for the PR industry to wrestle with, since so many women are in the profession.

As an agency we have been committed to handling this dilemma as flexibly as possible. We hate to see a bright woman invest 5+ years in the agency only to give up the progress she's made.

The problem with the "career vs. family" debate is the "vs." in the middle. It seems to too often become an "either/or" proposition.

We've set up arrangements including Flex Time and Telecommuting, and, we have even expressed a willingness to investigate Job Sharing and Daycare Assistance. For a handful of women, a situation where they work 3 days in SHIFT's offices and 2 from home has worked well. But, despite this flexibility, some women have decided to walk away from their careers and give motherhood a 100% effort.

As a father I can't fault these women. Who would dare suggest that parenting requires less than a 100% effort? My own wife - who is both beautiful & brilliant - decided to stay home with our kids.

But as an employer who has committed to flexibility, I still can't fathom why so many women - whose careers were meticulously and lovingly nurtured - decide to chuck it all.

I don't have an answer. This issue is too complex to solve in a blog posting. Ultimately we can only continue to strive to be as flexible and supportive as possible, while running a profitable business that is fair to everyone.

And by fair I mean this: to advance in this career, as a man or woman, you should expect to put in approx. 40 hours a week, and, a minimum of about 16 of those hours should be spent with your team.

The litmus test for a successful work/life balance that is fair to the Employee and Employer is whether or not TEAM, CLIENTS, and MANAGEMENT are happy with performance.

A TEAM whose leader is only available for 20 hours (max) becomes a team adrift.
A CLIENT whose leader is working part-time becomes an unhappy client.
A MANAGEMENT team whose stars are not available when needed becomes resentful.

Of course, "work/family balance" is an issue in most industries. It just seems more pressing in PR because a) the majority of the staff are women and, b) so many agencies bend over backwards and make significant investments of time and creativity to support women's dual roles. And yet, despite these PR organizations' substantial commitments to being supportive, they must still address legitimate concerns about female executives' long-term "staying power."

Is it true that "You can have ANYTHING you want, but not EVERYTHING you want"?

Should it be?

Art of the (Lost) Deal

2006-04-17T16:01:00.000-04:00

My car lease is up. We go car shopping. Being a wee bit Web savvy, we check out Edmunds and AutoSite (which I had the pleasure of launching, umpteen years ago), to get a sense of sticker prices, options, etc.

I enjoyed my 3 years with the 2003 Passat, and my wife learns that VW can be pretty generous with current owners, to keep 'em in the family, so I decide to just get a new model. We comparison shop, with 2 local dealers.

When it comes to the "real life" stuff, my bride is the tough negotiator in the family. You'd never expect it; she's a tiny blonde whom most contractors, car salesmen, etc., assume they can hoodwink. But in 18 years I've been shocked and delighted by the number of shuysters she's left enfeebled and shivering in her wake.

First dealership takes 3 "trips to the pencil sharpener" to come up with a contract that is satisfactory to the wife. It's not that we begrudge the dealer his profit, but, c'mon: we knew the dealer invoice price on every widget in the car before we walked in. Why is this so hard?

It takes 2 visits to the dealership, numerous phone calls and emails to get the "BEST" offer. Ultimately we say "we'll think about it" and walk out...

The second dealer is willing to chat with my wife on the phone, and without prompting or "pencil sharpening" he comes up with a deal that is a little bit better than the "BEST" deal from the first dealership.

She calls the first dealership to tell them about this better deal. They offer to match it. But didn't we already get their BEST offer? Apparently not.

Guess who got our business?

Lessons: All vendors of consumer goods must bow down before the pricing transparency that the 'Net empowers. You can't treat customers like suckers anymore; that day is past.

Also - don't mess with little blondes.

Growing Up Blogger

2006-04-14T08:43:00.000-04:00

Like many bloggers, this site started out as a lark. In the Summer of 2004, a colleague said something to me along the lines of, "Hey, smartypants, why don't you start a blog?" And after fretting about "not having much to say" at the time, alluvasudden it's 2 years later.

Blogging is fun. I like it. I like knowing that, 2 years later, I still have enough goin' on in my skull to ward off a premature senility. After assiduously avoiding "professional organizations" like the PRSA, I like the feeling of being part of a larger community of PR pros. And because (like most bloggers?) I have a large-but-tender ego, I like it that over 1,000 people come here every month. It ain't Scobel traffic or anything, but that's at least 999 visitors a month, even after you count my mom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Because I'm 2 years into it and not likely to "retire" from blogging anytime soon, it is time to upgrade. Using a free service like Blogger, I am starting to feel like that guy in the new Acura commercials who clacks away on a typewriter - amidst looks of disbelief from his fellow patrons in an Internet cafe.

So, per the advice of several fellow bloggers, sometime in the next couple of weeks, this blog will be moving to a new site - www.pr-squared.com (beta is up now, but don't bother visiting yet!) - and a new blogging platform (Movable Type).

My tech guy assures me that a visit to this current "blogspot" site will automatically re-direct browsers to the new site but, frankly, I am not sure how many problems this transition might cause, nor how many readers I might lose in the move... All I know is that I am tired of hearing my tech guy sigh,"Yeah, ummm, Blogger doesn't let us do that," whenever I've suggested a cool tweak or widget for the blog.

If anyone has any advice, suggestions, words-of-caution, etc., I'd love to hear from you.

Values vs. Billings

2006-04-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

From an article yesterday at the website of KTLA (Los Angeles' WB station):

"A former Fleishman-Hillard vice president testified...that she padded the public relations firm's bills to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power by as much as $50,000 a month...(When asked) why? (the PR exec replied) 'We hadn't met our projections...We needed to bump up our hours.'"

F-H management has been trying to distance themselves from these so-called "rogue agents."

I know some F-H folks, and they are great people. But, I also doubt that the F-H execs now on the stand were "rogues." The F-H pros I've talked to complained that achieving their quotas was paramount. I am paraphrasing here, but the sentiment was, "You don't submit your time unless it matches what the beancounters were projecting."

On F-H's list of Agency Principles, #10 out of 10 is, "We are committed to the highest ethical standards." Given this billing debacle in L.A., they might want to bump that trait up a few notches ... and maybe allow the re-jiggering of their value system to spawn an internal debate about their billing system.

Can Blogs Help Ward-Off Youthful Transgressions?

2006-04-12T10:56:00.000-04:00

Look around any PR agency and you'll soon realize that this is a young person's game. Most staffers are under age 30. Sure, there are some "gray-hairs" in the management ranks, but it's rare to see an agency PR pro in their late 50's. It seems that many PR professionals start out in the agency world but wind up in a corporate marketing department...

I love hangin' with the young whippersnappers; I applaud their energy & fresh thinking, but, I sometimes find it frustrating to see age-old mistakes being made because so few agencies have made training and best-practices a priority. This is an easy trap to fall into - lord knows it is a never-ending battle for us - because as an industry, PR is so laser-focused on the daily Client Service demands that we're usually happy to just have enough "arms-and-legs" to get the basic work done.

I wonder if "new media" resources like the BadPitch Blog, Forward, the Marcomblog and the Publicity Hound, et al., can ultimately help PR agency newbies to avoid youthful transgressions? Might we make these educational PR blogs mandatory reading? Maybe each agency-owned computer should come pre-configured with these RSS feeds already set-up for new hires?

Wouldn't it be great if esteem for the PR industry could make incremental gains, year over year, instead of playing defense so often, for the same rookie mistakes?

Bi-coastal Blissburger

2006-04-12T09:14:00.000-04:00

Last week we learned that SHIFT Communications was named one of the Best Places To Work in the Bay Area for 2006.

This joins our award for Best Place To Work in Boston, for 2005.

That's coast-to-coast bliss, baby.

Yes, I am tootin' our own horn. Our Agency is not even 3 years old yet; to have won back-to-back "Best Places To Work" awards in two highly-competitive metros feels like a meaningful victory.

How did we create a Bi-Coastal Blissburger like this one? By trying to never forget that everyone in the agency (and everyone in the world, for that matter), wears an invisible sign around their neck that reads, "Make me feel special." We try to ward off over-work; to defend good people from bad clients; to keep our doors open; to greet each person with a smile in the morning; and to be as transparent as possible about the business.

The new Flavia "mocapuccinomacallit" machine probably doesn't hurt, either.

Measurement, Schmeasurement

2006-04-11T17:19:00.000-04:00

Speaking of Measurement, from the Intelligent Measurement blog, here are the "top 10 excuses for not evaluating (PR results)" ...

Be sure to visit the original post for the good-kind-of-snarky sidebar commentary.

"It's too expensive."
"I don't know how."
"I'm too busy 'doing' to be bothered with measuring."
"What I'm doing couldn't possibly be measured."
"I don't see the value of it."
"I'm scared of what I will find out."
"People are fed up with giving their opinion."
"My gut feeling tells me I'm doing a good job."
"All my work is vetoed by the CEO, if s/he's happy so am I."
"You can't prove anything anyway."

Cost to implement a genuinely valuable PR Measurement process? Under $10K.

The cluelessness, fear & ignorance that prevents measurement? Priceless.

Give Away The Ruler So They'll Keep Buying "Column Inches?"

2006-04-11T08:35:00.000-04:00

Seth Godin preached for "measurement" last week, and hallelujah! for that. As Steve Gershik notes, "If (Seth's) talking about a topic, you know it's going to become a BusinessWeek article within the next few months."

Godin's post gave me some food for thought about our agency's own Measurement product - which enables companies to capture & analyze source data on all inbound leads, across all marketing channels... Thus far we've been charging a reasonable premium for the service. Everyone loves the idea but only a handful have been willing to pony up the fee.

Godin's post suggests that we ought to give the measurement program away for free:

"Once the number is on the wall, in marker, or in phone calls or dollar bills, the investment will follow."

In other words - once the client gets religion; once they get hooked on monitoring their progress (just as we bloggers obsessively monitor our memes & trackbacks), they'll be eager to get more actively engaged in the PR program.

Once they see it working, they'll be keen to see how they can make it work better.

Valleywag Attacks PR Industry

2006-04-10T17:06:00.000-04:00

In a post today titled "PR Eats Itself", Valleywag calls out Thomas PR of Melville, NY for sending out a generic press release about a new agency win.

Thomas PR is so proud of its new contract, it did what it does best: the agency sent out a press release about itself. Yes, a press release about a PR agency signing a deal. Says a reader, "I thought the point of hiring a PR agency was to get press for your company, not press for the agency."

Of all the things for the Snark Machine at Valleywag to munch on when it comes to the PR industry, this seems like a pretty lame example. These types of releases go out all the time. Standard practice. Sheesh.

Yay! I'm a Nobody!

2006-04-10T13:48:00.000-04:00

Some silly person at Ragan Media's Journal of Employee Communication Management had the temerity to call the inimitable Allan Jenkins a "nobody."

The funny part is not what the original debate was about - some to-do about whether "social media is the next big thing" - no, what's funny is that Allan (tongue planted in cheek) was able to demonstrate the unique, high-speed power of social media by creating a club for nobodies - which everyone wanted to join!

Not being one to miss out on a meme, and with my 30-day PubSub rankings plummeting from a high of #9 last month to somethin' like #38 nowadays, clearly, I am a nobody. But now, I don't need to care: there's even a home for a PR wastrel like me.

A "Third Way" for International PR

2006-04-10T09:07:00.000-04:00

As noted earlier, the majority of clients who engage in International PR programs think that their programs are ineffective. Communications between regions is sporadic, riven by inter- and intra-agency politics, etc.

As noted in that earlier post, there are currently 2 ways to skin the cat when it comes to global PR programming:

"Seamless integrated network" - the approach favored by conglomerate agencies conveniently forgets the fact that regional offices acquired via acquisitions and managed via competitive P&L will rarely cooperate seamlessly.

"Independent network" - this best-of-breed model still implies vendor lock-in on a regional basis, and does not always offer simplified administration (e.g., a single invoice).

As a mid-sized firm that typically handled start-up companies, we did not often have to worry about these broken models. But, as our business grew we took on ever-larger clients, and meanwhile the Internet facilitated global selling for clients of all sizes. The "Global Question" loomed large. The more we explored, the more troubled we became; we grew determined to find a "third way."

We came up with this:

"Centralized Coordination of a Freeform Network" - this approach required us to hire a senior-level PR pro whose only job is to help clients manage a best-of-breed network of worldwide agencies. Credo: "Performance Through Simplification"

First, we vetted out and created our own independent network, making sure to have several agency options in each major geography to better ensure a good client/agency fit. We offer these agencies' services to clients (simplified agency reviews), and take on the responsibility of managing each agency relationship (simplified communications, simplified & centralized billing).

While we view our partners as "preferred," there is no exclusivity mandate. If one of our partners doesn't work out (or if the client already has preferred vendors overseas), we simply assimilate a new regional partner into the fold. Our dedicated Global Coordinator manages it all - including working bizzaro hours, so that the client need not set up 5am conference calls to get on the same page with PR firms in Tokyo, London, Beijing, etc. (simplified life)!

In essence this model offers the centralized coordination and administration of a global conglomerate, while gaining access to any-and-all varieties of best-of-breed regional partners.

The PR Goliaths can point to a map, flip a switch, and all the push-pins representing all their many offices will light up in the same color. I'd rather point to a map that lights up with all the colors of the United Nations ... As long as you can get a handle on the tough aspects of inter-agency coordination, diversity is a strength when it comes to global PR.

Fortune 500 Blogs

2006-04-07T14:05:00.000-04:00

Maybe I am late to this particular party, since the experiment has been going on since the end of last year, but I find it pretty fascinating. Ultimately this site will serve as a place to keep tabs on FORTUNE 500 companies that maintain "active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products."

From the wiki:

"According to our research, 27 (5.4%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 4/4/06
Once we've got this list in pretty good shape, we plan to add share price data to create a Business Blogging Index, comparing the stock performance of companies that blog with those that don't."

Most bloggers, myself included would think (or at least hope) that blog-friendly companies do better in the stock market. "Transparency adds value," and all that jazz, right?

Turns out that the blog-friendly companies lag pretty badly. The resulting theory suggests that companies in trouble (GM) are more "bloggy" than those that are on a tear (Apple), because more communication & spectrum-wide conversations are more likely to spur some good storylines... whereas companies that already enjoy a good marketplace storyline don't want to muck it up by introducing new (potentially problematic) perspectives.

This post from Doc Searles' blog explains it all in a far more interesting way via far more intelligent people.

Afraid of 2008

2006-04-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

Wonkette called this NY Times piece (Politics Faces Sweeping Changes via the Web), "painfully obvious," and yep, surely it is to the bloggerati... but, it was a reminder to me that the 2008 presidential elections are coming up in the not-so-distant-future. If 2004 was any indication, it'll be yet another polarizing brouhaha.

In 2004, blogs were really just emerging on the scene, via spots like Instapundit, DailyKOS, Talking Points Memo, etc. This time around, though, the blogosphere will be the domain of a far-ranging field of bloggers of various stripes, and the blogosphere at-large will play a more crucial role.

And by "crucial" I mean:

crude
vicious
impactful
mishmashy
enlightening
whodoyatrust

Thinking about the raft of blogs that will spring up between now and November 2008 (watch for a slew of 'em to appear as soon as the first Democrat announces his - or her - intentions) is already making my stomach churn.

Snakebit

2006-04-06T18:16:00.000-04:00

Every now and then, an account gets "snakebit." You have all the best intentions; you've got a good team in place; you have good chemistry with the client; the story is pretty good.

But everything goes wrong, anyway.

There are lots of "moving parts" on a client account, and any one of them can get snakebit.

With one client, the PR results and relationship are terrific - but whenever this particular client needs me at a meeting, something unavoidable comes up at the last minute: my dog died; I got a paralyzing migraine; etc. All the best intentions, yet everything turns to sh** when it comes time for the Big Cheese to show up. I've vowed to never miss a meeting with these folks again!

Another client had all the right results - but in the wrong order, and always a step slower than the client wanted. We won a huge award; a game-changer - but it took months to happen. The analysts were less responsive than usual to our meeting requests. We got a ton of media meetings, but the articles that came out - while fantastic - always seemed to dribble in like molasses.

This last one was particularly hard on us. As I suggested, we liked the client, the tech, the story, everything. But it was all going too slow, despite our best efforts. So, the VP says: "Look, you guys are great, but you've got 1 month to get this thing rolling on rails, or else we're going to have a tough conversation."

One month later, we had set-up 32 appointments. The ink that resulted was dead-on. The CEO congratulated us on a bang-up job. Yet the VP still handed us our walking papers. Ironically, the last thing they said to me was, "You've got a great team, make sure they don't burn out." (That's a little disingenuous, eh? "You've got a month to pull out all the stops, or we walk - but, don't burn out your team.")

That's the thing about snake bites. Sometimes you suck out the venom, spit it out and vow to forge ahead, stronger and more positive than ever. But sometimes, you just wanna spit.

How-To Save The Mainstream Media

2006-04-05T09:08:00.000-04:00

Tom Foremski asks, "What is a viable business model for the mediasphere?" (mainstream media & blogs).

"Current media business models cannot carry the information load because they are being decimated faster than the ice caps are melting. What happens if the old media dies before the new media learns to walk..."?

Tom promises ever-lasting fame to whomever figures this out. I love a challenge. Here goes:

The mainstream media (MSM) needs to start charging for premium content. Period. Clearly, giving away content in hopes of generating revenues from online ads is not working. Ideally the MSM would gang together and make this happen universally and all-at-once. Horrors, right? But, this would immediately put the brakes on "parasitic" consumer-generated media (CGM), which would start to choke on its own exhaust within 30 days of such a media temblor.

The resulting surfeit of free CGM content would ultimately make consumers weary and leery of all the teeth-gnashing & opinion-mongering... They would gravitate back towards the MSM (as discussed earlier), predisposed to pay a premium for high quality content.

The trick is to make consumers pay DIFFERENTLY for premium content: forget about annual subscriptions or over-priced per-article charges. The answer lies in viable MICROPAYMENT and LICENSING approaches.

I wouldn't mind spending $0.05 for 1-time access to an article, and, say, $2.50 to make a link to premium content on my blog available to my readers (or, to raise the bar, to readers subscribed to my RSS feed) for a 3-month period.

Such "little nibbles" would not hurt too badly. And according to Technorati (via Kami Huyse), only 9 percent of bloggers post with regularity; these so-called "elite" would surely have the wherewithal to pay for a fair number of links to premium MSM content ... and as it got cost-prohibitive, they might be forced to add more of their own value, and to only the most compelling MSM content (vs. simplistic blog posts like, "check this NY Times link").

Right now, about 25 MSM sites are represented on this top 100 "blogged-about" list at URLfan. The Washington Post is at #4, with 4,693 blog links. If you multiply 4,693 by $2.50 (for the proposed 3-month license described above), that could have netted WaPo over $11K in 3 months. "Chump change," yes, but it begins to add up to a tidy supplemental revenue stream - and, it's $11K that the paper would not have seen otherwise. Also, it's incremental and continuous: every article link would be monetized in perpetuity... That original $2.50 payment by the blogger would lead to follow-on income of $0.05 with every click that occured among the blog's readers, after the initial 3-month period wore out. Ultimately it's a similar model used in radio, e.g., the artist gets a few pennies for every time their song is played.

The keys to a successful "MSM Micropayments" approach?

Rational "fair use" policies - including options for "pay-per-view," "unlimited views (per IP address or subscriber log-in)" and, most importantly to the blogosphere - simple-to-administer "time-limit licenses" ("this content available to your blog readers for 1-month; after that they pay $0.05 to view the link")
Reasonable pricing - $0.05 is better than $0.25 for a one-time view of the content
One-click ordering (Google toolbar/wallet) - ideally, content-based payments would show up in an aggregated way on our credit card statements
Revamped micropayment policies/standards/fees from credit card companies & PayPal
Technology and/or agreements that block search engines from accessing/archiving premium content without compensating content creators
Universal Digital Rights Management adoption (Adobe/PDF) to hinder content piracy

None of which would be EASY to figure out. But it beats going outta business!

Top 3 Reasons To Love Constantin Basturea

2006-04-04T20:58:00.000-04:00

Everybody loves Constantin. The PR blogosphere's pioneer and chief advocate got himself a big-time gig at Converseon, and who doesn't love it when good things happen to good people?

In Constantin's honor, here's a makeshift list of my Top 3 Reasons To Love Constantin Basturea:

1. His name.
I have yet to type it out without having to triple-check the spelling. How 'bout you?

2. His unbridled enthusiasm. This quote from his Converseon press release tells you everything you need to know: "there's no magic twelve-step cluetraining program that will allow businesses to be successful on the internet."

3. His honest-to-goodness goodness.
Always helpful, always nice, a consummate professional.

Maybe this'll start a meme! What are your top 3 reasons to love 'Da Man?

Congrats, Constantin!!

Pendulums Always Swing

2006-04-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

This article in the NY Times: "Chevy Tries a Write-Your-Own-Ad Approach, and the Potshots Fly" is a terrific example of how consumer-generated media (CGM) represents an exciting but scary opportunity for marketers.

Chevy was trying to be groovy and let users put their own captions, etc., on some professionally-produced tv commercials for the Chevy Tahoe. Some (many?) of the resulting ads took the automaker to task for its gas-guzzler. Some of the captions are clever, some are hysterical; many are sobering.

Chevrolet - to its everlasting credit if it sticks with the campaign - has made no moves whatsoever to counteract this trend. And THAT'S what makes it groovy.

Having said that, this reminds me of why PROFESSIONAL EDITORIAL FILTERS came about in the first place. Back in the day (Benjamin Franklin days, to be precise), pamphleteers were the bloggerati: they produced content that paid no heed to legitimacy, fairness, accuracy, etc. Before long, the consumer did not know whom to believe, and the newspapermen ostensibly played the "middleman" role (yellow journalism era aside). The journalists cut through the hype and told the "balanced" version of events and issues.

In the dawning age of CGM - in editorial & advertising - we may come to miss these ombudsmen.

Perhaps the pendulum has swung in favor of CGM because newspapers became overly-produced house organs for Corporate America and political machines?

Perhaps a flood of crazy content from CGM will someday make us long for the days when we could "trust" the mainstream media for their accuracy, balance, and quality controls?

A "Can't Wait Til Friday" Fun Fact

2006-04-04T12:33:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, April 5, 2006, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 AM in the morning, the time and date will be:

01:02:03 04/05/06

This will never happen again.

PR WEEK's Andrew Gordon Joins Agency

2006-04-04T06:11:00.000-04:00

I got a (mass) email from PR WEEK's west coast bureau chief, Andrew Gordon, as he announced his departure from the magazine to join Access Communications.

Although I often did not see eye to eye with Andrew, he's a really nice guy and I wish him well.

Let's just hope that this is the LAST mass e-mail he ever sends. Journalists frown upon that, I'm told. ;)

Cliens Terribilis

2006-04-03T11:26:00.000-04:00

Morgan McLintic has a great post on "How To Be A Terrible Client." I was not sure whether to laugh or cry. Here's Morgan's Top 10 List (be sure to visit his site for the wry commentary that accompanies each "suggestion"):

1. Never praise the agency.
2. Don’t set targets.
3. Demand constant attention.
4. Never make up your mind.
5. Brief light, brief late.
6. Delegate the bottom of your to do list.
7. Maintain radio silence.
8. Pass the blame.
9. Make sure you are the single point of contact.
10. Pay late

To this list - which is close to a perfect list of reasons to fire a client - I'd add:

11. Make false promises. Wanna have a laugh at the agency's expense? Set a "performance metric" with vague promises of "reward-based incentives." Then, when the agency hits the target, find something else to complain about, so that the agency execs stop exulting and instead slink towards the underbelly of the nearest rock.

Finally! A Huge Dog Post

2006-04-03T09:34:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I paid off the blog description (above) that promises "random stories about huge dogs." That's because for a while there, we'd gone without a huge dog in our lives. To this day we still mourn good ol' Owen.

But, life goes on and after several months of drool-free living, we decided to get another English Mastiff.

His name is Charlie. We've had him for a few months. He's not as solemn nor as drooly nor as mild-mannered as Owen, but then again, at 7 months' old he's still just a puppy (a 100+ lb. puppy!) and if Owen was any indication, Charlie will continue to get lazier by the pound. Ultimately, he'll be little more than a 4-legged couch (200+ lbs.).

Some people think we're crazy to have chosen the English Mastiff as "our breed." Some folks even steer clear of a pony-sized dog on the sidewalks. But we've never met a species of dog more lovable, lazy, loyal and dopey.

This weekend I walked along a wooded trail with Charlie, for a mile or two. He was off-leash and never strayed more than 5 paces from my side. How many 7-month old Labs or Golden Retrievers could ya say that about?

"Stop Synching & Pay Attention"

2006-04-01T15:15:00.000-05:00

You have a sickness. You know it, I know it, and your significant others know it.

You suffer from "Continuous Partial Attention."

It means exactly what you suspect it means. It means that while you're strolling down the avenue with your spouse, you're surreptitiously checking your Treo for new messages. You check voicemail while she's in the ladies' room. Admit it: you even do a li'l SMS while in traffic. (And sometimes, when you're crusing down the highway. You may as well be driving drunk, you know.)

Linda Stone, a former Microsoft & Apple exec, coined the term at a tradeshow attended by Newsweek's Steven Levy, who subsequently wrote this article (which I found via Brendan Hodgson at H&K). In Levy's article, Ms. Stone described Continuous Partial Attention as "stemming from our desire...to be a live node on the network."

Who knew? The Borg 'R' Us.

A Friend In Need

2006-04-01T14:50:00.000-05:00

I wish this were an April Fool's Joke.

When BL Ochman posted her appeal to help saxophonist Michael Brecker find a bone marrow or stem cell transplant, I realized that blogging might be a great way to help a friend in need. One of SHIFT’s pro-bono projects involves spreading the word about Diane Glass, a mother and two-time grandmother, to find a kidney donor.

Unfortunately, Diane’s time is running out. She suffers from Hereditary Nephritis, a very rare kidney disease that already killed her brother. Her own family and friends have been tested but none of them are a match, as Diane needs an O+ or O- blood type donor.

Her doctor recently told her that she must have a kidney transplant by April 12.

My colleagues tell me she’s a remarkable woman and – despite her rollercoaster ride of good and bad days – an inspiration to the team. Check out her site to find out how you can help. And if you live in or near Boston, join us for the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Walk on May 21 at the Franklin Park Zoo.

Thanks.

Never Burn A Bridge

2006-03-31T08:32:00.000-05:00

A very cool newbiz prospect entered our pipeline this week. A name-brand consumer tech company has extended an invite to their RFP. We've made some great headway in our Lifestyle Technologies Group, with clients such as Shimano, Oakley, Ugobe, etc., and it would be sweet to add this company to the roster, too.

But what is interesting about this prospect is how it came to us.

The PR manager at the client company was a former interview candidate at SHIFT. Interestingly, this person did not get the gig with us (can't remember why - for all I know, we did make an offer) ... But, apparently they were so impressed by the folks they met that when this person landed "the big job" at the consumer tech company, they remembered the interview fondly and subsequently extended the invite to pitch their business.

Never, ever burn a bridge. Be nice to e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y.

A Blog Is Not A Newsletter

2006-03-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

One thing that often strikes me as we begin a dialogue with clients about "this blogging stuff" is how often the client assumes that one post per month oughta' do the trick. This is particularly true if the blog is slated to become a CEO-level responsibility. "He's a very busy man, after all. He can't be expected to post more often than that."

Here's my retort:

"How is a monthly blog post any different from a newsletter?"

So many clients still see blogs as a one-to-many communication vs. a participatory dialogue.

The blog is not about making the CEO a star (though it can help in that effort); it's about ensuring that the client execs are engaged in their industry; communicating to-and-fro with customers, prospects, employees, media, friends & enemies.

"Daily posting might be a pipe dream," I say, "But monthly posting is a fool's errand."

When you holler across a canyon, you can't come back a month later and still expect to hear an echo.

Best-Laid Plans

2006-03-29T19:42:00.000-05:00

Hawaii waiting out rain to launch sunny PR campaign

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

HONOLULU, Hawaii (AP) -- State and county tourism officials hoped to launch a nationwide public relations campaign this week promoting Hawaii's sunny skies, but their plans were postponed for a week because of the rainy weather.

... Buy your tickets now. Prices go up after the agency's invoice comes due.

Wouldst Thou Drink From The Holy Grail?

2006-03-29T08:39:00.000-05:00

In response to this age-old post, which briefly described the process that P&G used to determine PR's true bottom-line value (hallelujah!), this week I received a note from Mark Weiner, who heads up Delahaye, the measurement firm that aided the consumer giant:

The method that P&G used is called "marketing mix modeling" which ties multiple streams of marketing data -- including PR, advertising, price promotions, direct marketing, the Internet, sales in terms of dollars and units, and more -- through a multiple regression anaysis by date, market and campaign. By looking at sales results over time and from market to market along with the marketing activities present at that time, the statistical model identifies the extent to which each marketing agent contributes to sales.

Delahaye, the research-based consulting firm I lead, has worked on dozens of similar analyses for a variety of companies. In each case, in categories as diverse as automobiles, telecom, entertainment, consumer package goods, financial services companies and more, we find the same result over and over again: PR works, delivering an ROI that is the best among all marketing agents. Whereas mass-market TV advertising delivers a return of roughly $1.25 for every dollar spent; and whereas price promotions lose a quarter for every dollar spent; PR delivers from $3.00 to $8.00. At the same time, PR in the form of marketing media relations lifts all boats: in a positive PR environment, the advertising is more effective, the telemarketing more efficient and so on.

Typical PR data won't work: simple tabulations of clips, ad value or impressions repeatedly fail. What's required is PR data which are both a) consistent and integratable with GRPs from the marketing world, and, b) representative of PR's unique role within the marketing mix (only semi-controllable at best).

The question is whether the PR profession is prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. As you rightly point out, the advertising trades have broken this story rather than the PR media. The Ad Age story ran months ago and it is only in this week's issue of PR Week that the P&G/Delahaye story appears. The Council of PR Firms published a booklet on the subject but the PRSA, IABC and other leading professional bodies haven't been touting this extraordinarily important development.

As long-time readers know, the subject of PR Measurement fascinates me. In fact our agency developed its own methodology - after a 2-year research effort - to help clients measure PR's impact on Sales. (Our approach is complementary to Delahaye's marketing mix modeling.)

But honestly, as challenging as it was to develop our approach, the HARDER part has been convincing fellow PR pros and even CLIENTS that tying PR to Sales results is not only achievable, but also worth the additional time/cost/effort.

So I am not surprised that Delahaye has experienced frustrating amounts of hesitation on the part of the PR industry. I am saddened, but not surprised.

PR pundits (myself included) spend so much time, lately, debating the finer points of new trends in media consumption, and that's important & laudable... But, I will continue to insist that our cleverness in communications will never gain PR a seat at the Boardroom table if we don't also wise up to the "Measurement Mandate."

You Blog Through The Lifecycle & It All Goes To Shit, Anyway

2006-03-28T17:17:00.000-05:00

I think we're maybe getting sick of each other.

Josh Hallett takes us through the lifecycle of a PR blogger, and, damn... it all sounds too true; it is almost painful to recognize yourself with such eery accuracy. (Josh, I'm at Stage 5, I think. But I'll admit to shades of #6: nothing against Steve, but MicroPersuasion seems so Web 2.0 focused; not enough PR content for my taste. Thankfully I sense enough of #7 on the psychic horizon that I think I'll be traipsing right past Stage #6, soon enough.)

The ever-upbeat Jeneane Sessum tells us that we might reach blogging nirvana ... but who cares? It's going to go to shit, anyway.

Not that that imminent shitstorm has put off some of our favorite peers from begging for linklove. You'd think that this blogging stuff was paying the bills, or something. If links = dollars, Scott, let us know.

Last but not least, and speaking of blogosphere whoredom, the entire peer group gets all wiggy over the debut of a tarted-up gossip column that will assuredly run out of ideas before long. If my fellow bloggers and PR pros are at all like me, they are living happy, relatively boring lives compared to what you'd read at Defamer. (See earlier post for details on Strumpette: the clever vixen will get no more linklove from me.)

So.... why are we doing this, again?

This Is Fame?

2006-03-27T08:35:00.000-05:00

Strumpette - "A Naked Journal of the PR Business" - debuted this weekend, with a snarky post that suggests that Steve Rubel of MicroPersuasion, the PR industry's uber-blogger, will be on the outs at Edelman within a few months. "Place your bets."

Already, as of this writing, the initial post has 42 comments, of varying degrees of quality and counter-snarkiness. Nice way to get attention, Strumpette. But did ya really think we'd believe that "the chicks" in your office were gossiping about Mr. Rubel?

More importantly: what do you do for an encore? This industry, all $3B of it, is still a small field. For all his "fame" in the blogosphere, there are probably only 500-some-odd people who even know of Steve Rubel. I feel for the guy. Steve is among the very first journeyman PR guys to gain some clout outside the Big Names like Burson, Edelman, Weber, Dyson, etc., and he's just 7 minutes into his 15-minute run at fame when he's attacked...

I tip my hat to the headlong rush of Strumpette to the top o' the meme, but I can't help but smirk at the silliness of it all.

I think I'll go take care of my clients. They are so good about ensuring that we keep things in perspective.

International PR Is Broken

2006-03-23T09:25:00.000-05:00

We recently completed a survey (with our friends at Launch Pad) which asked scores of marketers within big companies about their experiences with international PR programming. We have our own thoughts and strategies for global PR coordination, and we wanted to take the pulse of our prospective clients about whether they were happy with the status quo...

Newsflash: they ain't happy.

Right now there are 2 basic models for global PR:

Global Network - "Flip a switch and all the pins on the map light up" - this is a glib way of describing the approach of the worldwide PR conglomerates, who promise seamless, country-to-country consistency.

Sounds swell, but, most of these conglomerates were created via acquisitions, and each country office typically runs its own P&L: so the reality is that these regional agencies have different corporate cultures and are competing with their inter-regional sister agencies for client budget.

Best-Of-Breed Network - "We found the best firms for you in each geography!" - this approach was created by independent firms to combat the so-called advantages of the Global Network model. The small, independent network of firms offers local-market experts who know their culture and media landscape inside-out. However, if you're a busy corporate PR exec overseeeing a global PR program, you're stuck managing multiple agencies in multiple regions.

So if you're an agency person who touts either of these models, your clients have news for you: neither approach is working.

According to our survey, fully 2/3rds of the clients who now engage in international PR programs reported that their international colleagues and global agencies "don’t properly adhere to a single strategy." A lack of effective two-way communication raised these marketers' concerns about "inconsistent messaging and branding."

We've got tri-band cellphones, find-me/follow-me VOIP services, email, IM, SMS, intranets & extranets & blogs ... but when it comes to effectively coordinating an international PR program, agencies and clients are still not able to communicate.

Two Visions of the Internet's Future

2006-03-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

Will the day come when you'll be asked whether you are a "Tier One" or "Tier Two" Internet user? That's a frightening thought. I've been following this debate with one eye closed, thinking, "Naaaw, couldn't happen. That's crazy talk." If you live in Oregon, folks, please, vote Democrat.

Not sure this is any less frightening, but, it's definitely an interesting vision of the Internet's future. Honestly, I think that this well-produced mini-mockumentary of "Googlezon" is not far off; in fact, literally you can see versions of this well-imagined future happening today at places ranging from Where.com and PixPulse to Google News and other wild, emerging services.

We've been really charged up about where this Web 2.0 stuff is headed... but do we want to pay2play in the Brave New World?

Don't Think; It Can Only Hurt The Ball Club

2006-03-21T08:47:00.000-05:00

A fascinating top-of-the-fold article in Advertising Age (registration required) today.

Apparently people who get MBA degrees suck at Marketing.

You think I am overstating it, right? - but read AdAge's own headline: "Don't Study Too Hard: MBA's Fail At Marketing... Surveys Find Those With Degrees Underperform."

The research suggests that the big winners in Marketing work within corporate departments that spend a bit more (marketing accounted for 12.4% of sales vs. 11.6%) and work a bit harder (they're understaffed) than those in the peer group who are underperforming.

The study also found that out-performers tended to be more supportive of their staffers' professional development. Lastly, the outperformers were more generous with stock options - these companies incented their employees by making them stakeholders in the organization's financial future.

It all sounds like common sense: spend money on what's important (brand/reputation/lead gen); keep costs down; work really hard; stay focused; be nice to your people.

The irony is that these are lessons that they ought to be teaching in business school, eh?

Exception or Rule?

2006-03-20T20:19:00.000-05:00

This ain't pretty. It appeared in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post (tip o' the hat to Peter Himler). Ugh.

There have certainly been a fair number of similar such examples of bad (tasteless, clueless) PR pitches. Meanwhile, while my colleagues at the Bad Pitch Blog seem to have no shortage of fodder, the pipeline at the Good Pitch Blog is dry as bone. (And frankly I put too much time into this blog - and my day job - to worry about begging for more submissions. Plus Kevin & Richard also cover the occassional "good pitch.")

But it leads me to wonder: Is bad PR the exception or the rule?

Do journalists get a ton of decent pitches, from which they pick-and-choose those that best suit their needs - but every now and then are blown-away by a truly terrible pitch that they are compelled to share with their readers? If so, that would make "bad pr" the exception.

Or, do journalists put up with a ton of bad pitches, until they can't take it anymore and decide to vent their frustrations? If so, that makes "bad pr" the rule.

"Search" Tells A Story

2006-03-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

Should the PR industry be prepared to add Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to its "PR 2.0" bag of tricks?

I've written before about this opportunity. More than once. Thrice, even. But, not as comprehensively as Pete Blackshaw, nor as eloquently as Kevin Dugan, nor as insightfully as Rohit Bhargava.

First thing we need to agree on is that PR folks could reasonably claim this marketing function. Advertising does not "own" SEM. The SEM companies that have sprung up to own SEM don't even "own" SEM (frankly, too many of them come off as carpetbaggers). Skills-wise, an SEM campaign takes some strategic insight, direct-marketing experience, copywriting ability, etc., but the barriers are still low enough, and the sector young enough, to consider SEM "up for grabs."

The question is, "Do we want it?"

Without simply parroting the gents mentioned above, it's hard to move the ball downfield in this debate, but, here's the essence of why PR ought to participate in the SEM landgrab:

Since a majority of online interactions that impact clients start with search, it follows that a large percentage of the clients' core narrative ought to be instantly visible via SEM - regardless of whether the audience is a prospect or customer, journo or blogger, competitor or complainer...

A generic search term (simply the "client name") ought to highlight the sales messaging.
A search for bad news about the client (e.g., a keyword search appended to phrases like "sucks", "complaints", etc.) ought to lead to an "Official Perspectives" SEM response.
Most importantly, even if the client has the foresight to have keywords and campaigns "good to go" based on both generic & negative keywords, they will need to be able to drop everything in a crisis to snap up relevant, specific keywords, as-needed.

A RapidReaction SEM campaign allows the client to tell their side of the story as searches happen (as discussed in the Emerging PR Tactics post, in relation to the mining tragedies of earlier this year).

Isn't it PR's job to help clients tell the story, in appropriate media? Why shouldn't PR pros consider Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., as media channels? Why shouldn't we offer clients our counsel and tactical support to ensure that their key messages are front-and-center in relevant search results?

We could, we should, we can. But will we?

LongTail Radio

2006-03-18T18:52:00.000-05:00

Spend 5 minutes at Pandora, but only if you have 5 hours to kill.

This is, for me, one of the best examples of where the Web will take us. Not coincidentally it's reflective of one of my fave themes, the Long Tail. This site takes a couple of your favorite songs and creates an entire library of songs for you to listen to (and buy from iTunes if you find some new songs you really dig. Or digg, for that matter.)

You can check out my own personal radio station in the lower regions of the right-hand nav bar, if you feel like mellowing out to some great tunes (most of which I haven't even heard yet, but I like a lot of what Pandora's let out of the box so far).

If you're just discovering Pandora thanks to this post ... You can thank me later.

Quick Update: "Press Release of the Future"

2006-03-16T22:54:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to let anyone still interested in the "press release of the future" furor that I've showed it to a few clients and prospects, to take their temperature on whether they are ready to consider a "PR 2.0" approach.

I figure if the clients don't dig it, it won't matter much if the journalists do.

They dig it. My friends, the clients & prospects I've shown it to so far have LOVED it. Very interesting.

Not sure, yet, whether they love the idea just because it is NEW (shiny object syndrome?) or because they think it might really work better. Stay tuned.

The World's News In A "Flash"

2006-03-16T22:04:00.000-05:00

This is so cool.

It's a Flash-powered look at the world's headlines in a tag cloud-style format ... A newsmeme-graph?

Click on any item in the cloud and you're connected to the news outlet and article that spawned it... RSS + Flash?

Here's the site owners' official description:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

"The unseen patterns in news media"? Hmm. Some brainiac ought to figure out how to leverage this somehow. Could it be used to visualize Google's AdSense keywords, for example, or to visualize memes within TailRank or Memeorandum?

Bloggy Lube

2006-03-16T08:43:00.000-05:00

Hey, this blogging stuff seems to really work!

Earlier this week I was bitchin'-and-moanin' about prospects who seemed to get stuck in the sales funnel. Since then, 2 of the 19 leads called up to apologize, share a good-natured laugh about my online whining - and ask for contracts.

"All things come to he who waits" (and blogs about it).

Stop "Over-Thinking"

2006-03-15T20:05:00.000-05:00

I was sitting in a meeting with an account team, fly-on-the-wall style, and my emotions ranged from bemused to concerned as I heard these highly competent, self-motivated rock-stars spend umpteen minutes talking about HOW to present some much-needed but hard-to-swallow advice to their (curmudgeonly) client.

"If we say THIS, then they will probably say ..."

"Maybe if we present it THIS way, they will be more open to it..."

Ugh! I finally pounced from my chair.

"You are OVER-THINKING this," I pontificated. "This is your job:

"Provide the best counsel you can, based on your experience, with very little nuance;
"Be prepared to present pros & cons of the situation or suggested approach, along with your defensible recommendations; and,
"Work your butt off on the tactics."

A good client will appreciate smart, straight talk. A bad client is a bad client.

Waiting For Godot ... Sucks

2006-03-15T08:21:00.001-05:00

So, the good news is that we have something outrageous like 19 prospects in our pipeline. For a mid-sized PR agency, that's a lot of leads.

The bad news is that you take a meeting - you make your pitch - you do a good job - you get a big smile & a handshake and promises of "a decision by (date)" ... and then ... NOTHING. A gaping void of silence. You follow-up politely, once or twice; leave messages. NO response.

The smart PR Guy sighs, "Oh well, I guess we lost."

But actually, more often than not this complete lack of basic courtesy has had no hidden meaning: because, in fact, usually we found that we've WON.

Either way, I say: whatever happened to Courtesy? Professionalism? The Niceties? Whether leaning one way or another, how long does it take to give someone a quick head's-up? Even if all you have to say is, "Sorry, the decision was delayed - stay tuned," that's like manna from heaven these days.

You know, I think the Internet might have killed Business Courtesy.

Basically, everyone is moving too damn fast, don't you think? Too fast to remember or care about professional commitments, except to their immediate superiors. The always-on economy has turned us all into worker-bee juggernauts. We are always fighting fires...and as any firefighter would tell you - they don't show up at a fire worried about tromping mud on the carpet.

Similarly, as we tear through our to-do lists, we often forget the simple things that make a life in business more palatable. So, as for me, I'm putting: "Return every phone call within 1 business day" on my own list of to-do's.

(Just don't call me 'til April... I'm awfully busy!)

Who's Zooming Who?

2006-03-14T21:53:00.000-05:00

Honestly I can't add any additional value to this post by Peter Himler at The Flack. This bit, from the excellent WaPo article by Howard Kurtz, really hit home:

"Google News offers access within two clicks to 14,000 stories, but really they are accounts of just 24 news events."

It's a small world, after all.

Bloggers did not make the universe of stories any bigger; they made the need to track & react to stories bigger.

Wall Street Lukewarm To Corporate Blogs

2006-03-14T06:35:00.000-05:00

Hill & Knowlton has released a study of Wall Street analysts' perceptions on corporate communication channels.

Only 17% of the surveyed audience see blogs as even "fairly important," compared to 71% who viewed "articles in the business media" as being important, and 85% who voted for a company's website.

This is good news for those PR souls who fear a slow "death by disintermediation." But don't get too excited, not before you chew on this ironic tidbit from the study:

"For analysts what is most important is the strategic direction, progress against milestones or success against strategy and changes in the senior executive team. They are followed by changes in company structure, new product or service developments, plans for mitigating risk and customer satisfaction data. One to one meetings, quarterly earnings conference calls, company presentations and annual reports are the top four most important methods of communications. Analysts want regular communications with most specifying the preference of monthly or quarterly communications."

Maybe I am stoopid, but I can't see a single thing in that Wall Street wishlist that could not be handily covered in a CEO blog (and perhaps sundry additional official, and less-than-official, insider blogs).

My guess is that the keys to the kingdom of Wall Street communication will ultimately come from the jewel-boxes of Transparency and Regularity. A corporate website is neither transparent nor regularly-updated. A news article has the benefit of 3rd party context and value-added reporting - but only a handful of FORTUNE 1000 companies can rely on regular reports in the MSM; and even so, these media clips cannot be relied on by financial analysts to guide their estimates.

Will the corporate website become a catch-all for a company's various bloggers?

"Click here for the CEO blog...Click here for the product manager's blog...Click here for the customer support knowledgebase and blog..." ???

I think PR pros will be able to help companies create and sustain communities for each of these blogs, in addition to maintaining their traditional role in MSM relations.

Tip o'the hat to Steve Rubel for workin' weekends and noting this one.

Wal-Mart+Edelman+NY Times: Perfect Storm or Tipping Point?

2006-03-13T00:25:00.000-05:00

On Friday, Jim Horton at Online Public Relations Thoughts pointed out this "Doh" moment about how bloggers have impacted business-as-usual in Detroit.

I made a comment over at Jim's spot that felt worth transporting to this blog, i.e., I think that the Wal-Mart/Edelman controversy from last week will be looked back upon - by the mainstream media (MSM), by the PR industry, and by the rest of the blogosphere - as either the tipping point or the perfect storm for the critical storyline about blogs merging and competing with the MSM.

If it's a Perfect Storm - which you could argue for, given the negative tone of many stories and the inimitable cast of characters (Wal-Mart, world's largest retailer + Edelman, world's largest independent PR agency + NY TIMES, the Gray Lady of journalism), that will mean that a harsh light will shine on the PR industry, in which we'll be "exposed" (unfairly) as cynical spin doctors with questionable intentions and tactics.

If it's a Tipping Point - which is what I'd suggest it is, for the record - then we will see the "influence of blogs" meme (a la the story out of Detroit, above) continue to grow in prominence. This meme is less about "how PR influences blogs" and more about why we're reaching out in the first place, i.e., "citizen media is an influential outlet" for corporate/marketing outreach.

Is It E-Z To Be Popular?

2006-03-11T11:15:00.000-05:00

I love Scott Baradell over at Media Orchard. He was the first guy to make my "Technorati Favorites" list. Know why? 'Cuz he asked! (By the way, Scott, you've moved from 98 to 89 since your post of this morning, asking for more Fave picks. 'Grats!)

So, I go on to check out the Technorati "Most Favorited" Top 100 list and note that #100 has been "favorited" just 17 times. (Note that this is not just PR blogs - it ranges the gamut of the Web!) Given that Technorati appears to be the de-facto leader in blog stuff, for me this begs the question: Is it currently that "easy" to be popular in the blogopshere?

Let's try something. Do me a favor and click this link. (Take the 2 seconds to create a Technorati account, if you don't already have one. It's a good thing to do, in any case.) Let's see how far and how fast we can go. Believe it or not, this is less about ego and more about the current state of the blogosphere.

And if we pick up a few new readers along the way, yeah, sure, that'd be cool too.

UPDATE: Hey, cool. From "0" to "69" in under 24 hours. (And Scott's at 62, up from 89 on Friday!) Thanks, gang. Such "fame" won't last long - frankly, to see "PR Squared" above Lawrence Lessig's blog is just kooky. But this has been a good experiment for "blog relations," I think. It is surely a reflection on the embryonic stage of the Technorati "Favorites" feature - and the youthful stage of the blogosphere, for that matter.

Fending Off Dilbert-itis

2006-03-10T21:17:00.000-05:00

I was perversely fascinated by the FORTUNE article about the evolution of the workplace and, specifically, the soul-sapping nature of CUBICLES. Apparently even "the father of the cubicle, Robert Propst, hated his invention.

This was a timely read for me because we've doubled our office space in downtown San Francisco; we now occupy two floors in our funky building (next up: world domination). So, the hard part is: you've got a blank slate - what kind of place do you want to work in?

I've visited the offices of agencies around the world. Just in the past 6 months I've grabbed coffee with the principals at firms like bite in San Francisco and Axicom in the U.K. These 2 firms swear by the "bullpen" model for office space - i.e., an open, no-cube environment. Downsides: no privacy, kinda noisy. Upsides: more collaborative and transparent.

But in taking a poll of our SF peeps - despite being a highly collaborative bunch, most seem to still want "a little bit of privacy." I can't blame them. Feels like we all already know too much about our office-mates, eh?

So do you go with something funky like this? Do you go with traditional cubes? What does your spot look like? If you could start over, what would you do differently?

TrackBack Blogger Hack! Finally!

2006-03-09T09:48:00.000-05:00

I love our tech guys. Our account rep overheard me complaining that the Blogger service doesn't do TrackBacks and within an hour he found this post from Radiant Marketing, which led to deploying the FREE trackback service from HaloScan.

Lo & behold! PR Squared now has TrackBack functionality. Finally.

Blog As Memory

2006-03-09T08:47:00.000-05:00

Your blog is your life. Your life is your blog. Now you can document it all, on the go, via the Bloggerphone!

Until the day comes when a computer chip embedded in our brains will act as our "memory," we can count on newfangled ideas like this one to make sure that our id is adequately nourished.

"This is me at the restaurant. Yum."

"This is me at the car wash. Booooring."

"This is Jimmy, kissing the porcelain at the keg party. Eew!"

"This is the cute salesclerk from the Gap on Chestnut St. Bet they didn't expect me to blog about them! Do you see those slacks in the foreground? I bought a pair."

I am being cheeky, of course, but actually there is a lot of evidence that such services will be a big part of the New Media future. MySpace and up-n-comers like Where.com (a client) are all agog over this intersection between mobility, presence, location and pictures.

Inappropriate

2006-03-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person who thinks that this was the wrong picture for Vanity Fair to use for their cover story about actress Teri Hatcher's intimate revelations of childhood sex abuse?

Beautiful woman. Beautiful, provocative photo.

But who decides to "tease" a horrible story about child molestation with a beautiful, provocative photo? I dunno. Just struck me as wrong.

PR Industry's Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation

2006-03-08T11:05:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere is abuzz about the NY Times piece that describes Edelman's blogging campaign for Wal-Mart.

I tend to think that Edelman's intentions and approach were, for the most part, appropriate - but as often happens in a Wild West-style new market, mistakes are made and rules are broken.

Edelman's intent was laudable: to create an ongoing dialogue with bloggers who have shown Wal-Mart some sympathy, and to incent further blog-love via the promise of news tidbits that they would not find in the mainstream media.

The approach was spot-on: Edelman first took the time to READ the bloggers' works (much as the journalism community implores PR to do more often!), and then fed into the bloggers' egos by promising them some scoops. I wonder how MSM journos will respond to this revelation!

Where I think the PR industry at-large is going to get tripped up in "blogger relations" is in expecting this woolly new media to behave itself. When I cheekily suggest that Blog Relations could be akin "Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation," my point is that we are dashing headlong and happily into a provocative new sphere, with little foresight into "where this could take us."

In the case of Edelman/Wal-Mart, I can't say for sure whether mistakes were made, nor that rules were broken, by the agency or its client. But it's a 3-way relationship: client, agency, media. In this case, the media contacts are "amateurs" who not only don't need to play by MSM rules, but in fact will purposefully flout them.

In the end I think the PR industry will look to this as a case study for "how snafu's happen." And we ought to privately thank Edelman's crew for going bravely where we all have just begun to tread.

For Richard Edelman's take, click here.

Adventures in Transparency

2006-03-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

We are doing some consulting for a cool company called BzzAgent, a leader in Word Of Mouth Marketing. As part of our research, we were intrigued by the company's dedication to transparency, best exemplified by the "90 Days Blog" found on their website. This blog is written by a consultant hired by the company, commenting on his day-to-day findings during a 3 month stint on-site.

Most of it is pretty standard stuff, but a quickie, seemingly innocuous post set off a firestorm inside the company and among its constituents.

First off, you need to know that BzzAgent "employs" volunteers to help "spread the word" about BzzAgent clients, e.g., "Did you read the latest book by XYZ? It's part of my gig at BzzAgent to talk about stuff that I really like. I read this book and loved it. If I report back on my conversations, I might get a (reward) for helping out..." (certainly an actual Bzz chat would not sound so fake & wooden!)

Anyway, it seems that there was some left-over "free stuff" from clients hangin' at the BzzAgent hive, and employees helped themselves. The blogger posted on this, and bzzzzzzzzzzzz! - every BzzAgent who felt as if they'd been under-rewarded had plenty to say about this topic. It got pretty heated. Ahh, a return to the Usenet flamewar days!

Long story short (and to their credit), the BzzAgent management team felt compelled to revamp their "free stuff" policies.

This is the beauty and the peril of the blogosphere - and the Web, for that matter. Everyone thought that the ubiquity of networked connections would create the paradigm shift. That's surely the accelerent. But if you ask me, "transparency" is the fuel that will enflame momentous change.

Can The Web Make You Cry?

2006-03-07T13:05:00.000-05:00

On NPR this week I heard an interesting give-and-take on "Advertising 2.0" themes. Defending "the old ways" was advertising industry icon Phil Dusenberry of BBDO. Dusenberry may be Old School but the guy's still on top of his game; he understands the intrigue, promises and threats of New Media - but remains unconvinced that the Web will unseat conventional broadcast advertising any time soon.

As one of those guys who dig any and all "2.0" themes, I could not help but think that Dusenberry was playing defense, but, one thing he said struck me as interesting. Paraphrasing, he suggested that, "The Web does not pack the emotional whallop of TV."

Before we continue ... time for a Pansy Alert: Ever since I had kids, I have been known to mist-up during those "Reach Out And Touch Someone" ads. (And no more slasher movies for me, either.)

But I can't remember ever having my eyes well-up over anything I've seen online.

When we are online, we are ACTIVE. We are SEARCHING. We are ENGAGED. We are the hunters, on a mission. We are more accepting of unpolished crap, as long as it is useful in some way, because we know we can take what we need and move on quickly. Even if our "mission" is simply to stumble upon something new, online we are always masters of our domain.

When we are flat-out on the couch in front of the toob, we are PASSIVE. We are RECEPTORS. We are OPEN to what comes, but the "price" of our willing surrender is that we expect some quality entertainment.

Online, we are amusing ourselves. We don't expect much (and we ain't gonna cry). Offline, we expect the content provider to do all the work, and to do it well. That's a huge shift in responsibility.

I wonder if this is the realization that they had over at Yahoo? No one wants to watch TV (or TV-style advertisements, for that matter) on the Web, I don't think. Look at StupidVideos for the best-of Web-as-TV. Most of those clips are all of 5 seconds long, and yet if you're like me (and Richard Edelman), you still won't be able to tear yourself away for a good 10 minutes.

This Is Good, Right?

2006-03-07T08:42:00.000-05:00

I generally try to ignore this kind of stuff, but someone pointed out to me this morning that PR Squared was #11 on the 30-day rankings at PR Community List at PubSub. This was news to me.

According to the PubSub crew,

PubSub's Community Lists are miniature roadmaps to ... influential sites. They combine human expertise with LinkRanks, PubSub's method of comparing sites to one another by scrutinizing their links. A Community List tells you which sites to keep an eye on and which sites are leading the conversation from one day to the next.

So, the good news is we're in the top #20 for the past 30 days. Damn near top-10, which will impress Mom, at least.

Bad news is that I'll probably be a slave to this PubSub list from now on.

"Am I helping to 'lead the conversation' this month?"

Cursed ego.

Anyway, thanks for indulging this shameless bit of self-promotion. We'll move on quickly.

Mange On The Long Tail

2006-03-06T23:33:00.000-05:00

Catching up on my late-night blog reading. When you track a gazillion interesting blogs, each of which post daily (or more often!), ya do tend to fall behind now and then.

On the plus side, a post from a week or two back is still kinda relevant, eh?

It ought to be when you are Jeff Jarvis, anyway. Jeffis a top blogger, the man behind the curtain at BuzzMachine. Jeff is also an unapologetic Howard Stern fan. So am I. ("All I want for Christmas is a Sirius radio," was my plea of 2005.)

So I was fascinated by Jeff's recent piece on the "Howard 100" news team. Jeff used his on-site experience to pontificate on the surge of navel-gazing going on in news rooms across America, but for me the work effort and production quality that's going into an "All Stern, All The Time" newscast speaks to the power of the Long Tail.

As Jeff says, "Is this news? Sure, it is. This is stuff that matters to Stern fans..."

Isn't that quintessential Long Tail thinking? - A niche of devotees create a profit zone for original creative works.

You don't need to be a Stern fan to find this to be a sexy concept.

What Should We Measure?

2006-03-06T09:35:00.000-05:00

I received a much-belated but very welcome comment (in response to this post) from measurement guru Katie Delahaye Paine over the weekend.

I'm as enthusiastic as anyone about P&G's new measurement system. In fact I named it one of the "Products of the Year" in my newsletter. But I do need to add a note of caution. The type of measurement you need depends on the objectives you set for your program. If sales is your objective, then P&G's solution is great. But if you're trying to build support for your cause, or if you're trying to sell something that costs millions and takes years for a sale to close, trying to tie PR to sales is a waste of time. There are a number of measures of PR success and not all are tied to sales.

Katie - first of all, thanks very much for visiting. Having followed your work for years (whether I agreed with it or not), I am honored that you stopped by.

While I can't disagree with your comment - it is sensible, logical, and thoughtful - I contend that the vast majority of corporations who engage a PR agency are keen on "sales" as their objective.

Short of a charitable effort (e.g., "kidney donation" - one of our pro bono projects), there is nothing in my mind about "building support for a cause" and/or "trying to sell something that costs millions and takes years for a sale to close" that does not loop back to the ultimate question: "Did my PR spend positively impact the company's bottom-line?"

I do not suggest that measurements such as "Share Of Voice" (and related terminology for Media Content Analyses) are worthless. Certainly it is very NICE to know that the client's PR message is resonating, and maybe even gaining traction vs. a competitor. But in the end - with more and more "rival" elements within the marketing mix becoming automated/measurable - as an industry we are going to NEED to know how our PR measures impacted REVENUE.

Red Capes, Roaring Bulls

2006-03-06T09:19:00.000-05:00

I love it when Microsoft is put on their heels by an upstart competitor.

It's no secret that Google has been eating up market- and mindshare from Redmond for the last few years (in Search), just as Netscape did in the mid-late '90's with browsers.

Forgetting for a moment how often we've each been kicked in the teeth by Microsoft's ill-conceived, bloated software over the years, I give the company props for still being very much in the game. They are fierce competitors and that is one of the reasons that Technology is still fun.

As a PR Guy, reading the recent bits from Microsoft's Neil Holloway about how "Microsoft will be more relevant than Google in 6 months" gives me a shiver. Google's recent thought about becoming a $100B company also made me rub my eyes in disbelief...

Who is waving the red cape? And who is the bull?