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January 23rd, 2012 by Steve

Time’s up for PR’s big fat lie

As instantaneous, utterly transparent media forces PRs to focus on truthful storytelling, isn’t it a bit ironic that a big fat lie remains right at the heart of what we do?

When we talk about results, we have tended to concentrate on the volume of publicity achieved. Yes fragmenting media is changing that and increasingly campaigns are being engineered to target commercial outcomes, but fundamentally a lot of targets that agencies work to are to get high quality and quantity of media exposure.

Chance and best guesses

So the flimsy fib upon which PR is based is that getting stuff about you in the papers, on radio and on TV will actually make a difference to you or your business. Because we have, ultimately, no way of knowing whether anyone is going to read it, see it or believe it. We don’t know whether it’ll be of influence and what they’ll think.

PR has always been a game of chance and best guesses.

But before I get my coat having completely done myself out of a job, let me qualify those brash statements a little. Of course publicity can have an enormously positive effect on brands and their reputations otherwise PR firms wouldn’t exist. And of course PR agencies can’t be taken to task when publicity campaigns don’t have the desired commercial effect because these things can’t be guaranteed.

Indeed I have successful argued that last point in court on more than one occasion.

Fantasy footfall

Yet the PR game has always been over reliant on its supposed ability to influence people. We talk about it being more effective than advertising because of the power of third party endorsement, and that is probably true. We have even dreamed up daft ‘industry standard advertising value equivalent ratios for measuring PR output. Because we had nothing better and had to do something to justify ourselves.

The lie, then, is that we’ve been planning PR activity and telling people that the topics or content we pursue will be effective ‘because that’s what will convince people’ or ‘because that’s what will inspire the audience. Guff like that. When we have no real way of knowing that, or didn’t until relatively recently, beyond a smattering of largely unrepresentative focus groups.

And yet PRs and those paying for their services were always happy (or mostly happy) to pursue the illusion, knowing that their competitors were all doing the same thing and they had to do what they could to influence the market through the established media.

Now though the lie is being undermined by the very thing that lies get brought down by: the truth. Because the transparency of two-way digital media – not just social media, but conventional media publishing online, and branded media assets too – means the audience can actually tell us what they think of the content they’re presented with.

They can answer back

When we undertake a campaign, carry out sustained communication or even answer a question posed by a customer or critic, we can actually see what that person thinks. It’s direct, visible feedback, and it’s typically provided because they really care about the topic. For better or worse, as we heard at Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week. Providing they’re being truthful of course.

What’s more, this level of engagement enables brands to actually learn from their audiences over time – not just about what might influence them better, not just about their purchasing habits and views on issues that might impact them, but about how to better tailor products and services to what customers actually want. Over time, we can even get them to participate in the brand’s story.

So why haven’t more PRs woken up and realised that, while it may be imperfect at the moment, the possibilities for finally measuring what we do more accurately, using direct feedback from the audience we want to reach, is obvious and we should start to change the way we plan and deliver our work accordingly?

We could start to put an end to the intangible nature of PR, start to think about how we could offer consultancy that has a more clinical commercial outcome, and stop coming up with daft, unsubstantiated statements about why the results we achieved were really good. We could fill our boots with this.

Growing up time

Instead, while more progressive agencies are investing time, money but most of all energy in enhancing how they measure their work, a lot of firms seem to be burying their heads in the sand.

PR’s days of being a game of chance are numbered. It’s a really good thing for us. We can devise clever long-term communication strategies and deliver on them. We can be braver in pushing the boundaries of how brands can plan and create influence, because it’s no longer built on foundations of fudge.

Let’s man up, grow up and say goodbye to guesswork.

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August 19th, 2010 by Steve

Multi-tasking with media: a kick in the shins for reputation-building?

Today’s BBC coverage of the Ofcom study into how Britons now consume media features some perhaps obvious but nonetheless stark highlights. On average, we now spend, according to the study, half of our waking lives consuming media. Moreover, a lot of that time is spent consuming multiple types of media at the same time.

So we’re exposed to more media – good for those of us who work to influence reputation. But our eyes and ears are everywhere, meaning we undoubtedly have smaller attention spans and influence may be battering us from all angles – potentially bad for reputation efforts.

Or is it?

Rory Cellan-Jones’ latest blog post talks of the moral panic created by the realistation that we spend so much time staring at gadgets or listening to broadcasts. The ‘too much telly’ decry has long been a feature of applicable social analysis, but the rapid digitisation and socialisation of media makes this a whole different issue. So we’re spending a lot of time consuming information and communicating? Good. We’re on Facebook, Twitter and commenting on blogs while watching TV? Better than just slumped in front of the telly vegetating.

But the moral implications aren’t my point here. With multi-tasking firmly established in our media habits, with so many types of media that we actively engage with daily, and with media changing rapidly, the potential for influence reputation is increasing. It’s just that there are so many more options and planning how content is disseminated is now a far more intricate process. Early communication that created influence – the sermon on the mount, the town crier, Houdini’s publicity stunts that got ink – has been replaced with a fragmented media landscape and real difficulty in working out which publicity will have the greatest impact.

Which means effective PR needs to be a lot more sophisticated, and PRs must invest a lot more thought and expertise in doing things right. Which means this is no place for slackers or airheads.

PR planning must be upgraded to meet the needs of changing media and the public’s rabid appetite for it. We need to go and ask the target audience what media they consume and ask them the right kinds of questions about how how they perceive brands as a result. Equally, asking everyone will mean prohibitive costs, and even then they may not tell us the whole truth.

So the opportunity to create greater influence with more media, that people are consuming more of, is there. We just need to gain proper insight and do a lot of hard work to be effective.

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July 2nd, 2010 by Steve

Social media bingers ‘under the influence’ – shock

Social f&cking media eh?

If you’re a PR, it’s everywhere. All the time. Dozens of tatty bits of spam each day. Hundreds of tweets from inane PR types about the fact that they’re buying a coffee, how ‘busy’ they are, some apparently fascinating new fact (normally days after the event) or their latest Lambrini escapade. Loads of sage-like wisdom from the social media powerlords about the future, the larger social implications and the sheer exuberance that stemmed from what several dozen people had to say about a topic that’s actually very on the grey side.

If a lot of the Twitter conversations I’ve seen recently are comparable to conversations in a pub, it’s time to sup up and sod off home.

But enough of this pessimism and wholly unfair fingerpointing. The point of this post is an appeal for all PRs to get real and move on on the subject of social media influence. Of course social media has growing influence. It’s sort of obvious that if people suddenly have the ability to talk to individuals, politicians and brands all over the world, that two-way communication is becoming inevitable and that the transparency has hitherto unforeseen power, it will have influence. Yes social media has influence. Yes it is measurable in some way, because it is digitised so has an audit trail.

Yet those PRs who bleat on about how fascinating it is that influence can be measured, that ratings and supposed positivity around a brand or a person can be extracted in graph form, are spending too much time wallowing in the same wafting smells and not enough considering the bigger picture. Which is that media is changing, outcomes can be better measured but we are not there yet in making PR a fully measurable cost centre. Not by a long way.

Equally, the social media experts (they call themselves that, so clearly it must be so, given the scope of their social media influence of course) who run down other forms of media are short-sighted. Media is changing. The rules are changing. Influence is changing. We don’t know what it will look like in future, but saying something like the internet is now all-powerful and telly is less so is missing the point by a country mile.

The way I see it is this: some clever people are putting time and thought into making PR more measurable and making sense of media/technological change, and they will get their rewards I hope. Meanwhile, a lot of (by comparison) very workshy or blindly-led people are banging on about things like social media influence as if it’s the be-all and end-all of modern, better justifiable PR. My guess is they’re doing it because they’re late to the party and reckon it’ll get them sales/prevent them from looking like dinosaurs. And all they’re doing is confusing matters and making the industry look a bit fickle.

I’ve deliberately left lots of links out of this post. I could attribute much of this venting to individuals and their published content, but that’d be a cheap shot, even for me.

So instead, consider some of the emails and tweets I’ve seen in recent days from agencies and individuals offering ‘social media services’, advice and trumpeting interesting social media things:
- Five ways to get started with a social media strategy
- The power of Twitter influence
- Social media engagement and why communities work
- Building social media into your engagement framework
- Social media is good for you (because it’s so social)

FFS.

It’s the equivalent of old school PRs 20 years ago braying about why newspapers are widely read by people, why being on the front page means your story is prominent or why television can be influential given it can attract a captive audience of couch potatoes.

Social media is one of the most important developments in media ever, because it is direct to readers, is two-way and leaves an audit trail. Fact. Get over it. Get on with it. And while you’re at it, figure out how editorial influence and search marketing join up too please.

And for the love of Jesus, will someone please send me a message about how to make PR properly measurable in a very straightforward way; so that for once, finally, after years of struggle, I can clinically prove the value of what I do for a living?

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May 27th, 2010 by Steve

The book is go

I am writing a book. With Stephen Waddington. It is frank, pragmatic and does not use long words. Not too many anyway.

It’s about the future of brand reputation and, therefore, what the future may hold for PR.

We’ll be previewing some of the content before it’s published. But in the meantime, here’s what the first chapter covers, and I’ll have details of other chapters in the near future. Don’t expect an-time classic, but do expect sound advice and a hefty dose of honesty:

- Pace of technological change has caught the practice of reputation management on the hop. And many brand managers feel control is slipping away.

- How PR exercised ‘control’ in far simpler times

- The fragility of relationships with customers, shareholders, media and reputation influencers

- The editorial world: how it has changed, how it is changing and the factors that will govern corporate reputation as that change accelerates

- In pursuit of the science of reputation. Digitisation can bring automation and mechanisation, but does that help your reputation?

- Judgement in the glare of an agile direct and indirect media

- If control has gone, can brands take greater command?

Stay tuned.

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May 27th, 2010 by Steve

CIPR talk: media change, PR change and networks in the language of a seven-year-old

I did a short talk (more of a gentle rant with strange anecdotes) at the CIPR’s Digital Impact conference on Monday. Rather than a Slideshare dump I thought I’d jot down some of what I talked about in case it’s of interest. It was all about how the UK media is changing, cutting through the crap of what digital media means for PR and what digitised ‘networks’ are really all about.

I got into PR, and in particular the technology side, because I trained as a journalist and was brought up playing with technology. My mum had been PA to the late Robert Maxwell. My dad installed mainframes for big companies. The bubblewrap opportunities were sensational for a seven-year-old.

I wrote crap for my local paper at 13. At 15 I was writing it regularly, after doing some intensive journalism training (mostly how to stitch people up). Then after a news journalism course I started working as a ‘normal’ reporter for a local newspaper. I chased down parish council tittle tattle, interviewed local ‘personalities’, knocked on the doors of newly-bereaved families and was humiliated at the judging of school fete fancy dress competitions. Then it was regional dailies, tabloid writing, some broadcast stuff, then PR.

Since then (the early to mid-90s) the media has changed hugely. It wasn’t a cosy world back then, especially if gypsies chased you with bricks, but now the media is not what it’s used to be. Print is on one knee. TV is wobbly. Radio is growing. Social media is rocketing. If Maxwell was still with us, he’d probably have tried to do some dodgy deal to cut on it on.

Snapshot of media change in the UK
1709, oldest surviving UK newspaper starts in Worcester. It was to be 282 years before I wrote for it, yet it survived that and is still around today
More newspapers, more magazines
1920s, early public radio
1930s, early public TV
1950s, TV really took root. If PR had been an established sector then, everyone would’ve rushed to start hip new TV PR agencies
1980s, beginning of diversification sparked by technological change
1990s, the internet. The conventional media largely ignored it until the second half of the decade, some beyond that

So media really started to digitise in the mid 90s. Initially it was about the web being a new platform for publishing words and pictures. Then video came. Technology has made all of this possible. About six years ago we saw the arrival of much-hyped web 2.0. There was a load of bollocks about this, but basically from a media perspective it means media began to change from being one-way to two-way. Before then, the only way the media had really been two-way was the odd TV vox-pop and the letters to the editor page, which was mostly made up anyway.

What digital actually means for PR people
So now the people can answer back. Brands may be able to talk to them directly, but then there are conversations they may want to have and they may not want to have. These are some of the fundamental issues for building reputation through social media these days and you’ll be familiar with them I’m sure.

What does this mean for PR? We’re about managing reputation. What it means for me is that we have to modernise what we do so that we can do that across the diverse and digitised media landscape, and be ready to tackle the way that landscape will evolve further.

Five years ago I felt I was looking over my shoulder at the rise of digital PR. Today that’s not the case. We are not there yet, but soon there will be no regular PR and online or digital PR. It will all just be PR.

The reason for that is that there will not be a distinction as such between conventional and social media. It will all just be media. We just have to figure out how to become the new middleman for a new media landscape.

Examples of how conventional media is addressing digitisation
Oil and water – can conventional and social media mix?

I think that The Guardian site is the closest I’ve come to a national newspaper that has rebuilt its content around its audience using features such as content curation and micro-blogging. An example is the microsite created for the Grand National. Content was posted in real time in a micro-blog format. Race results appeared in real term. And longer stories filed after the racing at Aintree. It’s typical of how The Guardian deals with a big story. It handled the Chilcot Inquiry in exactly the same way.

If you’re a reader of The Guardian site and follow some its journalists on Twitter you’ll spot how stories develop. Journalists tweet about stories they’re writing on. PRs or people in their network make suggestions for sources of information. A first story will go live as a blog maybe after a journalist has done a couple of interviews. Readers will comment on the story. Additional sources will chip in and the journalist will curate comments and produce a second and third version of the story. This provides PRs with more opportunities than ever to influence how a journalist writes a story.

Secondly, branded media: The Economist. Media is in turmoil, no doubt. Social media provides a means for brands to build develop communities in their own right. The Economist (Speed client) on YouTube is a media owner that has a branded video channel for disseminating its own content. But we could equally be looking at any number of consumer brands. Vodafone is a great example on YouTube that you might want to check out. The Economist has always done video but you have to look hard on the site to dig it up. We’ve created a channel on YouTube and promoted it as an asset in its own right. It has become so successful that it’s a top 100 channel on YouTube, and it’s generating revenue. Increasingly this will become a model for brands wanting to engage with their audience, bypassing traditional media altogether.

How PR people need to change/upgrade their media skills
I think what media change means is that PRs have got to assess what they do and how they do it. Across the board. We’ve got to become the type of PR people, PR agencies and PR sector that that media and clients will demand in the future. If we don’t, we should sod off and find another line of work.

But putting that delicate issue to one side, let’s look at the digital media that are changing the world of PR, and their pros and cons.

Conventional publishers: we need more understanding of each media and how content is likely to permeate within that platform and beyond. The pro is that the ripple effect can cause far broader and potentially more lasting impact, the con is that is requires far more work than just knowing a journalist on a publication and tapping them up. There is a need for firm insight and really clear planning so that our ideas can be successful

Conventional broadcasters: as above, but understand that journalists working for them are following what social media is generating, and that technology is going to change this media big time. An example is IPTV. Of course the ability to watch what TV when you want it has changed things, but imagine if you could engage with a local community group and some of your neighbours via the TV when a topical piece of programming content is there. With integration between the TV and social media communities, and the devices to support user interaction over that content from anywhere, it’s not far away perhaps. TV has long been influential, it will gain combined influence alongside new technologies and its content should have high editorial integrity. The flipside, again, is that keeping tabs on all of that for a PR means a lot of work.

Social media platforms: the pros are that conventional editorial barriers aren’t there, but influence will still be created by editorial content, albeit with the nature of editorial changing. It’s very agile, it can be comparatively cheap, but the potential to backfire is huge because it has that two-way channel. It can go from a minor problem to a crisis in minutes. It also means clients’ PR teams have to make themselves far more agile to ensure the right content is delivered.

Analytical tools: to measure influence on reputation. The great thing about digitised media is the audit trail – if you can track it, you should be able to measure its impact. Another big pro is that a lot of the tools for tracking and assessing social media and all forms of published digitised content are free – the trick is knowing which ones are most effective. And the downside is that PRs could end up digging in the wrong place for the measurement they seek. These tools mean we can track not only what is published and what the reaction is, but the sentiment of those conversations – but what price sarcasm? These tools move us much closer to honest and clinical measurement of PR value, but still we can only really know what impact editorial content in any media has on a brand’s reputation and purchase influence by asking the audience. And even then, they may not be straight with us.

Engagement: both with social and conventional media. Obviously engagement with social media is direct and requires skills. Engagement via digital means with conventional media is growing, but again needs skill and the downside can be that fickle PR methods used in conventional media relations are transposed to digital tools. Crap pitches don’t work offline, so best avoid them online. For media and social media engagement, the network is key.

What this network business means
The first thing to point out is the the value of network to brands lies with the trust factor. People trust other people they’re networked with. If they’re networked around a passion for a brand, that is a good thing for us.

But remember that networks are just really word-of-mouth digitised, and so preserved for the best part of eternity. Social media conversations pretty much replicate those that happen and have always happened in society anyway. The difference is that the media encourages conversations to build faster, encourages more participation and can engage more people. A bigger, bolder, faster, more impactful type of conversation typically – and they can be tracked and joined.

The trick for PRs is to apply themselves in the right way to that environment, rather than blundering in to a pub conversation like a gobby or naive person, and quickly ending up as the object of derision.

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April 14th, 2010 by Steve

PR department of the future part three: are agencies even worth hiring?

I suppose the answer to this had better be yes they are worth hiring, or I’m out of a job.

My point here though is that there is a growing danger that in-house marketing teams don’t really know what they’re buying when they’re considering taking on external PR support. And the main reason for that is that PR has changed, and will continue to change, so dramatically.

That’s all because of the digitisation of media.

Yes PR is changing, but everyone is banging on about that so let’s be pragmatic and make a stand on it
As I covered in the last of these posts before I ventured south for sunburn and saddle antics, the media looks very different now to how it looked when I first joined the Beano Fan Club. It even looks very different to how it was five years ago. By the end of this year, it will have changed further.

It can be dizzying. The advent of television changed the nature of media in this country: newspapers had to compete with its relative immediacy and ability to communicate news visually compared to radio, plus its entertainment appeal and reach. The expansion of the trade and lifestyle media in the 80s and 90s drove further change as the desire for more specific (and often banal) information grew. Then along came the internet, creating scope for what would be a two-way dimension to media and content taken onto all manner of platforms.

Meaning that while conventional media is getting the body blows at the moment because of this new ‘competition’, the lust for information and sharing content has never been greater. And for organisations wanting to gain value of some kind through PR, the choices are both extensive and ever-changing.

I’m not going to delve into that further here. What I will say is that, generally speaking, the PR industry is currently far too hung up on new types of media and trying to make itself look on the ball, without having the balls to truly change itself in preparation for what the media will look like in the future.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what it will look like in the future either. But it will all just be media – conventional, social. Print, audio, visual, text, delivered wherever and whenever. Animal, vegetable, mineral. PR needs to stop glamourising digital media while it stands back on its heels worrying about media change.

Could PR (and other marketing) agencies have predicted this change better when the internet first began to gain a foothold in the mid 1990s? Possibly. We could have seen the two-way thing coming better, but couldn’t have quite foreseen the meteoric rise of YouTube back then. Not the print media’s burying of heads in the sand over payment for content.

So here we are. A right mixed bag of an industry. I think, and Speed thinks, that it will all just be media and that the PR agency of the future will need its whole team to be equally adept at all types of media. In the meantime, let’s look at the choices facing PR buyers in 2010.

A la carte, but at the risk of indigestion
This is doubtless incomplete, but here are the types of sustained external PR support on offer in the UK today:
- Classic PR agency: knows conventional media, niche expertise in one or multiple sectors, has started a digital division probably, and talks about PR and digital PR as if they are two separate disciplines
- A step up from that: as above, but talks about the domino effect of content from social to conventional to social media etc, and gets that it’s all just content, you just needed to be cleverer in deploying it
- A dithering dinosaur: classic agency with no willingness (probably at the top) to understand digital PR and would rather leave it to someone else. Ancestors probably blindly wedded to the Penny Farthing when Henry Ford was busy plotting. On borrowed time
- Pure digital agency: may talk about doing digital PR, may not even use the letters P and R, but is working with clients to create/deliver/inspire influential content across social media. So is doing PR whether it says so or not. Typically smart entrepreneurial people, shorter-term commercial ambitions, marvellous hair and look down on classic PRs (and in some cases, like the dinosaurs, that’s fair enough). However, not investing in understanding and being able to deliver across conventional media. Perfectly capable of delivering a social media campaign that makes it into The Sun, but does not really understand The Sun and so assured outcomes from the investment can be questionable
- Ad firms or other marketing agencies: have started muscling in on former PR turf. All’s fair in that respect, but generally ignorant of how to handle and measure the influence of the editorial world effectively. Could make a claim for the PR ground of the future, if only the shareholders or powers that be didn’t see it as a modernising advertising business rather than a marketing business. Saying your stuff is great and getting others to say your stuff is great will always require different approaches
- Mish-mash job: may have done social media consultancy for a car brand, also does trade print PR for niche clients, also does some international campaign management, big on digital PR obviously (because people need to say that these days) and also now has a blog. Potentially extremely painful

No one of these agencies is likely to provide a full range of effective PR services for any sizeable brand today. You could say that has long been the case, that brands have long worked with several agencies, and that’s true. But as media keeps digitising and diversifying, the danger is that any sizeable brand might need a dozen PR agencies, and an army of internal PR people to manage them. The freedom of a la carte, but too many courses and inevitable indigestion. And a bigger bill to pay.

How can PR buyers make sense of this?
Increasingly, I get calls or briefs from prospective clients not really sure what they’re looking for. That’s completely understandable, because the way the industry markets itself to them is in a real mess. The need for rapid modernisation and threats from new kinds of agencies has caused some wild claims, some strange diversions and some changes in fortunes. Couple that with the recession and media change, and the landscape looks very complex.

In many ways, the advice here to clients is unchanged. Figure out what you want to do commercially, define your brand strategy, then comes the talk about how and what PR can deliver for you. Then you can assess who you want to reach and understand what media is best, and what content you’ll need. Inevitably, not all in-house PR departments will have the ability to determine all that for themselves, or even dedicated PR experts who have that knowledge. The problem is that at the moment too many client teams are approaching different kinds of agencies and getting all kinds of different stories about what it is they actually need from PR.

In the words of my brilliant colleague at Seymourpowell, Richard Seymour, “they’re probably digging in the wrong place”.

What should PR buyers do?
It’d be presumptuous, arrogant and possibly foolish of me to tell people what they need to do. But I’m paid to consult, so let me stick my neck out and see if I can avoid mortal wounding. Here’s what I think PR buyers need to do in working out what external PR support they need at the moment:
1. Do you really know which media will be most effective for you and how you can best/most accurately measure the impact of what exposure you’ll generate across it?
2. Does/how much does your audience care about you, and why?
3. How will your PR operation (and content delivery) work overall: are you sufficiently agile to get the job done right?
4. Which types of agency should you rule out of the running because they don’t provide enough of the services you need?
5. If it can’t all be done under one roof, is the best split of responsibility by media type or audience type (and shouldn’t an agency working to reach a specific audience be able to handle all the media required to do that?!)?
6. Hand on heart, do you really have a clear view of where the media landscape is heading and, in particular, how to work with social media?
7. Equally, do you really understand how the conventional press has changed in the past few years and what its modernisation plans are?
8. If the prospective agency claims to understand how to deliver content across conventional media and now understands the digital world too, do its web site and blogs live up to that, and are its senior management all engaged with it too?
9. Once you’ve figured most of these things out, have a serious conversation, ideally with your board or senior local management, about how what PR can deliver for the business is changing and how the way the business uses PR services will need to evolve too
10. Once you’ve got the budget signed off, think hard about how you need to measure the value of PR and do not just take one agency’s word for it. This is a hot topic of debate at the moment, although some corners of the industry seem to be staying suspiciously silent on it

This honestly isn’t supposed to be a plug for Speed, but incidentally our approach in all of this is to invest in becoming the agency that cracks it all: that can work equally well across all forms of media to deliver assured and measurable value for clients. It is not just media digitisation that is forcing that evolution, it’s us being bold and not tolerating any lily-livered half-bakedness. If the PR person of the future can’t handle what the media of the future will be, they should start looking for another job.

So (phew..) agencies are worth hiring. But the right agencies and for the right reasons, and in my opinion PR buyers both need to tread carefully and take an honest look at how they’re set up to do modern PR.

Next post: a three-year plan for upgrading your PR department to meet this challenge.

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