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PR 2.0 Tactics

While at NewComm Forum last month, I attended Rohit Bhargava’s session on “The Future of Marketing & Advertising.”  During the Q&A I asked Rohit one of those classic, simple questions that tend to elicit surprising answers.

“What keeps you up at night?  What do you fear in this brave new world?”

Rohit’s answer – and I’m paraphrasing – boiled down to, “I’m afraid of what happens when a big corporation peels $1M from their advertising budget and hands it to me for a Social Media campaign.  The types of demands they’ll make regarding ROI for that kind of budget won’t be easily answered.”

With all due respect to Rohit, I don’t share this anxiety.  Forget about PR blacklisting for a second (it’s an insular issue amongst relatively tiny communities) and think about the stupid antics of those advertising agencies that have not figured out that Marketing has become a transparent, 2–way street.  Remember “All I Want for Xmas is a PSP” for example?  The PR industry gaffes have been stoopid, not fraudulent.  I think it’s high time that corporate marketers shaved those ad budgets in favor of grassroots Social Media concepts, where PR is the stronger partner.       

Heck, give me a million dollars – I double-dog-dare you – and we can talk about how we’ll use that money to generate more positive word-of-mouth for your company than any single advertising campaign could ever accomplish. 

With $1 million we can play the biggest game of smallball ever played.

Sure, we’ll cover the waterfront in terms of top-tier blogs, mainstream media and vertical channels. 

We’ll also be sure to appropriately reach-out to the B-Z list bloggers, too.  Thanks to tools like Radian6 we’ll know who’s talking about our client and related industry-level issues, and when & why, and can respond rapidly and transparently.

We’ll empower everyday users, too.  We can create a Flickr group that pays homage to their creativity by identifying images via related tags.  The best of those images might be highlighted on the corporate website.  We can create a YouTube channel where the million-dollar-client can speak forthrightly and in human terms about their news, events and mission and solicit video responses, too.

We’ll be on Twitter, of course, and using tools like Tweetscan and Tweetbeep to monitor conversations 24/7 – again, we’ll be monitoring not just for client references but for associated industry themes.

We’ll train and empower a cadre of client employees to serve as community liaisons.  Think of this as “distributed PR.”  Some of these employee evangelists will be bloggers; most will be on Twitter too; the charismatic folks will be gifted with a Flip camera so they can vlog their thoughts.  These internal advocates will work hand-in-glove with the PR team.

Speaking of video – we’ll create a video production group, complete with mini studio rigged with an HD video camera, audio recording equipment, green screen, etc.  Thus equipped, we’ll produce weekly podcasts and vlogs with our million-dollar-client’s execs and other industry do-gooders.  If appropriate we’ll also create funky videos that might have some viral appeal.  Heck, we could “live-vlog” a major product announcement! 

I’m not generally a fan of creating branded social networks, but you can’t argue with the success of white-label solutions like Ning.  If our million-dollar-client served one or more niches that was prone to fandom, this would become a serious consideration.

SEO would play a role, but I’d be just as intrigued to explore Search Engine Marketing options, too.  How about testing out NewsAds – contextual Google ads based on industry and news-oriented keyword searches?

Oops – almost forgot – we’ll also want to create an RSS microsite as part of the Social Media Newsroom we’ll create.  This will aggregate all the blog posts about our million-dollar client in one feed.  As described by Marshall Kirkpatrick, “It's like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what's being written about (the client).”

These are just the ideas that spewed out in the initial rush of pondering for our imaginary deep-pocketed client.  For an actual client – one where we’d have a sense of products, customer satisfaction, industry trends, etc. – we would get much more granular and creative.  (Just as Picasso started out as a fine classical artist before delving into Cubism, the Agency team would need to do a deep-dive into the million-dollar-client’s business before breaking out the disco ball of creativity.) 

Ultimately a big goal of any million-dollar program would be to make every stakeholder feel important through monitoring, response, and transparent, frequent outreach. 

Measurement?  Think about benchmarking the BEFORE and measuring the AFTER of: web traffic, sales, online mentions (volume and tone), customer service inbound calls, media buzz, customer satisfaction index, etc.  It’s possible to measure – and would still be worthwhile even if it weren’t.

What Big Ideas would you add to the list?  What else would you measure?

Meanwhile, make your million-dollar check payable to …

Although some might disagree, I try to keep the self-promotion to a minimum on the blog.  But my marketing vp would kill me if I didn’t mention this:

SHIFT was named “The New Media Agency of the Year” at the SABRE Awards Dinner in New York City this week.

Read the news release about our win – that’s where the self-promotion stuff kicks in.

This win – on top of our “Agency of the Year” victory at the last American Business Awards – feels pretty darned good.  Makes all the hard work and umpteen trips to Logan Airport worthwhile.

Thanks to all the super-duper people at SHIFT!  Way to go, team.

How do we top this??

I already have some ideas.

The blacklisting of PR agencies by respected media contacts like WIRED’s Chris Anderson and Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani has yet to “wake up” the industry. 

Oh, we wring our hands.  And those of us who bother to listen in the first place react with varying degrees of regret or rancor.  Yet the fact remains that this tug-of-war is almost 100 years old and at the end of the day, we all have a job to do. 

Could we get better at it?  Absolutely.  Will we stop trying to peddle stories on behalf of clients?  No way – nor should we.

I think Rick Calvert at BlogWorldExpo put it best:

“If you are a professional journalist, or editor covering a particular industry or topic then part of your job is fielding PR pitches for products in that industry.

“Think of it like a buyer working for a major department store. Let’s say they buy men’s clothing. That person’s job is to buy things from people they know, and people they don’t know. In fact a good buyer is actively searching for, and appreciatively receiving unsolicited (contact) from people they have never met who are trying to sell them some new line of clothing they have never heard of.  Why?  That new line of clothing just might be the Next Big Thing.

“It is that buyer’s job to diligently review that line and listen to that sales pitch to decide if buying that line would give his company a competitive advantage.  A buyer who only buys from his friends and buys lines he already knows about is lazy and should be fired for not doing his job.

“In Journalism and PR it is the same thing… Will you occasionally get pitched something that is irrelevant to you or that is personally uninteresting to you? Of course. Too bad… Now if the same PR firm keeps sending you irrelevant information it is entirely appropriate to contact them and politely ask them to knock it off…”

Okay, so take it as a given that newsmakers won’t stop making news – and that they’ll want to find efficient ways to get the word out.  Assume further that reporters and bloggers won’t stop writing.  And lastly, swallow your indignation and acknowledge that the 100–year-old PR industry can serve both newsmakers and content-creators by improving.  That leaves this:

“WHAT CAN WE DO to all get along better?”  This was the question I heard from a handful of budding PR pros finishing up their college coursework.  “It seems like PR can’t win for trying,” they told me.  “Are there some simple rules for Media Relations that will help us avoid these challenges?”

Answer: Yes. And, no.  Because everyone gets hit with the craphammer at some point, regardless of good intentions and training and oversight.   

Still, I think we can boil down the essentials, for all PR pros.

My attempt at a simplified PR Credo, in the form of “7 Promises,” is below (and tightly edited in PDF form, offered to you without copyright restrictions).  You can have it sit alongside the Blogger Relations Bookmark:

1. The PR pro promises to read several weeks’ worth of previous blog posts and/or articles to ascertain whether their story would be a good fit for the blog/publication.
2. If the PR pro ascertains that there is NOT a good fit, they will not pitch the blogger/reporter, and promise to push back on unreasonable client or management demands to do so.
3. Before pitching the blogger/reporter, the PR pro promises to double-check their method of outreach.  They will not only check externally-developed media resources like Cision but will also review any guidelines made publicly available by the blogger or publication.
4. The PR pro promises to never send a press release without being able to demonstrate its concrete relevance to the blogger/reporter … and will never, ever send an attachment unless it’s been requested.
5. As much as is possible, the PR pro will participate actively and transparently within the communities of-interest to their clients.  The PR pro acknowledges that a “cold call” (in any form) – while sometimes unavoidable – is considerably less effective than reaching out as a known community member.
6. The PR pro promises that any correspondence – whether the initial contact or follow-up – should contain a message customized to the blogger/reporter’s needs and should offer value.  For example, “just checking to see if you got the press release” is not welcome or appropriate.
7. The PR pro acknowledges that being ignored by the blogger/reporter is not to be considered license for harassment.  It’s more likely the pitch was not of-interest, so any further outreach should be mindful that the story idea has likely been quietly rejected.  If the PR pro must try again, they promise to do so by offering a different, more creative and valuable approach to their original pitch.

Following these 7 Promises of the PR Pro will not make the world a better place.  Following these 7 Promises will not eliminate mistakes and misunderstandings.

But it’s a start.

A friend in the Twittersphere – with weekend access to the ubiquitous Cision/MediaMap database of media contacts – confirms that Gina Trapani’s personal email address is provided for PR’s use. 

That doesn’t mean that PR is off the hook.  Mistakes and misunderstandings will continue to occur in the PR/Media relationship, and PR pros still have much work to do.  But I can’t help it, I feel a li’l better knowing we might be able to pass the buck on this one.

P.S. to the haters: yea, we sometimes rely on databases to store and track and retrieve contact info.  Barbaric, medieval, outrageous, I know.

UPDATE – the proof (click to view larger size on Flickr):

Picture deleted at Ms. Trapani’s request.  Wish it was as simple to ask her to delete that %$#*&%ing wiki.

Hi Gina –

I’d email you directly but apparently you’ve blocked my agency’s domain name (along with many esteemed peers).

I have written many times about crummy PR practices, and have acknowledged more than one mistake of our own, over the years. I empathize with your frustration and regret that we added to it.

Sorry if we spammed you. We not only extensively train our folks, but we published a Blogger Relations Bookmark (PDF) that is laminated on each employee’s desk. However, mistakes will happen, if only because we insist on only hiring humans.

But “being human” is no excuse for stupid mistakes; I am not trying to be cheeky. We always strive to improve. If you can dig up the offending email from a shiftcomm.com address, I will publish and critique it on my blog, and will include any of your personal comments as well. We’ll gladly fall on the sword if it’s in service to improving our agency and our profession as a whole.

You’d expect me to say this but for every 999 compliments we get from media and bloggers, it’s a shame that it’s the one crap pitch that gets publicly outed. But that’s a risk built-in to my profession. I suppose that a risk built-in to your own profession is that you have to weed through 999 crap pitches to unearth that one stellar nugget. We each have a job to do, and our own crap to shovel through, eh?

In our case, it’s “spam if we do and damned if we don’t.” In your case, it’s spam if you don’t want it (even if we truly think it may be relevant), but damned if you want a competitor to scoop you on an agency’s one great pitch.

I hope you’ll re-think your blanket condemnation of the thousands of employees who work at those firms listed in your wiki. Thanks to outcries like yours, the PR profession is becoming ever-more cognizant of the need for change, and it truly is changing.

Of course, every industry will have its ignoramuses so feel free to blacklist individuals but, again, please consider giving the many thoughtful, helpful PR pros at those blacklisted firms a second chance.

Thanks.

P.S. – If this note does not sway you, I hope Brian’s note will.