PR

Reaching the Silent Majority

In social media PR, you often find yourself targeting the most influential people within a demographic. Influence can be measured many different ways but it generally comes down to people that are vocal and reach a certain group of people in a meaningful way. Often we look for people who blog and have a lot of people who link to them or, when we’re diving another level deeper, we’re looking for commenters who have a degree of credibility in the places they post their encapsulated opinions.

But not everyone is looking for connectors.

With some of the frenzy about social media and Web 2.0 coming back down to earth, there are some companies and organizations that are realizing that the people they really want to target aren’t the most vocal but instead the most silent.

In many online circles that encourage interactions, people who just watch and read content without posting or contributing are called “lurkers.” In the early days of the Internet and digest mailing lists, people would look at the amount of subscribers on a list then the amount of people that were posting and then call out the people who were merely lurking. It was equivalent of “leeches” on file sharing sites.

As much as most people in this field will make a case for the value of connectors, it isn’t hard to come up with examples of companies that would be afraid of them. One of the biggest spenders in public affairs PR is the US Army and one of their main objectives is recruitment. Do you think the Army is trying to reach people that are extremely vocal and blog? Probably not. What about Apple? As the company continues to grow rapidly, they will probably turn towards recruiting and, given their secretive nature, I doubt they’ll be looking for message board loud mouths in their R&D department. These are PR challenges.

To it’s credit, reach marketers and advertisers already do this pretty well. Most of their media is push or one way so anyone who comes across it basically takes away the same value, whether or not you have a participatory personality. Of course there are several downsides to this as well, since you’re probably paying for a lot of marketing that isn’t reaching the right people and your message is most likely becoming diluted.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers on this one but it’s a challenge that social media marketers need to become aware of. It’s fine to track the most active people online but you can’t completely discount the silent majority.

The PR Practitioner Guide to Wikipedia

WikiGeoff Livingston surfaced the topic of marketers’ tumultuous relationship with Wikipedia a while back so I’ve been tinkering with this post for a while.  Considering how the next major Wikipedia/PR snafu is due any minute now, I figured this might be as good a time as any to share a few of the things I learned this year about existing as a PR practitioner in the dangerous nerd jungle that is Wikipedia.

First of all, contrary to what some social media purists think, everyone belongs in Wikipedia. This includes PR people, internal employees, disgruntled customers, academics and anyone else you can think of.

The Wikipedia rule that scare most people away is the conflict of interest (COI) section of the guidelines.  The most important passage is as follows:

A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor.

COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where an editor must forgo advancing the aims of Wikipedia in order to advance outside interests, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.

COI edits are strongly discouraged. When they cause disruption to the encyclopedia in the opinion of an uninvolved administrator, they may lead to accounts being blocked and embarrassment for the individuals and groups who were being promoted.

While I think everyone agrees that Wikipedia should not be used to “advance outside interests,” the real gray area is in the neutrality.  Put simply, neutrality is rare amongst Wikipedia editors.  The kind of people that actively write and edit the articles you find in Wikipedia are generally enthusiasts who have a distinct point of view and are able to mask it with varying degrees of success.  As a brand participating in Wikipedia, you have to be very careful to not interject your point of view and preserve a very high level of transparency but there is still some content that you are probably the best person in the world to edit.  If the number of employees is incorrect or your stake in investments is misrepresented, I firmly believe that you are in the right to edit it.

Ok, so these are all grand principles, which PR bloggers are all great at pontificating about, but how exactly do you do it?  In my opinion there are a few rules that brands can follow to participate organically in Wikipedia:

  1. Create a profile – Your user profile is your best tool to promote complete transparency.  Say exactly who you are, who you work for and what exactly you plan on doing in Wikipedia.  Maybe you won’t be editing but you will be contacting editors so it’s still important that it is clear who exactly you are.  This goes for both PR agencies and client side representatives.  Anonymous edits hold very little weight and are usually overwritten within days.
  2. Know your editors – Chances are that you’re only monitoring a few Wikipedia entries and you are more than likely to come across editors who participate in more than one article.  These editors have Talk pages and this is generally the best way to engage with them directly but keep in mind that Talk pages are public so you shouldn’t call them out or expose them in any way that might make them defensive.
  3. Know your Sandbox – For some reason, very few marketers seem to know about the Sandbox in Wikipedia.  The Sandbox basically has all the functionality of a normal Wikipedia page except that it doesn’t get published to the community.  It’s a place to work on entries and get an article up to the guidelines without risking the violation of any policies.  You can still flag your articles to get help from other members of the community and, ultimately, get other more established editors to finish them and publish them without raising COI suspicion.
  4. Know the language – If you can learn basic HTML, you can learn most of the important codes and rules of Wikipedia.  There are many ways to flag articles to get the attention of other editors if something is wrong.  There are also fairly strict formatting and content rules that you should be aware of before doing any editing.
  5. Don’t just stick to your brand – If you work for a dishwasher detergent company, I’m sure you’re an expert on more than just your detergent.  Don’t be afraid to tell the world about what you know about different dishwashing technologies and the environmental impact of different kinds of detergent.  The more you contribute, the less you will be suspected of astroturfing.
  6. Only edit articles relating to your brand as a last resort – Sure, if there is a factual error on a Wikipedia page about your CEO then I believe you have a right to correct it but that doesn’t mean that jumping in and making an edit is the best way.  Try contacting the creator of the article on his or her Talk page to make a correction or flag the article for an inaccuracy.  There are people policing Wikipedia for every possible flag and, if you flag something, they will generally find it and act surprisingly quickly.

Although I don’t think this justifies it’s own rule, it should go without saying that Wikipedia should never ever be used as an SEO tool.  Yes, Wikipedia is one of the most valuable properties to Google but if you start manipulating the links on your Wikipedia article to move search rankings, you’re really doing a disservice to both organic search and social media as a whole.  You might get away with it but if you don’t you will feel the wrath of a lot of people.

That said, Wikipedia is not the playground of purity that social media pundits would like you to believe it is.  It’s a sector of media that brands have a right to participate in as long as they understand the rules and leave everything they know about PR and advertising at the door.

Twitter Warning

After discovering Tweetscan and their amazingly useful RSS feeds recently, I’ve been thinking about writing a post about how Twitter can be used in a crisis communications scenario. Then along comes Michael Arrington and his scrappy little blog, TechCrunch, and suddenly the issue is everywhere. Ok, you win this time Mr. Arrington but your dominance over Point Oh! will be short lived. Mark my words.

Anyway…what Arrington brought to light in his post last night was how Comcast officially responded to his complaint within 20 minutes of his first Twitter message going out about his connection problems in his home. Certainly it didn’t hurt to have Jeff Jarvis and others pick up on the story but still…20 minutes is a pretty amazing response time in the face of a potential crisis. If Comcast sits on this issue overnight, on a Sunday no less, they would probably wake to find a TechCrunch post about how awful their support is but instead hundreds of thousands of people are reading about how quick they were to respond.

So obviously this is underscored by the fact that Comcast has customer service issues. As single tweet by Arrington may not have popped up on the radar for Comcast but the hundreds of people that quickly chimed in with their own customer service horror stories certainly created enough chatter for Comcast’s monitoring program to spring into action.

As I’ve said previously, Twitter is often dismissed as a fringe technology that has limited appeal but in crisis communications it’s more important to find out who is talking about your issue than how many people are talking about it. By subscribing to your key crisis terms in Tweetscan’s RSS feeds can do is alert you to a potential problem well before it hits the mainstream, which is the best case scenario in any crisis situation.

Mark Cuban: One of Us

After running into some problems with giving bloggers access to the Dallas Maverick’s locker room, Mark Cuban has decided that he is opening up the locker room to any blogger who he feels can write. The move comes after several “real” journalists were blocked from the locker room after a ban on giving blogger’s media credentials. The NBA has now stated that bloggers can’t be banned from locker rooms in this day and age.

Of course, now that the ban is lifted and potentially everyone will be given access, there are yet even more moans from the traditional media establishment, like this one from Mike Fannin of the Kansas City Star:

With all due respect for the potential journalism talent in the middle school ranks, this rebuttal smacks with the tartness of sour grapes. Is this really the standard the NBA wants to set for blogging?

Yes, Mike, we only want bloggers who are from newspapers. That way we can ensure that there is no change in point of view and we maintain exactly the same standard of journalism that is currently driving sports enthusiasts to blogs instead of the incredibly intuitive Kansas City Star sports site.

Although I’m not sure it will really work, what Cuban is doing is probably a sign of things to come and it’s certainly fun to watch it unfold on his blog, where he’s taking submissions from anyone who has a blog and wants access. As the influential media expands beyond print and television, organizations are going to have to find ways to accommodate larger numbers of journalists. I think anyone who’s watched a post-game press conference would welcome some fresh questions.

Measuring the Awesomeness of Jimmy Page’s Stairway to Heaven Guitar Solo

One of the greatest guitar solos of all time is Jimmy Page’s masterpiece on Stairway to Heaven. Right after Robert Plant sings “your stairway lies on the whispering wind,” Page launches into an epic solo that, at the time, extended the song well beyond the limit of any airtime that radio stations could give it (this would later be amended). Yes, the solo is awesome but how do we measure how awesome it is?

For starters, let’s look at engagement. The average guitar solo is about 15-20 seconds so, if you count the 12-string strumming part, the Stairway solo is easily over a minute, making the solo 3-4 times more awesome than your average guitar solo.

Let’s not forget about impressions either. Stairway has been a AOR staple since November 1971 and often appears near the top of the list on Classic Rock Greatest Hits of All-Time countdowns. According to Wikipedia, it is the most requested song of all time on FM radio despite never being released as a single. Don’t forget about all the amateur guitarists playing this song in Guitar Centers all around the country at this very moment either. Yeah, they may be annoying people but those are impressions too.

Then, of course, there’s Page’s use of the double-neck guitar. Sure he probably didn’t use the double-neck in the studio but it’s still implied in the overall awesomeness quotient due to the live performances. Using the ad equivilency model, I think that makes all these numbers worth 1.75 more than other guitar solos by the same measurement. Keep in mind that this formula doesn’t apply to the five-neck guitar that the guy from Cheap Trick uses. After three, each additional neck begins to count against you.

Ok, this is obviously stupid, right?

The parallel hit me while reading the excellent Brains on Fire post in response to an Ad Week interview with Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bogusky was quoted as saying:

We are so lucky to be in a creative field at a time when the economy is running on creativity. Yet we are still inculcated to mistrust the concept of creativity. We may be perfectly positioned, but we spend our time trying to add scientific processes to our strategies and scientific testing to our work. Why do we distrust something that is so easy for us all to identify and identify with?

It still amazes me when I hear clients that are really drawn to a creative idea, have the budget to do it but can’t justify it unless they can measure quantifiable results. If this approach was taken to any other creative discipline I would be amazed if any creativity survived. Not to mention, it’s probably at the root of many consumers’ disdain for marketing.

In a world where singles had to be under five minutes long (it would’ve been shorter if not for Dylan, btw), how would Jimmy Page have made a case for his epic guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven? More importantly, if it was omitted, how would it have affected the legacy of Led Zeppelin?

The fact is that attaching your brand to a creative idea makes you look more intelligent, inventive and creates an actual connection with another human being that goes one level deeper than an overused emotional trigger. Good design, writing (you know sometimes words have two meanings) and compelling interactivity can only be measured on the most basic levels but the real value is far more obvious. Not all that glitters is gold, but some of it is.

So when will this new day dawn for those who stand long? Hard to tell. Interactive platforms are certainly expanding the canvass for creativity, as I learned when I visited the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley this week, but there is still a ways to go before everyone can climb the stairway over quantifiability. Perhaps only then will our shadows be taller than our souls.

(ed note: forgive me for this self indulgence…at least I didn’t use every line from the song, as I originally intended)

Observations from Suxorz: The Worst Social Media Campaigns of 2007

SXSWThe word of the day at the Suxorz Worst of Social Media session at SXSW was transparency.  Led by Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine and Steve Hall of Ad Rants, the session poked fun at what are mostly well known blunders in the world of social media marketing.

The winner (?) of the distinction was none other than the largest client at my agency, HP.  Of course, we had nothing to do with their work with PayPerPost, who really should’ve won the award, but there was something about the combination of a huge brand with such a low concept marketing idea that really made the crowd turn against them.

Other runners up included:

  • Molson – A Facebook group that encouraged people to post drunk pictures to win a try to a trip to Cancun (presumably to get drunker)
  • Carlton Beer – The famous YouTube commercial that got millions of views but had no connection to any of their actual brands
  • Wal-Mart – The classic Edelman fake blog Wal-Marting Across America
  • Whole Foods – Their CEO posting negative comments anonymously about a competitor to drive their acquisition price down
  • Cisco – Paying bloggers to write about what the “Human Network” meant to them
  • Coke – For jumping on the Coke/Mentos bandwagon about a year too late and then pretending like it was their marketing program all along
  • Vespa – Steve Rubel’s old agency set up a blog for Vespa enthusiasts but then abandoned the blog and the last several posts were about how the marketing people wouldn’t return emails to the bloggers
  • Agency.com – The classic video about pitching Subway (they lost), although it was agreed that this was more embarrassing than actually unethical
  • Target – Their Facebook stealth campaign that told Facebook users not to tell anyone they’re working for Target
  • Guiliani – His closed MySpace page that preventing anyone from friending him or commenting on their support
  • Sony – The PSP fake blog that told the story of two fake boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas, which was particularly dumb due to the amount of real teen boys who probably could’ve provided better content.

No big surprises but an interesting overview of a year that this industry will probably look back on as a learning experience.

More SXSW updates later.

The #1 Reason You Don’t Need a Social Media Press Release

Press ReleaseWith the exception of a few people who just want to change the approach, just about everyone agrees that press releases need to change or they risk becoming completely irrelevant. Unfortunately, this staple of public relations is so ingrained in how agencies and PR managers go about promoting their brands that it will take a long time to kill off. When you think about it, it’s one of the only pieces of tangible work that many PR practice areas produce, especially in sectors where getting actual coverage, or “ink,” is rare.

In my first job in PR I had a Japanese electronics client that invested millions of dollars a year in their trade show appearances. They trotted out dozens of new and existing products at each of these shows and each one of them needed their own press release. Due to distance and the language barrier, we probably spent more than half our time, in a group of eight people, sending releases back and forth and editing and reformatting. When all was said and done, I doubt more than five, of the hundreds of releases we generated, were ever referenced in actual media coverage, which there was clipbooks full off.

Still today, people issue press releases for two primary reasons:

  1. To distribute an announcement
  2. To be persuasive about brand attributes

In terms of making an announcement, press releases do serve a function. For the simple fact that releases are picked up by Google News can alone probably justify the couple hundred dollars you have to spend. But it’s still dead content. You’ve basically just dumped indexable text on a third party site and crossed your fingers that someone finds it.

In reference to the second point, attempting to shape sentiment or being at all persuasive in a press release format is a total lost cause. A journalist can see a press release from a mile away and knows that it’s really only good for finding basic specs and official numbers. It would be embarrassing to be caught using a quote from a press release at any reputable news organization. The hours spent crafting the language of a press release and picking the perfect jargon is a waste of time.

This brings us to the social media release, or SMR, which is supposed to bring the press release into the 21st century. Brian Solis does a great job of breaking down the difference in the various SMR flavors in his “Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases.” What it basically boils down to is that the major SMR providers, which includes PR Newswire and BusinessWire, are trying to add as much blog functionality as possible. However, none of their offerings speak to the heart of the issue, which Brian sums up neatly here:

I think we’re learning “how” to create Social Media Releases, aesthetically at least. But, I don’t see many discussions that effectively and clearly say “why” we need them.

Exactly! Social media releases aren’t needed because blogging has replaced them. Although many of the SMR providers get close, none of them offer the flexibility and power of one of the major blogging platforms. If you’re looking for more distribution options, getting your press release bookmarked on Digg or Del.icio.us is going to be a lot harder on Marketwire’s platform than it would be if you had Movable Type installed on your corporate site.

Then there’s the issue of trust. You can dress up a press release with as many Web 2.0 applets as you can dream up but it’s still a press release and no one will trust anything but the hard facts contained in it. If you want to be persuasive (reminder: that’s one of your main roles as PR practitioner), people don’t want a canned quote from the CEO. They want to read something authored by the CEO that he stands behind and explains why your HDTV is better than the hundreds of competitors on the market or why this quarter’s earnings really do signal a turnaround for the company.

A commenter on Brian Solis’ blog followed up by saying that the audience wasn’t as important as some of the other benefits of the SMR, mainly being “findable.”  I agree that creating content that indexes better is certainly important but without changing the format to something more credible you run into the same dead content issue.  No one cares what Apple’s PR reps think of the new iPhone but they do want to hear what Steve Jobs thinks.  Why put up a barrier?  Steve Jobs is happy to stand behind open letters posted to their sites, why can’t their press announcements be delivered over a more compelling and personal platform?  Plus, a blog announcement is still more “findable” than any of the SMR platforms.

Regardless of how you feel, the debate over SMRs is one worth having.  Most will agree that they’re an improvement over standard wire services but they’re probably not the giant step in tactical evolution that PR needs right now.

Kudoos to ooVoo

ooVooIn an effort to be less critical, I bring you an example of great PR from ooVoo, a video conferencing service that has been in beta for a while now.  The most impressive thing that ooVoo allows you to do is hold a multi-user chat in a very simple interface that basically keeps the software out of the way.

I met someone from ooVoo a few months ago and didn’t think much of the service when they told me about it.  Sure, another video chat.  No big deal.

ooVoo popped back into my life over the past couple weeks when I started seeing it come up in a lot of my favorite marketing and Web 2.0 blogs.  First I saw Joseph Jaffe at Jaffe Juice talk about some of the sessions he held with readers of his blog and then I saw Scott Monty at Social Media Marketing do pretty much the same thing.

Apparently, this was all part of an ooVoo promotion called “My ooVoo Day with…” where ooVoo used their technology to demonstrate how bloggers could engage with their readers on a deeper level.  Sure, it’s just video chat and it’s hardly the killer app for bloggers but when you read about some of the conversations that took place amongst loyal readers of different prominent marketing blogs it no longer seems like such a commoditized tool.  In fact, pretty much every blogger that participated in the program reported positively on their experiences.

And this goes far beyond the simple reach of these bloggers.  Many of the bloggers chosen were expert online marketers and have extremely optimized sites that reach a host of other highly connected people.  By being selective about who they chose to participate in the program, ooVoo tapped into an extremely influential base that plays a huge role in shaping sentiment about emerging technologies online.

Nice work, ooVoo!

Forrester: Listen Before You Shout

ShoutAccording to Mary Beth Camp and Peter Kim at Forrester, the big agencies that currently rule the marketing world, both on the PR and advertising sides, won’t be going away as much as they will be changing their focus to be more deeply entrenched with consumers. Naturally, this is a true 360 from how the industries have worked since the beginning of time and they make a point to mention that there are no agencies currently doing this, which should get their report forwarded around to plenty of the top brass tasked with reversing the downward spiral many agencies are facing.

Luckily for the agencies, Forrester has outlined an easy three-step process towards revamping your businesses for the future:

To become a Connected Agency, current players will have to shift:

1. Consumer: from messages to connections.

2. Media: from push to pull interactions.

3. Operations: from campaigns to conversations.

Simple, eh?

The main factors driving this will be familiar to many people working in social media. For starters, the report points out how sophisticated consumers are at ignoring your messages. Not only do they know how to block ads they don’t want but they’ve also been given better tools to fast forward through your commercials in media where they have traditional been passive. On top of this is the old faithful pyramid of influence, which clearly show organic word-of-mouth to be roughly twice as powerful as any other vehicle for your messaging.

There’s not a lot that you can argue with in the report except for one question: “what advantage do agencies have in making this change over individuals or small specialty shops?”  Sure, you could argue the economics of it and how the agencies have access to the brands and are skilled at selling in larger programs.  Plus, if there was a network of smaller specialty practitioners that were more ingrained in the social landscape then they will probably be sucked up by the big media holding companies as their value becomes more obvious.

I see it from a different angle though.  The benefit of being a specialist is that you’re more agile and can adapt to these kinds of changes much faster than big agencies.  Also, contrary to what the report suggest, CMOs are getting smarter and will be able to overcome operational struggles much sooner than agencies will be able to change their whole model.  It’s much easier for a CMO to start a few new specialty areas than it is for an agency to tell their creative department to completely change the way they think.  Just look at how CRM has become integrated into the corporate structure while agencies struggled to figure out what their role was.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Agency-wide emails could be going out right now that could turn the agency structure on its head.  But, of course, the emails aren’t going out.  Not yet anyway.

The Nelson Award: Cut and Paste Pitches

Cut and PasteYou have to wonder how many of these pitches political bloggers are getting every day?

Sure, every once in a while there will be a nutbag who wants to live in your store and blog about it but blasting out pitches about how blogging from a Manhattan Applebee’s is a great way to find “true Americans” (the PR person also felt the need to put this in quotes) is just a misguided way to inspire a backlash. Here’s the pitch that Ben Smith at Politico got the other day:
Subject: Blogging from Applebee’s

Hi Ben -

I hope you are well. I wanted to see if you would have any interest in setting up camp this week or in the next few weeks at Applebee’s in Times Square so you can interview “true Americans” about the election, candidates, etc. We would obviously set up an area for you and provide food throughout the week. We thought this would give you great insight into what Americans think for your blog, etc.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!

If the people in the Manhattan Applebee’s are “real Americans,” I will never bother to vote again.  How about renting Ben a car and getting him out of the city to see how the other 99% live?  Plus, isn’t an Applebee’s just full of grinning tourists from other countries here to spend their higher valued currency?

Luckily Ben had the decency not to publish names but I’d kind of like to know who to award this Nelson Award to directly. Is it so hard to read the blog and actually show some sense of context?

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