Doing Words

Social media won’t achieve every goal: an example…

// May 29th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Green, Media relations, Social Media

Yolanda is a smart person (MBA candidate and chemical engineer — I’m impressed) and since I got to do the social media work for TEDxSydney on the weekend, I now consider myself a real social media expert (yes, I’m that vain and deluded). So I’m offering free social media advice (hey, at least I’m not charging for it, I’m not that deluded… though I’d like to be…)

Here’s Yolanda’s question:

Feeling like a gen x, needing some social media lessons…

I have been following LinkedIn for 6 months, just got a facebook page two weeks ago (yes, hard to believe…when did I become a luddite…). Phase 1 – my neighbours and I produced a short film entry to the Origin Sustainability Drive competition, so proved that we could take an idea into reality (check it out on link). Phase 2 – We need at least 2000 votes for the $10K people’s choice award, but sitting at just 65. We have formed an alliance with the community not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation (we would donate half if we win). We have interviewed for an article that will appear in The AGE next week. But how do we use social media? It is much harder than I imagined!! (I am studying an MBA, so super keen to develop these new world skills!) Will appreciate your help and advice.

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Sourcebottle helped get my business on the radio

// March 11th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Media relations

Back when Moses was a boy and milk came in bottles with cream on top, I worked in PR. Yuck! It’s taken me decades to work off the bad karma I built up by bothering people who don’t want to be bothered, about stuff they don’t want to be bothered about.

It can be a very inefficient way of communicating because you have to bother a lot of people before you find one person who is interested in what you have to say, still more to find someone who might get you some media coverage on it. PR can be expensive and time-consuming as a result, putting it out of reach of very small businesspeople like myself.

No more. I’ve been a Sourcebottle.com.au user for a couple of months (it’s free to join) and yesterday it paid off for me with a free, highly-targeted and efficiently unearthed PR opportunity for my tiny Milkooler.com business, which could never afford traditional PR services.

Sourcebottle makes the connection between media and marketer so much more efficient

It happened like this: a radio station on Queensland’s Gold Coast put out a request on Sourcebottle for products to be used by a promotional street team (they drive around in a branded truck, get people trialling new products, and broadcast their impressions near-live, on-air.)

Every day I get an email from Sourcebottle listing the new requests they’ve received from radio stations, magazines, newspapers, freelancers, bloggers and event organisers. I saw the request for promotional products for the radio station street team and filled in a response form. In half an hour I had a reply from the street team coordinator, with a postal address and contact details so I could send her a box of Milkoolers.

Too easy.

In Ye Olden Days of public relations I would have had to find a list of contacts in radio stations, send out a press release about Milkoolers, call to follow up each station, and hopefully, someone at one of those stations might want to take some Milkoolers and make some air time with them — a costly waste of everybody’s time.

In Ye Modern Days, I’ve scored myself some free airtime on a good regional radio network for the cost of answering an email and walking an ExpressPost bag up to the mailbox.

The only thing lacking from Sourcebottle now is a way of tying the media coverage back to the opportunity. Some kind of premium service, perhaps in conjunction with an existing media monitoring company, that uses the fact Sourcebottle knows to look out for a particular kind of coverage in a particular medium, during a known period of time. That would be very efficient indeed.

Thanks Sourcebottle.

Is there really any difference between PR and journalism any more?

// February 24th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Media, Media relations

Good mate Lloyd Shepherd wrote a great post this week about the news that veteran British journalism Richard Sambrook has announced he’s joining PR firm Edelman.

As Lloyd says, PR people and journalists have in the past been on opposite sides of a vast gulf of distrust.

“…Journalists and PRs found themselves locked into a transactional process where “market value” was reflected by the quality (and uniqueness) of the information being traded. Journalists thrived on exclusivity, because that’s how they gained both attention and also self-worth: if they broke a unique story, they were professionally validated.

PRs sometimes thrived on exclusivity (when the story was big enough), but normally craved ubiquity, because that meant more eyeballs. Journalists saw themselves as gatekeepers and purveyors of truth; PRs saw journalists as opportunities and as obstacles. No wonder they rarely got on.”

Not only has the line blurred between news and editorial and public relations in recent years, but the internet has allowed anyone with an interesting story to find their own audience without having to go through the gatekeepers of public relations and journalism.

“Anyone with something interesting to say can get it into the public forum, as the politicians are beginning to discover. But once it’s out there, a new set of skills is needed to get significant attention to it. These are communication skills, and they include such things as optimising for search, incorporating reader input and responding quickly to new information.”

Lloyd asks: what motivates a journalist to move to PR? What might motivate a good PR to move to journalism?

Now, I’m no Richard Sambrook — there would be perhaps 20 people in the world who’d remember my journalism, and still fewer who’d remember my PR, but if I’m truly anything, I’m an early adopter. I first switched from journalism to PR the first time for entirely venal reasons: it was the late 1980s, greed was good, and most PR people earned more than most journalists. I wanted RayBan Wayfarers, Italian suits and a convertible BMW. Everybody I knew did. I could hardly get out of my punk-era lifestyle fast enough. Ugh. It still shames me.

(Now I’ve returned from washing my hands compulsively for an hour, let’s return to our story.)

A few years later, I switched back from journalism to PR because as a journalist, I was sick of people pretending I was a demi-god visionary who knew more about the future of the industry I covered than anyone actually working in it. Like many, I thought the industry really cared about my opinion, when really they only cared if they could influence my opinion.

A few years after that, I left PR once again when I realised I would always be held accountable for the results I achieved for my clients, even though the results I achieved for my clients were so influenced by random factors outside my control that my worst work was often my most successful, and vise-versa.

I could have gone back to journalism but the interwebs beckoned, and with it, the opportunity to create not just new content but a new medium for it to be created in.

However, much of the work I’ve done since has been so close to journalism and public relations, particularly my work in social media. The big difference has been the ability to communicate with an audience both one-to-many (as in a blog post) and one-to-one (as in a messageboard) or both at the same time (as in Twitter).

There’s an ancient distrust of ex-PR people in journalism, and an ancient respect for ex-journalists in PR but that’s the only barrier to switching and it’s legacy code — no longer makes any sense today.

Neither profession is very often able to write or say what they think, both professions have an additional agenda or two in the back of their minds when communicating, both professions are held accountable. Neither is able to define the scope or composition of their audience anymore. And both have experienced a collapse in the centre of the bell curve graphing salary against number of salary earners in their industry.

It’s going to piss some people off, but I say there’s no significant difference between journalism and public relations now. Prove me wrong if you can.

Secret media relations: how to criticise your competitors

// May 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Media relations, Other news

This is the second in a series of posts on the secrets of media relations, drawn from my previous career in PR and the time I’ve spent as a senior exec with web startups. You can find the first post, on how to keep secrets, here. This is new for me, so I need to ask: are you enjoying these? Not enjoying them? Let me know in the comments at the end of this post.

A startup friend emailed me today, to ask: “This Google Wave thing is ambitious and complicated. I doubt it’s going to be popular with consumers. At the same time, some of the things Wave does are similar to of the things my product does. Maybe we’re competitors now. Should I look for opportunities to criticise Google Wave and talk up my own product?”

photo credit: timsamoff

The answer, as always when you consult a specialist, is “yes, and no.” The fine art of criticism takes lots of practice, and when you engage in a critical battle that is waged in a third-party medium (news, blogs, forums, tweets) one step removed (communicating via employees, customers, partners, investors, journalists, bloggers and consumers) it’s easy for your carefully-aimed arrows to morph into shotgun blasts, or worse, boomerangs.

Here are three simple rules I’ve learned through painful experience. Stick to these three rules to present yourself in the best possible light, while at the same time undermining your competitor.

Rule 1 : never be anything other than constructively critical of someone else’s product.

In other words, don’t say, “Google Wave is too complicated” say “Here’s a way Google Wave could be even better.”

Rule 2: If you can, wait to be asked.

Don’t offer an unsolicited opinion. When you say something (even constructively critical) without being asked, it looks like you need the attention more than the other guy. If you can, engineer the situation so that a third-party (e.g. conference convener, analyst, blogger) you can trust asks for your opinion before you give it.

Rule 3: Don’t position your product as a threat to the behemoths

The behemoths for the moment are Google and Microsoft in software, Cisco, Intel and Apple in hardware.

Behemoths have more fans than you do, and those fans will bury you in rebuttals. The behemoths have detractors too, but aligning them with your point of view is like herding cats. Online debates are always won by the argument with the most supporters, not by the correct point of view.

Then there’s the relationship with the behemoth themselves. While they don’t see you as a threat, or aren’t even aware of your existence, you can thrive. Once there are a few people at Google or Microsoft whose only job is to evaluate you as a potential threat and take you out, business gets a whole lot harder.

This is made worse by journalists and their need to get readers to stop scanning headlines and read a story. To get an interesting angle for a story, journalists will take any tiny hint of potential competition between a behemoth and a startup and blow it way out of proportion. And once you’re perceived as a competitor, it spreads fast.

If you try to deny it the headline just reads “Startup founder denies his product is a threat to Google.” If you’re at Google and you’re reading that, the subtext is, “We are going to kill Google one day, we’re just not ready to announce that yet.” That’s when they  press the button on their command chair  labelled “launch ninjas”. You don’t want that.

So there you have go: it’s sometimes necessary to compare your product and your company to others. It’s hard to compare without being critical. But being critical comes with risks. Don’t do it lightly and follow these rules.

Media relations: not dead yet, just dramatically different

// October 23rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media relations, Other news

Here’s an important rule: it’s easy to get journalists to write about you; it’s just hard to control what they write.

I’ve been doing some consulting to startups recently with the lads at Pollenizer and the other day the topic of media relations arose. “Media relations?” somebody said, “Isn’t that extinct?”

Not quite, not yet.

For a decade, people (including me) advocating the use of online marketing have talked trash at traditional marketing, criticising it as too expensive, not measurable enough, and too often ineffective. Well, yes and no. Yes, when it’s done poorly. Less so when it’s done creatively and well. Maybe we argued our point too hard, made it all seem a little to black-and-white, either/or, us or them. Because it shouldn’t be.

If you’ve been paying attention, online advertising, viral memes and social media can each be wildly expensive, sadly ineffective, and impossibly difficult to measure too. That’s partly because there are poor practitioners of any craft, but largely because these are such new marketing disciplines there is very little known about how to do them well. At Pollenizer we’ve begun reviewing the ways of measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns, and, well… picture a dusty, deserted road and a tumbleweed blowing in the wind.

At least people have been doing traditional marketing for a long time. Yes, they can still lie to you. The circulation figures of almost any newspaper or magazine will be an outright lie. The audience numbers for any TV show will be a witty pun that you shouldn’t take too seriously. A media relations person who says they know just how to get your message across perfectly is just checking to see if you’re paying attention. But this maze is known and negotiable. The facts can be discerned. And there are libraries full of the history of traditional marketing. Hell, in Australia, television advertising even has its own TV show, on the ABC, no less!

You can’t afford offline advertising, no matter how effective, but you can get results with media relations. While it’s sometimes considered the ugly stepsister of traditional marketing, for an internet startup it’s often an effective option on a small budget. It hits your customer, partner and investor audiences, and it has a very long tail.

For my tips on how and why to do media relations in a 2.0 world, schlep on over to the Pollenizer blog.