PR Multiplying or Dividing?

There was an interesting story we tweeted about a few days ago originally written by our friends at PR Newswire that suggested there is some disagreement about the skill set PR pros need to succeed in today’s environment, and there are three points of view emerging:

• The traditionalist, who values the ability to write, build relationships, isolate and convey key messages and build publicity strategy above all else.
• The digital enthusiast, who values social media acuity, digital content production and editing and coding skills highly.
• The quant, which focuses on data, analytics and how PR integrates with business processes.

At NettResults we like to think of it as multiplying and dividing.

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters in a social media world, you have a choice to make. You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

So it is with PR.  You want to ever increase your sphere of influence, or put another way, you want to increase the number of journalist you can call up.  At the same time you want to concentrate your time on the 5% (or is it another 80/20 rule?) that don’t just passively receive your news stories, but actively read into them, converse with you and find the story they can report on.

This is why an intellectual rivalry between traditional PR pros and digital enthusiast PR pros is a loose/loose battle.  To be good at PR in today’s rapidly evolving media market, you need to be both a traditionalist and a digital enthusiast.  Gone are the days when having one Millennial digital evangelist in your PR agency’s office was enough – today each of your teams need to be made up digi-traditionalists.

Oh, and they better be able to measure that success. Results are king.

PR pros and journalists - conjoined twins that constantly squabble

Public relations and journalists have always had a love-hate relationship; simultaneously relying on each other for their professional livelihood while at the same time holding untold (and sometimes voiced) resentment.

They are like conjoined twins that constantly squabble.

Both professions are miss-understood by the general public, but well understood by the other.  Today, the facts are that there are becoming less professional journalist and more public relations professionals. And the trend is getting more dramatic.

In their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about 45 PR workers per one hundred thousand population compared with 36 journalists. In 2008, there were 90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to 25 journalists. That’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.

Oh, and that was 2008 – in the USA.  One can only imagine how those stats have multiplied in the past 4 years taken at a global level.

The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies—they don’t include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government.

Traditional journalism, of course, has been headed in the opposite direction. The Newspaper Association of America reported that newspaper advertising revenue dropped from an all-time high of $49 billion in 2000 to $22 billion in 2009. That’s right - more than half. A lot of that loss is due to the recession. But even the most upbeat news executive has to admit that many of those dollars are not coming back soon.

So, do PR folks and journalists even need to play friendly.  My father was a serious journalists having worked in several countries and eventually settling in the UK writing for The Times and The Sunday Times.  I’ve been involved in public relations (both client and agency side) for over 15 years, so maybe my view is bias, but even in the day of citizen journalism and hyper blogging, the scope of a PR pro and a professional journalist rely on the skills, contacts and reach of each other.

Assuming they have to play in the same sand box, how do PR and journalist folks reconcile the difference in number and budgets to hand?

Well, the number game is not so difficult.  With the ever-increasing efficiencies of technology, there is not only the ability to communicate with multiple people at once (it was only 15 years ago when the best way to do this was to print and envelope stuff your press release), but we can use these tools to understand and build stronger relationships.

One of the age-old truisms for a PR pro is to understand the media and the journalist’s contributions before pitching.  Only ten years ago a PR agency would have piles of newspapers and magazines going back at least a year.  Of course there in no reason for this any more.

So we can speak quicker, to more people, with more meaning and at a deeper level then ever before. This goes for PR pros and journalists equally.

What has caused the budget differences?  In other words why the increase in PR?  I think that is relatively simple.

1 – Globalization.  More companies are conducting business outside of their home city, so need to have a PR strategy in place to speak to their potential and existing customers.

2 – The cost to offer PR services has decreased.  Therefore more PR agencies can offer the service (it’s still a relatively low cost business to start) and more companies can afford to use these professionals (or carry the function in-house).  The fact that there are less traditional media outlets doesn’t really matter – the fact that are so many non-traditional media available just increases the requirement of the PR agency.

3 – Those larger companies that were already implementing an integrated marketing program have spent the past 10 years shifting their expenditure within the marketing functions – money coming from the advertising line item and flowing to the PR and social media line items.

4 – More media is now consumed by more people.  So what if there are less newspapers in existence? How many people did actually read multiple newspapers who were not directly involved in the industry? If you were the type of person who read a newspaper in yesteryear, there are still plenty to choose from. And the number of people logging in online to news / views from newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook etc etc far exceeds newspaper subscription rates in the past. Oh, the fact that so much media is actually free to consumers doesn’t hurt either.

So yes, the PR pro needs the journalist, and for a journalist to act professionally and profitably (they are of course producing and writing more stories, quicker, than ever before) they need the PR pros.

The technology allows for greater communication and sharing of knowledge.

Now all we need to do it get the remaining children to stop squabbling in the name of better media for all. 

SOPA, PIPA & PR

There has been a lot of noise around SOPA and PIPA in the past three weeks so lets break this down and see what this really means, as while there is a lot of noise, there seems to be little real understanding, of how that effects online users and those of us in the PR business.

The chief protagonists in the story that is SOPA and PIPA are getting a bit full of themselves. If you haven't been following this saga, these two bills, prompted Google, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites to black out their logos or temporarily shut down in protest January 18. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, the House version) and PIPA (Protect IP Act, the Senate version) are said to threaten free speech, the future of innovation, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, and the economic foundation of the global economy. Wrote one wag: "Big content is quite literally trying to foist its own version of the Great Firewall of China on to the American public."

For another example of the overwrought reactions, consider the public statement from blog site Boing Boing, which shut itself down on Jan. 18 to protest the two Congressional bills: "We could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits."

For more background on the SOPA anti-piracy legislation, see SOPA: 10 Key Facts.

I'm not going to defend SOPA or PIPA. If, as their critics maintain, the bills effectively give ISPs, search engines, and payment services carte blanche to cut off foreign websites that U.S. movie, music, and other content creators merely claim are profiting from their stolen goods, then the legislation is outlandish. On the flip side, if the SOPA and PIPA language is so broad as to invite such flagrant abuses, then the bills' authors need to start again.

Question is, are they up to the task? An argument making the rounds among the digerati is that SOPA and PIPA are 20th century answers to a 21st century challenge, that the movie, music, and media industry lobbyists and their Congressional puppets just don't understand the dynamics of the Internet. If that's so (and maybe it is), then it's up to the Internet industry stalwarts opposing SOPA/PIPA to rally support for a meaningful, 21st century alternative to stopping online content piracy. Most of them pay lip service to the notion that such piracy is a serious problem. It's time for them to stop grandstanding--stop stomping their feet and holding their breath--and start showing the 20th century studios and record labels and media companies and their clueless lobbyists and Congressional supporters a much more effective way to address this issue.

To its credit Google, whose YouTube is a dumping ground for pirated material, is behind an alternative bill--The Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade, or OPEN, Act and is seeking industry comment and collaboration. That collaboration must include movie, music, and media companies.

And from a PR point of view – why do we care?  Well, as with most discussions/arguments that prompt emotions in the public domain, it is PR that can fuel the fire or bring parties closer to find a resolution.  Inevitably one side or another has a stronger PR strategy and that often leads to the majority of media aligning.

We’ve said it a million times – we live in a new digital age… and that is somewhat upsetting the public domain apple cart.  With so much personal publishing (yes, I’m talking about the blogging and micro-blogging world) we see loose groupings (non-corporate) of individuals creating power. I’m thinking of the Occupy movements in cities round the U.S. and Spring Uprisings in the Middle East. So here’s the million-dollar question – how can these groups really integrate a coherent media relations program?

They don’t have the structure, resources or full time dedication of most organized businesses, charities or public offices, but they still have the power. They have a need to push public debate and while they are very good at using social media to do this, they need to work out how to use public relations to further develop their power and to reach those luddites that don’t spend 3 hours a day on social media platforms (apparently there is a massive population around the world that doesn’t – who knew?). Or maybe they don’t.  Maybe a successful PR agency will find a solution…

When advertising needs PR (yes it's Super Bowl)!

As far as the U.S. market is concerned, there's once a year when advertising and PR hold hands; or maybe more precisely advertising depends on media relations to make them successful (OK - so that has just pissed off a bunch of creatives, but hey, that's life). It's the Super Bowl.

Quickly approaching this coming weekend, the Super Bowl 2012 always promises to bring out TV adverts that entertain and delight.  While we don't have time to go over some really cool PR stories about ads from the past, we do have time now to give you a sneak peak of what is coming up this weekend.

Some of the adverts are available (or their previews are) here.

There is inevitably the actual media relations about how much money a 30 second spot actually costs. Then the best ads create great PR around them.  This year, look out for the companies which are using social media to get the anticipation glands going (Century 21 seem to have a strong strategy in place). Similarly look for hash tags that are quite prominent in the ads - not of the company/brand name, but around the campaign name/message.

Enjoy the ads and watch this space to see how PR will treat this year's ad-fest.

Social Media, Journalists and Public Relations Agencies

Our friends at Cision have just released their  2011 Cision-Newhouse School Digital Influencers Survey. It has some interesting findings and you can read the full research here.

Now, much as we love research and its findings, we do have to identify that Cision's research is often heavily skewed to the bias of selling media lists and the Cision services.  That said, we all benefit from understanding exactly how to use social media with the media.

The 2011 digital influencer survey shows that social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (with the impact of Google+ soon to be felt) continue to revolutionize how those who create digital content do their jobs: how often they post content (“file stories”) and how they identify stories and trends, cultivate and qualify sources, and share information.

But – perhaps even more importantly – it is apparent that social media has empowered anyone with a voice that resonates with a community to build influence and vie for the same attention and audience as traditional media.

These “other content creators” may not be connected to an established news organization or blog, but their “social capital” is so significant that they have a direct impact on consumers and other influencers.

Those who define themselves as journalists tend to have very different (and less positive) perceptions about the usefulness and accuracy of social media.

Yet all respondents agree that social media is a superior way to share stories, connect with communities, and make their voices heard.

Bottom line - what does this mean to PR agencies and organizations that use agencies?  Well, PR agencies need to use social media tools to inform/converse with journalists and those writing materials that customers are reading.  But they can't rely on them - social media needs to be integrated into journalist outreach.

Power is nothing without Control

...according to the tire manufacturer Pirelli. And so it is with public relations. Gone are the days when an organization can fully control their corporate message to the media.

In days gone by, it was normal for an organization’s employee handbook to strictly dictate that no employee could speak to the media without prior approval and spokesperson media training. No problem.

Then a few years ago social media popped up. According to a recent piece of research by Altimeter, companies average an overwhelming number of corporate owned accounts – about 178. That is a bunch of people from different departments and around the globe that are speaking on social media platforms, that the media are seeing. And that’s before we count the personal SM accounts of employees who happen to mention their job. So what’s to be done?

NettResults recommends three levels of corporate communication development:

1 - Relinquish a mindset of control - instead ‘enable’. In business school we were taught to foster message control and encourage all corporate representatives to stay on message. Yet today, as multiple business units from support, sales, HR and beyond participate in social technologies, communication is spread to the edges of the company – not just from the PR department. As a result, PR groups have changed their mindset to safely enabling business units to communicate, based on pre-set parameters they put in place through governance, coordination, and workflow.

2 - Roll out enterprise workflows - education programs at four levels. We’ve found that savvy corporations have detailed workflows, including sample language in which employees should respond. Beyond creating these workflows, they must be distributed throughout the enterprise through education programs, and drilled. We’ve found savvy corporations have up to four types of education programs spanning: Executive team, social media team, business stakeholder teams, and finally all associates. Even if the mandate is for rank and file employees to not respond in social on behalf of the company, reinforcing education is still required.

3 - Run mock crises. Lastly, we’ve found a closer relationship with media relations, social media and crisis communications. Savvy corporations are working with agency partners such as NettResults to setup mock crisis drills where they approach a week-long crises in a number of hours in private. Not only does this test the mettle of the organization it provides useful training so companies can respond faster, in a more coordinated approach. We have already witnessed health organizations receiving ‘social-crises-ready’ compliance notices and we expect compliance programs to spread into other industries.

Get ready – take control.

Social Media from adorable baby to angst filled adolescent

Is social media about to experience growing pains?

According to people at Unica this year, social media is no longer the adorable baby everyone wants to hold, but the angst filled adolescent – still immature yet no longer cute – who inspires mixed feelings. All things social continue to hold intense interest, with 53% of marketers currently applying it to their marketing efforts. But as tactics rise and fall, a more sophisticated approach is emerging.

Instead of thinking tactic by tactic, marketers are beginning to think strategically across three major areas of social content: owned (what they create), earned (what customers create) and paid (what marketers spend money for).

And as far as NettResults is concerned, social media can be a grumpy old man - so make sure your have an integrated PR and SM campaign in place. Not only can SM be your friend and help you reminisce about good stories (helping you get the word out), it can also turn around and bite you in the butt in a crisis.

What do you think?