I seem to have renewed interest in bad/good PR pitches these days, particularly regarding social media. Through the Scoble link factory I was pointed to Scott Monty's
Social Media Marketing. He received a video pitch for an ebook. The vid was devoid of hype. It simply had two people staring into a webcam saying what they had to say. Real people. Simple story. We need more of that.
I just got an unsolicited, old-fashioned email from a PR operative who I don't think I ever met. But he had heard me speak, was familiar with my blog and the topics I covered. In less than 250 words, he told me who he was and why he thought I might be interested.
I was.
His name is Ted Weismann. He works for the Lois Paul Agency and his client is Lionbridge. I want to speak to them for the SAP Global Survey. Stay tuned.
Ted did me a favor, bringing me a company that may solve part of the translation problem for social networks that I have written and spoken about. He has done me a favor and it is likely what I write will be helpful to his clients.
As the media trained cliche goes: "It's really that simple." If this happened more often, I would not kvetch about practitioners in my former profession so often.
Lately, I have been hit by a bevy of bad PR pitches. They have about the same effect n me as eating bad clams. I am a recovering publicist, so I try to be gentle and encouraging to PR folk, even though I rarely write about a pitched company or topic. But this week, I know I got grumpy. Enough is enough.
So many of my favorite bloggers are PR folk. There are probably too many to mention. But Phil Gomes, Mike Manuel, Kami Huyse, Joe Thornley, Shel Holtz, David Parmet, Josh Hallett, and Chris Heuer are the first to come to mind. There are others, but I'm feeling link-lazy.
Many started blogging before or at about the same time as I did and, as far as I can tell, few of them reached prominence in their field before they became so immersed in blogging and social media. They figured out that the fundamentals of PR had shifted. Instead of pitching influencers, they could be influencers. They realized that while a hit in the times or at Scobleizer was nice, a hit in their own posts could have its impact as well.
Each of these players gave me hope that enough PR practitioners would understand and embrace the fundamental change in the PR practice. That their was greater PR impact in talking with client customers than sending them messages through traditional tactics.
But the taper off seems to be sharpening. My experience is that an increasing number of PR folk are trying to treat bloggers as media. They want to find the 3-5 highest ranked topical bloggers and get hits that can be converted to clips.
They've learned smarmy little tricks like telling bloggers that they consider the blogger influential. It takes little time for a blogger to realize the pitcher has never read the blog they are pitching.
Here's the real trick. Don't pitch the conversational network. Join it. start your own blog. Get into the social networks like Facebook. Send your own tweets. Be part of the conversation so that we bloggers can see who you are and what yo do and what you have to say.
Then when you say something that is useful or interesting to my readers, chances are I will link to you. If I write something, and you can add value to the conversation--new insight, new data, a different perspective, I will scurry to your blog and read you for a while. Kami Huyse did this to me a while back and I became a fan of her blog and recommend it to all sorts of people. When Kami & Josh launched Sea World's Roller Coaster blog, they didn't have to pitch me. I saw they had news that was relevant and I wrote about it because my audience would be interested. Any of the other bloggers listed above also have sufficient transparency and authenticity. If they wrote about a client, I would not need a pitch from them to be motivated to find a post that would be relevant to my readers.
In the end, that is where my loyalty rests. I write for the people who come here.
My point is this. PR fiolk have a huge new opportunity. They can now have actual relationships with the public. They can bring back what they learn i conversations to clients. That's the real value in blogger relations. The conversation means a great deal, the blogger rankings, in most cases, means very little.
It's springtime! Flowers are blooming and birds are chirping. Time once again to clean out the garage a set the old blogosphere ablaze with the burning of a few publicists. The assault on PR practitioners has become a seasonal thing. I have been a part of it in the past and in Naked Conversations, we wrote an entire chapter called "Survival of the Publicists." In it, we talked about the fact that the image of the PR industry had more cracks in it than the portrait of Dorian Grat. We cited the Edelman Trust Barometer which said PR people were viewed in lower esteem than even lawyers.
Since then I have written several times about the deteriorating business model of traditional PR as well of its diminishing effectiveness. But, I was thinking enough had been said, when this new round of PR good/bad erupted. My friend Jeremiah wrote a post that I thought was intelligent and accurate and found himself the target of outrage by a bevy of PR folk whose nerve ends have become a bit too frayed. PR maven Mike Manuel who has the respect of anyone who see the way he works, had the best one liner of the week when he advised those who didn't like PR: "Go try advertising."
Guy Kawasaki, ran a column on the thoughts of Glenn Kelman, the CEO of real estate startup Redfin on why Kelman thinks he's better off dealing directly with the press without the tag along PR person who he argues, gets in the way of the conversation. In my opinion, it's the best piece yet written on the subject.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that PR folk need to stop bristling and start really thinking about the transformations going on. The term "public relations" is about relationships with the public. You have relationships, as I learned from my wife during 10 years of courting, through listening more than talking. PR as most people practice it today,is more about taking messages from clients to publics. PR people need to figure out how to be a facilitator not of messages but of two-way conversations.
This is not easy and the answer remains unclear. Social Media is obviously part of the solution.
The Internet is the Great Disintermediator. One by one, all institutions that stood between companies and customers are being rendered obsolete. Its true of PR, newspapers, book stores, ravel agents and a great deal more. If Kelman has his way, the list may include real estate agents.
A great number of professions need to adapt. If they cannot handle fundamental and significant environmental changes, they will find themselves in Jurassic Park with the other creatures who could not adapt as well.
Dear Amanda,
Writing to you is one way like writing to Santa Claus. Neither of you actually exists. But there, the similarities diverge. We think of Santa as a jovial elder, filled with goodwill and Amanda, that is just not you. If I write to Santa, I might expect to get gifts back. Amanda, when I write to you I fear that I may receive hostility and venom in return.
Don't get me wrong Amanda. You have been a good show. You are a talented writer and filled with the passion that the best bloggers seem to contain. The PR industry most certainly has its self-inflated members and poking holes in their bubbles can be fun to watch on occasion. In the beginning, Amanda, you were a surprise, even a shock, but not so much anymore.
Amanda, I don't know how to say this, but your act is getting stale, predictable... old. You no longer feel like a satirist, but more like a biting, angry hag, more like a divorcee angry about her settlement, than an observer of the foibles of an industry.
I must admit, I've always had my ambivalence about you. I have a love for blogging and feel pride for the PR industry of which I was a member for 25 years. You are both a blogger and purport to be part of the PR industry. You seem to hate both as much as I respect both. I am an advocate of honesty and humanity in business practice and and Amanda, you practice deception and are not a human at all, but rather a fictitious character, and a pretty bitchy one at that.
Who are you, really Amanda? Is this diatribe of vitriol some form of self purge or self loathing? How can you call others out for not being transparent, when you are so transparent as to not really be there? How can you call for more ethical practices in PR when in your very first post, you boasted about sleeping with clients?
You stand on a virtual soapbox calling for transparency. In fact, you are so transparent that you are but a shadow. You are not there. You are only a pigment of someone's imagination. You are a fantasy blogger, probably giving a strong voice to an essentially meek person.
Amanda, let's talk about truth for a minute, shall we? A few months back, your “webmaster” posted a phony AP wire release that claimed you were seriously injured in a car accident. This turned out to be a fictitious stunt. The AP Release was a phoney. Worse, a photo of a crashed out Porsche was embedded in the false release. This was not your car, but rather one in which people had actually been killed.
Amanda, why did you cheapen yorself with such a stunt? this was not your usual nastiness in the name of satire. This was something lower and I wondered why you had done this. My guess was that you thought we bloggers would pick it up a relay it, then you would jump in and point out what fools we were, but that is not what happened. Bloggers went to work and showed the factual errors. Within hours, the deception was revealed. You whined a couple of times that the accident really happened then, miraculously cured, you just went back to doing whatever it is you think you are doing.
I also wonder about your obsession with the Edelman agency. They certainly have been worth of criticism in recent times. But so have just about all the other major agencies, or for that matter most large organizations. I have come to suspect that it's something personal between you and them, something that makes them your Moby Dick, a great pale whale into which you obsessively wish to shove your harpoon.
I had to wonder about your response to my recent post on Edelman executive Phil Gomes, whom you recently addressed in what I thought was slanderous fashion. Now, I don’t know Phil very well. In fact, I've only met him briefly a couple of times before. The post I made was hardly lauditory, and in fact had a couple of gaffes that Phil saw fit to correct. But I thought he made a good point on the issue of captive and open online communities. I thoughtthat might interest some of my readers, so I posted a few paragraphs.
Thetwist was that I almost didn't write it, because the thought crossed my mind: “Shit, Amanda's going to come after me, if I say something neutral or favorable about Phil." But, Hell, we all have trolls, people who follow prominent bloggers around and say bad things about them wherever and whenever mentioned, and Amanda, you have become Phil's troll.
By the time my plane had landed in California, your Comment had been posted. You implied I had some secret agenda and that I lacked transparency. I do not, but the same back at you, Amanda. Why are you on an Edelman vendetta? Did something happen between you and them? C'mon you can tell us bloggers. And while we are at it, I don't seriously consider attacks on my transparency from people who hide anonymously behind fictional character masks.
Amanda, I suspect that you have multiple personalities because you are written by multiple people. At one time detecting who you are interested me. It no longer does. You are becoming predictable, too-often angry, too rarely funny. What you have to say is no longer fresh.
Amanda, I was 19 years between wives. I had many stormy relationships during those days. Like you, some of my partners were provocative as Hell, but over time, one of us would come to realize the relationship had died of atrophy. That is what is happening for you and the blogosphere Amanda. If we know what it is you have to say, then it is not all that interesting and fewer of us will read or talk about you.
Frankly, Amanda, I’m bored with our relationship. I refer the virtual company of real people. If you want to come back as whoever you are, you may find it liberating. But if you continue down the well worn path you are on, you may find yourself hollering when no one is listening.
Yours truly,
Shel
Phil Gomes the first PR Blogger, an Edelman VP is on the podium here at the Bulldog PR University in Chicago. Research shows that people trust people like themselves. He refers to Trust Barometer has for three years showed people trust peers more than doctors or academics. Entertainers and atheletes were dead last.
He divides social networking into two camps. One camp is a captive area. Sites that try to keep you. He names MySpace, Friendster and Bebo as examples. More compelling he says are the open social network spaces which denote relationships that form online.
He's talking about B to B PR and pointing out that a blogger can get precisely to the audiences that matter to a company, without touching anyone else. Moving to consumer, he notes that an average MySpace visitor spends an astounding 172 minutes per visit. Facebook is consider the safest of these closed consumer communities and Bebo dominates Europe. Over in South Korea, CyWorld as a community of 19 million users. Gather, one I don't persoanlly know is described as MySpace for grown ups. I think it will be interesting to see if MySpace will let users just leave when they reach a certain age.
Word of mouth is not new, it's been around since the beginning f time, an observation, I'll repeat when I speak later today. He gives a case study of how Edelman used MySpace via a "Forbidden, a popular, somewhat racy woman to promote their Game Killer client. It got word of mouth going and it was transparent in the effort.
He says that as an agency the idea is to find the right voice inside a captive online community. He found four message boards to promote Nissan G35 Coupe, prior t the auto show. The idea was to give something of real value as opposed to just do a promo inside the communities. They went to four message boards. The message board owners treated the video showing the new car was theirs. They then evangelized it into the blogosphere.
He advises PR pros to not to polish videos when they post and to not treat bloggers like lower tier media.
Nice job, Phil.
[NOTE: I tweaked this after posting it and have just changed the text from the original throughout the post.]
The following are my draft talking points for my talk Thursday in Chicago at the Bulldog reporter PR University. I am not entirely satisfied with the closing poiints and would welcome some more additions. If I use your comments I will credit them to you in my talk.
1. I am a “recovering publicist.” One day, early in 2001, I scrawled “Stop me before I pitch again” across a mirror. …been going to “Pitch-enders” ever since.
2. Was in PR more than 25 years. Worked with tech startups. Loved it. Loved the creativity and integrity of most PR people I knew.
3. I left for many reasons. A few I recall:
4. Environmental changes
5. The generation now emerging, the one who will inherit my desktop and my generation in the workplace is now 25 or younger. They are the Online Generation –“Onliners” for short.
6. The overriding question that you need to ask yourselves is what happens when the Onliners come of age, replacing we 60s kids and boomers as we drive off to Jurassic Park to join the other fossils who could not adapt to change? What tools to reach the Online Generation?
6. So once again: How does PR adapt? What is the practitioner’s role moving forward? Does PR even have a role? Is this change a threat or an opportunity?
7. I'll answer that last question first. It’s the easiest and the most ambiguous: Social media is both threat and opportunity for PR. … a threat because there is a fundamental change in the way people are influenced on what they buy, watch, read and listen to. Change is disruptive. When there is disruption some companies rise and others fall. Rarely do they ever rise again.
Social Media is simultaneously an opportunity because PR people are generally great conversationalists and we are entering the Conversational Era. In it, we are transitioning from monologue into dialog. Through conversations you can find out what customers want simply by asking them. You can deliver more popular products just by doing what they tell you to do.
PR also has an opportunity also because advertising is more broken than PR and will take longer to fix. Companies will be turning to PR sooner for more immediate answers. It will be a wise agency who is ready with answers.
8. This Conversational Era has just now begun. PR in 5, 10 & 20 years will have a far more value than it does today—not just for your clients, but for the communities those clients wish to be part of. What's also relevant about the next 20 years is a fundamental shift in the habits of the people leaving the marketplace and those who are preschoolers and young adults today.
9. Two cautions:
10. As you take a look at social media consider this phenomenon: Power is moving from the large organization into communities. People who are most generous in these communities are the most influential.
11. Consider also: The online community is nt confined to any single URL. You won’t succeed by marketing to MySpace and more than you would by sending the same messages to the ruling class and shantytowns of Sao Paolo and MySpace is many times larger.
12. Here’s what’s actually happening. People with shared interests from all over the world are bopping from one place to another. The same people are meeting up with the same people at blogs and photo sites. They are downloading the same music and videos. In these virtual spaces, real and lasting trusted social networks are forming. Often people meet online first, then encounter each other face-to-face later. It's like meeting old friends for the first time.
13. I call these groups who are defined by neither geography nor URL Global neighborhoods. They are smaller and more intimate than the huge online communities. They are comprised of people who share diverse passions, on almost any subject: hummingbirds or Hummers, Global warming or urban terrorism, Religious fundamentalism or fundamental paganism. I'm writing a book called Global Neighborhoods, which is about just their relevance to business. The challenge is to be brief.
14. Global neighborhoods work very much like the tangible ones where you live in. You get to know some of your neighbors. The more time you spend there the more familiar you become. Trust builds on neighborhood issues. You know to ask about recommend movies or where to get your car fixed. You know how to avoid commuter snarls and where it's safe to walk alone or not.
Over time, each neighborhood resident earns a personal brand.
Transition:Now, Bulldog folk don’t let you up onto the dais without specific tactical advice. That’s hard for me because I’m more concerned with where you are going than how you are going to get there. But I’ll try to give you a few tips. I blogged about this and got a few tips from people in my own Global neighborhood, which includes a good number of PR bloggers.
My closing thought: those of you in this room, are part of a profession filled with brilliant conversationalists, people with knowledge and passion. You are more generous than your current image would have people believe. We are entering ‘’The Conversational Era.’
This is your time. Join the conversation. Enjoy.
I'm the after-lunch keynoter Friday at the Bulldog Reporter PR University in Chicago. I'm speaking, of course, about blogs and social media.
But I want to give some fresh advice to PR folk, both on a tactical and on a strategic level. Do you have any advice I should convey? If I use it, I'll credit you.
Amanda Chapel calls herself a satirist, but I've never been so sure. The great satirists I've known--Jonathan Swift and Mad Magazine, have used humor as a weapon to reveal truth. Amanda, all too often, seems to me to be using harshness and even cruelty. She often seems to me more like she's talking trash then serving up satire.
Last week, she apologized to Jeff Jarvis in a post after being admonished by blog fountainhead David Weinberger. Well sort of. After calling Jarvis all sorts of nasty names, she wrote that Jeff should realize her insulting him on a well-read, and often-quoted blog is nothing personal. Most of us think that being held up to public ridicule and scorn is quite personal.
The very next day Amanda fired a volley of very cheap shots at Edelman blogger Phil Gomes.
Then, to continue her bipolar behavior, she graciously turned over her blog space over to Shel Holtz, perhaps the highest road, social media player in the PR industry.. Shel did a devastating job on her by calmly, rationally dissecting Amanda for the savage and inaccurate shots she took at Gomes for the crime of moving from LA to Chicago, supposedly to be closer to a particular woman.
Amanda is someone who lives at or near the top, which makes her often go over it. She reminds me of my favorite quote from TS Eliot: "Only those who risk going to far can possibly know how far one can go."
Amanda goes too far.
Personally, I think it's a shame. She's a Hell of a writer and seems to me to be extremely knowledgeable about the innards of the PR industry. My experience as a recovering publicist is that it is too self congratulatory while knowing very little about relationships with the public. I think it can use someone to poke it in the eye and Amanda has gleefully volunteered for the task.
To that degree Amanda provides a great service and her blog is one of the most provocative reads on my RSS list. She tells me she likes being called provocative.
It seems to me, she could serve everyone better if she lay down her broadaxe and learn to use a scalpel. She would score more points if she attacked issues and the abundant lame practices in the PR industry and singled out individuals a whole lot less.
As I've written and said too many times, I am a recovering publicist. One day, I scrawled on a restroom mirror, "stop me before I pitch again." I've joined Hypers Anonymous, and attend meetings once weekly. I have not pitched in over five years.
Well none of that is not exactly true. In 2001, I sold SIPR, my PR agency to employees and went home. The main reason was not a disaffection with the profession but that a bubble popped in my face. My choices were to lay everyone off and start all over again, or to turn the keys over to everyone else and go home.
I opted for the latter.
What is true however, is that PR as I had learned it Regis McKenna, Inc. the legendary tech PR agency had changed significantly during my tenure and I did not think it was for the better. At Regis we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects. The press loved speaking to us, because were industry insiders. We knew what was going on in this new place called Silicon Valley. We were active particpants in conversations. We were facilitators for our clients. We knew which editor wanted what story and we helped them get it, sometimes pointing them to companies that were not agency clients.
As an aside, the press release was considered an almost superflous document in the Regis process. He used to say that he didn't care if it was just a series of bullet points. After all, we were not in the news writing business. We were more relationship facilitators than anything else. While many were cute, Regis hired people because they were smart. many of us were aggressive, perhaps overly so, but some of us did quitre well by being slow, methodical and thoughtful.
Much has passed from then to now, but I am not the only observer who believes the early 80s were a Golden Age in tech PR. It was a respected profession then. Editors, for th most part, valued us. We were translators of the complex into terms that people could understand. We had special knowledge worth sharing. Our clients were often engineers who wanted to tell you how hard it was to accomplish something. We simplified the story. Simplified it and facilitated its distribtution to people who made a difference.
It seems to me we have come full circle because of several factors, particularly the rise of the internet and the reduced relevance of traditional media. Back in the Regis days, we played active roles in the conversation--not as client boosting hypesters, but as knowledgeable resources. We eroded into roles as smilers and dialers. Now because all that smiling and dialing has become increasingly ineffectual, there is a great opportunity for the PR professional to once again join the conversation.
PR people have a future as the same kind of trusted resources we were back in the days of Regis McKenna. except now we can use blogging and social media. We get to establish our own credibility over time and when we discuss our own clients on our blogs, we are trusted sources of information relevant to our audiences.
There are all sorts of people doing this today. They may get hung up n small matters such as the social media press release, but that is not relevant. What's relevant is that we know them from an ongoing series of conversations held on the Internet. I may disagree with Shel Holtz about the social media release and whether we are in a new phase of a PR continuum as he believes or at the beginning of a social revolution as I believe. In the large sense such issues are no great matter.
What is a great matter, if you are in the PR proffesion is that you will not succeed if you focus on smiling and dialing a media list of strangers, if you are intent in inject hubris into what you have to say or write. If you think you can succeed by being just cute or clever, you are living in the wrong Era.
Today, you need to join the conversation. You are part of the news distribution system, not just for your clients, but for the community where your clients would like to flourish.
This to me is very liberating. The PR people I know and respect are all interesting people and great story teller. They often know so much more than their clients allow them to express. We are now in a Conversational Era. It looks like we will be in this Era for some time to come, and the best and brightest of the PR professionals will join in that conversation, while others will just be left behind.
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