One of the challenges facing PR people is to not just cross the chasm of their own professions, but to lead clients--sometimes kicking and screaming in resistance-- across as well. When we interviewed Steve Rubel, we told him we thought he was the leader of that and he shrugged it off. “Go interview Mike Manuel,” he told us. “He’s the real maestro.” So we did. Here’s what Mike, who has played a key role in helping several Yahoo Search, had to say:
Could you just give me a little background on yourself before you started at Voce?
Prior to joining Voce in early 2002, I worked for a tech agency here in the Valley called Walt & Company Communications. The principal was Bob Walt, who spun off Walt & Company in the early 90s after serving hard time running Ketchum’s Silicon Valley office. Bob was a good mentor, with a rare mix of creative energy and business acumen and I learned a lot from him. I spent several years working at Walt, cutting my teeth mostly on consumer technology, enterprise software, and even a few dot com startups.
What are you doing at Voce? Who are your clients?
I work on both traditional and non-traditional PR programs. Non-traditional refers to online, word-of-mouth marketing programs. I like to think my skill set is indicative of a bigger trend afoot: that being as the media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, I think it’s becoming increasingly important that communicators wear multiple hats and know how to use different means for reaching their audiences.
About 18 months ago, I took the lead on building out a new practice that Voce calls Digital Advocacy (DA). While the practice components are primarily focused on online communication, our overall philosophy is that brand advocacy takes a multitude of shapes and forms and it appears in a variety of different places – both traditional and non-traditional. Our DA program aims to help companies understand what’s being said, where opinions are being formed and who the core influencers are. Then we help them determine what would be the best way to get into the conversation.
I work with a mix of clients that include Yahoo, for example. I’m also working with a range of early stage start-ups, most of them in social media. When did you start blogging? What made you decide to start? I started actively reading and following blogs in early 2003. Being a self-proclaimed info junkie, I became addicted to the one-two combo of syndication and blogging. What I found was that the blogosphere augmented my daily info hunt, plus it offered me a raw, unfiltered perspective on my clients and the markets. Long story short, it kept me informed and that made me sharp.
My initial hesitation with respect to a personal blog wasn’t that uncommon I suppose – I wasn’t certain where I would find the time and I didn’t want to commit to something half-heartedly. At the same time, I had always enjoyed writing and a blog seemed like the perfect blend of technology and prose, so I took the plunge and in the spring of 2004 created Media Guerrilla.
How has blogging changed your practice?
I think the most noticeable change is that blogging is forcing firms like ours to shut up and listen. When nearly 10 million people have blogs and an estimated 30+ million people read them, as a communications consultancy, it’s really in our interest and the interest of our clients to take the time to determine how the blogosphere is – or is not – impacting public opinion and brand perception. And you do this by listening. Listening is hard for companies and ironically it’s hard for “communicators” too, especially the command and control types who are accustomed to, well, talking. It takes time for folks to understand this change, but gradually it’s happening.
How has blogging changed you?
PR is an information business. From a professional standpoint, blogging has changed me because I now have immediate access to an amazing pool of knowledge and information. The blogosphere keeps me informed,and allows me to do my job faster and smarter. Media Guerrilla also provides me with a platform to basically brand myself (and indirectly my firm) within the PR and marketing community. And that’s had all sorts of ancillary benefits including new business leads, speaking gigs, story commentary, etc.
From a personal perspective, blogging has allowed me to grow my personal network in an organic way that conventional offline activities just can’t match. The technology really lends itself to relationship-building. Trackbacks, comment threads, cross-linking, blogrolls, etc., they all weave together to help me identify and connect online with people that share common interests, ideas and opinions.
Over time, these online relationships migrate to offline activities like geek dinners and that’s where the network building effects of blogging really come full circle.
I read on your blog that you implement communication campaigns that leverage weblogs, wikis, podcasts and other forms of social media. Can you name a few and tell me about them?
I’m working with a lot of companies on ways they can augment their online communication and marketing programs with new strategies and new tools. For example, we began working with Yahoo’s Search division a little over a year ago with a basic underlying goal to help the division listen and understand how online discussion was impacting its perception – and to formulate a strategy that would allow the group to have more of a voice in a noisy marketplace.
We’ve helped them create an underlying information- gathering process that provides the division with insights into online discussion. We use tools like blogs and wikis to help structure all this data in a meaningful way so that it’s digestible and more important, actionable for a variety of points in the Yahoo Search internal food chain. This is all part of what we call a listening engine. Another listening platform we helped get off the ground was the Yahoo Search Blog. We worked in the background early on with respect to all the planning and development efforts around the effort. Initially it was to help educate folks but later it was to help ensure a practical internal strategy was put in place to support the blog. I think what Yahoo is doing with the search blog is a model for other companies to consider as they formulate their own corporate blog plans. There are a lot of other activities we touch inside Yahoo Search (online and offline) and we’ve actually grown the program to include several other Yahoo divisions.
I understand you have a role in Yahoo 360. What can you tell me about how they expect to pull market share, coming so late after other players?
Yup, the Yahoo 360 group falls under our radar and yes, we helped with some pre- and post-launch marketing activities, but I’ll need to punt on this particular question because there would naturally be some client sensitivities to me publicly talking about their marketing strategy.
How will blogging change PR? What trends do you see?
I see three big themes taking shape:
(1)Blogs are democratizing the media. I think we’ve seen this theme playing out in a couple different iterations now. Whether it’s the Trent Lott scandal or the Dan Rather cover up, the blogosphere is actively watching mainstream media (MSM)– and actively participating in news cycles. The audience has never had an active part in the news cycle, mostly because there was never an easy way for them to be heard. That’s changed.
Today, the barrier to entry for online publishing is 30 seconds and an opinion, and that’s giving new voices near-instant broadcast-like abilities for expressing themselves. This directly impacts both journalists and communicators. It’s forcing communicators to listen. Blogs and participatory media represent a powerful new voice in news making. You can listen to these sources, cultivate a dialogue and fold them into the news cycle or you can ignore them, marginalize their significance and hope that doesn’t come back to bite you.
(2) Blogs are driving corporate transparency. In the same way we’re seeing trust erode with the MSM, we’re seeing the same thing happen with corporate brands. Trust is the only capital you have in the blogosphere and to build trust, companies need to become more transparent. This is a tough one for the command and control PR types who prefer speaking in legally sanitized sound bites. Consumers have known this for a long time, but they’ve lacked a platform for talking back. Now blogging gives them one and, go figure, they’re screaming back. Consumers want to know that companies are listening and they want to know that a company can speak with them directly, at an eye-level. Companies need to do these two things if they want to foster trust.
(3) Blogs are challenging traditional PR practices. The rules of engagement are different with the blogosphere, but the fundamental principles behind solid media relations still apply. Case in point: some of the biggest mistakes companies and agencies are making revolve around taking old school media tactics and lazily applying them to the online community. For example, blasting out the same product announcement to bloggers and journalists is a recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, in much the same way that following a journalist’s column and sending a personalized pitch increases the chances that your story idea gets considered, so too, this tack sets you up for success with bloggers.
I would also argue that PR people that actively comment and perhaps blog themselves are far more likely to succeed with bloggers than those who don’t. There’s just something about knowing the secret handshake...
Dave Black recently posted on some guy named Scoble who spoke at a big PRSA conference. He wrote, “Many attendees still didn’t even know what blogs look like, let alone understand aggregators and RSS feeds.” What do you see happening to these attendees in the near and medium-term future?
Scoble? That guy’s overrated. I think we’re still in the early stages of all this. A lot of education and growth is in front of us and over time will evolve. I think the MSM just this year began legitimizing blogging. Also, we’re just beginning to see big companies offer new products that will lower the barrier to entry for the consumer masses, making the technology more accessible and user-friendly. As these trends continue to take shape, I think more users will come to understand and embrace “what all this blogging stuff is all about.”
