Although it’s exciting to witness the evolution of the Public Relations industry, it is also a bit frightening. PR is evolving quickly, from the technology used, to the changing market dynamics, to the increased demands and empowerment of the twenty-first-century consumer. Most important, the principles and channels you use to reach people, whether influencers or your direct customers, are also changing. It’s impossible to continue viewing the PR industry in the same way we have for years. After all, we always have something new to learn and embrace—no matter how much we think we currently know.
You might have uttered or heard this question once or twice in your career: “What’s wrong with PR?” Many PR veterans are cautiously or skeptically observing the changes taking place in PR. Instead of debating what’s wrong with the status quo, let’s look at a different way. With Web 2.0 and the mass adoption of Social Media (discussed in more detail later), we can also ask, “What can we do better to make PR more effective in these rapidly changing times?”
The answer involves a new, forward-looking way of thinking. The answer also shows you how to enhance your own personal experience, value, and brand through engagement and how to approach Social Media for your brands. For us, it took years (in fact, a decade) to change our way of thinking about PR. But now we believe that the socialization of media and PR 2.0 have expedited all the good change that we see today and discuss throughout this book.
In the chapters ahead, we examine why and how PR has changed and still is changing, and how PR 2.0, Social Media, and marketing conversations with customers and new influencers are reinventing an industry. Over the course of our careers, we have talked with hundreds of professionals to find out what they believe are the greatest benefits of PR and what they think PR is supposed to achieve. Those conversations have told us that these professionals believe that good PR does the following:
• Provides one of the most credible forms of marketing: third-party endorsements
• Leads to effective communication, which builds trust and strong relationships with media, bloggers, analysts, influencers, and customers
• Influences and changes opinion, increases exposure, and builds a positive image and reputation
• Creates presence, enhances brand loyalty, and extends brand resonance
• Elicits response and action
These positive features of PR must remain prominent in our minds as we consider the changing markets, the advancing Internet technology, and the shifting ways in which consumers want to receive information (and, in turn, share it in their communities). Because of the technological revolution currently underway, PR can truly be one of the most powerful marketing disciplines. And although we know that PR should always result in the positives previously listed, we must now seriously consider some new factors: how to engage and communicate through the appropriate channels and which tools to use to achieve these benefits.
Let’s first identify what’s wrong with the industry before we try to fix it. This is not a bashing session to point fingers or otherwise place blame on you, your PR and marketing colleagues, or your faithful industry associations (or to make professionals feel like they “just don’t get it”). Instead, this is our way of saying that we recognize how difficult it is to embrace change. With insight and shared knowledge, however, we can move forward together. If we establish and maintain a united front, the change will be easier and more widely accepted. It will also help so many companies and their customers have meaningful, direct conversations—dialogue resulting in strong relationships and, ultimately, more brand loyalty. The change is meant to complement traditional PR, which means that first we must reflect on the status quo. Our goal, as you are reading Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, is to have you say, “I know what’s wrong with PR, and I know what to do to fix it.”
As experienced professionals, we can identify what is good within our industry and then pinpoint what is less than desirable—the PR practices we prefer to leave behind. In the face of socialized media, however, our industry has a new wave of critics. And instead of plugging our ears, we’re listening and sharing what we’ve learned with you.
Countless articles, books, blog posts, comments, and opinions speculate about why PR doesn’t work and why so many executives have a bad taste in their mouths at the mere mention of Public Relations. In this book, we show you how this conversation has been building in various communities (for example, in blogs), with some very influential people sharing their opinions.
Industry veteran, financier, and marketing evangelist (the man credited with bringing “evangelism” into the marketing department through his work with Apple in the 1980s) Guy Kawasaki sparked a thread of conversation with his blog post “The Top 10 Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work.” Kawasaki followed up with “DIY PR,” a guide to “do-it-yourself” PR penned by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. With blog titles such as these, every new comment, link, and blog post ruffled feathers and bruised egos. (This is just a small glimpse at the ongoing discussions about this topic; you can also get involved in the dialogue and vest in the process of improving and changing the game.)
Truth be told, there are 1,000 reasons why PR doesn’t work, but there are also countless reasons why it does work. Sometimes DIY PR works, too, but often it works to an extent that eventually requires an internal team or an agency (depending on the goals and reach of the campaign).
Kawasaki’s blog post, sourcing Zable Fisher of ThePRSite, lists the top ten reasons why PR doesn’t work:
1. The client doesn’t understand the publicity process.
2. The scope of work is not detailed and agreed upon by both parties.
3. The client has not been properly trained on how to communicate with the media.
4. The client and the PR person or PR firm are not a good match.
5. The client has not gotten results quickly enough and ends the relationship too soon.
6. PR people don’t explain the kind of publicity placements a client will most likely receive.
7. Clients don’t realize that what happens after you get the publicity coverage is sometimes more important than the actual placement.
8. Clients refuse to be flexible on their story angles.
9. Clients get upset when the media coverage is not 100 percent accurate or not the kind of coverage that they wanted.
10. Clients won’t change their schedules for the media.
However, paring PR to its basics to address these top ten concerns will not solve the industry-wide plague of bad PR. In fact, just addressing these concerns would make sense only to those who believe that bad PR doesn’t exist.
Dave McClure, a Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur, seemed to capture it more accurately in his blog—at least, for those of us in a world that demands that we prove value and worth using metrics (and not just whether we can get along with people, trained our spokespersons well, or explained the publicity process so that executives could have something other than running a business to worry about). McClure summed up his top six reasons why PR doesn’t work:
1. The PR firm doesn’t understand the product or technology.
2. The PR firm is seen as a spinner, blocker, or gatekeeper to access the CEO/CTO/brain trust.
3. The PR firm hasn’t been properly trained on how to communicate with bloggers or Social Media.
4. The PR firm prefers working with a few big traditional media instead of lots of smaller online media and online channels.
5. The PR firm doesn’t understand SEO (search engine optimzation), SEM (search engine marketing), widgets, blogs, tags, social networks, pictures, video, or other online and viral methods—a.k.a. “all that Web 2.0 stuff.”
6. Most PR folks have no clue what the hell a TechMeme is.
(TechMeme is a news aggregation site for the most popular discussed technology news stories at any given moment. McClure’s point is that PR people generally don’t stay plugged into the evolution within their own respective industries.)
Obviously, there’s no shortage of gripes about PR. If you look closely, however, you’ll notice common themes. We asked a few more respected influencers about why PR works and why it doesn’t. Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang continued with more reasons why PR doesn’t work on his blog, www.web-strategist.com, paraphrased here:
1. Dialogue versus monologue is not fully understood. I believe that markets are two-way conversations, not message throwing. As dialogue happens, communities form and trust (or distrust) forms.
2. Marketing is about storytelling, not raw facts on the press release.
3. Marketing (and communications) is not just facts (the when, what, and where), but it’s telling a story, engaging the community, and being “human.”
4. The community must be included in the event and message.
5. In countless events that I’ve attended, PR firms have forgotten to welcome or invite “influential people” who will help dialogue or tell a story about the event using Social Media. Although it often makes sense to invite the mainstream media, don’t forget that customers are now playing the role of media as well as analyst. I got beat up pretty bad when I asked this question: “Who should you trust more, a paid analyst or a customer blogger?”
6. More than one group in the company does Public Relations (resulting in a lack of awareness).
PR is no longer limited to the PR firm or corporate communications. Various groups and individuals will communicate with the market. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s important to understand Brian Oberkirch’s Edgework concept.
Brian Oberkirch is a marketing consultant focused on Social Media and product development. His Edgework concept is inspired by the very media evolution that we highlight in this book. It’s based on the idea that PR can also complement outbound influencer and market relations with two-way dialogue.
You can understand from this discussion that PR and the way we need to communicate with people are changing. No matter what business you’re in, you can do a number of things to help you improve, manage, and measure PR. This list of 20 PR gripes is a game changer and can serve as the foundation for improving PR and elevating its value among those who have been burned by previous experiences.
So you’ve heard some reasons why PR fails (from us and from people who join us on a quest to better an industry). This is the part where you can take your fingers out of your ears. The gripes about PR that we’ve heard for years, our own involvement in the discussion, and the dialogue among people who share similar concerns—all these conversations are important. They set the stage for the chapters ahead. We affirm that we can all learn something about our own communications. It’s similar to driving: No one admits to being a bad driver, but the roads and highways are full of them.
If you read carefully, you’ll realize that our suggestions or answers to the “What’s wrong with PR?” question are just the beginning. By internalizing and remembering them, you will see and think about things differently:
• Remember that just because you show up to work doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It may simply equate to you keeping your job.
• If you expect to represent anything, whether in an agency or in a company, spend a significant portion of your time figuring out why it matters to people—on your own time. This is the difference between PR and good PR.
• Figure out who your customers are and where they go for their information. This forces PR to mirror sales strategies to reach the people who could benefit from the product or service. Different people go to different places for information. First determine where you want to be, and then work backward from there.
• Read the blogs, magazines, newspapers, forums, newsletters, and so on—this is where customers are actively engaged. Then understand how to translate what you do in a way that matters. This is the only way to be successful in running PR in the “Long Tail.” People within your target markets share experiences, pains, and wants that are unique to each group. By reading, you’re participating. And by participating, you’re better staged to engage more effectively than the rest of the flacks.
The Long Tail, written by Chris Anderson, describes a niche business strategy in which businesses realize significant profit by selling small volumes of hard-to-sell items instead of focusing on large volumes of blockbuster items.
• Don’t speak in messages. Instead, spark conversations based on the unique requirements of each market segment and the people within them. And please, don’t spin. We all hate when politicians do it. If you find yourself consistently selling or spinning instead of evangelizing, you might be in the wrong place in your career.
• Traditional PR still matters, but you also need to embrace Social Media (after you’ve had a chance to participate as a person and not as a marketer). This is the future of PR. Understanding how it works and what it takes to participate will ensure that your experience is relevant to the communications needs of businesses during the next decade.
• Broadcasting your “message” to your audience with top-down PR campaigns no longer works in New Media. You have to engage people through the diverse segments that represent your target markets.
• When working with reporters, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers, spend a significant amount of time understanding what they write about, to whom, and why. Then align your story accordingly. One story no longer applies to the masses.
• When you understand what it takes to make the story more compelling to the various markets and the influencers who reach them, then, and only then, think about news releases. One news release no longer carries across the entire spectrum of customers. Figure out the core value proposition and then write several different flavors based on the needs and pains of your target customers, addressing how you will help them do something better, easier, and more cost-effectively.
• Set goals with the executive team of the company you represent. Based on the previous points, you have to ensure that your activities align with their business strategy. Ask them to define success month-to-month so that you can all agree, in advance, what it takes to move forward. Create the PR program that will help you achieve these goals. If anything beyond your control stands in your way of success, do what it takes to fix it. If your spokesperson is horrible, either train him or her or tell the spokesperson that you need someone else. If the product or service isn’t wowing people, find out why and learn what it takes to compel people to use it.
• Communicate progress regularly, document milestones, and showcase successes. PR often suffers from a lack of “PR for the PR.” If you don’t demonstrate success, who will? By communicating progress, status, and feedback, you can consistently prove your value to those who underwrite the PR program.
You can’t fairly assess work that you don’t understand. We also offer our advice to company executives who need to understand the difference between PR and good PR, and how to be an effective partner in the process.
First, understand what PR is and what it isn’t. Businesses often expect PR to perform miracles just because they confuse it with advertising, online marketing, media buying, search marketing, and so forth. PR can’t guarantee legitimate coverage in industry publications, no matter how tight the relationship. If PR promises it, they’re lying. We leverage relationships daily to encourage consideration of “stories” packaged in a way that’s most relevant to them. If we took advantage of our contacts to force coverage whenever we needed to deliver on a promise, it would mark the beginning of the end of our relationships.
Although we won’t compare PR to each branch of marketing, we agree that PR is not advertising. Reporters and bloggers don’t stop what they’re doing to write about your company just because you send them a news release. They’re bombarded by PR people from all over the world. Stories are cultivated. If you respect your contacts, do your homework and help highlight the value of a story—coverage is imminent. If you want guaranteed exposure, buy an ad.
When done correctly, PR is extremely valuable to company branding, which results in immeasurable benefits in the long haul. Customers have choices, and if you’re not consistently vying for their attention, it’s pretty easy to fall off their radar screen when they evaluate options. Too many companies try to nickel-and-dime PR, to the point of absurdity. Don’t get us wrong: Expensive PR doesn’t equal success. But shortchanging PR is usually a first step in the wrong direction.
PR is not a switch. It doesn’t go on and off whenever you have the time or budget to throw at it. The market moves too fast, and if you’re not actively participating in it, you’ll quickly find that company sales and site traffic will begin a downward spiral that might not recover.
In most cases, coverage doesn’t just happen. PR is similar to farming: The more seeds you plant, the more crops (in the form of coverage over time) you will grow (as long as you spend time watering, caring for, and feeding those seeds and new shoots). Although some things force information out quickly (for example, hard news), other stories take time. And when those “slower” stories appear, they help raise brand visibility, drive some people to buy, and also spark others to consider writing about them (which, in turn, influences the cycle to repeat). Don’t assume that all this coverage happens just because you are a popular company or have a killer product. Even the best companies and solutions need great PR to rise above the noise.
Just because you created the product doesn’t mean you’re the best person to sell it. We’ve worked with some of the most passionate executives who just don’t click with the people they’re trying to engage—no matter how hard they try. Suck it up and get a spokesperson who will connect with the people and who will help grow your business.
Understand that PR is only an umbrella for the specific communications initiatives that will help you reach complementary, simultaneous goals. For example, corporate branding and product marketing require different campaigns.
No matter what industry you’re in, realize that the most popular blogs, newspapers, and magazines are only one part of the process. Your market is divided by adoption and buying behavior and documented through many means: a bell curve rich with chasms, pyramids that further divide and classify them, quadrants that demonstrate competitive advantages, ladders that represent how people use the technology to participate in online media, a “cluetrain” that shows how people carry it through the Long Tail as the new conductors, and, hopefully, the guerilla tactics that propel the hockey stick and eventually force you to evaluate what to do from “inside the tornado” to continue the success. For those who just read that sentence and are shaking your heads wondering if you just missed an inside joke, let us explain. We referenced the most often cited and the most popular business and marketing books, graphs, and tactics that help companies carve up their markets and define how to reach them at every step of the product life cycle. Yes, this was meant to be funny...but it does show that one program no longer serves the masses when you deconstruct it by the markets and the people who comprise them.
This means that you have to embrace both New Media and traditional media in PR. In the tech space, for example, TechCrunch, Mashable, Venture Beat, ReadWriteWeb, and other channels will yield measurable traffic so great that most of the time it knocks out company Web servers. Every executive wants these channels. CEOs cry if they can’t get coverage on them. But by no means do they carry your value proposition to the entire collective of people who might embrace your product and help sustain your business for the whole game.
These channels represent early adopters and pragmatists. However, other worlds of global micro communities rich with horizontal and vertical publications and blogs can carry your story to the more conservative groups of people who collectively converge as the primary base of recurring revenue. In this case, it’s less about traffic and hits as metrics for success and more about quality, registrations, purchases, referrals, and so on that define business growth.
Engage in Social Media. We live in a “social” economy, and the only way to succeed in it is to participate:
• Listen to what your customers and the customers of your competitors are saying.
• Blog about industry-relevant topics, not just company accomplishments. Social Media is not just a new tool in the marketing belt. It is a new opportunity to engage customers and cultivate relationships. Be a resource for your community. Comment on other blogs, too. Be part of the conversation.
• Embrace online video and watch how creative, genuine, and cool content becomes incredibly viral. Words can carry the message just so far, but video is an opportunity to showcase the product while entertaining viewers.
• If possible, host a podcast, livestream, or Webcast to share new updates, customer successes, ideas for new product uses, and so forth. Embrace and cultivate the community.
• Bookmark and share relevant links using the popular social tools available.
• Cultivate user-generated content.
• Write Social Media releases in addition to traditional releases.
• If relevant, build transparent profiles in the social networks where your customers can find and support you and where you can find and support them. Go where your customers are.
• Share images, demos, and behind-the-scenes footage using services such as Flickr, Zooomr, and YouTube.
• Hire a community manager. Having someone actively represent the company in all things social will complement New PR by providing proactive information and support to people looking for guidance in the communities they frequent. Don’t market to them—have conversations.
Although this is just an ultra-simplified list of how to jump into the world of Social Media, your initial participation will increase your curiosity, knowledge, and online savvy. You can expect your community profile to increase exponentially with your participation. But first you have to get your feet wet.
Support your PR program and feed it as you do any other branch of the company. Respect it when it works and let your team share in the success. Don’t focus on the shortcomings. Extend congratulations as goals are achieved.
If you find a PR person who truly lives and breathes the company and the product, never let that person go. These Allstars are a rare breed and deserve support and promotion.
Meet with your PR team regularly to communicate realistic goals and measure progress. Paint a real-world picture of what success looks like each month and listen to the reports to see whether those goals are indeed attainable. You get out of PR what you put into it.
Agree upon metrics in advance. Executives often lose sight of what PR is designed to do. The right coverage is invaluable, even when it doesn’t translate directly into visible hits, traffic spikes, or sales. Super Bowl ads, for example, rarely pay for themselves in the short run. Realize that a proactive, intelligent, and consistent PR program will contribute to the bottom line. It shouldn’t be solely responsible for company success or failure. Metrics can be in the form of specific targets every month, registrations, lead generation, links, and, now, conversations.
In the past, a PR person looked at a campaign with a well-known and highly accepted approach: You evaluate the target demographics, develop strategic messages, conduct an audit or focus group, revise messages, determine the broadcast mechanisms to push your content, go live, monitor the response, evaluate the ROI, and repeat the process with enhanced information.
However, communicators who have embraced Social Media and the idea that sociology is a prominent focus, not just the technology that facilitates the process, take a much different approach.
Brian shed some light on this topic when he blogged about an excellent example of a company whose communication team knew the value of dialogue and engagement. Skullcandy (www.skullcandy.com) is a popular Generation Y brand that makes electronic products, including MP3 players and headphones, that can run circles around Sony, Bose, and Phillips. Everything Skullcandy does is reflective of those they want to engage and embrace—from embeddable widgets with valuable content, downloadable music, custom artwork, and peer-to-peer street teams to blogs, communities, events, and social networks, all combined with traditional marketing. Skullcandy makes the customer the center of everything. And it could do even more to reach customers with the right social tools, proactive participation, elevated outbound strategies, and voices.
Here’s an example of a tweet scan from Twitter engaging a community of people in the Skullcandy brand:
The Skullcandy example shows how PR is changing—more than 180 Skullcandy blogs exist, proving that the brand’s customers are its surrogate sales force.
We think the change in PR is for the better. It will take some intense readjustments in thinking, resources, and participation by all. Most important, it requires you to become more than just a communicator. You need to evolve into something more significant than just a publicist. You can be more effective and valuable as a genuine enthusiast for who and what you represent. We want you to become a part of the New PR movement that carries forward all the good of the past, but also moves ahead with a realistic sense of how today’s brands need to communicate in the market. Welcome to the world of PR 2.0 and the socialization of media—a new standard to advance the PR industry and the communication professionals who abide by today’s rules of conversation.