Chapter 3. PR 2.0 in a Web 2.0 World

You might be asking, “What do people mean when they refer to the Web 2.0 world? How does PR fit in, and how does Web 2.0 complement PR?” These are all valid questions. If you were to research the origins of Web 2.0, you would find that Tim O’Reilly coined the term. O’Reilly was a huge supporter of free software and the open source movement. His company, O’Reilly Media, is known as a technology transfer company focused on “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators” (in the words of Wikipedia). After the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004, the term became widely recognized and communities developed online to enable collaboration, sharing, and creativity among users. These communities included social networking sites, blogs, and wikis. Web 2.0 brought a new way for groups of people to converse, and it presented an opportunity for them to gather and then share information collectively.

This was the rebirth of the Web. It was also a catalyst for officially inspiring the reinvention of public relations.

The New Collaborators

Web 2.0 introduced a read/write Web, a new paradigm where hosts and participants could contribute to a more collaborative Web landscape and experience. But it’s not the tools that make Web 2.0 or New PR what it is today; it’s clearly the many people who collaborate and share information every day in their communities and who demonstrate how the latest tools can facilitate conversations and foster relationships across the Web. Web 2.0 introduced the Social Web, which is about people communicating with each other using the tools that reach their respective online communities. Online conversations and the discovery, creation, and sharing of content is the foundation for Web 2.0, Social Media, and New PR. New PR’s goal is to understand the communities of people we want to reach and how to engage them in conversations without marketing at them.

The Social Web induced the realization by smart companies that the people and respective brands that “let go” and share control of how messages and communications are received and perceived, create and foster a more active and respected community through communication and the participation in direct conversations with their peers and customers. In a Web 2.0 world, “command and control communication,” which is dictated and prescripted communication, has diminished because companies are realizing that this type of communication no longer belongs in today’s marketplace. In this “new world,” companies augment and “let go” of the push and broadcast mechanisms associated with traditional marketing and message control, enabling customers to internalize information and, in turn, share their reaction and interpretation.

Understand that you’re not giving up the ability to share your messages and broadcast them. People now have a powerful voice and, in many cases, have the ability to steer your messages within their realms of influence, picking up steam and voices along the way.

You, as a participant and also a content creator, have the ability to shape perception through the process of the information you say about yourself, what they hear, how they share that story, how you respond, and how you weave that insight into future conversations.

Listen and read before engaging in or launching important outbound initiatives. Follow the dialogue. Learn from it. Help shape conversations productively. Answer questions. Become a resource. Listening teaches us everything—from where to start, to how to improve our communications processes, and even how to improve our products and services to better meet the needs of customers.

In the Web 2.0 world, brands are more embraceable, shapeable, and approachable than ever before. People are actively participating in the social Web—sharing, finding, and writing about the things that are important to them. Brands are frequently the focus of conversations. The interactivity of the new Web makes brands personal and portable, making their reach fairly unlimited and requiring participation from brand representatives to help shape and steer them through discussions. With the openness and collaboration of Social Media, successful brands need to establish trust and build relationships with stakeholders. People do business with people they respect. Brands today must show their human side by participating directly with the people they want to reach in the networks where they’re active.

Since Brian introduced the idea of New PR in the mid-to-late 1990s, the PR 2.0 manifesto has quietly spread through a natural evolution via an intelligent set of influencers, which hasn’t been fast enough to appease outspoken critics. Traditional and new influencers are looking for meaningful information delivered in their preferred approach, and PR 2.0 is the platform that will finally be the catalyst for change. It took Social Media and Web 2.0’s migration into the mainstream to finally accentuate the need to improve PR’s foundation and also nurture the community needed to help PR professionals learn how.

The New PR movement has met resistance over the years. Change isn’t easy to embrace, especially when processes have existed relatively unchanged for many years. However, the Web changed everything well before Web 2.0, and it’s inspiring a new level of commitment—one that fuses the role of PR with market expertise, product and brand enthusiasm, and customer empathy. The technology that socialized Web 1.0 and gave way to Social Media is giving communicators a new toolkit to reinvent how companies communicate with influencers, and directly with people, in a more open and honest way.

PR Redux

PR 2.0 was, and is, the PR industry’s chance to improve our craft and escalate our value by directly engaging and participating with traditional voices as well as those new influencers who have emerged as leading authorities through the use of socialized media. Web 1.0 actually inspired the concept (although many communications professionals think Web 2.0 did) and the new channel of information distribution it represented. Web 1.0 changed everything. It forced traditional media to evolve. It created an entirely new set of influencers, developed a completely different mechanism for collecting and sharing information, and reformed the daily routines of how people searched for news and information.

PR 2.0 is a philosophy and practice to improve the quality of work, change the game, and participate in a more informed and intelligent way. As mentioned earlier, we envision fusing the intelligence of market analysts, the mechanics of Web marketing, the credibility of market influencers, and the conviction and reach of passionate evangelists. This remains PR 2.0’s goal.

PR 2.0 was not inspired by Web 2.0, but it was influenced by it—just as it was by Web 1.0, search engine marketing (SEM), and Social Media. New PR is driven by learning, practicing, and sharing, which alleviates and untangles the conflict between traditional, social, and new media as they wrestle with influence challenges. It truly is PR redux, with leading PR professionals marching forward with a true working knowledge and honest conviction to improve an industry long plagued and hampered by the lack of PR for itself.

We’d like you to help reinvent PR and become a more successful communications professional in the process. The issues with PR and the struggle for survival and credibility aren’t just a notion that came to us through our own personal experiences. Every so often, journalists and other influencers strike back against PR for its inauthentic, disingenuous, and “spamlike” ways of pitching them. For example, Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, opened many eyes with his blog post “Sorry PR People, You’re Blocked.” On October 29, 2007, this was Anderson’s way of telling lazy PR people and the PR industry that something just wasn’t working:

I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers (that’s [email protected]).

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).

Anderson then listed about 100 PR professionals’ e-mail addresses. We respect Chris Anderson and his work. Brian appropriately responded to Anderson’s post in November of 2007 on his blog PR 2.0:

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired and also author of The Long Tail, is someone whom I deeply admire and respect. We’ve linked to each other in the past and, for the most part, I agree with his views and observations.

Every now and then Anderson discusses the state of PR and when he does, it causes nothing less than a full blown blogstorm that reverberates across the entire industry. But, what matters is that we all learn from it.

In his latest post, he makes a pretty powerful statement, “Sorry PR people, you’re blocked.”

If you don’t read anything else in my post, please just learn from what Chris says here, “So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that.”

What’s it going to take for PR to reflect that sentiment and honest plea for relevance?

It should be common sense. But it’s not. Common sense is all too uncommon in almost everything we do these days. I really wasn’t going to blog about this, as there has been plenty of very astute, as well as unbelievably lame, commentary on the subject.

Taking a step back to observe the landscape, the cumulative response represents both sides of the spectrum and everything in between. The net result should be that we as PR people need to do things better.

I promise to fix this problem among those with whom I work and can reach. I will also work with others whose voices are trusted among PR practitioners and their peers within the communities in which they seek guidance. We will do everything we can to help teach those PR people who truly desire to learn and truly understand the ramifications of their actions, good and bad, how to be successful while respecting the rules.

Everyone else, a.k.a. the lazy PR flacks, well, they’re on their own.

Yes, they represent the larger epidemic of what we, the few but proud PR folks who try to do things better, have to contend with day in and day out—the worldwide poor reputation of PR. Public relations, when you think about it, really is the furthest thing from PR these days. I mean, honestly, very few of us are out there building relationships with the public or people, for that matter. Most of us don’t bother to spend the time to really learn about what we represent, why it matters, and how it’s different than everything else out there. And without that understanding, how could we possibly figure out the channels and context necessary for it to reach the people that would need to hear the story?

This is the reason why many PR people aren’t, or will never be, ready to make the transition to Social Media. After all, if reporters and bloggers don’t want to talk to us, why would we bring the same foolish BS and spam tactics to our customers?

I join a growing group of people who really do want to change, build relationships, and be of service to you, our customers, as well as to the people who employ us.

Let’s look at the game, however, because PR is only one of many functions in the greater scheme of content distribution.

It is a job that many people perform every day in order to earn a living. Like any business, there are shining stars and lazy flacks that ruin it for everyone else. But it is still a job and people are still just people. We all have a$$hole bosses or clients that push and push us in order to prove our value and earn our paychecks regardless of how much we push back. In many cases, like in everything else, most just grin and bear it. We also have coworkers that are just in this to collect a paycheck. Even though the timer is ticking until they leave the business, their contribution only damages the damaged PR reputation in the meantime.

Many of us are measured in volume, inbound links, traffic, sales, or by the stack of coverage that all collectively determines our ability to keep our jobs. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of snake oil salesman in this business, and in every business for that matter, but those who truly want to do things differently choose to separate themselves from the crowd.

There are those that are overly ambitious and just don’t know better. Then there are those who are trained by decades of outdated communications philosophies, formulas, and bullsh!t metrics that send them out into the real world only to get baptized by fire for every mistake they make—while taking down the brand they represent in the process. And in the realm of Social Media, these lessons are the equivalent of public flogging in the town square, except this time, the world is watching.

There have been many responses to this subject; however, what every single one of them is missing is that sense of internalization that demonstrates that “we” get it. Maybe most don’t believe that some of us could get it, but boy, do we get it. Then again, how does everyone else know we really get it?

I can guarantee you that I will still get my scheduled call from Cision (formerly MediaMap) offering to renew my unbelievably expensive subscription to the “industry-leading” media database that, as they swear, provides me with every opt-in contact who wants to receive information associated with key topics, products, and industries.

But it’s the difference between building lists and building relationships.

Could we take the time to make sure that what we want to share is actually important to you?

Yes, absolutely.

Should we spend more time reaching out to people individually than blasting matrices comprised of those who are simply grouped by “key words?”

I mean, it should be obvious. But most PR people, veterans included, are just groomed to make the numbers. But yes, we really need to adopt and live the “less is more” and “quality versus quantity” mantras we hear all the time. More importantly, we need to also push back and ensure that our clients and bosses understand what the collective group of fed-up journalists and bloggers are saying that they will no longer tolerate the status quo.

It’s all about humanizing not just the process of receiving information, but also the process of sending it.

This is business and every cog in the machine has its associated benefits and downsides. For every reporter and blogger that’s inundated with lame pitches and unsolicited press releases, I can show you two flacks that are equally spammed with requests for updates and the status of coverage from execs in order to prove their worth. The problem is so much deeper than PR spam. It goes back to the very reason why companies invest in PR in the first place, and in the process, they mostly miss the point of publicity altogether. They all believe their news matters to everyone else and that you have nothing better to do than take our release and run with it.

Get me the Wall Street Journal!

Why aren’t we in the New York Times?

You do have these relationships, right?

We all choose who we ultimately work with and we earn the relationships we deserve. But at the end of the day, the onus is on PR leaders to do something about it—at least from our side anyway.

Chris Anderson didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. He only brought a bigger magnifying glass to class in order for us to more effectively see the ills of our business. We still have things we need to change and until we do, these public lists are only going to increase in frequency and volume.

Attention PR people, here are your life hacks or PR hacks in order for you to do your job better and stop pissing people off (and ruining it for the rest of us in the process).

1. Remember, this is about people.

2. What do you stand for? Answer that first before you try to convince people that are busier than you why they should take time to stop what they’re doing to pay you any attention.

3. It’s more than doing your homework. To some, doing homework is building lists. Figure out what you are representing and why it matters. How does it compare to other things? What do people need? What are their pains?

4. Practice saying it aloud in one to two minutes or less to a friend or in front of a mirror. Seriously. It works. If you don’t get it, no one else will.

5. Less is more. Find the right people, not just because you read their profile in a database, but because you read their work and understand their perspective.

6. Engage in conversations outside of when you need something.

7. Build relationships, not lists.

8. Humanize the process and remember that this is about people.

9. Stop whining and making excuses. You are responsible for your actions, so arm yourself with what you need to be successful.

10. Isn’t it weird that it’s always 10? Stop sending press releases without summarizing what the news is and why it is important to the individual person you’re sending it to.

11. Ah, thank you Spinal Tap. This one goes to 11. Remember, the future of PR is on you. If you’re not in this to do your job better, then ask yourself why you’re here. If you’re not actively contributing to things improving, then you’re part of the problem.

As Anderson’s statement and Brian’s thoughtful response affirm, there’s no room for mass, meaningless, one-way communication. It historically hasn’t been accepted in PR and certainly will not fare well with the New PR movement today—especially in an era of a more social Web. New PR has an opportunity to reinvent itself (with the help from people such as you) because Social Media provides us with the tools and the channels to reach people directly. Through this process, you become part of the media paradigm and your communication and influence can become powerful.

Anderson’s post lit up the blogosphere and traditional press. Yes, one post sparked online conversations that spawned hundreds of articles in response. That’s the power of a social Web and tools that power it. Anderson reached people, and they responded. The new Web is forcing a more “conversational” methodology when reaching out to influencers—both traditional (press) and new (everyone with access to Social Media tools).

Don’t get caught up in the tools that define the Web 2.0 landscape. Tech darlings Twitter, Utterz, Digg, Wordpress, Blogger, Jaiku, Facebook, Yelp, FriendFeed, and Bebo are just tools and communities in which people share, learn, and communicate. The approach you take to engage them sets you apart. As the earlier example showed, influencers—whether they’re traditional journalists, bloggers, or enthusiasts—all seek information in specific formats through their preferred methods of contact. In the era of Social Media, broadcast PR, in of itself, isn’t going to work anymore.

Communicating With, Not To

PR today encourages collaborative communication, enabling people to find, enjoy, and share useful information. No pitching or blasting news releases. It’s the art and science of marketing without marketing. The emergence and proliferation of a socially powered Web created a conversation ecosystem, and we’re now responsible for learning more about what we represent and how it’s important to those with whom we want to connect.

It’s no secret that the PR industry has inadvertently positioned itself as a necessary evil or the “stepchild” of marketing communications.

Again, this is our chance.

Social media is the product of Web 2.0 technology, and it’s important because it represents the democratization of news and information. But remember that PR 2.0 isn’t Social Media, and Social Media isn’t Web 2.0. These are distinct movements that can complement and inspire each other. To sum up, PR 2.0 does incorporate the tools that enable the socialization of media, enabling smart folks to reach other folks directly. Social media frames “media” in a socialized context, but it doesn’t invite PR (as it exists today) to market through (or to) it. However, worthy individuals can participate in conversations.

You are worthy!

You’re reading this book. You’re worthy. You’re learning what it takes to communicate transparently and honestly with the people who matter to your business, using the tools they use to communicate. You can also balance PR with the traditional elements that still work.

The best new media practitioners are using social tools to conduct PR 2.0 transparently. At the end of the day, it’s about the conversations you start and participate in, not about how many people in the industry understand how you did it.

Web 2.0, PR 2.0, and Social Media aside, reporters and customers share in their desire, and their demand, to hear from you as a person who took the time to think about and present information to them their way—individualized content and the tools that get it there. What’s going on right now is tremendous, and we’re living through history in the making. This is our opportunity to force a renaissance of a worn and beaten profession and transform it into something much bigger and more meaningful. PR 2.0 is about bringing value and prestige back into the profession, and creating a new breed of communications professionals for a new century. PR 2.0 can thrive in today’s ever-evolving and highly competitive online social climate. The two movements are complementary, and together they lead to a powerful arsenal of communication practices and applications that foster trust and build better relationships among stakeholders.

It all starts with you—you are a new influencer.

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