Posts Tagged ‘Media Relations’

Driving Me Crazy: Southwest Didn’t Err

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Sometimes I really think the end of the republic is nigh.  A large man who usually buys two seats (because he is so large) wants to snag an earlier flight which has only one seat, cannot fit without discomfort to himself and his hapless row-mates, so he cries, “discrimination!” Oh, and he also has a new film coming out soon. Hmmmmm. Grrrrrr.

According to a story in the Newark Star-Ledger website, Kevin Smith fit into the middle seat with the armrests down, but the flight crew believed he was a safety risk and removed him from the aircraft. Smith activated his 1.6 million Twitter followers to take Southwest Airlines to task.

The story clips from several bloggers, including Sonny Gill, the HuffPo and a couple of others. The debate seems to be over whether airlines need to make accommodations for “persons of size.”

Southwest has a policy. If you’re big, buy two seats. Smith knew the policy and often did so, according to numerous media reports.  As a frequent traveler, I know that it’s good to get home early if you can. But if my choice is to wait a while and have my comfy two seats instead of being a human Panini, I’m waiting.

We all know that air travel today is like bus travel in 1966 (which I remember, thanks) — crowded into old, creaky seats, mashed together, with substandard sanitary facilities and somewhat, er, limited cuisine.  Southwest does a fab job, in my book, of making a rather unpleasant task bearable,  mostly with good cheer, Heineken and tasty bags of peanuts.

I don’t think they needed to apologize.

I can’t shake the idea that the esteemed Mr. Smith is subscribing to the old adage that all publicity is good. I wonder if we compare movie openings press coverage, that his clip count will be higher this time around.

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The Measurement Debate Continues

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The estimable Shonali Burke has started a fortnightly Twitter chat — #MeasurePR — that begun 2 February, with the equally estimable Katie Paine as first guest. I caught only the last half, which featured good discussion and the usual paroxysm over advertising value equivalency. AVE is bete noir for @KDPaine and @Shonali, who both are categorical in their condemnation of the practice. A couple of participants, however, say that there still is demand on the part of clients for AVE.

The Institute for PR Measurement Commission condemned AVE last fall, AMEC (the professional organization for media evaluation firms) has declared its intent to find a logical replacement, and a recent paper offered Weighted Media Cost as an element worthy of inclusion in measurement programming. Where does this leave us?

I have no stake in this game. My personal belief is that AVEs are bad science, but I’m also sensitive to the need to help clients. AVE is easy for a client to grasp — “if we paid for the space our story ran in, it would have cost us X.”  Katie points out that doctors won’t prescribe a medicine if it’s not right for the patient. AVE isn’t life and death — but what do we do after we’ve explained the drawbacks and negatives and the client still wants it?

I can’t help but put myself in that situation — young company, trying to latch on with a client. Do I tell the client “No. I won’t do AVE” and risk having him/her say, “Well then, I’ll go find someone who will!” ?

#MeasurePR had much more great content than this AVE nonsense, and I really do wish we could collectively move on. I’m done writing about the debate, at least for now.

Looking for a quick way to improve measurement?

Start setting objectives and measuring your attainment of them. Stop worrying about generating lots of eyeballs and do some audience research to reach the right ones. Start looking for correlations between your various communication outputs (and outtakes) and business metrics, such as revenue, cost savings, cost avoidance, time saved, help desk traffic, speed of benefits enrollment, travel system savings, expense systems savings, etc…

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Effective Messaging is Not Passe

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

As much as many of our social media mavens would like to have it so, the concept of messaging isn’t going away for some time. The methods of delivery are definitely changing, but in public relations, we still have to reach people.

There’s a fashionable trend denouncing “talking at customers” as opposed to “having a conversation.” the trend is going on15 years old, at least. Social media’s recent sprouting of new tools (kind of like a Swiss Army Knife) has made me ponder whether the inexorable decline of mainstream media would lead, finally, to a lack of organizational interest in messaging.

If so, that’s bad news for the PR industry, as Marc Hausman (@StrategicGuy) wrote today.

But I still believe that as long as organizations have objectives, they’ll need messages: crafted, interesting, tailored to audience, pithy, memorable, descriptive, fascinating, thought-provoking and even wise. For that, they’ll continue to need lowly, ink-stained (er, pixel-stained?) wretches who understand the transformative power of words.

A friend once wrote that words are powerful, they create reality. Motivation, excitement, laughter, sadness — in our Western culture, we depend greatly on words.

This becomes even more important in the social media age, when everyone is a publisher, and it’s up to the individual to glean the seeds from the dirt and chaff.  There still needs to be an organizational voice carrying consistent, clear messages to stakeholders. It may be one of many (and it should be), but it needs to exist.

Marc is right — if PR firms rely totally on media relations for their enterprise, they are doomed. Or, at least, they’ll be a lot smaller than they are now. Of course, social media doesn’t scale very well — cultivating a relationship with a blogger takes as much effort as doing so with a magazine editor or a reporter — but the number of people reached is typically much lower.

Now, before the “it’s not about eyeballs” people light torches and scream for my head, let me say that until we better understand the communities we might want to reach in social media, we’re stuck with the lack of scalability complaint.  It holds us back from helping organizations see the benefits to them of social media engagement.

Once we can get a better read on the characteristics of communities, we can make the scale work — it’s not much different than looking to reach readers of a given magazine. But, we need independent data on the communities and a clear understanding of what we can expect, whether we are selling directly to them, or merely engaging them for reputation purposes.

As astonishing as the advances in technology have been over the past five years, we still have audiences and we need words to help us reach, influence, reward and interact with them. We still have objectives to attain and a business to run. And messages aren’t going away just because the means of delivering them is.

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NYT ‘Corner Office’ shows power of leadership communication

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

It’s usually on page two of the Sunday New York Times business section. A short Q & A with some notable business leader that covers the usual ground –  “How do you hire? What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?” This week, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is on the hot seat, and she joins a long list of her peers in crediting effective communication for much of her organizational effectiveness.

There isn’t anything particularly earth-shattering in the interview, and truth to tell, there usually isn’t. But I continue to be heartened by the focus on communication as a business process that I see in this feature almost every week. Faust says:

“I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the worl, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around — that a digital space now, it’s virtual space.  An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.”

The interviewer says, “But you can’t make everybody happy.”  Her reply:

“No, you don’t make everybody happy, but if people feel they were listened to, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.”

If that short conversation doesn’t motivate communicators to see themselves as something other than a media publicity machine, I don’t know what will.  We, alone in the organization, are well-equipped to counsel leaders on communication effectiveness.  Yet, we too often cede this skill to Human Resources (“Well, it’s really about training people, and that’s HR!”).

We are the experts at communication. We understand why dialogue and discussion among our employee base is important. We know what a good presentation is and how to help improve the level of communication in our organization.  If not us, whom? And yet, most of us would rather work with a reporter on a media story than do the hard work of remaking our organizational culture from hierarchy to high performance.  We rationalize that choice by claiming that the media story has more impact on revenue. But the jury is still out on that, except for marketing communication and product PR. I submit that we’d positively affect reputation in a measurable way if we focused more on making our leaders and their teams communicate better.

I’ve been reading the Corner Office in the Times for years. I haven’t yet seen an executive say that media relations is a core leadership function.

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As Ad Spending Declines, What of Media?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

“The Wall Street Journal” closes its Boston bureau.  “Forbes” lays off a couple dozen this week, with rumors flying of more to come. “The New York Times” is looking for 100 buyout exits. Conde Nast shutters “Gourmet” magazine, and “Cookie,” “Elegant Bride” and “Modern Bride.” It’s a lousy time to be a journalist, eh?  But what about being the PR people who pitch these pubs?

With advertising spending falling (or at least reclassifying from print to broadcast and Web), “getting media attention” in the right segments continues to be a critical element of PR activity. But the burgeoning social media market is threatening to change that calculus, if you believe the doyennes of blogs, Twitter and similar platforms.  And why wouldn’t it? If we were pitching Modern Bride before, why can’t we pitch Classic Bride, Becoming Mrs. Jones, or The Broke-Ass Bride?

Does a company that makes bride dresses, or wedding catering, or domestic partnership photography have the time necessary to build relationships in social media? Or do they just need a quick ad with a special phone number that offers 20 percent off, a mention in a popular blog?

How many of us will the new behemoth integrated agencies need to help facilitate these processes? Who’s going to pay us to tell them to talk to a bride blogger in Madison, Wisc.?

This is only part of the puzzle — I have written before about the lack of independent and authoritative content in new media. Unless many of us suddenly become willing to pay a subscription fee for such content, it’s going to go away.  Perhaps crowds really are wise, and not mobs. Perhaps over time, Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, notwithstanding being horrifically inaccurate at the moment we need factual information, or openly manipulated.

Any of us who care about this topic will need to develop our own ability to engage in social media, build our reputation for accuracy and probity, and somehow compete with the fakers, liars, and spammers. That’s not an easy task.

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Whither Public Relations?

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

There is an existential discussion going on over at PRConversations. A post by the eminent Toni Muzi Falconi asks the question, “What comes next after Grunig?” — Jim Grunig being the legendary PR pro and educator whose landmark research in the 1980s led to the Excellence Theory of public relations.

PR has long had a love-hate relationship with theories. One hallmark of a true profession is that it has a strong theoretical basis in academic circles. So, the lack of a theory of its own (as near as I can figure) has led to gnashing of teeth and some amount of inferiority fantasy in the academic community.

Many of the most studied theories — Community Theory, Rhetorical Theory, Framing Theory, Systems Theory — borrow heavily from other disciplines, most notably from the general communication studies field.  Coupled with PR practitioner resistance to theory in general and the academy in part, scholars for a time were very quick to dismiss PR as a separate profession. They preferred to see it, instead, as a part of communication, journalism, or marketing, and thus not as serious as their intellectual fore-bearers.

Grunig, along with co-researchers David Dozier, William Ehling, Larissa Grunig, Fred Repper and Jon White, conducted a massive study funded by the IABC Foundation to answer the question of why public relations has value to an organization.

In itself, this research wasn’t geared to establish a theoretical foundation for the profession. Instead, it answered two main questions: “Why and to what extent [does] PR make an organization more effective, and how much is that contribution worth economically?” and, “What are the characteristics of a public relations function that are most likely to make an organization effective?”

It was the process of identifying the structural and behavioral aspects of PR departments that led to the idea that Excellence was a theory. In a nutshell, Excellence says that the PR team should be led by a manager who is in senior management, and its work should primarily rely on two-way, symmetrical communication.

It’s this contention that an increasing number of scholars are taking issue with. The foundation of our profession is persuasion (Bernays, Ivy Lee) and the use of language and discourse in service of that effort (Rhetorical Theory) — either one-way or two-way, but definitely asymmetrical.

I don’t pretend to be as schooled in these matters as some of the commenters at PR Conversations, but as an experienced practitioner who is now dabbling in the academe (adjunct prof at Kent State this fall), I’m intrigued by the intellectual exercise.  One person says that such navel-gazing (my words) isn’t important — likening the discussion to a college student trying to examine new majors.  But our profession can no longer get by with “trust me” as its operating theory.  There are solid reasons why we do what we do and recommend what we recommend.  The theoretical foundation for these efforts gives us credibility even if we never mention them to our employers or clients.

What is PR, and why is it important? That’s a question worth discussing.

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Research Report Finds Little Impact of SocMed on Brand

Friday, July 24th, 2009

A study conducted by Cleveland-area research firm WorkPlace Media may be bad news for social media marketers.

“A whopping 96% of respondents said their opinion of a product brand did not change if that brand had no presence on a social networking site, only 11% of social networking users reported following any major brand through a social networking site, and just 12% of respondents
said their opinion of a brand changes if that brand maintains a social networking presence.”

The research echos a recent Harris poll that found just 4% of its respondents mentioned “private social networking sites, such as customer communities,” when asked about pre-purchase information gathering.

Well, then.

As with many announcements of this kind, my skept-o-meter kicks in. The news release offers the highlights (as it should), and the offer of more detail comes with a requirement to fill out a contact form.  What’s missing for geeky old me is some more of the math — I’d be interested in the actual correlations — what were the variables? Or, was the research just a preference exploration — a quick marketing tool?

The role of social media in forming perceptions needs more study.  That’s pretty hardcore research — there are so many factors that make up people’s perspectives on things, including on brands and marketing and companies.  I am not a stat guy, but I know the work on Marketing Mix Modeling is very promising. Structural Equation Modeling permits multiple dependent and independent variables, so you can see how different variables interact on one another, which is critical to determining which are the most important and effective.

The excellent work of Dr. Don Wright of Boston University and Michelle Hinson of the Institute for PR since 2006 have examined how social media is affecting PR.  It seems to me that this is what’s really needed in the social media space: The bridges to brand perception, disposition and purchase intent still need to be built.

I realize that this opinion may brand me as seeing social media as just another channel for messaging. But unless we have better understanding of the impact of social media on the people using it for business, we’ll fail to get the resources to study how the conversation itself affects people.

We see casual, superficial research on social media all the time, usually from consultants with a vested interest in pushing social media as revolution.  I don’t deny that this new suite of tools is important — I just want some facts on my side before I go declaring that the tide is permanently shifted.

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Social Media Crossing from Personal to Business

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

At the May 21 IABC Cleveland luncheon, Christina Klenotic, who gets paid to worry about such things, revealed that journalists Google, Facebook and Twitter-search the PR people who call them for placements.

Citing personal experience and data from the Society for New Communications Research, the Dix and Eaton vice president certainly surprised me when she said that nearly half of media members reportedly used social media tools. Klenotic also said that a USA Today reporter “friended” her on Facebook right before she was due to meet him in person.

O’Dwyer’s Kevin McCauley blogged about the Wall Street Journal new guidelines on social media on Monday.

I’m very new to this universe, having been a “reader” and occasional commenter on other people’s blogs, Yahoo! message boards, MyRagan, and a few others. I started a Twitter account today, in fact, after about two weeks of using Facebook. Luddite? No, just a bit concerned about blurring the lines between public and private.

Klenotic uses these tools for work, so I guess I’m not surprised by her decision to share the social media space with friends, family, and whomever. But it’s hard for me to avoid jumping to conclusions about the willful intersection of one’s personal life with the world of work. There is a pattern emerging, here, and it’s not limited to social media’s move from self-indulgent claptrap to essential business tool.

The sphere of the public, especially the state, is reaching more deeply than ever into the private sphere — perhaps that’s desirable, perhaps not; this is not a political blog, so let’s please not go there. I will keep my Facebook profile to friends and family, and maintain my LinkedIn profile for business purposes, along with this blog and my Twitter account.

Somehow, I just can’t get past my aversion to sharing truly personal information with people I don’t know personally. Besides, no one really wants to know anyway, do they?

P.s., Klenotic and Eaton Corporation’s Hillary Spittle will continue the social media discussion at the new Greenhouse Tavern, on E. 4th St. in Cleveland May 28 at 5:30 p.m.

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