What You Don't Know About PR CAN Hurt You

David Beisel capped last night's fabulous Web Innovation Night with a panel on how entrepreneurs can do PR without PR agencies. Moderated by Mike Troiano, the panel included Bob Brown of NetworkWorld, Peter Kafka of AllthingsD, Scott Kirsner of his own making and the Innovation Economy column in the Boston Globe and Wade Roush of Xconomy.

This was intended to be PR 101 lesson for entrepreneurs who want coverage but don't know how to go about getting it. But the takeaway, as I heard it, was much closer to what Bobbie Carlton says in her blog post:

...if I was an entrepreneur, all I would have heard was, “Run away from PR people, they are useless to you. In fact, probably worse than useless because top reporters look down on them as a breed.”

There are two main problems here. First, the panel didn't have a good idea of how PR actually helps media relations; but second is the misunderstanding that PR means only media relations. Today's PR is much more than that.

On the first issue the panel joked several times about how entrepreneurs will do silly things like send them "embargoed" press releases, or conduct an interview and to call back a day later only to say "the first 20 minutes of that talk was off the record, right?" or try to pitch a "news hook" that is a minor upgrade of a product.

Good PR counsel fixes those problems. We guide clients on how to talk with journalists so when you they get their 30 or 60 minutes with Scott Kirsner they use that time effectively, both for them and for the journalists. We guide our clients on what information is pertinent to which audiences and how to best present that information.

Peter Kafka made the point that PR firms make a lot of money selling clients on the idea that they can reach him, but the act of reaching him is quite simple. He went as far as to call PR people liars, since they say they know him when they don't.

A good media relations firm will never sell you on their contact list since we all know that the contact list is worth the pixels it appears on. The fact that any one of us knows or is known by any journalist only gets us an additional few seconds of consideration. Maybe it gets our email opened when others get tossed immediately. But unless that email or phone call includes a good story, then the time is wasted, so we focus on packaging the story.

After the panel, as I approached Wade Roush, I found myself in a very interesting conversation with one of the panel's targets: an bootstrapped entrepreneur whose company is targeting application developers. He had a few questions of Wade that frankly were out of Wade's range. The entrepreneur wanted to know how to talk with specific application development message boards and what impact news and information presented there would have on gaining coverage from Xconomy. He and I then had a nice conversation about communications strategy leading up to his launch. We agreed that getting coverage in the Globe, for example, wouldn't help him reach his audience, but later may be useful in reaching potential investors, a move that affects his communciations strategy. We also talked about his need for a "community manager" who would focus on working with the various application development forums.

And that leads to my main problem with the panel: they preached the misguided notion that PR is only media relations.

There is a reason that the landscape is dotted with the former co-workers of the people on this panel. Individuals today get their information from a number of sources, many of whom are not professional journalists. Today anyone with a blog has the potential to reach their core audience, provided they hit the right keys. Google is the gateway.

Yes, traditional PR is about getting coverage and even today many agencies sell that very thing. In fact, for many companies media relations remains an important component of their overall PR program. But PR is about developing a broad communications program that includes:

• Building a long-term strategy that establishes lasting relationships with your core audiences;
• Creating content and managing conversations that engage those audiences directly; and
  
• Reaching industry influencers (media relations gets lumped in here).

Tactically this means that the communicator or agency you hire should have skill sets that include: writing ability; audio and video skills; creative thinking and the ability to connect with influencers.

It happens that next week a partner and I will be announcing a PR firm that focuses on just this kind of work. Once our site is live I'll provide a link.

If an entrepreneur walked out of that panel thinking that all they have to do is call up one of these reporters and say "hey, my company's live, come write about us!" and all will be good with their PR program, then they have done a disservice to Boston's startup community. These companies need long-term strategies to drive business, not just the tactical skills to get the occasional story in Network World.

And the right PR counsel will help them do just that.

Why You Can't Rely on Outreach for Coverage

Journalists have always been forced to perform under intense pressures.

No matter how much time pressure or stress I have ever felt while working in PR, nothing compared to writing and producing live television. Knowing that at 5pm or 6pm the anchors start the show and your stuff better be done, it better be good and it better be accurate gave quite an adrenaline high.

Of course, working under that pressure every day gets pretty old.

I can't imagine the stresses felt by today's reporters, who not only need to "feed the beast" that is the news hole, but need to do more stories, as there are fewer people, and do it for less money. Add to that even more deadlines thanks to the deadline-every-second attitude of online news and you have a pretty volatile situation.

Lylah Alphonse compares her 23 percent wage cut at the Boston Globe (which goes into effect today) to being "tossed... a white-hot anvil." Of course, she still has a job, unlike the 8 percent at IDG who were handed walking papers.

It's obvious that this has an impact on media relations, but the details are much more difficult to understand.

Let's assume you produce refrigerator magnets. For a long time there was probably a reporter at a weekly refrigerator trade publication whose job it was to cover magnets and for years you enjoyed some good, regular coverage. Then, as things got tight, that reporter started covering magnets as well as refrigerator handles.

Well, now things have gotten worse. That same reporter is carrying more of the load, meaning that instead of covering just magnets and handles, they're covering everything having to do with the refrigerator door. Instead of producing a couple of stories a week they're now producing two or three shorter stories a DAY about all things on the door (inside and out) of all the refrigerators on the market. To go one step further, their content is probably syndicated through the parent organization to all sorts of appliance magazines, so they'll occasionally report on commercial fridge doors as well as doors for dishwashers, ovens and even washers and dryers.

What does this mean for your magnet company? It means that instead of getting coverage for a lot of your news, you'll probably get one story every 6 months written about the entire magnet industry, and it'll be a roundup. When you hold a user conference the reporters who used to come won't show up. It's not that they don't care, it's that their beats are so much broader that to send them to a single user conference for two or three days on a single company in a single market is not cost-effective.

So, how can you make sure your magnet company still reaches its audience?

• Start your own publication -- Your website is a great place to start writing about the industry. This can be as simple as a blog written by your own people, or something more complex like a destination site written by journalists. You know all those journalists who used to cover your industry who were laid off? Most are looking for full time or freelance work. Why shouldn't they work for you?
• Start your own multimedia project -- If you're in the tech world take advantage of your internal developer talent as well as the APIs associated with Web 2.0 to create new and interseting ways to aggregate information about your industry.
• Bring the news to them -- No matter how much you produce on your own there is still a need to be in the major publications covering your industry. But instead of demanding that reporters travel to your site or user conference, bring the information to them through streaming video or even webinars. Hubspot TV is a great example of a how a company can put out good information that reporters want to use.
  

Of course, with all of these concepts you need guidance. Just as having Word on your laptop doesn't make you a novelist, having the tools to produce content doesn't mean you and your company have the skills to do it right.

Isn't the New York Times Already Pretty Social?

You can read all about the New York Times new social media editor nearly everywhere today. Or, you can just follow Jennifer Preston on Twitter and hear from her directly. Of course, there's the original memo announcing her new role, the CJR article telling us, um... not much, and Mike Volpe's on target criticism of her hiring, pointing out that a single person can't do it all, that social media needs to extend through out an organization. Though, to be fair, when I read the original memo I felt that her hiring was as much an internal educational move as an external outreach play.

All that being said, if all Preston takes away from this job is a few ideas from the peanut gallery like creating standardized hashtags for breaking news, then I'd call this a failed experiment.

Isn't the Times already a pretty good community? They have content, people who come to read the content and the ability for people to comment on that content. In fact, they have multiple communities, not just the readers but also the various communities they cover. Shouldn't the Times be working to galvenize those communities and strengthen them, rather than simply trying to Tweet more?

The Times, and other newspapers, should start inviting their readers to be editors. Their model should be Facebook, letting people interact and use the information as the basis of that interaction. I touched on this concept back in 2005, but I think it's much more important now.

The social media world has taught us that people follow people, but that organizations such as the New York Times and its more localized sibling the Boston Globe command trust and respect from their readers. They need to build on that, but also let the people have a say.

And not just on Twitter.

Your Town's Ad Play: PaperG

An article in Sunday's Boston Globe asking "What Went Wrong" started with an interesting anecdote about how the Globe turned away a stake in Monster.com at the beginning of the Internet revolution.

One one level you can read the story as a lost opportunity. On another you can read it as a company simply doing what had always made it successful. Hindsight is always 20/20. If I knew then what I know now I would have taken jobs "coding" in the mid-90s when I really wanted to be a writer. At the time "coding" meant putting HTML tags on documents, I thought it was something more complex that I didn't understand.

The people who took those jobs went on to become pretty good journalists, but that's all hindsight.

So I found it very interesting to get an email from a young CEO named Victor Wong of PaperG touting how the Your Town section of Boston.com will be using the company's "Flyerboards." These are like local bulletin boards for Your Town sites like those in Newton, Wellesley, Needham and Waltham that tap into the local ad market.

You can read into it what you want, but here is a small, young comapny started by a bunch of smart guys that has managed to tap into the Globe. Though, given the Globe's current financial state I have to wonder if any money changed hands or if PaperG is just eating what it kills.

"Truth" Only Unto Its PR Parts

As a Brandeis grad I find myself following the Rose Art Museum PR disaster with particular interest. The most amazing thing about this story is how many people Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz managed to annoy with a single letter to students, faculty and alumni. Not only did he manage to annoy his own inner family of Brandeis people, but also the arts community, the journalism establishment and even the average person in Boston. People around my office who neither care about art nor ever set foot on the Brandeis campus are talking about this mess.

In a sense, Brandeis did the right thing by hiring Rasky Baerlein to help with crisis PR in this mess. The well-connected crew over there immediately put Reinharz in front of major local journalists to clear the air, including interviews with the Boston Globe and WBUR. Their strategy also included a letter to faculty and students (though, not to alumni) clarifying what the trustees actually meant when they voted on the Rose. That is, that the museum would be closed and they MAY sell some artwork over time.

The problem, however, is that the moves are far too blatant and haven't really changed anything. Rose Curator Michael Rush made the point early on in the discussion that Rose donors would not come back if they felt that the museum was in jeopardy, the Brandeis President has done nothing to assuage those fears.

As for the strategy, the Brandeis student paper called The Hoot says the following:

While last Wednesday, Reinharz told The Hoot that “we have no media strategy,” he said yesterday that the university has temporarily hired public relations firm Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications Inc. in order to “correct misstatements that are now floating all over the world about the rose.”

The President would not specify as to how long the university would employ the public relations firm. He also said that the firm has already helped the university in dealing with the Boston Globe this week when they convinced the Globe to hold a story a day so that Reinharz could clarify some of the details of the piece.

Rasky Baerlein’s vice president Melissa Monahan told The Hoot in a phone interview that the administration has been working directly with both her and the President of Rasky Baerlein. Other clients of Rasky Baerlein include the Boston Red Sox, North Eastern University and Toyota.

Neither Reinharz nor Monahan would comment on how much the university is paying the public relations firm for their services.

Monahan did say, however that the firm is helping the administration deal both with the national press and with the student press and Brandeis community.

The paper goes on to point out major discrepancies between the trustees' vote on the issue and the press release the school put out. In a way, Brandeis created its own problem.

The school completely underestimated the backlash this announcement would have. The best crisis PR is to avoid the problem from the start. (Note to Dennis Nealon, this may be a good time to find a new job.)

Right now the school has to focus on one person: Rush. He is the hero here, the person who was blindsided by the school and who has been speaking out about his displeasure. Any crisis PR program must focus on gaining HIS trust, then bringing him out to speak to the other constituencies. If you can't get him on your side, then it's lost anyway.

Though, according to Bloomberg, Rush's job is apparently ending on June 30.

Gatehouse and Boston.com Reach Agreement

The New York Times Company and Gatehouse Media have reached an agreement on the tussle over whether Boston.com violated fair use in how it links to Gatehouse stories. This is something that has had media watchers on edge for quite a while.

No word yet on what the agreement is, exactly. In fact, the story on the Wicked Local site right now comes from the AP.

When News Breaks, Where do You Turn?

Back in my newsroom days we had a series of feeds coming in on a regular basis, most were TV screens. Of course, we also had the AP wire on our computer screens feeding us breaking news as it came in. For people in the newsrooms this was commonplace.

But in the working world people didn't have this constant feed. People only got the news when they turned on the radio, TV or were told about something from a friend. Back in 2001 I had just settled at my desk with a cup of coffee when a friend IM'd me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center towers. I immediately ran to the TV to turn on CNN and for a good 10 minutes sat alone in our lounge. Over the next 30 minutes people filtered in to watch, as they had just heard the news.

Flash forward to today when a plane went down in the Hudson River. My first news came from Twitter, which feeds constantly onto my desktop from a program called Digsby. After seeing the news I jumped to search.twitter.com to see if anyone else was posting, then hit the major news sites. Inside of 5 minutes I had video streaming from CNN.com to my desktop.

The video was certainly compelling, but not nearly as compelling as a single picture that a bystander sent from his iPhone through Twitter.

This wasn't the first time today that I turned to Twitter and IM before the traditional news coverage. Earlier in the day I sat in traffic on Totten Pond Road and rather than turning on WBZ to hear that ther was an electrical fire, I turned to my BlackBerry to find out that Totten Pond Road was backed up all the way along my trip. 'BZ only tells me about the major highways, like 128. A quick IM to a friend told me of another open route and I shaved about an hour off my time to work.

That doesn't mean the traditional news venues are worthless, they're not. They give me the perspective and research I need to better understand an event. But for breaking news it's all about eyewitnesses and instant coverage.

It's no wonder, then, that today the Boston Globe announced it would cut 50 jobs from the newsroom. I know, I'm part of the problem.

I just don't know if there's a way to make money on this kind of information flow.

The Win/Loss in Changing Media

The Ideas section of today's Boston Globe has a great piece on what's lost when we move from color film to color digital images. Unlike a lot of pieces on the topic, this one doesn't try to lament the loss of film, but take an even look at what we gain and what we lose with the change from film to digital.

I still shoot quite a bit of film along with my digital images. I'm even playing with my pinhole Polaroid, just to see what I can get. My local camera shop greatly appreciates my film habit.

Unfortunately, the thing people haven't yet learned, whether it's film or digital, is how to edit. At least with film people didn't snap indiscriminately hoping for one decent shot. They aimed, shot and then forgot about it for a few months until they bothered bringing them into the local CVS for developing.

The change actually started long before digital back when we went from having to focus and meter to what my wife calls PHD cameras, as in "Push Here Dummy." When I give my son my old manual focus AE-1p, he spends time framing his shot. Hand him a similar auto-focus camera and he snaps much quicker spending less time on framing. It gets worse with digital when people think "I can crop later."

A photo teacher told me that he tells his students to crop with their feet. He also says a major problem with digital, for him, is that he only sees what his students want to share, he can't get a full contact sheet to see what they did right and wrong. One of my great "ah-ha" moments in photography was seeing Diane Arbus' contact sheet and noticing that she had blank images and some lousy exposures.

Not long ago I went to a local camera club meeting where a woman showed off pictures of her trip to Italy. Some of the shots were quite good, but the 20 minute presentation that involved her dumping EVERY SINGLE IMAGE SHE TOOK into a slide show program, then just hitting "go" was painful to sit through. Had she bothered to look through her image, think about the story she wanted to tell and then used the images to tell it, she could have had a beautiful and strong presentation. Instead, she left a lot of us longing for the end of the interminable show.

So while it's easy to click "send" on a few hundred images, think about what you want to say with those pictures. One or two images that tell a story are much better than 25 that say nothing.

Gatehouse v. New York Times

In just a few days the media pundits have jumped on the lawsuit between Gatehouse Media and the New York Times over Boston.com's hyper-local concept. Dan Kennedy is doing the best job at keeping us all updated.

At the heart of the issue is the question of whether Boston.com is simply linking to stories by Gatehouse media's local papers, like the Newton TAB, or if has based its entire business model on using content developed by another commercial news organization.

Adam Reilly has a great take on this when he asks:

Imagine that I decide to start a new, web-only newspaper devoted to the city of Boston. Then imagine I fill my new publication--let's call it the "Boston Gazette"--entirely with links to articles from the Boston Globe. Is that journalistically legit? Nope. It's just a lame, transparent attempt to repackage someone else's work as my own.

It's a fair question and what I believe the Globe is doing right now. Do they have the potential for more? Of course. The problem is that the site, as it stands, spread the information out into a number of different areas. But the main page is only part of the problem.

The Newton site includes a local wiki in which the editors are asking people to submit information, any information and then self-police it. This is a fanciful notion to make a Wikipedia type play, but that's only likely to work if they can also get a number of local overzealous editors.

During the launch meeting one person asked a simple question: what's to stop the Globe from eventually taking that information, restricting access and selling it back to us? The editors assured us this would never happen. Though, that assumes the current editors are always in charge. What happens if and when Boston.com gets sold. Wouldn't another owner look at any repository of information as a potential revenue source?

The editors also noted that any information submitted by an individual remains the property of that individual. OK, that's fair. But what happens when my writeup of Taste Coffee House in Newtonville gets edited by a Globe editor, and then added to by another customer? Who owns the content then? How do you track that ownership?

Jeff Jarvis portrays the Gatehouse folks as ignorant stooges who don't seem to understand how the Internet works. However, as one of the few people writing on this issue who actually LIVES in Newton and also operates a hyper-local site, I have a little better idea of the personalities involved.

It happens that the Newton TAB folks understand new media very well. They are on Twitter, blog regularly and use Facebook all in an attempt to get closer to their readers. They went from being a weekly to having an active local news site with a regular blog long before the Globe even bothered letting readers comment on its own local blog.

This is a group that understands the implications of what it's doing. But it also knows the economic realities of the situation. If a local business is looking to spend money advertising, are they going to advertise with the TAB (and on its online site) or with Boston.com? If Newtonians are flocking to Boston.com/Newton, a site that is made up mostly of content reported by Gatehouse, then the money is going to flow there, plain and simple.

In fact, the entire Boston.com hyper-local operation feels more like an adveristing play than anything else. They created a site, hired a single (very young) editor, then simply reorganized much of its existing content so it focused heavily on one city.

One final very telling note in all this. When Boston.com started rolling out its site it invited a number of local thought-leaders to the Newton War Memorial Auditorium to show it off. This group included a number of bloggers, advertisers, people who have local TV shows and a few others who are well known. The mockup they showed included articles from the TAB in addition to other bloggers, some of who were in attendence, and they even pointed out that they were going to aggregate information from every site, including the TAB.

They never invited the TAB to the meeting. The editors first heard about it when I posted about it on TheGardenCity.net

Tech Blogging Event

This is a cross post of something that also appears on the Schwartz Crossroads Blog, where I am also a contributor.

I'm tired of going to events in which someone stands up and says "So, can you tell me what exactly defines a blog?"

Yes, this is an important question for someone just coming to the table, but many of us are well beyond that and the discussion is now about more high-level topics, such as "how are the current crop of blogs affecting coverage?" and "how can bloggers, reporters and PR people work together?"

That's what last night's great event at the Cambridge Innovation Center was all about. Scott Kirsner put together a great group of panelists, including Bijan Sabet, venture capitalist at Spark Capital; Barbara Heffner of CHEN PR; Don Dodge, director of business development at Microsoft; Jimmy Guterman, editor of Release 2.0 and blogger at O'Reilly Radar; Scott Kirsner, who writes the Boston Globe "Innovation Economy" column; and Nabeel Hyatt, CEO of Conduit Labs. Both Schwartz Communications and CHEN PR sponsored the event, as well as Morse Barnes-Brown & Pendleton and the Cambridge Innovation Center.

The panel was just a start, as I was charged with running around the room to bring in discussion from others attending the event. Dan Bricklin has a few pictures as well as the full podcast up, so rather than me running through the whole thing, go and have a listen.

Discussion items included:

• Why do you blog?
• What is your most popular post?
• How addicted are you to statistics?
• Where do journalistic ethics come into play?
• What does blogging do for your business?
• How do you maintain an authentic voice?
• How do people who cannot write well engage in this environment?
• What role do edited blogs (like this one) have both in the corporation and in the blogosphere in general?
• Can you do a "news" announcement only through social media?

Don Dodge shared great pieces of advice--both of which I violated on my various blogs--that he received from Robert Scoble.

First: include your own name in the name of the blog. Of my personal blogs only two have any part of my name involved, the Tanoblog and Tanophoto. And second: include your picture. While my picture is on my Schwartz bio, it is not on my Media Metamorphosis page, which may be why Paul Gillin didn't include my name in his roundup of the event.

I also enjoyed the discussion on edited blogs, in which Nabeel noted how the corporate blog at Conduit is, in fact, edited. The point is to have a common voice and to acknowledge that the company must come first, in this context. But also it's because there are people within the organization who have great thoughts when they're standing at the whiteboard, but do not have the ability to express themselves in writing. In this case the editing process is not about sanitizing the content, but about saying to those who are more self-conscious, "hey, we've got your back."

I found the ethics discussion to be among the most interesting and will be writing more on that later. But let me just share this from Don Dodge on conflict of interest: "No conflict, no interest."

On a personal note, I got a chance to meet David Laubner, who writes the excellent 93South blog, one I've been reading for some time.

In all, a great discussion of some of the primary issues facing modern tech journalism. I'm sure there will be more discussion on the various Boston-based tech blogs, but the podcast is probably the most complete recounting of the event. Though, not everyone identified themselves before speaking, so it sometimes be tough to follow.

Redefining Competition

I know I haven't posted in a very long time. There are some good reasons for this, but I'm not going to go into them now. I have been continuing my work over at TheGardenCity.net and also doing more new media work at Schwartz, but as for writing about media, I've held off.

But recently I had a situation that I thought others could learn from and it falls under the heading of "competition."

During a recent launch my team and I reached out to both Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe as well as to Wade Roush at the relatively new site Xconomy.com (if you aren't reading Xconomy, you should be). Our feeling was that while both have similar missions, Xconomy has a much smaller audience and wouldn't be much of a competitor to the Globe. In fact, I felt the site was probably still flying under the radar of the Globe, as it measured its tenure in weeks rather than decades. Probably something the editors were reading and watching, but not something they'd consider a direct competitor.

I was wrong.

Kirsner informed us that yes, Xconomy was competition for him and because the client appeared first there, in a long and detailed profile, he wouldn't do something similar in the Globe. He did interview the client and quoted the CEO in a different piece, but wasn't going to do more than that.

On the one hand, this showed the fledgling Xconomy a lot of respect, since Kirsner went so far as to praise the reporters and the work. But it also taught me something else about competition: it's not about the readers, it's about the mission.

Even more, it's about the mission of particular reporters and columnists. So it's not about whether the Globe thinks Xconomy is a competitor, it's about whether Kirsner believes it. Since he has his own blog and video segments in addition to his Sunday Globe column, this makes sense.

It just hadn't occurred to me before.

But just because they're competitive doesn't mean they don't acknowledge the other's work. Krisner has linked to Xconomy stories on his own blog to give a background, so it really comes down to "coopitition" and how the stories move forward.

Blurring the line between distribution and competition

An interesting article in yesterday's New York Times talked about the arrest of a producer of "mixed tapes." That is, a DJ who puts together mixes of different pieces from different rap artists and then sells those through vendors.

I didn't realize the extent to which these played a role in the rap and hip hop communities, but according to the article this is a vital part of the viral marketing employed by many record labels.

The article is worth a read. But it also brings to the forefront an increasingly touchy issue: where does a distribution channel and and competition begin? Back when I bought vinyl records and dropped a few of my favorite songs onto an analog cassette for friends, the record industry never blinked an eye. But now that I can share more of my music library more easily, the record companies want it stopped.

The same goes for the news industry. The other day I heard a Boston Globe editor talk about how the bloggers help the Globe get news distributed, since most point back to articles (just as I did for the Times in this entry). He's right.

But I wonder what happens when certain blogs raise in stature. I edit a "Placeblog" called The Garden City, which has picked up quite a bit of interest lately given a local election about building a new high school. The local paper also has a blog, but it doesn't have the same number of contributors, though it often has more reporting behind it. We link to each other's stories, but are we, at some level, in competition? Where is that line?