Breaking Fresh Ground

So many of you have been asking what I'm working on, and now I can tell you: Fresh Ground!

After many months of planning, talking and researching, I'm happy to announce that Todd Van Hoosear and I have teamed up to launch a different kind of PR firm. Much of this was laid out in my previous post after the Web Innovator's Group panel, but in short, we take a different approach to how PR is done. We start with the corporate story, focus on content and community and then extend that story through the right channels, whether that's a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, trade publications or the Boston Globe.

Traditionally, companies turn to PR to gain media coverage with the idea that broad coverage in top publications will drive traffic, prospects, investors and, ultimately, revenue. Over the past couple of years several top PR firms have added social media capabilities, some doing it quite well.

But for many social media is an add-on to the primary goal of getting coverage. The PR program in that case isn't about building relationships, it's about getting coverage with occasional social media projects thrown in.

Fresh Ground is about long-term engagement with influencer relations playing a key, but supporting role.

Check us out and tell us what you think.

Good Marketing Isn't Free

Quick show of hands: how many of you have Word on your computer?

Great, that's just about everyone (if you didn't raise your hand, check out Google Docs).

How many of you used that tool to write an amazing novel?

I don't see many hands.

OK, how many of you wrote your memoirs? Family history? A decent article?

I see a few more, but not many. Why didn't you? Because the tool doesn't make the talent.

Four years ago I did a video about my daughter's adoption. After this 9 minute video that took me hours to produce, distilling 3 hours of video, re-cutting music, selecting other Chinese music and fretting over the order of certain sequences given the audience, my cousin said to me "Oh, so you just need to choose the right music."

Um... right. That and get a graduate degree then spend a decade producing TV news. But sure, just pick the right music and you're on your way.

I thought about this after reading George Colony's recent post referencing a Forrester report noting how marketing budgets are dropping. I've seen the impact of that myself.

A lot of CMOs and Marketing VPs see the free tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all those other great social media buzzwords and figure "great, we can do this ourselves!" And yes, some can. But in reality, to handle these tools effectively you need someone who can help you tell your story.

Of course, you can always go and work on that novel.

How much is experience worth?

Today I was told by a VC that his portfolio companies operate extremely lean and that as an advisor he doesn't encourage any spending on marketing.

In fact, those that do anything just do some blogging, and he encourages them to hire a recent college grad--"they're available dirt cheap," he said--to do the writing work. For about $1000 a month you can direct them to write some posts then take what you want and discard the rest. Content for short money.

Another startup told me that they hired a woman who had been with an agency for a year to do their PR. One year out of college, one agency job under he belt and she was in charge of getting them coverage. To their credit, they know that eventually they'll outgrow her experience and they will need to invest more in PR.*

If you're a startup exec, the numbers person in you is probably saying "wow, that seems to make complete sense!"

But let me ask you this: could your college self do the job you do today? My college self certainly coudn't, though he thought he could. Why would you trust your company's image to someone with no worldly experience?

Last week I met with someone how commented that he liked reading my blog because my punctuation and grammar are on target. That's a pretty low bar. Though, having had recent college grads writing for me, it's one that is apparently pretty high.

Back when I taught a news production class at Emerson College I had to teach the juniors, seniors and master's students the difference between present tense and active voice. Many simply did not know.

So, are you now willing to trust your brand to someone with no worldly experience? Someone who doesn't know the players, doesn't know the language and doesn't know how to market?

Maybe it's me, but seems like a waste of $12,000 annually.

_________________________________

* Added 7/7/09

Just to clarify, I think this is a smart strategy on their part because of their situation. They need a launch right now, it's all they need. They are focued on a tight market and there are just a few blogs and publications that will get them off the ground. Also, as a very small company they have the time to focus on these details. They do understand, however, that this is not a long-term strategy and won't help them to sustain exposure, nor will it help them as their business focus expands.

New York Times: Hey , bloggers matter too!

The New York Times devotes quite a bit of space today to the changing face of PR in Silicon Valley. Not the whole tech sector, mind you. They avoid talking about the outlying areas like, oh, say, Boston, New York, Austin, Seattle, San Diego and the Research Triangle.

Regardless, the piece breathlessly follows PR execs who, shock of shocks, pitch people other than the A-list "journalists" such as the Times itself, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, etc. Instead, the PR folks pitch bloggers and social media influencers.

Instead, [Publicist Brooke Hammerling] decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

Notably, none are journalists.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

So nice that the Times is now only 2 years behind.

The fact is, the new PR needs to be about creating content, not just pushing it. Hammerling touches on this briefly when she points out that when she represented Flickr back in 2004 The Times touches on this briefly in referencing the 2004 PR program for Twitter headed up by Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of Spark PR: "she never issued a press release for it, even when it was acquired by Yahoo. Flickr would publish news on its company blog, a few more blogs would pick it up 'and two days later, BusinessWeek would call,' she recalls."

In all, the story paints a picture of PR that's straight out of Sex in the City. Attractive women partying up a storm and hobnobbing with the who's who of influencers. It also talks about measurement in terms of followers and number of Twitter mentions, but gives short shrift to metrics such as "traffic driven" or "conversion rates."

In all, the view of PR portrayed in the piece is still about pitching and about having other people tell your story, but less focused on creating a story built on your own content.

There is so much more to do in the trenches, even here in the hinterlands.

Come for the Company, Get a Discount on Coffee!

We're just under a week away from our first Boston Solo PR Practitioner Coffee at Taste Coffee House in Newtonville.

I've spoken with Nik, who owns Taste and is one of the top baristas in the country, and he's offering a 10 percent discount on any purchase by someone coming for the PR Coffee event.

So if seeing my shiny face in person isn't enough to entice you, about about saving a little on your morning caffeine? Nik is currently brewing some wonderful Intelligentsia espresso.

In any case, if you have no idea what I'm talking about take a look at my original post. If you do, then come on by. If you want to feel that this is formal, sign up over on Eventbrite!

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.

Breaking the News Release Cycle

The single biggest problem facing traditional PR firms as they shift to social media lies in their history. Not that they can't change and not that they lack the talent, but everyone in the organization came up through that organization learning to do things a cetain way.

As a prime example look at the idea of "news." A basic PR tactic is to create a news pipeline with the goal being to keep media interest high. A secondary benefit of this is showing customers and prospects a full press room, so when people peek into the online newsroom they see an active company.

It's a sound tactic and one that has served the industry well for a very long time. There's only one problem with it: it assumes "outreach" to a channel that, if not dead is certainly constricting.

Even attemps to remake the press release don't dissect it entirely, they just try to rearrange the

facts in a way that are more palatable to the changing taste of the percevied consumer of that release: bloggers, podcasters and reporters who now need more multimedia content.

But these attempts don't get at the core of the issue: news is content and should be treated as such. To that end, companies must look at their news pipeline not as a reason to write another release, but as an editorial calendar. The traditional news release, distributed over services such as PRNewswire and BusinessWire are still valid, but only as a single channel of communications within a much broader universe.

One of my favorite examples of a non-news release type scenario came from Google. If you bring yourself back to September 2007 you may remember the anticipation leading up to the announcement that Google would be entering the mobile world. On November 5, Andy Rubin put up a blog post titled "Where is my GPhone?" in which he announced the open handset alliance and Android.

If you read the post it has all the elements that would go into a traditional release. It talks about the partners, the technology and even uses the word "annnoucing." But it was not distributed over BusinessWire, does not have the usual list of editorial contacts and doesn't say "Google, the leading provider of search services to the planet Earth..."

Of course, this is Google and they can do that sort of thing for a highly anticipated annoucement, but for most companies there are pieces of news expected by their core constituancies. Customers may be looking for a product upgrade or partners may want to know about expanded programs. If they have an existing communications channel with which to follow news, then reaching them is that much easier.

The fact is, news is information and can be anything you want it to be. What works for you?

Why You Won't Find Answers on Twitter and Facebook

As kids and teens, my brother and I used to occasionally accompany my dad to printing shows, as that was his industry. While there we'd grab a number of printed posters and see quite a few of my dad's colleagues. Me, being aloof, could never remember a person from one year to the next, but my brother had this wonderful inate ability to know a person's name, face and even something about them. One year, as a baby-faced teen, he asked my dad's colleague about his daughter.

"That kid's a natural salesman," my dad's colleague commented. Before you joke, he meant it as a compliment.

It wasn't that my brother understood how to sell. He didn't memorize reams of data about a particular product or have a knack for showing it off, but he could naturally relate to any individual through information.

Flash forward a few years and I'm a Resident Adviser at Brandeis when the head of Residence Life tells us her secret for making people think she knows everything. Before going in to bust a suite for illegal activity (like drinking) she would have information on the oldest person living in the suite, just their name and birth date. Then she'd say "I know no one in this dorm is legally able to drink until Bob turns 21 on March 3rd." Everyone would freeze and think she knew everything. She built a reputation for omnicience. Really, this information was readily available to administrators and she just read it before walking in. Neat trick.

This is what makes Twitter and Facebook so valuable. It gives you the information you need to make personal connections. I'm not suggesting you fake your way through these connections and feign interest in things you hate just to do your job, but these tools help you do your job better by allowing you to relate to people, not to products. The best part: people give you the information.

Too often when people ask about social media tools they want a quick fix. PR people want to know if the reporters they are following will say "today I'm writing as story about mobile media tools, can anyone help?" and then they want to be able pitch.

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. What you get is a little knowledge about someone that can help you forge a better relationship, then you can, by default, do your job better. Maybe that person is an auto entusiast and you know something about cars. Maybe they're a crafter specializing in jewelry-making and you know something about that.

Or, maybe, you can just ask how their daughter is doing.

"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.

Beating PR People and Getting PR Value

Beating on PR people seems to have become a sport. Chris Anderson's rant is only the latest in a long list of bloggers complaining about the emails they get from the clueless PR people who send out scads of useless pitches .

Most of the complaining I hear comes from bloggers who, until they put out a blog, had never seen this side of the industry. Though, quite a bit comes from reporters who routinely echo the same refrain: why don't PR people read what I write before sending me a pitch?

I also get a lot of lousy pitches, some from people who show up on Chris' short list, but so what? Every once in a while I hear about something interesting. Though, I must admit, NO ONE has tried to engage me in any meaningful conversation.

Why are PR people such easy targets? I believe this is because PR does, in many ways, operate in the shadows. Whenever I try to tell someone what I do they give me a funny look, not because they don't understand it, but because I don't appear to do anything at all. I don't write the articles that appear, I don't produce the products I pitch, but I just tell reporters the stories and get THEM to write something. The key question they never get around to asking is "don't the reporters FIND the stories?" It's a tough for a general news consumer to understand that reporters find stories, but some stories are sent to them. It means admitting that not everything they read was collected as expected.

On the other side, you never read an article that says "I got a call from a PR person telling me about this story." The source is usually left unknown. Frankly, if I do my job well, you never should know that I exist, you should just hear about my client and all the great things they do.

So, if people know we exist but don't fully understand what we do, and we continue to operate in the shadows, then we're easy targets. I mean, who really loses other than the PR people? The members of the press look good, as if they would much rather be out doing REAL reporting than dealing with our annoying email, the general audience feels as if they've gained some insight, and PR people are still going to pitch Chris Anderson because, well, he's got a pretty good audience.

The irony of this Anderson flap is that he's done some amazing PR for a client of my agency (though, not one of my own). He loves Cloudmark Desktop so much, that not only does he talk about it on his blog, but he started this whole thing by trying to emulate the collaborative nature of the product. Going beyond that, he's talking about the product in almost every interview he's done, even Portfolio.com.

Can you imagine trying to pitch an email Spam tool to Portfolio.com? Of course not, no PR person would ever do it, unless they had a great story to go along with it. Yet, there it is, messaging in tact, from the Editor-in-Chief of WIRED.

The lesson? It's not just about pitching bloggers, it's about impressing them in such a way that they want to write.

Pitching, Bad Pitching and Blogger Griping

Every once in a while I read bloggers complaining about PR people.

OK.... more than every once in a while. Probably about once a week. The latest is on the Church of the Customer blog, which starts out by saying not to pitch reporters and then falls back a bit encouraging PR people (and their customers) to cultivate relationships instead.

This is, of course, sound advice. It is also how things SHOULD be done across the board. In PR we're taught from the start to read our assigned publications, learn the reporters, talk with them and only call/email/IM when we have something worth sending. The issue isn't what PR SHOULD be, it's what PR is, meaning all this bitching and moaning is about a lot of bad PR, not PR in general.

But in the Church post is this:

PR companies could actually become more strategic service providers by helping their clients cultivate relationships with existing, well-connected customers. Appeal to the people who already love your clients and foster those relationships.

(I'm really trying not to take an overly snarky attitude on this one.) OF COURSE we do that! We can't do our jobs without having our clients' customers work with us. But the reality is, especially for smaller companies, customers don't always want to talk. Different companies have different reasons. I've had situations in which my client would be competing with a small part of Microsoft and the customer wouldn't go into a public forum and say "this is great!" since it could hurt their contract deals with Redmond. In other cases the deals are relatively small for the size of the customer, so they just don't feel it's important enough to discuss.

In other cases it's a pure marketing issue. While it may be great exposure for my client to get on a technology-focused blog or in a similar publication, their customer may only care about reaching teenagers, aged 12 to 18. Those audiences don't often mix, so the customer doesn't see it as worth their time to get on the phone and talk.

It's fine to toss off comments like "PR should build relationships" or "make your customers work for you," but giving solid advice on how to do that is a different story.

When I work with junior members of my teams I will often assign a large list of publications, bloggers and podcasters, then tell them to focus most of their attention on a much smaller and more strategic list. On the large list they are responsible for keeping track and getting coverage, but the smaller list are those publications they should "own." After a few months on the account they should be at the point that the blogger/podcaster/reporter calls US for information.

That means talking to these people on a regular basis, not just when we put out a release but sometimes calling to say "what are you working on?" Sometimes it's directing them to other people in the agency (or even outside the agency) who can help with their reporting. When you become a trusted part of the reporting process, only then do you have a truly working relationship.

Tellme like it is

My very first client at Schwartz was in the voice recognition space. Like a lot of companies from the age of the bubble, they had great technology and a lot of money that they blew through. I remember walking into their office and seeing the company logo stitched into a carpet that sat in front of the reception desk. I have no idea if the VCs authorized that purchase.

In any case, while this company targeted itself at telecommunications companies and large enterprises, another similar company had a more consumer-friendly model. Tellme launched with a consumer service that let you get the weather, news, sports scores and a few other things.
Both companies talked about the idea of "Dial tone 2.0." The basic concept was that instead of picking up your phone and hearing the familiar dial tone, you hear a voice saying "who do you want to call?" And instead of pushing buttons, you just give it a name or a series of numbers and POOF, the person is on the other line.

Never mind that dial tone 2.0 is actually the one we have now and dial tone 1.0 was the original operator who connected you to a person when you gave her that person's name. So the next dial tone would actually be like the first dial tone only without actual people.

In any case, my client fizzled (later selling its technology to a wireless carrier) and after the dotcom bust Tellme stopped updating its service so regularly. I remember calling it during a golf outing in September 2001 to get news updates. I also used it for New York Jets scores through the winter. But when the updating stopped, so did my usage.

Over the next few years Tellme changed its strategy from a consumer-facing service to one aimed at call centers. I recognized the sounds when I called certain companies. Today, as Microsoft added Tellme to its arsenal, Rob Hof at BusinessWeek had a great blog entry outlining how he'd talked to the company and even visited them at least once. In fact, he liked the technology a lot, but just couldn't find the story.

This happens a lot in PR. You get in front of the right people, give them as much positioning and as many stories as you can, but sometimes it just doesn't feel right to them. There isn't much you can do but keep trying.

But while Rob didn't see the story many other publications did. I remember reading huge profiles of the founders and of the company. So even without the hit in BusinessWeek Tellme still managed the $800 million deal.

Does the ethics change with the price tag?

Dan Shaugnessy came to visit our office one day and waxed poetic about Fenway Park and what it means to bring his children there.

I'm sure it's romantic to a guy who doesn't need to pay for it. For a father of five sitting out in the bleachers, Fenway Park means about $250 for roughly 3 hours of entertainment. That's a lot out of the family budget. But Shaugnessy gets in for free, has no trouble parking and can even get his kids some autographs. Such is the advantage of being a sports reporter.

How different would sports reporting be if each reporter had to pay for a ticket? Let's assume $20 for a ticket (below market rate) and that the reporter attends 60 home games. That's $1200 worth of baseball for one season. That also doesn't include spring training, road games or any other expenses (such as food) that the team may pick up.

It's accepted that such jobs as sports reporters and movie reviewers come with that main perk, something that can be worth quite a bit of money when extended over a year or a whole career. As readers we don't question it, nor do we demand that every review come with a disclaimer that says "movies are free for the reviewers" or "this sports reporter didn't pay for his seat, and ate at the buffet supplied by the team. They served shrimp."

So when I hear an argument about the fact that Microsoft supplied $2500 laptops to bloggers, asking nothing in return, and some of the bloggers did not initially disclose that they received those laptops from Microsoft, I give a big shrug. It's not that I think this is the right thing to do, I don't. But I can't really get all excited by it either. (A good source for articles on the topic is here.)

Yes, it would be ideal for the bloggers to have paid for the goods or not accepted them at all. At the very least they should disclose the goods that were were received. And frankly, Microsoft should have followed the traditional protocol used when giving out review hardware and asked for it to be sent back.

Still I agree mostly with Neville Hobson who calls this a "PR cock-up." This is a tempest in a teapot. Bloggers are not journalists, but they are people with an audience. Over time, those that are ethical will maintain their audience and their street cred, while those that aren't will lose both.

But I still wonder, does it matter that the laptop cost $2500? Does it matter that a movie ticket is $8 or $10? Does the price tag change the ethical consideration? When I choose a movie both my time and my money are worth something, I want to see a movie that is worth both. Is it a rental or a theater experience?

Is Vista really worth the money? Are the features just OK? Who gave the information for the review?

Big names but no meat

I represent mostly small companies, those with a lot of great ideas but no true track record. Often their technology is as good, if not better than that created by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or [enter big software company here].

Still, it amazes me how easy it is for these big companies to keep the spotlight. I may call a reporter and hear him/her say "oh, just another [enter name of topic area here]" and then go on to ignore everything I say. Then, of course, they'll do a big story on the Microsoft Zune, which, to be honest, is "just another [mp3 player]."

But it's from Microsoft.

Which is why the story about the media companies working on a competitor to YouTube made me chuckle. The companies have been meeting but have no real technology and no site. Just content.

But, they're household names... of course it's a story!

What they're forgetting about YouTube is that many companies tried and failed to create content destinations. YouTube isn't about the content, it's about the people who create and view the content. The media companies are starting with the content and expect to build something from that.

I'd be amazed if the "major" players can get it right.

Color the Future

A number of PR, marketing and advertising firms are trying to figure out this new, social media -driven world. In fact, a number of us working in those firms are trying to find ways to help our clients get there. It's a long haul, as many cultures and business models have grown up doing one way and are now trying to change. When a bulk of your revenue comes from marking up printing and reselling advertising space, how do you adjust? If you're used to working with traditional media and heap praise on people for getting major hits in top publications, how do you change to the high-touch and conversational environment of the blogging/podcasting/MySpace/Second Life world?

At least one group of very smart people are trying to do something about it by starting fresh. Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, CC Chapman and Joseph Jaffee have launched crayon. This is a company devoted to social media from the get-go, so it's not like clients will come to them and say "so, we really want to be in the New York Times... oh, and what about this blogging thing?" Considering that they held a launch in Second Life, they've already got the right idea.

These are people whose advice I heed, so I'm eager to see where they go with this.

And in this world that is constantly in metamorphosis, there is plenty of passion.

Coffee Filter

I've talked a lot on this blog about the concept of a "filter." That is, as we continue to be bombarded by information filters will arise to help others separate the wheat from the chaff. The filters will take different forms for different people, or even different types of information. Maybe it's Amazon for filtering through products, or an individual whose taste you admire. Maybe it's TiVo and its recommendations, or Google and its algorithms for choosing what appears on Google News.

Or maybe it's Starbucks.

Starbucks?

A few years ago I looked at the shelves at my local Starbucks and wondered why it suddenly looked a lot like Pottery Barn. My initial instinct was that the coffee company was veering far from its roots in an attempt to leverage its demographic. I figured that kind of venture would fail. I was only half right.

The company failed at selling dishes, but it succeeded at selling entertainment. An article in Sunday's New York Times lays this out nicely (reg. req.). Keep in mind, Starbucks' original concept was to become the "third place." Work, home and another place to be. Of course, when you have a number of people gathering, you have a community. In this case it's a community with an average age of 42 and income in the range of $90,000.

Perhaps my favorite quote in the piece comes at the end:

Thomas Hay, a 48-year-old contractor from Hartsdale, N.Y., said Starbucks helped him by editing down his cultural choices. Looking over the selections the company makes, he said, he has the impression that “some people of caring hearts and minds have looked at this and felt it was worthwhile and beneficial and would create a good vibe in the world.”

It's not just that this guy trusts the brand, it's that he's overwhelmed by what's in the market and needs some way to find the "good stuff."

So, in the future, PR people are going to have to figure out what filters they need to target and how to best reach the decision makers. It's not going to be easy.

Serving PR like Takeout?

A PR Store just opened up the street from me. I haven't been in there, though I do remember hearing about the concept a few years ago.

While it's interesting, the person quoted at the end of this article is correct. Cookie cutter PR just doen't work. Especially now that the media world is fragmented. I know that I've received a large number of pitches, but few (if any) actually speak to my particular focus. Though, recently I have had some success in pitching bloggers, those tend to be the kind that use a blog model but act more like a traditional news operation.

Then again, it doesn't seem like the PR Store is actually about pure PR. It's more like a gimicky advertising shop, or even what used to be the corner print shop... with a twist.

I think what bugs me about it is that it's not actually selling PR. It's selling marketing, printing and design. It just confuses the issue.