Escherman

I’ve been ploughing my way through 3 books recently – all on ostensibly different topics – but which have some surprisingly common themes with major implications for the PR industry.

I’ve listed the books below – with a quick precis on each – and some more general conclusions to follow:

Competing on Analytics by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris

There is one basic premise to this book – namely that the best performing companies today have put analytics at the heart of their strategy. No longer confined to specialists or specific departments, analytics permeates every aspect of the organisation. Decisions are made on the basis of analytics rather than intuition. Failure to adopt a strategic approach to analytics will almost certainly result in poorer performance. The key barriers to be overcome are primarily cultural – ie intuition still rules the day when it comes to making decisions. Plus you need decent data to analyse in the first place.

In terms of PR, how many companies or agencies truly take a strategic approach to analysis? Advertising and DM remain well ahead in terms of analytics – PR is still stuck in the dark ages with outdated metrics – there is clearly an opportunity for those who are prepared to grasp the nettle in terms of investment in analytics.

The New Rules Of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott had already stirred a lot of debate with his original paper on the direct-to -consumer news release – the book expands much further on this original theme. However, at bottom, he has these basic premises (and which don’t actually sound that new):

PR and marketing can no longer be treated as separate disciplines (integrated marketing as a concept has been around for decades – but his point I guess is that the PR and marketing are blurring into one – and that actually advertising has no place in this new world ie advertising as interrupting your attention and attempting to arrest that attention when you don’t want to be interrupted. 

Media relations is still important – but not that important – he is quite adamant that companies can now generate their own news releases in order to directly reach their target audiences, unfiltered by the media – content is king – and the more news releases the better.

The 4 Hour Work Week
by Tim Ferriss

I confess that at times this does read like one of those old style "Get Rich Quick" books – but he actually has a subtler point – namely that its all about adopting methods of automating cash flow and freeing up time to do the things you really want. He advocates various techniques to achieve this such as only checking email twice a day (he only now does it twice a week), telling people to only call you if its urgent – and perhaps most controversially, outsource everything – even the trivial items of your life, to a cheap Indian outsourcing centre.  For automated cash flow, you need to have a business you own, but don’t need to run – and sell a product not a service.

There is obviously huge amount I haven’t touched on in all this – perhaps another book’s worth. But what intrigued me was that all three books made a lot of noise about testing – testing different analytic techniques, testing different content strategies, testing products. It made me realise that the PR business  has a pretty hopeless track record with the concept of test and learn.  How many original and creative approaches to press releases, media relations, etc have witnessed in the last few years? Not many.  And where is the hard data to back up PR decision making? And are there huge swathes of PR admin work that can and will be outsourced to India? 

All three books together potentially offer a model for the next generation of PR – once I’ve worked out what that model is, I’ll let you know.

My thanks to Mr Waddington at Rainier for getting one of his interns to analyse Sourcewire’s press release output from June.

The results showed that: "Out of 150 press releases, “best” appeared 68, times followed by “latest” recurring 29
times and “largest” 24 times. Descriptive words such as “biggest”,
“fastest” and “hottest” weren’t far behind. Two-thirds of
releases had opening sentences stretching to more than 20 words, with
one example topping 60 words. The length of headline was also
excessive, in some cases reaching almost 30 words. Does it
matter? I think it does. The industry has lost sight of what a press
release is for and I think we need to get back to basics."

The thing that always bemuses me about the "crap press release" debate is that pretty much anyone in PR knows how they OUGHT to write a press release – yet as Sourcewire’s output shows, everyone seems to continue to ignore this.

As ever, there is a familiar cast of villians:

1. It’s the client’s fault – we PR folk advise them how a release ought to be written, but the client insists on keeping its jargon riddled straplines and marketing messages in the release.
2. It’s the PRs fault – because we aren’t tough enough with our clients and don’t force them to do it "the right way".

Go back 20 years and we were still having these debates – tech press releases were just as bad then as they are now – except that when you were paying to send out press releases on paper via post, there weren’t too many companies that could afford to send out a press release every couple of days. Today, its just too easy to pump out a release at the click of a mouse.

Let’s not forget that companies have usually invested a lot of time and money in coming up with their marketing messages – and these may be appropriate to use in certain forms of marketing eg advertising (though even here, I’d dispute that). The real challenge is to "show" the message rather than simply "tell it". For example, all of those companies claiming to be the biggest and fastest never really "show" why this might be remotely relevant or appropriate to the journalists they are targetting.

Ultimately, a press release is supposed to tell a story – unfortunately, most companies don’t really have that many good stories to tell. PR agencies are supposed to be able unearth angles that the client might not be aware of – but at the end of the day, one of the reason’s agencies will carry on sending out more press releases than they ought (and not challenging clients on jargon) is that they continue to get paid for it.

Another reason is that clients often think that PR is their marketing "silver bullet" – (or that it’s the cheapest way to solve their problems). However, when a client comes along with a brief, how many PR agencies can stomach telling the prospect that they are wasting their money – or advise on an alternative marketing approach? The temptation to simply take the money (and wait for the inevitable failure) is still very strong.

In which case, I suspect that when Rainier carry out a similiar exercise to the one above this time next year, things won’t be any different (or indeed, even worse).

PR Week’s lead story this week has some profound implications for the PR industry.

There has been much talk in recent times of just how the new TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings Protection Employment) regulations might impact PR agencies and their clients – it now seems we have the answer.

According to PR Week: "An employment tribunal has fired a ‘legal warning
shot’ at the PR industry by ruling that agency PROs have the right to
transfer to a rival firm following a client re-tender.

Hunt was
made redundant from Storm when Brown Brothers Wines – her biggest
client – stopped using the agency and turned instead to Wild Card PR,
following a competitive pitch.

Under TUPE, if a PRO’s
principal purpose at an agency is to serve one particular client, he or
she is automatically entitled to continue employment with another
age­n­cy, should another agency. In this case, ‘principal purpose’ is
defined as spending 52% of her time on the client."

So – will this serve as the test case for future guidance as to interpretation of the law? Or, as PRCA MD Patrick Barrow thinks: "there is a danger of similiar cases collapsing under the weight of legal argument."

Although this only applies to accounts where personnel spend 52pc or more of their time, this almost certainly would impact a significant number of client accounts – and not just the big ones. Many smaller agencies hinge for their existence on a flagship client – so would face not only losing the client but their people as well.

On the other side of the coin, it puts clients in this situation in a quandary – what’t the point in changing agency if you have to keep the same team – presumably the whole point of changing is to bring in a brand new team. Or perhaps they will ask agencies to reduce the time spent on their account before firing them?

Perhaps agencies will now start finding ingenious justifications to show that any agency exec spends no more than 51pc of their time on a particular account?

This one will run and run.

Like most people I know, I’ve been spending more time than is healthy on Facebook in the last few weeks (which is why my blog posting has slowed to a crawl). However, the more I use it, the more I’m convinced it offers a model for the way PR will be conducted in the future (especially media relations).

Take for example the concept of journalist relationships – every agency will wax lyrical about the strength of its journalist relationships. The problem in the past has been that it is nigh on impossible to actually quantify this. With Facebook, journalists can choose who they want to have on their friends lists – so presumably only trusted PRs would get on there (I think people are very relaxed at the moment as to who they accept as Friends – but the option to remove people you don’t want is there – and I’m sure people will use it if they feel they are being used/abused). If a client wants to verify whether someone has a relationship with the journalist, they simply check the friends list – if you aren’t on there, it suggests your relationship isn’t that good.

In the past, agencies have made great play of their level of knowledge of  journalists interests – both professional and personal. Now, journalists can provide this information to whoever they see fit. The need for all those tedious briefing documents simply disappears – because the journalist will, by default, provide that information on their Facebook page – at least to those they consider appropriate to have access to it. And if an agency tries to construct a profile that doesn’t match what the journalist has on Facebook? Again, more flanneling is exposed.

And what about how journalists want to be contacted (the possible answer to Charles Arthur’s prayers?)
By using a status alert, it is very clear what they are currently up to eg I’m busy for the next 2 hours – only contact me if urgent. They can provide a landline or mobile number that only trusted contacts have access to – so hopefully ensuring that they really do only get the urgent (and relevant) stuff. Or they can have a Skype app on their FB page which shows whether or not they can be contacted in this way (again, only those PRs in the trusted circle would have the Skype ID).

And if anyone breaks the rules? They will simply get de-listed from the Friends list – or the journalist can post a public note about serial offenders on their wall.

Perhaps will also see the death of "liaising" with journalists from PR reports eg we have a great relationship with journalist X, but we couldn’t get hold of him. If you aren’t on the friends list, then that’s a porky – or if his/her status alert for that day clearly said he/she was in the office and contactable, then this sort of flannel will be easily rooted out.

Journalists are also beginning to use Facebook to research stories, etc. Even books.
I can see a time where journalists routinely use Facebook to ask for input for stories – either via their trusted network of PR friends – or cast their net wider by Wall posts, etc – whatever they prefer (a threat to Responsesource?)

And why spend a fortune on surveys when you can run them on Facebook. Or the dreaded media survey when journalists get contacted by PR agencies trying to get their feedback on a prospect they are pitching to? Clients themselves can check out a journalist profile and see which PRs really do have a relationship with a particular PR.

What does this all add up to? I really do think it has the potential to provide a much great degree of transparency into the PR process. For too long, PR agencies have treated media relations as a black box exercise and milked client’s ignorance – Facebook does offer a glimpse of a more transparent model – which should hopeufully reward the PRs who really do have genuine relationships with the press and come up with the best stories.

I could go on – but I think you get the idea.

So if your boss asks you why you are spending so much time on Facebook, just tell them you are upskilling to ensure you have a long term career in PR.

BBC NEWS | Technology | From here to cyberspace:

A timely piece from Bill Thompson at Beeb website. He writes: “One of the big problems with Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and the other social network sites is that they
bring the many different groups we all belong to into one online space, creating a ‘social soup’ that encourages intermingling when most of us work hard to keep our friends, family and colleagues just a little bit separate, negotiating the boundaries with more or less skill.

The tools used to manage privacy and sharing online remain crude and inflexible compared with the nuanced way we handle real-life social networks, and we are going to have to learn to deal with the new modes of social engagement that result.”

A good point – whereas in the past you would maintain different circles of friends, we are all potentially intersecting at one central point in the Venn diagram.

He continues: “(Facebook) is rapidly becoming more than just a social network site.

Its support for third-party applications and services is turning it into a platform for all other forms of online social activity, from talking about movies via the Flixster application to asking friends questions or ‘superpoking’ them. Facebook may well become the single point of contact with one’s online networks, wherever they may be hosted. I rarely visit Twitter, the site that lets you send short updates about what you’re up to, because it’s easier to post from within Facebook. And as this trend develops, more and more of us will spend more and more time on Facebook instead of elsewhere. Once someone builds ‘MySpaceBook’, an application that lets you run your MySpace profile from within Facebook, the game will be over.

Is Facebook becoming the first true portal?

TWL has now turned up on Facebook – though he has had to adopt the name Theo as Facebook needs a "proper" first name.

More PR fun to be had here as well then.