Category: Technology PR

Over there. In the corner. Next to the deep freeze.

Though not according to Firefly.They’ve just won a global brief to launch Korean electronics conglomerate LG’s new range of ‘chic’ touch-sensitive refrigerators.

According to PR Week: "Firefly’s brief includes ­positioning these fridges as interior design
elements rather than simple kitchen appliances. The range includes
silver titanium and stainless steel designs as well as a Swarovski
crystal-embellished fridge available only by special order. The rest of
the line will be available in the UK exclusively at Harrods from the
end of the month, with each fridge costing up to £1,199."

Firefly’s task is thus to persuade (at least a section) of the global fridge buying public to part with an extra £1000 to buy "an interior design element" rather than a "a simple kitchen appliance." Quite a tall order – but good luck to Firefly – it looks like they are being paid handsomely to try and achieve this.

However, the thing that irritated me about this story was PR Week’s use of the word "positioning".

I’ve always been irked by the rather lax way this word gets used in PR. Anybody who as ever read  Geoffery Moore’s books (Crossing the Chasm, etc) will know that companies or their PR companies can never position a product – the market positions you. You can attempt to influence the market perception of where your position in the market it is – but ultimately, the market (or your customers or propects) decide what that position will be.

In which case, it would be nice to see places like PR Week stop referring to PR briefs being to "position" companies. No PR company has that power.

Nice piece of Private Eye-style satire at TWL. Enjoy.

Tom Foremski has highlighted a new social media news release service* called PRXBuilder. Currently in beta (and free to use), it is intended to provide an easy means of creating and distributing rich media releases.

However, the bit that caught my eye was an extra service called NewsAds – ie using Google AdWords to advertise and drive traffic to the original release. You can see why clients might like this idea – for example you choose to set a specific budget to try and drive particular levels of traffic – or indeed set a cap in case you have an unexpected "hit" on your hands (or at least be in control of how much you want to spend on a particular news release campaign).

Using PR to support advertising campaigns is as old as the hills – but using advertising to drive attention for a press release is a novel inversion of tradition. However, you do have to wonder  how credible target consumers will find these ads – or indeed the news release itself if they’ve been led their by an ad.

*I’m making a conscious effort to refer to news releases rather than press releases these days – given that the new accepted wisdom is that they are intended for anyone but a journalist.

Excellent post on Strumpette from Ike Piggot – anyone who can use Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a metaphor for what’s happening in social media gets my vote:

Outside observers kill communities in a hurry, regardless of the
transparency of their motives. The only tolerated agenda is pure:
thrash metal fans don’t want Mr. Labelpants from Arista watching over
their shoulder. The Curse of Heisenberg: The act of observing disturbs
the observed. So that leaves us with completely Naked Conversations.
The PR guy now has to be the biggest fan in the forum – the king of the
community – top Twit in the Twitterbin. And then corporate expectation
will be nothing less than maximum influence. That means that only the
rabid fans will have the inside track to be PR representatives. Even
transparent, the lack of Motive Purity changes the dynamic of the
group.

Bottom line: Corporate expectations being what they are, some
degree of control will remain on the agenda. The message might be out
of their hands, but then again it never was firmly in their grasp to
begin with. The illusion of control was a product of a tiny number of
outlets – slits that kept the electron beams somewhat coherent with a
minimum of interference. A few years ago, the slits became close enough
together to blur the results, and now the screen is gone altogether.
We’re all bathing in our own complex streams of radiation, and PR’s
challenge is to create relevance once again.

You can choose to be immersed in the community.
You can choose to be an advocate.
You can choose to be transparent as to your motive.

But you can only pick two of the above, because the communities won’t let you have all three.

Perhaps time to dust off my piece about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorum and PR.

There was me saying that Facebook could be the way forward for PR – and then along comes Danny Bradbury and shows how LinkedIn could help get rid of us altogether (well, almost).

Specifically, Danny is referring to the use of LinkedIn Answers as a research tool:

"I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a
lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I
thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another
article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back
about six answers – all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the
money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the
subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out
their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where
they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them,
have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.

This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your
research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that
you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR
(which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d
use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool
nonetheless."

I know the PR defense – it relies upon people who are on LinkedIn, who are prepared to take the time to respond to the question, etc, etc. But again, I think Danny has rightly identified that there now tools emerging that could easily remove traditional PR from the equation – and is that necessarily a bad thing?

Haven’t been able to log in to Facebook all day – perhaps I should be grateful. Then again, wouldn’t surprise me if their servers have melted with the ever spiralling number of new users being added daily.

The Viking Manifesto didn’t take long to read – and shared with David Meerman Scott’s book a common theme about the importance of telling good stories.

Which made me wonder about the curious PR phrase pitching or selling stories to journalists. As we all know, the PR industry seems to be pretty hopeless at doing this – more specifically, what is pitched or sold to a journalist is anything but a story in the proper sense of the word.

So what makes a good story – a cursory Google search revealed this helpful little crib sheet. I realise its more geared towards general creative writing, but it did make me realise why PR writing generally fails in its objectives.

Let’s look at some specific examples:

 
A good story needs conflict and resolution. Stories are made up of people, 
places, and happenings. Strong stories usually have a well-defined main character — a he, a she, an animal, a machine, or whatever — 
that encounters some kind of trouble (conflict). There is something blocking our protagonist, whether it is nature, another person, or even the main character him or herself. The action taken signifies personal growth and 
change — possibly an “ah ha!” — and finally, some sort of redemption. It is the believable action moving the story from beginning to middle to end that keeps the audience entranced.

The protagonist in virtually all tech PR is simply the company or the product. We all know what’s going to happen ie our product/company is the best – buy it/us. No "Ah Ha!" or redemption there.

A good story creates vivid images. Through our knowing, as the storyteller, 
what vivid images the story creates for us, we will create images for our listeners. They may not see the same images we see and imagine, and that is the exciting part of storytelling. We want them to imagine their own images that relate to them and their experiences as the story unfolds. 
This is the part that makes interaction so important. If our stories help the listener to think of his/her own stories, we have succeeded in igniting
   a storytelling spark.

Vivid images in a press release? Not likely. What image is conjured by: "ACAL ATM Parts has been authorised as a certified reseller for
Passfaces Web Access and Passfaces for Windows, patented authentication
software which increases data security in a wide range of applications
including high-risk sectors such as banking and finance." I haven’t singled this release out specifically – pretty much any release you see these days would fail on this test.

A good 
story is not “wimpy.” In the excellent book The
        Storyteller’s Guideby Bill Mooney and David Holt , many well known storytellers give their views on what makes
  a “wimpy story.” Michael Parent says, “The difference between a good story and a wimpy story for me is the wimpy story gives too easy a solution.” Laura Simms says, “A wimpy story is one that points toward something very obvious, that doesn’t have resonance inside, 
that doesn’t provide an experience.” Jon Spelman says, “To
        me, the strongest mark of a good story well-told is its sincerity. I think there is something about a wimpy story that is insincere; it’s unauthentic.
  It’s not true to the person who is telling it.” Kathryn Windham
  adds, “When you find interesting people, you are going to find interesting stories.”

Most tech press releases make out that the solution is easy – or states the blindingly obvious – and of course, sincerity abounds, yes? Perhaps the lack of interesting people is a reason for the lack of interesting stories?

 A good 
story is the story that is perfect for your audience.  We must keep in tune with the listeners and change direction if we aren’t connecting

Given the failure rate of PR with connecting with journalists why haven’t we learned to change direction?

A good 
story is a story that you love and love to tell. Never, never, never, 
tell a story you don’t like, even if a client has requested it. As a storyteller, we are never on the outside looking in as we tell the story. 
We are a part of the story. We have internalized that story and we truly care about it. We can’t do that, if we don’t like the story.

This is as good an acid test for PRs as it is for creative writers.

In short, PR better get better at telling stories – or stop pretending that stories are what journalists are being pitched.

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.