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Category: Web/Tech
A recent Daily Telegraph interview with legendary music producer Brian Eno contained an instructive quote about dealing with too many choices:
“In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”
Whereas in the past these recording choices would only have been available to a small number of well funded bands, the problem is now one faced by anyone who has played around with Apple’s Garageband software. It is all too easy to get sidetracked into tinkering with different instrument settings and effects (how about trying a bit more phasing on that clavier?). Before you know it, hours have passed, and you haven’t actually recorded anything meaningful.
In many ways, a similar problem faces marketing and PR clients. The range of possible choice in terms of the composition of the marketing mix grows by the day. A mind blowing selection of agencies, tools and offerings that serve to make your brain fuse. Experimenting with Twitter and Facebook is similar to agonising over Pinch or Flutter Harmonics – and the million and one permutations of digital effects.
Brian Eno thus seems to belong to the same “Less is More” camp as Clay “filter failure” Shirky, Barry “Paradox of Choice” Schwartz and Richard “80/20” Koch. You have to set up some boundaries and constraints up front to prevent getting sucked into an endless cycle of fruitless tinkering.
Hot off the digital press today is a new whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing entitled “Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme.” I have a very personal interest in this – I wrote it. Within the confines of a 4000 word whitepaper, we’ve tried to make it as comprehensive as possible – but clearly, all feedback will be appreciated. Let the conversation begin (see below for press release):
PR and marketing professionals looking to kick start or improve their online communications programmes now have a valuable new free guide thanks to the publication today of the latest whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub). The whitepaper, entitled “Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme”, sets out the basic steps required to get results from digital media. The whitepaper was written by digital PR veteran Andrew Bruce Smith, founder of online PR specialist consultancy escherman. It was inspired by a lack of detailed information about how to pull together all the various elements of a successful online PR campaign – despite huge volumes of information available on specific aspects of the subject.
According to Smith: “PR and marketing professionals are spoilt for choice when it comes to information available on niche features of online PR such as press release distribution or search engine optimisation (SEO). It occurred to me that much of this material was being produced by search marketing specialists rather than PR practitioners. And no one had really put together a practical guide that looked at the subject from the perspective of the PR professional – whether in-house or agency – as well as looking at the entire PR process from planning through implementation to analysis and reporting. This new whitepaper aims to provide a solid framework for allowing PR professionals from SMEs to larger businesses to begin making rapid improvements to their online PR campaigns.”
DWPub chairman Daryl Willcox said: “There are tons of people out there blogging about how important online PR is, but there is very little in terms of actual guidance – especially for those who have limited online PR experience. This latest whitepaper seeks to address that imbalance and give people a practical introduction to digital PR techniques.” In the whitepaper’s foreword, Willcox warns that if PR professionals do not adapt to an increasingly digital media, they risk being sidelined by other marketing disciplines. Willcox first made this prediction in his 2007 whitepaper entitled “PR versus Search” – a forecast that is showing signs of coming true. “Online PR in action” is the latest in the Public Relations Whitepaper Series from DWPub which covers such topics as press release writing, getting coverage in feature articles and working with freelance journalists.
All the whitepapers can be downloaded at www.dwpub.com/whitepapers
Online services from DWPub, such as its media database and online press release distribution services, are effective tools for supporting online PR campaigns.
For more information contact:
Vanessa McGreevy
Daryl Willcox Publishing
Tel: 0845 370 7777
Email: vanessa@dwpub.com
Andrew Smith Escherman
Tel: 0208 334 8095
andrew@escherman.com
About Daryl Willcox Publishing
Online services for journalists and media relations specialists www.dwpub.com Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub) focuses entirely on online information services for journalists and PR professionals. DWPub brands enjoy widespread recognition with both the press and the PR community. DWPub is a UK-owned independent company and has grown every year since its launch in 1997. The company was founded and is run by an experienced journalist.
The above quote is a reworking of Albert “The Outsider” Camus’ existentialist poser: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” It is referred to in Barry Schwartz’s highly insightful cult classic, The Paradox of Choice to stress the point that everything in life is a choice. One of the key themes in Schwartz’s book is that although having no choice at all is a bad thing, having an ever expanding growth in choice isn’t leading us to the promised land either.
In other words, choice overload is an even more serious problem them information overload. And choice overload is clearly in abundance in the world of PR, marketing and social media – whether it is the range of marketing channels available (and ways in which these can be combined), or the number of 3rd party agencies and suppliers queuing up to offer their services to the deluged client side buyers.
As Schwartz says: “Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of consciousness. If everything available to our senses demanded our attention at all times, we wouldn’t be able to get through the day.” (He has clearly never used Twitter).
We are becoming trapped by what economist Fred Hirch has referred to as “the tyranny of small decisions” (or in social media terms, the Tyranny of the Twitter Stream or the infinitely expanding Google Reader RSS subscription list). According to Clay Shirky, there is no such thing as information overload, merely “filter failure.” If that is true, then we just need to build better filters. But presumably building better filters requires us to be more clear and decisive about our goals. And as Schwartz fascinatingly points out: “Goal setting and decision making begins with the question, ‘What do I want?”. But knowing what we want means being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no easy task.” A number of experiments cited show that our predictions about how we will feel about our goal making decisions are usually wrong. “Susceptibility to error can only get worse as the number and complexity of decisions increase, which in general describes the conditions of daily life. The growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related unfortunate effects:
It means that decisions require more effort
It makes mistakes more likely
It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe
Another key element of the book is the distinction between people who are maximisers and satisficers. “Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough”.
If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximiser. Maximisers need to be “assured that every decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given option is absolutely the best possible? The only way is to check out all the alternatives. As a decision strategy, maximising creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases.”
Take some social media examples. A Twitter maximiser will presumably keep following more people and reading more Tweets in order to reassure themselves they have found the absolute best in terms of Twitterers and material. They will click every link they can to make sure they haven’t missed that vital blog post or news story. Or what about a client side PR director who in order to reassure themselves they have chosen the right agency will keep adding to the pitch list until they have 20 agencies lined up (as Schwartz points out, the more alternatives you consider the more likely you are to suffer from buyer’s remorse and still feel disatisfied with your decision – he cites a number of experiments which seem to verify this principle – at last, scientific proof of the ineffectiveness of lengthy pitch lists!) He has a lot more to say on maximisers, but one of the key conclusions is that maximisers tend to be unhappier people – and unhappy people tend to be poor decision makers.
Contrast this with “satisficers”. To satisfice is to settle for something that is “good enough” and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. He or she will search until they find the item (whatever it is) that meets those standards and at that point stop. They are not concerned that a better alternative might be just around the corner.
I could go on, but I’m making a decision to stop now and go and do something else instead. Suffice to say there is a lot be learnt from The Paradox of Choice – and I shall return to it again in later blog posts.
So. Should I follow yet another person on Twitter? Spend another few minutes on Tweetdeck? Or kill myself? Or go an re-read some Camus?
A quick plug for client SaaS-IT Consult and their new whitepaper entitled “Software as a service: It’s about the business model, stupid”.
SaaS-IT say that too much focus on technology and a failure to develop new business models will mean many traditional IT industry players such as ISVs and resellers may fail to capitalise on the emerging Software as Service (SaaS) market.
They also say the SaaS market has got more in common with supermarket retailing than traditional IT sales models. Or as they put it, selling cheese rather than technology.
As SaaS-IT founder and partner Anders Trolle-Schultz remarks: “Software as a Service (SaaS) is going to have a major impact on the business world in the next few years. In spite of this, virtually all of the discussion around SaaS to date has focussed on technology – and that SaaS is merely a different technology delivery model. The simple fact is that SaaS isn’t about technology at all. It’s a business model. As a result, mainstream SaaS adoption will require a major mindset change on the part of all participants, not least the existing IT channel. Technology is not the main market inhibitor. We have produced this new whitepaper to help move the debate and discussion toward the real business drivers in the development of the SaaS market.”
About SaaS-IT
SaaS-IT is Europe’s leading Software As A Service (SaaS) business enablement consultancy. SaaS-IT provides a bespoke mix of practical, real world consulting services to allow small to medium size ISVs, value added hosters and mainstream software vendors to optimise their SaaS business capabilities.
Unlike larger generalist and technology led consultancies, SaaS-IT delivers an unrivalled level of business partnership expertise to ensure SaaS market opportunities are properly validated and optimally executed where appropriate.
SaaS-IT consultants have extensive expertise, understanding and experience of local European market conditions and are best positioned to advise on all aspects of SaaS business enablement including messaging, pricing, sales & marketing, demand generation, licensing models, product development lifecycle, and support operations.
After another inspiring Castaway networking event last night (and meeting some very bright, energetic digital innovators from companies as diverse as Zopa, Kizoom and Fortune Cookie), I was reminded of a great quote from Richard Koch, author of the 80/20 Principle.
“We tend to assume our organisations and our industries are doing pretty much the best they can. We tend to think that our business world is highly competitive and has reached some sort of equilibrium or end-game. Nothing could be further from the truth! It would be far better to start from the proposition that your industry is all screwed up and could be structured much more effectively to provide what customers want. And as far as your organisation is concerned, your ambition should be to transform it within the next decade, so that in 10 years time your people will look back, shake their heads ruefully and say to each other “I can’t believe we used to do things that way, We must have been crazy!”
There were certainly plenty of great ideas bouncing around last night about how PR and marketing can (and is) being transformed. Bring it on.
Stephen Davies has posted a great list of prominent UK journalists who are on Twitter.
As he says: “Twitter isn’t something that immediately strikes you as anything good and explaining the benefits of it to someone who has never heard of it – particularly a pressed for time PR person – can be quite difficult.”
OK. Here’s my current top 6 reasons to use Twitter to supercharge you PR efforts:
1. Look at the numbers – as per Stephen’s list, many more journalists are using it. Not only that, but some journalists are giving priority to communication via Twitter over any other channel. For example, I’m willing to bet that you are far more likely to get the attention of someone like, say, Charles Arthur at the Guardian, by sending him a direct Tweet and/or a link to a dedicated info landing page than by trying to call him or e-mail him. Of course, you still need a good story, but I suspect he would give you more respect for using this approach.
2. It is much easier now to manage the Twitter info firehose because of tools like Tweetdeck. Being able to keep real time tabs on specific brands/issues/people is fantastic. The kind of insight you could only have dreamed of in the past.
3. People are beginning to develop their own individual styles of Twitter usage. Smart PRs will adapt their approach depending on the various Twitter “communities” they participate in (I can now see why having separate accounts for certain things makes sense eg having a dedicated client press release account so you can separate this from more general Twittering).
4. The 140 character limit imposes a healthy discipline on communicating clearly and succinctly.
5. Lets not forget the journalist research aspect of Twitter – checking out a journalist’s recent Tweets gives great insight into the kind of things they are really interested in.
6. Being there when you can’t be there – if you can’t get to an event, you can be sure that someone on Twitter will be – and will provide useful updates and commentary on proceedings – not only that, if they are journalists, you can feed them questions that might be worth asking….
The drug has removed nervous tension and panic attacks, calmed me down and clarified the mind. Side effects are described at https://careanimalrights.org/xanax-2mg/ but I haven’t felt any.
I think the excuses for not using Twitter are dwindling by the day. The only way to really understand Twitter is to dive in and use it. What are you waiting for?
SEO keyword firm Wordtracker have released a new free tool that allows you to see the most popular questions people ask in relation to a specific keyword or phrase. For example, the most common phrase associated with public relations is: “what is public relations?”.
According to Wordtracker, by creating content related to relevant questions, you may improve your search efficacy – although they freely admit this is a “long tail” technique.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, questions are mainly of a Socratic variety ie “What is X?”
But it did make me wonder why we don’t ask more questions via Google? If you were looking for the best digital PR consultancy for example, wouldn’t it make sense to at least ask the question, just to see what results Google brings back? As I’ve blogged previously, this clearly isn’t the way we use Google (and it seems to apply across the board).
Perhaps if I ask the question “Why don’t more people use Google Search to ask questions?”, I might bring down the Internet?
Why is it there is always a great blog post that you only catch up on a while after it is has been published?
For some reason I missed Mike Butcher’s “top 15 ways to get on with TechCrunch UK, and maybe other media” post when it first came out in August. No matter. It has some good, non time sensitive advice – all worth sharing.
However, I do have a difference of opinion with Mike on some of the following:
“Here’s the thing about PR firms. Only a small number are really any good. What happens is that there are individuals inside big PR firms who know their trade, understand how to interface with the media, read blogs, etc etc. If they’re good, they usually end up leaving and setting up their own boutique firm. In which case I still hear from them. The best PRs behave like the best contacts – they keep in contact, float ideas, check if something is of interest before bothering to send you a full-blown release, etc etc. Others are good, but decide instead to rise through the ranks inside MEGA PR CORP, and guys like me stop hearing from them because they have been replaced by a spotty teenager / recent graduate who just reads your name and number out on a list and “checks if you got the press release”. Or worse, they call you to check if they can email over the non-exclusive (Aargh!) press release. Either that person learns fast and turns into a decent PR or they stay being the person who who cold calls you with crap – at least until they eventually realise they’d do a lot better in life as a bingo caller.”
It is a truism that people don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. And the PR business is no different. PR firms build their businesses on the promise of the brand (ie you can count on a certain level of value and quality whoever works on your account). Of course, this just isn’t true. Mike seems to bemoan the fact good media relations people have the nerve to want to get promoted. However, I’ve blogged in the past about the fact that the really good media relations people in agencies are faced with a Catch 22 situation – if you are good, you tend to get more accounts pushed your way – however, there is a ceiling on the number of accounts you can possible service to an acceptable level (because most journalists have no idea about all the other stuff that is expected of a PR – account management, billing, reporting, internal politics, etc). If you want to get promoted, you have to take on a more managerial role. Which means not doing what you were good at in the first place. Smart agencies would hopefully get the good senior media relations folk to train the rookies. But as per previous downturns, training is usually the first budget to go.
When Mike talks about PRs who “learn fast” or “eventually realise they’d do a lot better in life as a bingo caller”, he seems to be laying all the blame on the individual. I’d say it is more a fault of management. If that person were trained properly in the first place, much of the “learning” that Mike thinks they require wouldn’t be needed in the first place. And if they don’t seem to be “learning”, it is just possible that their managers have told them to keep doing it this way. Which may explain why so many boutique firms emerge.
In reality, when Mike says they are only a handful PR firms that are any good, he means there are only a handful of good PR people. But what journalists regard as good PR people aren’t necessarily the same people who can build large, successful PR businesses. Given that such universally derided practices such as the press release follow up call still persist, a cynic might argue that people wouldn’t keep doing it if there weren’t some value in it.
According to Google, UK internet users searched for the term “cars” on Google 185 million times in October. The historical 12 month average has been 226 million – so there has been an 18pc decline in search term usage.
And as we know, new car sales in the UK slumped 21pc in September.
Should we draw any connections between these statements? Before I have any Freakonomics fans on my case, the answer is – not necessarily.
For a start, I’m still trying to get my brain around the figure of 185 million. If we accept that the UK internet population is around 35.6 million, that would mean we online Britons searched on the term “cars” over 5 times each last month. Clearly not every UK internet user is interested in cars, so that suggests that there are some people who are searching on the same search term in an almost obsessive fashion. And why would you do that? Perhaps people check multiple times because they believe they will get different results – which will almost certainly be true in terms of ads served – and even natural rankings.
Then again, there may be other possible explanations:
1. Google’s numbers are rubbish
2. There are automated searches on the term “cars” which is hugely inflating numbers (though of course this contravenes Google’s Terms of Service).
3. The term “cars” is not just related to automobiles, but covers other things such as the Pixar film, etc.
Leaving this aside for the moment, if we drill down into some more specific terms such as “new cars” and “used cars”, we get something that seems a bit more realistic.
New cars 368,000 (Oct 08)
Used cars 1,500,000 (Oct 08)
(NB: Google Trends shows that people seem to search on term “used cars” most often on Sundays – which is worth knowing if you are looking to sell a used car).
If Google is to be believed, then these search volumes are the same as the historical 12 month trend. Which might offer cheerier news for car dealers. Then again, they may want to keep monitoring Google Trends carefully to see whether this holds up.
So what does this all mean? As a nation of Internet users, are we attempting to ignore the credit crunch by searching for “cars” all day? (Then again, we apparently searched on the term “shoes” 101 million times last month as well).
I still stand by my view that SEO Keyword Tools can be very helpful in helping to formulate a PR or marketing content strategy. However, like any tool, you need to be aware of its limitations – and how to use it properly. And have some confidence in the underlying data.