we can haz comms profeshionils? kthx

Since I started #fixPR back in January I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of the tips I provided but I’ve also been hearing a similar theme in response

“We know we should but…”

I hate to get all Tony Robbins but… knowing and doing are completely different things. How do you help your agency get to grips with social media? Make it compulsory.

I used to be all soft & fluffy on this issue (honest) but it’s 2010 and I’m still seeing PRs uncomfortable with the word RSS. The only thing for it is a shift in agency culture.

Switch the daily ritual of reading the papers to reading online feeds and social bookmarking, create a simple social media policy and insist people use services like Twitter. Make it happen.

You might run into some resistance so I’ve scripted some handy responses:

Excuse 1:  “We don’t have time on top of everything else”

Internal Response: FFS. You’ll have all the time in the world in 2 years time when we’ve lost all our clients and are sat round here twiddling our thumbs. Would that be a more convenient time for you?

Actual Response: “Sure, but there’s actually some real time-saving benefits to getting social. For instance pulling in all our mainstream media into RSS readers cuts down on reading time, the team can collaborate more effectively on finding & sharing stories, we can even reduce our heaving Inboxes by using social bookmarking instead of sending links round the company on email.”

Excuse 2: “My client doesn’t want social media.”

Internal Response: Are you freakin’ kidding me? Aren’t you a media consultant? You should be helping them understand where it’s relevant to them and what’s worth doing and why.

Actual Response: “Maybe not today but we need to be educating them and moving them towards it in the future before some groovy digital agency swoops in and pitches them leaving them thinking ‘Why didn’t my PR agency tell me this?’”

Excuse 3: “I’ve read Twitter, I get it, I just don’t want to be using it personally.”

Internal Response: Yeah, that’s what my gran said, unfortunately I wouldn’t trust my gran to consult with clients after having ‘read a few of the twitters’ and I don’t trust you either.

Actual: “Hmm, yeah, I’d argue that as media professionals unfortunately we have to go above and beyond consumer understanding of media and really get to grips with features, etiquette, community etc. You don’t have to share your personal life, you could develop your professional profile online, our social media policy has some guidelines.”

Excuse 4: “We have a specialist digital team working on social media briefs.”

Internal response: Yeah, I saw that digital account exec sizing up your corner office the other day. Good luck with that.

External response: “Sure, and your skills and knowledge are still relevant but with online channels playing a bigger and bigger role in media consumption it would be good if we all had a decent base level of knowledge.”

Excuse 5: “I’m just not techie.”

Internal response: No sh*t. I saw you getting flustered with your Nokia 3310 but I’m sure even you use Google on a daily basis right?

External Response: “That’s OK, you don’t have to understand the techie bit behind how everything works, you just have to know how the average person uses it.”

Ok, so what I’ve written is a bit harsh and bit scary. Don’t get me wrong, no one knows how hard PRs work than me. I think what most PRs do is great and I’m not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater and everything you know is useless. What I am saying is that I want to see you getting to grips with new media, socia media, digital, interactive marketing, whatever it is this thing is called.  No ifs no buts, you’re better than that.

Where did it go wrong and how can we fix it….?

Measurement

PR agrees to be measured by some really dumb things sometimes

Before I even continue I have to reference Measurement Camp as probably the best group looking at this issue and pro actively solving it with industry-wide collaboration. They have an excellent wiki and hold regular meetups. This will probably be more useful to you than anything you’ll read here.

So listen, PR is not a Google Adwords campaign. Yet time and again PRs agree to, and dare I say even suggest, that a campaign’s success hangs on whether it drove traffic to a website or microsite. While I’m not saying that social media measurement shouldn’t look to drive traffic, it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all for a few reasons:

• PR activity will never drive comparable volume traffic like Search and Advertising campaigns
• A link resulting from PR activity is online ‘forever’ so, unlike a Search campaign you shouldn’t be evaluated within a set time
• PR links don’t have conversion rates like online advertising does, that’s because they’re supposed to do very different things, so why apply the same measurement?
• Sometimes a website or microsite isn’t the core offering, so consumers ultimately aren’t very interested to go there

You'll never win comparing apples and oranges

I know it’s not uncommon for a Marketing Director to say “Well I’ll get more bang for my buck by putting money I would’ve given towards PR into online advertising and SEO.”

Come on PR! You don’t need to compete in that way. You are well versed in how to debate the old PR vs Advertising issue. You just need to update the script to a social media version. [In fact, one advantage to online PR activity is for the first time the traditional PR metric of  word-of-mouth can actually be measured by a host of “buzz monitoring” tools.]

Ok, so what *should* you measure? Well you *should* set some objectives first. We know it’s bad practice but it’s amazing how many social media drives are initiated and then everyone gets to the end and isn’t sure (or even worse, disagrees) whether it was successful.

In addition setting an objective means that you may not know exactly what to measure but you’ll know what you want to achieve and can check a range of data to see if you’re doing that.

Let’s use an analogy that three different businesses wanting to start something in social media are like three people who decide to take up running.
Person 1 – wants to run a marathon
Person 2 – wants to be fitter for their 5-a-side team
Person 3 – has just moved to the city and wants to join a club to meet people

All three will approach learning to run in different ways because they have very different objectives (i.e. you wouldn’t all jump on Twitter and try and grow to as many followers as possible)

Imagine if we said at the end of a couple of months “Ok, who can run the longest and furthest. That person’s the winner”. Obviously  Person 1 would’ve been trained for endurance and perhaps completed a marathon by now, it wouldn’t be fair to hold the other runners to the same measurement when they wanted to achieve different things.

Let’s say Person 2’s five-a-side team had won every game and they’d managed to play each game the whole way through without alternating with other players. W00T, they’re a winner!

Person 3 may not be a great runner at all, but have made lots of friends in the process, which was their key aim in running in the first place. Yay, they’re a winner too!

What about if Person 2 also found that they’d lost a stone and reduced their cholesterol? That would be a happy side benefit, no? You’d be mad to say “sorry, that’s not of interest”.

My point is…are you still with me… you have to measure what’s important to the business and you also have to include positive and unexpected benefits as part of learning what works in social media for a particular brand.

If you’re realistic about what’s possible from the outset (remember you wouldn’t measure offline PR directly by sales, don’t make the same mistake online) then you can define your own benchmarks and success metrics from a range of options.

Being facetious I propose the following social media measurement scale. I call it the “Ahrens Scale”a.k.a “The Good Thing, Bad Thing scale”

Here’s how you would apply it.
Drove traffic = Good Thing
Resulted a in a lot of negative commentary and formation of a hate group on Facebook = Bad Thing
Got a link from a blog or website = Good Thing
No increase in online conversation in any way = Bad Thing
Your online content re-purposed and re-used by online fans = Good Thing
Data capture = Good Thing
Rich media content like images or video was submitted by users = Good Thing
You created a Microsite = Bad Thing (Just kidding, I have a love/hate relationship with microsites)

Who could fix this?

1. Monitoring providers: Need to sell their products based on measurement benefits “you can track and measure X, Y, Z”
2. Agencies: Update your social media knowledge, study good practice, so you can lead on metrics

Solution? Become expert in what can be measured, then apply relevant metrics to pre-defined objectives. Shout about unexpected side benefits which result from activity.
Crib notes:

• It’s a no brainer: Set objectives before activity starts
• Don’t measure by non-PR measurables
• Look for side benefits and then perhaps use as benchmark or KPI for next time
• Don’t build microsites (Kidding again!)

Image: Dano

PR doesn’t understand the internet

PRs, I love you, but you still don’t understand the internet. I don’t mean in the way that my mum doesn’t understand the internet, but basic stuff like Google.

A few years ago we worked with a national newspaper to get a write up on a client, this included that all important link from the publication’s website to the client’s website. Links are good right? Between patting ourselves on the back I called the client

Me: “We got [national newspaper] to write about you and they linked to your site!”

Client: “Meh. Yeah we only got about two traffic referrals from the article so big whoop. BTW I just spoke to our SEO agency, could you instead get us coverage from [other major news site] and [another niche site]?”

After smashing the phone in frustration while dying a little inside hanging up I decided to call my client’s Search agency. SEO is considered as evil, if not more so, than PR. I didn’t know what to expect but here’s how it went…

Me: “We do PR for CLIENT and I need to know what you need us to know”

SEO: “Wow! Thanks for calling! It’s so great to hear from a client’s PR agency. You guys do great work which is very valuable to us.”

The internet: Revolutionary but not evolutionary

I’m sorry -  Great work? Valuable? The SEO agency went further than stroking our egos. They sent over a list of the top sites, ranked in order of importance, where it was important for our client to be mentioned or linked from. They also sent us a list of keywords we should be including in all campaign activity and offered to check over press releases and make sure they were optimised.

Basically they’d handed me an online media target list, tweaked our messaging, and profiled our target audience in some detail. And they weren’t just being nice [Incidentally they were nice but were mainly giving me the info to support their work].

That’s when I realised that for all my lofty ideals about social media and communities, influencers and engagement; I didn’t really know how the internet really worked, yet I was trying to harness it for clients.

At the heart of this point is Search, but also the ways people use the web to collate and share information once they’ve found it, and online purchasing processes where E-Commerce is in place.

Nothing illustrated more to me recently that PRs still don’t get important concepts like Search more than a recent PR week debate around SMNRs [SMRs. Worth they paper they're printed on?]

Some PRs were talking about SMNRs as if they were just a paper press release on the internet. Many looked at it with an old PR mentality without considering how they might be part of a wider online marketing mix. Of the six opinions captured, and a host of comments, only a few showed an understanding of how an optimized and online release might fit with new PR methodology (Adam Zand, Ian McKee, Mark O’Toole, Ann Krauss – you stood out to me).

Yeah, yeah, I’m no expert but I have tried to broaden my knowledge of the web and internet marketing over the years.

What I know now can still only fill the back of  a napkin but here it is:

1. When PR and SEO aligns they maximise each other’s value
2. PR actually creates content (great for Organic vs. Paid Search) which is beneficial online over time -  not just the duration of an Adwords campaign
3. The internet is tracking lots of useful stuff, go find and use that data
4. Social media activity can work with online sales [Just don't use it as the only yard-stick. More to come on measurement]
5. Most social features aren’t just ‘nice to have’ web add-ons but powerful tools which serve important functions
6. Knowing how to do even a basic Boolean Search has to be learnt I’m afraid
7. There’s usually a tool, service, or application that can make your job easier. Example: Nobody has to read 50 blog posts a day, use an RSS reader people! (I’m not joking it still kills me how many PRs don’t know about this) Paid or free,  9 times out of 10 there is a tool you could be using – and where there isn’t, well, you might have identified a potential revenue stream by creating it and reselling to others

Who could fix this?

1. Agencies: Invest in extensive internal education. Don’t stop there, create partnerships with specialist service providers who complement your expertise
2. In-house: Internally, make sure you’re working with your web team. Externally, connect relevant agencies to work together

SOLUTION? Gone are the days of keeping everyone in their boxes. If we’re going to benefit from everything the internet has to offer, we have to use everything the internet has to offer.

Crib notes:

• At a minimum PR and SEO should be working together
• The data’s out there somewhere. Find it and use it
• The web’s  a wonderful place, your PR team’s knowledge should reflect that
• You can’t do it all on your own: use good tools and work with good people

Image: ChrisL_AK

This frustrates me immensely as not only is it often true but I’ve always thought the PR industry has the most potential to rock social media strategy. PR is all about word-of-mouth right? [Reference great ad explaining the differences between PR, Advertising and co.]  So, why the bad rap?

I’m dedicating this week to a series of posts on where it went wrong and how to fix it. Starting with…

Campaign strategy vs. Brand strategy

Social media has tended to be funded on a campaign by campaign basis – short term activity.  Social media work by nature relies on building community and generating conversation – longer term commitment.

Traditional PRs cultivated their community, a.k.a. journalists, year round. A skilled PR could have a useful conversation any day of the week with a handful of key influencers they’d established a trusted relationship with.

Social media comes along and boom, the list of potential influencers suddenly grew by hundreds.  The tools needed to identify, sort, and categorise them are slow to appear

Slow and steady wins the race

On top of that,  categories fragmented further. Instead of being able to talk to people who broadly cover ‘Consumer Tech’, ‘B2B tech’, ‘Mobile tech’,  or ‘all of the above’, you need to be able to recall contacts with an interest in location-based service applications specifically for Symbian devices with a love of LOLCats and such like.  Sometimes there’s entire communities you’ve never heard of and it’s hard to define who, if anyone, would even be interested in a new Symbian LOLCat app.

It’s not possible to build trusted relations and have brand conversations in the short-term. Three months, the traditional quarterly budget or common campaign cycle, is not long enough.

If PR does succeed then what happens after the campaign has gone? Who looks after the abandoned profile or answers requests from a new blogger ‘friend’ who has suddenly moved down the list of importance?

The effort it takes to conceive and execute a social media campaign vs. investing in a longer-term brand strategy strikes me as a false economy.

I personally turn down a lot of short-term project work these days because I think it’s not possible to achieve much beyond securing a few blog posts. I also don’t like hearing from bloggers and community contacts that they weren’t looked after beyond the life-cycle of a specific campaign – I’m not in this industry for the short-term.

PR agencies with numerous mouths to feed don’t necessarily have that luxury but for their own sanity I hope they’re moving clients away from achieving short-term online objectives now. For in-house PR … what are you waiting for?!

Who could fix this?

1. Clients: Stop giving piecemeal social media projects to agencies
2. Agencies: Don’t let being competitive hold the industry back. Be brave and say ‘No’ sometimes

SOLUTION? Banish the term “can we get it out to some blogs?” from your vocabulary. Identify your most relevant communities [and not just blogs] from the start of your social media strategy and make that strategy brand-wide. Later you can build out to support campaign tactics.

Crib notes:

• Develop ongoing and long-term brand relationships
• Suspend traditional expectations like coverage
• Add value: Ask not what can my community do for me but what can I do for my community?

If your business needs to change direction and target varying communities manically throughout the year then your problems are probably bigger than social media.

Image: Rennett Stowe

You may have caught my previous thoughts on women being under-represented at industry events. So while it’s fantastic to see Social Glue initiate a Female Social Media Guru UK Award it caused a few rumblings and raised some questions for me…

Couldn’t we just recognise these women amongst their peers [male & female]. I think this is the heart of the problem the award is attempting to address.

Jamie has justified thus:

This is a debate we have had over the last few weeks. You are right there should be no division on gender but if you look at speaker panels there clearly is. Hopefully this combats the problem.

The “you missed off so-and-so” outcry was almost certainly due to lack of criteria [it seems to be just something to do with the internet and having a vagina being female] and probably a misconception there’s only a small number of fantastic women in Social Media.

I also found the later ranking of all nominees, with number of votes displayed, in poor taste.

I don’t want to get too down on Jamie. It was intended to address a very real issue and was well intentioned but comparing these women across their diverse areas is bit like like apples and oranges.

Here’s some of my faves and the areas where I think they are Social Media gurus. I’m pleased some of them made the list.

Contribution to the Social Media Industry: KATIE LEE

Aside from being “gadget girl” before anyone else was doing it, Katie Lee co-founded Shiny Media, the UK’s first commercial blog publisher. Over the years she’s been responsible for finding and nurturing a range of online writers and establishing credibility for bloggers in mainstream media.

http://shinykatie.blogspot.com/

Fashion & Social Media: GEMMA CARTWRIGHT

You don’t hear enough about Gemma as she’s been head down managing Shiny Media’s  fashion network for the past few years.

You never hear about her work within fashion to promote the benefits of Social Media to the industry and build relationships, particularly in PR, that just didn’t exist before. Graduate Fashion Week, touring agencies to educate, and dealing with the uncomfortable first fumblings of Fashion PRs has been Gemma’s lot. Again she’s made blogger/PR relations seem so normal these days.

http://gemmacartwright.com/

Technology & Social Media: SUSI WEASER

Picking up the mantle from Katie Lee is  this talented person who left PR to follow the Social Media dream via Shiny Shiny and become a UK trailblazer for online video.

What’s cool is that she’s just launched a business doing this type of thing.

http://susiweaser.com/

Promoting the cause of women in the industry / Mobile: HELEN KEEGAN

She’s  a mover and shaker in mobile regardless of  having a vagina being female. What I love is that she’s been so vocal about the lack of women speakers at events that’s got us all questioning this state of affairs.

http://technokitten.blogspot.com/

PR & Social Media: MICHELLE GOODALL

Michelle has been doing this long before most, irrespective of being a woman. If you’d ever read her posts & reports over on econsultancy you’d get that she knows her industry inside and out and is a bit of a hero to PRs like myself. She also just creates great campaigns.

http://econsultancy.com/blog/authors/michelle-goodall-2

Social Media Marketing: SANDRINE PLASSERAUD

If you haven’t heard about Sandrine, despite her tireless blogging (how does she find the time?), it’s because she’s always working to design & deliver awesome campaigns for her clients. She does that by being one of the most authentic users of Social Media working in an agency that I know.

http://sandrineplasseraud.typepad.com/

Social Media & Start-ups / MSM: JEMIMA KISS

Jemima landed on the scene at the Guardian’s Media section and all of sudden Social Media became mainstream. Her enthusiasm gives many new start-ups a much needed helping hand in the beginning. She’s inundated with 1000s of calls and emails daily but still manages to personally respond to tenfold more than she should have to as part of her job.

She constantly gets overlooked, most annoyingly in last year’s Evening Standard 1000 most influential Londoners. (No doubt because of who she writes for).

http://jemimakiss.com/

—-

Of course I know many other wonderful people, both male and female, working in this industry. But with this “girls of social media” theme currently percolating I wanted to take time to give them special mention.

rant, rant, mad women go home

Was pleased to see technokitten AKA Helen Keegan blogging that when it comes to the tech conference circuit women are invisible. I also tentatively griped about this with regards to a BBC media debate. (And appreciate Mike Butcher responded). I too didn’t want to be perceived as Keegan states, like a “bra-burning feminist” but this is all getting a little ridiculous based on the male to female ratio at non-speaking events in our respective industries.

But, hmm, what do you think of this? A site which names and shames tech conferences with “a ridiculously high percentage of male speakers” [More at this post by Dori Smith]

Really wanted to keep away from this one. It’s the age old argument that talking about it perpetuates it, then people start “pandering” to inferior candidates etc., but this was something I’d noticed all by my very self. I think it would be unfair to my peers and colleagues who astound me every day with the wonderful things they have to say, to avoid writing;

I think they are not getting the soap boxes they deserve.

At the risk of being controversial, I saw Techcrunch live blogging the BBC debate. The picture struck me funny – where have all the women gone?

This isn’t a “why aren’t there more women in tech” question but a much broader question about the new media industry in general; an industry where many women are employed. Are none of them up to debating the issues around whether the BBC should open up their platform.

Am I being unfair?

[Apologies any women who were part of this debate and I haven't picked up on it]

My positive response to the environment demonstrated that people feel different degrees of being intro- or extroverted and it’s something that crops up in questions when I run social media training sessions: who are ‘these people’ ie bloggers, tweeters, social networkers et al and why do *they* feel so comfortable broadcasting their lives?

I’m not sure I know the answer. At a basic level, once you and your friends start using something like Facebook it becomes more standardised and natural, you find yourself adding more personal updates, posting photos etc.

But honestly I still feel a bit like a social media “observer” using tools like this blog and Twitter to engage with my community from professional more than personal desires. As a pretty private person being publicly online makes me feel exposed and I contemplate deleting my accounts to run away to my Benedict’s cave. (Although I wonder if after 30 mins there I’d discover a compulsion to tweet “sitting in cave waiting for @Romanus to stop by with the food basket”).

I suspect that your level of comfort with publicly sharing is based on your confidence to allow people to make judgements about you. After all people can be nasty (See: Max’s Guardian blog or when Katie took on Fark)

There must be social anthropologists studying and categorising social media engagement types. But it’s intrinsic for humans to share at some level whether it’s online via blogging etc or offline via updating the people in your office with details of your love life. Only the mediums have diverged.

1000s of years ago when humans were creating cave drawings I wonder if they ever imagined their works would be seen outside of their small tribes.

How do you feel? Are you too shy to share?

Simon Collister wrote a good response post which is closer to what i think. He also raises a great point that it’s probably a matter of personal perspective as well.

What’s your perspective?

Mine isn’t about a “naive” dedication to The Cluetrain Manifesto (I haven’t read it) but probably from spending time with bloggers who were early pioneers with the platform and passionate about it as a new communication medium, not just another channel for the same old corporate comms. I’m also realistic about the commercialisation of blogs  – I had to be working for Shiny Media.

Anyway, let’s face it, when you work in PR, most people think you went over to ”the dark side” long ago, whether your approach is traditional or “noo medja”.

The point where “everyone will be expected to know how to navigate the online landscape if they want to have a thriving career” as Rubel states,is some time off. There’s still a lot of digital education required and people needed to facilitate that learning, luckily for me. (BTW I also think PR will just evolve as comms specialists in the new digital landscape).

He’s right though in that the next generations of workers are naturally going to be more digitally focused.

I reckon the conventional education system is still behind in understanding this as they continue to treat technology as a specialist subject rather than something which will be applicable to all subject areas and the process of learning itself (Ewan McIntosh is a real visionary in this space). That’s why all the disappearing Medicine & Law grads Rubel mentions are off trying to become ”webillionaires” instead of digitally innovating within their own specialist area.

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and learning recently. Bear with me while I get a bit sentimental but I’ve just found out my dad, in his 60s, has received a BA in Applied Management. I’m very pleased for him to finally achieve degree recognition for his career in the field of people with disabilities but I’ve also really admired him for the revolutionary ways in which he applied technology to education & curative therapy throughout his career.

In the late 80s, apart from the painful stuff he did with synthesisers (one headline called him “The Maestro of the Retarded”), he recognised the potential for these new-fangled computer things to transform early childhood education by collating and analysing the 1000s of steps every child progresses through to develop from baby to school-ready child.

He envisaged in the future home, where everyone would have a PC (and drive flying cars), that families could become teachers in this key stage of learning and not reliant on intermittent contact with child development specialists; that’s a god-send if your child has a disability, even more so if they haven’t yet been identified as having one and the programme spots it early. Later incarnations of his e-learning product led to looking at how the web could enable this to be distributed free, to the mass market.

It’s up and running in some form in China but still something key decision-makers he’s spoken to over the years are yet to really get behind it. Maybe there’s been an unconscious desire for specialists to protect themselves?

Anyway, I guess my point is that while increasing digital confidence by people may replace the old-style  ”online specialists”, new specialisms will crop up, but allowing more access to previously “specialised knowledge” isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

[Just to clarify the picture at the top is not me and my dad, it's from the Russell Crowe film. However, the picture below of the bearded man and boyish looking, pudgy baby girl is me and dad]