PR Studies

With the benefit of hindsight

The question came via Twitter from a thoughtful student: 'Why do PR professionals still prioritise print coverage over online?'

It's a good question. Assuming they do - and with the exception of a few social media specialists it probably is true - then there are several likely explanations:

• Print is tangible, and thus has a higher perceived value than online (or broadcast even)
• Practitioners do what they know best (and avoid the risky and the uncertain)
• Clients and bosses demand and expect it

I then asked myself a different question. Knowing what I now know, would I have practised differently back then in the bad old days before the web and social media rose to prominence?

I should have focused more on outcomes, not outputs (attendance at events, press coverage). But this would have meant turning away business. I recall the look I had from my consultancy managing director when, in a meeting with a potential new client, I asked 'what do you want press coverage for?'

I wish I'd focused more on finding the issue than promoting the product or service. Again, this would have meant turning down some easy hits in the media for a more sustainable strategy. We did try (and we knew we should), but sometimes the low hanging fruit was just too easy to pick...

What's interesting is to note how little has changed. These two should still be high on the wish list of current practitioners wanting to avoid obsolescence. Focus on the outcomes; and develop an issues-led approach. Otherwise what value are you adding, and what's to differentiate your advice from anyone else's?

It's about ideas, not events

News used to be the currency of public relations. Event-led stories were our speciality (pseudo-events if you like). But it's a dying craft and most practitioners need to move on (and advise their clients accordingly). Here's why news is limited:

• It has a short shelf-life that's becoming ever shorter in the social media age
• Neither PR people nor journalists have a monopoly on news any more
• There are fewer publications taking PR news
• The conventional press release is treated like spam

If news is no longer our currency, what should be? How about ideas, or content? Note how Edelman has appointed a senior BBC executive as 'chief content officer'.

Content, conversations, communities are what it should be about (Jim Macnamara goes further and lists 8 Cs that count in the current media landscape).

Or to put it a different way, don't be so fixated on getting your news event mentioned that you pass up the opportunity to contribute an ideas-based feature to the same publication.

It's about ideas, not events. Adapt or die!

The currency of the web is attention and reputation

In her review of The Long Tail author Chris Anderson's new book Free, Debbie Weil discusses what matters online:

"I've been saying for years that the currency of the Web is links. Anderson says it better: the currency of the Internet is 1. Attention (translated as number of visits or traffic to your site) and 2. Reputation (roughly translated as number of links pointing to your site or blog)."

That reads like a good summary of online public relations and reputation management, with suitable measures of success.

The premise behind Free is also readily comprehensible in a PR context. The publicity and media relations role has always been based on the giving away of free (ie no cost and copyright free) content in the hope of receiving free media coverage. There are critics of this hidden exchange, but fewer of the underlying principles of a free society underpinned by free speech, press freedom and 'free and fair' elections.

How PR works (continued)

So you want some publicity for your product or company (or to boost the vanity of your boss)? Then think up a controversial news angle and support it with the semblance of research. (Think of the headline and work backwards from there. Be sure to build in some searchable keywords). Here's a masterclass:

    76% Of Businesses Do Not Understand What PR Is

The owner of pr2go, the online PR business has criticised practitioners for failing to communicate what the discipline entailed after discovering that 76 per cent of businesses didn’t understand what public relations was.

James Hobday, CEO of pr2go, said that the statistics had come to light as part of ongoing marketing activity for the business. The online service stripped back the PR discipline to its most basic form, offering businesses and agencies the opportunity to access affordable PR.

The service, which sees a team of journalists with experience across a broad range of sectors prepare press information and distribute it on behalf of our clients for a flat fee, has proved a big success, both with businesses wanting localised PR but also with marketing agencies wanting to add value and offer the service to their clients.

“We’ve implemented a fairly aggressive marketing campaign to raise awareness and generate business, and the thing that has appalled me is the lack of understanding of what PR really is,” said James.

“To date, 76 per cent of people we’ve spoken to have not understood what PR is. We’re not talking your average man in the street here, we’re talking marketing managers and directors of large businesses with multiple regional sites needing localised PR.

“We spoke to more than 500 business people seeking to raise the profile of their company across the UK, and their definition of PR varied from telesales to mail-shots. Very few of them understood that it involved the use of online, broadcast and print media to get their key messages and stories across,” he said.

“It concerns me as it is such a massive industry and for those incorporating PR into their communications strategies to have such a weak understanding of what it means suggests that PR practitioners are missing the mark significantly when it comes to actually demonstrating and justifying their product,” he added.

Via Fresh Business Thinking

That's how to do it. But wait a minute: the people who don't know what PR is thought that it involved telesales and mailshots. The expert assures them it involves the use of 'online, broadcast and print media to get their key messages and stories across'.

Well, up to a point. The use of ex-journalists to create media publicity is, I would have thought, the readily understood part of PR, the tip of the iceberg.

Below the water, you need to know what you're hoping to achieve with the publicity (a strategy); you need to know when to use - and when not to use the media; when to prioritise internal over external communications; how one message aimed at a customer can mean something very different to an employee or a shareholder. You need to know when to listen rather than shout.

In principle, if the legal process involved in buying a house (conveyancing) can be turned into a routine online business, then so can publicity and PR. But just as you most need lawyers in the bad times, so you might need public relations advisers to help you when you really don't want the news out there. That seems to me to be the limiting factor on PR2GO's proposition, not the lack of understanding of PR in business.

Journalisted: out of darkness, enlightenment

Here's a tale from the dark ages (less than 20 years ago).

I've arranged some press briefings for a visiting executive and I'm asked to supply the following: who each journalist writes for, copies of their last three published articles, a list of their hot topics, bugbears and some personal notes (favourite food, sports etc).

The exercise requires you to imagine finding this out without the internet (it barely functioned back then). It wasn't easy.

Today, PR people can read journalists online (publications and blogs), follow them on twitter and friend them on Facebook. This makes the task so much easier - except that the media landscape is much larger and more fluid than in the past. Who's a journalist? What's a publication?

So you can do it yourself, or you can be grateful that someone else has pulled together much of the data. Take a look at the Media Standards Trust's Journalisted site. Once you struggle past the poor search facility, it's a mine of information including social media features such as a tag cloud of frequently mentioned terms.

Just one concern. Did the difficulty of media relations in the dark ages make us more respectful of and knowledgeable about the media? Because now that it's so easy, why is there so much bad media relations?

PR and the media (latest from the US)

Here are three observations on contemporary public relations from a media perspective (most positive first):

1. The Power and the Story: Michael Wolff's analysis in Vanity Fair of President Obama's powerful media operation. (Note the difference in style between a magazine and a blog: there's a 76-word sentence containing no fewer than nine commas here. But don't let that put you off reading this elegant article.)
2. Spinning the Web: PR in Silicon Valley: New York Times business section (and note Richard Edelman's scathing reaction to this exercise in self-promotion).
3. PR Girls Who Don't Know Where Darfur Is Bask in Bruno Press Blitz: New York Times fashion section (via PROpenMic). Nuff said, probably, though there's already a tribute blog - Hot Twin PR. 

What are we to make of this? In brief, it shows the problem of simplifying an activity that spans political and technology communications and also includes celebrity publicity. But I suspect it also shows something of an east coast, west coast divide in the US. Here in the UK, Max Clifford, Matthew Freud, Alan Parker and Roland Rudd all work in London (see post below) - a political, financial and media hub.

News release revisited

I've been asked for some advice from a student on how she can improve her news release writing skills. (Obviously my twelve-week module on PR Writing at the start of the previous academic year had faded from memory).

I know that the traditional press release is discredited and that we should be willing to experiment with new forms. I prefer the term news release because this describes its essential ingredient. I also feel that the discipline of writing a 'story in a sentence' is useful even if the document gets discarded, and that a grounding in news values is important for PR students.

Here are my tips on news release writing:

• Ask yourself 'what's the story?'. Make sure that the story is focused on a matter of public interest or customer benefit - not just on the client's desire for publicity. No story, no news release. Does it meet the following test: 'is it new, or is it surprising?'

• To help you think about news, it describes an event so you should be able to answer the question 'what happened?' News is conventionally written in the past tense (eg 'launched', 'announced').

• Now write the story in a sentence using short words and dropping the adjectives (the descriptive words that can easily lead to hype such as 'revolutionary'). For style tips read the first sentence of any story in a newspaper - especially the tabloids.

• The rest of the document should elaborate on this sentence using the inverted pyramid principle (most important facts first, followed by next most important and so on).

• Always include a quotation: this is the next most important component as it should express a real opinion from a real person. Check and discuss this quotation with them and never resort to a statement starting with 'we're delighted...' That's not new, not surprising and won't be used, though it's opposite might gain you some attention. 'We're ashamed of our new product and apologise for introducing it...'

• Put the company puff in the notes or use a hyperlink. Don't clutter the news paragraph with a lengthy description of the client.

• The client will want to change much of the above, assuming the news release to be a form of placed adverisement. You have to earn your salary by advising them that without news there's no chance of publicity and that the news release is the start, not the end, of a process.

• Images are usually helpful, but don't automatically send large file attachments. Plain text is best (and a phone call first is usually better).

Vintage Cluetrain

So The Cluetrain Manifesto is ten years old.

Much has changed since 1999 (blogs and other forms of social media have made the web a much more conversational space). But it remains an important polemic against most marketing and PR practices. These haven't changed fast enough.

Take the standard computer-industry press release (the authors write). With few exceptions, it describes an "announcement" that was not made, for a product that was not available, quoting people who never said anything, for distribution to a list of people who mostly consider it trash.

Is there any hope for PR?

But, of course, the best of the people in PR ... understand that they aren’t censors, they’re the company’s best conversationalists. Their job -- their craft -- is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

It still needs saying, so The Cluetrain Manifesto still needs reading.

Media relations: still a big slice of the pie

In follow up to the previous post (about students in the workplace) and spurred by a rather heated internal discussion about the extent to which PR students should be steered towards or away from media relations in their first year at university, I've done some counting.

I took ten students I've assessed in the workplace (eight in-house, two in consultancies) and I've allocated ten marks for each depending on the extent of their work in some common areas of activity. So these rough-and-ready figures are percentages of placement student time devoted to the following activities, in descending order:

1. Media relations (48%)
2. Community relations (15%)
3. Event management (12%)
4. Marketing communications (10%)
5. Social media engagement (10%)
6. Internal communications (5%)

The surprise isn't that media relations is way ahead as the primary activity (it will always have been there for junior employees in public relations), but that community relations and social media activities are becoming more prominent. But my sample is small: the social media engagement figure represents one student whose whose sole focus this was for a not-for-profit organisation; the community relations activity reflects two students whose primary focus this was.

Had I included more students working in consultancies, the media relations figure would almost certainly have topped 50%. So should we teach it?

Truth may be beauty - but is it accuracy?

Nick Davies's much-discussed Flat Earth News is easily summarised: 'Journalism today is little more than churnalism. 60% of newspaper stories are uncritically recycled from public relations and news agency sources.'

It's easy to view this as an old-fashioned journalist's lament for a mythical golden age when reporters had time to investigate stories, and when proprietors were benign media owners. (He dismisses today's owners as 'grocers' because of their focus on margins.)

Because this 400 page book is so easily summarised and dismissed, I was at first reluctant to buy it. But it's a much better and more worthwhile read than you might imagine. Take one small example.

Davies describes the primary purpose of journalism as 'telling the truth'. But he distinguishes truth from accuracy. A news release from a PR source should be accurate, for example (names spelt correctly, facts checked) but cannot be truthful, since truthfulness would require a balanced account including mention of competitors or critics.

This truthfulness v accuracy issue is at the heart of the Wikipedia debate below. Again, contributions to Wikipedia should be accurate; but the entry can only become truthful once a balanced judgement has been reached.

In this analysis - and in my words - the journalist is like a High Court judge. Knowledgeable, attentive, patient and fair. The public relations practitioner is like a barrister: professional, persuasive and necessarily biased.

I've not finished reading Flat Earth News so I'll hold off making further comments, but this image of magisterial and impartial journalism doesn't sound truthful, does it?