High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype

Looking forward to PR News Measurement Conference

In the current marketplace, ROI is king.  Measurement, therefore, gains in importance every day.  Because of this, I am very much looking forward to attending PR News' Measurement Conference in Washington, DC next week.  I am very grateful as well for the opportunity to speak on the panel for the session on "Media Measurement" at 9:45 a.m. on June 3.  I'll be joining four other very smart PR pros -- Shonali Burke, Geoff Burt, Adam Sohn, and Johna Burke.  Here's what we'll be covering:

This panel will provide the most practical and results-oriented techniques for measuring your media relations activities most effectively – from measuring blogs to mainsteam media coverage, to even measuring your media relationships. And most importantly, you'll get the tools and tactics you need to tie your media relations to business outcomes or public affairs goals. This panel moves beyond “media measurement 101” and toward strategies that will truly improve your organization's media relations and, in turn, your reputation in the eyes of the CEO and your stakeholders. You’ll hear what's working, what's not—as well as the latest ways to integrate media measurement into your organization's business goals. You'll also hear how to measure your failures, too, so you can stop spending money on efforts that's don't pay off.

I'm really looking forward to learning from top practitioners in the field about some innovative new techniques and approaches to measurement that I can bring back and apply for our clients.  Of course, I also will be tweeting from there, as I'm sure others will as well.  You can follow the conference by following the #prnews hashtag on Twitter.

The Empire Strikes Back at "D"

After watching many very young entrepreneurs hold court at elite technology conferences like the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital "D" conference over the years, it's been gratifying this year to see the experienced managers hogging the limelight at D7. The conference opened with the young Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who admit they don't know everything, but nonetheless seem like they at least know what they don't know and are trying to find the answers. They don't evidence the dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance that some young founders/CEOs have displayed in the past. But they were seriously trumped today by some real pro's, Carol Bartz of Yahoo! and John Malone of Liberty Media, in particular.

Given the state of Yahoo! and the skepticism about the task she faces there, Bartz surprised everyone, I believe, and dominated her interview with a confident, edgy style that made it clear she knows what she is facing and may just be the best person for the job.  More importantly, she articulated the true value and differentiators Yahoo! has -- its personalization -- while she was restoring confidence by asserting there is a strong, experienced leader at the helm now. Similarly, though Malone did not evidence Carol's sense of humor, but he so clearly understood the cable model and the requirements for monetizing content that no questions from the stage or the floor could rattle him. He was knowledge personified and you had to respect him for it.

As I was watching the various speakers, it became clear to me why some were more effective than others. This venue more than perhaps any other requires an ability to engage with the interviewer in an interesting conversation. Someone who is too studied in their messages or who leans too heavily on "no comment" phrases will not fare as well. A sense of humor and ability to candidly disagree without defensiveness, as Bartz did, wins the day. Even the style of dress makes a difference. The audience is mostly business casual, so a too formal approach, such as a suit and tie, can be a detriment to the speaker's perceived accessibility. The CEO of Nokia, for example, had an open collar shirt rather than the more formal attire of the CEO of AT&T, and it worked better.

In this tough economic period, there's something comforting about seeing experienced people at the helm and on the podium. Carol Bartz snapped right back when Kara Swisher asked her whether she needed a visionary number two, "Because I'm too old and stupid to understand the Internet?!" She then reminded her interviewer that her co-producer Walt Mossberg is a year older than she is. Maybe that has something to do with the shift in demographics this year -- that plus the omnipresence of Rupert Murdoch at the conference.  Whatever the reason, it's refreshing. I've done a lot less eye-rolling than I have at some past conferences. 

A nice view into All Things Digital conference (#D7)

Lois is currently at D7, the 7th annual All Things Digital conference run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.  I'm sure she'll come back with some great blog fodder and share her views on what came out of the confab, but I'd like to point our readers to how you can follow her real-time commentary on Twitter.

Given her passion for working with our clients on executive communications, I've personally valued her commentary from the standpoint of how well they've performed when grilled on stage by Kara and Walt.  She had some positive comments about how well the Twitter guys -- Ev and Biz -- did last night (the latest of her critiques).

This link takes you to the specific tweets that she has made from the event.  I've captured a snapshot of it here as well.

 

June is New England Innovation Month (spread the word - #neinno)

 

As we get ready for Memorial Day weekend, this is always the time when we can really start to look forward to summer.  On tap for June is New England Innovation Month.  I caught a tweet from @ScottKirsner this morning with a link to the web site.

The initiative is all about coming together to fuel innovation as a way to help us get out of this downturn.  The site has a list of events for our community to do so.  Bill McLaughlin blogged about one of them recently -- The What's Next in Tech event on June 25. 

As for me, I'll be at the MassNetComms Innovator's Summit on June 17, tweeting from there using the #neinno hashtag.  If you can't attend and want to follow what innovations are being presented, please feel free to follow me on Twitter (@TedWeismann).

What event will you be attending?

Social Media Release Debate Rages On

The discussion and debate on the social media release lives on, thanks to a "study" by HubSpot this week that compared traditional and social media releases (SMRs) in terms of how effectively they were syndicated to search engines and "portal" via newswire services.  The conclusion was that SMRs are less effective.

This led to an interesting discussion with our client base in which some were asking for my perspective.  I want to share what I offered to them here in order to add to the broader conversation.  One of the questions that has come up in my discussions with clients is whether EVERY release needs to be a social media release with a strong contingent ascribing to the view that not every release does.

According to HubSpot, one of the central reasons why SMRs don't syndicate well is because they include long encoded URLs and complex formatting that, as well as multimedia are handled differently by each newswire and do not always "translate" to the search engines or portals in the right way.  To me all these points seem to be common sense and don’t really offer any new revelations.

As I see it, the most important takeaway from the study is point #4 --

Use basic language. Many portal sites decide to publish a release by scanning for relevant keywords in the release body and headline. The portal then automatically posts anything that contains the right keywords to fit their formulas. To be syndicated by more relevant portals, use straight-forward text that the portal's crawlers will pick up.

Since the advent of the social media release, most of the ones I've seen are no different then what traditional releases have been for such a long time with regards to the writing and style of them.  I very much agree with what Brian Solis has said in the past about how we need to use this effort to rethink the press release to change the way they are written.  He hit on this again earlier this week --

News flash: New media releases aren’t a new tool to package the same old marketing "speak" that form and enforce the stereotype of existing press releases. They are indeed an opportunity to improve how we, as individuals representing a company that helps real world customers, share our story with them in a way that means something.

This was the biggest complaint Tom Foremski had three years ago when he sparked this whole debate.  And since press releases now have more value as a way to communicate directly to customers, fixing how they are written is even more important.

Companies should do social media releases to offer atomized pieces of content that complement the information in the release itself.  This allows bloggers, (increasingly) traditional media and members of a company's buying community that are publishers/ creators of information to embed in their own posts or online articles about the subject of the release.  The other aspect that's more important now in the age of microsharing is to include triggers that prompt people to share the news, such as a "Tweet This" summary that is hyperlinked so someone can more easily distribute it.  These all involve wrapping in more code within the release (embed code, encoded URLs, etc) that are naturally going to get stripped out when sent over the wires.  This is why the wires have been struggling with the social media release concept and we see data like HubSpot.

The other view I have is that there is not a one-size-fits-all template that should be followed for every release. That said, the templates that are out there help to determine what people and companies should consider adding to releases.  There are certain elements that should be in every release (links to company web site, Twitter summaries, straight URL's to content/channels on third party services like Flickr, YouTube, related links, calls to action with simple links to a purpose landing page for the release so it is measurable, etc.), but not every release should be in a bulleted format, nor should every release include multimedia content.

Finally, a good general rule of thumb is to keep releases that go over the wire as basic as possible - include links to supporting content as mentioned above, but then treat it much more as a social media release on your own company's web site where you have much more control and range over the bells and whistles.  In some cases, I have had clients include a straight link in the version that goes over the wire to an enhanced social media version on the clients' newsrooms to drive even more inbound links.

Wherever you stand, it’s always an interesting debate...

Taming Your Inbox

I'm not breaking any news stating we live in the information age. I watched a video not long ago that sort of took this concept to an entirely new level. For instance, one of the many random factoids stated was that if MySpace was its own country, it would be the 5th largest in the world. Granted, I couldn't figure out the point of the video, but that's OK, because it clearly did its job as I'm referencing it and pointing you to it.

The first tweet from space was sent from an astronaut last week. Someone told me today that the show The Soup recently called Twitter "the digital Macarena," which I thought was pretty funny. Whether Twitter is a fad or not, social computing in general is here and is not going anywhere - communications has many new channels to reach your niche audience and now it's a matter of picking the ones you need (another news flash, I know).

But most of us sometimes find ourselves overloaded with information, user names, portals, links, etc. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week noted that IBM recently did a study and found that its 400,000 employees send 12 million instant messages a day to each other. And according to research firm Basex, companies lose an estimated $900 million in productivity because of information overload - people, including myself, often feel they must trudge through all of it or their job is not complete. So actual workforce productivity sometimes takes a back seat.

It went on to explain that we primarily interact with colleagues via our inbox - but the problem is, we've lost control of our inboxes. So what's the solution? IBM says social networking technologies - shared Web pages, Wikis or Ning type environments so employees can talk to each other without the need to file 45 e-mails tied to one certain topic.

I consider myself a slow technology adapter - I'll admit it, I'd like to say I'm progressive in other areas of my career, but I like the idea of controlling my information flow and I'm anxious to see how internal communications changes in the future. IBM tends to pave a path for companies in many areas (IBM does and companies follow) and it looks like they might be trying to do it again with internal information management. We shall see, but I like the approach.

Keeping Bloggers Honest

Doug MacMillan's story on the FTC's plans to establish guidelines to "clarify how companies can court bloggers to write about their products" was an interesting endorsement of why the watchdogs of the third estate -- professional journalists -- need to continue to ply their trade, whether via newsprint or online vehicles. 

As MacMillan wrote in the BusinessWeek.com posting, "The FTC says it wants to protect consumers, who may take a blogger's opinion at face value without knowing it was influenced by an advertiser."  The goal is to make sure it is clear that if a blogger is paid by a company to write about a product that this is properly disclosed so any potential bias is on the table.

As more and more companies build or expand their social media programs to augment the declining media channels to their customers and prospects, it is important that companies who work with bloggers are clear about their affiliations as much as it is key that their potential biases are known to consumers.  Many years ago when I was an editor, I found out after the fact that one of my regular contributors had a long association with a company he had written about positively on a number of occasions.  I confronted him about it and the practice ended, but it was not something he had disclosed and it wasn’t easy for me to discern.  Meanwhile, those pieces about the company seemed objective, but clearly were not and the readers were in the dark about the bias.  Not to mention other companies this individual may have written about could have potentially suffered because of the lens he used to evaluate them.

Good journalists and publications -- whether they are online or in print -- have strict rules about disclosing any connection (direct or otherwise) with any companies especially if an occasion arises that they need to write about one of those companies.  The bloggers who were once journalists tend to follow this next approach.  In her Boomtown blog for All Things Digital, Kara Swisher carefully describes the fact that her partner is an executive at Google, a company she cannot avoid writing about on occasion.

Although I firmly believe that citizen bloggers are the way of the future and some of the most unvarnished assessments of products, services and companies are found in their posts, I do worry about the potential for abuse when one steps outside the rules of traditional journalism. It is hard enough to retain your objectivity when you are a paid journalist.  Recently a reporter from one of the top dailies told one of my colleagues that he welcomed talking with one of our clients as it would give him a different perspective from the industry bellwether in his backyard whose army of PR people was constantly "chirping in my ear."  The giants of any industry must be covered closely by journalists, as their moves have the largest impact.  It was refreshing to hear this journalist acknowledge that he was barraged by one of them and wanted to make sure he was validating what they told him and maintaining his objective view to keep his coverage balanced and accurate.  This is why we have to make sure that traditional journalism survives this downturn, as we need those watchdogs of objectivity.

If the FTC is going to weigh in and update the guidelines to help with the process, I'm okay with that.  But I'm also counting on a sort of citizen ombudsmanship in the blogosphere.  Everyone knows someone these days, so if you see someone twittering or blogging about a company they are paid by and they haven't disclosed it and are making it seem objective, call them out on it.  That is in fact what social media is all about, right?

Apply PR Like Sunscreen, Before you Get Burned, Not After

I just can't resist addressing the latest Roger Clemens media move, particularly since he made a big show of being armed with PR counsel that the New York Daily News described as "his third public relations expert since he was identified as a steroid user in the Mitchell Report."

Reading the coverage and listening to the chatter on sports radio here in Boston, where Red Sox Nation are not fans of Clemens, I was curious to hear just how he was trying to use PR.  I assumed it was as a human shield against the allegations coming out in the new book, "American Icon", which is hitting store shelves.

It was for that purpose and more.  Clearly Clemens is determined to continue to refute the allegations of steroid abuse that he knows will be amplified in the new book, which was written by four reporters from the Daily News.  That certainly is his right.  He's clearly angry that all of this will be dredged up again and he obviously wanted to speak his piece about it so he pulled in a new PR counsel, a crisis expert, to help him hit the airwaves and column inches once again. 

One can only speculate what the prep session between this new counsel and Clemens was like.  They may have counseled him to continue to deprive the story of oxygen by refusing to comment or just providing a statement.  Clemens may have insisted he wanted to talk, and insisted they help him figure out what to say.  It seems to me that what they arrived at as a solution was to go on the popular sports radio station, Mike and Mike in the Morning to recast Roger Clemens as a good guy, a family guy who is community minded and focused on his foundation, charities and telling kids to stay away from steroids.  The only news Clemens offered in response to the direct questions about the steroid allegations by Mike Greenberg was that he would have been insane to take steroids because of the history of heart disease in his family.  The reference to his brother's heart attack was a good proof point for this assertion.  Adding his stepfather's death by a heart attack moved this to a theater of the absurd.  In the midst of it all, Clemens was very specific in proudly pushing forward his PR counsel and making him part of the story.

Clemens has many lessons to learn from all of this, but an understanding of what PR is all about is one of them.  First of all, PR belongs in the background and not as part of the story.  It is our job to help the people who are making the news and creating the products do the best job they can to tell their story accurately, concisely and in an interesting enough way to earn good coverage that will positively impact their various constituencies.  In tough times, PR helps companies get to the truth of a tough situation and provide the facts, within legal and corporate governance constraints.  An excellent role for PR is reputation management for companies and high profile individuals.  But that isn't a band-aid that can be applied after crisis hits.  You can help someone rehabilitate their image in a marketplace, but this does not happen overnight.  PR done correctly is iterative and cumulative.  It is a strategic process and not a twelfth hour event.  Crisis management cannot change a person's image, especially when that individual seems determined to keep talking when silence is the better form of valor.

Perhaps Clemens might have been better served by getting the hero of the old TV program, Quantum Leap, to leap into his body and go back in time to either change some facts (Clemens is still innocent until proven guilty in this country) or at least hire PR earlier in the process to build the more likeable image he's expecting his third agency to tack on now.

What's Next in Tech to Showcase Blooming Technology in New England

Sure signs of spring in New England. Fenway is filled, the Celts are defending their title and even the Bruins are making noise in the playoffs. To these we can add What's Next in Tech Event. Orchestrated by the Boston Globe's Innovation Economy columnist, Scott Kirsner, this event will bring together the leaders of New England's technology community to showcase and discuss the latest trends, hottest technologies and emerging companies in the region. 

It should be a great event. As they say, hope springs eternal and that sentiment should be in full force when attendees get the opportunity to hear the latest innovations in mobile computing, gaming, cleantech, robotics, social media and more. Here are the logistics on the event:

Thursday, June 25, 2009 from 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (ET)

Boston University
School of Management
595 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Hope to see you there.  Also, look for my tweets (billmcl) from the event.

A Private Man Does Social Media Right

A few weeks ago, there was a great profile of the president of Red Sox Nation and, really, the official voice of the Red Sox, Jerry Remy, in the Boston Globe Magazine.  It showed what I've suspected or heard over the years that, despite his outgoing personality in the announcer booth and his smart marketing of his RemDawg persona over the years, he is at heart a very private person. 

Interestingly, this private man, who has been sorely missed over the past couple of weeks by Red Sox fans like myself, effectively used public social media to alert everyone that he recently had successful cancer surgery and is recovering well, but will be out for a while.  Remy used his own blog to impart the news and to leverage this as a way to tell kids not to start smoking, as he did as a youngster.  He also has been using Twitter and sent a "tweet" out with a reference to his blog post so the widest possible distribution (he has 4,952 followers) would hear the news, stop speculating and spread the anti-smoking message.

#RedSox Read my statement why I have been missing games lately. Click here http://www.theremyreport.co... Thanks, Jerry about 15 hours ago from web

It was a savvy communications move and word has spread quickly among his many fans.  Thanks, RemDawg, for showing all of us that social media is the way to go, even for a private guy like you.  And take care of yourself.  We want to hear that great voice again very soon.