Category Archives: Influencer Relations

Who Killed Journalism? You Did

We’re easy targets, those of us in the PR field. It’s easy to say that we’re slimy, dumb and get in the way of good journalism. Over my PR career I’ve worked with my share of morons and liars.

But not all of those were in PR, many were also in journalism. Many were also in technology. Many were in printing. Many were in auto repair or many were investors.

Yes, morons and liars are everywhere.

So when an unnamed PR pro writes that many PR folks really aren’t that good, he’s right. But he’s also just enjoying the fact that PR people are an easy target. Why? Because really, we shouldn’t exist.

Let me explain: the theory goes that if you have a good product or a good story, then you’ll get exposure. People who report the news will find you, they’ll do the digging and the work to grab the important nuggets of information and present those to you.

You believe that? Really? Are you sure?

I’ve had reporters tell me that they believed a certain topic was very important to their readers, but they couldn’t report on it because they just didn’t have time. I’ve gone to others with a story and been asked “can you just send the release?” Then a story would appear without any interview or additional reporting. Is this the fault of the PR pro?

Yesterday I attended a forum on the First Amendment at Suffolk Law School that included Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Eileen McNamara, Media Critic an all-around-good-guy Dan Kennedy, leader of the Nieman Foundation Ann Marie Lapinski and Linda Greenhouse, whose long list of accomplishments doesn’t begin to sum her up.

All agreed that truth is a major casualty of modern reporting. McNamara lamented the fact that today’s reporters don’t seem to do research in their own archives. They lamented the use of Beltway Insiders who regularly offer up quotes just to provide a story with “the other side” of an issue.

But Dan Kennedy made the point that sometimes sources have one key selling point: they return calls when you’re on deadline.

This is a real problem in political reporting. It’s also a problem in technology PR. Too often reporters take on the easy story. Audrey Watters, in writing why she left Read Write Web, noted that no one seems to care about Education Technology. This is a huge story overall, something that impacts not just parents and students, but our future as a nation. She writes:

What I learned — and what I continue to be reminded of with unfortunate frequency: the tech blogosphere really doesn’t notice education stories. Not really. Not unless teachers do something untoward on a blog. Not unless a tech CEO, past or present, makes a major education-oriented donation. Not unless there’s an rumored iPhone 5 angle involved.

Back at the forum, when I stood up to ask a question, I mentioned that I work in PR. A woman laughed. Yes, she LAUGHED. Yet, everyone in that room had been subject to PR at that moment and didn’t know it. The forum itself was an attempt to raise the visibility and importance of Suffolk Law School, especially among its alumni. That’s because Suffolk operates in a competitive environment that includes Harvard, BU and BC, all with law schools that have strong alumni networks. As a proof point, consider that Greg Gatlin, a former Boston Herald staffer and current PR flack for the school, was on the panel.

So who is at fault for the lousy and lazy journalism? Is it the journalists? Is it their editors? Is it the PR people who feed them crap?

No. It’s us, the media consumers.

You see, reporters write stories that get them noticed, stories that will satisfy their editors. Editors are under pressure to satisfy their bosses, the publishers. They need to drive traffic to the website, grab clicks, gain conversation, build “mindshare” and all those other marketing things. They do this by writing stories that are attractive to an audience.

If you write about the iPad, your clicks go up. If you write about education technology, you can hear the crickets. Write about large constitutional issues, no one cares. Write about Rush Limbaugh and you’re front and center.

So, do you want to blame PR folks for being stupid? Sure, go ahead. Want to blame reporters for being lazy? Feel free.

But next time you click on a headline, think about why you’re doing it and what really matters to you. Then consider if you really want to click there.

What Boston Really Needs….

In The Devil Wears Prada there’s this wonderful scene in which Meryl Streep tries to decide on a belt. Anne Hathaway, as her assistant snickers at the prospect of deciding between two belts that look very similar. What she receives next is a smack-down.

“You think this has nothing to do with you,” Streep’s Miranda Priestly says. She then launches into an evenly-delivered soliloquy that points out how the “blue” sweater Hathaway casually chose that morning is actually “cerulean,” which had started at the height of fashion then trickled down through the fashion ecosystem representing “millions of dollars and countless jobs,” until it landed in a discount bin and, eventually, this assistant’s closet. “It sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that’s been selected for you…” she says.

Here in Boston engineers love to think that they make all the best stuff. That their technology is so great it doesn’t need marketing. Because marketing doesn’t make people take action. No, they say, it’s the work that makes all the difference. Make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Someone call Meryl Streep.

Often we dismiss this attitude as “well, they’re just engineers” and we let it go. The issues trickle down even to those companies that do spend time and money on marketing. They resist messaging, insist they know how to tell a better story or refuse changes that could make a huge difference in their bottom line. It’s all an effort to put technology first.

Ideally, they need to invest in marketing and PR. It needs to be factored into the funding rounds as a necessary part of the budget, even in small rounds.

Then there is the “celebrity” factor. Boston tends to shy away from that, but as a number of entrepreneurs point out in the Sunday Boston Globe, that’s just what Boston needs. Says Ben Jabbawy, CEO of Privy:

Chances are if you’re not part of the tech community here, you’ve never heard of Wayfair or Gemvara. And that’s the problem. The Boston area needs to do a better job championing its little guys. We don’t have many giant anchor companies here, and oftentimes that’s understood to be a bad thing. Instead of collectively pining for Mark Zuckerberg to return to the Hub, we should focus on, promote, and celebrate the assets we do have: smaller companies and start-ups.

This shift in emphasis would help start-ups recruit and retain local graduates, and perhaps inspire graduating talent to take the risk of joining a start-up instead of taking lucrative corporate jobs.

So what does Boston need? We need to think more about marketing. We need to make our voices louder. In a way, we need our own “Mike Arrington” to lead the way.

Whenever I say this to people their response is “oh, we need a loud, arrogant, obnoxious guy that makes everyone fear his power?” No, I’m not saying that. But what we need is someone with the voice, skills and savvy to tell the world what Boston is all about. To hold up the great technology, ideas and companies that grow from the Boston ecosystem every day and tell the world why they need to pay attention. If this means that voice needs to be brash and obnoxious in order to cut through the clutter, then so be it.

Recently I spent some time hanging around with the guys at Evernote. This is a fascinating company made up of leadership that spent time running startups in Boston and then moved to the Valley. The company is growing like crazy and poised to make a leap from the technology world to the general populous. This is no small task.

Josh Kopelman recently spent some time in jury duty and used that as a way to get a focus group of non-tech folks:

Facebook is a great example of a company that made the leap, same with Apple (which doesn’t consider itself a tech company) and Google. But what makes Evernote interesting is how marketing is so much a part of its DNA. Yes, Andrew Sinkov does a great job of marketing the company. He’s an incredibly smart guy a lot of great ideas. But it’s also a company churning out apps like Evernote Food and releasing Skitch for free as a way to extend its base.

If you listen to CEO Phil Libin speak, he doesn’t tell you about the technology behind Evernote, he talks about bigger ideas of human memory and ways that technology can make our lives different. Sure, he spends time thinking about the technology itself, but the average person doesn’t care about the technology. They just want it to do what you asked. They want a product.

But to get it in their hands, you need marketing. And so do we.

Defining Journalism

Some bloggers are journalists.

And some paid reporters aren’t.

The power to mold the future fo the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.The “Who is a Journalist?” debate came back at the end of 2011 when Montana blogger Crystal Cox lost a Federal Case focusing on an Oregon law that protects journalists from having to reveal sources. Cox had been sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick in regards to stories she wrote about the bankruptcy of Obsidian Finance Group LLC. She relied on anonymous sources.

A federal judge ruled that under Oregon law, she did not qualify as a journalist. This of course, sent the journalistic and blogging communities into a tizzy about definitions (until they figured out that Cox was a bit on the edge and, frankly, not much of a journalist at all). This isn’t a new debate, it’s been around since bloggers started writing online.

That’s the wrong debate. Journalism is a profession, it’s a way of thinking. It’s never been clearly defined, but you know it when you see it. Kind of like the classic definition of pornography. Can a blogger be a journalist? Sure, if they are doggedly pursuing truth, working sources, checking facts and, as Pulitzer would say, “shining a light into the darkest corners.”

By the same token, many paid reporters are no more journalists than typists.

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson is on a speaking tour with his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, talking about what the two of them went through during the debate about going to war in Iraq. I’m not going to rehash the whole story here, but in his talk Wilson made a simple point: journalists didn’t do their jobs.

He points out how journalists wrote a narrative about he and his wife that was fed to them by people in power, while ignoring a much more important story about whey the US was entering a war and why the President put words into the State of the Union address that, on the surface, were simply untrue. The question is why? Why did reporters chase the Wilsons while not doing the harder and more “journalistic” work?

Dan Gillmor makes a similar argument in his wonderful book Mediactive, in which he calls the Washington press corps little more than “stenographers” in their coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

I head a wonderful debate on the subject at Social Media Weekend during a discussion about Occupy Wall Street and Press Credentials. The issue here became pretty simple to understand, but complicated to solve. The NYPD issues press credentials so they can provide the right access to the right people. But not every person working full-time for a journalistic organization has them. Also, they take a while to get (one reporter applied for credentials in October and still hasn’t been “screened.” So when police started to arrest protesters, “journalists” were caught in the roundup. Still, were they journalists or were they participants?

Andrea Courtois over at WBZ TV (@AndreaWBZ on Twitter) told me that she stopped following quite a number of reporters because, she felt, they became too involved in the movement, killing their objectivity.

Then there is Josh Stearns, who tracked journalist arrests during the Occupy movements. Part of his issue was simply defining which of those arrested were, in fact, journalists. Even on the panel itself some people who worked for journalistic organizations like MSNBC or the Daily News went to the site to check things out during off-hours. In other words, they weren’t acting on behalf of their organizations when they started acting like journalists. So, in that moment, what were they?

What does it all mean?

In my opinion the main issue comes  down to the inherent tension between journalism’s “purpose” and its reward structure. Press freedoms are, in many ways, a necessary offshoot of democracy. The populous can’t make intelligent voting decisions unless it has information by which to make those decisions. However, publishing is a business, one that sells advertising and subscriptions. Information has value if people WANT to consume it. Citizen journalists fill some of this gap, but where will we the people get our information on a regular basis? How will we vet what comes in? What information can we trust?

We, as media consumers, prove again and again that we are far more interested in being entertained than informed. We do it every day by clicking on TMZ rather than Global Post. We follow entertainers in striking numbers on Twitter, but leave intelligent, thoughtful people alone.

The fault, dear brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.

How are you measuring your PR?

Throughout my career companies have asked for coverage. They know what they want to say, they know what they want to promote, they know the sales figures they want to meet. They know they need PR.

They just aren’t sure why.

Todd likes to say that the best thing about social media and modern PR is that you can measure everything. Oh, and the worst thing about social media and PR is that you can measure everything.

His point is that you may not be measuring the right thing.

Many of our clients focus on a single but very important measurement: website traffic. That is, does a media hit (online or offline) result in website traffic? There are multiple ways to measure this, whether it’s looking at referrals, measuring traffic from a geographic location, looking at traffic numbers from a day with coverage versus a similar time period, or including twitter traffic generated by a particular piece of coverage. It can all go into that measurement.

But not every piece of media will drive traffic. For example, we’ve put clients in the big city publications that used to make clients drool, only to see little or no discernible traffic spike. The reason is simple: some big publications just don’t provide links. No links, no traffic. Asking people to take an action (searching on a company name or finding a website) is a barrier to results.

So the question becomes, if a piece of coverage doesn’t drive traffic, is it effective?

The answer isn’t so simple.

Let’s take the work we did for TeraDiode, a laser manufacturer in Littleton, Mass. As part of our outreach Xconomy’s Greg Huang wrote a great piece. Thanks to some great writing that piece got “slashdotted.”

If you just look at the traffic numbers, SlashDot drove quite a bit of traffic, though it tended to be low quality. Most of the users bounced and few knew anything about the type of lasers TeraDiode is in the business of building.

But that SlashDot hit helped the story get picked up by a number of other publications, like PhysOrg and R&D Magazine. The traffic from those sites had low bounce rates, high pages per visit and resulted in whitepaper downloads. It also caught the eye of a reporter at Jane’s Defence Weekly, a primary target. It should be noted that Jane’s doesn’t include links in its coverage.

So, was SlashDot worth it? Yes, if you measure its broad impact, not just its direct impact.

Of course, most media programs won’t have that kind of turnaround. A mention in a broad publication like the Boston Globe or Newsweek may not result in immediate impact. But its ancillary benefits include third-party validation and helping build credibility so you can gain bigger or more relevant coverage.

To get there, you need to plan for the long-run.

So what are the takeaways here?

  1. Know what you’re measuring — Yes, you can easily measure site visits, but that may not be your only goals. You may also be looking for venture funding or doing some recruiting. You may simply be looking to build awareness. Different hits have different purposes and need to be measured with a different yardstick.
  2. Have realistic expectations – A single “hit” in a widely read publication isn’t going to bring you thousands of new users. You need to keep your information flowing, both through your own content and by sharing others. Your primary goal is to build an audience, not just gain a short-term bump.
  3. Know where PR Fits In – Influencer relations is a part of the traffic-driving puzzle, but if you don’t have a way to capture that traffic, then it’s like going fishing with a hoop instead of a net. People should come to your site and know what to do next. Don’t let them bounce, keep them warm.
  4. Plan for the long haul — It’s tempting to measure PR on a week-by-week basis, but a program takes time to develop. A hit today in a small online publication may be what you need to move up to the bigger, more impressive and more traffic-driving publications down the road.
  5. Understand where you belong — While the Boston Globe may not yield major results for technology companies who want site traffic, I’ve spoken with consumer-goods companies that say a single piece their made their year. They needed awareness that later turned into sales. It’s a very different measure. Another company may find that CMSWire drives the most relevant traffic. Success depends a long list of factors.

Just a Number: Measuring Influence is Personal

Mention “Klout” in a social media conversation and you’ll hear groans, frustrations and grumbling.

But all those folks know their Klout score.

I don’t need to rehash how Klout recently changed its algorithm and sent Twitter ablaze with vitriol. You can read a great piece on the impact and find the alternatives here. But what has always been frustrating about Klout is how it tries to apply a number to something rather arbitrary. We’ve trod this ground before, but it came up again today during an online event called “Relevant Influence – Discovering and Engaging with Influencers for Effective Social Marketing“ moderated by Chris Selland of Terametric. Mike Maney, who is an incredibly intelligent marketer, pointed out how he does most of his work by hand. He becomes an influencer, he learns the influencers he needs to know and just talks to them. Sure, there are tools out there to help him do that, but sometimes it comes down to something simple.

Like collecting the top influencers on a given topic at a Mexican restaurant at SXSW, pouring Margaritas and having a conversation.

But if you’re looking at a number like a Klout score you need to ask yourself “what are you truly measuring?” Even accepted measurements have flaws. For evidence of that look no further than a great Freakonomics video on Football stats. They point out how seemingly simple metrics like a QB’s passing yards never tell the whole story. The video points out that last season, quarterbacks who threw for 300 or more yards a game went 47-49. When you look at those QBs with 400+ passing games, that record drops to 3-11. (I’d like to note here that Joe Namath was the MVP of Superbowl III without throwing a single touchdown pass. He didn’t throw any passes in the 4th quarter. Yet the Jets still won.)

I like what Klout is attempting to do: trying to provide everyone with a simple way to measure influence. The problem is, it means different things to different people and has a dozen different contexts.

In other words, “influence” isn’t so simple to measure.