PR and the respect factor

Sally Saville Hodge

Public relations has always been like the Rodney Dangerfield of the communications field. You know: We just don’t get any respect.

Our collective inferiority complex has been self-created, to a significant extent. The tendency by many in the profession to use overstatement and hype as their stock in trade hasn’t helped the cause. And high profile ethical lapses haven’t added any to the practice’s luster. (Remember Ketchum PR’s payment of $240,000 to minority radio broadcaster Armstrong Williams to tout on air and with his peers the No Child Left Behind program?)

That’s on the public side. Generally speaking, PR is low on the totem pole among business professionals as well. Never mind some of the more unfortunate associations that play down PR’s value. The term “free publicity” is emblematic.

I’ve always thought much of it related to how much of a budget PR commands and controls, particularly vis a vis the far weightier purse carried by Marcom and advertising. After all, money equals power, and it’s not unusual to see ad budgets of the big players in the millions of dollars – hundreds of millions, even. On the other hand, a million-dollar PR campaign is considered exceedingly healthy.

The irony is that for all the disrespect, and for whatever reason, it’s PR that really has the power to build a brand. For all of traditional media’s failings (and recent flailings, for that matter), it’s the news coverage that PR helps bring about that carries credibility, not the “they’ll say anything to make you buy” advertising messaging that’s so transparent to the public. And that’s only part of the powerful overall PR package.

We’re hearing more stories these days of some recession-hit businesses cutting their marketing budgets, but diverting more funds into PR programs instead. I don’t know that I’m ready to call it a trend, unfortunately. We just haven’t managed to do the job of convincing our partners in marketing (and higher up the food chain) that we can be more than simply masters of spin.

Or have we, but marketing leadership just can’t bring itself to respond accordingly?

Michael Dunn, Chairman of Prophet (full disclosure: a client since 2001) has just authored a book called The Marketing Accountability Imperative. It’s a heavy read, but a must-read for senior management. But apropos to this conversation, here’s a pullout worth thinking about:

“Our 2007 senior marketer survey showed that B2B companies believe that public relations is the most effective activity for long-term brand building and the third most effective at driving short-term sales (after field sales activities and outbound marketing). No form of advertising came close to PR in its perceived long- or short-term effectiveness. Despite this, B2B marketers spend only about 1 percent of their budget on public relations and over 20 percent on advertising. The effectiveness of PR is also rated higher than advertising among B2C marketers and their contradictory spending relationships are even more pronounced.
…[M]arketers’ behaviors seem somewhat puzzling – they do not believe that the marketing activities that they are spending the most on are the most effective, yet they are unwilling or unable to take the steps necessary to quantify this performance.”

Puzzling, indeed.

The press release revived

Sally Saville Hodge

I’ve long since lost track of the number of people who have come to me over the years saying, “We want public relations. Do you do press releases?”

PR is not, in fact, an acronym for Press Releases, a misconception fostered by many so-called PR professionals who apparently aren’t creative enough to find other tactics to add to their toolkits. It’s also often perpetuated by marketers who don’t know any better to challenge such thinking.

Well, of course, we do press releases. But for a long time, because of the kind of public relations we practice, we actually only did a handful a year. I found them so useless compared to other, more targeted and customized approaches to media relations that I wrote an article titled “The Press Release is Dead (Will Somebody Please Tell the Clients?).”

It appeared on MarketingProfs.com (Google my name and it’s still first up, four years later!) and generated numerous e-mails and blog posts, some friendly, some scathing. (And curiously enough, it also generated calls from prospective clients wanting to talk to us about, believe it or not, helping them do more and better press releases!)

PR folks sure do take their press releases seriously. And the debate over their value continues. Just last week, I linked through to End Game PR’s blog to read a post on “10 Dead or Dying PR Tactics.” Sure enough, the press release received honorable mention – with the author acknowledging its rebirth even though many experts put it in the doornail category.

I, however, am no longer of that opinion. It’s not because I now think it’s a particularly effective tool to reach reporters. It’s because of the changing nature of the media, and the 24/7 demand for content. It’s created much higher pickup rates by news sites for optimized releases that are driven out through wire distribution services. That, in turn, drives traffic to clients’ Web sites. Used in tandem with targeted and customized media outreach, it creates sustainable gains in visitors. (From there, of course, the trick is to get them to take some sort of action – but that’s a whole different post.)

Here’s how we have seen this play out for one client, an egg donor and surrogate recruitment agency. In late November, we distributed a news release via PR Newswire that was picked up by 123 news sites, and caused a 441 percent jump in traffic. A few days later, our direct pitching resulted in the story being picked up by a Chicago Tribune health reporter’s blog, which sustained the traffic gains. A few days after that, the Wall Street Journal carried a separate article quoting the client, which was in turn picked up by the Huffington Post and the “Quote of the Day” feature on Time magazine’s Web site. Traffic surged another 162 percent on top of the earlier gains.

It’s best if releases are accompanied by direct reporter outreach, but even without, they can create a healthy flow of traffic. For this same client, for example, we distributed two releases in February, without broader media coverage, and its site experienced a 138 percent increase in traffic.

It’s tricky given the nature of this client’s business to draw a correlation between increased traffic and increased business, since not everyone who might take action once they are on the Web site is qualified to be either an egg donor or a surrogate. But the client can see a correlating increase in calls and submission of online forms with the traffic surge – and so is happy with the results.

Press releases have experienced a happy recovery. They still have to be written well – and smart – and will never be the only tactic in a strategic communications toolkit. But it’s well worth talking to clients about rethinking how they’re used in a comprehensive program.

Any PR is not, in fact, good PR

Sally Saville Hodge

There’s an all-too-common school of thought that “any PR is good PR,” and Illinois’ soon-to-be-deposed Governor Rod Blagojevich is clearly a leading advocate.

His whirlwind New York press tour this week only succeeded at underscoring the fallacies of such thinking. If anything, his frenzied “I am not a crook” and “they’re denying me my rights” proclamations made him more of a caricature than he was prior to his arrest in December on charges of trying to sell the President’s former Senate seat.

But it’s too easy to riff on Blagojevich. My beef is with the flack he hired to trot him out to the press. Did he (or she) warn the Guv of the dangers of this course from the perspective of an image that has already been battered to hell?

What’s been wrought is not good PR. Good PR doesn’t further decimate an already shredded reputation. Good PR practitioners counsel their clients in the interests of creating positive buzz. They ask what the client’s end objective is with the media outreach. To change minds? To shape or re-shape a brand? They coach their clients – especially vigorously if television is a primary target– on their key messages, and how to segue back to them. They learn their clients’ tendencies and try to head them off at the pass to avoid situations like the use of bad analogies (cowboys and revered religious leaders, for example) that may provide fodder for derision.

Okay, Blago was probably not inclined to listen to wiser (saner?) counsel on these matters. When his estimable attorney Ed Genson threw in the towel in disgust, it gave a pretty clear signal that the Guv was intent on bulldozing his own path – rightly or wrongly.

But still. Many perceive PR folks as generally ranking right up there with used car salesman when it comes to ethics and honesty. In this instance, someone just took the money and ran, perpetuating many myths in the process.

Is HARO a new PR HERO?

Sally Saville Hodge

After more than a month away from blogging (don’t you hate it when work gets in the way of fun?), the big issue for me was whether to whine about my limited bandwidth or write about a relatively new development in the PR realm that has me intrigued.

One aside, and I’ll then forgo the whining: How the heck does Richard Laermer of the Bad Pitch Blog manage to post with great regularity on at least three blogs, write a gazillion books AND run “an acclaimed” (you can tell he’s a PR guy) agency?

So a few weeks ago, a co-worker forwarded me a new media matchmaking feed called “Help A Reporter Out,” or HARO for short. This free service is a project of Peter Shankman, who bills himself as a “CEO, entrepreneur and adventurist.” (Another one who seems to multi-task a lot better than I.)

Anyone who’s serious about PR knows about Profnet, which until HARO launched was really the only game in town: Journalists can submit, for free, descriptions of articles they’re working on and the kinds of sources they need to help round out their stories. PR folks can respond, but we have to pay an annual membership fee to play. We get e-mail “feeds” a few times a day where queries are compiled by category, and can respond to those that are appropriate.

So now Profnet has a competitor, and not a moment too soon. On one hand, I think Shankman gives HARO a bit too much credit for better helping all us flaks out here to pitch the media more effectively, but it’s always good to have more options.

Having used Profnet for about the last 10 years and HARO for the last two weeks or so, I’ve been musing to myself about their similarities and points of difference. So how do they stack up?

Journalist posters: I see a fair number of redundant posts, not a bad thing, and both services seem to have about an equal number of queries per feed. My sense, however, is that HARO has more “reporters” and “editors” versus the “freelancers” that tend to dominate Profnet. That’s not a bad thing, either; just a difference.

Storyline/media variety: Here, too, both services are fairly equal, and, honestly, it’s almost an issue that’s out of their control. Reporters are often assigned (or choose to write about) topics deemed to appeal to either the lowest common denominator or to those where esoterica is the name of the game. I remember getting hits off Profnet years ago with reporters from the national business press who had fairly sophisticated queries. These days, you rarely see a query on either service from the Wall Street Journal or Fortune, say, unless it’s cloaked. To HARO’s credit, however, Shankman regularly urges his members to spread the word among their journalist contacts and notes the subject categories that could be beefed up.

Personality: Thumbs up to HARO on this front. The more corporate Profnet is “just the facts, ma’am,” while Shankman has enlivened each feed by leading off with a fun message from a sponsor (way to go to make this pay!) and asides. One told of the subscriber who sent him a birthday cake. That HARO T-shirts are on the way. That membership has surpassed 20,000. And, by the way, that Profnet’s not happy with the competition. All delivered in a breezy and engaging writing style.

Functionality: A few years ago, Profnet did a redesign so that each post was essentially an HTML message within the email body. The summary line at the top of each post linked to the detail. Neat on the bells and whistles front, but I, for one, hate it. It takes forever to load in my inbox and in these days of instant gratification, I don’t want to wait for 120 seconds for something I’m just going to trash after skimming in 30 seconds. HARO is just a numbered list of posts by category (business and finance; general; technology; yadda, yadda, yadda); you just scroll down to the right number to get the detail. Thumbs up to HARO for keeping the KISS factor in mind.

Profnet has a full Web site in addition to its daily feeds that presumably enriches the user experience. For some, features like the ability to post profiles of your “expert” client sources may be just fine and dandy. For us, we never saw enough of a return on time expended to put the profiles together to make the effort worthwhile.

It will be interesting to watch this new competition evolve in the months ahead. But for now, HARO’s my hero for a clean, easy-to-use and fun service. (Never mind that I always root for the underdog.) Check it out for yourself!

A brand promise story with a happy ending?

By Chris Scott

Everybody has a horror story dealing with a utility company – from telephone to gas to electric service provider. But few of these companies inspire more customer wrath than the cable company, especially one with a shoddy reputation.

How many times has a friend moaned about the cable company’s missed installation appointments, surprise billing errors, intermittent service or rude customer service?

The complaints I’ve heard usually involve one of the biggest players: Comcast. In recent years, it’s moved into providing Internet and phone services alongside its cable TV offerings for residences and now for businesses. Oh joy. Now they can screw up all of our electronic connections to the outside world simultaneously!

So when we decided to research a new Internet and Internet-based phone service provider for Hodge Schindler, Comcast was last on our list, especially because its push into business services was an unknown quantity. We had visions of the phone cutting out for no logical reason, or losing e-mail and Web access for an extended period of time.

Imagine our surprise when Comcast (and its Business Services department) came through not only with Internet speeds four times faster than our previous service, but also with reliable VoIP phone service for our 10-person office. We’ve had the service for nearly a month now and have (knock wood) experienced very few problems. (The company even threw in free basic cable TV service for our conference room set.)

And all of this costs about 30 percent less a month than the old service for the next three years – the regular price, not an introductory rate.

Not that there weren’t some glitches that had us questioning the entire deal for a time: pre-installation issues with certain Comcast technicians telling us to pay a separate contractor to wire the cable from our building’s basement to our offices; unreturned phone calls seeking answers on installation timing; and, yes, a missed appointment from a technician.

Our skepticism was heightened when it appeared as though Comcast wouldn’t live up to promised pre-installation services due to a lazy technician who lied about his actions (or lack thereof) to the bosses back in the office.

Still, the tale ended happily, partly because we contacted a newly installed Comcast customer ombudsman. And also, I think, because the company really wants to expand its local business customer base. As the beneficiaries so far, that’s pretty cool.

So what have we learned?

• Comcast is trying (with some success) to overcome its negative brand associations and really is able to offer reliable Internet and Internet-based phone service to businesses at reasonable rates.
• Albeit with a bit of arm-twisting, Comcast is willing to do what it takes to expand its business client roster, to the extent of wiring an old, not cable-ready building.
• Sometimes it pays off for customers to take a risk, even when a potential vendor’s poor reputation makes you take pause at doing business with them.

Let’s keep that last point in mind the next time a company suggests giving them a try for a service you might be shopping around for. We certainly plan to.

Managing the viral spread of bad customer experiences

Sally Saville Hodge

You may have heard this factoid mentioned when it comes to customer service: A satisfied customer is likely to share the experience with one person, while one who’s dissatisfied will share it with ten.

Now, think about the implications of those numbers in a Web 2.0 world, when anyone and everyone has a voice and can make it heard resoundingly around the world. Whether through a blog, a Twitter, a YouTube feed, or a MySpace post. The possibilities for sharing positive, but (human nature being what it is) more often, negative experiences have exploded.

Any business that understands the value of a strong brand is going to do whatever it takes to consistently deliver a superior customer experience. Part and parcel of the deal is monitoring the conversation and seizing any opportunity to identify any disconnects – real or imagined – in the way the business is delivering. And find ways to make it right.

What’s amazing to me, though, is the number of businesses that still don’t get the power of the Web as more than just a messaging channel du jour. It’s also a great, grassroots way to keep the pulse of changing customer perceptions and to respond in real time and in authentic ways to shape them.

Or not.

Consider Brenda and Gerald Moran. These folks love cruises. They were such fans of Royal Caribbean that they booked two trips a year and even bought stock in the company. This despite a customer experience that was less than ideal for each and every trip.

Some of their complaints were laughable: Her birthday greeting was delivered to the wrong cabin. (Get over it.) Others? Not so much. On their most recent, two-week Alaska/Northwest cruise, their cabin reeked of sewage, which was blamed on other guests flushing everything from oranges to diapers. With no more rooms available at this floating inn, their balcony door remained open in 40-degree weather to offset the odor. Yet the Morans were happy with the cruise line’s offer of a 20 percent discount on their next cruise.

But here’s the deal. Brenda wrote, as she always did, a post-cruise review on Cruise Critic, which sparked an active viral dialogue. Royal Caribbean responded by offering the Morans an additional discount for their next trip…and, oh, by the way, now will you pull your review?

Brenda declined. Cruise Critic later declined to pull or modify it. And Royal Caribbean soon thereafter banned the Morans from its cruises – for life.

Even in the olden days before the Web boosted the power of word-of-mouth, such heavy-handed tactics would have been ill-advised. Royal Caribbean would have been much better served with a variety of other courses of action:

• Apologizing in the discussion forum for the Morans’ experience and detailing steps being taken to make it right (and remember, it’s not always about money!) and create a consistently positive customer experience for all its guests.
• Identifying the Morans’ (and others’) specific complaints about the customer experience, their relative degree of importance, and possible fixes besides discounting that would create goodwill.
• Identifying and cultivating other satisfied customers (which the Morans really were, overall) who could serve as brand ambassadors and encouraged, among other things, to share their own positive experiences.
• Monitoring the conversation and employing an ombudsman, perhaps (see what Comcast is doing), to run interference in real time as a means of enhancing customer satisfaction.

The Web’s current role and future potential to help make or break brands is only growing. For those that don’t like the way the conversation goes, killing the messenger isn’t the answer. Finding better ways to keep the negative word of mouth from spreading virally to hundreds or even thousands more is.

Don’t titter at Twitter – there’s a place for almost everything in this changing new media world

Sally Saville Hodge

A month or so ago, Helena Bouchez, our erstwhile, soon-to-be-former VP and resident guide to all things new- and social media-related, started telling me about the marvels of Twitter. Then she sent me some links to some of her favorite Twitterers.

I kind of knew about Twitter. Little top-of-mind messages – 140 characters max – that you can use to keep your friends and followers abreast of what you’re doing and thinking during the course of the day. A mini blog, as it were. Accessible through the Web, your cell phone, and instant messaging.

Now, Helena is a self-proclaimed early adopter, God love her. Once she gloms onto something, she does it with gusto. She now oooVoos and/or Skypes with aplomb. She has several blogs. So it’s not surprising that she’s Twittering away with great regularity.

It takes me a bit longer to embrace a lot of this stuff. It’s only been the last several years, for example, that I’ve been satisfied with the business benefits of a blog strategy, and, heck, we only just launched this one in January. (The time commitment I was worried about? I was right: It’s 1:21 p.m. Saturday and I’m writing this post instead of playing outside!)

So I went to some of Helena’s recommended Twitterers. One I liked. Gaper’s Block’s Twitters are useful little facts about stuff going on in the city. The others? Not so much. When I see a bunch of messages that read like this…

11:45 a.m.: landed at Las Vegas airport.
Left laptop in room; had to go back for it.
Was late to my meeting with students.
5:45 p.m., and I’m boarding now to go back home.

…my first reaction is: Does anyone really care?

Apparently they do, or Twitter’s ranks wouldn’t be swelling with each passing day. (*Pat on my own back: Many people have lives that seem to be as boring as yours!)

Helena hasn’t yet talked me into setting up my own Twitter feed. I am, nonetheless, keeping an eye on this utility to see how its applications expand.

The Bad Pitch Blog, for instance, just exhorted its readers to learn not to hate Twitter, and shared how some have used it for more than just mental masturbation. Like the PR person who followed one journalist’s feeds, and used the tool to not just successfully make a story pitch but to see the article through, including fact checking.

Now, that’s cool and useful. And the kind of thinking may make a believer out of me yet.

Bad pitches, Richard Laermer and the Gumby factor

Sally Saville Hodge

I recently had a conversation with PR professional, author and blogger Richard Laermer, and my (failed) challenge was to write this resulting post fast because he talks fast, and I was worried over being able to recreate the sense of all the threads that were spun from the discussion if I waited.

Alas, other work got in the way of a speedy turnaround. But my ace in the hole is the fact that I’m no longer a journalist; accordingly, I offered, “Hey, want to look at it before I post?” He can always add his own quotes if he doesn’t he think he sounds smart enough.

Richard Laermer, however, isn’t that self-important to worry about sounding smart. (I’m pretty sure, though, that he’s smart enough to worry about sounding cogent.) In fact, self-importance is something he deflates with regularity, and one of his vehicles for this is The Bad Pitch Blog. Read his post debunking a journalist-turned-PR-pro’s pontifications on how PR should be done, and you get the picture.

What led me to his door was a recent post about a news release that was bad for so many reasons, starting with the unfortunate overuse of the ® symbol after the word “Bone” as in Milk Bone® Dog Biscuits. And, as these things happen, when the release was distributed over the wire, the little circle around the “R” was lost, and the first, ahem, boner of many was identified.

The ensuing discussion made me both laugh out loud and pray that we never are on the receiving end. And I decided I’d like to talk to him for a blog post of my own. Happily, he was agreeable – it didn’t hurt that his latest book, “2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade” recently hit the newsstands.

The whole notion of trends is integral to Laermer’s main business (RLM PR), which focuses on “placing clients ahead of trends.” And, indeed, his various blogs seize upon trends as a point of departure for many conversations.

The Bad Pitch Blog exposes mediocre-to-really-bad writing – and thinking – being put out by too many in public relations, going beyond the simple carelessness of the poorly placed ®. Indeed, the “boner” news release was a fine example of that, trying to cover so much ground in one piece that it left the poor reader dazed and confused as to the point. Laermer didn’t name the firm (“that’s easy enough to find”) because he really faulted Milk Bone for the problem.

Indeed, why would Milk Bone settle for that kind of “counsel” and output? And if the company – any company – really just wants its PR firm to serve as order-takers, then it needs to do a better job internally of monitoring and overseeing what’s being produced and distributed.

“Too many people in this business spend a lot of time at it, but there’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re doing,” Laermer suggests. “A lot of first drafting goes on, for example, because no one wants to take responsibility for words – they want to let someone else take care of it.”

Likewise, he thinks there’s an overabundance of folks entering into the field who don’t seem inclined to sit down and figure out what it takes to do the job well. “I have seen too many just sit there with the ‘just tell me what to do’ attitude. There just isn’t enough thinking going on.”

As Laermer puts it, “We (as PR practitioners) have an incredible amount of power. But as a profession, we have to wake up and get better at it.”

You might say we need more “Gumbitude” – and actually, that’s exactly what Laermer does say. Gumbitude is his word playing off the characteristics of the green Gumby character from the 50s and 60s children’s television show – and adopted by Laermer as the “Mascot of 2011” for the way he represents this trend: “People discover that flexibility is among the few basic qualities in which to excel.”

“Gumby’s power is more than flexibility,” Laermer writes in 2011. “Gumby is attitude… Gumby is confident, ambitious and willing to get the job done… Gumby is action… Gumby is results… Gumby learns… Those that have Gumby participate…Gumby isn’t about yes and no. It’s about how and why.”

We in the profession need to get Gumbetized. It’s all about doing our jobs better. And maybe avoiding getting skewered in Bad Pitch Blog.

Swimming in the social media waters: C’mon in, the temperature’s fine!

Sally Saville Hodge

We just found out that we won an award for an integrated communications program we created and executed over the course of about a year for one of our clients. Woo-hoo!

I can’t give specifics on the award as it hasn’t yet been formally announced. But it occurs to me that the work itself is a case in point for all those PR and marketing folks who remain mired in traditional strategies because they’re too fearful and risk averse or just plain too lazy to bring themselves up to speed by reading up on who’s doing what and how that translates into best practices.

Says the Friday Traffic Report: Successful marketing practices are born of experimentation, testing and boundary tweaking. It’s time to quit complaining and start learning.

That’s what we decided to do last year, thanks to complete buy-in from a client that hired us for our expertise and trusted us to employ it in the firm’s best interests.

Alternative Reproductive Resources (ARR) initially hired us to do “traditional” PR, but it quickly became apparent that the way ARR does business (matching intended parents with egg donors and gestational surrogates in a highly principled way) and the demographics of some of its critical audiences (young women between 21 and 38) lent themselves to more.

At its heart, ARR is dedicated to building a community of families and the women who enable their creation. Moreover, while traditional media coverage is helpful for image building and credibility, by itself, that’s not sufficient to convince young women that the physical and psychological “testing” required to donate their eggs or carry another’s child is worth it – whether in hard cash or psychic income. This is a play where the peer experience is invaluable.

We believed a community blog would not only reinforce ARR’s positioning as a caring, ethical leader among egg donation/surrogacy agencies, but also allow women to share their personal experiences in their own words. The viral effect would boost traffic to both the blog, Conception Connections, and from there, to ARR’s Web site. Ultimately, with its own egg donors, surrogates and parents as implied endorsers, the strategy would respond to ARR’s ultimate business need to bring in more qualified donors and surrogates.

We proposed the idea to ARR and were told: “Go for it.” (Even though we had to explain what a blog was first!)

Here’s the point, though. We’d never done a blog before, from start (underlying strategy) to finish (content management). And there was a risk. Screw up and it could well cost us money, not just in time to fix, but in the potential loss of a valued client.

Gulp.

Luckily, it’s not like we haven’t been staying on top of developments in the social media world. We consult regularly with partners who’ve been blogging for years and others who specialize in search engine optimization. Plus, we have talent in-house with personal experience in this realm who helped guide the strategy and execution. So, I was comfortable in making this bet.

And it’s paying off. Media relations tactics, like a release sent to targeted bloggers and Web sites and a feature mentioning the blog on Reuters, combined with some SEO strategies, have caused traffic to steadily rise (about 2,500 total visitors since the official launch), and created a steady stream of comments and direct positive feedback to the client. On its role in meeting the ultimate business need? Time will have to tell.

More important to me than awards and succeeding at risk-taking, though, has been the client’s response. At our most recent meeting, mere hours after I sent ARR its monthly invoice, the company’s president handed me the check. “This is one I don’t mind paying because we feel so well cared for by your team,” she said.

The dying art of good writing

Sally Saville Hodge

Just when I’m ready to sound the death knell for the craft of good writing, out comes a New York Times article saying “not so fast.”

The piece outlines results of a nationwide test that suggests one-third of U.S. eighth graders and a quarter of its high schoolers are “proficient” writers. Now, that doesn’t sound so hot to me, but the folks with the federal government’s school testing program said the overall results were heartening and counter other studies citing a decline in our society’s ability to write.

Maybe I’m just harder to please than your average bureaucrat.

Frankly, I’m with the National Commission on Writing, which back in 2003 issued a call to put “the neglected ‘R’” back as an emphasis into the school curriculum at all grade levels. Other studies have found that a large proportion of college professors believe high schoolers advance to college with limited writing skills. And businesses are concerned as well: Another survey suggested blue chip companies are spending billions in remedial writing training.

But to my way of thinking, writing “training” only goes so far. It does impart the rules, for example. You know. The “never start a sentence with an ‘and’” and “every sentence must have subject and verb” kinds of things. (Rules that really great writers break with panache.) It may help with ways to plot your outline as a means of organizing the chaos of your thinking. And it may provide those who really want to do better with good resources to guide them on their journey. (One that I recommend to all my staff as a must-read is a terrific blog called Word Wise.)

But you can’t train people to love good writing and how it comes about. You can’t train them to understand the nuances that differentiate an okay word from the right word for the context. Or to understand why “it was a dark and stormy night” is cliché, while “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is classic. Or why a spare writing style is fine, but sometimes you need to add meat to those potatoes to make your copy sing.

We need to find ways to instill that love in our young people from a very early age. I wish I had a sure-fire way to do so. I hate to contemplate a world where communication is dominated by staccato blasts of texted acronyms and video sound bites. But that does seem to be where we’re heading.

Electronic communications (r)evolution

Helena Bouchez

Something weird has happened to e-mail. People have stopped answering it. Or it takes them a week to reply. And it’s not just one or two people anymore. I have to follow up on about half the e-mails I send now, when just six months ago I received responses from most within 24-36 hours.

Electronic communications methods are evolving quickly – and some say away from e-mail. In fact, e-mail bankruptcy, a desperate act in which the overwhelmed e-mail account owner highlights his or her entire inbox and presses the delete key, is becoming commonplace. People are increasingly protective of their e-mail addresses and many have figured out how to set up e-mail rules and filters to screen out unwanted – and unsolicited – messages. (Great video commentary on e-mail bankruptcy and what to do about it from French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur here.)

This e-mail tune-out is happening across realms: business and personal. In business, it’s across industries. Editors who used to respond to us almost immediately need to be nudged two and three times for the barest acknowledgment. For a current (annual) research project, I’ve even resorted to (gasp) phoning some of the sources to get some response to my time-sensitive requests. When I do get an e-mail reply, it tends to be extremely short. Like a text message. Or a tweet (Twitter communiqué – 140 character limit). I’ve also noticed a steady uptick in the number of actionable messages received via Facebook and LinkedIn.

Because things are changing so rapidly, we must stay on top of what messaging is relevant to our clients’ target markets and the best way to get it in their way. Every tactic has to be reassessed every time, especially if the last time we executed it was more than six months ago. We must be curious and experiment. How many of you Twitter? Use Skype or OoVoo? Belong to a forum? Are aware of the next generation of social networking sites? (I’ll help here: Brain gym and brain training site Headstrongbrain.com currently in beta, is one such site.)

As if keeping up is not enough, we also need to remember to inform clients as to the degree of flux the entire communications industry is in (and is likely to stay in) and educate them about the new communications channels and choices out there. It’s more work for us, of course, but will pay off big in the end – also known as Web 3.0.

And the battle twixt technocrats and luddites rages

Sally Saville Hodge

One of the never-ending discussions in both the PR/marketing blog world and in related traditional media focuses on who gets it and who doesn’t when it comes to social media strategies. By now, it’s become obvious. Only a chosen few apparently get it.

The most recent salvo, picked up by the media and bloggers alike, was issued in the form of a recent survey of senior level corporate marketers by TNS media intelligence and Cymfony, a marketing influence analytics firm. Agencies – marketing, advertising and PR – are all behind the eight-ball, was the consensus: They lack practical experience and tend to try to shoehorn traditional tactics into social media space.

To me, this study shows some flaws. For starters, only 70-some senior level corporate marketers were included in the survey, and those apparently with Fortune 500-level firms like Hewlett Packard, Hyundai and Johnson & Johnson. That’s not a huge base. Moreover, to my mind, such players have the financial flexibility and the human capital that smaller businesses don’t of being able to take the risk of experimenting.

And for all their talk, yes, big businesses are shifting more of their budgets to social media, but the lion’s share is still directed toward traditional channels. To be sure, a study last year (subscription required) by Ad Age of major advertisers’ spending showed the most growth in non-measured media (including some forms of digital communication, like paid search). But nearly 60 percent of their ad spend still goes to TV, print and some forms of Internet advertising.

Bottom line, though, is that I find this ongoing conversation both troublesome and irritating.

On one hand, the smug superiority of many of the social media specialists is irksome. (One tells ClickZ’s Mike Grehan that she believes traditional PR shops are “on their way out.”) Do they think they invented this next best thing? Do they truly think the once and future interests and needs of all audiences are met solely through this one channel? Please.

But I also understand the disdain they feel for some — too many? – of the traditional shops that don’t even try to grow some modicum of understanding of the power some of these new vehicles have to grow a brand. Call it inertia. Call it lazy. Call it incurious. Or something else.

Personally, I put it down to something else. Like the “order taker” mentality that is way too prevalent, both among agencies and professionals on the client side. If clients and employers aren’t pushing for it, why should PR and marketing professionals move themselves to advance along the learning curve? Other factors: Fear of failure. Risk aversion. Discomfort with change.

I agree with what the senior level marketers seemed to be telling TNS and Cymfony. Those of us whose clients and bosses aren’t pushing us to test these new waters should at least be trying them on our own accounts and measuring how they’re working. That way, we’re in a much better position to recommend some of these strategies that might augment what’s being done on the traditional side.

There are experts out there who are willing to share, especially when there might be an opportunity to partner on business in the future. We’ve found them and tap into them regularly, and never once has anyone with my shop been called a Luddite (even if some of us might deserve it)!

And for heaven’s sake. Anyone who doesn’t have “familiarity with social media and search” as a prerequisite for new hires needs to wake up. These folks are out there, too. Bill Sledzik, who teaches PR at Kent State writes about making his students blog – or they fail. “You won’t grasp the ‘zen’ of Web 2.0 until you become one with the medium,” he writes.

As much as some wish they would, the new communications channels are not going away. In fact some are expanding on a monthly basis. Instead of resisting and lamenting halcyon days gone by, marketers need to stop whining, hold their nose and jump into the deep end of the social media pool.

PR’s world: bad writing, bad pitching and PO’d journalists

Sally Saville Hodge

One of my more mortifying moments since hanging up my PR shingle 20 years ago:

I was having lunch with a former colleague who was the editor of a local business publication when he pulled out a news release, liberally doused with red ink, that had been sent out by my firm.

“I was really surprised, Sal, to see this coming from you,” he said. And he proceeded to itemize why: A variety of typos had, er, slipped through – including our phone number and in the spelling of the name of our business. There were grammatical errors. The run-on sentences took my breath away.

As these things went, he told me kindly, this was not one of the worst press releases he’d ever seen. He (as I in my journalism days) could cite example upon example of purely dreadful crap issued in the guise of “public relations.” Ten-page releases chock-full of irrelevant information (like where a business owner’s oldest son had graduated from college). Pieces that were only marginally veiled sales sheets. Releases where you might find the point if you had the patience to read through to the last page (most journalists don’t).

Mortified, I still thanked my friend, telling him that I was just as surprised as he was, as this was the first time I was seeing the release myself. Yes, the account executive had broken my cardinal rule that I see everything before it is distributed. And, yes, she would have been fired immediately upon my return to the office had she not resigned as soon as I confronted her.

The drek produced by many shops is only one reason why journalists and PR practitioners have a love/hate relationship. The fact is that we need each other, even though many with the media hate to admit it. But too many agencies and their people work in a way that makes it harder for those of us who are more thoughtful in positioning storylines that meet the needs of the media as well as our clients.

Two blogs of note for clients and agencies to monitor to grow their understanding of best practices in media relations – by virtue of negative examples. One is The Bad Pitch Blog, providing appallingly hilarious tales from the trenches. These guys just wrote about another blog that makes for interesting reading, AngryJournalist.com. On this front, I find it very comforting to note that while its contributors are angry at bad flaks, they are equally angry at themselves, their editors, their co-horts and peers, their advertising staff, their advertisers…

New media use slowed by old business ideas, not old marketers

Sally Saville Hodge

It’s hell getting old.

Your back aches more. It’s harder to get away with calling your growing network of wrinkles “laugh lines.” And popular wisdom holds that you become so mired in tradition that you’re not keeping up with the changing world.

These days, the lines separating old dogs like me from the young Turks in PR and marketing are being drawn in media – traditional versus new. MarketingPilgrim’s Janet Driscoll Miller states it pretty bluntly: Most of the marketers she knows over 40, she writes, don’t understand even the basics of online marketing. And she cites Mike Grehan at Clickz to further support her position that most PR firms aren’t bringing new technologies to their clients.

Oh, if it were just so simple as the generation gap at work.

Here’s what this dinosaur has observed after many years in business.

First, there’s a lot of inertia out there. If clients and corporate bosses aren’t pushing their marketing and PR teams to be more than merely order-takers, to be thinking creatively about new and traditional tools to help move the business forward, then they aren’t going to step out of their comfort zones. Everyone knows traditional media works (never mind that studies show effectiveness is falling off). So why tinker? Where’s the incentive?

A second factor relates less to the generational thing and more to the risk aversion prevalent in our business culture. Why take a chance on something new when you know, as the saying goes, that the more s— you throw against the wall, enough of it’s bound to stick?

Ultimately, whether you’re pushing new media strategies or old, the challenge is to speak in the kind of language that decision-makers understand: These are the kinds of results you can expect.

Whether you’re a new media groupie or a traditional media Neanderthal, your challenge is to strive to learn what’s on both sides of the fence, step away from the order-taker mentality, and find a way to mesh the best of both worlds to demonstrate value to the client. It’s a challenge we all should be stepping up to meet – at whatever age.