Marketing Roadmaps

PR

Managing Crisis: When Insiders Go Public

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Recently someone ask me if I thought car service Uber could improve consumer perceptions by engaging with social influencers. I replied with a very tentative maybe.

The damage to the firm’s brand goes well beyond one or two faux pas. Sexual assault of female passengers  and sexual harassment of female employees being a particular problem. Before it should engage with consumers directly through social influencers, Uber needs to actually fix that which is broken. Time for talk has passed. Time to walk.

The following day, I read an opinion piece by Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor that called on the company to do that very thing. Really fix its problems, not just promise to fix and do nothing substantive or sustaining.

Think about that for a minute. Investors so concerned about the situation, and so stymied by the regular channels of communication that they felt their only recourse was a public, open letter.

Something similar happened in the “momosphere” this past weekend. While I am not privy to all the details, the general gist is that two employees of a non-profit quit very publicly, detailing systemic racism and microaggressions in their posts, and others were quick to corroborate their stories, also very publicly.

How bad is the crisis, when insiders feel there is no possibility of change from within, and they literally take to the streets? Publicly and with attribution, as distinct from an anonymous source like Watergate’s Deep Throat or any number of rogue Twitter accounts sharing salacious details from the Trump White House.

And what does that mean for the organization under siege?

Fundamentally, when things get to this point, Public Relations As Usual is too little, too late. When the folks are figuratively marching in the streets, you need to respond in kind — with passion and commitment to change. Keeping in mind that you may NEVER do enough to satisfy the critics, but you have to try. Seriously try to fix your broken product.

You can’t expect things to turnaround overnight either. The things you do and say right away are just the start. You have to stay the course. Your public has to see that the changes you promise are real and sustainable. Especially if they have heard it before, but the followthrough was lacking.

Anything less than real commitment to change will not be enough.

Is “earned media” an anachronism?

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anachronism — A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, esp. a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned (Source: Google Search)

Perhaps anachronism is a little harsh, but not by much. The whole concept pf earned media, as part of the triumvirate of Earned, Paid and Owned, has always been a little squishy. There’s just something a little bogus in the idea that the story being told was so tremendously good that the brand earned its non-paid media mention in a story, when of course brands, entertainment properties and celebrities spend millions of dollars every month to PR agencies and publicists to obtain these placements. There’s nothing unpaid about earned media.

Nevertheless, earned media  is where “we” have been accounting for the results of blogger outreach and other word of mouth engagement programs. In part because many early social media engagement programs originated in PR agencies for whom the earned media model made sense (or at least as much sense as it ever will.)

Certainly more so than paid media, which was clearly understood to be paid advertising media, and owned media, which is a bit more complex but boils down to the assets that the company controls – its packaging, trucks, website and so on.

The problem is that nothing is that simple. It never was, but social media and the rise of the engaged consumer has changed the dynamic to the point that classifying things into three buckets just doesn’t work any more.

Blogger outreach programs often include freelance fees paid to the bloggers for their work. So that’s paid media, I guess. When readers of those posts leave comments or post to Facebook or tweet about the posts? Earned. What about if the blogger who was paid to write a post, either a sponsored post on her own blog or as a freelance assignment, tweets it out on her own initiative?

Digital ads almost always include Share icons for Twitter and Facebook. So the media is paid, but the sharing is what? Pearned, for paid + earned?

And then there’s Facebook. How do we classify the activity on Facebook? A brand page is owned, I suppose. But are the comments earned? And what about custom promotional tabs? Are those owned or paid? And when someone shares it, is it now earned?

Clearly, we’ve outgrown these simple models of Paid, Earned and Owned.

What matters is whether consumers want to share. It doesn’t really matter whether the story you are telling starts in paid, earned or owned media.

Will consumers share it?

This concept of shared, or shareable, media is easy to understand. Much harder to execute, because it crosses so many functional lines – media, PR, marketing, advertising, creative. Much harder to measure, because it is more than pageviews or Twitter followers.

Up for the challenge? I am, and would love to hear how you are navigating this world.

Who owns social media (redux)

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Photo from Flickr user toffehoff. Used under a Creative Commons license.

When I wrote about who owns social media last May, I couldn’t believe THEN that we were still asking this question. I’m both surprised (and yet not) a year later that we are *still* asking. As though there were a simple, and only one, right answer, and if we ask enough, eventually we’ll get whatever answer we want to hear.

Um no. Not going to happen. Social media involves people, and people are messy. Social media engagement also depends on our expression of both our individuality and the collective mind. Try to fit that neatly in a demographic box. The mass market still exists, it is just influenced by multiple micro-markets and their denizens.

No simple answer then.

In the column I wrote last year, I concluded that the company and the consumer were the “owners” of the relationship, and ad and PR agencies were facilitators. I’d like to take this a step further and advocate for an integrated marketing approach that I think will ultimately be more successful and productive.

Don’t tell anyone, but good social media marketing is simply good marketing. Just as in the “old days,” you wouldn’t limit yourself to a single tool in the marketing toolkit – advertising, PR, direct response, loyalty programs etc., no matter how successful it was, in the “new days,” you still need to deploy multiple tools. You can’t get seduced by the flavor (or Facebook) of the month and shift all your spend because “that’s what the cool kids are doing.”  You need an integrated approach to reach your consumer, because that’s how she consumes the information she gets. It’s not a different brand before and after we buy, in an ad versus a news article versus a blog post.

People use information from different sources in different ways.  A personal referral – our old friend word-of-mouth – is treated differently than the information conveyed in an advertisement or a magazine article. But we use all the information we collect to make a purchase decision, and we generally require more than one. No matter how much Aunt Sue loves her car, we look for independent reviews and probably consult the brand website.

Our marketing message needs to appropriately be in all the important places a consumer might look for it. Do we spend more of our budget in the most productive places? Absolutely. But smart marketers don’t make the mistake of limiting the plan to a single tactic. It’s marketing suicide. Even infomercial brands like OxiClean have distribution strategies in addition to the commercials, and do not get me started on all the failed high-tech start-ups that thought they could make it on PR buzz alone.

Smart marketers also don’t let functional silos, whether internal departments, outside agencies or a combination of both,  derail the story. Especially now, when customers have such a strong voice and will more easily see if the emperor has no clothes.  It’s not enough to hand out a messaging document and timeline to the various functions and allow them to go forth in their independent silos, with their independent strategies.

This of course brings ownership of strategy back to the brand, which is where it belongs. Agencies advise, and yes, strategize. But the brand owns it.

What does that mean in practice?

Agencies that take an integrated approach to strategy, either by vertical integration or actively seeking to work with in tandem with their counterpart agencies on the brand account, are going to be more attractive to brands than those that take a more silo’d approach. We already see this happening. Some will do it well. Some not so much. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that score.

Social media expertise will continue to shift in-house. It has to. To navigate the organizational boundaries, foster cross-functional and inter-departmental cooperation at the level required, the person responsible for social media engagement has to have the internal knowledge and ties that only a full-time, bottom-line driven employee can. And once social media moves in-house it will have multiple flavors. The best description of what this may turn out to look like is from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group in his piece on the two career paths of the corporate social strategist.

Warning: This integration will not be an easy road. It requires that everyone check their egos (and worries about budget) at the door. This is not easy if you run the PR agency and are worried about the ad agency getting your budget or vice versa. And within the organization, this social media “thing” is still considered a bit “squishy.” Internal champions have to navigate many hurdles, often including not having the budget for social media, just the mandate.

But I just don’t see any other way. The consumer views a product as a whole. We want a consistent experience across our interactions with the brand, whether it be functions (customer service, sales, finance) or marketing (ads, PR, coupons, sampling etc. ). And we expect to have those interactions across multiple channels – mass and micro media, new media and old.

Consumers see us as one “thing.” It’s about time we did as well.

What are you going to do to break down a silo or foster cross functional cooperation in your organization?

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Rambling down my road: random-ish thoughts on blogger relations and expertise

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For the past few months, I’ve been head down working on Professional Blogging For Dummies, and there just hasn’t been a lot of time to write blog posts. A few things were just too important to let slide, like the FTC/Ann Taylor Loft story, but for the most part I’ve had to let many juicy stories go.

Like the pitch for an FDA approved douche sent to bloggers of both genders. Or the one for a snake repellent sent to mom bloggers in Manhattan. Seriously, outside of the zoo, how often do you see a snake of the reptilian variety in New York City?

Then there are the brand ambassador programs that seem to be multiplying like rabbits. For example, the Sears Outlet brand ambassador program with the laundry list of requirements for the bloggers but zero compensation.

Somehow, we’ve lost the distinction between public relations, which relies on a compelling story to “earn” the placement in the media outlet (hence the term “earned media,” more about that below), and promotion, which is a sales-related activity closely related to advertising. Many blogger programs are really about promotion, but they offer little or no compensation to the bloggers for what is essentially advertising space. Read Liz Gumbinner’s posts for more on this: Nothing is free, except it seems, a mommyblogger and In defense of PR.

And then there was last week’s dust-up between a blogger who took umbrage at, and posted about, a specific pitch, and a pretty strong response from the mentioned agency. I haven’t looked at the specifics of the post or program in question, but my immediate reaction reading the agency’s post was a certain amount of amazement that the author didn’t seem  realize that the very questions she was raising in her post have been circling around the blogosphere for years. Read Julie Pippert’s The elephant in the room? Not so much for more about this specific post and its aftermath.

Earned media is a dinosaur
I participated in my first conference panel on blogger relations at BlogHer Business in 2007. More than 3 years later, I often feel like we haven’t moved forward at all. We’re still arguing about the same things — Are the pitches good, targeted and relevant? Are bloggers journalists? And so on. Blah Blah Blah.

This discussion is old and tired, and it’s not going anywhere except down a rathole. We need to move on. As Julie (@jpippert)  and I discussed on Twitter after I read her post, earned media is a dinosaur. We need a new model.

One that understands that the blogger is also a customer, not just a reporter. That the old forms of engagement don’t work anymore. And that both sides — PR and bloggers — need to look at the relationship through a new lens. Companies and their PR agents aren’t doing bloggers “a favor” by including them in their programs. There’s an expected business benefit. And bloggers aren’t entitled to anything. If you want to participate in blogger relations or advertising programs, you’ve got to build a compelling blog that attracts an audience that the companies and advertisers want to reach.

The successful approach for reaching out to bloggers integrates public relations and advertising to achieve marketing objectives. If the story is compelling, PR outreach. If the company wants to control a message, advertising.

This flies in the face of the typical corporate organization and certainly agency alignments, and absolutely requires a change in the way we look at our marketing task. I’ve been writing about this changing model for some time now, and will continue to write about it here and at Shamable.com.

Expertise

True expertise is less about knowing how to do something than understanding why you’re doing it. Always start by asking Why? Then worry about How?  Check out Toby Bloomberg’s e-book Social Media Marketing GPS for advice from 40 social media experts that truly understand the why and the how. I was doubly privileged with regard to this book — I was one of the people Toby interviewed on Twitter for the book and I was in Atlanta the day she launched, so I got to celebrate with her in person.

Also on my radar screen (and bound to be the topics of upcoming posts): more on measurement, including some thoughts on the importance of sentiment, and another look at Facebook after the privacy dilemmas of the past month. What are the implication for marketers and consumers?

Finally, thank you to the folks at Ignite Social Media for including Marketing Roadmaps (and me) on their list of 50 Women Bloggers You Should Be Reading. I’m not a terrific fan of lists, but feel privileged to be included in this company.

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A little integrity with that PR, please

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<rant on>

I’ve got more than a few posts pending, including part 2 of my analysis of the published FTC guidelines on commercial endorsements and an update on Blog with Integrity, but today I received an email that demanded immediate attention.

As many of you know, I collect bad pitches. I use them here on the blog and in my workshops. Someday perhaps they will even make it into a book about community engagement. I get a few myself (and for some reason more lately), but the best source of pitches — good and bad — are my friends and readers.

Today’s example, from a reader, was just about the worst pitch ever. It’s bad enough when bloggers get press releases that quote their previous reviews on the topic. That’s clueless and stupid.

When the pitch plagiarizes a blogger’s own words, and they send her the pitch? There really are no words.

Here’s the pitch, dated 10/22/09:

moving pitch

And here’s the post from which the content was lifted, from 9/29/09:

moving post

Yes, my friends, apparently, this PR agency took the blogger’s intellectual property, changed a few words, and then sent her the pitch. There’s so much wrong with this whole scenario that it’s hard to know what’s worse — stealing the post or stupidly sending the pitch to the victim.

How do I know that it was the PR agency that ripped off the blogger and not vice versa? Apart from the dates, which make it pretty obvious?  Gut. While I’ve only met this blogger once, at BlogHer Boston last year, I have no reason to doubt her. She also had no problem being identified in this post, an inevitable consequence of her by-line. I double-checked.

The agency in question? It’s like the umpteenth time someone has sent me one of their pitches as a bad pitch, and I’ve received more than a few crappy ones from them myself.

This is why PR agencies have to be more than crisp when reaching out to bloggers. You have to be damn near perfect because there are dopes out there doing crap like this.

Makes me sick and embarrassed for the marketing and communications profession.

</rant off>