Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

People who don’t understand PR tend to conflate it with media relations. While earning media coverage is just one of many PR activities, the profound changes shaking the news business are good news for public relations. There’s hardly an online news outlet that hasn’t taken steps to offer native advertising. The decimation of the ranks of paid journalists means more opportunity for brands to influence what gets coverage. The ability for companies to go directly to their audiences, bypassing the filter of the media, has reduced reliance on hostile outlets to tell company stories.

If you think all this presages a rosy future for the PR business, think again. As PR becomes an increasingly potent force for shaping the news people see, practitioners will need to be at least as accountable to the public as they are to their clients. The time has come to take the “public” in public relations seriously....

Investigating the gun industry, Muslim extremists, and high-stakes litigation, I’ve grown accustomed to deadline intimidation from corporate legal departments or an executive’s personal PR squad, but only this week am I getting a feel for what it’s like to be the target when a sovereign nation goes into crisis-communication mode.

Worried about revelations in Law of the Jungle, my soon-to-be-released book about the epic Chevron (CVX) oil pollution case, the Republic of Ecuador’s U.S. public relations advisers, New York-based Ketchum, has sent a six-page, single-spaced memo to Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., Nathalie Cely. Marked “reservado y confidencial,” the memo, prepared in Spanish throughout, outlines “difficult questions” the book raises “that negatively affect Ecuador,” and includes an ad hominem swipe. “It remains unclear when and how many times Barrett visited Ecuador or if he interviewed anyone from the Government,” the memo states. “This can be converted into a point that we can raise, but only in suitable settings and among appropriate journalists.”

I obtained a copy of the memo from a helpful noncombatant who works for neither Ketchum nor the ambassador and who requested anonymity for all the obvious and usual reasons. The damage-control document is a peculiar combination of advice on how to discredit the messenger—“this can be converted into a point …”—and admissions that the book raises issues that do not reflect well on Ecuador’s government....

The capability of LinkedIn to be an effective platform for strategic communication is both constrained and advanced by its unique properties. Make no mistake, however. When operating in a B2B and/or services-oriented environment, organisations can leverage LinkedIn via a number of potent means – e.g. market research, differentiation, positioning, viral marketing – to deliver business results....

My bias towards believing LinkedIn is better for service-leaning organisations is because of LinkedIn’s proclivity for better suiting the approaches of thought leadership and inbound marketing (noted below)....

Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organizations have been responding to that new reality, realizing the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life: wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects; internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing; sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty; next-generation products are codeveloped in open-innovation processes; and corporate leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy.

 

This radical change has created a dilemma for senior executives: while the potential of social media seems immense, the inherent risks create uncertainty and unease. By nature unbridled, these new communications media can let internal and privileged information suddenly go public virally. What’s more, there’s a mismatch between the logic of participatory media and the still-reigning 20th-century model of management and organizations, with its emphasis on linear processes and control. Social media encourages horizontal collaboration and unscripted conversations that travel in random paths across management hierarchies. It thereby short-circuits established power dynamics and traditional lines of communication.

 

We believe that capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization....

How do you create a message platform? If this is your first time, this post will help you get started. Learn the different components and how to assemble them.

 

Here is the first post in my series on message planning. If you don’t know how to put together a message platform, this platform will help you understand some of the components most commonly found in them. If you already know how to create a message platform, I hope you’ll pick up a tip or two that you can use the next time you have to put one together – and I hope you’ll chime in with your suggestions for the less-experienced readers of this post.

 

Please keep in mind that there are many different approaches to developing a message platform. Not all platform components outlined in this post are necessary or appropriate for every organization. I’m providing these suggestions as guidance for those going through this process for the first time. It’s up to you to evaluate and decide which components will help you best meet your communication goals.

 

Rather than drone on about all the reasons why you should create a message platform for your organization, I’m going to assume you have already gone through that process. If you need a reason, I think a message platform is a great way to get everyone in your organization on the same page with who you are, what you do and how you want to communicate all those things in various formats inside and outside of your organization. Let’s get started….

 

[Jeremy Porter offers a really informative look at messaging - JD]

Encouraging headline, no? This new paper comes from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, UK, and we have so many mixed feelings about it right now.

Everyone knows that the PR-to-journalist ratio grows more lopsided by the day, but this study’s findings confirm that the power shift goes deeper than that.

In short, “hacks” need “flacks” more and more whether they want to admit it or not. The reverse isn’t really true, though, so the dude in the image above might want to pour himself another stiff one…

...PR News: One of your seven principles of business brilliance is "know-how is good. "know-who is better." How would that apply to the work of PR pros and marketers?

Lewis Schiff: Much of the middle-class mentality focuses on the development of technical skills in order to succeed (lawyer, doctor, etc.). However, at the higher levels of wealth, we see that all of those "trades" can be hired for. The most successful among us build strong teams while they focus their energies on creating extremely effective networks. Depending on the task, an effective network can be five strong relationships or 5,000 thin relationships. However, for the most important strategic relationships, we see that very successful people have very deep relationships with just a few people.

For communicating, a large network is desirable. But for influencing strategy and crafting smart messaging, it probably makes more sense to cultivate fewer relationships where there is greater intimacy and support, rather than a "WAN" or wide-area network....

Nothing gets management's attention faster than negative media attention.

 

Want to get a company's attention? Go public with your gripes. Few things prompt change in U.S. businesses as much as bad media attention does, new research shows.

 

A study by University of Illinois business professor Michael Bednar found that negative media coverageprompts firms to engage in greater levels of strategic change than previously thought.

 

"As the news media reports negatively about firms, that registers with executives," Bednar said. "And that, in turn, prompts executives to engage in larger-scale strategic change."...

Venture capitalists are hiring full-time public relations experts to tell bloggers and reporters of their investing prowess.

 

 It wasn’t so long ago that venture capitalists kept secrets. The young start-ups they backed certainly sought attention, but most venture capitalists operated under levels of secrecy typically reserved for Swiss banks....

 

Investment partners at Sequoia even used a disparaging name for venture capitalists who promoted themselves to the press: “parade jumpers.”

 

Now, Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley is one long parade route. Venture capitalists are hiring full-time public relations experts to tell bloggers and reporters of their investing prowess. They publicize their every doing and thought on Twitter and in blog posts.

 

In the last year, several top firms have hired people to handle marketing, branding and public relations full time. Among them: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners and True Ventures. Many others, like Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Greylock Partners, keep public relations firms on retainer.

 

[Reputation matters and sociaal media is playing a key role in PR & VC success - JD]

One of my favorite new practices, which is outlined in my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, is PR Practice #5: The Pre-Crisis Doctor.

 

As a Pre-Crisis Doctor, it’s your responsibility to catch the negative sentiment, at a point when you’re able to react swiftly. You should have several resources in place, which includes everything from your company’s social media crisis organizational chart and the shell of the message to your measurement tools and key influencers to help keep the public updated with the most recent information.

 

Here’s how the responsibilities break down in your new practice...