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| Tuesday, July 26, 2005 |
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It's safe 
| | Had a good time talking with Jeff Miller last night after my talk at City College here in Santa Barbara. Aside from interesting stories about his old busienss partner Tommy Rettig (whose character Lassie constantly got out of trouble on the old TV series), Jeff told me about his blog, which concerns Senior Safety and Health Issues, about which Jeff knows a great deal. The blog is a companion to his company. I'm closer than most of you to needing Jeff's services; but still: check it out. |
Radio 2.0
| | With its long reliance on talk formats and call-in programs, radio was arguably the first open-source media form. Now a new Public Radio International program, "Open Source from P.R.I.," will test whether the collective intelligence permeating the Web can make not just loud radio, but smart radio. Not only does the program pull from unfiltered voices and opinions found on blogs, Open Source uses its own blog (www.radioopensource.org) to cull ideas and sources from its listeners. |
| | The penultimate paragraph: |
| | There are always people in the radio audience who know more on the topics being discussed on the air. Open Source's blog taps into that, and tries to get the experts on the air. But at the end of the day, what the audience of nonexperts hears will define Open Source, according to Ms. McGrath. |
Overseen
Fill the void
| | Hugh MacLeod asked me (quite mysteriously) to put up a Wiki. |
| | Here it is, the HughPage. |
| | I think this is the first time I've learned HughNews from somebody other than Hugh. |
| | It's pretty cool. Read that last link and go check it out. |
Changing the PR game
| | ...I spoke with Jay Rosen, dean of the NYU Journalism School {http://journalism.nyu.edu/}; and big time blogger about the perception problem for the PR business. His view is "Every time an institution has a serious problem, it is deemed a PR issue. This contributes to the diminished view of PR. And there has been a lot of abuse of PR (he noted the Armstrong Williams case of last December). |
| | As we discussed the problem, we came to an agreement on what needs to change. We should modify our vocabulary. We talk with pride about developing messages for our clients. What about Doc Searls' {http://doc-weblogs.com/}; view that in this democratized world, we don't need messages? Maybe the idea of controlled messages is something that worked in a world of relatively few media and is now obsolete. We have to get away from anything that smacks of control and manipulation of audiences. We should opt for public relationships where the operational words are dialogue, transparency and speed to market. |
| | We also agreed that we need to have PR that is policy based, not the PR of defense and spin. As Paul Holmes eloquently stated in PR Week, {http://www.prweek.com}; "So good PR can't be about cosmetics, nor can it be about projecting an image that fails to reflect reality. Relationships aren't built on images; they are built on authentic and consistent behavior." We need to have a seat at the table in the C Suite, with a real voice in corporate strategy and ability to assure delivery on the promise. |
| | We must also defend the need for PR, which is to educate the multiple stakeholder universe and particularly the general public so that they can make informed decisions. We are the essential bridge in a world lacking in trust, where there is heavy reliance on friends and family because of a loss in confidence in traditional institutions of business, government and media. We can help to stimulate conversations among fellow consumers while encouraging them to report on their experiences. |
| | Status quo is not acceptable for our industry. We are being dismissed as eyewash or even worse as obfuscators. I for one am heartily sick of being whacked like the pinata. Let's challenge the presumption that what we do is a waste of money. Instead let's take as our cause the enabling of a democratized world where the average person can have an important role in the process because we help give him/her a voice in the co-creation of a better product or a more respected corporation. Let me hear your views on this. |
| | The way we deal with journalists is a problem precisely because we make assumptions about 'control' and 'message' that are fundamentally in opposition to how journalists see the universe. And in the networked world we¹re living in today, those assumptions are fundamentally wrong. |
| | The larger point is that ten years after the Internet and five years after the Cluetrain, most PR agencies are still in denial that the age of control is over. |
| | In my last agency job we would sit in meetings for hours working over every detail of what to say to a single reporter, when a simple Œhi, are you interested in this¹ would have sufficed. Instead we sent out six paragraph long monstrosities that ended up in the proverbial circular file. But it was the tone that mattered to us, how could we justify our retainers if we didn¹t maintain that tone? |
| | I¹m sure this scenario plays itself out in most agency and most reporters can smell a contrivance a mile a way. But PR folks still do it. And journalists and bloggers still hate it. |
| | And I¹m still getting through to reporters by talking like a human being and holding a conversation with them. Not dictating to them. |
| | What we wrote six years ago in Cluetrain is in this chapter here. I you want to start where we whack the PR piñata, scroll down to the Private Relations subhead. That section begins, |
| | Ironically, public relations has a huge PR problem: people use it as a synonym for BS. The call of the flack has never been an especially honorable one. There is no Pulitzer Prize for public relations. No Peabody, Heismann, Oscar, Emmy, Eddy, or Flacky. Like all besieged professions, PR has its official bodies, which do indeed grant various awards, degrees, and titles. But do you know what they are? Neither do most PR people. Say that you¹re an award-winning PR person and most people will want to change their seats. |
| | Everyone — including many PR people — senses that something is deeply phony about the profession. And it¹s not hard to see what it is. Take the standard computer-industry press release. With few exceptions, it describes an "announcement" that was not made, for a product that was not available, quoting people who never said anything, for distribution to a list of people who mostly consider it trash. |
| | On the positive side, we later add, |
| | But, of course, the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They understand that they aren't censors, they¹re the company¹s best conversationalists. Their job — their craft — is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever. |
| | Richard is right that there is a vocabulary issue. But the issue goes much deeper than a simple choice of words. Vocabularies derive from concepts — from how we conceive or frame what we think and talk about. |
| | We visit that subject earlier in that same chapter, under The Shipping View: |
| | During the Industrial Age, the movement of materials from production to consumption — from flax to linen and from ore to musket — was a long and complicated process. Potentially vast markets had potentially vast distribution needs. The development of new transportation systems eased the burden, and global systems flourished. Even huge distances could be spanned so that products could be delivered efficiently. Inexorably, business began to understand itself through a peculiar new metaphor: Business is shipping. In this shipping metaphor — still the heart and soul of business-as-usual — producers package content and move it through a channel, addressed for delivery down a distribution system. |
| | The metaphor was effectively applied not just to the movement of physical goods, but also quickly applied to the packaging and delivery of marketing content. It¹s no surprise that business came to think of marketing as simply the delivery of a different type of content to consumers. It was efficient to manage, one size could fit many, and the distribution channel — the new world of broadcast media — was more than ready to deliver. The symmetry was perfect. The production side of business ships interchangeable products and the marketing side ships interchangeable messages, both to the same market, the bigger and more homogeneous, the better. |
| | One problem: there is no demand for messages. The customer doesn¹t want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth¹s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It¹s worse than noise. It¹s an interruption. It's the Anti-Conversation. |
| | That's the awful truth about marketing. It broadcasts messages to people who don't want to listen. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a Marketing department is colored by the fact that it's going to a public that doesn't ask to hear it. |
| | Many years ago, when I was making a good living as a marketing consultant, my wife and I were talking about the differences between marketing and sales, and the antipathy that often exists within companies between marketing and sales organizations. As a veteran manufacturer and retailer — working both ends of the Value Chain — my wife understood sales, but confessed to mystification about marketing. I explained "strategy" and "positioning" and how marketing is all about "finding" and "influencing" what customers want. After awhile we talked about the difference between sales and marketing roles within companies. Marketing is "strategic," I said, while sales is "tactical." |
| | "Why doesn't Marketing talk directly to customers?" she asked. |
| | "Because that's what Sales does." |
| | "Then I'll tell you what the difference is." |
| | "Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit." |
| | It stung, but she was right. |
| | So was Jakob when he told me Cluetrain's authors had defected from marketing — had crossed over to join markets in their Net-enabled revolt against marketing. |
| | I don't want to slam the ideals of marketing. Theodore Levitt was right on when he said the job of marketing is "to give the customer what he wants, no matter what." The problem is, that's not what marketing is usually paid to do. Marketers are in the influence business. Marketing's customers aren't consumers. They're companies that want to influence consumers. |
| | But most consumers would rather be customers. They'd rather have a voice. They don't want to reinforce the customer influence machinery we call marketing. |
| | Have you ever noticed that VPs of Sales & Marketing are usually Sales people? That isn't just because Sales is a higher corporate caste than Marketing, or even because it's Sales that brings in the money (though that's a big reason). |
| | It's because Sales touches the customer and Marketing doesn't. Touching the customer is Sales' job. Since Marketing isn't allowed to touch the customer, its job is unavoidably "strategic." |
| | And that distance is what's behind the message convention. Shipping messages to consumers is what you do when you can't talk directly with customers. |
| | So the job for PR is to live up to its second name: Relations. PR needs to be the force in the industry that advocates real relations between companies and customers — across the whole enterprise, and not just through the sales/customer interface. Market conversations need to involve everybody with an interest in the whole market category, including non-sales and non-marketing employees within the company, and interested customers, journalists and other industry parties out in the marketplace. |
| | PR needs to become an advocate, and an instrument, of truth and trust. This has always been an ideal of PR; but let's face it ... that's not usually what PR gets hired to do. If it was, PR wouldn't be a piñata. |
| | But the ideals are still there. So, kudos to Richard, David and others for working to make them real. |
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