Public Relations / Marketing / Advertising

The Wall Street article Institutions Engage More On Confronting Scandals details how Dartmouth, Tuck, and other colleges are realizing the critical need to insure they are actively managing how they are viewed by the public. Several lessons here for corporations as well.

“Like companies, business schools can be touched by scandals and crises, yet many haven’t prepared for events that can tarnish their reputations. They are often caught off guard and must scramble to react, sometimes exacerbating the damage by failing to communicate effectively with the media, alumni, students and employees.”

The key is to success is a proactive vs. a reactive approach (emphasis mine):

“Angel Cabrera, president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “Students are buying a brand and an experience, and they use the school’s reputation to decide where to go.” Dr. Cabrera himself has dealt with recent financial problems at Thunderbird and rumors about selling the campus or merging with another school. “You need to be proactive when you’re dealing with negative publicity,”

The issue of transparency and citizen journalism rears it’s head as well:

“Vincent Hammersley, communications director at Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom, had to adjust to one big difference when he switched from the automotive industry. “At my old job, I could insist that employees not talk to the press on company issues without my consent,” he says. “Now, academic freedom of speech means that I am happy if I hear about a comment from a member of the staff before I read about it in the press.”

Strangely, no mention of blogs or feed monitoring in the article, especially considering the word “engage” in the headline…

According to the Economist, Arab bloggers or “pyjamahideen” are exerting pressure on local authorities and affecting political change.

…youthful denizens of the internet are chipping away at the overweening dominance of Arab governments… blogging has evolved within the past year from a narcissistic parlour sport to a shaper of the political agenda. By simply posting embarrassing video footage, small-time bloggers have blown open scandals over such issues as torture and women’s harassment on the streets of Cairo.

Reinforces our long-running assertion that businesses need to understand the difference between content and platform when talking about blogs. Physics papers were not why the Web mattered, and personal diaries are not why blogs matter…

As a follow-up to our work with CEA in evaluating bloggers for the 2007 CES show, and in preparation for our 2008 CES blogger bash, we’ve launched an in-depth analysis of blog activity related to the January event.

Using a combination of several Web intelligence engines and human review of over 3,000 individual blog posts, we’ve captured the majority of blog posts made by those in attendance at CES. We’re starting to see clear patterns emerge.

One of the largest data sets we have on hand is extracted post subject lines. We’ve broken those subjects into individual words and have analyzed them for frequency. Below is a chart depicting the top 150 or so words in use–after assignment to companies best aligned with them. The iPod was the single most frequently mentioned product term. Vista, iPhone, and Xbox also were hot topics.

Note that PodTech’s Bloghaus sponsored by Seagate was in the top ten. Heads up that thanks to the data being munched and the services being tapped into, we’ll soon have a comprehensive set of interpreted CES blog-related info. We have a list of the hundreds of individual bloggers who attended CES, and are ranking them now based on influence. We’ve also begun the process to glean product and company mentions (and sentiment) within blog posts.

FYI that Monster Cable is just one of the client companies who have commissioned us to deliver to them the final report we’re preparing. If you are interested in receiving the report based on this data, contact Kim Larsen.

I’ve tried to stay on top of this recent “Wirged” memo fiasco, and have read most (but certainly not all) of the posts produced so far. I have to say I am somewhat disappointed by the one-dimensional commentary. All I seem to see are variations on “dossiers are anathema to transparent journalism!” (from the former baristas) and — since every PR old-timer now has a Typepad account — lots of “get real! We’ve used dossiers since I started spinning during the Eisenhower adminstration!”

The best analysis I’ve seen so far, and one that cuts to the heart of the issue is Jeremy Wagstaff’s post. Do yourself a favor, and leave this site now and read it. (Please come back.)

Wagstaff interprets several key passages in the memo, and comes up with five essential messages that Wagged appeared to be sending to their Microsoft masters:

1) “We wanted them (Wired) to write about Sandquist and they are.”

2) “We will be exerting influence over the writer as he writes.”

3) “We are exerting influence over the timing of the journalistic process.”

4) “We will exert influence over the journalist to ascertain the content of the article and (implicitly) seek to remove anything we don’t like.”

5) “We will use all tools in our kit including personal feelings and guilt to ensure the journalist writes what we want.”

In essence, Wagged appears to be telling their biggest client that they are TOTALLY on top of it and in control — they have Vogelstein corralled. The $300 plus dollars an hour they charge (per staff head in the meeting) are being well spent. Keep those checks coming.

Immediately Fred Vogelstein responds to Wagstaff in a comment and echoes what Chris Anderson has already posted (and other Wired staff have commented elsewhere) — that points one through five are a total fantasy. All from Wired make very persuasive cases IMHO.

Wagged immediately responds with the following brief podcast.

Hmmmmm. So far all that Frank Shaw has blogged (hey, aren’t there any other bloggers over there at Waggener Edstrom??) is some happy talk about how “we just want a super-great interview, and dossiers help us help the reporter!”

Hey, the big point here isn’t about whether dossiers are a good idea or not (I think they are) to me, it’s whether you’re feeding your client a bunch of hooey, or if Wired can be gamed by high-priced spin.

Which is it?

The Wall Street Journal’s Informed Reader column reports today that Hollywood studios are enlisting bloggers to talk up nominated movies, which is “Ruffling Feathers in (the) Hollywood Hierarchy.”

As we saw with electronics firms at CES this year, the article reports that:

Movie studios have embraced bloggers as a cost-effective route for launching all-important Oscar campaigns. Studios frequently give a handful of high-profile Web sites a first look at trailers or rough cuts of movies. The new dynamic has ruffled some feathers in Hollywood, where for years studios focused their outreach on trade publications and other mainstream media.

I’ve been spending some time lately researching the brand monitoring space. A portion of the various vendors of these services (Biz360, Brandimensions, Cymfony, Factiva, MotiveQuest, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and Umbria) have approached us to ask about potential conference sponsorships over the years, and a few have presented at one or more Blog Business Summits.

I read that Peter Kim of Forrester had conducted in-depth evaluations in Q3 2006 of the main players in this space, and also “conducted client reference interviews with 17 user companies, including ABC, Activision, BP, Citigroup, CNN, DaimlerChrysler, Fleishman-Hillard, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Toyota, VeriSign, Verizon, and Xerox.”

The result is a PDF file available for $995.00 here, or for free(!) here.

After reading the report, I still had a few questions, so I called Peter Kim up and grilled him. He was very patient with my ignorance, and very generous with his time. Here is the short synopsis of what I concluded from the call:

To get an analysis across all major media (Web, Television, Print) that reveals what is being said (and how often) about you or your products — you’re talking a price tag of around $75,000.00. The alternative is do it yourself ad hoc (Google searches, Technorati, etc.) for “free.” Of course “free” means a ton of staff/your time.

How much of this stuff is algorithmic? It varies, but non-trivial human involvement is essential for all of the profiled services. At least one company (Brandimensions) employs an army of 400 part-time humans to manually catalog and tag news etc.

Another interesting note is that the market for these services appears to be booming. Kim said that many of the services were growing their client lists at a rapid clip, and based on the recent coverage of VC funding for buzz monitoring firms, there seems to be no lack of investor enthusiasm.

It’s been announced that business communications Goliath Ogilvy has partnered with Technorati to provide clients with, “engage in online conversations and build relationships with online communities relevant to their brands.”

Sounds like competition to me…
In all seriousness, it’s cool that Ogilvy is doing this. And I’m really curious as to how they’ll leverage Technorati’s ever-growing database of syndicated content to add value for their clients. I wonder how they’ll parse and make sense of it all. There’s a lot of data out there to assimilate and synthesize. And then managing the outreach is quite a feat.

We’re playing now with some new tools in that arena right now, so my brain is definitely in the monitoring/engaging space.

—
Many thanks to Blog Business Summit speaker and all around kick ass guy Kevin O’Keefe.

Today, I got a boilerplate comment on my personal blog from a person who was trying to correct some “misinformation” about her company’s product that was being spread via the blogosphere. (To read the whole troubled tale of woe, check out my personal blog.)

The problem: my blog post was more about my reaction to a larger issue brought up by the product than it was about the product itself. She didn’t respond to any of my thoughts, she just did a boilerplate hit-and-run on my blog and left. She didn’t even bother to identify herself.

The whole thing got me thinking a bit about best practices for commenting on someone’s blog on behalf of an organization. This is what I would have recommended she do differently.

• Identify yourself. You don’t HAVE to leave your full name, but at the very least, leave your first name.
• Address the blogger by name. Even if most of your comment is a boilerplate statement, show some courtesy by attempting to discover the blogger’s name (or handle) and using it when addressing him or her.
• Respond to the specifics of the blog post. Even if you’re responding with talking points, tailor your response to issues raised in the specific blog post instead of just posting a general blob of information.
• Acknowledge feelings, opinions and concerns. If the blogger is pissed off about something (whether or not you think she has a right to be) try to acknowledge the validity of the opinion/emotion/concern. Even if you disagree, try empathizing. It helps to diffuse anger and promote a spirit of reconciliation.

I’m sure that these are pretty common knowledge to many of you, but they bear repeating as long as there are people out there who do social media outreach the wrong way.

I read Chris Pirillo’s recent post about the trouble he’s been having with canceling his Comcast service and remembered Andy’s post about the exact same problem a few months back and our commenter Thomas who said the same thing happened to him.

I remember the big blowup over the guy who recorded his frustrating attempt to cancel his AOL service and the ensuing changes at America Online. I wonder what it will take for Comcast to have a similar wake-up call.

I found Dave Winer’s post about the end of information embargoes via Robert Scoble’s blog and I think both of them have excellent points.

As we all know, information has a way of slipping out onto the Web before companies are ready to announce it publicly. That’s only going to increase, unless of course blogging peaks in 2007 and goes downhill from there. You simply can’t keep an announcement bottled up until a press conference like you used to.

Unless of course, you’re Steve Jobs. Robert Scoble points out that Jobs’ system of “shock and awe” is envied throughout the public relations sphere. There is an ingrained sense of command and control, he argues, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

I’m not ready to draw too many conclusions yet. But I’ve had enough experiences with the world of public relations to know that command and control isn’t going anywhere just yet.

BTW, I was fortunate enough to meet Dave Winer at Chris and Ponzi’s wedding. I got a little weak in the knees when I found out who he was. I hope he was amused, rather than irritated, by my starstruck-ness.

Jeremiah Owyang (newly of PodTech) e-mailed me today and made me aware of this e-mail he had received.

Edelman, which was recently embroiled in a blogosphere scandal, set up a pro Wal-Mart organization Working Families for Wal-Mart. The organization’s website uses blogging architecture. It was recently revealed that all the content on that site is written by Edelman staffers.

Edelman covered a lot of their bases, but it looks like they forgot a crucial step: reserving the domain most closely associated with their organization. Now the anti Wal-Mart group Wal-Mart Watch has regitered the domain workingfamiliesforwalmart.com and has set up a spoof website there.

There’s a stereotype in the blogosphere that whenever people sit around getting great ideas, the first person to register the domain wins. The same is true here. Anytime you’re doing anything on the Web, it’s a good idea to register any and all domains that are even closely related to the project you’re working on.

Technorati Tags: edelman, wal_mart, working_families_for_wal_mart, jeremiah_owyang

Since we launched our first blogger gathering back in 2004, we’ve not only had to assess blogger influence metrics for our own events, but for several other companies as well. We recently began assisting the Consumer Electronics Association in their efforts to insure that the best aligned bloggers get in as “press” to their January 2007 CES expo in Las Vegas.

While there is no “blogger” checkbox in the 2007 CES application form, bloggers who apply as press and supply appropriate permalinks to “articles” are being routed to us for evaluation. While it’s still early in the process, we’ve processed several dozen blogger requests and are pleased to report that CEA is very happy with the results of our research.

We know from our conferences and consulting that PR firms worldwide are working hard to cultivate and prioritize bloggers for their clients, so let me share the approach we are taking.

In a nutshell, we are looking for individuals that a typical CES exhibitor would want to have come to their booth. The ultimate blog(ger) would have the following attributes:

a) Lots of eyeballs: A highly trafficked blog

b) Lots of influence: Inbound links, bookmarks, and subscribers aplenty

c) Lots of posts: 1 or more posts daily over a significant period

d) A “real” blog: RSS feeds, Permalinks, compliant code, etc.

e) Highly topical content: a blog or writer who mostly/exclusively writes about the kind of products being displayed at CES.

f) Other intangible assets: Passion and/or significant expertise etc.

Luckily we have automated most of the data gathering required to capture and analyze the two dozen plus metrics that give us the full picture of a blog(ger.)

Consider Engadget or Gizmodo. They have all 6 attributes. Most “A listers” have 3 or 4 (what they lack in topicality, they make up for it in other areas.) Notice how a passionate, knowledgeable newbie will be accepted — we’ve approved promising bloggers with a PageRank of zero and a non-existent Alexa ranking.

After hosting our own events and discussing “influence” metrics at length with Robert Scoble, Mary Hodder, Jeremy Pepper and many other gurus, we’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t afford to ignore those up-and coming “A”, “B”, or even “C” listers. Topicality and passion are critical and can transcend page views. Many PR firms don’t understand this yet.

More detail on this subject to come. If you are a blogger who is headed to CES, please let us know, as we plan to host a party for bloggers at the show. Just email steve AT blogbusinesssummit DOT com. We’ll be mailing all of our conference speakers and attendees as soon as we have booked the venue.

Technorati Tags: CES, consumer electronics show, Jeremy Pepper, PR, Jeremy Pepper, Robert Scoble, Mary Hodder, vegas

I’ve argued to both Jeff Jarvis and Jason Calacanis that there’s room to establish best practices when it comes to commercializing social media. Today, Jeff argued that, no matter how well-intentioned, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s guidelines for marketing disclosure in social media are based on the “science of manipulation.”

In a perfect world, he’d be right. But we live in an imperfect world. In an imperfect world you can’t create a new, global publishing medium and expect that businesses aren’t going to try to leverage its inherent strengths for direct benefit.

Going by WOMMA’s very well thought-out guidelines when leveraging social media for commercial purposes is a near-optimal solution for an imperfect world.

Just a quick link this morning to a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he chronicles the influences that have changed the media landscape over the past 10-15 years and the ways that Public Relations have had to change with it. I’m curious to hear what Weber Shandwick’s Jeremy Pepper might say in response.

There are two very notable bits of blogospheria surfacing from the aftermath of the Wal-Mart/Edelman “fake blog” scandal. Both can be found in the comments on Steve Rubel’s post about the snafu.

1. The call to make Steve Rubel Edelman’s blogosphere ombudsman… Rubel is taking quite a beating for his lack of immediate response to the controversy. Several of his readers have put forth the idea of making him Edelman’s blogosphere ombudsman. I think it’s a fantastic idea that would make him Edelman’s equivalent of Scoble.
2. When you want to apologize to the blogosphere, call Robert Scoble… I find it remarkable that when businesses want to get the blogosphere’s attention to manage a crisis, they call Robert. I think that really says something about the respect he commands in this space. Robert seems satisfied with the mea culpas of Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel. The rest of the blogosphere will likely follow.

And of course, I wouldn’t be any kind of a self-promoter if I didn’t at least mention that Robert will be speaking at our conference next week.

I’ve been late to the table on this Wal-Mart discussion, although my good friend Tris Hussey has been right on top of the coverage.

The way I understand it, the blogosphere is up in arms because of a blog called Wal-Marting Across America. The blog told the story of a couple who were traveling around the country staying the night in various Wal-Mart parking lots and talking to people about Wal-Mart. The problem was that they didn’t properly disclose that their sponsor was Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization that was started to counter the anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric of union-funded groups Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch.

In a post dated October 12, 2006, Wal-Marting blogger Laura wrote an explanation of how the story got started.

Our blog was about the people we met and the stories they told. As a storyteller, I should have done a better job beginning at the beginning with our tale.

Yes, Laura, you should have been more forthcoming about your association with Wal-Mart PR firm Edelman. You should have been more forthcoming about the fact that Working Families for Wal-Mart was paying for your trip. If you had done that, you might have just become the first even moderately unscripted voice to represent Wal-Mart in the blogosphere.

As it is, we can chalk this one up as a major screw-up for an otherwise blog-savvy public relations firm. Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel have both been forthcoming on this (although it took them long enough).

I think it was the great philosopher Big Bird who said that “everyone makes mistakes.” Admitting them publicly is a difficult thing, and I admire Edelman for being able to stick their necks out.

And in the interests of self-promotion, I should mention that these are the kinds of real-world lessons that we’ll analyze and discuss at our upcoming Blog Business Summit conference, which will have some representatives from Edelman in attendance.

As a precursor to our Small Business Blogging session at our upcoming conference, we highly recommend the article How to Get Attention In a New-Media World by Gwendolyn Bounds. In some ways it contradicts what we know from a few successful blogs who have leveraged traditional PR to get their blogs noticed.

“Three years ago, fledgling New York shoe and dress designer Holly Dunlap hired a well-known public-relations firm to put her brand name — Hollywould — on the map. She paid roughly $6,500 a month as a retainer…Ms. Dunlap, in fact, was seeing results — just not so much from the PR firm. She had begun penning a diary on her Web site, www.ilovehollywould.com, chock-full of juicy details about her personal life, from late-night keg-party revelry in her downtown Manhattan boutique to boozy jet-setting jaunts through Europe…After five months, Ms. Dunlap cut loose her PR firm, betting the Web site could do more to build her company’s image. Today, she spends roughly $700 a month on Web maintenance and commands an average of 20,000 visitors a week, a figure that can triple when her site is mentioned on other Web-site trend leaders such as DailyCandy and Gawker.

Our best PR,” Ms. Dunlap says, “comes from people who are mentioned or featured on our site and forward the link to their friends.” Ms. Dunlap estimates sales of $6 million to $8 million for 2006 for Hollywould, and her wares are now sold in Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Harrods of London, among others.”

I’d say the right strategy is abandon the PR firm that doesn’t “get” blogging (few do at this point.) and get one that does. OR, hire a consulting firm that specializes in engaging with the blogosphere. The problem is that you’ll have a hard time finding a PR firm (good or bad) that isn’t touting a blog-centric strategy. The issue is discovering which ones are blowing smoke, and which ones have their act together.

According to Rubel, over 200 US bloggers have Wikipedia bios. Looking up the bio for your target blogger might be a good place to start if your goal is to avoid doing ham-handed blogger “engagement”.

The overarching theme here is: get to know a blogger before you start pitching. Figure out how to best engage them with your product, even if that means thinking outside the box. Look for the value add on both sides of the fence, instead of going in with an old-school broadcast mentality.

…Or an example of another snarky blogger? Alas, I suspect the former.

All we can say to corporate America is once again, if you’re planning a blogger campaign, consider hiring a consultant (like us) to help you. Joel Spolsky has written a scathing essay about his experience with Sprint and their Power Vision Network. Ultimately, it appears that Sprint has some lessons to learn here (many of which we cover BTW at our conferences, seminars, and consulting sessions) about blogger engagement:

“Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.

That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.”

Conclusion? Have some finesse. Work on having an agenda that’s a little less transparent. Form a relationship, cultivate a bond of some kind. Sending out phones to targeted “influencers” is a one-way, old world, broadcast model notion. An engineer asking a blogger for their input because they’ve read a post of theirs about interface concerns forms a two-way relationship. Here’s a question to Joel — was the PR person a blogger themselves? Would it have made any difference? Our feeling is that to engage a blogger, it helps to BE a blogger.

“Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments.”

“There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing…”

“…I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.”

Conclusion? Understand your audience. Don’t send a geek engineer a product that a geek engineer that won’t respect. Make sure you are providing something of real value. Beware that it’s real easy to post negatively too. If you aren’t sure, hire a blogger to help you.

“And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic.

Ouch. Conclusion? Ask/hire for input before pushing for a “review.” This was a classic example of how sending Spolsky a prototype phone a year ago could have saved Sprint from shipping a sub-par product, and could have given them a heads up that he’d pan the thing as is. As I suspected, other bloggers in the program also seem to want to be more than just co-marketers, and have influence over the product’s direction.