Posts Tagged “PR”

Last week, I posted a bit of my side of Tangyslice’s story of Firstgiving’s selection of a new PR firm, and promised to talk about the thing we did that caused the most trauma to the folks pitching us. It’s hardly unique to PR that the people who pitch you and sell you and win your business are not always the ones who actually deliver the service.

We had already had a preliminary meeting with each candidate agency, generally meeting a principal and a lead member of our team to be. So my idea was to ask each PR agency to send us the full actual team that would be working on our account, and to leave the principal behind. Tangy talked me out of the last bit at least in part because he thought the firms would just tell us to get lost. He might well have been right, but what happened instead was actually more revealing than meeting the team alone would have been.

We told each agency that we wanted to meet the full team and wanted the principal to keep her mouth shut as much as possible. After all, we had already heard the big pitch from the head honchos. We know that we won’t get that much time from the top dog and most of the daily work will be done by the mid-level and junior folks. We wanted to meet those people and hear what they have to say.

As it turns out, what we got to see was to what extent the principal really trusted the team in front of a client, or even more frighteningly, a prospective client. We threw out questions to individuals and to the group and watched when principals interrupted or corrected the junior people and when they let them speak. One principal spent much of the meeting talking about how she would be doing lots and lots of work for us and by implication calling her team amateurs. Not cool.

I suppose it might have been more traumatic for the junior people to get put on the spot by a client in front of the boss than for the boss to let them talk, but some of those junior people are going to run their own agencies some day, why not give them a shot now? Maybe someday I’ll be able to say that I believed in them back when they were just associates.

Perhaps you’ve been following Tangyslice’s series on Selecting a Web 2.0 PR Agency. Part one is here. [update: part III just published!] Upon return from a recent trip to London, Tangy brought me a gag gift, a 147-page, glossy, perfect bound guide to Facebook. The absurdity of a paper book printed to teach you about Facebook* reminded me of something that happened during the Web 2.0 PR search.

The ultimate success of PR firms in our search was inversely proportional to the amount of paper they brought to the pitch. Those with plastic comb-bound presentations were at an immediate disadvantage. I felt bad waiting until they left the office to zip out the plastic combs and recycle the presentations. I wonder if the plastic covers are recyclable too?

Similarly, I mocked Tangy for putting on dress slacks for the pitch meetings while I made sure I was wearing jeans and a black shirt, and shined up my web 2.0 haircut**. None of the candidate agencies matched my ‘do, but one did match my outfit. It’s easy (and fun) to make fun of these things, but when your RFP says more or less, “we want to rule the world via social media” you are looking for a certain measure of out-of-the-boxiness, aren’t you?

Thirdly, and at least for now, finally, I have to point out that given the opportunity, only a couple of our pitching firms seized the marker and went to the whiteboard to illustrate their ideas. Visual thinking, especially on the fly, is a definite turn-on to firms seeking innovative PR.

Tune in next time when I reveal at least one thing that really annoys PR firms when you invite them in to pitch.

Oh, and in case you’re out there googling yourselves, the consideration set was:

• PerkettPR
• KEL and Partners
• Topaz
• Version 2 Communications
• Waggener Edstrom

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* I don’t mean to say, by the way, that Facebook is so dead simple that it needs no documentation. I mean that if you aren’t ready to jump in and learn from the online help and by experimenting, you’re not going to do well with Facebook. That said, the book does at least attempt to answer some important questions about Facebook, notably, “Why Facebook?” (page 6) and “Why did the UK fall in love with Facebook?” (page 11, by “internet psychologist Graham Jones.”)

** I hereby claim to be the originator of the term, “web 2.0 haircut” to mean a shaved head and a goatee or vandyke (soul patch does not qualify), usually in company of heavy-framed glasses. In the event that it should catch on, you read it here first. If not, somebody else thought of it.

I’m going back to work tomorrow after a two-week vacation, during which - uncharacteristically - I read work email just twice, once at the beginning, just briefly, and again today, much more thoroughly to prepare for re-entry tomorrow.

Here’s a redacted summary of one message I received. For the purpose of illustration, please assume that “Citrusy Canard” is the name of a company that competes with mine.

Subj: FW: Google Alert for Citrusy Canard

Citrusy is all over the news. Everything they do shows up in my Google alerts. They joined [industry organization] and are getting written up for it, but we were a founding member.
Google Alert for Citrusy Canard
[link to Canard's press release on joining industry organization]

Can you spot the sloppy thinking here? And for extra credit, can you spot the disturbing reality exposed for all marketing and PR professionals?

My colleague is worried because Citrusy Canard is all over the news and we’re not. No, that’s not quite it. He’s worried because CC is all over his news and we’re not. And that’s because he has instructed Google to bring him all the news about CC but not about his own company. Note that he has asked for alerts on the name of the company, not on keywords around what they do - this filter will show all kinds of “news” relevant or not about the company, but will miss news about the industry that doesn’t include that company.

As a PR guy, I said he was barking up the wrong tree. I said that this press release matters only if it gets picked up and read by actual customers, and the Google alert merely says that it got put up on the company’s site, and you’re only getting it because you set up an alert on the company name. I thought it was like when you start thinking about getting a new car and suddenly you notice your intended model all over town - it’s just an illusion based on what you’re attuned to, not the actual prevalence or importance of the thing you’re seeking.

But then I felt it. That funny feeling you get when somebody innocent or foolish, like a child or a sales guy, says something that actually cuts to the heart of the matter in a way that you - the alleged elder or professional - had missed. It wasn’t the uncomfortable digestive readjustment to American food, it was the gassy gurgle of truth.

Fewer and fewer people are reading any regular media, and by that I sweepingly include pretty much all news sites, blogs and company sites. What they are doing is using aggregators, bots, and feeds to create their own personalized metamedia and consuming that. You don’t open the New York Times (paper or web) to learn what’s going on, you get fed selected headlines by the robots you’ve tasked to collect your news. So getting a press release picked up by a news media outlet is nice, but it matters less and less as long as your PR is getting picked up by the newsbots. Makes you think…

So I’m doing an experiment - I’m setting up a Google alert for the uncommon phrase, “Citrusy Canard,” which I will sprinkle throughout this post, to see if I get an alert about it when I publish. For what it’s worth, even such nonsense as Citrusy Canard pulls 461 results on Google, soon to be 462, I hope.

If you put a press release on your website and nobody reads it, does it make a difference? Yes, because Google reads it. Nobody reads anything anymore, but everybody reads Google, and Google reads everything, capisce?

Stand by for the update - will I receive a Google Alert on Citrusy Canard when I publish? How long will it take?

I very much enjoy the NPR show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, which includes a segment called, “Not My Job” in which they “ask interesting people about things they’re just not interested in.” Some days at work, I feel like I’m stuck in this segment for hours.

One such segment came my way on Friday, when the PR folks asked me to provide a comment for an article about a controversial WiFi implementation in England, where parents were worried that their children might be harmed by exposure to 802.11 waves bouncing around their local school. I tossed off 350 words and didn’t give it a second thought. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

As sometimes happens, the coverage ran. With many of my words, most of them in the original order. And a pull quote. Under my photo.  This highlights two important points about PR and the media:

• Showing up is a big part of PR coverage. If you’re in the right place at the right time and have a decent story that the journalist needs to make a deadline, you can get your name in lights.
• Given this, don’t assume that everybody quoted in the media really is an expert of any kind.

I don’t mind saying that it’s a damn fine sound bite, and I’m pretty proud of myself for getting quoted as an expert by opening with “I’m not qualified” to discuss the topic at hand. Score one for modesty in self-promotion.