Results are In, Verdict Still Out posted by Anonymous at Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Apparent in blogs across the web, social media is the PR du jour. Call the notary public, because it's that official.

But, the concept of social media as some aggrandizing power play we PR agencies have to master for our clients is still, to me, a question to be answered. How much can really be gained by power-tweeting our clients and answering, "What are you doing right now?" every 42 minutes? I wanted to explore this idea to see what social media has (or hasn’t) done.

I set up a survey for my Page One colleagues and found there are some conclusive benefits to stacking a client's (Tweet)deck with social media. The Survey Monkey results revealed these social media channels yield the best results for clients:

39.9% - BLOGS
33.3% - TWITTER
11.1% - SCREENCASTS
5.6% - VIDEO
5.6% - CONTESTS
5.6% - OTHER
0.0% - FACEBOOK
0.0% - LINKEDIN

My hypothesis is that social media works when it can entertain as well as inform. It engages in a way that traditional media can’t. Seeing a reporter's snide comment on a news story trumps reading his rendition of a press release when it comes to dishing out opinions. Delivery of information is faster, sometimes funnier, less formal and a lot more in your face.

Twitter, for example, allows people to find their inner prophet. Having actual followers, yes, that's right... followers... guarantees an audience who will validate your every thought (or so you hope). As humans, let alone PR agents, how are we not supposed to find the advantages in that?

When asked to rank the purpose of social media on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most important), my Page One colleagues listed:

9.0 - WEB TRAFFIC
8.5 - GROW COMMUNITY SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
7.0 - PRODUCT DOWNLOADS
6.4 - MEASURABLE PR
5.5 - REACH NEW TARGET AUDIENCE
5.4 - LEAD GENERATION

So here's the bottom line. Social media is useful in PR. But it's not going to completely usurp traditional media. Segmenting social media from its traditional counterpart is as huge a mistake as asking Madoff for investment tips. At this agency, the most successful social media campaigns have intertwined social media and traditional media, because again, what is a video sitting on YouTube without a TechCrunch mention to drive traffic to it?

The future of (good) PR is finding the mix of both. I remain a skeptic about some of the grandiose claims of social media, but I need to better understand how we measure the nominal versus real benefits of social media.

With Google Analytics and a host of monitoring tools, we are getting better at locking in numbers to measure social media. I still don’t think that anyone in social media has gotten close to calibrating those measurements in terms of possibility and percent of market reached. As an economics major, I look (and more easily trust) numbers that reflect not just reach, but penetration. Sure, we can throw parties when we can tell clients we've gotten them 1,000 more unique visitors to their site in a day, or even that we've managed to increase their web traffic by 313 percent, but I like to look at the macro results. I want to know what the pool of potential targets was. Was it 5,000 or 250,000? And if we reached 1,000, how well is social media helping us penetrate the audiences we're actually targeting?

I’ll probably be a skeptic supporter of social media until it’s matured far enough to the point where this can be easily measured and assessed. As a CEO or CMO, this is the kind of question I would ask, and though social media is growing quickly, it can't answer these questions yet. But, it will, and probably soon.

Traditional PR - 3 Things You Can Still Do Better posted by Ray George at Tuesday, March 24, 2009

While I'm not a fan of reading blogs about PR best practices from PR professionals, I wanted to give a shout out to three good friends from the old world of traditional PR that you don't want to overlook in the mad rush to embrace all things social media.

So, my credentials. I've promoted everything from Kinkos and McDonald's to hot high-tech startups and even the BodPod on Good Morning America. PR for me is all about results. Whatever it takes to get results as long as you don't burn bridges - that's how I see it. Be smart, be useful, show restraint, add value.

Specifically, there are three things from the old media world of PR that I think every practitioner still needs to understand and do better.

1) Contributed articles - typically, these are pieces written by a vendor for a publication that provides a series of criteria for acceptance (vendor neutrality is usually #1 requirement). While there are reputable publications that accept contributed articles (eWeek and Network World come to mind), there is an order of magnitude greater number of online publications that are suspect. In other words, their filter for excellence is porous at best. Now, I'm not talking about professional trade journals published quarterly by associations with peer review. I'm talking about contributed 'cons.' If you're counting client clips at the end of the month, you know what I'm talking about - begins with an S and ends with 'con.' Don't con your clients. Takeaway - go big or go home. A clip in a publication no one has ever heard of is a waste of your time and your client's retainer.

2) Product reviews - tread carefully as bad reviews live forever on Google searches. First, do NOT submit your product for a review if you can't find the time to make sure to prepare a reviewer's guide. Assuming you have at least a basic reviewer's guide, there are many types of reviews with varying degrees of depth you can consider. There are competitive bake-off reviews. There are reviews written from demos alone (if even that). There are reviews by established labs (unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer every day) under the supervision of eWeek, InfoWorld, Informationweek or CRN, for example. But, even some of these pubs "outsource" their reviews to freelancers. Some advice - avoid bake-off reviews whenever your product is more expensive. I've seen a number of examples where cost influenced the reviewer over functionality. It's not too surprising since they have to crank out a lot of reviews and can't spend too much time on each product. If you do get a standalone review with a reputable source - I've always felt Cameron Sturdevandt stood out here - drop everything and be available for them. Send a competent body to help with configuration who can answer all questions on the spot (even if you have to put them on a plane). Answer email and phone questions within an hour. Make it as easy on the reviewer as possible. Lastly, don't try to get reviews if your product is not ready - you can't fool all of the people any of the time.

3) Company mention - this is where your company, along with a string of other companies, is mentioned in an article. I see these types of mentions as mush. Tapioca pudding. Cream of Wheat. Sure, you want to make sure you're included in the discussion - it is bad if you're not included - but it will hardly move the results meter. Frankly, I think it's mostly unscrupulous PR firms who rely on these drive-by mentions to pad their monthly client reports.

Here's a bigger idea to chew on - people sell PR short by thinking of media opportunities as a 1:1 ratio. That is, client briefs reporter - reporter writes story - it goes live - it is listed under client news section. Instead, focus on using media opportunities and successes and discussion to breed other media opportunities and successes and discussion.

There's a reason Twitter is exploding and newspapers are going out of business.

Ray George

EMAIL: ray@pageonepr.com

TWITTER: @rgeorge28