Putting the "Public" Back Into Public Relations

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The holidays are typically a slow time in the public relations business. But David Meerman Scott isn’t the type of guy to take it easy. Scott, a former bond trader and content marketing specialist who launched his own marketing consulting company in 2002, took advantage of the 2005 holidays to write down some ideas that he been kicking around in his head for some time.

What Scott did over the next three weeks would change his career and his life. It would launch his business in a new direction and make him an internationally recognized authority on content marketing. And it started with a blog.

David Scott had a beef with the PR business. He had long believed that the public relations profession was too focused on the media. His epiphany came in 1995, when Yahoo! made the decision to start including press releases along with mainstream media coverage on its financial news wires. When you searched on a company name, a press release was just as likely to appear in the search results as a Reuters story. Anyone could now read a press release. So why were PR agencies so focused on the media? And why did they call them “press” releases in the first place?

On December 20, 2004, Scott began to write down his thoughts. He came up with the idea for an electronic book called The New Rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly. In it, he proposed to blow up the old rules of PR. Stop writing press releases only when news happened. Find reasons to send them all the time. Stop writing just for the media. Address the public directly. Make releases rich with searchable keywords and URLs that lead to landing pages on your website. Optimize them for searching and browsing.

It was very Web 2.0 and Scott’s timing was impeccable. He invested a couple of thousand dollars in professional design and, on January 16, 2006, posted the 21-page document on his Web site. Then he fired off e-mails to about 30 friends and waited to see what happened.

“I was hoping for a couple of thousand downloads and maybe three or four mentions from bloggers,” he says. He didn’t have to wait very long.

Viral traffic got news of the book out to a few bloggers, who posted links. Downloads jumped immediately to over 1,000 a day. Then marketing guru Seth Godin posted a link on his blog, praising Meerman’s ideas. So did PR super-blogger Steve Rubel, only Rubel was critical of Meerman’s proposal. It didn’t matter. Traffic skyrocketed.

Between January 19 and 22, more than 15,000 people downloaded the e-book. The blogosphere was swarming. Dozens of bloggers were now commenting on and linking to Meerman’s book. The media picked up on the thread. The Toronto Globe and Mail called. Then the Associated Press and Reuters. The Marketing Profs website asked for a bylined article, then an online seminar. Speaking invitations started coming in.

Eight months after publication of New Rules, the e-book had been downloaded more than 75,000 times. A Google search on “new rules of PR,” which had returned only one result in January, 2006, yielded 42,000 hits. Scott was under contract with Wiley to turn the e-book into a bound book. And his business was increasingly about advising clients on how to rethink their press releases.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

No profession stands to influence social media more than public relations. And while most corporate marketers remain leery of the new frontier, some PR people are leading diving in with bold viral marketing campaigns and using the tools of social media to advance their own businesses. David Scott’s success was almost accidental, though he worked the basics very well. But as marketers come to understand the fundamentals of social media marketing, they’re turning the new forum to their clients’ advantage and to their own.

The goal, at least at this early stage, isn’t so much to be loved as to be noticed. Agency.com, an interactive marketing agency, created a swarm in the summer of 2006 with an unconventional video it posted on YouTube.com. The nine-minute serial dramatized the agency’s efforts to win the advertising account for the Subway sandwich shop chain, showing a snippet of life inside an ad agency.

Reaction was overwhelming and largely negative, at least from other ad bloggers. The video is “filled with mindless business blather, self-important ad speak, fist bumps, fashionably un-tucked shirts and way too many utterances of the word ‘dude.’” wrote Steve Hall on AdRants.com. " Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS.”

“Agency.com didn't just hurt their reputation with Subway… They set their entire credibility in the social media space back eons and maybe did the same for other interactive agencies,” wrote Steve Rubel on MicroPersuasion. “Was it really worth it?”

Only time will tell the answer to that question, but there’s no doubt the video clip boosted Agency.com’s image. Two weeks after the video was posted, a Google search on “agency.com subway” returned 133,000 results.

PR people intuitively understand the value of relationship marketing, with social media simply being another way to build relationships. PR pros have flocked to social media because it plays so naturally to their strengths as relationship managers. PR has long been the neglected stepchild of corporate marketing departments hooked on lead generation and advertising metrics. Social media is its turn to shine.

“The irony of the New PR is that it's not anything new, it's just the industry adapting to new forms of communications - which is something that our industry has always been able to do,” wrote Jeremy Pepper, a prominent PR blogger, in a Global PR Blog Week article in late 2005. “PR firms out there do get it, there is an understanding of blogs, and an understanding that PR needs to be involved with blogs - whether tracking, pitching or blogging.”

There are hundreds of PR blogs and quite a few compelling podcasts. Blogger Constantin Basturea maintains a list of PR bloggers that numbered more than 500 by mid-2006. It includes writers from 29 countries and is growing by about 100 listings every six months.

In late 2004, Basturea started the New PR Wiki, an exhaustive resource of interviews, articles, blogs and discussions devoted to the evolution of public relations. It now has more than 60 contributors. There’s also a conference, Global PR Blog Week.

PR professionals see social media as both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is to raise the profession’s visibility at a time when market trends are clearly headed their way. The threat is that no one really knows how to deal with all these new influencers.

Consider how complex the public relations professionals become. In 1990, the number of media outlets that were important to any given business probably numbered in the double digits. If you got a hit in the Wall Street Journal, you could take the rest of the month off.

By the late nineties, the Internet had perhaps doubled the size of that list to include a number of special interest websites and a few new syndication services.

Social media has completely disrupted this model. With mainstream media losing readers, listeners and viewers, the growth areas have shifted to special-interest electronic media, including cable channels, satellite radio, and personal blogs. Some product categories, such as consumer electronics, support literally hundreds of bloggers.

Not only has the list of influencers grown, but the dynamics by which they are influenced has changed. In the old days, a company got media coverage by courting a reporter. Today, a news story in a major newspaper may begin as a blog discussion or a viral e-mail thread that takes on a life of its own.

Corporate and agency PR professionals are scrambling to get out in front of this trend and leaders in their field are trying to show the way. So far, it’s largely been a matter of the blind leading the blind. But patterns are emerging that are spawning new companies and taking existing firms in new directions.

The corporation as publisher

Larry Weber struck gold once and is digging hard again. In 1987, he founded The Weber Group, a technology public relations agency. The company got some lucky breaks: An unknown startup called America Online was an early client, and a contact at MIT got Weber a contract with an obscure scientist named Tim Berners-Lee to promote an idea called the World Wide Web. Mainly, though, The Weber Group thrived because of this remarkable creativity, a laser focus on high-tech and an appreciation of the power of new media.

Weber sold The Weber Group to Interpublic Group and stayed on as an executive for several years, but left to start his own venture in 2004. “The media is going through the biggest change in 200 years, so we need to understand where it’s going, “ he says of the waves of change sweeping the industry.

The new venture, W2Group, Inc., is an integrated marketing services company for the social media age. “Influence opportunities are no longer centralized within a few, widely read publications or from podiums at industry…events,” says the company’s website. “In a web-driven economy, the spheres of influence are infinite.”

Larry Weber believes this deeply. He was preaching the value of marketing via social networks when few PR types even knew what they were. The Web went off-course during the first ten years of its existence, “hijacked by marketers,” he says. Its potential to serve as a medium for conversation was sabotaged by the people trying to make it a vehicle for commerce. Basically, the only interactivity was placing an order.

All that is about change dramatically, Weber believes. The response rate-driven, lead generation-focused mentality is going away. In the future, “Marketers’ sole job will be the aggregation of customers and potential customers through content and interfacing with other customers - what I call enterprise-generated content,” he says. “The question will become how to create a branded website where people want to come and talk to you?”

What? Enterprise-generated content? Get people to come to your site to talk to you? That’s just not what marketing does. But Webber believes the old style of marketing is dead. People have too many choices, too many channels and low tolerance for listening to messages. The only way you will even be able to get a message across to a customer in the future, he believes, is by becoming a content provider.

“Why can’t a company website produce content that’s as good as the Wall Street Journal?” he asks. “In fact, why can’t a Journal reporter write for a company website?”

Talk like that is heresy in journalism circles, but Larry Weber isn’t about conventional wisdom. He believes the media world is at a turning point, one in which businesses have the opportunity to break out of their traditional role as message-makers and become legitimate publishers.

And he’s doing that for clients. For Genzyme, Webber’s agency is creating a web site about rare diseases that includes a blog written by the family of a young girl suffering from the debilitating illness. The agency is building a social network about travel for Visa International. The idea is to get travel enthusiasts to come and share tips and advice in an community environment.

In Weber’s view, the future of the Web is in communities. People will belong to dozens of them, some more important than others, but all receiving a slice of their attention. There is no reason those communities can’t be operated by corporations. Some may even be gated and limited to customers. The opportunity, he believes, is for businesses to provide content that is every bit as good as the information customers would get from mainstream media.

The company’s social media arm, Digital Influence, is trying to redefine public relations through a focus on New Influencers. To promote Technology Review magazine, the agency sent advance copies of the publication’s articles to bloggers who were writing about those topics. Online subscriptions doubled in six months.

To promote a search engine company, The agency created a humorous video aimed at the college market. Students passed it around enough that the video eventually made its way onto a number of top college-oriented web sites.

“What’s different now is that it’s no longer about the selling products and services,” says Rachelle Spero, a Digital Influence vice president. “It’s about how you pull together the client’s resources and intellectual capital and shape it based on what the influencers want.”

The press release is dead, Spero believes. What is replacing it is useful information delivered to influencers any form that suits their needs. These people have an insatiable need to publish information, and they care a little about where it originated as long as it meets their standards for quality and relevance.

The power of peers

Weber’s thinking mirrors, in many ways, the ideas of Richard Edelman, CEO of the 2,000-person PR company that bears his name. Edelman has been harshly critical of the practices that brand the profession as “flacks” and “spin doctors.” The profession stands on the doorstep of a revolution as mainstream media, its credibility in tatters, gives way to new sources of information. In accepting the National Public Relations Achievement Award in April, 2006, he said:

The media, communications and marketing landscape in which the public relations industry was developed is being knocked down… In this model, a small group of elites are briefed in advance with messages that are too often tightly scripted…The message is then simplified and communicated to a mass audience via advertising or as “earned” editorial. This model is premised on the audience being passive receptors for the message.

Citing Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, he continued:

This increased trust in peers has advanced steadily over the past three years. It correlates with the rapid growth in peer-to-peer media we have witnessed over this same stretch of time. In the U.S., for example, a "person like yourself or your peer" was trusted by 22% of respondents as recently as 2003, while in this year's study, 68% of respondents said they trusted a peer…[C]ompanies and organizations should be willing to yield control of the message in favor of a rich dialogue, in which you learn by listening… [R]ank-and-file employees should be seen as a new credible source for information about a company… [T]he consumer will be a co-creator, demanding transparency on decisions from sourcing to new-product positioning… Historically, companies keep all information close to the vest until the last minute…It is better to reveal what you know when you know, and to commit to updating as you learn more.

Edelman practices what he preaches. His PR firm includes more than a dozen bloggers, including Edelman himself, who has been writing since 2004. In 2006, the company launched a practice called me2revolution to identify communications opportunities through new channels. It also staged a coup with the hiring of A-list blogger Steve Rubel as head of the practice[1]. In May, 2006, Edelman teamed with Technorati to launch international versions of the search service in five languages.

Icons like Weber and Edelman are leading the charge in a broad transformation of the public relations profession, but the real activity is going on in small agencies. It’s the little guys who have had some of the most notable early successes.

U.K. blogger and PR professional Hugh McLeod was behind the successful Stormhoek wine promotion detailed in Chapter 6. David Parmet helped extend that campaign to the U.S.

Jeremy Pepper stole a page from Stormhoek in mailing cases of Red Vines licorice to bloggers in mid-2006. Dozens of them later gushed in their blogs about the joys of the chewy candy.

Shel Holtz promoted Click.TV, a new video publishing service, by inviting about 60 bloggers to use a preview version of the product. Eleven bloggers posted reviews within the first week, including A-list blogger Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

PR pro as blogger

A lot of PR people find that blogging and podcasting are natural outlets for their communications gifts.

Andy Abramson is a PR professional who understands the blogosphere well because he’s been successful there. His VOIP Watch blog, which covers technology that transmits voice calls over Internet lines, averages more than 12,000 page views a day. And that’s not his only social media activity. Abramson, who runs Communicano, a PR agency in Del Mar, Calif., also co-hosts a daily technology podcast and a blog dedicated to wine.

The visibility has paid off for the PR business. “I have more clients asking us to consider working for them than I have time to handle,” he says. Holding down a dual role as both influencer and publicist keeps him in tune with the culture of the blogosphere. Abramson’s innovative campaigns to promote Nokia phones through blogger enthusiasts has been written up in mainstream media worldwide[2] and is widely viewed as a seminal campaign in blogger relations..

As a blogger, Abramson sees four basic benefits to the business: to be quoted in the media; to make new contacts; to generate speaking engagements and to bring in business. The strategy has worked on all fronts “I get asked to do hundreds of briefings a month [as a journalist],” he says. “At trade shows and conferences, I get the same number of pitches as any journalist.”

As a PR professional, he sees his job becoming more complex.. For the Nokia campaign, aber send home through hundreds of blogs, some in great detail. Personalized pitches are key, he says, and that means understanding the author. And while the number of influencers has grown significantly, the job of influencing them hasn’t changed.

“It takes the same amount of effort today to get a story on a web site for one day as it used to take to get a feature story in a monthly magazine,” he says. That means PR people need to change their tactics and the expectations they set for their clients. “ leverage your skills and relationships beyond being a story planter,” Abramson says. “Don’t sell PR by the pound.”

Renee Blodgett is just a little skeptical about the vaunted transition from messages to conversations. “You mean we’re moving from message to conversations, Cluetrain Manifesto stuff?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for conversations. But you need to have a message. Otherwise, what are you doing this for?”

Blodgett has the credentials to be skeptical. She’s been blogging since 2004, making her one of the first PR bloggers – and perhaps the first woman PR blogger – on the Internet. Her Down the Avenue blog is must reading for the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times journalist who writes the popular Sillicon Valley Watcher blog, calls Blodgett “probably the best known woman blogger in tech today.”

Renee Blodgett gets it, but she’s not enchanted by Web 2.0 hip. She sees the whole focus on conversation marketing as jargony and overly simplistic. Conversations don’t replace messages and marketers need to have a message, she says. Whether it’s blasted out through e-mail or conveyed subtly through a blog, the message still has to get through.

It’s not like she couldn’t play the game. Down the Avenue is smart, savvy, hip and very in tune with the culture of the Valley. Renee is everywhere. An independent PR counsel, she spends half her time on the road and counts as friends scores of the most influential journalists, CEOs, venture capitalists, entertainers authors, academics and other opinion leaders in tech. Her blog is a mix of professional insight, personal experience and even fiction. It’s a kaleidoscopic window on a person of many dimensions.

Although ranked a respectable 10,138 on Technorati, Down the Avenue could be a more popular and more lucrative venture if Blodgett wanted it that way. “If I was more focused and practical about PR and marketing, I could quickly double my traffic,” she says. But that’s not what Down the Avenue is all about. In many ways, it’s a classic weblog, detailing the multi-dimensional life of one person for whom relationships are the essence of marketing. Down the Avenue is full of photos and anecdotes and personal reflections about the people and places the Renee goes.

Blodgett says Down the Avenue isn’t an ad for the business, but the site is commercially effective in an indirect way. The copious photo albums from top industry events belie a person who is in touch with the valley. It says that Renee Bodgett knows the people who make things happen in the tech industry. And in PR, that’s a pretty powerful image. Blodgett is turning away at least one business opportunity a week these days. That’s probably not a coincidence.

Podcast pioneer

Eric Schwartzman jumped on the trend early and has turned podcasting ino a PR bonanza. The Los Angeles based publicist launched an audio interview series on a whim in the spring of 2005. The effort has helped catapult him into the elite of social media PR specialists just as the field was about to take off.

For Schwartzman, the epiphany came when he was working was working in the entertainment PR field. It was at the Grammy Awards, with its mammoth, 20,000-square-foot press room and schedule police that moved celebrities through the press gauntlet in 20 minutes. It was an assembly line of stardom.

In 1999, the online media were allowed to cover the Grammys for the first time. “It was an ‘ah-hah!’ moment,” he remembers. “For years we had been turning journalists away because of fire rules. And now we had the ability to put all this information on the Internet so people could time-shift and place-shift. I knew I had to go in this direction.”

Shortly thereafter, Eric Schwartzman opened Schwartzman PR with the express goal of helping clients merge PR with the Internet. The dot-com meltdown hit at about the same time, but the timing was actually good for Schwartzman. “Everyone was looking to save money,” he says. “I had the big agency pedigree but not the overhead. So I got some great accounts like the Salt Lake City Olympics and Cirque du Soleil. But I didn’t have the manpower.”

Looking for ideas to do more with less, Schwartzman and two friends hit on the idea of creating a tool that would enable businesses to put their PR activities online. Their thinking was that corporations spend too much time distributing content to the media. Why not put press releases, audio clips, video streams and other communications on a website? It would save Schwartzman time and the clients money.

The idea seems like a no-brainer today, but in 2000 it was visionary. The first iteration of what would become iPressroom was ready in time for the Winter Olympics and it was a hit. Client companies saved on the drudge work that was previously necessary to pull together press materials. And once they loaded up a lot of content on iPressroom, they tended to stay with the service, even when budgets were cut. It was an annuity stream.

That’s not why Eric Schwartzman is a New Influencer, though. The big idea came at an annual conference organized by Bulldog Reporter, an information service for PR professionals, in early 2005. The buzz was all about podcasting, a new form of consumer-generated media that had potential PR applications. iPressroom was going to announce support for podcasts at the event. “So I said why don’t we do a podcast ourselves?” Schwartzman remembers. “We figured it’d attract attention on the floor.”

The team hit on the idea of inviting media influencers who were attending the show to stop by the booth to talk about how they used the Internet in their work. A bunch of journalists agreed, including senior reporters from The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Wired and Time magazine.

The experiment was a success but it was never intended to be more than a one-event affair. “We put the podcasts online and forgot about them,” Schwartzman said.

That was in April. Two months later, someone checked the traffic numbers. The 11 recordings had drawn more than 15,000 downloads. Schwartzman had a hit on his hands.

Today, On the Record…Online is a franchise. In the first year, Schwartzman recorded almost 50 more interviews, broadening the scope to include prominent figures from the PR world. Schwartzman studies up for each podcast and tunes his questions to the issues unique to the subject’s area of expertise. For PR professionals, they’re a gold mine. They’re also pretty useful if you’re writing a book on social media.

For iPressroom and Eric Schwartzman, the podcasts are a signature part of the business. The library averages more than 20,000 downloads a month and the series has heaped credibility on iPressroom. “When the salespeople call on a prospect, typically they’ve heard of us,” Schwartzman says.

There have been other benefits to the business. On the Record…Online has been a door-opener with prominent media figures. iPressroom has also generated leads by coordinating e-mail campaigns with new podcasts. CEOs from prominent vendors have registered for downloads.

And Eric Schwartzman has become quite an influencer in his own right. He gets a steady stream of requests to speak at conferences and seminars, boosting iPressroom’s visibility. “We are invited to bid on projects because people have heard our podcasts. I’d say that happens once a month,” he says. Schwartzman understands social media’s potential to address niche audiences and the podcasts have become core to the business.

“When it comes to reaching a wide audience, mainstream media may still be the way to go,” he says. “But to reach an underserved niche audience, social media really has something to offer.”

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[1] Rubel’s work is examined in “The Marketer,” a profile accompanying this chapter

[2] Including in this book. See the account of the Nokia campaign in Chapter 3.