PR's winning ways in recession

Despite assurances from the British Prime Minister yesterday, there are a number of commentators reflecting on the prospect of recession. Comments by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Joachim Fels of Morgan Stanley are but two and public opinion in the USA is of a similar mind.

If the US goes into recession, the world has to tighten its belt too.

In these time of universal interactive communication when intangible assets have a greater influence in the economy, what do we need to consider? The first is that the knowledge economy goes much further that the exchange of arcane patents and processes deep into the the interactive crowd of Facebookers and bloggers. They are participants in knowledge of organisations, intellectual properties, products, processes, trade, products and services as well as confidence and mood. In the last four years, this extension of social media means a much greater part of the population is involved in the knowledge economy offering added direct and indirect corporate assets.

The extent to which organisations can use the combination of transparency and porosity to gain advantage in economic slow down depends on the extent to which they can use interactive public relations and gain advantage from the relationship cloud.

As economies slow, there is a ripple effect and experience will tell us that the process begins with worries over sales. Recruitment is stopped, travel budgets are squeezed, inventory is tightened, R&D is focued on the short term and marketing budgets slashed. A question mark will hang over PR.

As the brochure print run is reduce, film and photographic budgets slim, exhibitions and conferences are eschewed and everything is turned to face the shop window or is shunted out of the back door, times seem very hard.

Typically in these times, such steps will go through two or three iterations as the red ink keeps coming.

The loss of confidence, that most intangible of harbingers, means this belt tightening will go on far too long after the recovery is under way and economies begin to grow again.

The best companies will stay in touch with the market, retain and re-deploy the most tallented employees, and will hang on to the best ideas and developments and those assets that are of greatest value beyond some of the less productive corporate icons. In addition they will work with the most agile and innovative vendors.

Where in this mayhem is the PR advantage?

We have the advantage that corporations are more aware of the value of relationships and that the web is now interactive and we can achieve things that were not possible before.

The first addresses the problem of employees.

In recession, more people are more available as and when they are needed using online communication. The empty desks no longer means loss of capacity. The capacity, as and when it is needed is a mouse click, Skype conference or wiki post away. This does mean that companies have to become more porous. The communications professional should be in a position to aid this process, developing interactive solutions to create, build, sustain and motivate employees.

The cost of travel can be largely replaced in the effective interaction of the web. Not the dreaded video conference but the humanly interactive, richness offered in online social networks. by which I do not mean MySpace or Facebook, but similar deployed packages.

The once tight knit R&D group can lever up both the wisdom of crowds and huge opportunities available from the concept of open source participation applied not just to software but to almost any developmental innovation.

Meantime those so valuable but under utilised experts we used to find in mundane occupations, often dressed up as added responsibilities during recessions can now face front. People like product managers who are less active in a world where the supply chain is less active are a typical example. They are the authentic voice that can have such influnce in writing and interacting in the bloggersphere and using wiki's. They can now be deployed in creating a much closer and directs relationship with key markets and other publics.

Many marketing activities can be moved onlne with the advantage of being a less costly but more direct relationship building activity. The power of YouTube and Linkedin and their competitors are now available to in place of exhibitions. The cell phone can come into its own for web sized photography and video.

The natural discipline for this brand of relationships and communication professional, a person who understands the simplicity of VoIP, wiki's, blogs and the social side of social media. It is the person who sees widgets in place of data bases..


This is a corporate advisory role from is the person who can convince the corporation that niche is nice; the cultural disruption role of PR is significant and that PR has a specific role as a relationships management discipline (and is what is says on the tin).

This then is the big opportunity for PR when times are tough.

Exciting huh!

Image from: http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/

A web outage is a relationships issue

Yesterday the www.tiny.com service was down. In a few hours there was a mass migration to a range of other comparable services.

Tiny lost customers and its reputation was tarnished.

This is a lesson for us all. If our online presence is not maintained it affects our reputation. It also means people go elsewhere to solve their problem. In the case of Tiny services like http://snipurl.com, http://urltea.com and http://paulding.net and the Firefox add-on all came to the aid of the online community.

When reputation is in the news so to are obscure commenst like this one from Slashdot.com

"Thanks to twitter, SMS, and mobile web, a lot of people are using the url minimizers like tinyurl.com, urltea.com. However, now I see a lot of people using it on their regular webpages. This could be a big problem if billions of different links are unreachable at a given time."

There is a ripple effect and a raft of different issues become relevant.

The circle of relationships is fractured.

But what if your organisation is the UK airport owner BAA?

What is the consequence of its sites being affected especially in times of crisis, as for example when there is a security scare?

This is not a Webmaster issue. Webmasters will be at the coal face trying to get it back up. Its a PR issue because it went down. It will also be a marketing issues, a finance issue, an internal relationship issue and a vendor relation issue.

A web site is a big public relations responsibility. It always was. But now its is a critical area of PR practice - a full lecture and seminar for year two in any BA PR degree.

Using a service like http://www.periscopeit.co.uk, a host data about the performance of a web site plus SMS and email alerts is a simple precaution.

Hopefully, this big issue is part of the CIPR advisory to its members and to its approved course lecturers and courses.

I (ahemmm) expect so!

The Reputation of PR - The Reputation of Marketing

I am a PR person. Its what I do. I am proud of what I have done in PR and I get very cross with practitioners who bend the rules.

The boundary between lying, hype and spin, creative content is pretty narrow and the latter is much miss understood. Once, I used to write up a lot of customer case studies and while the applications should, in theory, have been the same, the stories ranged from vernacular art to asset contribution for the same story. Was this spin or creative use of the same data to offer a relevant approach to a number of editors? I used to write the press releases and packs for new product launches. Many product upgrades are often technically interesting but often show little by way of enhancement in practice. Persuading a product manager to expound the relative merits and note that the new development comes from experience and good evolutionary design offered an opportunity to tell the same story in feature length detail from different perspectives for months and was far more interesting to users that the label 'new'. Was this spin or creative use of the same data to offer a relevant approach to a number of editors? To be sure, it was not lying or hype.

The one truth that I have been aware of is that the knowledge, wisdom and sense of the public is pretty good and pretty accurate most of the time. Redundancy is not a very good time in organisations but long before an announcement is made, most people know or have a feeling that its coming. The announcement plan has to be carefully developed and executed. But handing bad news is in most respects no different to handling good news (what is hard to manage, and experience is a great tutor, is the guilt and sense of loss of the people who are not made redundant).

The business of acquiring and selling companies with the interesting pressure of all manner of people seeking some indication of what is going on is always can be a time of considerable pressure to bend the truth. But, even today, if the opportunity came my way I will buy and sell companies and will act for organisations that want to do the same. And, as I say to those who enquire, would they really want me to be more specific when talking about people's lives, jobs' savings and ambitions? If so, they have the wrong person.

Was this spin or straight talking? To be sure, it was not lying or hype.

And so the work of PR goes on. There is no real reason to stretch the truth. Unless, of course you lack creativity and live at the bottom of a well. I guess there are a lot of so called PR people who do both and some of them do it with great aplomb.

Lets contrast this with the same work but undertaken as a marketing exercise.


The independent production company at the heart of the BBC's royal row had previously used the same footage of the Queen apparently storming out of a photoshoot to sell the series abroad, sources claim. The fact that she was 'entering' the sitting did not matter a jot to the marketers.

O2's iMode has been abandoned because it the 'Internet' service was limited to services no one wants or paid for content (£10m spent to get 260,000 customers) and was just like a similar bling product "Surf the Net, Surf the BT Cellnet" (the service was a failure with consumers, who quickly discovered it was nothing like the internet they knew).

It is now possible to pay for your organic food with a green credit card, to live in the tree house of your dreams thanks to green mortgages, and put all your hard-won lucre from saving the planet into a green bank account. Cynics, reports the FT suggesting that green products are as much an exercise in hype as last week’s Live Earth concerts.

RBS Private Banking is designed specifically for customers who expect personal service and excellent products (front page) .... We may use and share your information with other members of the Group to help us and them assess financial and insurance risks; recover debt; develop customer relationships, services and systems (T's and C's).

The list of this kind of marketing is endless.

The reputation of Marketing seems to be one of high cost, silly slogans, scream marketing and - well - lies!

Is this what we teach in business schools?

Who wants to take a Marketing Degree? Who want to be associated with Marketing Communications or even 'Marketing PR'?

Are web sites dying?

In many marketing courses, there is a mantra that says that, online, the thing to do is 'drive traffic to your site'.

This is now soooo yesterday!

The question for business and consumer communications practitioners is simple. Do you really want to drive your publics to places they really don't want to go.

Today there was news that MySpace has 10 million UK users. It is worth looking at what this really means.

Lets start with the Tesco, a big company with a global reach of terrestrial shops and a sizeable (£1.2 billion) online business. The BBC.co.uk a worldwide broadcaster and Amazon.co.uk an online only retailer.

The BBC' reach comes out on top with Tesco almost invisible. All three sites are in decline.

If we add blogs into this analysis (by adding the reach of Blogger.com). We see a different type of performance:

Which takes us to social networks like MySpace.

Social networks and blogs are where online visitors want to go. They don't seem to want to go to traditional web sites.

Is this because people don't want to find out about the products and services available from retailers?

Well, it seem that people want to find out stuff if we add Wikipedia into the mix.

So, its not that people are not interested in finding stuff and just want to chat. There is something going on here that requires further investigation.

Online advertising is up 42% this year so, convention says, the retailers should be 'driving' a lot of traffic to their sites. Even with declining visitor numbers, the amount of money spent by consumers shopping online increased by 33.4% to £10.9bn last year.

More people are spending more time online and more people have broadband.

People say they are shopping a lot

Online shopping has already clocked up online sales of £100 billion.

Why then are the retailers just not a big target for the online community?

Its not just Tesco, M&S (which aims to increase its annual online sales from £100m to £250m.) and John Lewis (catalogue and web sales division, John Lewis Direct, increased by 64%) are, like most retailers just not getting the interests.

Perhaps the retailers are happy with what they have got and do not want to join the real online community in the social space. Perhaps they have not yet noticed that their current online advertising and web sites are loosing the attention from the online community they once enjoyed.

If so, is this a short sighted policy?

Perhaps, there is a case for looking at what the marketers are trying to do and how the online community has moved on. Hitwise reports that the Entertainment category has overtaken the Retail category in share of UK Internet visits for the first time. visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites were down 5% year on year in May. UK Internet users aged 55+, the so-called silver surfers, are set to overtake 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group with the largest representation online. Those aged 55+ accounted for 22% of UK visits to all categories of websites.

Perhaps as the demographics change, the use of the Internet for all manner of solutions and its ubiquity as part of daily life including the social nature of the commons is coming into play.

Perhaps the conversation has overtaken the advertisement, flash and bling of the traditional web site.

Perhaps the social media lesson should be quietly introduced to the boardrooms of the retail sector.

Perhaps the big take out is that people seek relationships online. An area where PR could be pivotal.

Bang bang ... both feet

The International Cricket Council has ordered YouTube to remove "hundreds" of World Cup clips claiming copyright infringement, says the Guardian.

ICC Development, the body's commercial arm, and commercial rights holder the Global Cricket Corporation, have gone after the video-sharing website to protect the rights of broadcast and sponsorship partners.

"We are here to protect the commercial broadcast rights for the ICC and GCC and there is an issue here," said Christopher Stokes, the chief executive of online rights protection agency NetResult, which represents the ICC.

"In general there is a dilemma for rights holders in that they want people to enjoy the event but also have stringent contracts with TV broadcasters and with mobile rights holders. In today's world, broadcasters buy highlights as well as live coverage and mobile rights means clips. There is an obligation to protect them.

Of course this is nuts. More YouTube content means more viewers for the TV people.
If you hide the sport of cricket, it will be hidden and who than will care.
TV is not YouTube. They are different just like online news and newspapers are different.

Killing off a channel is just daft - just like shooting yourself in both feet.

Stick with the knitting BT.

"BT Tradespace is pitched as taking "a giant leap forward in digital marketing", encouraging users to "join a fast-growing community of buyers and sellers in your specific business area".

Business owners can garner some of the staples of Web 2.0-style Internet offerings - comments, reviews and ratings - to build customer-facing reputation...." according to e-consultancy.

Well is a couple of examples are any indication, there is some way to go. This one is an example of push communication in social space while others look like Yellow Pages.

BT has a problem with social media and always has. It is a marketing driven, push communications, scream marketing set up. It is desperate to be the final solution as witness its mad desire to sell broadband wrapped in email addresses, web gizmos and a computer stopping software bundle.

If it just did one thing well - lets say, deliver bandwidth to each home in the UK - everyone would know about it and would use it. But its would rather get into stuff that can be provided by Typepad or Blogger, MySpace(its partner in this venture) for free and better.

Turning social media into web site look alikes is trying to turn the clock back and it won't work. People use social media and web sites for different things.

Stick with the knitting BT.

The demographics of the web - broader than you think

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found according to the Daily Telegraph.

Emailing and online chatting to friends and family was the favourite internet activity of the retired people surveyed, followed by researching information, booking holidays and shopping.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes.

Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers.

This are the baby boomer generation. The generation that most marketers do not target online.

Which beggers the questions

Who is no longer part of the Internet generation?

What media is valuable for engaging with these people?

Is the PR industry using it?

BL Ochman's 12 Marketing Tenets

As always bang on the money B L Ochman has a great view of modern marketing - or is it public relations.

Today, organisations have to be interested in the 'Relationship Cloud'.

Examples of Relationship Clouds could include YouTube and MySpace and we know how valuable they are by looking at the accounts of thier owners. But they are just two among many.

CRM sux

We now see the Internet engaging people in evermore interactive ways. It is even closer to the ideas expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto half a decade ago (Searls, D. and Weinberger, D. 2000. Markets Are Conversations. In C. Locke, R. Levine, D. Searls and D. Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto (pp. 73-112). Great Britain: Biddles Ltd. www.cluetrain.com).

In their study The End of Attraction: Why People Stop Visiting Company Online Communities. Tuula Mittilä1 and Maria Mäntymäki (http://www.ebrc.fi/kuvat/25-37_05.pdf) juxtapose the more normal customer relationship management with its online counterpart.

They offer evidence that relationship marketing with online communities differs in two ways from the traditional relationship marketing. Both the medium, i.e. an online community, and the relations vary from the traditional ones. Since online communities enable dialogue between the customer and the supplier as well as among customers the development of online communities has brought a new tool for implementing relationship marketing. Because of the development of the Internet ... interaction has enhanced dramatically. People with similar interests and lifestyles may interact around the clock and the globe. Word-of-mouth has a new scale while customers’ exchange views on goods, services and suppliers. As a consequence of that a customer's power grows as well.

Nosy retailers lost 16 million orders

Keep you nose out of my business and listen to what I want. So say the UK's online shoppers according to Webcredible.

Webcredible, asked Internet users what would be most likely to make them abandon an online purchase. Hidden charges topped the list of frustrations for 36% of respondents followed by having to register before buying a product, which polled 31% of the votes. Other annoyances were: not providing clear delivery details (13%); not offering telephone details (10%); and lengthy checkout processes (9%).

The person in charge of relationship management among retailers need to get gritty with the margin chasers, control freaks, and email address collectors (normally un-reconstructed marketing managers and brand managers).

If the PR manager is not being robust with the control freaks they should be fired. Now!

This year, their soppy attitude cost sales and they did not tell the board to get ready for the boom in online retail sales we all knew was going to boom.

Its simple barriers are breaking down. People are getting active in social media. They share their holiday snaps, videos and location details with millions and so are not going to be shy buying online. PR people should not tolerate ninny heads who want to create barriers because they were taught to collect 'customer information' and do something stupid like have a data base for 'customer relationship management', spam and scream marketing.

I blame the PR industry. It needs something stiff up its spine instead of pink fizzy down its throat.

The biggest cocktail party in the world

he IPA in a report in 2007 suggested that: "In the future agencies must recognize that traditional advertiser/agency/consumer relationships will be challenged with new models of engagement coming to the fore. As traditional advertising continues to decline, by 2016, the hypothesis is that media owners of all kinds, including online search, all networks, gaming environments and interactive digital TV, will be integrating brands directly into content and editorial." (Re-invention is key if agencies are to survive).

Huh! 2016 is too far away. Try the end of next year, or at latest 2009.

The idea that there are market segments and stakeholders as described by Porter and Friedman come up against a mum commenting on social and domestic life, friends and locality for a small family circle. Such a diary, fascinating to son and daughter who have left home, does not describe a demographic segment. Its influence is personal and of limited circulation. If written online in a blog it disappears among the millions of other blogs also written by individuals. But, because it is public and can be viewed by a billion people worldwide, its potential audience is huge. The writer is the nexus of a tiny community but only at a time and in a context chosen by the community. The casual inclusion of a brand in this conversational medium is incidental and yet powerful. One aspect of this power is that the comment can move from beyond the family circle to other friends through the same medium or others and spread viraly. Sometimes at speed and others in a more leisurely fashion. The power is in conscious inclusion in 'small talk' at the biggest cocktail party in the world. Sometime this will be in the 'bloggersphere' and at others in others social media as diverse as YouTube and email. As with such comments there are occasions, from time to time, when the conversational cacophony pauses and the single voice is lone and clear and its message taken up by others. Online, this can count in millions and in seconds.

What we see in these interactions is not a 'market segment' or a 'stakeholder group' we see people with an interest in the values expressed. This convergence of values brings people together in wider, often short lived, social groups, a will-o-the-whisp emergence of both values and relationships. For brand and traditional stakeholder managers, this is too ephemeral, too counter to their training, unmanageable and yet mysteriously familiar.

It is about relationships and is powerful. Where the role of public relations is to interact with latent, aware and active social groups, it can now find them online.

Business leaders underestimate the web

The IMRG figures for online sales in the run up to Christmas show that forecasts underestimated demand. Forecasts of £7.5 billion compared to the actual outcome of £7.66 billion and that is only part of the story. Sales were limited because online retailers could not deliver.

Last year online sales were £30.2 billion with an increase during 10 weeks to Christmas up 54% on 2005.

Well this is not much of a surprise to some of us. What is disturbing is that so many people are still in denial. Online PR is still a fringe activity. Online advertising is inyerface. Web sites are horrid and lack interactivity and response to the power of social media lacks imagination to a degree that makes users cringe and rage.

As an industry the PR business just has to get stuck in.

Poncing around in the hope it will all go away led from behind by the PR institutions is no way to run an economy, industry sector or business.

The response to the power of the Internet in the UK is akin to the response to the realities of manufacturing in the 1960's, R&D and education in the '70's, the global economy in the run up to the millennium and show lack of foresight and fuddy duddy thinking.

The lack of knowledge about online interactivity across UK management and the creative services is appalling.

There is a need for leadership.

Would you believe it of - Marketers!

Dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.

Oh! Thats OJK then its not a 'PR excercise'.
It is a PR issue and I hope that the PR Managers are giving the marketers a real ear bashing or worse.

Pearson write a book using a wiki

Pearson the publisher is going to have a crack at writing a business book using a wiki and an online community dedicated to churning it out.

The book called "We Are Smarter Than Me" will look at how businesses can use online communities, consumer-generated media such as blogs, and other Web content to help in their marketing, pricing, research and service.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the project is being controlled through the WeAreSmarter.org web site. Chapter headings and a few starter pages were penned to direct the project. The big idea is that the community writes the information and provides more anecdotes.

Not the first but interesting to see a big publisher using social media.

Blogs - the new sellers medium?

Blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products, according to an Ipsos MORI poll. It found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing.

Well! What a suprise! Here is more of the report from Reuters.

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services. Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service. About a third of those Europeans questioned said they had been put off making a purchase after reading negative comments on the Internet from customers or other web-users, while 52 percent said they had been persuaded to buy after a positive review on a blog. Get it right, and blogs could be a boost to companies and even save on their advertising and marketing budgets. Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent), the survey commissioned by Hotwire, a technology public relations consultancy, said.But they still lag behind newspapers (30 percent).

Keeping up with like minded people - marketers note

BL Ochman reports that most big brand sims in Second Life are empty or have little traffic despite massive MSM media coverage, and many events are poorly attended. "That's because brands aren't creating or joining groups -- the most fundamental aspect of the metaverse's social structure, says Linda Zimmer in Business Communicators of Second Life."

At the same time she has reported on how Penguine, the publishers and others are opening a new presence, a virtual one, in SL.

It goes without saying that there is no point in moving in and then not joining the community. Its just like moving house. Some people just don't know how to get out and become a member of the community - I wonder how the marcom executives get a life if they can't get one in a virtual community?

MySpace isn't fun anymore

MySpace is moving to stop its users illegally uploading music content by introducing fingerprinting technology to the website. The site will scan all uploaded music, check it against a database of rights holders and block any protected content.

Users who repeatedly try to upload content illegally will be barred from the site.

The fingerprint technology is to be licenced from software firm Gracenote.

MySpace is now operating like a Music Agent, Cigar an' all.

Now, if the music industry was half bright (OK 25% bright), it would understand the dynamic of The Long Tail. It would encourage people to spread the music - and the date of the next gig, the price of tickets, the shop for consumables, the book etc etc etc - all of which are more valuable that the price/margin on a CD or download.

These margins are available forever - longer than copyright - and the music moguls can't see it.

So, folks go look for real musicians who want to spread their music AND make a fortune instead of givving it away to agents and Labels.

"Marketing last legs - Advertising legless"

"I've never seen things changing as much as they are now," says Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of trade magazine Advertising Age and a 40-plus-year observer of marketing. "Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass."

Ad-zapping devices — and a decrease in consumer attention spans — have created doubts about the effectiveness of traditional TV, radio and print ads. In response, marketers have become increasingly invasive.

"It's out of control," says Jenny Beaton, a mother of three in Westlake, Ohio. "I don't know how advertisers can think they're selling more products. It's just annoying everybody."

Many, such as Beaton, are tuning out.

"Advertising is so ubiquitous that it's turning people off," Crain says. "It's desensitizing people to the message."

The more consumers ignore ads, the more ads marketers spew back at them, says Max Kalehoff of marketing research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "It's like a drug addiction. Advertisers just keep buying more and more just to try to achieve prior levels of impact. In other words, they're hooked."

We have seen some of the fall out. We have seen WPP try to escape its advertising bonds and we have seen some awful attempts to shift advertising from paper and TV to the web and social media....
Now companies have to learn. Repeat after me.... "Marketing last legs - Advertising legless"

USATODAY.com - Product placement you can't escape it - www.usatoday.com/...