What Are We-- Meeting Planners?

It is unavoidable. No matter who your client is, or what demographic they are a part of -- old line companies with brand pedigree, start ups with deep VC funding, or a nonprofits dedicated to doing good – they will have their internal meetings during your weekly PR conference call. Write it down and file it between “The sun will rise tomorrow,” and “Paris Hilton is annoying.”



The scenario works like this: Your agency team is assembled around the speakerphone, breathlessly eager for the weekly client conference call. The call begins and the account manager is effortlessly traversing the agenda like clockwork. Then it happens.

Innocently enough, the client’s public affairs officer remarks to someone in charge of online marketing, “Did you know that division one’s marketing campaign starts on Monday?”

“We didn’t know anything about it!” responds the online marketing guy.
The train has now left the station. Before you know it, the client team is chatting amongst itself about budget, collateral and everything else under the sun, all the while forgetting – or ignoring altogether -- that the purpose of the call is external PR.



What are we, Mr. Client? Chopped liver? Last night’s dish water? I think we should add a meeting coordinator fee to our monthly retainer. If you want to pay us to get your inside ducks in a row, we are happy to help, but that isn’t our business and it surely isn’t in our contract. We are PR pros, not meeting planners. And you are wasting everyone’s time.

The agency team had worked tirelessly to execute last week’s objectives and to move forward on any new tasks. The team has questions, too, and they need to get them answered in order to be effective service providers.

The intrepid account manager, responsible for using everyone’s time efficiently, is sitting there befuddled; she wants to make sure this call isn’t bogged down in a morass of minutia.

She has to regain control of the call—this instant. Although the client team appears to enjoy the chatter and might bristle at first when you rein them in, they will ultimately appreciate how much you value their (and the paid-for) time.

It is very easy to simply press the mute button on the speakerphone and make silly faces at the cacophony on the other end. Resist the urge. That’s too easy. Use the opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills and gain the client’s respect by getting the call back on track.



When the leader of the call takes a breath from his tirade, interject with a hearty, “As we were saying…”

If, perchance, someone on their side of the call says something germane to your PR efforts while they’re musing on their own, use that to your advantage. Say, “We’d like to piggyback on what so-and-so said,” or, “He has a good point…” The goal is to get back in the conversation and return to your well-planned agenda.

If none of the above works, then “Team, let’s get back on track” should do the trick. If that doesn’t work—hang up. You owe it to your client to keep them on task. Plus, you have PR to provide. Let someone else plan the meetings.

Follow me @laermer

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The Pitch That Cried Wolf

There are only so many reporters and bloggers covering the field or industry you play in, whether it’s automotive technology, software, clothing, or architectural design. With time and experience, you will wind up speaking to them all one day—or their brethren. In a world of instant communication and shrinking inner circles, a PR person who cries wolf with a few off-the-mark pitches is blackballed in a hurry.



There’s nothing the media dislikes more than vapor (a non-story), so don’t pitch it. Click over to Business Wire, PR Web, or any of its ilk on a given day and you can count up hundreds of thousands of dollars spent propagating vapor news. “Small Company A Signs Agreement with About-to-Fold Company B” or “InterSliceTech.com Launches Bleeding-Edge Customer Tracking Functionality.” Find us a journalist who actually wants to write about topics like that (how do they affect anyone else besides the people who wrote the releases?) and we will tip our hats to that PR person (who has a reporter cousin, of course).

The danger in vapor is that it builds a name for you quickly. The wrong name. If you’re dabbling in handheld technology, say, and you pitch Jason Kincaid, well-known gadgetry guy from TechCrunch, on every software upgrade, he’s going to learn very rapidly not to take seriously any pitch you send his way. Who cares? The danger is that when you have real news, the kind that matters, such as the launch of your new device that makes the iPac shake in its boots, Jason will not pay attention because you’ve proven yourself to be a vapor merchant.

Before you blast out a cluster bomb of e-mails or send that release over the wire, consider long and hard what’s interesting about it. Is it fascinating just because you’ve spent three tireless months working on the content? Is it amazing because your latest noodling brings you one step closer to a competitor that no one’s ever heard of? If that’s the case, hold off and wait ’til you have something worthier of the presses; in other words, don’t believe your own story too much.

Larger public companies are especially guilty of pushing vapor into the press. There’s a theory out there, one we don’t subscribe to, that if you don’t have a steady, weekly stream of information crossing the wires—also known as “the machine”—your business’s progress has sunk to an uncompetitive pace. Remember that with public companies, their news unfortunately engenders an article or two (unfortunately, because it makes the firm think that what they put out is urgent, and so it compels them to keep the vapor machine oiled).

Yet when this non-urgent-news-pushing firm truly has something worth chatting about, the press may not bite. Everyone at the firm scratches their heads and wonders why. But reporters and analysts are glazed over from the hundreds of newsless missives shot through that PR cannon. And they are all too familiar with firms that cry wolf.

The take-away is that vapor works only rarely. For example, it did for the whole of Seinfeld. If what you desire is respected coverage continually, sit on the vapor (“CEO sneezed today!”), and don’t put it out. You’ll only numb the reporters who should care and who should notice that what you do is important. Being important is paramount.

For more topics like this, follow www.twitter.com/laermer

Exclusive Bad Pitch News: The HARO Rip-Off

Harvesting is a joyous thing for the great plains of the Midwest, and cause for a great celebration in Israel. Harvesting, though, is simply a no-go in the Social Media whirl...



Before our eyes today, PR and its brothers are seeing a naked attempt at harvesting another’s users, and it just isn’t cool. Peter Shankman’s invaluable helpareporter.com (HARO) has been providing free many-times-daily queries to PR folk and a lot of others who want to be quotable sources for quite some time—doing what he can to help us get connected. Harnessing the crowd-sourcing nature of the Internet has successfully proved that literally anyone can be a source. (A recent query asked for a bat expert. Surely somebody out there knows their guano, quite right!)


(Peter Shankman)

HARO has become so successful that the tool is being co-opted – nay, stolen. Imitation is certainly the sincerest form of flattery, but petty larceny is bushleague.

The culprit is the joker behind the clunkily URL’d http://www.reporterssource.com. (Note the double “s” in the middle. Hilariously, Shankman owns http://www.reportersource.com, which points to the main HARO page.) Frankly, this squatter isn’t even trying to hide his intentions – that is – he wants to steal from our friends at HARO.

Here’s how absurd the RS guy is: He (she?) has taken to following Shankman’s multitudes of @skydiver Twitter followers and constantly – for instance, 12 times between 5 and 6 p.m. on May 28 – tweeting about his "amazing" http://www.reporterSSource.com. Little does he realize that twitterers are brilliant buggers. Shankman’s followers are blocking the doofus, (name deleted to protect the idiot) en masse.

So, (doofus' email address redacted), if that’s your real name (reporterssource.com is registered with ICANN anonymously) we at Bad Pitch have our eye on you! Consumers know and trust a good product, and cheap imitations will not be tolerated, especially when that product is so hard to come by.

A lot of the PR game is based on intangibles. When a good, solid product comes into being that gives a pro something to sink his teeth into, it is worth its weight in platinum. Peter Shankman has created such a product, and our community will rightly reject outright the usurpers. Shankman has been getting emails from a bunch of fans asking “What is going on with this copycat?” To which his response has been: “Nuttin’ but a cheap wannabe!” It’s simply another example of some bad seed who wants to make a quick buck off someone else’s smartness. (This is not the first time someone has tried to unsuccessfully copy the HARO thang. See the PR Newser story here for more dirt: http://bit.ly/HAROvsExpertClick)

****

Speaking of Peter: In some nowhere-near-as-ridiculous but truly exciting news, HARO announced just today addition of veteran PR man and executive Thom Brodeur to its senior management team. Brodeur joined the company as its COO, where he assumes the kit and kaboodle responsibility for corporate strategy, marketing, sales, biz development and ops.


(Thom Brodeur)

After serving as SVP of global strategy and development at Marketwire for two years, Brodeur left in April. Before Marketwire, he was a VP at Brodeur Partners (or Brodeur Worldwide), providing marketing, PR and plain old good counsel to companies in the consumer, high technology, aerospace, services and telecoms. Incidentally, Thom Brodeur is not related to Brodeur Partners founder John Brodeur. How do you like them apples?

Prior, he was a start-up software and SP sales guy with, among others, AOL Latin America, Johnson & Johnson and Paramount.

During his tenure at Marketwire, Brodeur worked on the release of the company’s Social Media 2.0 Plus product suite, that thing to help marketers craft social media press releases and includes iTunes podcast integration.

In announcing the news, Shankman said with trademark jumping up and down: "Bringing Thom in made sense on several levels, not the least of which being his impressive track record for corporate growth.” Amen to that.

More on HARO and the rest of the PR world via http://www.twitter.com/laermer

What Just Happened To The Long Tail?

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson has been the rage for a while. It’s actually a fad. I keep hearing from people who want to “reach the long tail.” Some big journalist types—those who have not read the book—seem to be under the misguided impression that Chris and his people sure know how to coin a catch phrase. It is a catchy book title, but let me clarify the term for you:

Wikipedia says: the long tail is the colloquial name for a feature of statistical distributions.

The phrase refers to the appearance of a line graph where the left side is high on the Y axis and tapers down quickly to a sustained lower level. As the lower level is maintained, it cumulatively equates to more than the initial short-term burst. (Here, Yellow > Green.) It sounds like calculus (ugh!), but it really is just common sense. Commonsensical, helpful knowledge.

In a nutshell for PRists out there, Anderson has postulated that smaller niche audiences have more cumulative value to businesses than larger audiences reached over a short timeframe. Being editor-in-chief of Wired probably has something to do with why Anderson’s book puts everything in the context of cool tech.

I’m sure The Long Tail is well-written and insightful—I haven’t read it, but you knew—and groundbreaking for what it says in the long run. (Rimshot. Try the veal!) But I can’t help but roll my busy eyes when someone thinks they’re giving me something so unbelievable and ground stopping as they inform me about the importance of niche audiences and the fabulousness of blogs. I’m told the sequel will tell me the sky is blue.

As a blogger: “Really?”

See, in PR we’ve been dissecting audiences for many years. Look, tailees, blogs are not the first long tail (italics mine) form of communication. Some consider this example archaic but the “fad” of the weekly newspaper is still one of the best long tail communication tools.

The weekly newspaper reaches a niche who cares: community. That’s saying a lot. I wonder if that’s just a little too old-fashioned for Anderson groupies to grasp. Alas, I’m grateful to Anderson because his statement will influence the suits and help them finally get that “PR By The Pound” is a 1990s concept. Yes, you want to reach a lot of people with a message. However, doing so indiscriminately will not work since there’s no power in the message-less story that gets to the wrong (untargeted) individual.

Targeting is back! Which means that as with other trendy pseudo-new ideas, The Long Tail has made a core componentof PR fashionable.

Uh, again.

Unfortunately it leads some CMOs to believe that a successful PR program can be based entirely on niches. Smart practitioners of our field know that PR delivers return when it reaches both broad foundation of the pyramid and the specific audiences that inhabit the top.

Let me tell you how PR works. (Yes you can laugh.)

A Brief History of PR and Audiences

A while ago—think no computers and only 12 channels—we all tended to talk about audiences in general terms. Our demographic breakdowns included sex, age and geography. There were consumer stories (we called them features) and business stories (we called them business stories). News was by its definition new, and we were intimately familiar with the outlets we patronized because there were comparatively few.

As the sheer number of outlets increased we shifted focus to less tangible angles and discussed corporate reputation ad nauseum. Newsworthy events became stunts, some of which kinda worked.

Then online came into being. Those of us who had enough coffee knew early that the Web would change PR and once again we turned it into a process story, and fell in love with discussing it to death. Now we seem to be having a hard time moving past any discussion but that one.

Reality Check, Please

Online media is not in the least new. It’s not at all mysterious. It simply is. We must get over treating blogs – even this one that you love– as Brightest Shiny Object in the toy box, and get on with integrating what used to be new (and is now fairly old) media outreach into our programs. If you don’t understand how “new” and “traditional” media interact by now, let me come over with my portable White Board.

Dear Martha Stewart: It is not complicated.

So what about Anderson’s elongated extremity? Congratulations, sir, for stating the obvious. I’m staring at some of it on Amazon and (my gosh!) he has used a lot of fancy words. Then again Dickens got paid by the word so what can I say?

May I sum up? Niche audiences are important to people in PR—they always have been, always will be, bla bla bla—pointing it out seems to be a big hoohah moment. But niche is not the be-all-end-all.

At the acclaimed, wondrous and decades-old (!) RLM PR, we use what we have dubbed an Audience Matrix to identify how to reach niche audiences. Outreach is not conducted in a silo. If hardcore online gamers are important for one of our fabulous (read: paying) clients, we ensure that our tactics also appeal to the broader audience—like 20 year-old males who don’t play online but might be one of their eventual consumers. So we are reaching the whole tail and then we are also going after the head and torso.

That’s it for me. Drop me a line – and not one in the sand, please.

*****

Twitter @laermer; that’s where I’ll be. Rubbing my tail - naturally!