Tag Archive for 'public relations'

Should PR Own Social Media?

Published
by
David Parmet
on 12/30/2008
in Profound Thoughts
. Comments

Increasingly the discussions around marketing and social media move towards which team should “own” the social media toolkit. On the one hand, advertising with its huge budgets and teams of designers and code-monkeys seem to be the right home for online communications. But increasingly there is a call for social media to fall under the relm of the public relations team.

Kristin Maverick has a good post laying out the rational for this point of view, and cautioning (correctly):

But, as social media has changed the way we think, the traditional PR agency will also need to adapt to the new ways of handling these social media requests. While PR may be the right man for the job right now, it’s also important for PR to include others to help get it done. From partnerships with other specialists to new technologies and advancements emerging everyday, the acceptance of all things changing will only help create successful outcomes and ensure social media success.

Link

I’m inclined to agree, both with the notion that social media is part of public relations, and that traditional PR agencies will have to grow and change their ways of doing business to get the job done. I suppose this is one of those challenges for 2009.

Aside from just “getting it,” whatever your definition of “it” might be, PR agencies are going to have to be a lot smarter on the nuts and bolts of how the Web and social media work. For one thing, to look at many agency web sites, one would be excused for believing the industry is trapped in the late 1990s. Too many agencies have flash intros or sites built entirely on Flash. Too many agencies tout their social media starts but don’t have blogs, or even RSS feeds for their client news. And too many agencies are treating social media now like they treated online communications in the 1990s - as something separate from the “real work” of media relations.

Most of all, PR agencies have to drop the habit of viewing each new social media tool as a means to shout their clients’ messages to as many people as they can grab.

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Mad Bloggers

Published
by
David Parmet
on 12/17/2008
in Stupid Agency Tricks
. Comments

Mike Arrington observes:

All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

Link

Funny thing, just the other day I was discussing with another PR blogger the increasingly common “we’re offering you an embargo” emails we’re both getting from firms who obviously never read our blogs, or just could not care less as long as they can get a hit, any hit.

With the economy rapidly going to hell in a hand basket, this will only get worse. As Mike points out, the agencies are under a tremendous amount of pressure and that pressure means that increasingly lower paid, junior staff are on the front lines with little or no supervision and are being told to produce or take a walk. Which means more candidates for the Bad Pitch Blog and more pissed off tech bloggers.

Update: I like Brian Solis’s take on this:

The truth is that embargoes are special. They are not supposed to be used as a “PR trick” for locking-in stories with anyone and everyone. Ideally, they’re strategically reserved for important stories and they’re only effective when used in a “less is more” approach. Embargoes ARE NOT dead, however, they need to be practiced with great focus and respect. I guarantee you greater results and stronger relationships if you work with a smaller group of trusted and relevant contacts rather than embargo spamming everyone from the A-list to the C-list in your wish list.

This isn’t email marketing. It’s not a numbers game. There are real people on the other side of our “pitch.” This process must become humanized once again.

Link

Update 2: Robert Scoble points out that many companies are getting more hits through Twitter than through TechCrunch. I’m not so sure about the number of hits but I could imagine that dealing with Twitter is a lot easier than dealing with TechCrunch.

Update 3: Centernetwork’s Allen Stern has a very thoughtful piece on all of this. The money quote:

At the end of the day, it’s all about trust and relationships. It seems to keep boiling down to that, no matter if it’s about paid reviews, advertisers, how winners are selected at startup conferences or embargoes.

Link

Update 4: ReadWriteWeb is very happy to take your embargoed news.

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For Whom The Bell Tweets

Published
by
David Parmet
on 12/16/2008
in Self Promotion and news
. Comments

I was interviewed by Jessica Levco of Ragan for her story on The Media is Dying - a Twitter collective, recording the slow drip drip death of old media.

David Parmet, a New York PR agent, said the feed helps those involved in the public relations industry.

“For PR flacks, it’s always a good idea to make sure you know when journalists are moving around,” Parmet said. “If you’re pitching a story, you’ve got to know where people are.”

Link

Actually, what I said (and believe) is that “The Media” is a misnomer. It’s not media, old or new, that is dying. It’s the business model that’s giving up the ghost.

Peter Himler (as always) puts it more succinctly than I:

In my opinion, the name was simply inaccurate. Themediaisexpanding, changing, convulsing are probably more apt descriptions of what’s happening in the media ecosystem.

Link

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PR People as Car Dealers

Published
by
David Parmet
on 7/28/2008
in State of the Art
. Comments

I’ve often used the car dealer example as a way of explaining the changes brought about by social media. Do you remember what it was like to go with your Mom and Dad to a car dealer, circa 1975? Do you remember Dad clutching a worn copy of Consumer Reports? Do you remember the wheeling and dealing and offers of undercoating? Do you remember waiting six to eight weeks for delivery?

No more. Now you can go on the Web and right from your local dealer’s web site you can see what they have on the lot and how much it will cost you to drive off in your very own new gas-guzzler. You can even find out how much that dream car cost the dealer. And if you can find a better deal, your local guy might even match it.

The point is that the power relationship between car dealers and car buyers has reversed. Only a decade ago, the dealers held all the cards - they knew the price and you didn’t. Now we have access to all the information we need to make an informed decision.

Now the problem with this analogy is I never thought of it from the perspective of the car dealers. And until recently I never realized that I am a car dealer - of sorts. We PR folks have acted like car dealers for years, often treating our clients like clueless newbs who think we have some secret power to create media opportunites for them. LIke the mythical roledex that can get us the front page of Businessweek with only one phone call.

The problem is our clients are just as smart as we are and many of them are way ahead of us in using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. So they have access to the same journalists on Twitter that we do. They can subscribe to the same media email lists we do. And they know (hopefully) almost as much as we do.

So what can we offer them when they can subscribe to the Help A Reporter Out list just as easily as we can?

Still more on Bloggers vs PR flacks

Published
by
David Parmet
on 5/15/2008
in Required Reading
. Comments

Stowe Boyd wades into the stormy seas between bloggers and PR flacks and as usual, he gets it right:

The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.

Link

Stowe argues that bloggers need to stand up and say “no mas” and then be explicit to PR folks in how they want to be pitched. He’s got a point, but I would flip it around and put the onus on us, the PR folks in the trenches.

We need to get ourselves smarter. And we need to get our fellows smarter. And we need to keep getting even smarter. We have to understand that public relations is about relations and if you wouldn’t ‘relate’ to your friends or loved ones that way, why on Earth would you ‘relate’ like that to some blogger or journalist who could make or break your client.

Update: in the comments, Bob LeDrew points out, quite correctly:

We also need to get our CLIENTS smarter. Or maybe, if there’s no other choice, to get smarter clients.

Well, yeah. But in any case, we need to develop backbones and tell our clients the way things should be done.  We aren’t paid just to say ‘yes.’