Month: September 2003

Dear Readers, given the day that’s in it, some of you may find the following analogy a little disturbing, however, I believe it puts in perspective some very distasteful trends we’re seeing in corporate behaviour and how PR has become a fall-guy in the process.

Wars are an inevitable part of human existence.  That is a regrettable fact.  Humans sometimes find no other way of dealing with conflict. However the real victims of war are rarely the primary participants, and the world’s nations, recognizing this fact, created the Geneva Convention to protect the rights of those people who were at the mercy of more powerful adversaries.

You may be wondering where I am headed with this. Bear with me.

James Horton writes today about a story in the Los Angeles Times (Free Registration Required) which reveals that the RIAA was well aware of the potential backlash against their lawsuits against their customers, but they were willing to grin and bear it.

So, the bullies unleashed their legal muscle on children, retired people and students. In fact, they in effect declared war on people who were illegally downloading music.

Not good PR, but they wanted a strong message to get through – and it has.

No question.

I dealt yesterday with the fact that they chose the lazy route.  Rather than looking at how their industry markets their product, structures their costs etc. they went for the soft target.  (Compare this to the Business Software Alliance, whose “cease-and-desist” strategy has been very successful in reducing software piracy).

So the RIAA has declared war.  So in a convential war the Geneva Convention protects the weak. Who is protecting the weak in the RIAA war?

The Third Geneva Convention restricts combatants from using prisoners for “public curiousity”. But from the latest stories on the RIAA they are parading their prisoners on full view.

In a story from Wired, we learn that Brianna Lahara, the twelve year old, who the RIAA bravely sued, has had to pay (through her mother) $2,000.  But it doesn’t stop there, not only are the RIAA taking her money, but they are parading her like some sort of exhibit.

“I am sorry for what I have done,” Brianna said in a statement released by the Recording Industry Association of America on Tuesday. “I love music and I don’t want to hurt the artists I love.”

Do these people have no shame? I don’t care about the pros and cons.  This is simply unethical. That’s your music industry folks. Bullying and taking advantage of a twelve year old.

I’m not a member of any anti-trade group, I am pro free trade, pro free markets, but I am passionately against a lack of ethics among commerical entities.

A story on PaidContent.org, claims Red Herring is set to be re-launched. 

French publisher, Dasar [FLASH Warning], is planning to re-launch an online version of Red Herring early next year.

Jim Daly, former editor at Business 2.0 is rumored to be editing the re-launched site.

The way things are going, PR professionals in the future are not going to need to be affiliated to their local professional body or possess good writing skills.  Oh no, to practice PR 21st century style you’ll have to have a law degree.

Over the past few months we are seeing a rapid increase in the aggression of organizations seeking to enforce what they believe are their rights. Where good communications practice teaches us to engage our audience, these organizations believe in litigating with them.

In the business world, SCO continues to avoid the path of sensible conciliatory talks and instead is planning on not only suing large IT vendors like IBM, but smaller Linux vendors and now the crowning glory, they are suing end-users.

It’s a while since I read it, but I don’t remember Geoffrey Moore writing about the “Litigation Strategy” in Inside the Tornado. (I know, I know, I am SO 1990’s)

How SCO think they can outlast IBM in a legal process is beyond me.  But from a PR perspective this approach is harming not helping their profile – in my opinion.

Then in the consumer world we have the Recording Industry Association of America or the RIAA. 

It would be unfair to suggest the RIAA has their head in the sand, it’s more like concrete.

CD sales are falling so it’s the Internet’s fault.  That’s their thinking. They’re spending millions lobbying Federal government and now they’re turning their nasty focus on their customers.  There’s good PR for you.

So let’s look at the music business. CD sales are falling.  Did they ever think that it’s because CDs are so expensive? CDs are moving out of discretionary spending.  I only buy half the CDs I used to because I am unwilling to pay that much money for CDs. The Univeral Music Group has made some steps in fixing this problem, but let’s not forget just how little CD’s cost to manufacture.

In most industry’s you look at your costs if sales are falling, you don’t go suing your customers.

Ah the Internet. The music business has singularly refused to look at innovative ways for selling music online.  There’s too much vested interest.  Apple’s iTune’s has been a massive success showing that people are willing to legally buy music online – if only they could.

The Internet has been mainstream since the mid nineties and only now are authorized music services being made available online. That sounds like the RIAA’s problem to me.  But no my friend that is your problem, and that is why a twelve year old girl in New York is being sued by the might of the music industry.

When did communication, innovation and good business practice get railroaded by litigation? I’m not sure but I know in the end there will be no winners.

By the way, in case anyone from the RIAA reads this, all my music is legit. But that doesn’t mean I agree with your overpriced and under-innovated products.

“Out of all people, why did they pick me?”

Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old New York City girl who is being sued by the RIAA (New York Post Story)

Update: James Horton posts along similar lines today.

For anyone who is interested, Blogger (a.k.a Google) have announced that all the features in the paid-for version of Blogger (a.k.a Blogger Pro) are now being folded into the free version.

The result is that the basic, free version of Blogger can now generate RSS feeds and take advantage of a whole additional range of services.

Interesting move, it’ll certainly increase the number of RSS feeds exponentially overnight. I can’t help wondering if it’s a competitive move against TypePad which has been doing quite nicely.

Jeff Rutherford over at Trylon Communications alerted me to a story in the Boston Herald about how PR people are leading the marketing charge into the world of blogs – Rick Bruner’s gonna love that! 🙂

The story is only available to subscribers.

“Because just as fast as the Weblog phenomenon is weaving itself into the media landscape, publicity agents and public relations people are swarming this venue where anyone can carry a message to the masses.”

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to yesterday’s posting on PR measurement.

First up, the prolific James Horton has a well written whitepaper  on the subject which is definetely worth a read. James includes several characteristics of any publicity measurement tool, including:

• Measurement should reflect all activitity of a program
• It should be easy to use and update
• Measurement should reflect the value of different publicity work
• It should provide results which can be easily tracked and compared over time
• Any reporting should be integrated with other PR management tools
• Stories should be ranked on their content
• Media outlets should be weighted on their relevance to the client’s target market

I also recieved links to other PR measurement content around the web.  These include:

 Interesting opinion piece from Michael Bland on PR evaluation 

 The Institute for Public Relations has presentations on measurement from companies such as Sears, Roebucks & Co. and Texas Instruments.

 e21’s view on Measuring PR Effectiveness

 Vocus on PR and Measurement  for the New Millenium

 Old (1999) piece from PR News on Measurement

Please feel free to send on any other links or content that might be of interest…

You have to feel sorry for the guys over at Marketing Wonk.  When they launched as Up2Speed (from MarketingFix) they put a lot of time and effort into the site, then after very effectively building a large audience, their worst nightmare comes true and they have to change the name of their site.

Their response was a clever press release which following all the best lessons of crisis communications, came clean about how they didn’t do a trademark search.  But to add insult to injury, the newswires refused to publish the release.

Now while the release is tongue-in-cheek and may not fully conform to the “Headline-Intro Para-Quote” format of the traditional press release, I don’t see any reason why PR Newswire or BusinessWire would refuse to distribute it.  But there you go.

Needless to say the MarketingWonk team are unimpressed. Read more.

Marketing Sherpa’s “Fame” newsletter has listed seven PR blogs on the Internet.  They kindly include PR Opinions as well as Flacklife, G2Blog, Dan Gillmor, Marketing Wonk and PR Studies.

They also list PR Bop a new weblog looking at the interesting stories coming over the wires.

PS: A small correction on their listing.  I’m actually not based in the UK, in case your interested my primary co-ordinates are: Latitude 53,20N and Longitude 6,15 W !

No more to say then you’ll find it here…

Jay Porter from SS+K was in touch with me with an interesting question on metrics on performance and ROI from Public Relations.

From Jay’s e-mail (with kind permission):

“Our firm is always searching for ways to provide clients with metrics on performance and ROI that are both actionable for them and fair to us. For a particular client, we have settled on a scorecard approach that looks at both quantitative and qualitative measures of activity and results. As we refine this, we are searching for a simple way to weight coverage from trade, business, and more general media (for this client, generally print). We use a set of subjective guidelines to rate stories, but a great hit in a small newsletter obviously isn�t as powerful as a mostly positive write-up in BusinessWeek. Do you of any established tiering system for print media that takes into account relative influence as well as circulation? Or, to the larger point, are there established best-practices for coverage scorecards that you would recommend?”

I think this is a good opportunity for you kind reader to contribute something.  I’ll kick off with some thoughts, please feel free to add you two cents either via the comments below or you can e-mail me your comments directly if you prefer.

OK, so here are some of my thoughts:

Audit

The first step is to identify what media “moves the needle” for your client. In my experience a well targeted story in a low circulation publication that is tightly focused on your clients’ business can generate a lot more noise than a story in “Business Week.”

How do you do this?  Find out what the client reads, if possible find out what some of their customers or partners read.  What publications have historically driven business?

Grading outlets

I think you’re on the right track with the tiering system. 

The most basic form of this style of measurement is using circulation figures, though as I’ve already stated this doesn’t take into account qualitative coverage. 

So step two is to decide what media outlets (print, online, live media etc.) will make a real difference to your client and weight them accordingly. There’s a wide range of methodologies on what weight or scoring you should use.

Grading coverage

You can further analyse these results by grading the type of coverage; e.g. a product story, inclusion in a headline, client quote in a feature, quote in competitor’s story etc.

Automate it

At this stage it’s clear we are developing a model, so an application like Excel can help to automate much of the entry and analysis of these figures.

Extend the measurement

The next step is to get the client involved.  By analysing trends over time such as web hits, online registrations, whitepaper downloads etc. it is possible to begin to see how successful PR tactics is driving traffic which although not an end in itself is a useful gauge to what coverage is contributing to the company’s objectives.

 

So, what are your thoughts?