Category: General

I’m a big believer that whenever you get the chance to look at how PR and Marketing is executed in a different industry you should jump at it. I’ve always enjoy viewing my profession from different perspectives, you always come away with some new ideas. 

Last weekend I had the incredible opportunity to travel to France for the 24 Heures Du Mans, one of the world’s most famous motor races. I was there to support my brother’s team who were having their first crack at this toughest of all endurance events. While I was there I made it my business to meet and swop war stories with a number of people who spend their working lives in motorsport PR and Marketing.

From a marketing perspective the event had two major manufacturers competing to own Le Mans and each took a different approach – though both clearly spent a lot of budget.

On the one hand you had Audi, whose strategy appeared to be very focused with incredibly sophisticated hospitality facilities around the track (and cars on display) while relying on the dominance of their cars (which finished 1, 2 & 3) to drive excitement and media coverage.

		On the other hand you had Nissan taking a different approach (at least it seemed that way to me). They were everywhere at the event and seemed to be targeting consumers and businesses in equal measure. From a racing perspective they were providing engines to a range of different teams and had probably the biggest media draw outside the race itself with the Nissan Delta Wing which drove global media coverage before, during and after the race. It was hard to call the winner, but perhaps trackside it was Nissan.

At the other end of the spectrum was my brother’s team – Murphy Prototypes. Established earlier this year, working on a fraction (if even) of a budget, they’ve focused on PR and social media to build awareness and, albeit on a tiny scale compared to the industry titans, they’ve made outstanding progress.

 

After the car retired nearly 14 hours into the race – and after leading their class for nearly 3 hours and running as high as 6th overall – I took a walk around the track at about 5am and the number of fans (there are over 350,000 spectators each day over the weekend, many camping around the circuit) wearing Murphy Prototypes merchandise was astonishing.

They’ve started using Facebook and Twitter to engage fans (Emma Buxton was tirelessly driving PR and social media all weekend) and the level of engagement they’re getting is incredible.

One of my favorite moments over the weekend was when Massimo Favini appeared in the paddock. Massimo connected with the team on Facebook and was sent a team cap.  When he was recently climbing in Italy he took his cap with him and sent on a shot from the summit.

 

The team worked incredibly hard during the week of Le Mans to give the fans as much access as they could and it was clearly appreciated.

Like other industries, motorsport is increasingly using social media for engagement and sharing news and information, but media (print, online and broadcast) and traditional marketing remain front and center.

One thing I did notice was the thoroughness and creativity in preparation and execution across the marketing and PR activities at the venue. 

They’ve thought of everything from having their own photographers bringing the latest photos from around the track to the media center (and driving media photographers to any part of the track where there’s an incident), to creating subtle photo opportunities – such as the parking spot for the Delta Wing – everywhere.

 

From a professional perspective, the most illuminating part of the event (beyond the racing) was the opportunity to meet and talk with a number of motorsport PR and marketing folks.  There were many interesting discussions about the changes they’re seeing in their sport, the emergence of social media and the differences between an endurance event like Le Mans and the high church of motorsport, Formula 1. Where Formula 1 is about access, exclusivity and control, endurance racing is about creating a bond between the teams and the fans, giving them better access and insight, perhaps how Formula 1 was in the 80s and 90s – with more marketing.

The 24 Heures Du Mans is an incredible experience. I highly recommend it and I’ll be back.

The recent ‘conversation’ on the death of blogs forced me to sit down and write a blog post.  It takes a lot to encourage me to blog these days,  but then upon reviewing my wise, well written draft, I realized I didn’t want to post it.

Last month marked a full decade that I’ve had a blog. What started with an explosion of posts about everything PR-related, has matured into a trickle of rants and opinions mostly due to the increasing demands of family and work. The prioritization hasn’t been difficult.

Over the past ten years there have been incredible changes in marketing, PR and communications. New tools and channels have emerged, we’ve seen people finding and sharing information in new ways. But there’s also a lot of hot air.

Too many people have a predilection to declare the ‘death’ of something, or the compulsion to add the word ‘social’ to every noun in the dictionary, or the desire to critique things without any knowledge or insight.

This is where I see the difference between professionals and pundits emerging.

Professionals think about their objectives, their environment and audiences, their goals, their strategies, their tactics and their measurement.  They think about the return on the investment from their programs and campaigns.  They have to marry pragmatism with creativity, to balance costs with invention.  These are challenges they face every day.

They don’t focus on the tactic, the tool, or the navel gazing.  Thankfully that’s the pundit’s job. There’s a place for pundits.  We need people looking beyond the day to day grind.  We just don’t need so many.

When you think it can’t get any worse you read this:

If true, this only serves to confirm there are a lot of villages out there missing their idiots and perhaps some of their pundits too.

Klout is the perfect example. It’s simple to understand (in theory), doesn’t require any significant investment of time to analyze, and because it can be inherently gamed it’s useless as anything other than a measure of someone’s noise online. It’s like when you come across a ‘marketer’ you’ve never heard of with 75,000 followers on Twitter.  Sure you do. No really. Sure….

Ten years on, I’ve never regretted starting a blog or embracing social media. I’ve met some incredible people I probably would never have met without social media. I’ve reconnected with long lost colleagues and friends and I have a better view of what’s happening around the world than I’ve ever had before.

From a professional perspective social media has opened exciting new opportunities. It’s encouraging more creative ways of communicating, it’s revolutionizing our focus on storytelling and it’s enabling us all to engage and have conversations.

It’s just a pity there’s so much fluff and hyperbole inside the echo chamber.

C’est la vie.

PS: For the record, blogs are a tool.  They offers a range of benefits for many organizations, but they are a tool not a strategy.  If you’re not getting the appropriate return on your investment in blogging (and to know that you are of course measuring it) then you should absolutely reinvest your resources where you will get a greater return.  It’s not about death, it’s about professional decision making.  There’s no drama here no matter how much some wish there was.

PPS: If you’ve gone all old school and are – god forbid – thinking of starting a blog, two pieces of advice.  Firstly don’t underestimate the commitment and secondly for the love of all things holy put some thought into a compelling and memorable first post….

If you ventured out on the internet today there’s probably two things that popped up in your feeds, namely Kony 2012 and the Dollar Shave Club.

I first heard about the Dollar Shave Club through a tweet:

Well I had to click didn’t I?

Needless to say I wasn’t disappointed. 

It’s the combination of a clever business idea and a clever creative marketing execution. It’s  well scripted, well targeted and a great example of effective (and humorous)  storytelling.

The website draws on the same humor:

Will it be successful? Who knows? Success will depend on a wide range of factors, including the business model.  But over 700,000 views of the launch video is a good start.

Regardless, it’s a good illustration that creativity doesn’t necessarily have to cost a lot of money, and great storytelling that’s relevant to your audience is a winner.

And the answer to the question you’re asking yourself right now?

Yes.

For all the talk about the death of media, mainstream media, traditional media, broadcast media, print media and online media, since the turn of the century, they’re still hanging on. Sure circulations are down, many traditional papers have closed down, slimmed down or moved online.  But thankfully we still have the media, we still have journalists.

Social media has been great giving people a platform to share their opinions, but it doesn’t negate the need for journalists. This isn’t a post about bloggers not being journalists by the way.

The world isn’t that simple anymore. 

Some bloggers are journalists, some are not. Regardless everyone has opinions and thanks to social media they can share those opinions.  On the whole, and in view of the alternative, that’s a good thing.

However, after twenty years in the Public Relations business, I remain more convinced than ever that journalists are an essential and valuable asset that we must support and protect. 

Their cause hasn’t been helped by the confusion surrounding business models in a world that has a cacophony of often free content. But the value of free content is often tied to the cost. 

If you catch my drift.

As I’ve often said before the great thing about opinions is that everyone has one, and the downside is the same.

We need journalism because we need someone to be looking at our world in an objective manner. Yes I know there are sometimes issues, as I already mentioned, I’ve worked in PR for over twenty years.  I know the issues.

However, in a world of vested interest, give me traditional journalism any day.

I read a lot of blogs.  I read them with a filter.  We know that people (present author included) write blogs for a reason, and it’s not often to do with the finding the truth. People want to showcase their knowledge, share insight, push an agenda, sell their wares. There’s nothing wrong with any of these motivations, but let’s not pretend that it’s a replacement for journalism, it’s an adjunct – at best.

The bottom line is that society needs journalism regardless of your views or leanings.  The medium may indeed be the message, but it doesn’t matter if  journalism is in print, video, audio or online.  What matters is that we have people involved in looking at our world with an objective lens.

Blogs are a tool, they aren’t a replacement for the practice of journalism.

We should all try and remember that.

As the old song goes, all god’s creatures have a place in the choir.

I blame my grandmother. She loved providing real-time feedback on my grammar and her favorite was the difference between ‘off’ and ‘from’.

If I innocently reported to her that I had received something off someone, she would immediately respond that “you get fleas off people, but you get things from them”.

Indeed.

While I am a huge fan of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (and have a well thumbed copy on my bookshelf), I am also sympathetic to Stephen Fry’s tirade on language purists.

However, there is a happy medium.

Today well written, simple, plain English is the exception. Too often we descend to the lowest common denominator where we all proactively leverage robust, strategic solutions to global world-leading paradigm shifts.

Worse, in a deluge of meetings and conference calls we are routinely subjected to a verbal assault of meaningless phrases and buzzwords. This unscientific blog survey captured a few of the more common ones, although some of my personal favorites like ‘grok’ and ‘running it up the flagpole’ didn’t make the list.

Dan Pallotta put this very well in a post he published on the Harvard Business Review in December:

I’d say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn’t understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it’s to people’s benefit that I understand them but I don’t, then they’re the ones who are stupid.

So, what is the point of this post?

I want to promote a balanced approach to language.  Let’s encourage each other to speak and write in plain, simple English and avoid the buzz word madness.

In that spirit here are two bonus links:

• 7 grammatical errors you can ignore
• Replace Meaningless Words with Meaningful Ones

So I’ve been trawling through my PR RSS feeds and I’m including some interesting posts below, but before I get to that indulge me for a moment… 

Mini rant: What was interesting in reviewing these posts is the fact that the ‘PR 2.0’ moniker continues to live.  What is PR 2.0?  Should my business card say that I’m a PR 1.0 practitioner, or a PR 1.7.5 practitioner or maybe I can get ahead and say I’m a PR 3.1 practitioner? Here’s a secret truth. There’s no PR 2.0.  There’s just PR.  PR practice is either good (using the right tools and channels to reach, inform and engage the right audience in the right place at the right time) or bad (not using the right tools and channels etc. etc.).  There’s no 2.0.  Stop trying to make yourself sound more interesting.

	The award for the most obvious statement(s) of the week goes to John Bell at Ogilvy in this PR Week story.  I was going to include a quote, but there’s too many. Far too many. Lord.
	Andrew Bruce Smith has an interesting post on whether PR really is about reputation management.
	Aven Hames has a report on Paul Holmes’ predictions for PR in 2012 – there are some hardy annuals in there (e.g. PR in the executive suite).
	Paul Seaman shares some interesting thoughts on the Edelman Trust Barometer. You can find more news and views on the Trust Barometer here.
	Heather Yaxley has kicked off and interesting discussion “Are you too smart to work in PR”. David Reich also chimes in. I’m not
	Finally a nice post by Ariel Kouvaras on three things to keep in mind as the tools and channels of PR change and evolve. Be curious Be a thinker Be willing to change

 

Enough said.

Darika Ahrens at Forrester has blogged that that changing nature of ‘interactive marketing’ has the potential to make PR agencies largely irrelevant:

Why is PR at risk of losing their seat at the interactive table?

• Traditional media decreasing in relevancy
• Frontline ‘public relations’ online moving in-house
• PR agencies tend to lack specialised service
• Interactive marketing spend is dominated by Search and Paid advertising

She believes that the answer to the ‘problem’ facing PR agencies, among other things, is to build their search engine capabilities.

I haven’t seen the reaction to this yet though I’m sure there’ll be much breathless discussion of the topic across Twitter.

I have two core thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, ‘traditional PR’ is not dying as quickly as (it’s ever) been forecasted.  The reality is that traditional media still drives the majority of news cycles and much of the emerging online news is driven by key, identifiable influencers.  As a result the core PR business will survive for the time being.

Secondly, do PR agencies need to review the services they are offering and the skills of their people? Well that question isn’t reserved just for PR agencies.  Every PR and marketing professional needs to review their skills and capabilities in view of the new ways people are finding, sharing and creating information online. PR agencies are no different, they need to match the need for traditional services with services that address changing models of influence.  That’s their business.

The model for online marketing is evolving and changing in step with consumer consumption habits.  The idea that ‘interactive agencies’ will simply replace PR firms is at best a long shot and at worst a fallacy.

We live in interesting times.  One of the most enjoyable elements of a career in Public Relations is the constant need to change and adapt. The past ten years has shown me that change never takes place as quickly as people expect, but that change does happen. It’s not just PR firms that need to be actively looking at how the models of influence are changing, it’s every marketers’ challenge.

Update:

Today’s a busy day for the PR agency love meme. Haydn Shaughnessy over at Forbes has an interesting post on what PR companies are doing wrong.

Shakespeare wrote that when words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain. It’s not a problem we typically encounter these days. In fact verbal flatulence is everywhere.

Back in olden times (early and mid 1990s) one of the favorite journalist tricks was the pregnant pause. Sit and look at your interviewee. Peer over your spectacles. Say nothing. Watch them squirm at the uncomfortable silence, until hopefully they break and in a vain attempt at appearing interesting and relevant they fill the silence with some nice juicy morsel of previously unreleased information. Having seen this trick work at first hand, I now think its time may have passed. Today the likelihood of a pregnant pause is unlikely.

Silence may indeed be a virtue, but it’s a seldom used virtue. Instead we try our very best to inject noise and volume into everything.

I speak in general terms here, no specifics, just an observation.

It appears the marketing response to the increasing noise of our always-on world is, ironically, more noise.

Shout louder.

Shout more often.

That’s not to say frequency isn’t important. It is. But the big question is the frequency of what. Not to over indulge my Shakespearian theme, but 400 years ago he wrote:

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

That could be a motto for communications today.

Too often we just decide we need a blog post, with little thought about what we’re trying to achieve, what we’re trying to communicate and how we’ll make the information relevant, interesting, or memorable.

Too often we just write, proof, hit publish and move on.

It’s not just a social media phenomenon. Going back to olden times there were many proponents of getting a press release out regardless of whether there was any actual news. I imagine they’re still asking for press releases and now their poor downtrodden communicators will try and palm them off with a blog post or a tweet. Something that will be dispatched into the cloud -  more in hope than expectation – never to be seen, read or thought of again.

So, the alternative is to take a strategic approach to communications. Get an understanding of your audience, where they are, what they’re reading and sharing and invest the time and energy into creating something memorable. Not once a year for a special occasion or the one time you have some real news, but as part of your daily routine.

So next time you’re asked to ‘create’ a blog post about something no one cares about, remember:

This above all; to thine own self be true.