Blogging on internal communication and CSR

Trevor Cook is changing the focus of his PR blog to more tightly focus on the issues around communication in the workplace and Corporate Social Responsibility – areas he is passionate about. 

Trevor has already starting delivering some excellent thinking on the complex challenges facing workplace communication.

The diversity of the PR business means that many of us are focused on specific fields without an in-depth understanding of the issues faced by our fellow practitioners.  The PR community is made up of thousands of professionals who have a completely different set of challenges and expertise. 

This is one diverse profession and although the public perception of PR is spending every hour of every day on the phones with journalists, for many PR people it’s the exception rather than the rule.

RSS moves closer to mainstream…

Well RSS gots some well deserved attention during the weekend with an AP story  “Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing“.

The story prompted some lively discussion on Slashdot and PR blogger Greg Brooks bravely got involved.

The story is very upbeat and features practically every major blogger on the Internet…

“Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?” Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. “It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.”

Of course RSS isn’t mainstream, you could argue (in awful 1990’s parlance) it hasn’t even crossed the chasm, but it’s certainly reached the edge.

What does this mean for PR people? Right now it’s still in it’s early stages, but it’s no harm to begin offering corporate news over RSS. You might be surprised with the results.

PR isn't getting any easier

The job of a Public Relations practitioner can be defined in many ways. One of the better ones is: “Managing the relationship between an organization and its publics.”

In essence, PR is responsible for communications between an organization and its customers, media, staff etc. That’s a nice tight specification eh?

The increasing flood of information, shrinking editorial pages and the rising pressure of our daily lives all contribute to make Public Relations a more stressed occupation. Though as massochists, we obviously still enjoy it.

Rick Bruner has posted a piece which highlights how important it is for PR people to understand the tools at their command and how to best use them.

Rick has berated PR people in the past and we’ve enjoyed some lively back-and-forth. His latest concern surrounds a request from a PR agency for more information on his interests.

His posting raises some interesting issues.

In this day and age, everyone expects to recieve relevant information.  If it’s irrelevant, people consider it as spam. As a result PR agencies need to have an understanding of what areas and issues journalists, analysts and opinion formers are interested in.

That’s simple enough.  But how do you fill in the blanks? Let’s look at Rick’s case.

  • The agency in question wants to better understand his interests (good)
  • They have sent him four e-mails in six months requesting the information (bad)
  • They didn’t acknowledge that he once replied (albeit with a URL of a Google search for him) (bad)
  • They state that he “landed in their database” (bad)
  • They offer a link to their clients for him to view their market areas (neutral)

The lesson here is that people have less time. As a result anything that isn’t directly related to work is potential waste, this is particularly true for the media. If you want to know more about a journalist for example, use Google, use an online media database and read what they’ve written. That should make it very clear what they need or want.

If none of those techniques work, then it may be worth a quick call.  What you need to avoid is becoming a pest. I think it’s acceptable, if you’ve exhausted other methods, to contact a journalist to find out their interests, but don’t keep doing it a-la Plaxo. If you want to meet a journalist then contact them and say so.

You see, people expect you to be able to use the technology at your fingertips to remove the need for troublesome contact.  Save your media liaison for your clients or serious relationship building. Automated database requests aren’t productive.

Now before anyone gives me grief, I know some journalists welcome an opportunity to meet with PR people for relationship building etc. but there’s a lot of us and we need to make sure we maximize the benefits of our activity.

Grumpy Old PR People…

RLM PR produces an entertaining monthly newsletter with their opinions on the PR business.  I regularly cover it here and often I disagree with some of their opinions, but I enjoy their writing all the same.  This month’s issue has a story by Erin Mitchell, RLM’s Director of Business Development, on the Melrose Place generation. In effect it bemoans many of the attitudes of our younger colleagues. It’s an amusing piece.

The article reminded me of an off-beat documentary on the BBC called “Grumpy Old Men” where a collection of high profile British men in their forties and fifies moan about how the world is changing for the worse.  It was fantastic series, very funny and illustrated how although we are living longer, healthier and happier lives, we’re getting grumpier at an earlier age.

I know this of course because I’m 33 and I know I’m getting grumpy already!

The changing face of Public Relations

Michael Wolf, who works in the PR team for Microsoft’s XBox has a very interesting post on PR.

Michael is a former poacher turned gamekeeper and he shares his views on the PR business from someone, who like many practitioners, used to be at the business end of your PR activities.

“I know that I have a lot to learn, even after doing this for the last two and a half years. But I do have one leg up � I�m not constrained by the methods and tactics of an older generation of PR veterans.”

Trackable RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds are certainly growing in popularity. One of the problems with RSS feeds that it’s hard to differentiate between individuals who may have subscribed to your RSS feed and existing subscribers who are refreshing your feed in their RSS reader.

In effect, both the subscriber and the refresher are all accounted as “hits” or “page views” on your RSS feed.

To give an example, if my RSS feed link got 20,000 hits yesterday, that could be 20,000 people accessing the feed once, 1 person accessing the feed 20,000 times or more likely something in between. It’s not very accurate.

At the highest level of course you can track the absolute number and make assumptions based on the growth or decline of hits on your RSS feed link, but it’s not very accurate, making it unique in an online world where you can track content and visits far more accurately than in the “real world”.

So when I read that IMN Inc (formerly iMakeNews) have announced (PDF only) a trackable RSS feed service I was intrigued. A way of tracking RSS success.  Fantastic.

However, when I went to their site, and from the story in ClickZ it seems that all they do is publish your content to an RSS feed and count the hits.

“We’ve encoded all the links — usually with an RSS feed you get a subject of an article and a link. Every link provided is a unique trackable link. When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it. And when you click to read a particular article we register that,” Goodwin said.

That’s not exactly pushing the technological envelope on RSS measurement then…. unless I am misunderstanding it.

It was all much better in my day…

We should all learn from the lessons of the past. That’s been written so many times it is practically a cliche.

I am always interested in discovering about how Public Relations was practised in the past.  I’m sure there’s a lot of knowledge that could be applied today and probably a lot that’s irrelevant.

Bringing together the best traditional PR practices with the latest communications tools and technologies is the responsibility of every PR practitioner.  Whether it’s communicating online via e-mail or using blogs, many new developments can help the PR process become more effective.

Two PR-related stories prompted this ramble.

First of all, Aaron D. Cushman a retired Chicago PR man who started his career in the 1940’s has published a book that’s part handbook and part biography. From the article in Chicago Sun Times is appears Mr. Cushman was first and foremost a publicist.

He bemoans the lack of creativity in PR:

“Many of the young people entering the business today can write, Cushman said, “but there are very few idea people.”

Though he was probably heartened to see Janet’s performance at the superbowl. Ah yes the age old publicity stunt.

And Mr. Cushman isn’t impressed by practitioners today:

Planned or not, a lot of the fun seems to have gone out of the public relations business in the years since Cushman’s exit. Now it’s a more buttoned-down, altogether duller affair filled with rote press releases, and many young practitioners who don’t seem to share Cushman’s zest for the business. Or his professional savvy.

Unfortunately, I don’t get much opportunity to have wildlife attend product launches….

But he does offer some sound advice such as.. “knowing columnists’ styles and deadlines, leveling with editorial contacts, and being scrupulously fair.”

All good right and true in my humble opinion.

Then I discovered a fantastic story in the Tallahassee Democrat on how new technology is influencing PR practices in the legislative process.

“If you’re not using the latest technology and every tool available,” says (Karen) Moore (of Moore Consulting), “then you are short-changing your client.”

Instant communication means lawmakers can be in constant touch with constituents, and lobbyists can see the latest tracking polls.

But for all of the technological advances, there is one constant that remains unchanged and critical to the success of any public-relations campaign, says Gail Stansberry-Ziffer of Ziffer Marketing & Communications.

“I think the human touch is much more important,” says Stansberry-Ziffer, who counts Anheuser-Busch among her firm’s clients. “It’s important to maintain that personal contact with people.”

I think that sums it up nicely. 

Our challenge, ladies and gentlemen, is to take the very best traditional practices of our profession and marry them with new technology that can help us to reach our audience(s) faster and more efficiently. 

There is still room for the PR stunts, creativity, structured analysis, strong writing skills and the art of oration. But today we also have a whole new toolkit to deliver that information. Now that’s good news.