By Francis Moran
Francis’s Favourite PR Fictions started out as a presentation I used to give to technology company executives who always reacted strongly, and, surprisingly, usually positively, to the subtitle of the presentation, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” This fiction, that successful public relations relies mainly on the existing relationships I might have with the media and analysts my client needs to reach, has always been top of the list because, as I wrote in a previous post, it continues to persist despite ample everyday evidence to the contrary.
I am moved to come back to it today because belief in this fiction leads to the extraordinary comment I heard a few months ago from a highly paid marketing consultant and author who said she had to hire a new PR agency every 90 days because that’s how long it took each agency to exhaust its contacts. She was openly skeptical of my contention that a good PR agency was worth much more than just its contacts, and should be able to pitch her story anywhere it deserved to be covered. She couldn’t see how her own approach to agency selection was guaranteeing the lousy results she had come to expect. However, I wrote it off at the time as just a more extreme outcome of this favourite fiction of mine.
Then I was gobsmacked to read more recently that this idea that PR agencies must be replaced every three months or so enjoyed a wider currency, and even more astonished to read it in a blog post by respected social media commentator and publisher, Jeff Pulver. While I can easily endorse much of what Pulver wrote about his interactions with public relations agencies, especially his demand that they state up front what they are going to achieve in return for a client’s investment, I am in profound disagreement with his comment, “Most PR firms are good for one time thru (sic) their rolodex which translates into a 60-90 day shelf life.”
Now, Pulver is a success, and I assume he got there because, among other evident talents, he is a professional. I state this caveat not to brown nose but because I’m about to hoist him on his own petard and I’m hoping he’s professional enough that it doesn’t come back to bite me.
Here’s what I mean.
A little over a year ago, we were retained by a new client whose voice application technology meant that Pulver’s VON Magazine and VON trade shows were critical targets for our efforts. This was new space for us, however, and, as with many new clients, we did not have existing relationships with the journalists we would be targeting, including those at VON. While we work very hard to establish effective working relationships with our key media targets, having them is not a prerequisite, and that’s what makes this “It’s all about relationships” such a fiction for us. This new client was no different.
Starting with our very first pitch and continuing over the past 14 months, we have engaged successfully with four or five people within VON, from the editor in chief to the keeper of the briefing schedule for VON reporters attending the organization’s trade shows. Armed with no rolodex entry, just our client’s good and deserving story, our own thorough and hardworking approach and, of course, VON’s interest in what we were pitching, we have generated articles in the magazine, news briefs and other coverage on the web site and briefings at trade shows.
And the results continue, long past the three-month mark.
All in all, it has been an excellent, mutually beneficial interaction, exactly how things should be between flacks and hacks.
Bottom line, Jeff, is that even within your own organization your belief that PR agencies are only as good as their rolodexes, and then only for a few scant months, is being proven a fiction. I do hope this doesn’t mean we can’t continue to work together…
By Francis Moran
I could subtitle this, A newbie’s excellent adventure in blogging. Read on.
A week or so back, I reluctantly waded into the increasingly acrimonious battle being waged by some bloggers against the worst of the pitches they receive from PR folk, a contest that even the most mainstream of media are characterizing as a war. I believe it’s really a phony war given that competent practitioners on both sides of the PR-journalism fault line understand and appreciate what the others do, and know how to create value from the necessary relationship between us.
In my post, I cheered the bloggers who were naming and shaming the wretched. This caused my colleague, Gillian Brouse, to comment that, while she generally agreed with my sentiment, she was thankful such bloggers were not around in her misguided youth to call her out on the mistakes she made. Then, late last week, she drew my attention to what she called a “particularly egregious” example of a horrible pitch. I’m not going to provide the link here; if you really want to see it, you’ll be motivated to find Gillian’s comment and get the link there.
I’m not providing the link because my intent here is not to dump more opprobrium on the poor flack who was called out. I’m writing this update to share with you what happened when I posted a comment on that site, mainly in response to the many defensive comments it received from other bloggers and, especially, from PR practitioners who felt slamming bad PR was, to quote one of them, like “shooting fish in a barrel.” I wrote,
We’ve been commenting a bit on this whole hacks-versus-flacks thing our own blog, wwww.inmedialog.com, and one of our readers pointed to this, what she called a ” particularly egregious” example of the worst of PR practices. Some of our comments, and yours, wonder how fair it is for bloggers to pick on such easy targets. As a practitioner for 20 years, I say, “Bring it on.” Like the jackal who actually does the shepherd a favour by culling the weakest from the herd, having bloggers name and shame these poor practitioners will only make the PR species stronger.
BTW: Poor Tom Biro has missed the boat. This wasn’t a case of a “blog pitch gone bad.” This was malpractice from the first cut-and-paste. It was engineered from the outset to be a disaster.
As soon as I hit “Submit,” I had a momentary pang of concern that I had gone too far, especially in naming Tom Biro, the unfortunate flack’s boss, whose internal email addressing the problem had also been outed by the blog site. I’m very new to blogging and while I most certainly don’t want to pull my punches, I also don’t want to insult people or start flame wars.
So imagine my consternation when, the following morning, my Inbox told me I had an email from Tom! I expected a broadside of invective from him, or, at least, a mumbling defense of how his person had been mistreated, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Well, my hat is off to Tom. He wrote me a gracious and sporting email that made no excuses and actually thanked me for weighing in. “I completely take your comments to heart,” Tom wrote, adding, “I appreciate your chiming in and criticism of this situation, and this is yet another reason why I’m so strident into bringing much closer the way that solid media relations is supposed to work.”
And then, bless him, he graced us with a marvelous compliment. “Thanks for adding some actual value to this discussion, and now I’ve got another blog to keep an eye on by people who take their world very seriously.”
It confirmed my conviction that strong opinions about best practices in PR will find a receptive audience and that the blogosphere can be a forum for effective and considered debate of these issues.
By Francis Moran
We heard this one again last week.
Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell.
This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.
Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.
But if my client’s story deserves to be in the New York Times, or on the BBC, or in EE Times, or on National Public Radio, or on the Richard and Judy Show, or in the most narrowly focused of trade media outlets, it matters not a whit whether I have any kind of existing relationship with the reporter, editor or producer who needs to be successfully pitched in order to get that coverage. It matters only that I have a deserving story to pitch and the ability to pitch it well.
And if the story doesn’t deserve to be there, all the relationships in the world ain’t gonna make it happen.
Here at inmedia, we demolish this fiction practically every time we take on a new client since we invariably are required to add new media outlets, new contacts — indeed, entire new industry sectors — to our outreach efforts. And even where we have an established record of success with any individual journalist or outlet, we don’t lever the relationship; we lever our ability to engage that journalist on the only issue of any interest to her or him: the story.
So why does this fiction persist? I blame the PR industry. Truth is, you sell what you’ve got. And if you don’t have the necessary grasp of how newsrooms operate to effectively pitch into them, if you don’t have the deep understanding of your client’s story that allows you to get past the initial objections reporters throw in your way, if you don’t have the strategic understanding of why you’re trying to generate coverage for your client in the outlet you’re targeting, then the only thing you can rely on is your so-called relationships. So you tell the prospect that relationships with the target media are a prerequisite to getting coverage and you hope the prospect is an unsophisticated buyer who will fall for that.
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By Francis Moran
Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, is airing a special series on its national radio news programs called, “How may I help you?” I caught the first in-depth piece yesterday evening and I so badly wanted to call in immediately and share my endless stack of customer service horror stories. Many fellow listeners obviously felt the same way; as of late this morning, fully 279 (!) individual stories of lament had been posted to CBC’s web site.
The issue put me in mind of an article, authored by Graham Technology’s Frank Kirwan, that we secured in Customer Management magazine earlier this year.
As I was listening to the radio piece last evening and reading some of the horror stories posted online this morning, the key point that kept coming back to me from Kirwan’s article “Dissatisfaction is a greater driver of (customer) defection than satisfaction is of retention,” he said. And judging from the number of CBC listeners who wrote that they would never again do business with that bank, telephone company, travel agency or whatever, clearly it takes just a single outrageous example of lousy customer service to trigger that defection.It really doesn’t have to be that way.
Because we have been working with Graham Technology for about a year and a half now, and with other companies like PIKA Technologies and Vocantas whose products and services can help companies sharpen their customer service, we know that the effective deployment of the appropriate technology solution can dramatically improve what seems to be a near-universally dismal record. The irony is that technology implementations are often cited by customers as the most egregious part of the problem. (Bell Canada’s voice avatar Emily surely would be hung in effigy from city to city across Canada if she was anything more corporeal than the ultimate in service-preventing disembodied interactive voice response (IVR) systems!)
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By Francis Moran
It is with no small amount of trepidation that I leap into the latest eruption of a long-standing conflict that, invisible to most, has waged between journalists and PR practitioners ever since ink first spilled on paper. But when the New York Times itself is driven to comment on how things have turned ugly in this war, you know this has gone from bitch session to serious business.
The latest round was sparked by a blog post by Wired magazine executive editor Chris Anderson complaining about the hundreds of emails he receives every day from PR folk pitching him stories in which he has absolutely no interest. Anderson kicked the volume up to personal insult level when he went on to list more than 300 individual email addresses of practitioners he accused of being guilty of this practice, swearing that his magazine would block those addresses for all time. Some of the world’s largest agencies were on his list, as were many of our more direct competitors. We were relieved, but not unexpectedly so, to find that we were wholly absent.
The blogosphere raged with swift, loud, passionate reaction. Although there were clear exceptions, the PR industry tended to react defensively while the media industry cheered Anderson for outing these bad apples.
inmedia is unequivocally with Anderson, the majority of reporters and a distressingly small number of our fellow practitioners on this one. Sending a pitch to a reporter who does not write about your client’s stuff and so has no interest in what you’re pitching is bad for the client, bad for the PR industry, a waste of time and resources, and, most of all, betrays a profound ignorance of how the media function and how the PR industry interacts with that function to create value on both sides of the divide.
My colleague, Linda Forrest, weighed in on Friday with the unhappy implications this all-too-common practice has for the PR industry. Let me offer my view on why it’s so common. As a reporter for 10 years and a PR practitioner for another 20, I’ve been on both the transmit and receive ends of too many pitches not to understand why the good ones work so well and why there are so many bad ones out there.
Like many other things, PR is perceived to be a numbers game; throw enough darts and some of them are bound to hit the board. And with too many PR practitioners and their clients unable to measure the value of the function except in terms of the level of effort expended, then more must be better, right? Add in the ease with which today’s technology puts massive lists of journalists at the disposal of practitioners, lists that can be converted into seemingly personalised email blasts with just a few key strokes, plus the tendency, at least on the agency side of the business, to drill the labour-intensive task of actually pitching the media down to the most junior resources, and you have a sure-fire recipe for what Anderson and every other reporter who’s ever been asked about it hates most about the PR profession — bad pitches.
Maybe we’re just fortunate in that most of our clients can’t afford very many darts, so we’re obliged to make the most of every single one we throw, putting a huge amount of effort into ensuring it is aimed as accurately as possible at the highest-scoring part of the right board. But I think it has more to do with our conviction that every story has a natural news value, and that the proper telling of the story to the proper set of media targets will allow us to capture its full value for our clients.
I said at the outset of this post that it was with trepidation that I ventured into these roiling and disturbed waters and my reason for saying so is that I know we can’t afford to be smug about our own record. My colleague Danny Sullivan relayed just Friday morning the very positive reaction he received from a reporter he was pitching that day, a woman who said he had restored her confidence in PR. This is a not uncommon reaction for us. At the same time, Linda reminded me of the wire service reporter who rages at her every time she follows up on an email pitch.
Bottom line: There are many good PR practitioners and many bad ones. Same’s true of reporters. The so-called “war” between the two professions is waged exclusively between the bad operators on one or both sides. And clients, who want more, are not blameless is this, either.
