By Francis Moran
I understand very well that setting up straw-man arguments just to knock them down can be a useful presentation tactic and a powerful rhetorical device but at some point, if that’s the only way you can prop up your case, you run the risk of sounding as vacuous and intellectually dishonest as the bleating sheep in George Orwell’s seminal “Animal Farm.”
I’m afraid that’s the chief reaction I was left with following this morning’s Social Media Breakfast Ottawa where presenter Chris Greenfield of Toronto’s Clever Communications had an argument that regrettably distilled into the single phrase, “Old way bad; new way (by which I mean my way) good.” He got a lot of chuckles from the crowd and several tweets hailing him as a fresh-thinking skeptic merely by highlighting the most egregious failings of traditional marketing and communications practitioners and then showing how the brave new world of social media is totally different from how those dinosaur hacks operate.
Here’s the thing, Chris: Many — dare I say, most — of us old-school marketing practitioners understand very well that the opportunity to communicate effectively lives at an intersection of interest between the participants in the communications process. We have been working our entire careers either to build those intersections or to meet our customers at the intersections where they already gather. By definition, this means we must engage — one of your most repeated terms but not an alien concept to the rest of us — in a bi-directional conversation characterised by honesty, openness and the fair exchange of value. For most of us marketers, a social-media strategy is a potent new tool we add to a complete and integrated campaign when they deliver the ability to bring us to the intersections where our customers gather.
For all his social media eagerness, Greenfield seemed to be peculiarly derisive about one tool, Twitter, with an argument that simply left me confused. On the one hand, he told us that social media tools were superb at distributing content through trusted channels to where customers can actually interact with that content. On the other hand, he was critical of Twitter because too many tweets simply parrot content available elsewhere. Huh?
Maybe I started with a chip on my shoulder because I walked in a little late but in time to hear him say that “ad agencies are just like print shops.” They have made themselves undifferentiated commodity propositions that “aren’t partners (with their clients) any more.” Only social media agencies can play that role, apparently. Tell that to the countless stand-out agencies — and yes, Chris, I think there are even some in Toronto! — whose people are creating brilliant, compelling and breakthrough campaigns, many of them effectively deploying social media elements, that are creating massive value for their clients’ brands as well as their own.
Finally, I have to comment on one piece that I think exposes Greenfield’s whole proposition that what he is doing is somehow new and different. “We use 30-second equivalents” to measure the effectiveness of social media engagement, he said, suggesting that perhaps 10 minutes spent on a web site is equal to a 30-second television ad. For as long as I have been a communications practitioner, I have railed against the common and popular but downright wrong and misleading practice of measuring media relations results by calculating ad-value equivalencies. Now Greenfield suggests we take one of the very worst and most discredited practices in measurement and apply it to social media, an approach that fails to recognise that the objectives of the social media component of a campaign are simply not the same as the objectives of the television advertising component of the campaign.
Sometimes, both four legs and two legs can be good. Even Orwell’s sheep eventually found that out.
By Francis Moran
Two inmedia clients were among the finalists in their respective catagories in this year’s awards program by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation and at last night’s awards dinner, both came away with top honours. So our heartiest congratulations go to PIKA Technologies Inc., whose WARP Appliance, an open-source platform for the development of voice applications, won product of the year, and to Vocantas, which was recognised in the Technology Partnership Commercialisation category for the patient-messaging system it developed for the Ottawa Hospital’s thrombosis clinic.
By Leo Valiquette
No matter how busy we become and how far flung we are from the people we need to communicate with to carry out our work, there is still no substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face contact.
In recent weeks, I have been working on a series of business profiles that will run in an upcoming supplement in the Ottawa Business Journal. These are largely 350- to 500-word pieces for which I must interview the principal of each business and perhaps a couple of reference customers. (Nothing validates your business more than a good reference customer).
Considering the size of the articles I must produce, I could easily garner the information I need over the phone. It would be quicker and more efficient from a time-management perspective. But I’ve chosen to visit each of these businesses in person. They are all local businesses, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to interview the principals in their natural environment?
So much of the work I do at inmedia is with clients outside Ottawa and with trade and industry media spread across the continent and beyond. It’s refreshing to actually put a face to a name and enjoy the interaction of meeting in the flesh. A face-to-face meeting is by its very nature much more intimate and dynamic than two bodiless voices communicating across wires and networks. There is definitely something lost when you can’t look into the eyes of the person who is speaking to you. Body language is a critical part of any human interaction.
Nonetheless, we frequently have little choice but to conference by phone, (as I am about to do with inmedia client Xsilva Systems of Montreal, thanks to a service called Calliflower). And while communicating in this manner may not be as ideal as in person, there are ways to make the most of it. Richard Laermer at the Bad Pitch Blog offers plenty of helpful advice on the subject, and it all begins with planning ahead and staying focused on the matters at hand during the call.
By Francis Moran
I just got back from CNW’s excellent “Breakfast with the Media” featuring reformed journalist and now digital marketing and social media consultant Mark Evans along with the Ottawa Citizen‘s own Vito Pilieci, who covers business and technology and so is on speed dial here at inmedia. Both had a lot of value to contribute, and you can see a full Twitter stream of their better pointers here.
The bone I want to pick is not with Evans and Pilieci who shared a lot of excellent counsel about, in Mark’s case, what the new social media tools are and how to make best use of them and, in Vito’s case, how best to engage with him as he toils in a more traditional newsroom. Hint: Don’t send him a fax to draw attention to the email you sent to remind him about the voicemail message you left alerting him to the news release you couriered over! It pains me grievously as a 30-year veteran of the journalism and PR game to think there’s anybody in our business still operating like that but apparently there is!
Equally painful, though, were some of the questions from self-professed communicators in the audience who utterly betrayed their abject grasp of the most fundamental principles of effective communications.
Here’s the crux of the issue.
Everybody seems to agree that you can’t engage bloggers and other social media channels in a spray-and-pray approach that spams your messaging out to hundreds or even thousands of targets. Everybody seems to agree that it’s essential you adopt a personalised approach based on a clear understanding of what your target is actually interested in and how that intersects with what you’re pitching. Evans put it well when he said you need to “understand the motivation” of your target blogger who “wants to feel some love.”
What has me utterly gobsmacked is the number of public relations professionals who believe this is a brave new way of doing things and who are having trouble adjusting!
Here’s your knock on the head, people: If you’re finding it a real wrench from how you used to do things to engage on a personalised basis in a two-way dialogue with your target audience, you’ve been doing it wrong all along. How dare you waste your employer’s or your client’s money by reaching out to even a single journalist without first establishing their clear interest in what you have to pitch.
One poor woman talked about her role monitoring media coverage of her organization and how that now needs to be expanded to include bloggers, of which there are many, many more. How, she asked plaintively, do you figure out which bloggers are worth the effort? Well, exactly the same way we always determined who the genuine influencers were in our marketplace, whether they were journalists, analysts or other stakeholders. It’s called “research,” people, and there are no shortcuts and — Knock on the head warning, again — there never have been.
It is not a brave new world out there. But not because there aren’t exciting new communications channels and tools that we all need to learn about and integrate as appropriate into our strategies. It’s not a brave new world because those communicators who have been doing it properly all along are having absolutely no difficulty extending their capabilities slightly to accommodate these exciting new tools.
One final note: Please don’t confuse adopting a personalised approach with a requirement that you have a personal relationship with the target journalist or blogger or whoever. I went up after the session to introduce myself to Vito, whom I’ve never met. In short, he couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. I have no personal relationship with him. But he knew exactly who I was and he knows every one of my consultants here at inmedia because of the personalised manner in which we pitch our clients’ stories to him. We know what he writes about. We know his information requirements. And when we think it’s in his and our client’s interests that he be pitched, we pitch him. It’s the only way we know how to do it, and we’ve been doing it since long before the first blogger ever put pixel to screen.
Update: There is one important way in which the new environment differs from the past. In the old days, if you were a spray-and-pray artist, the peeved journalists whose time you were wasting merely ignored you. Today, you’re going to be publicly outed as the spammer you are.
