This weblog attempts to shine a brighter light on the subtle role public relations plays in politics, popular culture, journalism, business/finance, entertainment, technology, social media, consumer marketing and sports.
Penenberg joins PandoDaily (Illustration by Hallie Bateman)
Leave it to Jeff Domansky (aka @theprcoach) to draw this blogger's attention to a rant by one of the more astute observers of today's tech scene - Sarah Lacy (aka @sarahcuda).
Writing for her thought-leading tech news site PandoDaily (which just hiredFast Company's Adam Penenberg as its editor), Ms. Lacy rails into some PR numbnut who had the temerity to request that the site reprint a pre-packaged "news" article about his client:
"The email:
'We are looking to release this story next week and wanted to see if you would cover it. We are an Angelpad company that has now pivoted and were recommended to connect with you.
Here is what we got written up. Do you think we can get this or something similar out by next Tuesday?'
PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacy
In case you are not sufficiently outraged, let me explain what just went down. A company pivoted (read: failed) and decided it wanted some positive press. So it paid someone to write a story. Not a press release or a guest post, an actual fake news story, paid for and produced by the company. And it is now sending it around to tech blogs, asking if people who have forgone easier and more lucrative careers choosing instead to report and write news for a living can just cut and paste it under their own bylines. Or, you know, 'something similar.'"
Much has been written about today's new marketing paradigm wherein executives grapple with the interplay between earned, owned and paid media to advance their clients' interests. From my earliest days in the PR biz, we had to "earn" the attention of editorial decisionmakers. As the tools to create and syndicate "owned" content proliferated, organizations, companies and individuals morphed into media companies, as Tom Foremski declared.
Sometimes paid content can lead to earned content as Richard Edelman recounts in his post about how a paid deal with Buzzfeed catalyzed editorial coverage (and social buzz) for Edelman client Schick.
In fact, I've written previously that one might measure his or her success by the amount of social buzz such an integrated campaign generates. (But that's a post for another day.)
In recent years, we've seen a hybrid of earned and owned media emerge that's a bi-product of new journalism models. I wrote a while back about how The Huffington Post has redefined journalism through content aggregation and by publishing bylined articles from outside experts (paid and otherwise).
Lewis D'Vorkin
And just this week, Forbes.com's Lewis D'Vorkin, no stranger to traditional journalism, described the renewed vitality his site has experienced with its model featuring outside non-staff contributors (of which this blogger is one). My pal Dorian Benkoil captured it in a MediaShift piece yesterday.
But back to Sarah Lacy's take-down of a naive PR person who didn't do his homework when trying to earn Ms. Lacy's editorial affections. Earning media coverage is alive and well, but it entails a most delicate dance with often unwilling partners who have little patience for those who don't get how real journalism works. Sarah Lacy added:
"What’s more: This is not the only request like this we got this week. It’s actually becoming a mini-trend. Increasingly over the last few months I find myself saying the words, “Let me explain how an independent press works to you…” and “My staff works for me, not you. It’s going to go down like this, or we’re not going to do the story at all…” and “No, you can not read the story and offer feedback before it runs.” I doubt I would have to give this many lectures on the fourth estate, if I made a time machine and traveled back to cover startups in the USSR."
And I'm delighted to hear it. I'd much prefer an independent press taking the time to properly evaluate, and hopefully report on, my clients' product or service than some canned re-write of a press release. Unfortunately, the challenge to make a meaningful connection is as difficult as ever given the number of superfluous emailed PR pitches filling reporters' inboxes nowadays.
Ms. Lacy:
"At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you can get away with. Real entrepreneurs only want press that they’ve earned. They want blogs to question them, because they want blogs to question their competitors just as hard. If everyone can get their release rewritten on a blog, those accolades mean nothing."
Those of you who have taken August to heart and checked out of your digital information streams, a battle is brewing with everyone's favorite real-time firehose: Twitter. It seems that the digerati's lifeline is consolidating its power base by changing the rules that govern its API and specifically, third-party developer access to it.
GigaOM's Mathew Ingram
I first noticed this when my tweets stopped populating my LinkedIn newsfeed. More significantly, Twitter decision to exert greater control over its destiny prompted outcries from across the digital kingdom. One of the more pragmatic and astute chroniclers of the new media landscape, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram, observed in Bloomberg Businessweek:
"Depending on whom you listen to, this is either a totally logical and even welcome move by a growing corporation or a heinous betrayal of everything the company used to stand for and a sign it has completely lost its way."
The story's titled provided a hint as to where Mr. Ingram stood:
"Hey, Twitter: Shouldn't It Be About the Users?"
Be that as it may, Twitter clearly doesn't want to find itself in Facebook's PR predicament wherein investors are questioning the company's overall (ad-driven) business model and unusually high P/E ratio. Twitter wants to leverage its intellectual property (i.e., its platform) to monetize its real estate with commercial/promoted messages. But doesn't Facebook's walled-in garden already take this approach?
Furthermore, do Twitter's new rules portend the end of my UberSocial Twitter client? Is a Twitter API-dependent startup like Thirst flirting with eventual extinction?
Or as Jolie O'Dell posits in her VentureBeat piece: "Under strained circumstances, Thirst dares to launch a new Twitter app" She went on to note:
"It’s also a pretty big gamble. Twitter has asked developers — warned developers — repeatedly over the past couple years to not make Twitter clients for consumers, to not reproduce the Twitter experience in a new skin with new interactions."
Ms. O'Dell also wrote about another ("doomed") Twitter-dependent app called Twheel:
"We recently covered Twheel, a gorgeous Twitter app that we said was “doomed” due to its use/misuse of the Twitter API. Twheel is a consumer-facing client made to replace the official Twitter mobile app, and we loved it.
Unfortunately, Twitter has put the kibosh on unofficial consumer clients for Twitter; the only loophole is for apps that have 100,000 users or fewer. The Twheel team has just decided that to keep the app alive, they’re going to take that loophole.
And in an Internet economy where eyeballs equal money, 100,000 users or fewer still meets our definition of “doomed.”"
Of course Twitter's d̶r̶a̶c̶o̶n̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶s̶ retrenchment has much to do with its ad monetization strategy. If it controls the platform, then it can milk it for its data-driven riches -- or rather, the billions brand marketers will spend to engage Twitter's more than a half billion (and, in Facebook's case, nearly one billion) users.
Many will argue that the commercialization of these socially vital services rightfully sustain their very existence. Others pine for a utopian channel devoid of commercial interruption. Gee, wasn't that the crux of the issue people had with NBC over its tape-delayed Olympics coverage versus the BBC's live smorgasbord of programming?
I just forked over $50 for an annual subscription to a new, much buzzed-about social network called App.Net, which promises a commercial free, real-time socially driven information stream with an open API for developers. Take that, Twitter!
Personally, I think $50 will be an obstacle for many, and may change the democratic nature of the real-time stream. (No Arab Spring germinating here.) On the other hand, when last I checked some 15,000 people had signed on for App.Net's Alpha version.
So here's the big question: as Facebook struggles to gain friends on Wall Street by revamping and proving its ad monetization strategy, and Twitter maneuvers to avoid Facebook's mistakes when rolling out its ad-driven business model (prior to an IPO?), why not go the subscription route?
Even if each lost half their users, at $2/month they're both very healthy businesses. They might even start by taking a page from Wall Street darling LinkedIn by offering enhanced functionality at a premium. It's just a thought, but one that I'm sure surfaces in the vaunted halls at both social networks.
What would you pay for an annual (ad-free) subscription to Facebook? What about Twitter?
My Twitterstream was abuzz these last few days over this little app that could discern what percentage of one's Twitter followers were Fake, Inactive or Good. BusinessInsider's Kevin Smith took a look at "how many fake followers the most popular people on Twitter have." Here's his topline analysis:
76% of Bieber's Twitter followers Are Fake or Inactive
Seventy percent of Lady Gaga's 28.4 million followers are fake (47%) or inactive (23%). Rhianna, with 23 million followers, fared worse with 84% of her followers either fake or inactive. Of Ashton Kutcher's 11.9 million followers, 79% were fake or inactive, while 69% of Kim Kardashian's 15.8 million registered as either fake or inactive. More than three-quarters (76%) of Justin Bieber's 26.7 million were found to be fake (38%) or inactive (38%).
But Kevin didn't stop at these socially driven pop stars. He also took the tool to the tech set to learn that 15% of Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey's 2 million+ followers were fake and 45% inactive. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's fared a tad worse with a quarter (24%) of his 993K followers found to be fake and 48% inactive. Only 15% of Twitter's other co-founder Evan Williams' 1.5 million+ followers were fake, and 37% inactive.
The size of one's following has been an obsession of the social media cognoscenti almost as long as the Twitterstream's been flowing. A large disparity between your number of followers and those you follow purportedly speaks to your Klout. (Either that, or you're one stingy bastard.)
Klout, btw, just revamped its algorithm that ranks social media influence. My score is now 61 and I'm supposedly "influential" on "Islam," "Gay Marriage," and "Mitt Romney," which makes me think that Klout has considerably more work to do on its algorithm.
Wired's Mat Honan Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Recently, I noticed that Wired senior writer @mat aka Possibly Mat Honan proclaimed that he was jettisoning all those he follows on Twitter and would start anew. I thought it was a PR stunt, and in fact some of those with whom he soon re-upped actually tweeted their thanks for his renewed "follow." I soon learned however that Mat's Twitter account had been "epicly" breached. His digital life was erased and Twitter feed used to spew unsavory tweets to his 15,000 (now 18,000) followers.
Anyway, back to the premise of this piece, which started to look at the quality of one's followers as measured by this new tool that separates the fake from the inactive from the good and serves as a reasonable indicator of whether one has actually earned his or her following, as opposed to paying for them through one of those bot-delivery services.
My interest in this also was sparked by a newly-noted follower from New York City. This man billed himself as "a Social Media Expert helping consultants increase their social media presence and credibility so they can convert more clients." I had never heard of him nor did I recognize any of his followers. I ran the tool. As expected, 84% of his nearly 5000 followers were fake.
For a little fun, I used Listorious and my own list of those I follow to build a random list of influential PR tweeps. Here's how they fared.
A Selection of PR Influencers Ranked by Their Percentage of "Good" Twitter Followers
Steve Farnsworth (@steveology)- 70,000 followers
95%
Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans) - 83,000 followers
65%
Andrew Bloch (@andrewbloch) - 23,000 followers
40%
Brandee Barker (@brandee) - 29,000 followers
38%
Sean Garrett (@SG) - 21,000 followers
36%
I'm sure there are many PR pros on Twitter I missed here, so please forgive. As for me, I'm happy to report that 86% of my 5900 followers are rated "good." (Now if I can only monetize this.)
For more than a decade, email has endured as the preferred mode for engaging journalists in an "earned media" paradigm. Of course, the term earned media wasn't in the PR lexicon ten years ago. We simply called it media or editorial relations.
PCNY Panel (8/7): NY Daily News, Good Day NY, HuffPost, WPLJ, Buzzfeed
As much as has changed in the way story ideas surface in the media, i.e., Twitter, Facebook and other filtered or curated information streams, the journalists who regularly sit on our Publicity Club of New York lunch panels always advise the 120 PR pros in the audience to use email to engage them. The braver of these panelists even go so far as to reveal their primary email addresses.
Still the email inboxes of the most sought-after reporters, editors and producers overflow with hundreds if not thousands of emails a week. This has prompted some news orgs to establish generic emailboxes expressly for PR pitches, i.e., newsroom@mediaorg.com, which purportedly are seen by the outlet's key editorial decisionmakers. (Ping me if you've ever had success going this route.)
New York Times Bits blogger Nick Bilton
Two years ago, New York Times Bits blogger Nick Bilton lamented in a post:
"My e-mail inbox is a dejected, endless morass. It’s a desolate wasteland of unanswered messages that continue to appear like a never ending game of Tetris. I can confidently say I hate my inbox and I know I’m not alone."
"This month alone, I received more than 6,000 e-mails. That doesn’t include spam, notifications or daily deals, either. With all those messages, I have no desire to respond to even a fraction of them. I can just picture my tombstone: Here lies Nick Bilton, who responded to thousands of e-mails a month. May he rest in peace."
"I’ve long hated email. As someone with upwards of 5,000 unread messages at any given time, taking a quick moment to check email is like pushing hot pokers into my eyes. It makes me feel irresponsible and rude every time I see that massive number in bold, yet if I were to diligently read through each email I’m sent, I would write zero TechCrunch articles per day."
And yes, folks, we (PR peeps) are the bane of journalists' existence when it comes to the prospect of reconciling their inboxes. Jordan, to her credit, did not (publicly) suggest that we ignore her. She just asked that we shrink the prosaic fluff down to the bare minimum. She even offered up a before and after. Before:
Hi Jordan, how are you?
I have been reading your past few articles and absolutely love TechCrunch. I noticed you cover a lot of wedding apps, and was wondering what you think of the space? Isn’t it exciting, how tech is disrupting such a valuable and huge industry?
Speaking of, we have a new wedding startup called Wedding Startup. The service lets brides and grooms consult with real wedding planners online for a much cheaper price, cutting out the time and work of meeting in person and checking out real-life items like cakes, china, etc. It’s sort of like the Warby Parker for wedding coordination. (I saw on your author picture on TechCrunch that you’re a Warby Parker fan! Me too!)
Since the wedding planners can simply send over ideas and bundle certain options for the bride
Let me know if any of this sounds interesting to you. Our CEO, Bob Marriage, is available to chat on the phone today and tomorrow. He also loves TechCrunch. I can also send you screen grabs and more detailed information if you’d like.
Again, thank you so much for considering. We can’t express how excited we are to potentially be featured on the site.
Best,
PR LADY
PS. Where did you eat last night? The pictures you tweeted look like you had some delicious food!
Instead, an SMS version of this pitch would be:
Hey Jordan. Here’s our new wedding startup launching today. Link: http://www.theconcisepitch.com. It puts real wedding planners online to save time and cut costs. Like the Warby Parker of wedding planning. LMK if you want anything further.
To make matters worse for those PR pros praying, hoping that their email overtures will be noticed amidst the hundreds of other crying out for a click is the fact that you simply don't know the fate of your pitch after you send it. I do have some relief thanks to ToutApp, which offers some sense of whether the email even had a gander. After all, we just want resolution - good, bad or ugly!
Ironically one magazine editor on a recent PCNY lunch panel groused that she never hears from PR people by phone. Huh? You mean, the telephone? Yes. That's exactly what she meant...with the right story, the right reporter and the right time of day. She actually encouraged the audience to call her.
Aaron Kwitken, principal at Kwittken & Co. and "a fan of email," also encouraged the use of the phone for questions or info sharing "you have to think twice about." Here's a video clip from 30 Second MBA:
I feel bombarded by email and haven't known that phenomenon called "Inbox Zero" in years, so I don't like to be the person who is adding to someone else's Outlook landslide. Also, it's very difficult to convey tone and nuance in a work-related email. If I feel that the other person might take offense at what I need to say, I try to use the phone whenever possible.
That said, email is so convenient--I can get through a slew of emails as I'm waiting in line for my coffee, or on the subway during my commute to work. I've also found that many people (I'm one of them) don't check their office voice mail as often as they check their email. And, I find it's easier to have notes from a conversation stored in my inbox than it is to take notes during a phone call.
If you endeavor to use the phone in pitching a reporter, be sure to fully identify yourself at the outset of the call and be uber-brief, i.e., don't drone on without giving the reporter some breathing room. Typically a straight question will spark a dialogue.
As for email pitches to beleaguered journalists, presume that yours will go unread, which may require taking a cue from our marketing brethren in digital advertising. If you're not getting a click-through, swap out the creative, which in our case translates to a new subject line and body copy. Good luck.
Today's fragmented and Twitter-driven media landscape has created a significant challenge for PR pros seeking to earn their clients greater editorial attention. A fire-hosed and fickle media-consuming public has already moved on to the next news flash before most stories have a chance to sprout roots.
As ephemeral as things have become, clients still charge communications pros with creating conversations among their key customers and prospects. This is no easy task given the dynamic state of the news ecosystem, let alone the obscene proliferation of PR "pros" who have developed a dangerous dependency on the automated media database management vendors. We've all seen where that has led.
Advances in data management technology has spawned a number of new algorithmic-driven services to help media relations pros better identify topic-appropriate "influencers." I've been tooling with a few of them for my firm's clients and have concluded that no single solution exists for all of one's media targeting needs.
HOWEVER, many of these new services do offer real value and utility for surfacing subject-relevant influencers -- editorially and otherwise. They parse data derived primarily from one's editorial output as opposed to his or her title or media beat -- something this PR pro recognized a few years back as a better way to target.
Would I recommend that PR pros jettison their pricey subscriptions to Cision or Vocus (on whose backs many have burned a few journalistic bridges)? Probably not, since the titles, reported beats and contact info remains crucial. Then again, SalesForces's Jigsaw, at $1 per email address/phone number, may be a more economical way for solo and smaller practitioners to ferret out reporters' contact details.
Here's a topline rundown of a few services. I would suggest taking them for a test drive before splurging on a paid subscription:
"Now you can easily find journalists talking about your company, competitors and industry in real time."
Greg Galant and his team at MuckRack parent company Sawhorse Media recognized early on that Twitter holds a treasure trove of data that may one day prove valuable to certain professions, the PR industry among them. The company already has Listorious, a compendium of Twitter users searchable by topic and ranked by # of followers. In MuckRack Pro, Sawhorse built a searchable platform of Twitter-active journalists from the most influential mainstream media outlets, and more recently, web-only media properties.
MuckRack derives its mojo from the fact that it has negotiated access to Twitter's full firehose of data going back at least six months. (Most common Twitter searches extend back a week if that and don't include everything.) The company promotes itself to PR pros as follows:
"Cut through the clutter of Twitter search. See what journalists are saying about your company, brand, competitors or industry. With Muck Rack Pro you can search journalists by name, beat, title, bio, tweets or even the full text of articles they link to."
Pricing starts at $99/month per user. Here are pricing plans. A couple of drawbacks: reporter contact information is not offered, thus requiring a subscription to one of the pricier media database companies, and 2) only the most influential outlets are reflected in MuckRack Pro's proprietary database. Fine for me, but many story memes originate with smaller, solo bloggers or industry influencers.
"Appinions’ Influencer Exchange delivers a new and better way to discover, monitor and engage with influencers – not only those creating content but the people attracting the most attention."
After writing about the importance of influencer identification and engagement in a previous blog post, I was contacted by a rep for Appinions to demo the company's Influencer Exchange platform. He walked me through how to set up a keyword search to surface the "influencers" against any given subject.
The results rankings from the company's proprietary algorithm not only includes journalists and content creators, but others -- from business executives to politicians (i.e., from Steve Ballmer to Eric Cantor depending on the search). Of course, PR peeps are not about to engage Mr. Ballmer or Rep. Cantor to advocate on their behalf. Here's more from the company's website:
"The emergence of social media has made it more challenging to discover the top influencers.
Appinions meets this growing challenge with innovative and disruptive opinions-powered technology that identifies the topics, issues and brands attracting the most attention and the influencers talking about them.
We’re focused on helping you identify, analyze and engage with influencers."
A license is based on number of saved topics – the tiers are in buckets of 25 topics for $1500/month - $18K annual commitment. One can edit, save, delete, and cycle these topics at anytime. If the user needs more than 25, it would run an additional $833/Month or $28K annual commitment for 50 saved topics and so on.
Drawbacks: the pricing is high, especially since not all the influencers that surface in a keyword search are PR-engageable. Secondly, the results do not appear instantly. There is a several hour lag before one's influencer list renders. Are these lists humanly or dynamically created?
I was informed that the ranking algorithm was developed by Cornell University data scientists, but there were still some pedestrian names that surfaced and other more obvious ones that didn't. On the other hand, I uncovered some important and approachable influencers of which I was previously unaware. Finally, contact information was only available when readily findable and scrapeable from the blog or website, which seemed to be less than half the time.
"Promote your company, clients, or products using the only solution designed specifically for finding blogs and building relationships with bloggers."
When I first started talking to Group High founder Andy Theimer about his company and its methodology, I couldn't help but wonder how he arrived at the name. I can't remember what he said, but I knew enough not to ask him how he spent his youth.
While popular blogs are indexed by Google and some of the big media database companies, Andy set out to built a private database of active blogs by subject -- some 1.7 million of them covering the U.S., Canada, the UK and Oz. His engine ranked them algorithmically via a magic elixir of page rank, Twitter followers and Facebook friends, links, etc. It also allows the user to search by keyword and location. Some 187,000 U.S. blogs have location data.
"GroupHigh provides a simple, yet powerful platform for super-charging your blog outreach campaigns. Import your lists and let us automate the discovery of metrics and contact information or use our powerful blog search engine to discover the best bloggers on the Internet."
Price per agency (five users) is roughly $5K/year, but in September GroupHigh plans to move to a "# of blogs in the system" model (whatever that means). Also, to qualify for inclusion in the database, a blog must have a feed, some mechanism for relationship building, e.g., social profile(s), email, contact form, etc., posted in the past six months, and an average word/per/post count of >100.
A couple of drawbacks: with so many blogs in the blogosphere, it's a Herculean task to index and scrape the information from all of them. Hence, the results rankings, while surfacing some new outlets, aren't all encompassing. I also pointed out to Andy that he should not ignore the thousands of influential blogs housed on mainstream media sites. He said he would start indexing those too. Finally, I wonder whether blogger engagement alone drive an earned media/media relations campaign?
"Traackr's A-List identifies the most relevant online influencers for any topic or campaign. Our algorithms analyze an individual person's overall score."
Reach, Resonance and Relevance are the three indices that determine an influencer's ranking on Traackr's A-List search engine. The results typically include the person's name, title, location, a brief bio, a list of keyword search-relevant recent coverage and a look at his/her primary social/blogging stats and footprint.
"The "noise" generated online grows exponentially as the conversation migrates to social media. Instead of helping you access the timely, accurate, and actionable information you need, media databases and social media monitoring tools contribute to burying the signal into the noise of social content.
Traackr identifies people, not meaningless activity.
We instantly deliver the influencers that matter most to you, based on your targeted keywords, using our unique three-dimensional analysis for each influencer: Reach (audience size), Resonance (ability to engage their community), and Relevance (to your specific context)."
I chatted briefly with Traackr founder Pierre-Loic Assayag who happened to pen a post this week on assessing "influencer platforms." A good read. He explained that the company offers two services: Traackr 1 for topical searches, which are pre-built lists by subject (at $69/month or $300/year plus monitoring for one list/month), and A-List which is the "enterprise version" of Traackr 1 (at $1300/month for five custom lists.)
A-List is fully automated and surfaces via a keyword search a free top-ten list from the company's database of "a few million reviewers, bloggers, industry experts, etc." Users can run as many top ten searches as they want. If that doesn't satisfy, hit the "Activate" button to drill deeper into the open Web to surface a top 50, dynamically updated list pf pertinent "authors" of which some "40-60%" will have contact info.
There are a few others of note, and I could spend the rest of my waking days test-driving them. There's mBlast's mPACT Pro:
"Popularity is not influence.
mPACT® Pro identifies the voices who are moving your market. And they may not be who you think!"
I also penned a post on mining Twitter a while ago, wich lists a few more. AllTwitter just wrote up two new Twitter-mining (Klout-competitive?) services PeopleBrowsr and Kred.
Finally, let's not lose sight of the most effective means for identifying the exact right reporter to engage on a client's behalf: a simple keyword or competitor company search -- site by site, blog by blog -- to surface the relevant stories...and the reporter's name(s) who wrote them.
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