Social Overload

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A year ago, I penned a post titled "My Big Messy Social Life" in which I listed the many social media channels and the varied degrees of my engagement therein. It contrasted with one I had posted two years earlier titled "Socially Engaged" where I described how each channel was distinct and thus required different rules for engagement and inclusion.

LinkedIn was (and remains) the most liberal for me in terms of outsider inclusion, with caveats of course, i.e., no PR vendors, headhunters or non-industry strangers. Foursquare was (and is) the most stringent in terms of the circle of friends, i.e., no location-sharing with complete randoids. Since then, the list has evolved. Some have fallen by the wayside, while others have emerged as more useful. (My wife questions the value of them all, though she has come around to appreciate the organizational charms and serendipity of Pinterest.)

Last week, at a Wok+Wine event held at General Assembly in NYC's Flatiron District, I ran into my friend Dorie Clark who had just penned a thoughtful and related piece for Harvard Business Review titled "It's Time to Cut Back on Social Media." She made the point that as social media evolves, it no longer is necessary to be engaged in every shiny new object currently buzzing in the media-pheres. She wrote:

Dorie Clark

"During a panel I moderated with well-known blogger and tech expert Robert Scoble, he said there was no alternative to constant, ubiquitous engagement and held up a spare battery he carried for his smartphone, so he'd never run out of juice...Plenty of people agree with him. One consultant friend recently chided me for not being on Pinterest or Instagram — and like her, many worry they'll fall behind if they're not hard-core super users, or if they don't get in on the ground floor. Clearly there is a first mover advantage in some cases: Chris Brogan developed a passionate following as an early blogger, and Guy Kawasaki jumped onboard Twitter and became a powerhouse there."

Still, taking a strategic and time-managed approach to one's own (and his client's) social graph makes a hell of a lot of sense. Dorie reasoned that:

"In fact, we're now reaching a point where having a scattered focus could truly be deleterious to your goals, because you're only able to half-engage or create mediocre content. Marcy Massura of Weber Shandwick, who was on another panel with me, commented that "presence means nothing." Indeed, if you have a Twitter profile with 35 followers, or a MySpace page that hasn't been touched since 2007, it often looks worse than having nothing at all. (Personally, I just KO'd my Foursquare account.)"

I agree with Dorie, but also recognize that the personal or professional value of each new social channel cannot be fully determined without a reasonable test drive. This week, for example, Twitter debuted Vine to much fanfare.  The app does for short (six-second) video clips what Twitter did for short (140-character) text-driven messages in a socially shareable setting. Facebook followed (up) with a significant upgrade to its iOS app that allows both video and audio sharing.

While the early scuttlebutt on Vine has drifted into the porn-voyeuring realm, I am reserving judgement pending the app's ability to filter out all those feisty cat, ugly baby and mundane office cubicle clips. Here's a ranking of the social channels on which I currently reside, in descending order of usage. It does not include time spent penning three blogs:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• bit. ly 
• Foursquare
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Yelp
• RebelMouse
• YouTube
• Quora
• Path
• EventBrite
• Plancast
• Vine

Dorie's right. I probably need to go on a social media diet.

Protected Tweets

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During the nascent days of consumer generated media (CGM), communications pros obsessively focused on "mining the conversation" -- think Dell Hell and JetBlue -- and helping companies craft policies to avert the release by employees of defamatory, proprietary or material information into the burgeoning social and blogo spheres.

The rise of Twitter and Facebook almost mandated that companies lay down some specific employee ground rules, especially within public companies and news organizations.  For many, a macro approach seemed adequate, i.e., "Don't be stupid." But as my friend Perry Hewitt, chief digital officer at Harvard University, reminded me in a tweet:

@peterhimler one would be surprised by the level of variable interpretations of that word! (See also: "don't be evil")
— Perry Hewitt (@perryhewitt) January 22, 2013

Proskauer Rose’s second annual “Social Media in the Workplace Around the World 2.0” report found that in 2012, 68.9 percent of employers said they’ve created policies specifically for social media use, compared to 55.1 percent in 2011. Among the nearly 250 multinational businesses surveyed in the past two years, social media monitoring by employers increased in the last year from 27.4 percent to 35.8 percent.

Today, communications pros have expanded their purview beyond mining the online conversation and managing employees' use of their social channels. Many are focused on creative storytelling and plying big data to more effectively identify and engage audiences so these (sponsored) stories are shared in social media.

The need to create and enforce social media policies has been somewhat of a foregone conclusion until yesterday when Steve Greenhouse of The New York Times weighed in with a piece titled: "Even if It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected."

Huh? You mean if an employee wants to rant about his employer, or worse, pump up the company's stock with insider information, this may be viewed as "protected speech?" Here's the lede in The Times piece:

"As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online."

Apparently, this effort to loosen strict social media policies in the workplace comes from the National Labor Relations Board:

"...in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal. The National Labor Relations Board says workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution, whether the discussion takes place at the office or on Facebook."

A closer read reveals that the new rulings and advisories only "apply to virtually all private sector employers"...but also make it "permissible for employers to act against a lone worker ranting on the Internet." What constitutes an actionable rant is left for interpretation.

Maybe the macro approach of "don't be stupid" works better for private companies, and a more detailed (i.e., micro) policy of social media do's and don'ts remains valid for public companies, which have Reg-FD to contend with.  Then there are the news organizations, many of which wish to preserve their historical roles as keepers of the public trust.

I'll always remember The New York Times debating whether to break its long-standing policy and allow another news organization (CBS "Sunday Morning") to film in its newsroom. One concern was that many reporters had personal photos (some political) pinned to their cubicle walls. The Times ultimately acquiesced and the segment - marking the 150th anniversary of the Ochs-Sulzberger's family ownership - was a total home run.

Last year, I presided over a Social Media Week panel featuring the social media leads from Reuters, NBC, Bloomberg, CNN and The New York Times. One common misperception was that their primary job was to tweet and post links to their (and other) news organizations' content on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr...  The term "Twitter monkey" actually surfaced.

In reality, the more seasoned of these social media leads played vital roles in articulating and instituting the policies that govern how rank & file employees can behave in their social media channels. Now I wonder how the NLRB's new rules protecting the online speech of private company employees will apply to these journalistic enterprises?

Mega PR

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Kim Dotcom Mega launch presser/photo: AP

Few will question the public's fascination with peer-to-peer file-sharing. Services with cool-sounding names like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Grokster, Morpheus, Gnutella, BitTorrent and MegaUpload flourished among the digtital cognoscenti in the days when broadband Internet penetration had just started to gain real traction here and abroad.

Who could resist the idea of building at no cost a massive collection of music and movie files through the "benevolence" of others with like-minded, if not ill-conceived aspirations? In succession, these file-sharing services dominated the pre-Twitter media conversation, fueled to some degree by the RIAA and MPAA's maneuverings to shutter them with copyright infringement lawsuits.

At the time, I was doing some PR work for an organization called MediaDefender whose services were retained by the big content companies to make it difficult for anyone to download the work of their copyrighted music artists and TV/film producers. MediaDefender's sophisticated methods of releasing into the file-sharing services distorted decoy files didn't sit well with the all-content-should-be-free crowd. In a pre-Anonymous moment, they hacked MediaDefender's email servers exposing voluminous amount of proprietary information. Oh well.

Over the last couple of years, we kinda forgot about the drama that surrounded peer-to-peer file-sharing. Some of this is due to the success those trade associations achieved in the courts, and the scary publicity that resulted. Another reason may be the move to the cloud and the emergence of legal music-streaming/sharing services like Spotify, Pandora and Songza that granted access to one's fave tunes or playlists without the need to (illegally) download them to one's hard drive.

The file-sharing community, however, continued to thrive, albeit underground. One of the more notorious offenders, a big-boned German named Kim Dotcom, became a cult hero when the U.S. government convinced the Kiwis to shutter his file-sharing platform MegaUpload last August with a brazen raid of his Auckland compound.

On Friday, Dotcom re-emerged to tout his next (cloud-based) venture via a prominent exclusive with video that appeared in the influential Guardian news organization. Its headline:

"Kim Dotcom prepares to unveil new Mega site: Internet entrepreneur to launch successor to Megaupload at Auckland mansion raided last year"

It continued:

"In an interview with the Guardian days before the launch of the stepchild of Megaupload, to be called Mega and marked with a defiantly lavish launch at the same Auckland mansion that was dramatically raided on 20 January last year, Dotcom said the targeting of his site was motivated by a "political agenda" in the White House, brought on by pressure from Hollywood bosses to crack down on internet piracy."

 

What happened next is a publicist's dream. That piece spawned worldwide attention to Mr. Dotcom's new venture, simply called Mega. (I even heard it on New York's all-news radio station 1010 WINS.  Dotcom piled on his Guardian exclusive with a Mega "spectacle" of a press conference from his New Zealand mansion (see photo at top):

 

As for the MPAA and RIAA, CNET writes:

"The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have somehow managed to get the US government to take over the huge financial burden of policing copyright, instead of them having to finance it out of their profits. They have, along the way, criminalised American citizens. Whether this approach will succeed remains to be seen, but it will probably help drive file-sharing abroad. Mega isn't registered under a US domain name, because this is now too big a risk."

Mr. Dotcom likened his personal plight agaionst an "over-zealous" government to that of now-deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz (alongside whom this PR person toiled on behalf of launch Lawrence Lessig's Change Congress now Root Strikers) -- and Wikileaks' Julian Assange, now holed up in Ecuador. Politics aside, Mr. Dotcom's PR strategy to serve up an exclusive story to The Guardian, followed by an over-the-top presser, apparently worked. The coverage thus far is boffo, even though the site itself is inaccessible presumably due to over-demand. Ahhh...the allure of file sharing (and anarchy?).

Facebook's Presser

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Tech Blogs 100% Confident They Don't Know What Facebook Will Announce Tomorrow But let's all report on it anyway! rww.to/Y5NfFy

— ReadWrite (@RWW) January 14, 2013

Most journalists these days do not have the luxury to leave their workspaces to physically attend a news conference. This is especially true when the announcement itself is completely cloaked in mystery. "Just whisper in my ear so I may decide whether to cover," many reporters urge the PR protectors of the impending news.

For their part, these PR gatekeepers have done a decent job in recent years to make the news more accessible through live video streams or webcasts, some allowing remote questions. Embargoed pre-briefings (with NDAs and all) also help pave the way for a big one-day news splash.

Then of course there are the large annual confabs where reporters have a reasonable expectation of surreptitiously discovering something newsworthy. No guarantees, but the media herd has collectively decided that they need to "be there or be square."

 The most recent example of course was CES where every tech and gadget reporter I know literally and figuratively got their asses in gear. While no earth shattering news surfaced - unless a crowdfunded timepiece or an ultra high-def TV does it for you -- the meeting of one's social media connections in one physical place might very well justify being there.

Now there's this third category, which is reserved for those select few companies whose every move -- no matter how inconsequential -- has been known to spark national conversations.

No need for these companies to provide any advance guidance.  A simple cryptic invitation will do just fine to produce a quorum.

Dan Lons of ReadWrite, a follower of one such company, tweeted a link to his piece today in which his priceless lede read:

"Facebook is gathering the world's press to its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on January 15 for a very special, very huge announcement. Like, mega huge. Like, the-world-will-never-be-the-same huge. And because it is not yet tomorrow, at this point, today, nobody actually seems to know exactly what Facebook will announce, and this is what the tech blogs want you to know, which is that they have no idea what Facebook will announce tomorrow, and they want you to know that."

I won't feign to guess what "news" will emanate tomorrow from the Menlo Park headquarters of the world's largest social network. (Rumors are rife with the debut of a Facebook-branded smart phone or mobile device.)

All I can say is that it better be good. The crescendo of hype -- however unintentional -- is deafening.

PR's Mandate in 2013

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In a previous post, I referenced the abundance of year-end predictions in the PR, marketing and media spheres. Rather than jump onto that bandwagon alongside our industry's many pundits and prognosticators, I decided instead to share some thoughts on what I believe has been a short-sightedness by PR firms in embracing new media schemes to advance their clients' communications goals and business interests.

That post seemed to have struck a nerve considering the amount of social currency it generated. Yet, many of the likes and retweets somehow missed my main message. They assumed I was talking about the lack, or siloed state of social know-how within the ranks-and-file of many agencies, i.e., strategies to promulgate Likes, Shares, Pins, +'s and Retweets of client content in the social channels du jour.

While this meme remains valid, in a 2009'ish kind of way, my post purposely didn't dwell on PR agencies' social media acumen, or lack thereof.

Instead, I was referring to paid media, and in particular, the growing trend among digital media properties to accept new hybrid or native schemes that mix earned/paid and owned/paid content into their main news holes. Yes, PR people (as I make the sign of the cross), the time has arrived for the industry to consider buying (or sponsoring) its clients' way into the media outlets they covet.

Trust me, these outlets, faced with decimated display ad revenue streams and lower CPMs, will be all too happy to accommodate good storytellers...at bargain digital prices. (Who ever said that ad agencies had a lock on paying for placement?) Here's a quip from GigaOm's Mathew Ingram writing for paidContent on the fortunes of BusinessInsider:

"This is the same dilemma that almost every media entity is facing, from traditional players such as the New York Times to newer stars like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Some of the newer entrants like BuzzFeed — and even the more entrepreneurial of the old guard, such as The Atlantic and Forbes — are trying to use more “native” advertising formats such as sponsored posts and marketing-related content to combat this problem."

If a client's communications goal continues to be the appearance and propagation of its branded message in the media -- one that changes a POV, produces a business result or enhances a reputation -- the days of relying exclusively on a news or feature story to achieve these ends are dwindling. First of all, most journalists at highly sought-after media properties receive hundreds of PR come-ons daily, making the odds of your email being opened very slim indeed.

Secondly, when was the last time you successfully "placed" a story in which the reporter got it 100% right? Even with the most arduous pre-interview prep -- on both sides of the reporting equation -- there is always some information that gets misreported requiring a request for a correction.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the increasingly fragmented way in which the public consumes its news and information no longer guarantees that a boffo piece in the Wall Street Journal will set tongues-a-waggin for any meaningful duration of time. News coverage is just too damn ephemeral. (Even the unthinkable tragedy at Newtown has now mostly faded from the public consciousness.)

It is for these reasons that PR professionals should be striving to grab some market share from their pay-for-play brethren on the other side of the marketing aisle. If Buzzfeed, Mashable and The Atlantic are opening their doors for sponsored (owned/paid) content to appear in their news holes --- some even written by their editorial staffs -- then PR pros need to muster the temerity to ask their clients to pony up the cash to let them make it happen. (And I'm not even talking about promoted Tweets or sponsored stories on a Facebook fan page.)

My old friend and B-M colleague Pete Judice used to say that "there are many windows and doors into a media outlet." He was referring to a news outlet's many different editorial sections and gatekeepers.

Today that piece of wisdom can be extended to include those in-house sales teams working with marketers and content creators to help their "paid" messages gets heard in a non-commercial (quasi-editorial) way.

Is media relations dead? Hardly. In a future post, I will address this resilient (and still lucrative) PR deliverable with a look at new ways to enhance prospects for engagement in today's impossibly competitive (and reporter-hostile) environment. Stay tuned.

Liquid Gold

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Back in the early nineties, I switched agencies and found myself conceiving PR/media strategies for various products of the Colgate-Palmolive company - from toothpaste to laundry detergent. The agency change also necessitated that I alter my personal CPG usage habits from Pepsi to Coke, P&G's Crest brand to Colgate, and RJR's Winston Lights to Philip Morris USA's Marlboro Lights (or Merit) brand, among others. (Smoking was more accepted back then...especially with PM as a client.)

In my work for Colgate's laundry products, it was validated that P&G's Tide brand is the industry's gold standard when it comes to getting things clean. In fact, at the previous agency, I worked on Tide's campaign to find the "Dirtiest Kid in America," and the promotion that put a few real diamonds in P&G's Spic N Span boxes to celebrate the brand's diamond anniversary. Most had cubic zirconia, but when shoppers started ripping open boxes onto supermarket floors, the widely covered promotion ended.

Today, a piece in New York Magazine reveals just how valuable this "liquid gold" Tide has become. The magazine reported:

"At upwards of $20 per 150-ounce bottle, Tide costs about 50 percent more than the average liquid detergent yet outsells Gain, the closest competitor by market share (and another P&G product), by more than two to one. According to research firm SymphonyIRI Group, Tide is now a $1.7 billion business representing more than 30 percent of the liquid-detergent market."

Yet the folks in Cincinnati, who've seen some really bizarre things in their business lives -- including P&G's trademark being equated to satan -- were probably not prepared for this. Apparently, gangs are stealing the distinctive orange plastic bottles from grocery store shelves and pawning them on the street for drugs:

"It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product."

Putting on my PR hat, this clearly is a most unPRecedented conundrum. It's one thing to have a product tampered with -- like the syringes found in bottles of Pepsi or urine-tainted Gatorade back when the sports drink was available in only one color... I mean flavor.  I’m not so certain how I would advise P&G in this instance, other than to leave well enough alone.

If it’s any consolation, the company’s vaunted laundry detergent is being used as it was envisioned: to clean clothes, mostly. No bath salt off-label problem here.