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The Marketing Edge, one of the longest running marketing and public relations podcasts.
Host Albert Maruggi weaves his 25 years of marketing and PR experience across business, technology and national public affairs in interviews with newsmakers, authors and business leaders.
Maruggi is a frequent speaker and conducts workshop sessions on new media. For more information or to discuss your business challenges and goals, e-mail him.
Patrick Strother, A long time, thoughtful practitioner of strategic communications and public relations is the guest on this episode of the Marketing Edge Podcast. He is the Chief Creative Officer and founder of Strother Communications Group and a visiting faculty professor of PR and strategic communications planning at the University of Minnesota.
The inspiration for this conversation was an article written by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, The Twitter Trap. In this article, Keller (@nytkeller) laments giving his 13 year old daughter permission to be on Facebook, and I as a father of three teens, can empathize with Keller.
The journalist also highlights his concerns about how Twitter, et al. social is impacting out ability to give serious thought to issues, demand our attention, and perhaps even erode a bit of our humanity by undermining “complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, and intimacy.”
Strother (on twitter @patrickstrother )and I talk about Twitter’s impact on parenting and the decisions that social media participation forces on adolescents. I thought this particularly appropriate given that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to explore the possibility of children younger than 13 joining social networks safely. This agenda advanced at a summit of internet and public policy leaders called the eG8 last week.
Strother and I take the conversation to uses of Twitter in building relationships with journalists. In his eyes, Twitter is not a pitching tool, but an effective research and relationship tool. Agreed. I also enjoy using Muck Rack to discover the journalists using Twitter. I read Poynter.org to stay close to the heart and soul of being a journalist in changing times. It pursues the agenda of independent journalism’s importance to democracy.
We discuss some of the skills necessary for companies to effectively participate on the social web, a place shared by journalists and company thought leaders. A place that can reward discourse.
The Social PR Paradigm in corporate communications operation should include:
1) Editorial planning as if you were a news organization for social spaces that feature your company’s expertise. I’ve talked about this for a while as the idea of an embeded corporate journalist
2) Read, engage, and comment on journalists blogs and twitter profiles that cover your industry
3) Gain a greater understanding of writing with a news , as contrasted with say marketing collateral.
On this last point, Strother makes a strong case in the podcast and is working to incorporate this concept for his students.
I’m a fan of Hootsuite, I enjoy the paid service and admire Hootsuite folks like Dave Olson, with whom I’ve interacted. Dave, you’re great! That’s why I was a bit taken aback by the email that was almost, but not quite an apology and explanation. (The Hootsuite Making it Right post was also an email to paid users.) Before reading on, if you are into PR and writing you should read the HootSuite blog Making It Right to which this post is based.
I appreciate the enormity of the outage experienced by Amazon’s Web Services hosting which caused Hootsuite to be down for “approximately 15 hours”. HootSuite’s email which originated as a blog post, buries the lead which is “We are Making it Right” and eliminates an apology, what no we’re sorry, really? That’s what would have been my lead.
Hootsuite is a social media company, you know the whole “speaking with a human voice” stuff and drop the corporate speak and have a relationship with the customer. If that’s the case, the lead graph would have been along the lines of the following:
We apologize for April 21 being such a bad day for our customers. It was a bad day for us as well. We realize that being down 15 hours and loosing data is unacceptable regardless of the cause. We are offering our Pro and Enterprise customers $50 worth of coupons for our social analytics reports. One of the reasons for this form of apology and offer is even though the terms of service agreement provides a refund for a 24 hour outage, we simply didn’t foresee the Amazon Web Services EC2, upon which Hootsuite relies, being down for 15 hours.
From this humble lead, then by all means proceed to explain how “stellar performance with minimal outages” Hootsuite has, or how Hootsuite serves over 3 million social networks sending over a million updates per day with almost zero downtime.
Instead here is my brainwave emotional meter thinking out loud transcript as I’m reading this Hootsuite email — yawn yawn, lawyer inserted phrase, whatever, oh, 15 hours is “significantly” less than the 24 hours in the contract so I should be damn grateful to get this $50 coupon, so long as I use it in the next three weeks, Wow, is it possible they didn’t say sorry? Wait let me reread this, it says “we know how important up-time is for you and truly appreciate the kind words from our users who missed using HootSuite.” hmmm no sorry there, but in the midst of a 15 hour outage you still managed to get a testimonial in your own “having a bad day” blog post.
I suspect that “acknowledging the inconvenience” is as close as one can get in corporate speak to what I would have preferred. That would have been a more owly like “really sorry that me getting sucked into the Amazon cloud wind sheer caused a bad day for both of us.”
Sorry to be so harsh on the post gents, but I still dig the owl. Now, perhaps because this was the words of CEO Ryan Holmes, such candor is inappropriate from a PR and legal perspective. Afterall, Mr. Holmes signs contracts and is held accountable, a cute little owl isn’t. And this may reflect the nature of how corporate culture and institutions are less aligned with the culture of social media than I would like to believe.
Twitter is, if not the default database for many marketers PR, and communications professionals, a very important repository of individuals and relationships. The ability to focus on certain individuals among those you are following and who are following you is critical to deliver content that is of value to that segment of your relationships.
Granted, there are many ways to export your followers, one of the first among them was MyTweeple developed by Shannon Whitley. He also developed one of the more popular Twitter, WordPress plug-ins called Chat Catcher. That tool allowed tweets and links about your blog post to populate the comment section of that specific post. In this podcast we talk about why that service is no longer available.
Back to MyTweeple. Over time a relationship is about getting to know individuals, treating each person and their uniqueness separately instead of looking at Twitter followers as a list. Yes, I am speaking directly to social media and PR consultants who think that a Twitter list is for blasting irrelevant blather. I do not subscribe nor recommend this tactic. More importantly to buyers of PR services, please don’t get the impression that Twitter is cheaper or makes it easier to find free advertising for your mediocre product or service. I am sure there are firms that will take your money for such a purpose, ours isn’t one of them.
Whitley is a thoughtful, passionate developer who sought to address the issue of how to better understand the relationships he was creating on Twitter. This was his inspiration for developing www.mytweeple.com Here’s what I like about it.
Format is clean yet packed with information about each individual
Includes Klout information
Add notes about each individual
Add private and public tags for each individual
Export data in CSV format for importing into other databases
The new site we discussed in this edition of the Marketing Edge podcast is now live at www.mytweeple.com give it a try and share your thoughts with Shannon.
Back in 2005 it really hit me that public relations was impacted by social media. Between a client (Technomic Asia) getting called directly from a National Public Radio reporter after the reporter listened to his podcast, and another client’s feature piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal getting but an ounce of subsequent attention, I realized the world of communications was changing.
So I did a little keyword number crunching and dug up this chart from Google Insights for Search. The Red trend line for good ol’ PR is not exactly stellar performance. If the PR trend line were a company’s stock performance heads would roll. Now I completely understand that these search terms are relative and in some cases public relations has more absolute searches, relative to social media, however public relations keyword searches were on a long slide to parity if not lower than the term social media.
I suspect social media consultants and PR firm executives will battle royal over which is which, and who was a leader and who was a follower. The inconvenient truth for corporate communicators, marketers, and public relations professionals is the two must coexist. In my digital dog walk audio piece for Tuesday, August 4 I reminisce about the public relations & social media tipping point, and reflect that it is not an us vs them world.
Here’s what i have found to be helpful for client PR as these two functions have converged:
Four Ways to Capture Reporter’s Attention
Identify key people inside a company that can relate to a social audience
Find ways for the client to tap the social web either by their own actions or mentions by others on the social web
Tell the client’s story on social channels
Create a multimedia newsroom
Reference articles and blog posts in your client’s digital footprint
I was worried that all this social media transparency would bring down helpful PR tactics in media relations. Among those tactics, speaking on deep background so as not to be quoted or even described in some way by general title. Imagine my fear after 10 years as a political PR adviser what this would do to adding value in several types of situations such as damage control, personality profiles, and adding texture to the details of making a tough decision. Not to mention the occasional attempts to poison the well, take down an opponent on character assault or the ever popular distraction tactic.
Hey i’m not knocking the tactic, it is however, used for good and evil. So you may have an open blogging policy, but only a select few can officially be quoted by the media. That’s a tricky one. Again just observing how organizations are grappling with an open information landscape.
I found it interesting in reading a piece in the New York Times on Conan O’brien’s strategy for his websie that employees were not comfortable going on record about a squatter using ConanOBrien.com. Instead, Conan is using www.TeamCoco.com to highlight his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour. Below is how the New York Times article referenced the issue from an April 6 article titled Web Luddite No More: O’Brien Hits Internet, by Brian Stelter
“Because ConanOBrien.com is owned by an online squatter, Mr. O’Brien’s representatives decided to adopt Team Coco, one of his fans’ chosen names, as the host’s own. They even licensed a fan’s artwork for the tour poster. TeamCoco.com is a single Web page now, but as the tour gets under way, the site is to expand.
“We didn’t start the fire; we just add a log now and then,” said an employee of Mr. O’Brien’s, who, like three others interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because he did not have permission to speak publicly about Web strategy.”
This is a classic case where companies, organizations big and small are moving fast, involved in potential legal issues, are trying to keep everything in check, so there may be strict rules on who speaks to the media. Some might bristle at the phrase “no have permission…” but taking a step back you can see where having roles in a organization will help it stay focused. I also believe it gives some leeway to both reporter and the individual being interviewed to have a constructive conversation without feeling scripted. Others contend deep background can lead to a pretty leaky organization which has it’s own set of problems. I will say, before anyone jumps my case, that sometimes an organization where people have access to media, but are not comfortable being quoted may indicate a very risk averse and stifling place to work.
Shades of speaking on background paint the reality of a situation and I believe play into the desire for candor that social media, and society crave.
Where do you fall on this one, can everyone speak to the media? What if everyone can blog, can they speak to the media?
In this piece Murray makes the point that sometimes as a journalist he was concerned his sources would not like the piece when published. He refers to some writers, whether they be journalists or paid writers on internal corporate publications, who attempt to sanitize the piece, not including candid statements or personality traits, that may well be of interest to readers, but perhaps would be viewed as embarrassing for the source.
In a section Murray writes “People, I have found somewhat to my surprise, want less to be praised and more to simply be seen—for who they think they are—and heard, for what they have to say.” And this is my contention for the concept of the embedded corporate journalist. Corporations will gain more among their employees and their intended audiences by living a bit more actively and willing to talk about the elements of decisions as they are unfolding instead of waiting for everything to be perfect and scripted.
The embedded corporate journalist must align what is news worthy, what contributes to the topic, with the expertise and perspective his company or client. This is not about “Spin Doctoring” which is the art of twisting the topic to the point of confusion. This is about “Topic Engineering” which is contributing to the discussion in such a meaningful way that greater clarity is achieved.
In 2010 Marketers and PR professionals must resolve their personality crisis. It is an issue that Age Ad editor Ad Age Editor Jonah Bloom highlighted at the ANA Conference this week in this 3 minute Ad Age video The issue is whether marketers are media organizations. Bloom highlights how companies including Red Bull have created so much content that they license it to others, they have also become the destination for that content like what can best be described as Red Bull TV
No they are not jibber jabbing about Red Bull this or that, they are covering the things their Fans, Friends, Followers, oh yeah, customers are into. It’s about your universe.
The same is true for public relations. Look, half of us in PR either were or wanted to be journalists. We either didn’t want to travel every two years, (that was my reason), or the pay stunk, or the hours stunk and the list goes on. But the idea of covering issues that impact people, industries, governments, are still all there.
I contend that 1) social community participants reward candor, 2) the web rewards fresh content that others find relevant as measured in one regard by links, with better search results and 3) we live in an on demand, go direct environment.
It is a huge mistake to interpret this as a green light to pummel the public with heretofore defined advertising dribble wrapped inside user generated content, however, it is an opportunity to reconsider what advertising and PR look like in your company. The world is dying for you to engage them, support them, be associated with something that enriches them; Help them do something that makes them better, makes their lives easier.
The interuption ad is moving from a blur you tuned out to an annoyance consumers will hate. Really, have you ever seen one of those pop-up ads that is over part of a website you want to click on? Not cool. From an advertising perspective, participate in what the audience is participating in, support its delivery not as a trojan horse where ads pop out, but as a guest coming to dinner bringing something they enjoy so much they wanted to share it with others they enjoy being with.
On the PR side consider this different perspective on PR, It would give you greater freedom to engage you audiences, more opportunities to be heard, and perhaps the greatest benefit of all, new digital information assets that are relevant for sales.
Another survey by PriceGrabber.com made the correlation of more than 50% of consumers that purchase from their site listened to podcasts. OK, that one to me might be a stretch, but hey it’s a statistic, a snapshot right.
This next set of numbers is considerably more solid.
Gartner released a report that showed Smartphone sales 27% higher in the second quarter of 2009 than the comparable quarter last year. Notably, regular mobile phone sales were off 6% and one can say with credibility the typical mobile phone sales trend line will likely never point to the top of your computer screen ever again.
iTunes alone offers more than 100,000 different podcasts. However podcast listening has yet to reach the potential many early adopters believed the medium holds. Yes including me.
The main gripe of podcasts by a significant portion of potential users was the downloading process. To me, that was no different than downloading music, but this one instance perhaps where I’m not average.
It’s Radio Not Downloading
Enter Stitcher Radio – a smartphone application that eliminates the task of downloading and moving podcasts to your mobile device. It is essentially just as easy as listening to radio. You download the app to your phone, pick a category of shows, then select the shows you want to listen and they play on your phone. There is also a Stitcher Radio web site to listen from your computer.
All types of programming are available on Stitcher Radio from mainstream CNN to social media’s staple TechCrunch to our very own Marketing Edge podcast. The medium of audio is uniquely suited for this time in history. Society is increasingly mobile, multitasking, and multiformat. The on-demand information is also about on-demand format. Companies, especially content providers look at the marginal costs to produce podcasts given that the content has already been produced. For example, CNN’s Paging Dr. Gupta is produced for TV, it’s nothing to use that audio on Stitcher Radio.
In this episode, the Marketing Edge podcast features Colin Billings, Director of User Experience at Stitcher Radio. We talk about the future of mobile audio programming and what this means for all kinds of potential business and consumer programming.
Live by the Format, Die by the Format
Content that is produced as audio in its original form is cost effective and can be posted in plenty of places on the social web. I’ve been a fan of the medium of audio for a long time. The Marketing Edge first posted in February 2005. – I’ve recommended that audio be used in a variety of ways, from general shows that enhance brand building on the web to targeted, niche information that is part of a focused lead generation cycle.
Reading what you wrote 4 years ago can be a bit odd, but this article in Brandweek in the spring of 2005 had me on the record for advocating podcasting for business.
The article caught the attention and criticism of Steve Rubel, author of the Micropersuasion blog. He took exception to my suggestion that marketer’s use 5% of their marketing budget for podcasting. I saw podcasting as an easy entry point into social media with a tie back to specific business objectives like lead generation, increased web traffic, and as a thought leadership venue.
Ok, I’ll concede to Rubel, my respected colleague from New York, that he was right, 5% was a lot of money to pursue, as he called it, “podvertising”. For me it wasn’t about advertising on a podcast or producing marketing pabulum in audio form, but instead podcasting is contributing to a conversation with an actual discussion about issues. More on the extension of this concept as it evolved into what I call the embedded corporate journalist, a new public relations strategy.
Nonetheless, Rubel, I suspect, and I both enjoy a good podcast and see merit in the medium, especially when smart people are talking.
Do you think more people will listen to podcasts if it is as simple as Stitcher Radio has made it?
Bruce Zanca, SVP and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Bankrate INC, has spent his career reconciling the agendas of journalist with clients, (e.g. employer). In his current position, he has connected the dots between PR and revenue. Bankrate is a media content platform that raises revenue through advertising. The number of eyeballs on the site are increased the more valuable information about personal finance is on the site other when other media carry information originated by Bankrate Inc which further drives Bankrate.com traffic.
Brankrate.com is in the top ten personal finance websites with information from mortgage rates and car loans to Certificates of Deposit and credit card rates. It is also a resource for other financial and consumer media and bloggers.
In this “Soundbites From the Road” podcast, Zanca and I discuss the highlights of using experts to provide greater depth of information and analysis. This is a good follow-up to the Marketing Edge podcasts with author Paul Schempp of the book, 5 Steps to Expert. We did a two part series with Dr. Schempp, part 1, 5 Steps to Expert podcast posted on May 16 and part 2 featuring how experts continue to learn was posted on May 26 about developing experts within an organization for PR objectives.
Zanca combined the use of a unique checking study Bankrate conducted, a financial industry analyst to provide commentary and depth of the study, and advanced top tier media interest (USA Today) that helped drive significant coverage of the topic. We put the pieces together in this Marketing Edge podcast. Last week, Bankrate won a Bulldog Reporter Gold Award for this program.
Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2009 Best Website – Business/Consumer
Gold Winner
Bruce Zanca, Kayleen Keneally, Chris Spagnuolo
Bankrate, Inc for
Bankrate, Inc “Bankrate.com’s 2008 Checking Study”
The current PR dynamic is comprised of the following characteristics:
1) less reporters (layoffs and all) to do more work, and
2) the potential for greater exposure of company produced information via search engine rankings, whether it’s a news release, blog post or podcast.
This environment necessitates having a bull pen of experts to produce content in order to have a successful sustained PR program.
As more of the practice of PR becomes exposed to all of the public, and not just the segmented silos of the past, it is important for corporate PR and marketing practitioners to change their perspective as well. A company that views how it makes news, not just by what it does, but by the contributions it can make to their industry and community, will have ample opportunities to get attention. In this perspective, the main challenge is to identify the experts in their company matching the right expertise, personality, and talent with the medium and venue.
This perspective led me to writing about the concept of the embedded corporate journalist where the company considers public commentary it can make about external events. Not just the standard new product or customer release, but commentary about issues affecting the larger world in which that company lives.
While developing this concept I came across the book 5 Steps to Expert by Paul Schempp. In it, he outlines ways to become an expert and the qualities you will find in people who are at the top of their field. I turned his concept clockwise about 90 degrees and applied it to corporate PR as a helpful aide in finding experts in their companies. Using the characteristics in Schempp’s book, it may stimulate thinking in finding venues to showcase experts to contribute to issues in the news. It is also quite valuable in developing a dynamic to personal and professional growth.
I found it to be an exceptional read with plenty of interactive worksheets that make the book a one-on-one experience.
Schempp is an interesting expert himself. He coaches golfers on the PGA and European tours, is a scientific consultant to Golf Digest, a professor at the University of Georgia, and president of Performance Matters, Inc. He speaks and counsels companies frequently which made him a wonderful guest for the Marketing Edge podcast. This is the first of two parts, the second part will run next week
The Marketing Edge comment line is 206-600-6887 and Provident Partners will donate a food item for every comment we get on the blog below or to the comment line.
repository of individuals and relationships. The ability to focus on certain individuals among those you are following and who are following you is critical to deliver content that is of value to that segment of your relationships. 
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