Strategic Public Relations

Defining Paid, Earned and Owned Media

At SummitUp yesterday, I discussed integrating paid, owned, earned and, as a result, social media.

Media Mash Up: Integrating Chaos** -- became a fitting title for my presentation as I've realized how much change is threading through media. Classifying media types by silos, buckets or Venn diagrams is no longer possible. Even AdAge refers to it as "whatever it is that we're defining as media these days."

To integrate across media, marketers must be more flexible about how content, consumers and technology connect with a brand.

Serious karma found Pete Blackshaw laying groundwork for my presentation when he presented the following slide in his keynote presentation earlier that day. "His We Can No Longer Silo Media" slide details how a brand can drive earned media through paid or earned channels. This is something we've been discussing for awhile and it's interesting to see how it's evolved in just a year's time.

Clear as Mud
Social Media can be triggered by paid, earned or owned media. And social media can also be paid, earned or earned media. It's clear that social media is messy. It disrupts silos -- media silos as well as operational silos in a company. Social media is not linear. It is a paradox. Is it shared media? Yes. Spreadable media? Yes. But it's not something a PowerPoint slide can capture with some Smart Art. Not yet. 

As consumers, content and technology continue to change, we need to spend more time studying our audience as well as their online and offline behaviors. Mapping this against the sales funnel makes it easier to consider how various media can connect with customers through this cycle.

Iteration or Irrelevancy?
To better integrate something seemingly amorphous, we must plan for ongoing change. We must set aside resources, time and talent that can test and learn from the shiny new. If something new impacts business goals, it gets further consideration. Otherwise we risk losing focus on sites and technology that are getting a lot of industry attention. Planning for a constant of change is not second nature. It's not easy. But it's also the going premium for irrelevancy insurance.

** I kicked off the presentation with a mash up of Aerosmith and Alicia Keys to underscore how content and technology are meshing together to create some emotional connections with consumers. And I ended the presentation giving out examples of the first mash up we experience growing up. Music and candy go a long way to impact your speaker feedback forms.

Cross-posted to my work blog, Social Study.



 

Social Blurs Media Lines

In the article, "Wanna Buy a Blog?" Ad Age reports Forbes is selling access to its readers by selling advertisers blogs that operate alongside other Forbes blogs.

"This isn't the 'sponsored post' of yore; rather, it's giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand.

'In this case the marketer or advertiser is part of the Forbes environment, the news environment,' said Mr. DVorkin.

The product itself is called AdVoice, and the notion is that in a world of social media, corporations have to become participants and, in a sense, their own media companies. Corporations these days also have to face the practical problem of fewer business reporters left to pitch. 'There's fewer ways to get your message out and that's a fact,' he said."

Will brands buy access? Yes. Will readers react positively? That's entirely up to the brands. AdVoice shows how the lines between paid, owned and earned media are blurring thanks in part to social media.

It seems like a fundamental discussion. It isn't. Beginning to look at your content as part of a paid and earned mix is the first step to integrating all three. But even if you don't, the technology is already integrating it for you. Social media is designed to help us publish, share and syndicate content seamlessly.

New Content Models Needed
In the past, we neatly organized different forms of media in well-divided silos. But social media is messy. It crosses silos to create an ugly Venn diagram. Circles overlap all over the place and no one seems comfortable with it....whether it's on paper, online or within an organization.

Forbes is creating a new revenue stream. This isn't news. This is what we’ve been telling old media they’ve needed to do for some time now. If a brand puts forth bad, self-serving content, they're pissing away their media spend. Readers will gravitate towards good content and they're sure to out anyone trying to masquerade as anything other than themselves.

The benefit of this social media mess is that we've gained a new level of transparency. This isn't the equivalent of consumers losing the separation between church and state. Or old media and brands making a back room deal at the expense of its readers. AdVoice will clearly distinguish its content from editors content according to the article.

"There's a flow of content that's contextual. Anything can appear in any place as long as it's contextual -- that's the web and we are bringing that sensibility to the magazine."

As their options continue to multiply, consumers are becoming more discerning about the media they consume. Contextual media, along with curated media, will continue to morph the already elastic definition of content. Marketers need to understand the various implications and how this impacts their mix of paid, earned and owned media. But at the end of the day, this is more opportunity than challenge.

Influence, huh, yeah, what is it good for...

With apologies to Edwin Starr, when did the word influence join the commoditized dictionary with experience, integrated, solutions and the like?

Was it when the word was first used (incorrectly) as a synonym to popularity? I'm not sure. And I don't really care. But popularity is not the same as influence and ever since Fast Company's much-discussed "Influence Project" debuted, I've become interested in defining influence once and for all.

The Importance of Influence
At Empower, we use influence as a guide to our blogger relations efforts. It's an important metric. We know it makes more sense to talk to the people that count than simply count the people that talk about you. If you think influence is popularity, you'd assume a tweet from me was more influential than a tweet from Pete Blackshaw. And anyone that follows the marketing and advertising industries understands how flawed that thinking is.

All Eyes on SXSWi 2011
Instead of just blogging about it, I've connected with three other industry professionals to focus on the topic and present our findings at SXSWi. But we need your help. Please vote for our panel and leave a comment at the panel picker adding your thoughts to this conversation.

Please vote for Influencer Throwdown: Proving Influence Once & For All. Helping me clarify this important concept are David Binkowski, Krista Neher and Saul Colt. It's important concept. It's important to note this panel will NOT be the usual death by PowerPoint. We'll also have some constructive conclusions in addition to our strong opinions and energized group discussion. You'll have to register to vote and comment.

Our panel is one of more than 2,300 vying for a spot on the packed schedule for Austin next year. There are several ideas worth considering just from the Cincinnati area alone. Once you're registered, consider the following panels:

* Branded! Grocery Store Insights in the Digital Age: The team from LPK will be pouring some hard-earned insights into their presentation. You can't walk through a grocery store in North America without seeing some of LPK's branding and packaging work.

* Are We Not Men? Reaching New American Dads: Craig Heimbuch from Man of the House is spearheading this panel. Cincinnati Social Media had Man of the House at a recent event on community management. It's a great community sponsored by P&G with a lot of important things to say. I for one am hoping they can get dads portrayed as something other than out of touch buffoons in today's advertising.

* The Future of Nonprofits: Building Change-able Organizations: Randall Moss and David Neff will provide practical tools to create a culture of innovation within any non-profit organization.

* Rapid Prototyping a new model for Higher Education: Glenn Platt, one of two presenters from Miami University's Interactive Studies puts it best: "The destructive creation that entrepreneurs have embraced has put the traditional university into a tailspin. The presenters will present an explicit model for the future of higher education. We will examine the entire higher education eco-system and there are no sacred cows. The well-designed higher education experience involves theory, practice, collaboration, cooperative authorship, distribution & re-construction of knowledge, and radical re-thinking of credentials."

A diverse, world-class group bringing serious ideas to bear just from my home town. Be sure to rock the vote and I really appreciate your time and consideration. Voting ends this week. So I'll resume regular programming shortly. ;-)

Cross-posted to my work blog, Social Study.

The Press Release (a rant. for immediate release.)

Should the press release die? Or should it just become a social media press release? Hey, a press release and social media are like peanut butter and chocolate folks. Are you going to pass on a Reese's?! 

Um, who cares?!

OK, I understand there's a sh!t ton of money tied up in the distribution of press releases --from the agencies writing them and the blogs, conferences, workshops, e-books and teleseminars offering tips on how to write better press releases to the wire services and media databases helping to push them out (more than 2,000 each day on average I'm told).

The press release represents its own ecosystem of content and some of that content might even be newsworthy. Even the Bad Pitch blog recommends the topic as part of a balanced diet. But when the topic eclipses the industry discussion, is that balanced? 

There are plenty of times the press release is a worthy topic of discussion. I'm not overlooking the obvious need to teach, practice and hone our craft. But the current and steady level of discussion around the press release I'm seeing in the industry is comparable to a group of world famous artists constantly talking about which type of frame is best for their paintings. It's well-intended, but it misses the point. 

Rant, Party of One?
At the end of the day, if it's newsworthy, it doesn't matter what format it's in. Serve it up on toast...there are more than enough creative options. But the more the public relations industry talks about the press release, the more we have an answer as to why PR doesn't have a seat at the table.

The public relations industry needs to spend as much time on critical thinking, where we provide more value, as it does on the nitty gritty of the tactics. Maybe this rant is telling me the industry needs to spend more time on critical thinking. Perhaps it's the challenge of a discipline that must scale between thoughtful strategy and detail-oriented execution. But that's more of an opportunity than anything else.

The Impossible Dream uploaded by Sagesnow
Cross-Posted to the Bad Pitch blog

Journalism, Curation and Changing Face of News Sources

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
McChrystal's Balls - Honorable Discharge
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Two seemingly unrelated pieces of news help me make a point. The first is above from The Daily Show. Jon Stewart rails on mainstream media for dismissing Rolling Stone for landing the McChrystal interview. 

"The American news media finally realized they kind of suck."

Well the General had an agenda and Rolling Stone got the story. But I enjoy Ricky Van Veen's observation:

Here’s a journalist covering a comedian covering TV new personalities’ coverage of a journalist covering a subject.

The second story is more of a research factoid. Half of American adults surveyed trust Google more than they trust traditional media. And they trust Twitter and Facebook as much as they trust traditional media.

The research on trust in sources speaks to social media's impact, but I think the point it makes is the power of curation more than anything else. Twitter and Facebook is saturated with links to other sources. My assumption is that adults trust traditional media, they just get their news first from links pushed over Twitter and Facebook. 

This long post to make a short point is that conventional sources are changing. Are you changing your approach to determining which sources you pitch?! I've been hearing a lot about social media experiments. It may sound like semantics, but we should be focused on more strategic test and learn opportunities instead of shiny new experiments. And while this change has impacted traditional media relations, I'm not hearing about media relations experiments, much less test and learn opportunities. Our industry still seems focused on an end game that is increasingly becoming less of an option and more impossible to achieve. /rant

Age of Conversation 3: It's Time to Get Busy

Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan's "Age of Conversation" project is about to publish a third book. "AOC3: It's Time to Get Busy" could be available as early as next month.

I'm proud to note I participated in this edition of the series. "From pitch to participate – a new model for social media relations" is my 400-word contribution. It joins 99 other submissions from the amazing line up of folks you see below. The book's authors are a great mix of leading social thinkers, marketers & creatives -- new and familiar voices.

All proceeds from the sale of the "Age of Conversation" books go to charity. Expect more news here as the book is published.

Adam Joseph	Priyanka Sachar	Mark Earls
Cory Coley-Christakos	Stefan Erschwendner	Paul Hebert
Jeff De Cagna	Thomas Clifford	Phil Gerbyshak
Jon Burg	Toby Bloomberg	Shambhu Neil Vineberg
Joseph Jaffe	Uwe Hook	Steve Roesler
Michael E. Rubin	anibal casso	Steve Woodruff
Steve Sponder	Becky Carroll	Tim Tyler
Chris Wilson	Beth Harte	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Dan Schawbel	Carol Bodensteiner	Trey Pennington
David Weinfeld	Dan Sitter	Vanessa DiMauro
Ed Brenegar	David Zinger	Brett T. T. Macfarlane
Efrain Mendicuti	Deb Brown	Brian Reich
Gaurav Mishra	Dennis Deery	C.B. Whittemore
Gordon Whitehead	Heather Rast	Cam Beck
Hajj E. Flemings	Joan Endicott	Cathryn Hrudicka
Jeroen Verkroost	Karen D. Swim	Christopher Morris
Joe Pulizzi	Leah Otto	Corentin Monot
Karalee Evans	Leigh Durst	David Berkowitz
Kevin Jessop	Lesley Lambert	Duane Brown
Peter Korchnak	Mark Price	Dustin Jacobsen
Piet Wulleman	Mike Maddaloni	Ernie Mosteller
Scott Townsend	Nick Burcher	Frank Stiefler
Steve Olenski	Rich Nadworny	John Rosen
Tim Jackson	Suzanne Hull	Len Kendall
Amber Naslund	Wayne Buckhanan	Mark McGuinness
Caroline Melberg	Andy Drish	Oleksandr Skorokhod
Claire Grinton	Angela Maiers	Paul Williams
Gary Cohen	Armando Alves	Sam Ismail
Gautam Ramdurai	B.J. Smith	Tamera Kremer
Eaon Pritchard	Brendan Tripp	Adelino de Almeida
Jacob Morgan	Casey Hibbard	Andy Hunter
Julian Cole	Debra Helwig	Anjali Ramachandran
Jye Smith	Drew McLellan	Craig Wilson
Karin Hermans	Emily Reed	David Petherick
Katie Harris	Gavin Heaton	Dennis Price
Mark Levy	George Jenkins	Doug Mitchell
Mark W. Schaefer	Helge Tenno	Douglas Hanna
Marshall Sponder	James Stevens	Ian Lurie
Ryan Hanser	Jenny Meade	Jeff Larche
Sacha Tueni and Katherine Maher	David Svet	Jessica Hagy
Simon Payn	Joanne Austin-Olsen	Mark Avnet
Stanley Johnson	Marilyn Pratt	Mark Hancock
Steve Kellogg	Michelle Beckham-Corbin	Michelle Chmielewski
Amy Mengel	Veronique Rabuteau	Peter Komendowski
Andrea Vascellari	Timothy L Johnson	Phil Osborne
Beth Wampler	Amy Jussel	Rick Liebling
Eric Brody	Arun Rajagopal	Dr Letitia Wright
Hugh de Winton	David Koopmans	Aki Spicer
Jeff Wallace	Don Frederiksen	Charles Sipe
Katie McIntyre	James G Lindberg & Sandra Renshaw	David Reich
Lynae Johnson	Jasmin Tragas	Deborah Chaddock Brown
Mike O'Toole	Jeanne Dininni	Iqbal Mohammed
Morriss M. Partee	Katie Chatfield	Jeff Cutler
Pete Jones	Riku Vassinen	Jeff Garrison
Kevin Dugan	Tiphereth Gloria	Mike Sansone
Lori Magno	Valerie Simon	Nettie Hartsock
Mark Goren		Peter Salvitti

“Can I Pick your Brain?”

Disclaimer: This is a very specific RANT.

Hopefully it goes without saying that I love sharing my experiences, opinion and POV in the hopes it will help people. It's why I have two blogs, speak frequently and tweet.

But when I receive a voicemail or an email from someone asking to “pick my brain” it’s a fire-engine red flag.

Sending someone a note asking to pick their brain is the equivalent of saying you want them to work for free. Think about it. There's a difference from using other’s experiences and POVs to answer your questions and guide your efforts. Asking someone to essentially do your job is a bit different.

While having lunch with friend and colleague Mike Boehmer, we were trading experiences. Mike is using social media to help his stakeholders at the Hamilton County Job and Family Services. He also helps out the Cincinnati Chapter of PRSA as their social media committee chair.

Mike confessed that he started blogging to help decrease the amount of phone calls he receives from well-intended colleagues about social media. Everyone wins in that situation. In fact, Chris Brogan started blogging answers to questions he was asked so more people could benefit from the answer -- everyone wins.

When Mike told me he also gets requests to pick his brain, I realized it wasn’t just me.

So keep in mind that sharing is required for a network to, uh, work. Sharing is a two-way street and there’s a fine line between getting help and essentially outsourcing. /rant

Tribute To Guitarist Pat Martino - Scan 03 07 uploaded by Mikey G

Storytelling’s Link to Social Marketing Success | SummitUp 2009

SummitUp brought together some of the best and brightest in Ohio's social media scene as well as industry luminaries like Chris Brogan and Bob Garfield. Fueled in no small part by the passion and determination of David E. Bowman, the event was a complete success and I was honored to kick it off with my keynote presentation.

"What's Your Story?" details how the craft of storytelling can help us deal with the challenges social media creates. I consider these challenges a bit of a paradox as my slides and video will explain. But the very technology that is bringing us together with people from around the world also prevents us with truly connecting with people.

My presentation serves as a refresher course on storytelling, gives some examples of how it's being used in social media by non-profits and consumer brands in everything from big strategic plays to the littlest of details. It also gives 12 action items to challenge attendees to apply storytelling to their job and improve social marketing efforts.

Some additional resources from the presentation can be found here.

What's Your Story?

View more documents from prblog.

AMP, #PepsiFail and staying on brand

There's been lots of discussion around the iPhone App "AMP UP Before You Score" from Pepsi's AMP Energy Drink. Let me see if I can sum it up.

The Issue: The AMP app profiles 24 types of women, from "Cougar" and "Athlete" to "Out of Your League" and "Married."

Each profile provides unfortunate content including pickup lines and other information to help the user "score." It also has a brag function which allows users to promote and share their efforts via email, Facebook or Twitter. The app states: "Get lucky? Add her to your Brag List. You can include a name, date and whatever details you remember."

The Outrage: Needless to say, the immature, chauvinistic app has Twitter frothing. The vitriol is understandable. It even elicited an apology from AMP.

"Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback. #pepsifail"

Whether or not it's a genuine apology, it's smart because it:
* acknowledges the issue
* addresses the issue where the conversation is taking place vs. on the company's web site
* uses the #pepsifail tag to ensure the apology reaches the right people on Twitter. While some feel they should distance themselves from Pepsi, I highly doubt that's even remotely possible.

But AMP has done nothing else. And by not removing the app from the iTunes store, the amount of ill will for the AMP brand and for Pepsi has snowballed.

The Brand: It's obvious and understandable why people are offended by this app. I downloaded it to write this post and will be removing it promptly. But it bears noting that, if nothing else, it appears to be on brand. I'm not the target audience. Disclosure: Starbucks is the only energy drink I consume and have been happily married for more than 11 years.

But the site, including the Yo Mamma Slam and extreme sports sponsorships, seems to be geared to the same target audience. While AMP takes a slightly different approach, it reminds me of the positioning around Axe grooming products. 

The Strategy: The brand claims the app is a lighthearted attempt at humor vs. a misogynistic tool. But the concept and a variety of details in the app are a bit over the top. AMP knew it was competing with 76,000 other apps in the iTunes store. It even created a YouTube video riffing off the Apple "There's an app for that" commercials to promote it. AMP knew it needed to push the envelope to stand out. Perhaps they planned for controversy to fuel that promotion. Mission accomplished.

The Hypocrisy: If AMP had pulled the app, I can already see pundits like myself saying that AMP over-reacted to a Twitter mob mentality. Motrin received a similar rap when it responded quickly to a negative response one of its ads received online. AMP acknowledged the situation, something other brands don't always do, and they moved on.

We criticize brands for not responding online. Do we also get to criticize them when we feel they haven't responded to the degree of our expectations or even exceeded those expectations? Every "social media expert" shaking their head to the affirmative as they read this might also want to consider the cost to develop an iPhone app and then shelve it.

The Bottom Line: Does Motrin Moms set up the expectation that brands must instantly go to extremes when negative conversations first pop up? Perhaps, but I think Motrin Moms did so because its target audience was up in arms – the very consumers they’re trying to get buy their product. And, while I agree that the app is in poor taste, this does not appear to be a similar case.

I'm impressed by brands that use Twitter to monitor the conversation and respond as quickly as possible. But at the risk of increasing ire, I'm not sure AMP should remove the app. I think this is a new wrinkle. Brands might not be able to do everything we want. Or they simply might not be willing to do everything we want -- when we're not the target consumer.

We’re certainly reinforcing AMPs stance by drawing even more attention and Google juice to the application. That’s the real energy drink fueling this conversation.

AMP assumed its app would be ignored during the concepting stage. They designed it to get attention. Perhaps the lesson is that the proper response from Twitter, and consumers like me, is to do the exact opposite of our reaction up to this point. We should move from outrage to silence.

Considering Blended Media

My last few posts detail how the old approach to media outreach isn’t working with bloggers and how blogger relations takes more time compared to traditional media relations.

Add to this recent FTC Guidelines and anyone moving from pitching traditional media to building relationships with bloggers needs to revisit their plans.

One thing that hasn’t changed is client needs. They have to justify their marketing spend – even defend it when investing in social media. A 2.0 world of experimentation and soft metrics has given way to the need for scale and a better idea of expectations -- due in part to the economy.

Paid │ Earned
These factors are evolving my thinking of paid and earned media. As a quick refresher, let’s define terms. Paid media comes with guaranteed placement and total control of the message. Earned media does not pay for placement and, as a result, you don’t know the message until you see it online, in print or elsewhere.

Early in my career, I kept paid media and earned media as separate as church and state. This was in part a reflection of my passion for public relations. As various marketing disciplines were more siloed back then it was easy to do. As the integrated marketing campaigns I worked on grew in size and budget, I saw how much paid media and earned media need each other. In some instances one serves as ground cover for the other as part of the campaign strategy.

Blended Media
Viewing the paradox of blogger relations and client needs, I’ve wondered if there isn’t middle ground that would blend some benefits of paid and earned media without coming off looking like an advertorial, infomercial or worse.

The topic was also  discussed during a recent panel discussion I was on with Pete Blackshaw, Dave Knox and Suzanne Tosolini at Cincinnati's Digital Hub Conference.

According to Blackshaw,

“There is so much evidence across the web that "earned media" -- consumer-generated media, social media, conversation, variants of PR -- is creating meaningful lift and value for brands that we now need to think more critically about resource and spending allocations.

“Here is an attempt to acknowledge that paid media often serves as a critical stimulus or even vitamin for "earned media." Moreover, in a world of crowdsourcing and co-creation, "earned media" is increasingly becoming a core input into the paid equation. Yes, we must always accommodate that fuzzy middle.

Blackshaw created the above diagram as a possible model for paid, earned and blended media. There's potential in blended media that circumvents the old ways of doing things with this new audience.

Collaborating in the Middle
Let’s consider some completely fictitious scenarios as examples. Sharpie does an excellent job of marketing their products from Susan Wassel’s tireless efforts and showing up at Fashion Week to sponsoring NASCAR and encouraging artists to push the limits using their products.

So for their next product launch, instead of bombing bloggers with product samples, what if Sharpie teamed up with Hugh MacLeod and developed a cartoon generator widget?

Sharpie would fully disclose their involvement. It’s not an ad or a sponsorship, but the end result is more predictable than potential blog posts resulting from product mailings. The pitch becomes a collaboration where Hugh is the creative director, Sharpie is the sponsor and the end result is shared across the web.

Some would argue that collaboration is the ultimate connection with a specific audience online. This is just one example of how funding gets to the end result more quickly. But it’s done in an acceptable, fully-disclosed fashion. 

In the Mix
Social media and blogger relations are still a nascent field. We’re applying a few years of experience against projects compared to entire careers in other marketing disciplines. But as we continue to build programs that do more than simply broadcast across social media platforms, I think we'll see more examples of blended media.