Ryan Anderson dot ca

In reading this post from the Fast Company blog, I immediately thought of almost every project I’ve ever worked on in my professional career.  PR is the art of making it seem like you know what you’re doing, and then being really good at figuring it out before anyone realizes you’re a fraud. 

"You need to reach doctors with your message?  CEOs of law firms?  Illiterate librarians with diaper fetishes?  That’s what we do best!"

I usually tell younger people who ask me about a career in PR that the only two things you need to make it are spectacular writing skills and to be insanely intelligent.  Not only to have a breadth of knowledge, but to know what you don’t know, and more importantly where to find it.  In order to make it in this business, you need to love knowledge.  When I think of all the useless crap I know about airborne allergens and carpet care, about the legalities of service marks, obesity trends and import tarrifs on chicken in Canada, I always wonder about what kind of useful thing could have occupied those byte sectors.  Maybe it could have been how to properly boost a car, or how to spell the word "deperate" right the first time.

You can stop pretending you know what you’re doing. I know you’re making everything up as you go (hoping nobody notices). It’s OK though – that’s not where your problems are coming from. Rather, your problems are coming from the fact that you think other people know what they’re doing. It’s an illusion that’s wreaking havoc in your life.

Imagine how much different the PR business would be if we all admitted that we didn’t always know what we were doing.  I can’t imagine it would be good for monthly billings, but it certainly would be freeing.

I’ll be honest: I was less than zen when I walked out of my house to find my bike had been liberated from its lock during the night.  There was a lot of swearing and impotent rage, but I’ve since calmed down a little, and tried to make the best of a bad situation by taking a lesson from the whole experience.

As they say – when life hands you lemons, shut up and eat your goddamn lemons.

The first thing I learned is that while social media can have an immediate effect on a company’s bottom line, it cannot shatter a reputation earned from having a good product.  My first thought as I held the cut lock in my hand: "God damn, I wish I had bought a Kryptonite lock."

The second thing I learned when I called the place I bought the bike from three months ago (yeah) was that the people you have answering your phones can dramatically affect the perception of the company.  The first girl I talked to was unsympathetic, unhelpful and generally unsmart.  I’d always been happy with the service they provided, but I almost walked away completely and bought my new bike somewhere else.  Instead, I emailed the owner of the company, from whom I had bought the bike originally.

Which leads me to the third thing I learned – a simple customer service gesture can make a lifelong customer.  When I emailed the owner, he offered to loan me a bike until I bought a new one.  They’ve got tonnes of used bikes in the shop, so the gesture was small, but at the same time, extremely meaningful to an existing customer.

Long story short, I’m buying my new bike from the same place, and I’m buying a Kryptonite lock.  That is, unless I can find a lock with an insurance policy that will hunt down the person who stole the bike and give me five minutes alone in a locked room with them.  I would pay any amount of money for that.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the impact of the blogosphere on a product or a company.  Some accuse bloggers of being rabble-rousing communists drunk on power, hell-bent on making companies run the way they deem fit.  Others view it as the responsibility of companies to listen to their individual customers and respond to each of them in kind.

The answer, it seems, lies somewhere in between the two extremes.

The reality of online buzz is that the only way to ensure that nobody talks about your product is to make it completely unremarkable.  There’s a reason that nobody talks about their showerhead or their favourite brand of toilet paper online – it’s because nobody talks about it in real life either.  As I have said before, there are only two types of people who create buzz about a product online:

1. Extremely happy people.
2. Extremely pissed off people.

The only way to get your product talked about is to ensure that your product, your customer service, your advertising or your company in general positively delights or angers your customers.  If you have miserable customer service and draconian policies, people are going to hear about it – and likely from Jeff Jarvis. 

If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to give great customer service, people are going to hear about it too.  They’re probably not going to announce it as often or with as much passion as when you screw up, but if you make enough individual customers happy, you’re going to develop a reputation for making people happy.  The same is true for the opposite, though that reputation is not nearly as easy to shake.

So what does that mean for the influence of bloggers?  The blogosphere is a brilliant barometer of your success, and one that people are going to check before investing in a relationship with your company.  In that respect, the blog influence is huge – bloggers have become global opinion leaders in their respective knowledge circles.  Companies need to listen to bloggers, not so bloggers can dictate how business is run, but because they represent a larger community, and will report back to that community how the company really conducts itself.

However, we must always keep in mind that bloggers are not representative samples of a given customer base.  Sure, the percentage of bloggers will skew high with various products, but for the average everyday consumer stuff, we have to remember that we are a specific market.  Sometimes a little more educated, usually a little more geeky, and seemingly more prone to outrage than the average consumer.

The effect that bloggers cause is for now, short term.  Companies that are most affected by blogstorms can easily bounce back, but as more and more casual consumers start to develop their online voice, dusting oneself off after a blog knock-out is going to get more difficult.

At the same time, bloggers must be careful not to tarnish the reputation they have developed.  Already, the image of torch-wielding extremists has been conjured by many critics, and if bloggers continue making demands of the corporate world, that image may sap the influence from the blogosphere one boycott at a time. 

Just think of how much stock the average consumer puts in activist groups.  That’s not what we want to become.

Companies have to remember this – blog buzz as a general indicator of where you stand in the mind of the consumer, but don’t forget about the majority of your consumers who don’t live online. 

The blogosphere is a barometer.  Ignoring it before you go out to sea could be disastrous.  Viewing it as an infallible metric of your customer base, however, may be just as short-sighted.

Only in blogland would a company launching a blog be considered news, but hey – I’ll admit to being social media nerd, so I’m going to write about it too.

Dell, if you’re unfamiliar, is one of those companies that we PR bloggers are talking about when we refer to clueless old-school companies who are too big and Hell-bent on control to ever enter into a conversation with their market. Apparently, however, there are still some free-thinking communicators with enough sway to convince the company with one of the worst reputations for customer service in the blogosphere to take that leap of faith and start a-bloggin’.

Steve Rubel, Jeff Jarvis and countless others have offered their (actual) expert opinion on how to make the Dell one2one blog work. Dell would do well to heed this advice. I’m not even going to bother putting in my two cents, since the big guys have said pretty well all there is to say.

I’ll tell you what, though – reading through the comments on this thing, I would HATE to be the guy who had to spend his time responding to them. It seems that every self-proclaimed blogging expert in the world has taken it upon themselves to tell Dell what they should do with the blog and how.

Ranging from “drivel” to “such a boring blog” from someone who calls themselves “Microsoft Employee,” to rants about customer service and complaints that Michael Dell himself isn’t writing daily (hint: CEOs are busy) Dell has opened Pandora’s box for customer conversation, and there’s no closing it now.

Here’s how I predict it will play out:
- “Everyone hates us! Let’s start a blog!”
- “Welcome to the blogosphere – here is everything that is wrong with you.”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we grow!”
- “Um… yeah… I was trying to download Comet Cursor on my computer, and everything froze. What should I do?”
- “In order to make sure that we can address comments in a timely fashion, we’ll have to moderate them.”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we continue to grow!”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “Everyone hates us even more now. Blogs are failures – let’s go back to shouting at our customers about how great we are.”
- Blogosphere: “RABBLE!!! RABBLE, RABBLE!”

*fin*

I’m of the mind that anything you have to say that can make you look bad probably shouldn’t be said in an email. That’s extra true when it comes to pitching what are essentially strangers.

I have had a number of emails blogged verbatim – most of them were pitches, so no big deal, but it nonetheless surprised me. When I came across an email from another PR person in a group I belonged to, I had one of those “this is so painfully obvious” moments that make you shake your head and wonder why the hell you never thought of this before.

His email was simply appended with:

this email is: [X] blogable [ ] ask first [ ] private

I think this is a great idea. Of course, if someone’s out to ruin you, a line like this isn’t going to help, but I think in most cases that bloggers have enough respect for one another to abide by the wishes of the sender. Moreover, if you’re writing something that you want blogged, this may help the thought occur to the person you’re emailing.

If you’re anything like I was a few months ago, you can tell that del.icio.us is a really powerful tool – you’re just not sure what to make of it, or really, what to do with it. As I explored it and adopted it more and more into my normal PR day, I discovered a lot of really intriguing uses for it.

Steve Rubel’s latest post, “Fifteen Things I Learned from del.icio.us” is a must-read for the novice, and even more advanced users will learn a few tricks from it.

I wrote a few days ago about how companies who are not ready to lose control should stay out of the whole realm of social media. I will add quickly to this that not only should they not try to add social media public relations to their marketing mix, but they should stay away from it altogether.

Chris Thilik and Mack Collier both post excellent analyses of Paramount’s latest bone-headed move to issue a cease-and-disist order to The Movie Blog’s ISP, resulting in his site going down without receiving so much as a two-line email in advance.

This is a blogger who said nothing but positive things about the project in question, and even complied with a request to remove other pictures from his site. And yet, this is how they chose to reward the free publicity simply because they didn’t control it.

I won’t bother expounding on this, since both Mack and Chris have said everything I could have said and more, but I urge you to read both of them and treat this case as a case study in how not to deal with bloggers.

Having worked with heavily litigious clients in the past, I can say with authority that lawyers can be both the best friend and the sworn enemy of communication. However, in most of the cases I’ve encountered, lawyers do not understand the communications process any more than we understand commercial litigation, and when legal outranks communications, they have a lot of potential to completely screw things up, and end up biting the hand that feeds them.

Never has a version number incited such an emotional response from both extremes.  We began to see this with the popularization of "web 2.0," people embracing it wholly and without thought, and others denouncing it for being pure hype.  Now that the 2.0 suffix has been applied to PR, the praise and vitriol begin flowing once again.

Stuart Bruce chides Weber Shandwick for jumping on the PR 2.0 bandwagon, in his blog "A PR Guru’s Musings," saying:

However, after getting noticed I then always point out what a stupid idea PR 2.0 is. This whole PR 2.0 or ‘New PR’ is such a pile of garbage. What I’m doing is simply an evolution of what I’ve always done.

Fair enough – he’s right.  Online PR, new media PR, social media PR are just extensions of what we’ve all been doing for years – at least to some degree. 

However, while the profession hasn’t changed, the public has.  The internet changed things when it began to become popular near the end of the 90s – what we’re seeing with the new social media trends is a next step in that evolution; a jump from where we were to a society of publishers, and a new set of rules.

With respect to Stuart, who, from what I’ve read is an extremely intelligent guy, the new PR, PR 2.0, or magic internet public relations – whatever you want to call it – is important, and is something that needs to be differentiated.  It’s always going to bear resemblances to the original, but the 2.0 suffix isn’t about a sequel, it’s about an evolution – it’s about adapting to the social environment which has been carved out by the proliferation of technology, and understanding the new rules of the game.

Pitching bloggers IS different than pitching media.  Social networks ARE different from real-life networks.  Fail to recognize this, and you’re not going to be effective as a PR person… and that’s something that gets truer every day.

Yes, PR 2.0 is a buzzword, and it should be treated as such – to throw out everything we know about the profession and to dive naked into the new media pool would be stupid.  But we also can’t ignore the importance of the distinction.

Soon, PR 2.0 will just be PR… but for now, it’s way of calling attention to the disparity between the old guard of PR pros who are still stuck in an old media frame of mind and the more tech-savvy crowd who understands the importance of online tools beyond Google.

Being heavily involved in the arts for most of my career, I always enjoy going to the theatre.  I find that sometimes I can be watching a play and glean something from one of the lines that, while totally unrelated to what’s going on on stage, makes something I’ve been thinking about make perfect sense.  That’s the power of theatre.

For the past week, I spent nearly every night at the Ottawa Fringe Festival, taking in plays, talking to actors and drinking too much at the beer tent.  One show in particular – a performance poet called Jem Rolls from the UK – probably left the most lasting impression on me.  He said:

I decided to think about why the world is the way it is.  And I spent hours, just laying on the floor, thinking, determined to come up with an answer.  I thought about it for days and days until I came to the conclusion – the world is the way it is because the people who are run the world are paid too much.  So I went and told all my friends at the pub this, and they paused for about 10 seconds, and said "Jem – we all already knew that."  And I realized that I did too… but with all the thinking, I’d forgotten.

All this is to say that I came to a revelation last night that quite possibly be one of those epiphanies that had already occured to everyone else – nonetheless, here it is:

Dealing with social media PR does not mean giving up control over your message.  It means giving up the illusion of control over your message.  As soon as someone with an internet connection decides to talk about your brand, you’ve lost control.  Admitting that you have no control from the outset means that you have to take a different path to mitigate bad PR: giving your customers something they WANT to talk positively about.

Again, I’m pretty sure I knew this already, but when it came to me, it still blew my mind a little. 

Companies have begun to catch wind of this thing called social media and online PR.  Apparently, they’ve heard, instead of trying to pitch newspaper reporters on your products and spending millions of dollars on paid media, you can get your customers to talk about your product or your company online.

They’re not really sure what it is, but they know they want it.  The problem is, like any other medium, social media PR is not for everyone.

Putting your message in the hands of your customer means letting go of control.  Not every company is willing or able to do that.  I’ve worked with these companies – ones who wanted bloggers to sign image release waivers, who wanted language changed on personal websites because it didn’t match their marketing materials.  These are the companies that will not only not succeed, but they will damage their brand as a result of trying.

Social media PR has a lot of possibilities, but requires a major change in communications philosophy for all but the most progressive and nimble of companies.  Putting your message in the hands of bloggers means being able to say to bloggers “we just want your opinions to be public, whether they are positive or negative.”  It means letting go of the need for absolute control of the message, and to become a part of the conversation.

If you or your client can’t accept that, then social media PR is probably not the best tactic to consider.  Traditional companies should stick to traditional media.  Those who are willing to progress will be the new conversation, while the rest will be doomed to live by press release alone.