Ryan Anderson dot ca

I’m a firm believer that as PR professionals, it’s important for us to give back to the community and help young PR students understand what the profession is all about and how they can develop the skills they need to succeed (or even get started) in the industry.

I chat with students quite often who want to make a career in PR, and I find myself always giving the same advice:

Take responsibility for your own education.

Every good PR person I have ever met has been incredibly smart. Every mediocre one has been adequately educated. Good PR programs are rare at the University level, and more often than not, don’t equip students with the tools they need to survive in the workforce. The recommended reading isn’t enough – you need to be the one in charge of what you learn if you’re going to be employable when you graduate.

Here’s my story:

I tell pretty much anyone who asks that I owe my entire career to theatre. I was very much into art and music when I was in highschool, so I started doing musical theatre. I continued this during my first year doing a Bachelor of Architecture and offered to do the posters for the production. This was my start in PR.

When I decided that being an architect was not in the least what I wanted to do with my life, I switched to a communications degree, tweaked slightly so that I could focus on studying advertising. I took marketing, english, psychology, philosophy – anything that had anything to do with advertising or marketing in general.

In my third year, I was looking for a summer job, and found a position as publicist of the Ottawa Fringe Festival – a theatre festival with roots across the country. I applied, and because of my background in marketing and theatre, I got the job and was forced to learn how to write press releases, put together press kits, pitch reporters and coordinate interviews within a couple of weeks. I read everything I could, voraciously consuming information, working 80 hours a week with no budget, and by the end of it, I had promoted a festival.

On one of the last days, a guy I had met in my first year asked me if I wanted to help him promote a show he was doing in the Winter. He couldn’t pay me anything, but “it would be good experience.” I told him I wasn’t interested, but if he wanted me to come on board and help him co-found the company, build the brand and marketing collateral (I was still pretending to be a graphic designer at this point) that I would do it “for the experience.”

Five years later, I was still working with the company for next to nothing, but we had built it into one of the biggest theatre companies in the city, winning awards that previously only the National Arts Centre had won, and I had developed a reputation for being good at what I did. Lots of people were calling me to work with them, and some wanted to pay me actual money this time.

During my time with the company, I was hired by a PR firm (by a professor with whom I had kept in touch), largely due to my theatre experience. Had I not had this experience, I would have been unemployable since I don’t speak French (one of the joys of living next door to Quebec), but because I had taken my education into my own hands and invested my time in actually learning my trade outside the classroom, I was hired right away. I’ve moved on since then, and now have about the best job a PR guy could ask for. And I owe it all to theatre.

I recently told a girl in her second year of a university mass communications program that unless she took responsibility for her own education, she would never be employable. She was understandably shocked by this – she figured that getting a degree in communications was the way to get into communications. I told her she was wrong. The irony is – she’s in practically the same program I took from the same university. If it weren’t for the experience I picked up outside of school, I wouldn’t have hired me, either.

Now, not everyone has the luxury of being able to take four years of electives and call it a degree (seriously). But whether you’re blogging, involved in knowledge sharing organizations, maxing out your credit card at Amazon, or working your ass off for charities who need help with PR, the onus is on you to learn. Nobody is going to hand you the knowledge you need to make it in this business. It’s your responsibility to seek it out for yourself.

So, I pose this question to all the other PR bloggers out there. If you could give one piece of advice to a PR student, what would it be? I’ll post all the best answers here if anyone takes me up on it. Hopefully, someone with more influence than myself can help it take off.

Last week, I was asked to do an interview for a PR pub about crisis communications in the blogosphere (more on that later).  What do you do when a meme comes out with one of your sleeping employees on a customer’s couch?  I talked about this a bit in this post, but there’s obviously a lot more to it than just talking to bloggers – though that in itself is a good start.

If you look at the big negative memes that have come out over the past couple of years – Comcast’s sleeping cable guy, AOL’s customer service guy who wouldn’t let a customer cancel his service, or the "Dell Hell" posts that have been cropping up, they all have one thing in common:  they’re a negative result of a company’s inaction or unwillingness to change.

Studies are saying that CEOs are increasingly viewing blogs as a threat.  This is a very naive way of looking at the situation -  like saying that radar guns are a threat to driving.  The real threat is not listening to customers complaints – if anything, blogs make that easier.  You are now empowered to listen to your customers’ conversations by simply subscribing to an RSS feed.  When you start hearing negative buzz, you can now act on it instantly.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "I’m going to ruin Dell’s reputation today." A blogstorm starts as a drizzle – a leak that becomes a flood.  React quickly, address the problem before it becomes a bigger one, and chances are you’ll never have to worry about dealing with a major blog backlash that can potentially overflow into mainstream media.

Every PR person has a list of phrases they find themselves repeating to every client, day after day. Deborah Schultz and David Parmet share theirs.

My favourites are:

David:

Yes his blog is read by only 2,000 people but it’s probably the 2,000 people you most want to reach.

Deborah:

No, real evangelism, buzz and community cannot be manufactured out of thin air.

I don’t have the energy to write down ten of my oft-repeated phrases, but I’d say that my number one would probably be “I realize that this is your corporate line, but that’s not a story anyone is going to care about.”

Anyone want to share their favourites?

I’ve seen it happen.  PR people or clients start believing in the power of the blogosphere, and want their next communications plan to involve "blog pitching."  The PR firm agrees, not really knowing anything about it or really, even where to start.  They figure that it must pretty much be like pitching reporters.

Pitching bloggers is a touchy subject for a few reasons:

1. A reporter won’t write a story about you on the front page if you hit them with a bad pitch (though they might pass it along…)
2. A reporter probably won’t be mortally offended by your suggestion that they would write about anything other than exactly what they wanted
3. Bloggers are under no obligation to get facts right, and are all but immune to libel claims
4. Reporters are (ideally) less apt to write based on opinions instead of facts.

This isn’t to say that bloggers are unprofessional, but the fact remains that some are, and pitching to them is akin to trying to pet a tiger.  It looks like it could be soft, but you might end up missing half your hand.

I’ve always been open to PR pitches, both in this blog and my other one, though I can count the number I got on one hand.  That doesn’t mean that every blogger is, though – in fact, some are downright hostile about the whole thing.

I’ve had some success pitching bloggers – and the key, it would seem, is the personal touch.  Search through Technorati to find people blogging on a certain subject.  Read each one to see a) if they’ve said anything about asshole PR people contacting them and if b) they really do write about the subject their blog is tagged with.  At the very least, the first time you contact a blogger, you should be familiar with what they write about and the tone they write in.  You should also know something about them – often on a "contact" or "about" page, bloggers will list what they do and do not want to be contacted about… obey these warnings, or face the consequences.

The pitch is important – keep it short, keep it personal, but don’t assume a level of familiarity that doesn’t exist.  Make it clear that you have actually read their blog – if you read it regularly, tell them… but don’t lie.  Provide them with everything they need to make a decent post – including a choice of images, a link to a YouTube video or another media source. 

The big thing to remember here is that it is entirely possible that a blogger will reproduce your pitch in its entirety.  It has happened to me a number of times… and frankly, always makes me uncomfortable, regardless of how well thought out it is.  Be prepared for a story that begins with "so and so emailed me and said <BLOCKQUOTE>"

I know I’ll miss some here, but these are some golden rules of pitching blogs from my experience.  If anyone has others they’d like to add, I would LOVE to hear them.

1. Be transparent – let them know that you’re a PR person and who your client is
2. Aim for conversation rather than "pitching." I’ve ended up continuing correspondence with some bloggers I’ve pitched cold just because they were cool people.
3. Give them an out – the first time you pitch them, make sure you let them know if they don’t want to know about whatever they’re pitching you on to let you know and you’ll stop.  And then actually stop, if they do, of course.
4. Give them something to cut and paste.  Writing is hard work, and blockquotes are part of the tools of the blogging trade.
5. Don’t pitch them something they’ll never be interested in.  It’s not worth the effort / stress / potential backlash
6. Offer swag whenever possible – if I’m going to write about your new phone, you better give me one to play with
7. Give them something to link to.  You need a good website to link to – preferably one that has a plethora of information and media for people to link to and visit.
8. Be cautious with pitching A-listers.  Unless you know it’s something they would be interested in, don’t waste your first chance to make a good impression on wasting their time.

The big lesson here is something that has been said before – pitching blogs is not like pitching the media.  It’s much more time consuming, and much more dangerous.

Any PR people or regularly pitched bloggers want to add to this list?

This week’s BrandWeek has a thought-provoking feature on what they refer to as “open source branding.” The basis of the article is on empowering brand advocates by putting the brand in their hands – through consumer-generated media and generally taking marketing advice from your own consumers.

Of course, they mention the first failures of CGM campaigns – the Chevy Tahoe “build your own commercial” site that resulted in numerous satirical ads condemning the Tahoe’s less-than-environmentally-friendly fuel consumption.

Some of the best quotes from the article pretty much sum up what a go-get’em marketing person needs to know before delving into this space:

“When you flip the funnel, you turn it into a megaphone for your happiest customers.” – Seth Godin

“Consumer-generated ads make sense for some brands and not for others… if you don’t have an insight to back up your idea, you’ll fall flat on your face.” – Noah Brier, Senior Writer at Renegade Marketing

“It’s a mind shift from going out and deciding what people want and then giving it to them.” – Steven Addis, Addis Group

I like the idea of open source branding, though I do agree that it won’t work as well for everyone as it did for companies like Fluevog or Jones Soda. But get customers involved in your brand messaging, and they’ll certainly react more positively than just shoving your message down their throats.