Thursday, March 18, 2010

A blinding flash of the obvious: Reporters rely on PR pros for news

The folks at Crikey are shocked—shocked—to find that 55% of the articles published in 10 hard-copy newspapers were sourced one way or another by public relations.

The author of the article in Crikey—an Australian digital-only news source—believes this to be a dubious statistic, a view supported by the headline that reads, “Over half your news is spin.” The author (whoever that may be, since there’s no byline on the story) also seems to think that it’s a source of shame to practicing journalists. When called about it, “many journalists and editors were defensive,” he (or she) writes. “Who’d blame them? They’re busier than ever, under resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.”

The study was conducted by 40 studnets from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the university of Technology Sydney, and is available at a Crikey site (free registration required) with the provocative title, “Spinning the Media.” There, the ACIJ’s Wendy Bacon and UTS student Sasha Pavey conclude:

Our investigation strongly confirms that journalism in Australia today is heavily influenced by commercial interests selling a product, and constrained and blocked by politicians, police and others who control the media message.

The bar charts show the percentage of content across those 10 publications that was driven by media releases and by “other forms of public relations or promotions” and how many were published with “no significant journalism work.”

What strikes me most about this “Joint Crikey-ACIJ Investigation” is the notion that it’s something new. I attended a conference in the 1980s in which a speaker noted that an equally high percentage of the stories appearing in the mainstream press begin with some kind of PR contact. The same point was made in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series on PR, “Spin Cycles,” produced back in 2007. And the Pew Research Project’s Excellence in Journalism unit found, during a week of reviewing Baltimore media, that more “more commonly than in the past…press releases from politicians, governmente agencies and companies were rewritten quickly by multiple outlets and posted on the Web with no additional reporting.”

Crikey and the ACIJ may have done a deep dive into the 10 newspapers they studied, but evidently they didn’t research much beyond that or they might have determined that the situation hardly warrants the sensationalist treatment it was given.

There are two separate issues here. The first is simple: Journalists get a lot of their news from PR people. Does this mean the news readers get from purportedly objective journalists is tainted by PR spin?

Let’s be realistic. Business and government represent a huge part of what journalists cover. And just how do the folks at Crikey think reporters learn about much of the news coming out of government and business? Are investigative reporters hanging around bars and diners hoping to hear snippets of conversation? Are they on the phones all day calling contacts, asking “Hey, mate, anything going on at Acme I should be reporting?” Does all news come from whistle-blowers and tipsters?

The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organization’s news. That’s how journalists find out that a new CEO has been hired, that a new product is launching, that a smaller company has been acquired, that quarterly earnings have been released. These are legitimate news stories. It is the newspaper’s responsibility to report them. And journalists rely on PR representatives to let them know when these events occur.

Once a reporter has been informed, he generally asks questions, does research, and produces a story. He does not accept the company’s spin. In fact, as former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski put it, “In most news stories, the spin or angle, is set by the journalist” (the emphasis is mine).

There is a vast difference between spinning the news and providing relevant information about your company to the media. This is a relationship that most journalists take for granted.

Of course, newspapers don’t report on every press release or phone pitch they receive—just the ones about which theyr readers should know. God knows PR agencies shovel a lot of self-serving garbage to the press in the form of media releases and pitches, but that doesn’t mean those releases ever make it into print.

But what about that nasty second issue, that much of the newspaper content originating with PR was reprinted “with no significant journalism work?” Remember Foremski, who said the journalist, not the PR people, are the ones who spin the story? That happens, he says, in the first few paragraphs.

Much of the rest of the story is factual: what the CEO said, when the company was founded, where it is based, the stock price, the specs of a product, the price, etc, etc, etc. There is no need for journalists to rewrite this stuff…It is wasted effort because it duplicates work already done. The journalists should focus on their spin on the story, then assemble the news story from…the press release package.

So on the one hand, there’s Crikey, sounding the alarm that organizations are infiltrating the press and scamming the public with a flood of fluff and spin. On the other hand, there is reality: PR professionals advising the media of their organizations’ news, followed by informed judgments by journalists about which stories warrant coverage. Sometimes these stories are written afresh, sometimes the reporter rewrites the first few graphs to infuse the article with her own perspective, then reporting the facts from the press release pretty much as-is. (And that doesn’t mean the facts haven’t been verified by the reporter, mind you. The appearance of press releases in those 10 Australian newspapers mostly as they appeared in the release does not mean that nobody checked those facts.)

Ultimately, the Crikey-ACIJ “investigation” is just a lot of hot air that doesn’t reveal a damn thing beyond a pathetic ignorance of the wholly ethical process by which the media-PR relationship works at its best.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #535: March 18, 2010

Content summary: Neville’s in Berlin (home of his birth); Voce Communications’s Doug Haslam fills in. Doug and Shel chat about the Pan Mass Challenge and baseball, including the Chicago Cubs’ attempts to finalize an advertising deal with Toyota. Dan York reports on Facebook’s introduction of a weekly update for fan page administrators. Media Monitoring Minute on Reuters’ social media policy. News That Fits: Another interview-style keynote at South by Southwest (SxSW)—this one with Twitter’s Ev Williams—bombs, mommy bloggers unite in outrage over New York Times coverage of a mommy blogger conference that wasn’t so bad, a Wall Street Journal article questions the value of social media for small businesses, Eric Schwartzman reports from SxSW, an Australian study finds 55% of news in newspapers comes from PR sources; music from Amelia White.

About our guest co-host:

Doug Haslam is a Supervisor within the Voce Connect team. He joined Voce in 2010, bringing two decades of radio, PR, marketing and social media experience to the team. Doug’s track record prior to arriving at Voce included successful PR and social media programs for companies in the media, Internet, technology infrastructure and consumer spaces, and is a recognized fixture of the Boston social media scene. Outside of Voce, Doug spends time with his wife and son just outside of Boston, and cycles across Massachusetts every year, raising money to fight cancer in the Pan-Mass Challenge. Doug blogs at http://vocenation.com and http://doughaslam.com, and his Twitter ID is simply @DougH.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for March 18, 2010: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Winter Park, Florida, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #528 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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So, until Monday, March 22…

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Moving beyond the organic benefits of open employee access to social networks

As more than half of the companies in the U.S. continue to block employee access to social media sites, the organizations that maintain open channels are positioned to innovate and compete at levels that could crush their competition.

Being poised to extract value from a workforce that is networked 24/7 isn’t the same as taking the steps required to get there.

I intend to continue the campaign to end the conterproductive practice of blocking employees from their online communities. But the time has come to shift the focus from those companies that can’t see the opportunities inherent in a workforce that is connected to thousands of other people. Let them flounder and fail as their competitors tease new business opportunities from these networks, identify and recruit top talent, spot problems and address them before they become crises, and build a larger, more loyal customer base.

In fact, the best way to convince organizations that blocking works against their self-interest is to have them watch their more enlightened competitors kick their asses in the marketplace.

Some would argue that all a company needs to unleash this power is connected employees freed to connect to their networks. Business, though, is all about achieving established goals. The processes companies establish to produce the best results from employees’ organic networking activities will determine who really wins.

I see three types of processes organizations can model:

• Employees share information of value, such as complaints, product improvement ideas, ideas for new products and services, and competitive intelligence
• Departments initiate systems that integrate resources employees contribute from their networks into existing processes (for example, recruiters tapping into employees’ professional networks to identify the next key hire)
• Companies activate employees for focused efforts from product launches to political actdion to customer service (like Best Buy’s Twelpforce effort on Twitter)

Organic networking is just the first step

To realize these kinds of benefits, organizations can’t rely solely on employees’ organic social networking activities. Yes, some value can certainly be derived from the communities with which employees already engage. But consider the difference between a bunch of prospectors with pans in the river versus a mining company armed with geologic data and the best minds inside and outside the company working together. Which approach will produce the most gold?

Sustainability is just one reason to be more systematic about business use of social media. One recruiter who is smart enough to ask employees to tap their networks to identify the best candidate for a job may produce some great results, but what happens when she leaves the company? When social media is left only at the organic state, most efforts aren’t sustainable.

(I know of one company that had a fanstastic internal podcast that died when the producer took a new job with another company. That never happened with employee publications, which the company viewed as integral communication, as part of the management process. Strategic processes don’t simply fade away just because the champion left the company or changed jobs.)

In a recent post, Brian Solis argued that the brand management role is now every employees’ responsibility:

When we listen to the activity that populates the statusphere and the blogosphere, we find that in addition to the overall brand, conversations map specifically to the individual departments that define the business foundation, which ultimately supports brand stature and resonance. In turn, these activities inspire immediate and long-term responses either directly through focused interaction or indirectly through product refinement, adaptation and overall messaging, targeting, and positioning.

Brian’s right, and in his post he outlines a process for evaluating conversations based on keyword discovery (collected at a central source) with relevant information parsed to the right departments so they can incorporate this intelligence into their operations.

Turning noise into business results

But this still doesn’t address those thousands of networks to which the frontline employees belong. And without processes, all those conversations that could lead to improved sales, the next great product or the next key hire is all just a lot of unrefined data. It’s just noise. Processes filter out the crap and turn the remaining data into information, and from information into actionable knowledge.

Employees in your company are listening to their networks. Some are even talking to their colleagues about what they’re hearing Few companies, however, are positioned to activate those employees or the data they’re accumulating:

• The cultures don’t support it.
• The processes necessary to inspire those responses don’t exist.
• Internal communication doesn’t provide employees with the intelligence they need to interact with their communities beneficially.
• Training efforts don’t let employees know what to do with the information they obtain or how to react to it.
• Business and product literacy among employees is shockingly low.

 

In other words, companies don’t have the foundation to support connecting networked employees with business goals.

As companies begin to recognize the competitve advantage currently dormant in employees’ networks, many will make mistakes by implementing programs that smack of astroturfing, asking employees to convey common messages to their networks. Others will install layers of bureacracy that ultimately hinder rather than encourage employees bringing the power of their networks to bear on the company’s business.

Identifying existing business processes and models already working in companies—and developing new ones—are top priorities for me. In fact, it’s the subject of the pre-conference session I’m conducting at the NewComm Forum next month. (“Becoming a Networked Organization” will take place on Tuesday, April 20 beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the conference venue in San Mateo, California.) It’s also the subject of the next book I hope to write.

It is time to move beyond this notion that large, complex organizations can accure the greatest benefit from social media by sitting back while employees join in conversations—someone from sales chatting with this person, someone from finance joining that community—without resources to inform their contributions to the dialogue, without the means by which they can share what they learn, and without mechanisms to filter the data and turn it into action.

Let the companies that block employees keep blocking. But if you want your organization to reap the rewards of open access, you need to start thinking—now, today—about how best to leverage it.

Monday, March 15, 2010

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #534: March 15, 2010

Content summary: Communication jobs in Switzerland; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Fraxion Payments micropayment system launched for bloggers, PR agency runs for the US Congress, American medical journal bans the UK’s Sunday Times from reports after embargo break, best practices for disclosure on Facebook; FIR Friendfeed Room round-up; Neville’s in Berlin on Thursday so Doug Haslam will be guest co-host with Shel; music from Amy Macdonald; and more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for March 15, 2010: A 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #534 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

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So, until Thursday March 18…

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #533: March 11, 2010

Content summary: Shel’s in Chicago piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the show. Shel and Neville will be together on Monday, but guest co-host Doug Haslam will join Shel next Thursday. Dan York reports on social CRM and some nifty new resources. CustomScoop’s Media Monitoring Minute looks at cooperation versus competition between mainstream news media and social networks. News That FIts: Shel responds to a listener comment on the volume of FIR content that references Facebook; Neville explores the work-related issues that arise from Facebook and Twitter updates; Shel reports on a study that reveals human resources professionals depend on and benefit from interactions on social networks. Listener comments. Music from Tea Leaf Green. And, as always, more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for March 11, 2010: A 64-minute podcast recorded live from Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #533 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday, March 15…

Monday, March 08, 2010

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #532: March 8, 2010

Content summary: Shel’s in Washington, D.C. A brief interview with SNCR founder Jen McClure on the upcoming NewComm Forum (FIR listeners use promo code NCF125 by Friday for a $300 discount). Michael Netzley has a question for FIR listeners. Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop. News That Fits: how to avoid backchannel disasters; Zynga, a fundraising drive, a mainstream media misunderstanding, the spread of inaccurate information and the need for Web 2.0 organizations to be excruciatingly clear; an invitation for guest blog posts; IBM unveils Blog Muse; bloggers excluded from town council’s accreditation of Twitterers; listener comments; no music this Monday.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27.4Mb, 68:31)
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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for March 8, 2010: A 69-minute podcast recorded live from Washington, D.C., USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #532 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday, March 11…

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Chaos is not a strategy

Two seemingly evergreen threads have converged in my mind: First, is social media measurable? And second, the notion that soon, there will be no use for social media directors (or managers or coordinators) in organizations.

I have written several posts on what it means to be strategic in your approach to any communication effort, whether it’s social or traditional, internal or external. Others have taken up the cause, most recently Shannon Paul who elegantly reinforced my insistence that being strategic means you align your efforts with your organization’s (or client’s) business goals.

To be strategic ultimately means that you know what keeps your CEO and the members of her team awake at night so you can tailor communications that will help them all sleep better. That is, you know the business goals the company’s leaders are expected to achieve and you’re able to implement communications that move the needle in the right direction.

While some purists believe in their hearts that all such communication is trending toward nothing but social, a fragmented media ecosystem is evolving in which the efficacy of each kind of medium relies on the continued health of all the others. Smart companies now use traditional advertising and marketing to guide consumers to social channels where companies and customers can meet and engage.

The idea that social media directors are a species on the verge of extinction is based on the enthusiastic but misguided belief that every employee, top to bottom, will engage in social activities as naturally as they scratch their asses. No coordination will be required. This belief recognizes only one dimension of social media in business, one among three: organic, programmatic, and campaign-based.

Organic social media is the natural, ongoing, day-to-day engagement of individuals in the company with other stakeholder audiences. Lionel Menchaca, Richard Binhammer and the rest of the Dell communicators who engage routinely via Twitter are an example of organic social media, as are the kinds of employee blogs aggregated by companies like Microsoft, Thomas Nelson Publishers and IBM. When engaged employees enthuse about the company and its products on Facebook or other networks, that’s organic too.

Which is all great and undeniably important. But t doesn’t do much good—as US Airways learned when Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson River or Dominos after the YouTube video surfaced showing employees doing disgusting things with food—to launch a Twitter account in order to communicate with people after news about you breaks.

Organic social media is just that: organic. The two other levels of social media—programmatic and campaign-based—are where strategy is applied. Programmatic social media are the ongoing efforts designed to achieve measurable objectives. Those objectives are the foundation of strategies that, in turn, are the broad approaches taken to achieve business goals. If you don’t know what the business goals are, you’ll have one helluva hard time determining if your social media efforts are helping the company achieve them.

Chaos is not a strategy.

Dell’s IdeaStorm crowdsourcing tool and Direct2Dell blog are examples of programmatic social media. They’re focused on specific objectives. The Mayo Clinic’s Sharing Mayo Clinic is another example, as is the Nuts About Southwest blog.

CEO blogs like those from Michael Hyatt and Paul Levy are also programmatic. The posts company leaders make to such blogs are carefully considered, as are those to group blogs like Southwest Airlines’ which usually spotlights the company’s unique culture but can also be used to address issues and crises..

Then there are the campaign-based efforts—like Dewmocracy, Pepsi’s crowdsourcing effort for Mountain Dew—that have limited, defined lifespans and very specific measurable objectives.

Both programmatic and campaign-based social media efforts can (and often should) be supported by employees engaged organically.

In order for program and campaign efforts to succeed, somebody needs to know what business goals they are designed to achieve and coordinate with everyone involved in producing social content in order to ensure the efforts are crafted in order to meet those goals. I’m not talking about being a gatekeeper (although sometimes that’s not necessarily a bad idea). While freedom to experiment and take risks is paramount in social media execution, some consistency is necessary to avoid embarrassing message conflicts. Besides, if everyone’s left to their own devices, you’ll wind up with six departments each paying separate fees for the same type of services. Imagine paying for two cision accounts, three from Radian6 and four from CustomScoop when if the effort were coordinated, the everyone could share data from a single account.

There’s another problem with relying solely on organic social media. I’ve seen too many instances in which an enthusiastic employee launches an effort, but nobody picks up the ball when that employee leaves the company. I’m not talking about the Scoble Syndrome, in which a celebrity blogger leaves and takes his audience with him. I’m talking about a company- or product-branded effort for which nobody else wants to assume responsibility when the originator departs. It happens because it was not part of a strategy; it was not any department’s or business unit’s responsibility. It was just something somebody decided (and got permission—or not) to do.

In the end, social media can easily be measured by determining the degree to which they achieved the business objectives that were set for them. And they’ll succeed a lot better if there’s a resource in the organization who can guide any employee to the right tools, set objectives others can work to achieve, introduce the best new channels, make sure appropriate training is available and aggregate the results so management knows the time and money invested really is contributing to the execution of the company’s business plan.

Social media is social and conversational and businesses need to learn that. But purists need to understand that business is still business.