Friday, July 29, 2005

Are we reduced to only one voice?

One of the arguments I keep hearing for using blogs for just about everything from marketing to press releases is that they are written in a natural, authentic, human voice. There seems to be an unspoken ancillary statement that says: No other voice is as good as the natural, authentic, human voice.

Huh.

My favorite writer is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who writes in lyrical, magical prose that makes me jealous every time I read him. Why can’t I put words together like he can? He’s not using complex words or complex styles. He just has the ability to create music when he strings words together. But it’s not conversational by any stretch of the imagination. Anything wrong with that?

If you’ve never read William Goldman’s screenplay for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. You’ve never read such entertaining stage direction. Remember the scene, near the beginning, where Butch and Logan fight for control of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang? Goldman’s direction instructs Butch to deliver “the most aesthetically exquisite kick in the balls in the history of modern American cinema.” Isn’t that great?

What about the inverted pyramid? Is there never an appropriate use for a solid news story any more? Should the Pulitzer organization just eliminate the newswriting category altogether and replace it with blogs?

How about poetry? No! It’s not natural, authentic, human! Take it away!

In fact, all of these styles of writing are human, and authenticity does not derive solely from a converational tone. Humans have created many styles of writing that employ many different kinds of voice. There are appropriate times for each. Let’s use them all.

Press releases for all

In part of his response to my post on the press release meme, Eric Schartzman wrote, “...it’s tough, in today’s 24/7 news cycle where everyone has access to the newswires online, the segregate a news releases to just the news media.”

Yeah, it’s tough. That doesn’t mean that it’s never desirable.

I encountered two instances of organizations that embraced this notion that press releases are for everybody, although they were oppositve examples. In the first, a high-tech company explained that their primary audience—sophisticated programmers and systems engineers—were far better versed in their field than the average reporter covering the company. Therefore, they wrote their news releases over the heads of the average journalist, unconcerned that they might get less coverage. Since their primary audience found releases on their site as well as other news release venues (Yahoo!, for instance), it was more important that they get news that was meaningful for them.

The other company, a telecommunications outfit, explained that their typical customer could live in a trailer park and have the IQ of a 10-year-old. In order for their news to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, they had to dumb down their press releases despite the fact that this rendered them far less useful to the media. (My friend Pete Shinbach wonders if an SEC violation might lurk in this line of reasoning.)

I don’t think either are good solutions. The goal of a press release is to get press. Not coverage in blogs or bars or parks or beauty salons. (If the press release does its job, people will read it in the press and then talk about it in blogs and bars and parks…) You have to love the web because, more than any other channel, it enables the kind of narrowcasting required to craft messages designed to meet the needs of different audiences. Note I didn’t say spin the messages differently. The simple fact is that different audiences have different needs and interests. Employees, for instance, have a different take on news than, say, the investment community because their context is different.

I recall the first time I produced an annual report. Having never done one before, I sat down and listed the various audiences the annual report would reach. The list reached something like 13 or 14, including individual investors, institutional investors (like fund managers), employee-shareholders, prospective employees, key customers, strategic partners, investment analysts…you get the picture. The perspectives of each audience differed, but I could produce only one version. It was a classic case of one-size-fits-all, even if it doesn’t.

So I was intriguted the first time I saw a web-based annual report with two distinct paths: one for individual investors and one for institutional investors. The only difference was jargon. Fund managers got the version laden with financial terms they inherently understood, while individual investors got a version that spelled out the meaning of each term. Brilliant.

So why not produce press releases for the press, written in news style (inverted pyramid) so they can be adapted quickly to trade publications and other vehicles, then produce a consumer version for the company website (or even delivered via a corporate blog)? The press release version would be readily accessible for anyone who wanted to read it on the media site, addressing any concerns about transparency. In fact, it increases transparency, since any discrepancies between the two (or three or four) versions would be instantly visible.

Which leaves only the issue of all those venues where the press release will appear over which the company has no control (Yahoo! jumps to mind yet again). That, ultimately, is no big deal. Press releases come with a nifty little feature called a “boilerplate,” the last paragraph that lists company particulars. How hard would it be to insert the following into the boilerplate: “This release was prepared for media use. To read a consumer version of this news, please visit our website at…”

Thus we can narrowcast, satisfying the differing needs of our diverse audiences, while increasing transparency and embracing all appropriate channels. Kinda like having one’s cake and eating it, too.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #54: July 28, 2005

Content summary: Listeners’ comments discussion (on getting value from FIR and where to listen; European digital rights); BlogHer on Saturday; Dave Winer’s OPML editor launched; Podscope indexing every podcast; indie podcasters On A Podcast; made up quotes in press releases; PR bloggers should quit whining about being pitched; the missing link in mission statements; blog search tools comparisons; upcoming interviews; Podcast Awards.

Show notes for July 28, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 74-minute conversation recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Download the file here (MP3, 25MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free iPodder, DopplerRadio or iTunes 4.9, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In this edition:

Intro:

• 00:32 Shel introduces the show; how to give your feedback; show notes; vote in the Podcast Awards.

Listeners’ comments discussion:

• 02:58 Trackbacks to the last show’s show notes from Angela Booth, Tom Murphy and James Cherkoff
• 04:06 Frank Meeusen on the value he gets from FIR and how he listens; and wonders about upcoming podcasting conferences
• 11:08 Nicole Simon on her pledge for a European digital rights initiative and why communicators should pay attention

News and Features:

• 20:42 BlogHer on Saturday 30 July - the open and inclusive forum to discuss the role of women within the larger blog community, and much more; and how you can participate even if you’re not there
• 22:20 Dave Winer launches an OPML editor; OPML’s key role in producing content for the web
• 25:08 Podscope plans to index every spoken podcast on the web by the end of August
• 27:30 Indie podcasters don’t do it for the money and are here to stay - the message in our bonus music track from Cruisebox: On A Podcast
• 35:17 Making up quotes in press releases - should you be shocked?
• 41:20 Some PR bloggers want to be treated like journalists but complain about being pitched. Andy Lark and others say “Quit, you whiners!” What can PR bloggers do to make their interests clearer to pitchers, before they pitch?
• 48:27 The missing link in mission statements is employee understanding of the organization’s mission and its relevance to them - assuming the mission is clear from the outset, that is
• 57:13 Mary Hodder’s post on blog search tools and the comparisons (PDF) highlight the differences in how the tools work; the competitive edge Blogpulse has with its Blogpulse Profiles offering

Outro:

• 65:53 Neville outros the show; how to give your feedback; show notes
• 67:22 Upcoming confirmed interviews - Constantin Basturea on August 9; Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek, on August 16; to be confirmed: Jeff de Cagna of Associations Unorthodox
• 68:48 Shel introduces the music

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show:

Intro - Podcast Awards.

Listeners’ comments discussion - Angela Booth, Tom Murphy, James Cherkoff, Frank Meeusen, 9rules.com, IBC 2005, Portable Media Expo, Podcast Hotel, PodcastCon UK, Amy Gahran, Nicole Simon, Nicole’s pledge call for European digital rights, EFF, EDRI, Reboot7, Flickr, Tris Hussey.

News and Features - BlogHer, Dave Winer, iPodder.org, Podcasting News, Podscope, iTunes, AAC file format, Blinkx, Business 2.0, Greg Lindsay podcasting article, Shel’s podcasting post, Neville’s podcasting post, Cruisebox, On A Podcast, Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, iTunes Podcast Directory, Dan Gillmor, Steve Crescenzo, Cluetrain Manifesto, CEO Blogs List, Andy Lark, Steve Rubel, Om Malik, Marketing 1 to 1, Neville’s post on mission statements, Financial Times, Avis, NASA, Disney, Mattell, Hasbro, Dilbert’s Mission Statement Generator, Sue MacDonald, Intelliseek, Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub, Robert Scoble, Mary Hodder, Bloglines, Feedster, Ice Rocket, Dave Sifry, Blogpulse Profiles, Ketchum.

Outro - Podcast Awards, Constantin Basturea, Pete Blackshaw, Jeff de Cagna, Podsafe Music Network, Lejeune, Dead Again, For Immediate Release, A Shel of My Former Self, NevOn.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at comments@forimmediaterelease.biz, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 984 0931. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday August 1…

The press release meme

The “press release is dead” meme just won’t go away. Every time you turn around, somebody is proclaiming that blogs will replace press releases. Press releases are written in stilted, corporate jargon, the argument goes, and blogs use natural, authentic, human voices. Who would want to read a press release when they could read a blog?

It came up again yesterday as I caught up on some podcasts and listened to Amy Gahran disparage the press release in a panel sponsored by Business Wire. (Press release distribution services such as BW will continue to thrive, she noted; it’s the form of the press release that will die.)

With all the optimism that blogs can do the press releases’ job, I thought it would be instructive—just for my own edification—to pull one of the more venerated public relations textbooks from my shelf, “The Practice of Public Relations” by Fraser Seitel.

I was struck instantly by the fact that Seitel doesn’t refer to these tools as “press releases,” but rather as “news releases.” Here’s what Seitel writes:

There is no better, clearer, more persuasive way to announce news about an organization, its products, and their applications than by issuing a news release. A news release may be written as the document of record to state an organization’s official position—for example, in a court case or in announcing a price or rate increase. More frequently, however, releases have one overriding purpose: to influence a publication to write favorably about the material discussed.

Got that, everyone? The release is targeted at the media, not at everyone else. You could issue the release in order to get ink and post to a blog as an alternate channel. While Seitel notes that many newspaper editors swear by the press release, he concedes others call them worthless drivel. Is that the fault of the tool itself or its format, or of the people who write them? According to researcher Linda Morton, from the Herbert School of Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, there are three reasons press releases get a bad rap:

1. They are poorly written.
2. They are rarely localized.
3. They are not newsworthy.

Listening to Amy stomp on the press release, it occurred to me that her argument was simple: Bad press releases are bad. But are good press releases also bad, now that blogs have arrived? Can a blog really do the work of a press release?

In many instances, yes. But not in all instances. This notion brings us back to the truism that new media do not kill old media: Old media adapt. With the exception of the telegraph, I can’t think of a medium in the last 150 years or so that vanished due to the introduction of a new medium. Remember when IT showed up in your office around 1993 or 94 to get email working? Did they rip out your fax machines, insisting that email can better handle the fax machine’s work? I bet you still get faxes.

A case study

The obvious continued use of the press release is satisfying disclosure requirements. A blog cannot ensure material information is disclosed concurrently to all markets. Release your earnings statement in a blog and somebody’s going to go to jail. Another obvious use: A lot of small publications publish press releases verbatim, notably trade publications. Some pundits are already hammering the nails into the coffin of the trade publication, but can you honestly tell me that people in the toy industry have stopped reading “Toy World?” Gimme a break. A press release placed in a trade publication can still produce highly useful results. The format of the press release—the inverted pyramid news story—makes it easy for the editor of a small publication with limited resources to add the story with a minimum of work.

But there are other, more subtle uses for a well-crafted news release that simply couldn’t be assumed by a blog. Here’s an example.

Back around 1990 or 1991, when I was director of corporate communications at Allergan (an ophthalmic pharmaceutical company based in Irvine, California), I got a call from a television news reporter with a local station in Waco, Texas, where the company maintained a manufacturing plant. “We have a report that the sheriff has arrested a man for selling contact lenses to children on street corners,” he told me. “Since you have a plant in town, we’d like to know if they’re your lenses.”

It took a minute or two to get over the very idea that someone was selling contact lenses—not heroin or crack cocaine—to kids on street corners. It turns out that the prom was approaching, and girls were anxious to get tinted lenses so their eyes would omatch their gowns. I needed to make some calls to learn whose lenses were being peddled, but I had a chore that was more urgent than answering the reporter’s question. Wearing a lens that was not prescribed by a doctor could cause permanent eye damage. We had to get the word out.

Of course, there were no blogs in the early 1990s, but it would have been an ineffective tool even if there had been such a tool. A single news release distributed to all Waco media and schools created near-instant awareness in the community.  The warning to make sure your child wasn’t wearing an ill-gotten lens was all over the local news that night, and teachers throughout the city issued warnings to their students about the risks they faced if they stuck those puppies in their eyes. God knows how many corneal injuries we headed off by getting the word out fast. I seriously doubt that a blog could have achieved that same result.

(By the way, they weren’t our lenses. They’d been stolen off a Chiron truck out of Chicago.)

Hammers and nails

The success of our media outreach via news release was based on a strategy. When thinking strategically, PR professionals identify the goal, set a strategy, list measurable objectives and then—last—select the appropriate tools. In this case, the tool was a press release, and would have been a press release even if blogs had been an option. The advocates of burying the press release don’t think strategically. They think tactically. They start with the tool. “Whatever the issue, use a blog!” They are so enamored of blogs they believe it can solve every problem, address every issue. It’s the old analogy come to life: When you sell hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

Looking back at Fraser Seitel’s review of press releases, it’s easy to see when—strategically—they can be valuable. For example, it’s tough to localize a blog post, but effective press releases can be localized for the media outlets to which they are delivered.

Yes, in a lot of instances, blogs can be used in place of press releases. In fact, anyone who reads this blog knows I’m an active advocate of blogging. But I’m also a realist, and I’m practical, to boot. To throw out an entire tool without thinking about how it can be adapted in light of blogs’ availability is just plain stupid. Each tool should be evaluated based on its strengths and applied based on the outcomes it can achieve.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

H&K’s emergency response blog

If you haven’t read Niall Cook’s description of the blog Hill & Knowlton’s London office created to address the terrorist situation, it’s worth your time. After determining that email was insufficient, the H&K team began using SMS (cell phone text messaging) and a blog to keep employees updated on
“the situation in the city, office, and on public transport, as well as any contingency plans we need to put in place.”

Accessible outside the firewall, but securely, it allows staff to check in whenever there is a security alert to see what the current state of play is. Because it’s a blog, it also has an RSS feed that staff can subscribe to (assuming their reader supports authentication). Finally, it’s incredibly easy for our emergency response team (including members of our excellent crisis communications group) to post updates to it.

The blog took minutes to create, since it was just a new blog added to H&K’s existing suite of blogs. Niall’s post includes a screen shot. This is an excellent example of a PR agency practicing what it preaches.

 

OJR jumps into wiki journalism

The Online Journalism Review is one of the best sources of reporting on the applications of new media to the journalism business. Today, OJR is making news itself by producing its first wiki-like article. Five writers are engaged in the development of an article titled, “‘Video journalists’: Inevitable revolution or way to cut TV jobs?” According to OJR stalwart Mark Glaser,

We’ve decided to create a special limited wiki for this story, where you the reader will be able to actually watch the sausage get made, so to speak. For two days, this page will be open for myself, VJ evangelist Michael Rosenblum, Lost Remote editor Cory Bergman, video blogger Andrew Baron, and TV cameraman and blogger Stewart Pittman to contribute their answers to my questions and to each other. Rather than being a totally open wiki, I’ve asked them to mark each of their edits so we know who has added what. If you’d like to submit your questions to the group, please hit the button below. At the end of the two days, I’ve reserved the right to the final edit that will live on this page afterward.

The article itself doesn’t live on a wiki; Glaser is picking the content off the wiki and updating it on a traditional OJR web page. But watching the evolution of a story could be fascinating, particularly when it’s produced collaboratively. And the page does include the ability to submit a question to the writers. How often to journalistic endeavors query the readers about what the writers should address? It’s an intriguing step by OJR, one that other journalistic enterprises should study. After all, in an online world isn’t this more interesting than a print story shoveled onto the screen?

More predictions of podcasting’s demise

First it was Frank Barnako from CBS Marketwatch. Then it was Anjali Athavaley from the Washington Post. Now Greg Lindsay from Business 2.0 is predicting that mainstream media will edge out the “indie” podcasters (which include Neville and me).

Isn’t it interesting that the predictions that mainstream media will dominate podcasting come from mainstream media? Here’s a sample of what Lindsay had to say in his July 22 column:

...podcasting’s wildcatting era is over before it ever really began. An unknown number of those Apple-made microstars will convince themselves that they hold a first-mover advantage in an untapped medium and that there is at least a modest living to be made from a popular weekly podcast that maybe, just maybe, could become a bona fide media brand. Eventually they’ll fail, and they’ll fail faster than ever before. Because the sense of novelty attached to streaming audio and video—the sense that one could build a brand and a studio before big media showed up to play—has already passed when it comes to podcasting. For the first time in the history of the Net, big media showed up early to play.

Two presumptions drive this argument:

Listeners will prefer mainstream media content

Comcast, the US media giant, has made it clear (according to the Washington Post) that they consider podcasting nothing more than another channel for plain old radio. Problem is, a lot of people are fed up with the content they get from mainstream radio. Distributing content already aired over the radio airwaves as podcasts ultimately will have little appeal. The content will still be bound by the same restrictions that limited its content when it was pumped into radios, restrictions indie podcasters don’t face. And it will still be the same corporate-controlled, cookie-cutter, bland, mass-market garbage that has led so many people to forsake radio altogether in favor of digital media players.

Where can people hear exciting new music, for example? Certainly not on FM radio. I remember listening to FM radio in the 1970s when it was relatively new. DJs were pirates, playing whatever appealed to them. Today, FM programming is tightly managed through a relationship between station management and the big labels. My 16-year-old daughter downloaded music through Kazaa not to deny profits to artists, but for the opportunity to hear new music she simply couldn’t get over the FM airwaves. The music she didn’t like, she deleted, while she bought the CDs containing the music she liked. File sharing wasn’t a way to steal music; it was a channel for hearing new bands. Today, podcasting assumes that role, as evidenced by the growing popularity of the brand-spanking-new Podsafe Music Network. You won’t catch any of the mainstream radio stations playing music from the Network, because what they push as podcasts will be the same programs they played over the air, containing the same repetitious drivel from JLo and Brittney and the rest of the usual FM suspects.

There is no question that Apple, with its integration of podcasting into the latest release of iTunes, has promoted mainstream media podcasts. Most of the new subscriptions to podcasts through iTunes, I suspect, are from iTunes users who were unfamiliar with podcasting. They see it’s available, they see a name they recognize, they subscribe. At some point, though, many of these individuals will realize they’re using their digital media devices to listen to programming they found half-baked in the first place. Meanwhile, as awareness of podcasting increases, so will awareness of alternative programming. A rising tide (sorry for the cliche) lifts all boats.

It won’t be the first time we’ve seen this phenomenon at play. South Park, for instance, was originally an online feature that gained popularity with no help at all from mainstream media. It spread virally. Viral marketing will play a huge role in the spread of indie podcasting. Listeners to Endurance Radio, the podcast for endurance athletes, will tell other endurance athletes about the show. They’re a community of thousands of endurance athletes. They don’t need iTunes (or Clear Channel billboards, for that matter) to spread the word. And this is a show that commands thousands of dollars a month for advertising that comes from the likes of Gatorade and Fleet Sports.

Which doesn’t mean there’s no room for both brands of podcasts. XM Satellite Radio isn’t podcasting Bob Edwards’ show yet, but if it ever does, I’ll subscribe. I really like his show but I’m never at a radio when he’s on. But I’ll keep subscribing to Todd Cochrane, Adam Curry, Lee Hopkins, and other indie podcasters, too. The Internet offers unlimited bandwidth.

Interest in indie podcasting is driven by a sense of novelty

The novelty, Lindsay suggests, will wear off.

Didn’t we hear the same thing about the web in general? That it was the CB radio of the 1990s? In fact, the difference between the web and CB radio was clear: content. Indie podcasting will survive and thrive because of the value of the information it contains. Clearly, Neville and I will never attract an audience as large as ,movie reviewers Ebert & Roeper (one of the podcasts available from iTunes). However, public relations practitioners and others interested in organizational communication will never obtain content comparable to what “For Immediate Release” offers from a mainstream media source. There isn’t a radio station on earth that would produce a show dealing with the subject matter that Neville and I address because the audience isn’t big enough to attract the requisite advertising dollars to support it.

But Neville and I don’t need any advertising dollars. We’re not in it for the money. We are passionate about it and, as a consequence, our audience continues to grow. I’m not the least bit worried that our humble podcast is (in Lindsay’s words) “sooo over” because we represent the only option for those interested in our subject matter. And so it is with most other podcasts, including those focused on beer, wine, knitting, endurance sports, theme parks, and other niche interests. Public relations professionals have understood for years the value of narrowcasting.

To be sure, many podcasts will fail. Many would have failed had mainstream media never entered the picture. A medium with the practically non-existent barrier to entry that characterizes podcasting will attract people with no talent and nothing to say. But how many television series premiere each September that don’t make it to November? This isn’t unique to podcasting. Good content usually survives, bad content usually does not (the continued popularity of reality television notwithstanding).

No doubt, mainstream media will continue to predict the demise of indie podcasting. What else can they do when they don’t understand the models that drive it and face disrputive technologies that threaten their stranglehold on what we listen to? But take it with that proverbial grain of salt. Indie podcasting will do just fine.