I kicked off a bit of a debate in the office today, which then moved on Twitter (as these things usually do!).
The motion is this:
Has the growth of digital rendered the current PR agency model broken?
PR practitioners, especially in agencies, need to be jacks-of-all-trades – strategic, creative, tactical, client-facing…
I’ve often wondered whether the current model is flawed and whether we should be looking at a set up similar to what you would find in adland, with client facing account people supported by creatives, planners and producers etc.
With PRs increasingly having to deal with multiple specialisms, from SEO and social to traditional media, bloggers and analysts, is it just too much to expect everyone to be proficient in everything? Do they even need to be?
I have no answers as yet, but I’m keen to get a bit of a debate going.
If you had to start an agency from scratch tomorrow, how would you structure it?
What do you think? Do you know PR agencies that have a slightly different model? Does it work? Can we all be specialists in everything in these days of media fragmentation?
I was interested to see this week a live debate by the two candidates for the CIPR presidency. The debate was being trailed by Philip Sheldrake on Twitter and he was also asking for possible questions for the two. I decided to throw my hat into the ring:
I was pleased to see that my question was posed to the two candidates (about 14 minutes in!). The responses were mixed.
Rob Brown, who has written an excellent book on digital PR, gave a good overview of where we are and argued that, while the past has been all about journalist relations, PR faces a new opportunity and needs to reinvent itself. He suggested that we have a fantastic opportunity to get to the heart of what PR actually is and begin to engage directly and build relationships with the public.
Sally Sykes was a little more hesitant in her response and although she acknowledged that ‘this was our moment’, she fell back into the reputation management debate which I don’t really think encompasses the true might of what digital and social means for the PR industry. She did however acknowledge the importance of training, which is another positive sign.
Do we need more than the grassroots?
So my question is: does the industry needs better leadership from the top when it comes to online PR and social media and do we have this at the moment?
I’d argue we don’t.
I feel that a lot of the new thinking out there is coming from the grassroots of the industry (maybe this was always the way?). I see wide-ranging, in-depth arguments about the future of PR on Twitter, Linkedin and on blogs (even in PR Week from time to time!), but I don’t see much of this coming from the industry’s professional bodies.
I should add that I’m not a member of the CIPR and so maybe it’s just that I don’t hear some of the noise they are making because it is internalised. And perhaps this is partly why I’m less interested in membership itself.
I want the CIPR to be going out there are really representing the industry and its members by demonstrating the opportunity that PR has, encouraging change and best practice. We know that social media conferences are always oversubscribed; there’s clearly an appetite out there, but I feel that there is confusion and panic about how the industry can adopt these new techniques. The industry needs leadership here.
I know how these organisations work. In the past I used to work for a professional body and I appreciate that in big organisations like this change takes time and it happens slowly. Maybe this is how it should be; maybe we need a more staid, considered approach from the top? But I see some of the great work that bodies like the IAB do in the digital arena and wonder why PR be the same.
Let’s grasp the opportunity and shout about it
At the end of the day, I’m not trying to bash the CIPR or the other PR trade bodies, I’m just passionate about the opportunity the PR industry has and the changes that are necessary for it to truly grasp this potential.
It’s why I decided to enter into the PR industry in the first place instead of some of the other digital marketing disciplines out there. PR has a powerful argument for owning communication in the digital age. I’m just not sure that, as an industry, we are fully realising this potential yet. Hopefully, if elected, Rob or Sally will take this baton and run with it. As Sally said, this is our moment, we need to take it before it is too late.
They took 50 online news sites from across different industry sectors and analysed them against three key areas: readership per article (average numbers of UK page views per Google indexed url per month), engagement (time spent per page to indicate how long a reader is likely to be spending reading that content when they get there) and UK relevance (what proportion of the sites readers as a whole come from the UK and would therefore be likely to be relevant if you were trying to reach a UK audience).
The results are really interesting as Adam states:
“if you remove these six high scoring sites from the samples then the sector specific sites still achieve, on average, between 30-60% of the readership per article of the remaining UK Nationals or Consumer titles”
In addition, the titles that scored high for readership per article were not the same that scored high for engagement.
These findings have massive relevancy for the PR industry, as Andrew states:
“In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical. Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. Or whether this engagement results in a meaningful business outcome).
“However, you could argue that Google data now provides for a much deeper understanding of editorial engagement. At least online.”
At Wildfire, we take a very audience centric approach to PR (and online/social media) campaigns. This means knowing firstly about the audience that the brand/client wants (but also needs) to target and then, as demonstrated above, knowing which channels are going to be most effective.
This is crucial insight for planning but is also important for measurement and reporting as well.
There’s a good blog post from Mark Kobayashi-Hillary (a man with a great name!) over on Computer Weekly. He talks about how, with so many tech (and other trade) journalists now on Twitter, PRs should take note and get stuck in.
It’s a tactic that has become second nature to myself and my colleagues at Wildfire, but, as Mark says, the industry as a whole has often been slow on the uptake:
“This all comes back to the blog I wrote here recently about some executives trying Twitter and then discarding it because they could not find any use in just updating the world on their meeting schedule…Some PR agencies have realised this. There are many now with strong digital and social expertise, but there are so many that are just riding on an existing contract. They will ultimately die out through natural selection.”
There’s a great point here about the inability to react to change and the dangers of ‘doing nothing’. It might be ok in the short to mid term, but the ultimate endgame will be disastrous.
But, it’s another comment that Mark makes that is equally as interesting, when he suggests that tech journalists too are waking up to the benefits of social media engagement and, are beginning to cut out the PRs that are ignoring these new channels (and even some that aren’t) and going directly to their clients or spokespeople:
“This works both ways – how many trade hacks really pay attention to the sea of press releases anymore when they can talk directly to the people they are writing about?”
We’re beginning to take a very different approach – as an agency – in the role we play with some of our clients in this social savvy world. Rather than acting as the gatekeeper, we are much more the facilitator or even the supporter or guide.
This is bloody scary for some PR agencies, but its not going to change any time soon. It’s only going to get worse (or better!).
Sometimes the “PR industry” really frustrates me. It annoys me when I see discussion about whether PR should get involved in digital or social media (yes, this still happens) and also about PR’s role in SEO. But, whilst all these might be vaguely tolerable, it’s utterly ridiculous that we are still having discussions about AVE.
Not only is the AVE debate still going on, but it is being debated by some of the biggest names in PR. Recently some of PR’s bigwigs met in Barcelona under the auspices of the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication to agree a set of evaluation and measurement ‘principles’. The so-called Barcelona Principles were agreed as follows:
Goal setting and measurement are important
Media measurement requires quantity and quality
AVEs are not the value of public relations
Social media can and should be measured
Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results (outputs)
Organisational results and outcomes should be measured whenever possible
Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.
I’ve not really got an issue with any of these. However, they are all pretty basic and obvious. Also, ambiguous wording such as “results and outcomes should be measured whenever possible” gives PRs an easy opt-out. The principles don’t add anything to the debate and don’t push the boundaries of what forward thinking PRs and agencies already know.
The mention of AVE embodies this. Don’t get me wrong. I know there are lots of PR agencies out there that are still using AVE (I’m proud to say we are not one of them). And I know there are even more clients out there demanding it.
But AVE is a dinosaur and by still debating it and talking about it, we are merely giving it more awareness. In a digital world, AVE has absolutely no place (I personally doubt it had much place in a non-digital world either, but I wasn’t around then!). The other horrible thing about AVE is that it diminishes the role and power of PR. It reduces the power and raison d’être of PR to a mere ‘cost-effective way to do advertising’. Incredibly, by using AVE, all PRs are archiving is ‘doing-down’ their role in the marketing mix.
So whilst I can’t argue against the principle which declares that AVEs are not the value of public relations, it’s just sad that the conversation hasn’t moved on from this point yet, at least at an ‘industry body’ level.
PR Week reports today that legendary IT journalist and editor of CIO magazine, Martin Veitch, is leaving journalism for the verdant pastures of PR (with Bite).
This follows on the back of some other notable moves in a similar direction recently.
So what does this mean about the state of IT journalism and, indeed, the attraction of PR (an industry which many of these movers no doubt bemoaned on a regular basis!)?
Media woes
The problems the media face have been well documented by myself and others for a long time and need no re-evaluation. And the IT sector is no different, especially when we consider the more traditional ‘print’ titles. After the demise of IT Week in 2008, Computing has recently gone fortnightly and even Computer Weekly has made redundancies (not very insightful, but I also think the continually decreasing quality of the paper used by Computer Weekly is a bad sign…!).
The changing face of PR
And whilst the future looks less and less rosy on one side of the pond, PR perhaps offers an increasingly attractive proposition. I covered an article in the Independent last week which reported the appointment of a number of key journalists by Edelman recently. As the article states:
“In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, [PRs/their clients] are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.”
I took a bit of a (deliberately) controversial line of argument suggesting that journalists were therefore not really needed by PRs anymore and, whilst this is certainly not entirely the case, what it perhaps shows (as I stated in the comments) is that some of those traditional skills that journalists have always had (ability to craft a story, find an angle, write great content) are increasingly being needed by PRs.
It’s therefore no surprise to see Bite and Edelman creating ‘client strategy’ and ‘chief content officer’ roles for ex-journos [and it's certainly not the first and/or last time a journalist will turn to PR]. For those of us living and breathing this ‘new PR’ already, the question will be, whether hiring journalists is the way for PR agencies to go, and/or whether there are new skills that we all need to be learning to put us in the best position to help our clients enter into this brave new world!
There’s an rare article about PR in today’s Independent, which lifts the lid on the ‘new PR’:
PRs, who once had to go through the prism of journalism to convey their messages to a mass audience, are increasingly confident in circumventing traditional media altogether. In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, they are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.
Despite much of the article reading like an advert for Edelman (this line for example: “Other PR companies acknowledge the boldness of Edelman’s play”), it nicely recaps the position that PR finds itself in and the potential opportunity that many of us feel exists.
I bang on about this potential opportunity the industry has to really take control in this democratised and fragmented media world we find ourselves in. At a time when brands are quickly waking up to the fact that the ‘push’ marketing of yesterday just doesn’t cut it anymore and that creating intimate relationships directly with end users is not only possible, but is quickly becoming vital for brands.
Bit delayed with this one for a combination of holiday and that crazy bank holiday thang of trying to fit a week’s worth of work into just four days!
But, I’m famous! My first ever letter to PR Week has been published.
It’s all on the back of #wolfstargate (you can read more here) and, as the image above (courtesy of my iPhone) isn’t the best, here is the letter in full:
The whole Wolfstar/Paratus/Vodafone incident leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It seems there is quickly becoming a ‘them and us’ mindset in the social media agency versus PR agency debate.
I can see exactly why the ‘social media specialists’ are keen to propagandise that the entire PR industry doesn’t ‘get’ social media, but it’s a short-sighted and shallow argument.
In such a new discipline, mistakes will always be made (by all types of agencies) but, for those of us who believe PR specialists have the underlying strategic and tactical skills to provide effective social media counsel, the future surely seems to lie with agencies that can provide a holistic and integrated approach.
Some agencies in the PR industry might still be catching up, but it won’t take long, so expect to see more big social media wins from more ‘traditional’ agencies soon.
Infighting looks set to break out again amongst PR agencies. A blog post late last week from Wolfstar PR’sJed Hallam cast a (perhaps envious and rather harsh) stone at Paratus Communications – the PR agency that has (to the industry’s surprise) recently acquired the full Vodafone UK PR brief.
Jed’s beef is with a series of emails that were sent by Paratus on behalf of Vodafone yesterday all in the name of blogger outreach:
“Today the entire Wolfstar office has had two spam emails from Vodafone’s new PR agency. Now, we’re a pretty online social bunch, as you’d expect from a public relations consultancy that’s got a reputation for doing online PR. But, even if you’re generous, there’s only really two or three of us that might cover a mobile comms story. And you’d be better off pitching us by approaching us personally, not BCCd into a humungous list.”
Adam from Paratus has this morning posted a response in a move that could have even come from Wolfstar’s own ‘101 guide to social media crisis comms’; it’s a good reply – quick, transparent and honest.
Now, I’m not going to cast further accusations. But, I do think this incident raises two interesting points about the nature of social media outreach and the potential reputation issues this can create for agencies and their brands.
Firstly, the ‘leg-work’ that agencies do is now totally open to scrutiny. In the good ol’ days of traditional media relations, PRs in general had a pretty bad relationship with journalists, who accused them of spamming on a regular basis. But this bad feeling simmered below the surface and, perhaps because of this, agencies continued to enter into bad practices.
The ‘democratisation’ of media changes this. Bloggers and ’social media influencers’ aren’t afraid to name and shame, and their power is potentially venomous.
Secondly, as Jed alludes to, this storm in a tea-cup will probably be taken up by the so-called ’social media agencies’ that feel they have another nice example of why PR agencies aren’t suited to this new digital world. But the fact remains that PR agencies have the skills and experience to really ‘get’ this new digital space.
Yes, some PR agencies ’spam’ journalists. Some agencies (of all flavours) will still try and spam using social media channels. But, the sad fact is that they will all eventually become unstuck. There are plenty of PR agencies out there (and I have no reason to think that Paratus aren’t one of them) that have been doing it right and are still doing it right and are taking every effort to ensure that the reputation issues the PR industry faced with journalists, isn’t repeated in the social space. I’ve argued before that I think the industry needs to work together to combat these issues, not turn on itself and backstab.
We are all learning. We will (even Wolfstar) make mistakes. But agencies, more than ever, need to think before they act, both to preserve their client’s reputation and that of themselves.
If there is one issue that is almost guaranteed to raise its head every month or so, it is PR spam. I’m sure it has always been thus and I’m sure it will continue to be…
Yesterday, Business Zone editor Dan Martin blogged about a couple of PRs that pitched irrelevant information to him, failing to realise that his specialism was small businesses. At almost the same time, I saw tweets from journalists Sally Whittle and Adrian Bridgwater similarly moaning about pitches they had also recently received.
Dan mentions the Inconvenient PR Truth campaign that Real Wire launched earlier in the year. At the time, I resisted the temptation to blog about the campaign as I wasn’t really sure about my reaction to both the issue and the campaign itself.
But, I’ve been mulling it all over and think there are three key points worth making. I also think the comparison with other marketing genres is interesting and pertinent for example, email marketing – another area where spam is seen to be a big problem.
Pitching isn’t always as easy as it might seem – I’m prepared to get slated here, but pitching and targeting isn’t always as easy as it might seem. Media databases and distribution services (like Real Wire) in many ways make it seem too easy for PRs, but they also make us lazy. Factor in the pressure from colleagues and clients to get results and you have a situation where sending out press releases to a distribution list is as simple as a click of a button. This isn’t targeting. Targeting is much much harder and takes a lot of research and understanding. This isn’t an excuse, it is a recognition that this is a specialist technique that needs care and attention. It’s the same with email marketing; it’s easy to blast out an email to a distribution list, but it is much harder to segment your list based on user behaviour, it takes time. And the fact with both is that taking the care and effort will always bring better results.
Spam will always exist - many journalists rely on PR a lot (as a PR, you quickly get to know the publications and journalists that will simply copy and paste anything they are given!). That’s not to say they should just suck it up and cope with it, but there will inevitably be good and bad PRs (like there are good and bad journalists). This will never change. Similarly there will always be companies that spam using email marketing, it’s one of those things that are annoying but we just have to get on and deal with.
Education is vital - combining both these points, there is a genuine need for education in the industry, to promote best practice. We work with an email marketing company that works tirelessly with organisations like the Direct Marketing Association amongst others to promote best practice. I don’t think the same is really true in the PR industry and I’m not sure that it was an outcome of the Inconvenient Truth campaign, but perhaps should have been.
Conclusion: let’s be positive
So what is the answer? I genuinely think there is an opportunity for the industry as a whole, perhaps in combination with journalists, to share positive examples of how this process should work from a best practice standpoint. We are all quick to talk from lofty, strategic positions, but when do we ever talk about more tactical processes? Journalists too are quick to complain about bad practices, but if we don’t ever hear about good examples, how are those lower down in agencies or in-house meant to learn.
Yes, this should probably all happen internally to an extent, but it obviously isn’t happening everywhere so, as an industry, don’t we have a responsibility to share and learn together?
