Francis’s Favourite Fictions

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Fiction: Public relations can’t be measured

By Francis Moran

Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such a venture who nixed her marketing vice president’s intention to hire us, saying, “I can’t measure marketing so I won’t fund it.”

Too bad; the company she used to work for is now out of business, taking a genuinely valuable technology advance and more than $30-million in investors’ money with it. Maybe now, she at least has a yardstick with which to measure the cost of not marketing.

It is an enduring myth, though, that marketing in general, and maybe public relations in particular, evades measurement, that there’s no way to calculate the return on investment for such an inexact science. As with many of my other favourite fictions, it is a myth perpetuated in large part because it serves many in the PR industry itself to do so. Theirs is a black box science, they tell gullible clients, dependant on things like “relationships,” and intended to “build buzz” and a bunch of other ambiguous terms deliberately employed expressly because they do evade objective definition.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

I can’t imagine that any client today will sign on to a program that doesn’t at least define a scope of work in clear and unambiguous terms. In other words, a critical path of activities that at least tells the client how much PR stuff they’re buying, how many news releases, analyst briefings, story pitches, trade shows supported, that sort of thing. We call that measuring outputs, and it’s as far as many agencies are prepared to go. We think it’s a good, but woefully inadequate, starting point.

Any agency worth its retainer should be willing to describe the results its efforts will produce in similarly unambiguous terms. If you invest in our exerting this much effort, dear client, you will see this much media and analyst coverage over the term of the program. We call this measuring outcomes, and we define it very clearly in terms of specific objectives for the program. We tell you which media outlets and analyst firms we’re targeting. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that we will then tell you exactly in what percentage of them we expect to generate coverage over the term of the program, what type of coverage that will be, and what sorts of stories, key messages and so on that coverage will contain. We break down our objectives by category of activity, setting success objectives for individual news releases, product launches, analyst tours, trade show briefings, speaking programs, and so on.

We like this approach because we’re not asking our clients to buy a bunch of PR stuff from us. Rather, we’re asking them to invest in a given level of effort, the outcome of which we have clearly defined. Now they only need to ask themselves whether those results are a good return on the investment we’re asking them to make. At the end of the program, our clients don’t need us to tell them whether we have achieved the objectives or not. They can tell, without a trace of uncertainty or ambiguity, for themselves.

If your agency or internal PR department won’t commit to setting those kinds of objectives, it’s time to find a new one.

But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, don’t call yet, there’s more.

Even if we achieve the outcomes we projected, is it worth anything if that media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Here’s where the wheat really gets separated from the chaff. I’ll write more about this in a future post.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on January 8, 2008

Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Marketing strategy, Public and media relations — Leave a comment

Fiction: It’s all about relationships – Take 2

By Francis Moran

Francis’s Favourite PR Fictions started out as a presentation I used to give to technology company executives who always reacted strongly, and, surprisingly, usually positively, to the subtitle of the presentation, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” This fiction, that successful public relations relies mainly on the existing relationships I might have with the media and analysts my client needs to reach, has always been top of the list because, as I wrote in a previous post, it continues to persist despite ample everyday evidence to the contrary.

I am moved to come back to it today because belief in this fiction leads to the extraordinary comment I heard a few months ago from a highly paid marketing consultant and author who said she had to hire a new PR agency every 90 days because that’s how long it took each agency to exhaust its contacts. She was openly skeptical of my contention that a good PR agency was worth much more than just its contacts, and should be able to pitch her story anywhere it deserved to be covered. She couldn’t see how her own approach to agency selection was guaranteeing the lousy results she had come to expect. However, I wrote it off at the time as just a more extreme outcome of this favourite fiction of mine.

Then I was gobsmacked to read more recently that this idea that PR agencies must be replaced every three months or so enjoyed a wider currency, and even more astonished to read it in a blog post by respected social media commentator and publisher, Jeff Pulver. While I can easily endorse much of what Pulver wrote about his interactions with public relations agencies, especially his demand that they state up front what they are going to achieve in return for a client’s investment, I am in profound disagreement with his comment, “Most PR firms are good for one time thru (sic) their rolodex which translates into a 60-90 day shelf life.”

Now, Pulver is a success, and I assume he got there because, among other evident talents, he is a professional. I state this caveat not to brown nose but because I’m about to hoist him on his own petard and I’m hoping he’s professional enough that it doesn’t come back to bite me.

Here’s what I mean.

A little over a year ago, we were retained by a new client whose voice application technology meant that Pulver’s VON Magazine and VON trade shows were critical targets for our efforts. This was new space for us, however, and, as with many new clients, we did not have existing relationships with the journalists we would be targeting, including those at VON. While we work very hard to establish effective working relationships with our key media targets, having them is not a prerequisite, and that’s what makes this “It’s all about relationships” such a fiction for us. This new client was no different.

Starting with our very first pitch and continuing over the past 14 months, we have engaged successfully with four or five people within VON, from the editor in chief to the keeper of the briefing schedule for VON reporters attending the organization’s trade shows. Armed with no rolodex entry, just our client’s good and deserving story, our own thorough and hardworking approach and, of course, VON’s interest in what we were pitching, we have generated articles in the magazine, news briefs and other coverage on the web site and briefings at trade shows.

And the results continue, long past the three-month mark.

All in all, it has been an excellent, mutually beneficial interaction, exactly how things should be between flacks and hacks.

Bottom line, Jeff, is that even within your own organization your belief that PR agencies are only as good as their rolodexes, and then only for a few scant months, is being proven a fiction. I do hope this doesn’t mean we can’t continue to work together…

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Posted by: Francis Moran on December 17, 2007

Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations — Leave a comment

Fiction: It’s all about relationships

By Francis Moran

We heard this one again last week.

Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell.

This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.

Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.

But if my client’s story deserves to be in the New York Times, or on the BBC, or in EE Times, or on National Public Radio, or on the Richard and Judy Show, or in the most narrowly focused of trade media outlets, it matters not a whit whether I have any kind of existing relationship with the reporter, editor or producer who needs to be successfully pitched in order to get that coverage. It matters only that I have a deserving story to pitch and the ability to pitch it well.

And if the story doesn’t deserve to be there, all the relationships in the world ain’t gonna make it happen.

Here at inmedia, we demolish this fiction practically every time we take on a new client since we invariably are required to add new media outlets, new contacts — indeed, entire new industry sectors — to our outreach efforts. And even where we have an established record of success with any individual journalist or outlet, we don’t lever the relationship; we lever our ability to engage that journalist on the only issue of any interest to her or him: the story.

So why does this fiction persist? I blame the PR industry. Truth is, you sell what you’ve got. And if you don’t have the necessary grasp of how newsrooms operate to effectively pitch into them, if you don’t have the deep understanding of your client’s story that allows you to get past the initial objections reporters throw in your way, if you don’t have the strategic understanding of why you’re trying to generate coverage for your client in the outlet you’re targeting, then the only thing you can rely on is your so-called relationships. So you tell the prospect that relationships with the target media are a prerequisite to getting coverage and you hope the prospect is an unsophisticated buyer who will fall for that.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on November 26, 2007

Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations — Leave a comment

Fiction: Bloggers are different from other journalists

By Francis Moran

When I started this little tech PR agency, the world of online media outlets was still very much in its infancy. And an early fiction we had to deal with was a widely held belief that online media were some kind of a different beast from their print or broadcast brethren, and that only a PR agency that specialised in online media could reach these brave new e-journalists.

Our conviction was that these outlets might well be new but that there was nothing at all novel about a time-tested best-practices approach to pitching them, one based on pegging the natural news value of a client’s story and then pitching it only to those who would see that value. And we were right; from Day 1, our clients enjoyed the same widespread coverage online as they did in other media formats.

Our conviction that online journalists responded to same imperatives as their offline brethren actually cost us a client or two early on because our proposals didn’t specifically stipulate we were addressing them. We’d write that we’d target “all appropriate media outlets,” and assumed our clients were as canny as we were. We quickly learned to expand it to read, “all appropriate media outlets, including online outlets,” and to include key online titles in our list of examples.

Time passed and the requirement to single out these new media types passed with it as everyone learned that the same fundamental principles applied to pitching online media outlets and journalists, and that our phrase, “all appropriate media outlets” included online titles as a matter of course.

Then came blogs.

And the latest entry in a growing collection of what I call, “Francis’s favourite fictions.” Or, “Everything I know that’s wrong about public relations I learned from technology company executives.”

Here’s the latest one, tossed at me a few months back by a seasoned technology marketer who really should have known better. “Bloggers are different,” she insisted. “And only a PR agency that specialises in Web 2.0 social media can pitch them properly.”

Well, that was red-meat bait, and I rose to it. “Give me an example,” I challenged her. And she gave me two names, both of them critically influential bloggers in her company’s WiFi space with whom we couldn’t possibly develop a relationship, she said, because we weren’t a Web 2.0 agency.

I recognised one of the names immediately, and a check of our media contact database confirmed that we knew this guy very well. In fact, we first started successfully pitching to him when he was a columnist at a print trade magazine, then as a columnist for the online version of the same magazine, then as publisher of his own online newsletter, and now as a blogger. And guess what? He is just as pitchable, and he responds to the same things, now that he’s breathing the rarified air of the blogosphere as he had as an ink-stained wretch.

The second name was also in our database, and also had been for years, but we generally didn’t pitch him any more because his blog was the equivalent of what we used to call a rip-and-read outfit. That is, like small radio stations that just read wire copy for their newscasts, he didn’t do any original reporting; he just wrote about things he had read about elsewhere. A useful conduit, perhaps, but not one we’d bother pitching directly; better we get a hit in one of the media he watches and let him write about that. Which he does regularly.

Point is, in my world, the bloggers who count are either bona fide, and often dyed-in-the-wool, journalists making use of this latest communications channel, or they’re newcomers to the game who think, act, and respond to newsworthy pitches, in exactly the same way as journalists.

Problem is, too many people think like my favourite-fiction spinner. So we’re careful to once again add a phrase to our proposals, which these days read, “all appropriate media outlets, including bloggers.” This, too, shall pass.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on September 24, 2007

Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations, Social media — Leave a comment

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