Flogging (redux)
Exchanging a little email with John Robb at Userland. John unwittingly pushed one of my Rant-O-Matic buttons – a button I didn’t even realise I possessed, in this case – but something John said certainly got me off on one…
John’s innocuous comment was as simple as: “Any progress bringing the world of PR to weblogs (or vice versa)? There is such a good synergy there, but it surprises me that most PR agencies still don't get it.”
It’s a good point. As there’s a strong synergy between journalism and blogging, surely there should also be a strong synergy between PR and blogs? I’ve skated around this thought in the past, but haven’t really sunk my teeth into it for a while. Not for almost exactly a year, in fact. Last time I noodled on this was April ’02, where among other things I said:
“The flack is the natural symbiotic complement to the hack ;-) Makes sense that both sides of the relationship should gravitate towards the same environment. Blogging is conversation, in kind of a Cluetrain sense. If lots of journalists are participating in the conversation through their blogs, it feels right for engaged flacks to participate too. If markets are conversations, marketers need to be where the conversations are happening - or something like that.”
Back then, I was responding to a comment by Steve MacLaughlin at Saltire, that: “…the public relations folks don't quite understand the whole blogging thing...”
Struck me as generally true then, and still true now.
As I commented to John: I'm afraid there's still just so much cluelessness in the PR industry. He’s absolutely right to point out that most agencies don't get it. And those that think they do can sometimes be even more clueless and dangerous than the ones who haven't got blogging on their radars yet.
The idea of "pitching" blogs, for example, strikes me as an exercise doomed to failure.
I would imagine most self-respecting bloggers would be much more likely to marvel at the deed than consider the actual content of the pitch. The act of the pitch in itself might be covered by the target blogger (probably with a note of amused disdain); the actual story being pitched probably would not.
The effect is analogous to what happens when you stand in front of a dog and point to the stick you want him to retrieve. The dog will look at your finger.
A dog has no way of interpreting what the human gesture means - you're just an alpha dog showing them your finger. The finger of this alpha dog is, for the moment at least, really interesting. They're probably going to comment on it in their own doggy way: with a tilt of the head, a waggy tail, and a curious expression.
You want them to go get the stick - they're much more keen on sniffing your finger.
As with dogs; so with blogs. You want a blogger to swallow your pitch? They’re more likely to publicly snuffle around your underparts or hump your leg.
Then there's the approach some agencies have tried to take with co-opting the grassroots, meritocratic nature of the blogging community.
Raging Cow is probably the best example here. It's true that their (actually rather neatly executed) blog managed to secure a lot of blogosphere 'coverage'. They rose pretty fast to the top of Daypop, Blogdex, Technorati, et al.
But did this really help them shift any product? They demonstrated that their agency groks the cosmetics and idiosyncracies of the medium rather well, but did they increase sales as a result of the blog?
Actually the core problem here is not isolated to the PR industry's incursions into blogspace - I'm afraid there's a systemic cluelessness in the PR business at work in this example.
The depressing thing is that the Raging Cow blog was, I'm sure, considered a raging success by the creators and by Dr. Pepper, in that it achieved what was the all-too-obvious desired result.
That is: it got noticed, fast, by the blogging community. It burned very, very brightly at the top of the indexes for a short while. Lots of citations, a good few parodies, plenty of 'buzz'.
Whoopee-doo.
I would submit that buzz for buzz's sake achieves little of lasting merit. This is success measured in very conventional PR terms - success based entirely on measurement of Output, as opposed to Outcome.
Output, in traditional PR, means getting lots of 'ink' (often regardless of the quality/tone). Same rule applies to the way many agencies are approaching blogspace - "we've got to get the bloggers talking about it".
Spare me.
Sure, you'll get bloggers commenting on your arseheaded tactics, but they won't be saying anything too flattering.
Maybe Chris Pirillo will truck a case of your free product to a blogerati party - but only so he can videotape people gagging on it, for the amusement of his blog audience.
Lots of big blog dogs linking to the finger you've pointed; no one fetching yer stick.
PR based on driving outcomes, on the other hand, looks at tangible business results as the key measurement. Did your last announcement increase download traffic? Did you increase sales leads? Did you sell more product? Did you get people into your stores?
I'm not sure yet how to take this kind of campaign approach into the blogosphere. I'm not even convinced that one can.
It’s partly a problem of what and how do you measure here? PR folk in general pay lip service to measurement, but few understand it and most are, frankly, afraid of it. But if it ain’t measureable, it ain’t worth the money (or, to purloin and pervert an aphorism: if it cannot be measured, it shouldn’t exist).
And I don’t mean clippings-by-the-pound measurement, either. If you're going to launch a PR campaign, you should know what business goal you're trying to achieve. Setting the blogvines humming is not a viable business goal. Sure, you can measure it, but what difference does it make to your bottom line?
The idea of tying PR efforts to tangible business results is a scary concept for your average PR bunny - hence the traditional focus on quantitative metrics such as "share of voice" (*ack*), impressions, etc.
There's even a line of thought still popular in my business that PR activities actually can't be measured, except in fluffy, intangible, feel good terms.
Bollocks.
I’m not saying you can be entirely scientific about PR measurement, but at least if you focus on the right outcomes, you'll have a better chance of knowing what success should look like when you achieve it.
I seem to have wandered a little, but I guess all this is a terribly long-winded way of saying I'm just not sure how PR and the world of weblogs intersect right now, or how they should in the future. My thinking is flawed and incomplete, I know.
So, again: John's right -- us PR folk just don't get it. At least insofar as "getting it" would imply knowing how to use the meme to achieve our nefarious purposes ;-)
For the moment, I'm much more focused on evangelizing blogging as a fundamentally good and right thing to do, to anyone and everyone I can.
So far I've convinced at least six new people to start blogging, and I continue to talk it up to the journalists, producers, and client-side contacts I come across every day.
If Reed's law holds, I guess you could say I'm doing pro bono PR for the entire blogosphere by continuing to promote the practice at every opportunity.
Now there's an intersection of PR and blogging that makes good sense to me.
