PR Studies

Ridiculous PR and objectivity

Wikipedia requires contributors to write from a 'neutral point of view' and its founder Jimmy Wales discourages edits from PR practitioners because their view is deemed, as paid advocates, to be biased. (There's currently a lively debate on this topic on a Facebook group.)

This post is not about Wikipedia, but about the struggle for PR to be practised objectively. For, on the face of it, the paid advocate cannot ever be neutral.

It's because PR seems incapable of neutrality - and will always be vulnerable to charges of 'spin' or even deceit - that we should mind our language.

It is because we act as advocates (and have an intermediary role between the organisations and key groups) that we must be mindful of how the organisation is perceived. 

A stream of self-serving, upbeat messages can easily be dismissed as 'just PR'. To be effective, PR must adopt the language and values of news and be written objectively. How does this sound?

• 'Smiley Company are pleased to announce Fun Fridays'

It's wrong in so many ways. It put the organisation at the centre of the story, where it is unlikely to belong. It views the company as plural (we, they) and describes its state of emotion (who cares?). In short, it's not news. It may look like PR (and there's a lot of this about), but it's not ever likely to be effective public relations.

How can ojective public relations improve on this?

• 'Call for Fun Fridays to banish national gloom'

It's still weak, the softest of soft news, but it does raise a topical issue. It's not so smug and doesn't open the organisation to ridicule. At least it's not quite so readily dismissed.

When subjectivity is so inappropriate and so easily-spotted, why is it still so common in public relations statements? The answer has to be group think - the downside of organisational group dynamics - and the desire to please the boss or the client.

But what is more pleasing? Soft words that flatter the boss but fail to deliver any news (and may lead to ridicule); or a more objective approach that removes the self-serving publicity but may deliver greater news impact?

It's the difference between writing with the organisation/client in mind and writing with the reader in mind (the reader, conventionally, being a jaded journalist who has seen it all before).

It's easy to understand, but hard to put into practice. I raise it here because I see so many students and junior practitioners falling into group think and believing that PR means writing in an overly-promotional style.

To respond to Jimmy Wales, we may not be neutral but we can and should be objective.

 

Back to earth. Back to reality.

There's a feeling of 'back to school' this week. But that's not the reason for the jolt.

The reality check is the decision to fold the Media Guardian supplement (and Education and Society supplements too) into the main paper. Clearly, this is a commercially-driven decision taken because of the migration of job advertisements from print to online (and elsewhere). Decades ago, before the world of the web, each Monday's Media Guardian had page after page of job ads and was the place to find a whole range of graduate opportunities. Times change, and so does technology.

The second jolt relates to this first one. Here's a very lucid perspective on the issue of unpaid internships from an MSc Marketing student. The phrase that leaps out at me is this uncontentious-looking one: 'I’m 23 and aspire to a career in advertising'. Only connect. The Guardian loses its well-established Media supplement  because of the migration of classified ads online. Then ask some questions about the future of display ads and print media.

Yes, but surely broadcast ads have bounced back in the past year. Perhaps; but what's the wider picture? The future of advertising isn't in advertising. It's in creating ideas, delivering compelling communications, fostering communities and managing digital campaigns (as this student is already aware). In other words, the future of advertising looks very like public relations...

Hopefully smart graduates are alert to this. Hopefully their lecturers and textbook authors are too. But I very much doubt that university marketing and management teams are when they offer courses that appear to promise glittering careers in glamorous twentieth-century industries that evoke a Mad Men world.

Bump. Back to reality.

Book review: Loose

Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go
Martin Thomas, Headline Publishing Group 

Marketing consultant Martin Thomas was co-author of Crowd Surfing, one of my favourite books in 2008. When I saw the new book's contents page containing such chapters as 'Not a place for tidy minds' and 'The end of planning?' I knew I was in for a treat.

In follow up to Crowd Surfing and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (my top pick from 2008), this feels like a radical manifesto. It's certainly a challenge to the micro-managers, the planners and brand consultants whose traditional role has been to offer predictability and certainty.

We live in a complex, non-linear world - and the challenge is how to 'embrace the chaos and ambiguity of modern life'.

The author is keen to stress that this is not a web phenomenon. 'Something interesting is happening beyond the world of social media: public meetings are suddenly all the rage.'

It's a social phenomenon - and an understanding of behavioural economics is more useful than mastery of technology, Thomas argues. 'The simplistic view of man as a rational economic animal doesn't appear to fit the mood of the times.'

Simple prescriptions obviously won't do, though the author does offer some broad guiding principles for successful loose organisations (on page 168). He also gives many case studies to show where loose principles prevailed (ASDA, Pret a Manger, First Direct and Unilever among them).

He quotes Google's Shona Brown discussing loose management: 'The way to succeed in fast-paced, ambiguous situations is to avoid creating too much structure, but not to add too little either.'

Those singled out for criticism include business schools that have inculcated a rational approach to business. 'We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.'

Thomas writes well of the millennial generation who 'take great pleasure in subverting any attempts by authority figures to silence them.' But I should say that I'm more likely to be criticised by my students for teaching in too 'loose' a way by those who want me to give them much more precise instructions ('just tell me what you want me to do').

The author is an articulate and well-read guide. Though it's a business book and not an academic text, he frequently makes me feel inadequate by his erudition.

While there's nothing I can disagree with the in the book's premise, it's not an original idea. I'm surprised the author makes no reference to open source, whose concepts have already been taken beyond software development into politics and marketing.

And a book that makes an even more compelling case for creativity and innovation in business is Charles Leadbeater's We Think (not cited here).

But it's an enjoyable and valuable read and the challenge for many will be to learn the lessons and put them into practice.

'The principles that appear to determine the success of any social media initiative are becoming well established: be responsive, be human, be transparent... Unfortunately, most institutions struggle to live by them.'

A new approach to education

It was always evident that whoever formed the new government, higher education would face a period of retrenchment after the rapid growth of the past decade. We're still waiting for Lord Browne's review to report, but can expect it to recommend raising the current ceiling on student fees.

Many complain about education becoming a market. Educators are faced with growing demands from students, who complain loudly if they don't receive what they feel they've paid for (this is never about good teaching, note, but about good grades).

For a marketing perspective on the problems in higher education, read Seth Godin's analysis of university courses in the US. 'Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students.'

Let's hope average courses are squeezed in a more competitive market with rising fees. But how could the education we provide become less average, while remaining affordable to many?

Here's one approach. We should welcome two-year undergraduate degrees, but under the following conditions:

• Students should be older when they start university (either having taken a gap year, or worked, or studied for a foundation degree). We teach too many school leavers who aren't yet ready to learn.
• A two-year degree should not simply teach more to compress the syllabus (that only encourages students to learn less). 
• Students would be expected to meet minimum attendance requirements - at risk of losing the opportunity to be assessed.
• Work placements should not be abandoned: space would ideally have to be made for two three-month placements as part of the course.
• An academic year would have to become fuller: I suggest nine months, plus three months on placement. (Paid work outside the course would have to become a secondary commitment.)

Academics and university administrators will resist this fiercely: the status quo is very comfortable for very many. But Godin's right: an average education for average students is untenable in a world of rising fees and greater competition.

Community conversations: a case study

We took a look at the conversations surrounding a brand in class today - but I did not get to choose the case study.

ASOS sounds to me like a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer - but it's a brand that means a lot to my students.

We started with the website, and took a look at news reports, then moved onto blogs.

With Twitter it became really interesting. An appeal for photos of customers wearing leather garments was responded to within minutes. These photos became potential content for the ASOS Life Community site.

Customers were raving about the brand and its offers - and so were doing the marketing for the company. I could barely find a critical voice on the social web.

People are clearly happy to share their love of fashion and I can envisage this being true of music or sports fans - but it's not so easy to see how other organisations can so easily recruit customers to become fans.

PR and the media

I asked a group of students to list all available media channels for an imaginary local awareness campaign.

They began with mass media (print and broadcast) but quickly added social media. Soon they were thinking more creatively about the meaning of media ('means of communication') and were creating events and other opportunities to meet important groups of people.

Contrast this with the chapter I've just consulted in a very recent - and rather good - textbook on marketing communications. The chapter on media management is a straightforward (and very old-fashioned) account of media buying for a conventional advertising campaign. Social media and unmediated communication received no mention.

I recognise that I'm not comparing like with like. I also see that it's easier for students to think broadly since they've not been conditioned to focus on one channel (eg editorial coverage) - but I find the contrast highly encouraging.

The CIPR student representatives I met yesterday proposed many very good ideas for Behind the Spin magazine. Also very encouraging.

If less is more...

If less is more, then logically least is most of all. This takes us into the debates around Chris Anderson's latest book, Free.

Today we learn that the London Evening Standard is to be given away free, despite the closure of The London Paper.

It's easy to envisage there being a large market for free in the digital world (websites, music, software), but it remains harder to see the commercial case for free in the world of atoms (eg newspapers).

Somewhere in between free and expensive, we can anticipate the emergence of niche markets for 'less'. Here's Mark Simmons introducing his latest venture, USE LESS - a for-profit business in the US that's more about the message than the product (encouraging a more sustainable model of consumption). Simmons is the co-author of Punk Marketing; to make a full disclosure, he's also my brother in law.

Public relations literature barely touches on these concepts, even though a free model has long been built into the publicity and media relations models. Yet, in defending the excellence theory, Grunig and White wrote in 1992: 

‘In short, excellent organizations realize that they can get more of what they want by giving publics some of what they want.' 

The inherent compromises built into public relations (whichever model is practised) suggest PR should be flexible enough to cope with different business models - even free.

Reasons to love advertising

We'll miss it when it's gone. In a week when there's news of ITV's half year results being 'hit by the worst decline in UK television advertising on record' and when losses at News International (owners of The Sun and The Times) are causing a rethink on free access to the newspapers' news websites, now is a good time to consider what's so good about advertising.

• The strict separation of editorial from advertising is important in defence of press freedom and in helping consumers make choices. (Public relations can tend to blur these boundaries).
• The advertising-funding model has given us an abundance of free television, free magazines, free commercial radio and nearly-free newspapers as well as free websites and some free products. How much are we willing to pay to keep these?
• Commercial-free spaces (such as the BBC) are welcome - but a world with no commercials would be a greyer place. Some of us can remember the communist Soviet Union; it was commercial-free, but there was no lack of government propaganda.
• Advertising can be entertaining and even culturally important. Look at a newspaper of a hundred years ago, and the advertising is more interesting (because more culturally specific) than the news. Look at an old photograph of a street scene in a major city and you can date it from the transport, the fashions - and the advertising and branding.
• I'll find it much harder to teach public relations to first year undergraduates without reference to advertising (young people are particularly responsive to advertising - and public relations concepts and practices are elusive at first).

Now for The Fall of PR

Humans need narratives to simplify the muddy complexity of life. These narratives (stories) sometimes become so compelling that they appear to be the truth. But a narrative isn't the truth, it's a convenient and sometimes prevalent world view.

Here's a compelling narrative. Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto proclaimed that 'markets are conversations' and that marketers should stop shouting and start listening. The text wasn't comfortable reading for public relations practitioners, but it suggested they were closer to mastery of the conversational style needed in the online age. (The book was written in the early years of Google and before the rise of blogging, social networks and twitter.)

Then, in 2002, brand evangelists Al Ries and Laura Ries narrated 'The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR'. Their thesis turned the normal thinking upside down: 'You can't launch a new brand with advertising because advertising has no credibility. It's the self-serving voice of a company anxious to make a sale. You can launch new brands only with publicity or public relations (PR).'

In The Long Tail (2006), Chris Anderson turned to markets. The whole process of launches and hits was becoming less important than the aggregate sales available in niche markets over time. Publicity was becoming less important than discovery in our Google-mediated world.

Then, in Here Comes Everybody (2008) Clay Shirky took a look at organisations in the age of social media. What are they for, he wondered, when individuals can come together freely to create knowledge and products that are often then made available for free.

There have been other good books in the past decade, but many contribute to the same narrative. It's a narrative about fragmenting media, shortened attention spans, about trust, transparency and who we permit to talk to us. It's important to everyone in the media, commerce, marketing and public relations.

An argument (a thesis) invites a response (the antithesis); the debate sometimes leads to a useful synthess.

A belated riposte to Al Ries and Laura Ries pops into my inbox in the form of a free ebook. 

It's a reassertion of advertising's importance and a critique of public relations.

At one level, it's simple. If the objection to advertising was that it operates as one-way communication, then change this.

So Amazon channeled its advertising budget to subsidise free delivery, and recouped free advertising recommendation from customers as a result. Smart move, but surely this is now a public relations triumph.

What are the author's objections to PR? It's that it's too good at achieving free press, at a time when the press is in decline. Then there are the usual objections to fakery, to astroturfing and to benefiting from bad news (through offering crisis management services). That's all it amounts to.

We're told that 'PR is a one night stand in a world where people are looking for lasting relationships with their brands'. 'Advertising can become successful if it becomes more interactive and creates a relationship with the consumer'. Indeed, but doesn't it then become public relations? 

PR deserves criticism in its press agentry form (the one night stand) but it doesn't seem far-fetched to claim relationships for an area that's known as public relations. This is a definitional problem that has been around for a long time: certainly, it's one of the crticisms of the Al Ries and Laura Ries book from a PR perspective. They view PR simply as publicity.

This new book cites the great exception to the prevailing narrative: Apple. The computer company that became a brand capable of extension into new product areas. The company that keeps control of the message, that makes heavy use of conventional advertising. The company that is fervently worshipped by its followers. David Brain and Martin Thomas addressed the paradox of Apple in Crowd Surfing, concluding that this company is 'the exception that proves the rule'.

I applaud the author's assault on fakery. 'The time is over when advertising can fake brands into becoming real... In today's transparent market, faking doesn't work, even if you have the budget to buy all the media in the world. The reason is that the truth can spread for free on the Internet.'

Stockholm-based Stefan Engeseth has written an interesting book on marketing and branding - but he doesn't have anything new to say about public relations. Turf wars over the rightful domains of marketing, advertising and PR are beginning to look very twentieth century. Meanwhile, we're still looking for a 21st century paradigm for marketing. This book proposes authenticity; I'd suggest legitimacy as the ultimate goal of public relations activity.

Note how the old-fashioned PR stunt of making third parties aware of the new product has worked in this case: how could a PR blogger fail to rise to the bait of a book called The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising?

Authentic marketing and PR

It's easy to get excited about the 'new new thing' and forget that principles don't change that quickly. So when Anna Farmery described her farming ancestor bringing cattle to market, she said that he would be judged on his reputation. You see, reputation and social networks have always existed.

After a century of mass production supported by mass advertising, we're returning to a more organic approach to marketing and promotion using social media tools like blogs and podcasts. (To keep the analogy going, some farmers are returning to organic principles in order to capture a more lucrative and sustainable niche. Remember that all farming was once organic so this approach is old, not new.)

One of these organic marketing promotional tools might be podcasting, but it is only a tool, not a strategy.

Most engaging of all, Anna spoke for over 90 minutes with little need for technology. Social media is often merely an attempt to replicate the authentic experience of people talking to people.