by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
November 8, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Industry News + Developments, Online PR, Print vs. Web
(Via Shel Holtz): The Arketi Group has released a new study saying that 84% of journalists either have used or would use blogs as a primary or secondary source while researching an article. So that puts to be the older notion, pushed by some traditional media sources, that blogs are just linking to traditional media. It’s an ecosystem.
A blog can be a really powerful part of a company’s overall media mix. Let us help!
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 14, 2007 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice, Print vs. Web
I was struggling today to try to explain politely to a potential client why a traditional PR agency might not be the best source of advice on how to understand the conversational power of the Internet. This is always a touchy subject because of course there are plenty of people working in jobs at very established firms, who totally “get” online PR.
At least, I hope there are! But there are many more traditional PR people who know the right buzzwords but don’t really understand what it means to foster market conversation as opposed to controlling the message. And there are still more traditional PR people who don’t even know the right buzzwords.
The Internet is really quite different from print media (this is a newsflash for some folks). For the PR professional, it’s a bit like the difference between moderating a panel and giving a lecture. If the moderator talked the whole time, and the panelists said nothing, well they would probably be pretty pissed and so would everyone in attendance (”lurkers” are today’s audience).
In today’s conversation-enabled world, some end-users are starting to think of themselves more as panelists than as a polite audience. They can be reached, they listen carefully, and they are amazing at getting the word out - but “the word” is going to be their word, not your word.
Anyway, as it turns out this client already knew what she was talking about so I needn’t have struggled. She came up with what I thought was a very clever analogy in speaking to an old-school ad man the other day, and shared it with me. “Do you remember,” she said to him, “how outraged you were when little Mom and Pop shops started coming out of the woodwork saying they could do ad campaigns, and you knew you could do it better because you’d been doing it for 15 years already?” Of course, the guy had to admit that experience counts for alot, when he was reminded of his own experience and what it counted for. He could hardly discount that!
I thought this tack was brilliant, and I never would have thought of it because I don’t have a built-in prejudice against Mom and Pops. But it’s true - we’ve been building communities for so long that we can now take people’s “establishment” prejudice and turn it inside out to work for us instead of against us.
I’m not saying that people who have trained and learned one skill for many years can’t change or learn. But I am saying it’s a good idea to ask your PR company things like “who do you have on the team who has built online communities and how long have they been doing it?”, “How long have you been working with user-created content?”, “How long have you been blogging and participating in social networks?” and “What lessons have you learned about online collaboration?”.
Contrast that with questions like “How long have you been in the PR business?”, “How many magazine editors do you know?” and “How many press releases have you written?”. By pointing to their existing areas of expertise, it should be easy to remind them that experience counts for a lot and that they should bring some conversation experts in-house, if they haven’t already.
