PR 101

After posting last week’s blog (In case you have noticed, social media has already taken over), I was curious about those people who still either oppose using social media, or think it’s a fad. I know there are people out there who just aren’t too sure about it. For instance, I had a conversation about a year ago at a function where the director of major public relations agency told me he didn’t think social media was going to last. I wasn’t as adept as I am now, but I still knew he was wrong.

I think a lot of people out there who feel like the residents of Oz (no, not Australia – the mythical place created by L. Frank Baum). They look up in the sky and see this skywriting witch demanding they surrender Dorothy Gale. The residents of Oz all run to the see the wizard. The doorman assures them the wizard is going to deal with the issue.

Well, Social Media is not the Wicked Witch of the West. And the wizard cannot stop it anyway, although some executives are apparently still trying.

In my research, I found this: “51 percent of … executives fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while 49 percent assert that using social media could damage company reputation,” in a research brief from the Center for Media Research. The brief reported on a study done by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law that found that “senior US marketing, management and HR executives are concerned about the risks of increased use of social networks within their companies.”

A study by Equation Research and reported by eMarketer.com found these reasons for companies not adopting social media.

I think Walter Schwabe did a good job of explaining the resistance in the blog “fusedlogic.

“The truth is, most organizations despite the decline are still spending large dollars in the traditional advertising space and are justifying these expenditures on metrics that are estimates in many cases,” Schwabe wrote. “Then those same executives look at social media investments with risk in their eyes, a lack of understanding and claiming there’s no way to measure.

“What they’re really saying is “we don’t understand,” Schwabe explained. “Then they provide a media buyer with $250,000.00 or more to go fire away at the big three, print, television, radio for a 90-day campaign. Why? Not because it’s necessarily the right answer but because it’s what they understand and the safe move.”

Of course there are ways to measure Social Media impact. I have to say first that I have never understood some of the measurements of traditional marketing. I have heard marketing people say: “well, 10 million people saw that commercial during the game.” Or, “that magazine has a 800,000 readers.” So what.

To me, there is only one measure of the effectiveness of a marketing campaign in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing: did sales increase? Anything else is just commentary. If a campaign doesn’t increase sales, what’s the point? Yes, brand awareness has to built. People have to know about a product before they will buy it. But, I think a lot of marketers stop there. They forget the goal is the sales funnel – not getting people to watch some cutesy commercial.

Social media can drive sales – I think more effectively that traditional methods. But I digress. That is the subject for another blog.

The other fact that surprised me was that Twitter is for adults. Teenagers and tweens just don’t use it, according to The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN), an organization that helps marketers transition from push and permission marketing to participatory marketing.

“Just 11 percent of its (Twitters) users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore, the New York Times reported. “Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.”

The Times went on to report that: “In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success.”

Studies have found that tweens and teens prefer texting to Tweeting. There are two primary reasons, the studies found: tweens and teens do not want their parents to know what they are doing and it turns out Twitter is optimized best for marketing and news. Teens and Tweens have little use for those activities.

In other words, Social Media is maturing. Don’t worry; you won’t have to surrender anything. And you might just find Social Media is the key to the City of Oz.

I intended this week to write about an entirely different subject .Two things changed my mind: I love the blues. As I write this I am listening to Son House sing “Government Fleet Blues” on iTunes. It occurred to me that the reason I can hear a Blues song recorded over 80-years-ago is because of a technology perfected in the 1920s – phonograph records. It seems quaint now, but the record was a huge leap from the waxed cylinder previously used to record music. It democratized music distribution. Social media is having the same effect on information distribution,

Second, I was a reading the Socialnomics Blog. It contained information that just blew me away. I read a lot of social media blogs written by some of the best: Simon U. Ford, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Sarah Evans, and others. They are all saying that Social Media is taking over. I know they are right. But the following information underlined that fact in a way that surprised even me. Did you know:

(If you prefer the information in video form, here’s the link to the Social Media Revolution.)

• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth has now become world of mouth.

• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services – they will find us via social media.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first, selling second.
• Successful companies in social media also act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.
• Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because the Web is now the primary news source.
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers – 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
  • Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
  • Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
  • Three out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
  • Years to reach 50 million users:
    • Radio – 38 years
    • TV – 13 years
    • The Internet – four years
    • iPod – three years
    • Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.
    • iPhone applications hit one billion in nine months.
    • If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest – between the United States and Indonesia.
      • More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook – daily.
      • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
      • Some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using its services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this).
      • Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than four weeks and cost Facebook $0.
      • comScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the number one Russian social network.
      • A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. One-in-six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
      • Percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80 percent.
      • Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime. Company reputations are often killed before the company even knows it is bleeding.
        • Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
        • There are no secrets in social media – ask any job applicant who didn’t get hired because of those college party pictures on Facebook or Flickr.
        • The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
        • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78 percent of those articles are written in languages other than English.
          • If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour.
          • There are over 200,000,000 blogs and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
          • Twenty-five percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
          • People care more about how their social networks ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
          • Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations
            • Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
            • Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.
            • Ninety percent of people that can skip ads using TiVo do so.
            • Hulu (the online video site) has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
            • In the past month, 25 percent of Americans said they watched a short video – on their phone.
            • According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.

It takes a lot to surprise me. I was a newspaper for 25 years. I have pretty much seen it all. These facts, though, amazed even me. Social media isn’t taking over, it has taken over.

Traditional marketing, public relations and advertising are dying. They just don’t know it yet.

Note: Two weeks ago, I posted a blog about how the kindle could save newspapers. I thought it was an original idea. Well, I was wrong. In 1994, the old Knight-Ridder newspaper chain came up with the same idea. They called their reader The Tablet. What stopped them was technology had not moved far enough along to make it viable. Check out this video to see what Knight-Ridder planned to do.

So, you get a call from a Fox News producer – Bill O’Reilly wants you to appear on his show. Or you pick up your phone to hear a print reporter ask why your company is dumping toxic waste into the Old Mill Stream. Finally, the worst situation of all, you are watching a television show or reading a magazine story or a blog when you discover your company is the middle of a crisis because some advocacy group painted every company in your industry with the same brush.

In my over two-decade career as a reporter, I made some of those calls. In my somewhat shorter career as a public relations and marketing professional, I have responded to situations where an entire industry was painted with the same brush. In the later case, I was part of a team of three that crafted the first response to the first outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, in a cow in the state of Washington. We successfully showed that our client, Smithfield Beef, was doing everything right to ensure no cow with BSE would ever enter its slaughterhouses.

Incidentally, I just demonstrated the first rule of responding to a hostile situation. Many people called BSE “mad cow.” We never, ever used that term – even during meetings in the office. “Mad cow” conjures up images of some Holstein frothing at the mouth, chasing Old McDonald around the fields. BSE is the scientific term and more accurate. We determined the terms of the battle before it was even joined.

The second rule we demonstrated was we responded within hours of getting the news about the BSE discovery. We didn’t wait to respond to someone else’s announcement. Now, we got one break. The news of the BSE-infected cow broke on the morning of Dec. 24, 2003. Because it was a holiday, most of those who would have attacked the meat producing industry were not in their offices. We essentially had the playing field to ourselves for about 48 hours – we were able to present the issue on our terms. Two news cycles passed before the Chicken Littles got revved up. By then, we had shaped the issue and the debate into what the meat industry was doing right.

Something to remember. An announcement like that of the cow infected with BSE is a neutral event. The government officials who usually release such news generally play it right down the middle. So, it is up to you to tell your side right away.

Another thing to remember – if you have genuinely made a mistake, admit it. Don’t try to spin it. In the case of the cattle and meat packing industries, the discovery of the infected cow showed what was being done right. The cow was found before it got into the system. It showed that the proper checks were in place. We didn’t need to spin anything. We just needed to get our story out before it got buried in the noise.

Trying to spin a mistake just gets you into more trouble. The media and bloggers will usually quickly pick up on your attempts. They will trumpet your efforts to hide what you did. You or your company will end up looking worse than if you had just said, “yeah, we were wrong. We are doing everything we can to correct the error.”

Now, being preemptive works very well when there is an event that could turn out bad. Handling a Sean Hannity or a Bill O’Reilly is done somewhat differently. Remember, you are playing by their rules. This isn’t neutral ground. What you are hoping for here is a draw. Not losing is the same as winning.

First, watch as many of the shows as possible before going on. Make sure you know what the topic is and do your research. These shows have a rhythm. They start out seemingly being neutral and then move into questions designed to do one thing – make the interview subject look bad. Objectivity is not their strong suit.

Here’s the key thing to remember when you find yourself the subject of one of those “interviews:” stay calm. Don’t lose your temper. They want you to get upset. It makes better television. Angry people don’t think and spew out the wrong kind of answer.

What you want to be is calm and boring. Boring makes lousy television. Answer the question, but don’t elaborate. If the interviewer tries to go off on tangent, don’t let it happen. Go back to the main subject and stay there. Give short declarative answers.  Keep it boring.

Finally, you find there is the situation where find your company being criticized in the media and the Internet – and you had no idea it was happening. In this case, the blame is internal. You should have known that you had enemies out there. Most companies monitor conventional news outlets. Where they fall down is monitoring social media outlets – blogs, videos, etc.

Think that’s it’s not important to monitor those sites? Ask United Airlines about the country group Sons of Maxwell and its lead singer Dave Carroll. United baggage handlers broke Carroll’s $3,000 Taylor Guitar. Frustrated that the airline would do nothing to remedy the situation, Carroll recorded and posted a video on YouTube about his experience. As of Sunday, Aug. 16, the video had been viewed just under five million times. Now United did eventually step up and pay for repairing the instrument. It also said it wants to use the video in its employee training.

Still, think about the notoriety United gained from that one video. How many people chose to fly a competitor after watching that video?

United is just one example. Comcast, Proctor & Gamble and several other companies have felt the wrath of angry bloggers.

As I tell clients all of the time: “there is a conversation going on right now about your brand. You should be a part of it and leading it. But no matter what you do, it is going to happen anyway.”

Now, if it does happen, what to do is get involved in the conversation, quickly. Engage with the bloggers, talk to them and find out what the beef is. Proctor & Gamble was initially blind-sided by the Motrin Moms. But within 48-hours, the company had dealt with the problem and ended the furor.

In all these cases, the key is engagement and preparation. Do those things and at least you will never be surprised. And being ready is the most important thing to do.

Note: Check out my company’s new and improved website at JJC Communications.