PR 101

I was sitting at the BizTimes Milwaukee BizTech Conference-Expo last Wednesday listening to Kirk Strong of Smart Interactive Media explain how a sales program his company designed for Chrysler fell flat. On paper it was a great social media program designed to generate sales leads for local dealerships. In reality, despite hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars spent planning and implementing it failed. Chrysler killed the program after only a year.

Why did it fail? Because despite the sometimes dozens of leads generated for those local dealerships, the salespeople didn’t buy into it. What they wanted was instant gratification, Strong explained. They didn’t want to cultivate those potential sales, none of which were guaranteed to buy a vehicle. What they wanted was someone to walk into the dealership who wanted to buy a car immediately, he said.

Many of those listening to the presentation faulted the salespeople. How could they not want to accept a bunch of leads handed to them on that proverbial platter? Boy, those men and women were lazy, many said.

Well, I disagree – they weren’t lazy. I think it was just that no one sat down and walked them through how social media works. Not just how this sales program worked, which I believe was demonstrated, but how social media in its entirety works.

Look I know social media is taking over marketing. Still, it is only about five or six years old. To a lot of people it is new and somewhat scary. It is such a shift in the way things have been done that it still hard for many of the rank and file to grasp.

A lot of that has to do with the Great Recession. Companies from coast-to-coast cut employees. No one wanted to stand out for fear they would be the next one out the door. So they hunkered down in their cubicles, did what they were told, and did nothing to attract attention. The Japanese have a saying that goes “the nail that stands out is hammered down.” No one wanted to be that nail.

This was not an atmosphere that lent itself to creativity and risk taking.

Chrysler’s management loved and endorsed this program, Strong said. Unlike many CEOs and CMOs, Chrysler’s management actually got it. I think being the smallest U.S. auto manufacturer gave management the impetus to try something new.

Well, as Shakespeare said, “there’s the rub.” Given what’s been going on for the past three years in corporate America, do you think most people actually trust management? It appears to be no one bothered to get buy in from the people who would be the beneficiaries from the program.

Getting buy in does not mean just mean explaining this new marketing program. It means starting at zero and showing employees the benefits of social media. It cannot be assumed that they know what’s going on just because you tell them it is going to work.

Let me give you an analogy from own family’s history. My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. For most of the time when she was a girl, her father used a team of horses to power the farm. The horses were used for everything from pulling the plow to taking the family into town.

As the farm grew more prosperous and larger, the horses could no longer handle plowing the growing acreage. So the men on the farm debated what to do. This was a tough decision. We take these things for granted nowadays, but in 1920 a growing, sparking, loud tractor was a scary concept. Apparently only after the three men had decided unanimously – with buy-in from the women – that a tractor was needed was a purchase made. The key here was everyone agreed about the need and understand the benefits.

This is what companies need to do. Even if the CEO and CMO agree on the need to a new way of marketing, it is doesn’t mean the employees will understand the need. The days of top down management are gone. That Chrysler program demonstrated that to me. Employees have to be shown and convinced that something new will work. Otherwise the entire effort is a waste of time, money and effort.

I read an article Sunday about how the depressed the music industry is this summer. It said that in order to make up for income lost because of decreasing CD sales, many top bands had upped concert ticket prices to above $200 for the best seats. Given the current state of the economy, no one with an ounce of sanity is spending that kind of money to see a concert. So concert ticket sales are down and a number of acts have canceled summer tours.

This is, to me, is the beginning of the end game for the music business as it is presently constituted. As anyone with marketing experience can tell you, this is an industry that is doing itself in. The music industry didn’t do the same thing American car manufacturers didn’t do – respond to a changing market place.

“Billboard magazine recently predicted that summer 2010 could be the toughest touring market artists and promoters have had to face since the mid-’90s, citing a spate of nixed shows and canceled tours,” The Washington Post reported July 2.

Performers including the Eagles, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Simon & Garfunkel have either canceled dates or “postponed” entire tours because of weak ticket sales.

Why is this happening? Well, let’s get into the way back machine and look what happened when CDs were first introduced. That’s when the problems began.

In 1982, Sony and Phillips Electronics introduced the first CD recording – “The Visitors” by Abba. One would have thought that choice of a first release would have strangled the fledgling format in its cradle. Incidentally, the first CDs had a capacity of 74 minutes. That’s the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I guess that makes up for the Abba release.

This is where the recording industry made its major mistake. Vinyl albums contained between eight and 10 songs. Whether out of hubris, stupidity, greed or something else, the recording industry put the same eight to 10 songs on those first CDs. Those CDs sold for $21.50, according to a 2007 report prepared by Recording Industry Association of America.

That worked until CD burners were first sold to the public in the middle 1990s. People discovered a blank CD actually held between 15 and 20 songs. That was a “hey, what a minute” moment. True, CD prices had dropped to just under $13, according to the RIAA. It was too late. A lot of people felt they were getting ripped off and got angry.

Free file sharing sites such as Napster rose up in response to that anger. The feeling seemed to be if the record companies were going to rip us off, we are going to fight back. Without rehashing the history, this eventually led to the creation of ITunes, where a complete album can be purchased for $9 or $10. The recording industry essentially ceded control of its product to Apple and other such sites.

Plus, feeding that anger, I feel, was rock stars went from being one of us to one of them. The Rolling Stones bought estates in the south of France. Eric Clapton flies around in a private jet. Why should a college kid making $60 or $70 a week delivering pizza or a laid-off worker feel any sympathy for some over-privileged musician?

Apparently not wanting to give up the valet and butler, those fat and happy musicians raised concert ticket prices to make up for the lost CD income. That is so damned odd to me. Did they think somebody not willing to pay more than $10 for a CD is willing to pay over $200 a ticket? I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. Did he skip the lecture on “elasticity of demand?”

What that term means according to the Business Dictionary is “responsiveness of the demand  for a good or service to the increase or decrease in its price. Normally, sales increase with drop in prices and decrease with rise in prices.” Or the less you charge, the more likely people are to buy your product. Well duh!

As I said at the start, I think what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the music business in its current form. Unlike the American auto industry, they are not pulling up before they crash. I don’t think they know how. Rather than find a solution, they would rather waste their time going after teenagers downloading music. Sad really.

As all of you I am sure have seen, I am very active on social media. A key part of social media is connecting with people. In the last three months or so, I have seen an increase in the number of my connections who are out-of-work. I don’t care what Wall Street says, things are still tough out there. I have never counted how many job seekers I have connected with, but I would estimate it’s between 10 percent and 15 percent.

For a benchmark, between LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Plaxo, Digg and some other sites, I have more than 14,000 contacts.

I have a policy of replying to almost everyone who connects with me. I tell all job seekers the same thing – social media could be the key to finding a job. There are no guarantees on that. But, I think social media gives a job seekers a lot more than just a leg up in the market place. I think it gives them a Lambeau Leap up.

Note to my non-American and non-football fan readers: a Lambeau Leap is what Green Bay Packer football players do when they score a touchdown. The player who scores jumps about 10 feet up into the stands to celebrate.

By using a combination of blogging, a profile on LinkedIn, being active on Facebook and maybe even posting some YouTube videos – you can become a target for hiring managers. I cannot promise you will get hired, no one can. But, I can show you how to get your whole body in the door.

What social media will do for a hiring manager is provide a complete picture of your knowledge and skills. Let’s face, a resume is a like family portrait. Everything in that portrait and your resume are clean and neat. That resume no more defines exactly who you are than that family portrait shows what a family is really like. Does a family portrait show the work that goes into raising a family? Does a resume show how you spent weekends earning your Six Sigma designation?

Social media can, if used correctly.

As usual, I have more to say that I can fit in the approximately 1,000-word limit I set for myself. So I am going to take two weeks to cover this.

So how does social media help a job seeker? The same way it helps a company. It establishes your brand. Yes, you have a personal brand. You might not realize it – but you do. A brand makes you a standout in the marketplace. If you don’t maintain that brand, you will find yourself at the back of the line.

Job-hunting is very crowded marketplace right now. It’s a buyers market. Anything that can be done to make a candidate stand out is a good thing.

The first thing you have to know if you decide to head down this road is that takes more work than a traditional job search. You are not going to be just cruising the job sites, sending out resumes, networking, and cold calling your old contacts. In fact, most of that is going to go on the back burner – with the exception of the networking. You are still going to have to talk to people. But by using social media, they are going to know who you are and what you can do for their company.

That last sentence is key. You should not be using social media to pound your own chest. The same rules apply to personal social media as to business social media. Just as that attitude turns off customers, it also turns over hiring managers. What you should be doing is demonstrating your expertise in your profession. We will discuss next week the mechanics of doing that.

You want to be able to show that hiring manager that you really know about widget production or copyediting or whatever. As Richard Nelson Bolles says in “What Color Is Your Parachute,” a company wants to know how you can help them.

The other thing you should do is buy “What Color Is Your Parachute.” In my opinion, it is the single best job-hunting book ever written. It was a huge help to me when I switched from journalism to public relations. A good friend – Dave Vogel – gave me the book. I am paying it forward now.

Note to the FTC: I have never met Richard Nelson Bolles or any representative of his or his publisher. I not have not received any compensation – monetary or otherwise – to plug the book.

The second change is the same as business social media – the hunters have become the hunted. Nowadays, hiring managers are as likely to go looking for the right candidate as waiting for a resume to show up in their email box. Using social media will help you attract that hiring manager.

As Bolles and others have pointed out, the majority of available jobs are never advertised. Those that are on such sites as Monster, Career Builder and other’s attract thousands of resumes. Steve Jobs wouldn’t stand out in that crowd.

Social media could even help this guy. He could sell more apples - or get off the street and back into an office.

Another thing I learned from reading Bolles’s book is that hiring managers are terrified of making a mistake in their hiring decisions.

“As you go into the interview, keep in mind that the person-who-has-the-power-to-hire-you is sweating too,” Bolles wrote. “Why? Because the hiring interview is not a very reliable way to choose an employee.”

Bolles points out that a study conducted in the United Kingdom several years ago found that the chance of an employer hiring a good employee through the hiring process was only three percent better than if they had picked the name out of a hat. If the interview was conducted by someone who would be working directly with the candidate, the odds dropped to two percent. If it was done by a “so-called personnel expert,” the success rate dropped to 10 percent below that of the hat method.

Bolles lists 11 reasons why hiring terrifies company hiring managers. I will give you two that social media job searching has direct effect on:

• “That you won’t be able to do the job: that you lack the necessary skills or experience, and the hiring-interview didn’t uncover that.
• “That it will take you too long to master the job, and thus it will be too long before you are profitable to that organization.

You can see why the process terrifies those making the decision. Social media can remove some of that anxiety.

Next week, I will discuss how social media will demonstrate that you will be able to do the job from the day you hired.