Evolving PR towards influencers

Seth reminds me that PR is a diminishing activity, in terms of its importance. The more enlightened PR firms accept that their business has been commoditised, with minimal opportunities for differentiation and fierce price competition. The question is, what do you do about it?

As ever, it’s a mindset change that’s required. Most start-up firms I know begin their marketing activities by recruiting a PR agency. Why? Because that’s what everyone else does.

Why not try to engage with the 50 most important people in your target market? Sure, some of these will be journalists, and you should definitely reach out to them. But you’ll probably find there are only a relative handful of them, which means you can treat them differently. Find out what they want to hear, what they’d find useful, what they’re interested in. Concentrate on being a resource for these most important journalists.

It means you don’t have to go chasing after the hundred other hacks that cover your space. Then use the time saved to focus on other influencer types, such as analysts, academics, consultants, bloggers, standards bodies and regulators.

The catch? It’s hard to determine which of the hundred journalists are really influential, by which I mean influential on decision makers. And it’s even harder to determine who else is influential, beyond journalists. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, or can’t, do it

“British journalism is sloppy and morally bankrupt”

Allegedly…

I listened to Nick Davies, the author of Flat Earth News on Radio 4 a few days ago. He was defending his view that, because media outlets have moved into the ownership of huge corporations, their primary interest is in profit rather than journalism. It’s highly listenable stuff:

“The logic of journalism has been overwhelmed by logic of commercialism…”

“Journalists no longer have time or resources to do their jobs properly as active new gatherers. They’ve become passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material. This makes them enormously vulnerable to manipulation.”

Davies also claims that journalists are incorporating criminality into their work. Driven by scoops, and a lack of time and resources, they cut corners. It’s common practice, says Davies, to hire private investigators to trawl through the trash. They can source bank statements, phone bills, tax records, even health records.

Of particular note to this blog is Davies’s claim that, “The role of the PR industry has become fascinatingly powerful.” He cites research conducted by Cardiff university, which found that of 2000 stories in the quality UK press, “54% of stories were wholly or mainly constructed out of PR product.” So more than half of the stories we read are largely influenced by those serving an interest.

I’m not personally a fan of PR firms. Having been an analyst for 12 years, I found that most just got in the way. And now looking at broad ecosystems of influence, I see the dispersion of influence away from traditional journalists, which means that PR is less important to firms than it used to be.

Or so I thought. If Mr Davies is right, perhaps we should all hurry back to our PR friends with peace offerings and humble pie.

Or maybe he’s reporting the further and final erosion of journalists as real influencers.

…

(There’s a good review of Flat Earth News at The Economist, for those who subscribe. For those who don’t – tssk.)

(The full Cardfiff Uni report is here)

“We can’t find out who our influencers are…”

Reuters reports that US PR companies are struggling to identify social media influencers, because they are using criteria out of step with the social networks being influenced. PR companies think quality of content, relevance and search engine rankings are important in influencing social media users. Social media users in fact value participation levels (e.g. number of comments), frequency of posting, and name recognition of the individual.

Two key points here:

Firstly, PR is out of step with its target audience, and the research by Society for New Communications Research is therefore very timely. Importantly, PR firms under-estimate the value of engagement in influencing through social media.

Secondly, I think the study shows that influence itself is a social phenomenon, whether exerted through social media or via more traditional channels. A great way to engage with your target audience is to engage with its influencers, but this has to be done in an appropriate social context.

That’s why establishing communities of influencers works well. We say often at Influencer50 that influencers love to influence, but they also love to interact with other influencers – that how they get much of their influence in the first place. Firms that facilitate this interaction are much valued – like the CMO Council.

Spinfluencers

I’m directed by The Leading Edge to the Spinfluencer blog. “Spinfluencer” is a great name (wish I’d thought of it, damn you!), and it got me thinking about how the marketing industry (and PR in particular) is struggling to incorporate influencer strategies into their traditional kitbag of activities.

I think marketing has got an image problem. Sales people find marketing pointless or irrelevant most of the time. Customers are suspicious and mistrust what they’re being told. And proving RoI on marketing spend remains, for most, a “one day, maybe” aspiration.

I trust the irony of marketing’s dilemma is not lost…

So putting together our thoughts for the book, Nick and I wanted to distance ourselves from traditonal marketing. Influencer Marketing is all about making messages more believed (because they’re communicated by influencers, not by you). It’s about aligning marketing with sales. And it’s about demonstrating RoI, tangibly. Holistically, Influencer Marketing is about changing the way that organisations think about marketing.

One thing that holds this all together is the understanding that influencers are different. You can’t “pitch” to them – they’re way too smart for that. You can’t train them to say nice things about you – they’re not amenable. And you can’t pay them – because that undermines their influence and is thus counter-productive.

While the term “spinfluencer” is memorable it has, for me, all the wrong connotations. It implies traditional marketing, spin and fluff, and it reinforces the negative image of the industry. Any marketing or PR agency that wants to understand influencers should be moving away from this approach.

When I browsed the Spinfluencer blog I found it to be interesting, well-written and insightful. I recommend it. I just hope they don’t regret choosing the name.

Review of H+K’s Influencing Technology Decision Makers research

There’s a really interesting video and white paper produced by Hill and Knowlton, the PR/AR firm. The title is Influencing Technology Decision Makers (sounds relevant!) and the work is based on a research project carried out on behalf of H+K.

On the whole it is a really thought-provoking piece of research. The interesting bits, for me, are (in italics, with my comments):

• Previous experience is the primary driver for decision making. I agree, and where a decision maker doesn’t have this experience they have to borrow it from another source – influencers.
• Decision makers are cynical towards sales collateral and marketing messages. Yep.
• There is increasing influence of blogs, even in the C-suite. I disagree – we’ve completed a round of research for a client which shows that, except in France, blogs have little influence at the C-level. Blogs do tend to influence more technical audiences, and where blogs are part of the cultural make-up of the market under investigation (i.e. predominately online markets).
• Gartner and Forrester are the leading analysts, and there is not much between them. Gartner has greater influence on the IT managers, while Forrester is more widely read in the boardroom. Interesting. This indicates that Forrester has caught up with Gartner, and has more credibility with senior decision makers. We certainly see these two far and away the biggest influential analysts.
• Events are not that influential. I think this referred to analyst events, but I find it’s true in general. Gartner Symposium is the only analyst event that occurs in our research on a regular basis.
• The Financial Times is the most influential non-IT publication. The Wall Street Journal leads in the US but trails the FT in other countries. In the UK, the Sunday Times, Telegraph and The Economist ran highest. No real surprises here, except perhaps for the poor showing of the Journal outside the US.
• Print media is more widely read than online media. I agree, though the boundaries are often being blurred. As far as I know, the study didn’t track whether a respondent that read the FT did so in print or online format.
• Analysts are important throughout the decision making process. Absolutely. In the book we’ve mapped various influencer types to the decision making process, and analysts play more roles than any other type. It’s important to understand, though, that although analyst firms play various roles, it’s not the same analysts that play all roles.
• Use the media and analysts to influence decision makers, not to please your CEO on tour. Hoorah! If vendors take a decision maker focus, rather than creating noise to satisfy their own internal ends, then they might not annoy their customers and prospects so much. It is refreshing to hear this from a PR/AR firm.

The big criticism: where are the other influencers? This study only looks at the media, analysts and blogs. What about consultants, resellers, peers, user groups, academics, procurement experts, gurus and thought leaders, or the vendors themselves? I’d love to see the research run next year with this broader remit.

(A few words on the methodology. The research involved 420 interviews, across the UK, US Canada and China, and were conducted using a mix of online, face-to-face and telephone interviews. Interviews were also split by C-Suite and IT managers, and by large enterprises and SMEs. The sample looks a bit thin, when spread across all of these splits. But good food for thought.)

Time to try something new

Seth blogs on why firms refuse to change, when it would actually be the best thing for them. Business as usual seems the safe thing to do.

My pet topic, The Insanity of Marketing, refers to the unwillingness of marketers to change while trying to achieve different results. But what if the game changes? Doesn’t this mean that marketers have to change anyway?

One of my clients told me that their PR budgets have been cut by one third. Ouch! Irrespective of the initial size of the budget (big, since you ask), one third is a big chunk. And yet, my client is expected to deliver the same service as before.

It’s madness. Insane. If your budget gets cut by one third, don’t even try to do what you did before. It’s time to try something new.

PR votes to carry on lying

I’ve recently been writing and blogging on the Insanity of Marketing. But can there be a more insane branch of marketing than PR?

Martin Moore’s blog directs us to a debate held at Westminster University, the motion of which was that “PR has a duty to tell the truth.” I don’t know whether to laugh at the fact that the motion was defeated, or at the fact they had to debate the issue at all. Can anyone suggest another profession that would hold such a debate?

The majority view amongst PR is that their duty of care is towards their clients, and that this sometimes (often?) conflicts with the truth. In these cases, it seems permissible to lie.

The trouble I have with this admission is not that PR has to wrestle with conflicts of interest and ethics. It is that, once you know a PR firm lies, how can you ever tell if it’s telling the truth? And if the majority of the industry admits to the practice, doesn’t this undermine the whole industry?

As it happens, I know many PR professionals, and professional they are. I’m sure they’ll be dismayed by the results of the vote, and hopefully of the debate itself.

I think that PR has shot itself in the foot. It could do with appointing a PR firm to limit the damage, lie a little, and put PR in a positive spin.

PR moves from awareness to influence

I noted with interest Chime’s results announcement on March 14th. Lord Bell, the group chief, says that, “We have no evidence that the growth won’t continue through 2007…business continues to move from awareness to influence, which is good news for PR.”

There are two points worth comment. The first is that the PR industry (or Chime at least) recognises that awareness is insufficient – it’s influence that matters. Chime has tangible activity to back this up: for example, it owns Sunesis and Insight, which talk about influencer relations, and it owns Opinion Leader Research, which conducts influencer research for BT among others.

Does this mark the formal shift of PR into Influencer Relations? We’ll see. Though nearly all PR firms think influence stops at analysts and journalists.

The second point is the assertion that the news is good for PR. Actually, I think it’s very bad news for PR. PR is an industry measured in “air cover” – broad coverage measured in column inches. Influence is measured in impact on sales. The two are at complete ends of the targeted communications spectrum.

If you were a small vendor with limited budget, would you spend your meagre market budget on unfocused coverage in any trade title that will carry your copy? Or would you spend it on knowing who is directly influencing your target market, and then getting those influencers to carry your message?

I believe that the PR wave is heading for a crash. It’s good news for vendors, but not for PR firms.

Blogger Relations as an extension of PR

It had to happen. PR blog The World’s Leading reports that Prompt Communications has launched a Blogger Relations practice, alongside its traditional PR activities. I doubt they’ll be the last.

Blogging is causing headaches in the worlds of PR and AR, not necessarily because they threaten the status quo, but because neither knows how to handle them. In many ways, blogging just highlights the debate between PR and specialist AR functions. There are important and fundamental differences between PR and AR. Now Blogger Relations (BR?!) seems to create another set of tensions. Some bloggers are analysts, some are journalists, some are, well, just folk.

There are a couple of ways BR may evolve.

We may see the emergence of what ARmageddon called Influencer Relations (InfR), where all influencers are managed under a cohesive programme. BR just becomes subsumed into InfR.

My main problem with the idea of InfR is that it stops at “relations”. I prefer the holistic concept of Influencer Marketing, because it makes tangible acknowledge of, and contribution to, the bottom line. AR and PR have always struggled to measure their value in hard cash.

The other evolution path for BR is for us to realise that blogging is just a medium. True, the medium allows huge reach for previously unknown people, but same applied to ecommerce web sites 10 years ago. In our categorisation of influencer types we use the term “blogger” only in rare cases and as a last resort. Charlene Li blogs, but she’s a Forrester analyst. Seth Godin blogs, but he’s an author and speaker. Heather Green blogs, but she’s a journalist. And so on.

One final thing: on-line dialogue, including blogging, accounts for only 6% of communication. Face-to-face accounts for 77%. So before we swoon over the power of blogs, shouldn’t we be setting up practices that deal with Face-to-Face Relations?

I know some people that would benefit from such knowledge