Back to Basics: The PR Biggest Lesson Learned During a Tumultuous 2009
[This post is the first in a series of three for a blog panel comprised of marketing communications practitioners and also includes Frank Strong, Meredith Eaton and Krim Stephenson. All four of us will blog on the same topic on the same day. This first post is on the biggest lesson we learned this year for PR (and marketing).]
Exiting 2009, the public relations industry buzz is all about social media. There are literally thousands of blog posts extolling the virtues of social media use in PR. Some very highly regarded PR pundits are telling us that, because of social media, PR is dead. Still others say that social media is reinventing PR. Those that want to walk the middle line say that social media is causing PR to evolve.
I am amused by the notion that social media is causing PR to evolve, as if the practice of public relations has never previously evolved. PR as a corporate marketing function is older than the Internet, television and radio. As I recently (what’s the right word here) – confessed – to MoPR employees, when I began my career in PR more than 20 years ago, there was no email I could use to send my boss a draft document, and he did not have a mark-up or track changes capability with which to provide me edits. The process was simple: I wrote my draft, when I was satisfied I printed it out, I walked upstairs (we did have elevators back then, but call me old fashioned, I used the stairs anyway) and handed the draft to my boss. My boss then read the draft in my presence, using a red pen to mark his edits – a process he called “bleeding.” After he bled all over my draft, I would go back downstairs to my desk and fashion a rewrite and begin the process all over again.
To think that email and track changes did not play a major role in the evolution of PR is to either not understand what evolution is, or not understand that PR is always evolving. Social media is but one tool, or set of tools, that must be a part of the public relations toolkit. But it isn’t as yet the most important, and I don’t agree that it is the single most important aspect of what has changed in PR over 2009. There are still businesses that can execute a perfect PR program and never use microblogs (Twitter), social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) or even have a blog. If social media were so important, it would be impossible to conduct campaigns without these tools. Yet at the end of 2009 it can still be done.
Consider that social media penetration lags well behind mobile usage around the world. Facebook boasts 350 million “active users” around the world. While that is certainly an impressive number, it’s only about the size of how many people use mobile phones in India. There are still more than 4 billion connected people in the world not using Facebook or other social media.
I am not about to recommend PR without a robust social media component. In fact, my recommendations are quite the opposite, and our agency has invested both time and money in building a suite of proprietary social media tools. Social media is essential, for a variety of reasons. But let’s not over-rotate too far toward a “social media killed PR” belief. Not even close.
When I look back across 2009, I see tremendous changes on the media landscape. We have witnessed more major newsroom layoffs and closures this past year than at any time in my PR career. Some publications ceased producing print editions in favor of going with an online-only approach, while others ceased producing period. Media companies that stayed alive and even thrived in 2009 produced about the same number of articles and pages per edition as they did in 2008, but did so with a much smaller regiment of reporters.
What these changes represented for the PR industry was not a push to embrace social media as, perhaps, an alternative channel to traditional media and blogs, but rather a push to embrace the fundamentals of PR. Cleverness and cute headlines cannot replace the value (or obfuscate the lack thereof) of news being pitched. Reporters that now have double, triple, quadruple or even more the amount of beats to cover as they did last year honed a new skill: find the news in less than five seconds or trash the pitch. If the pitch was good, did it come complete with additional resources? If not, move onto the next pitch (after all, there are scores of pitches in each reporter’s inbox and voicemail, daily).
These changes represented bad news for innovative start-ups that found it harder to break through in 2009. The scarcity of time reporters had to cover all their beats created a litmus test that new companies had a difficult time passing. Without major funding, customer traction, customers willing to talk publicly, other third party references in their corner, new companies stood little chance of earning the game changing coverage they might have attained in previous years. Were there standouts? Certainly. But their numbers are a drop in the bucket as compared to the massive numbers of startups that yearned for important coverage.
Those campaigns executed by MoPR in 2009 that were most successful were those that included the following elements:
- A clear understanding of the audiences that benefit from the news
- News positioned in terms of important contemporary trends impacting these audiences
- Succinct pitches where the news value was obvious to the reporter
- News with additional resource including:
- Citable data related to important trends; bonus points if the data also shows customer take-up of the product or service being pitched
- Relevant graphics and images
- Quotes from customers and industry analysts (plus their contact info)
PR is of course broader than just placing news stories, and there were many lessons we should learn from this past year of tumultuous changes. But those PR practitioners who fail to recognize the fundamental changes that took place within the media landscape, and how those changes impact the practice of PR, risk failure, even if they possess first rate social media skills.
Over the course of 2010 social media will continue to mature. I agree with those that say social media will have a pronounced impact on the evolution of PR (though I disagree that social media is alone at the core of this evolution). Social media does not yet reach everyone it needs to, and in many cases is still a few degrees removed from them. But social media does provide invaluable market research and a means to help hone a company’s product or service story.
In 2009, the biggest lesson learned was the need to get back to basics.
See what the other panelists are saying on their blogs about this topic:
- Frank Strong: Blog Panel Part I: Biggest Lesson of 2009
- Meredith Eaton: Blog Panel – Part 1: 2009’s Biggest PR Lessons Learned
- Krim Stephenson: Blog Panel: The Biggest Lesson of 2009
The next post will focus on how the biggest lessons we’ve learned in 2009 (this post) will shape 2010 and beyond. Stay tuned!
