The MoPR Blog

At the beginning of August I wrote a post about the then-pending changes to the guidelines from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the notorious Reg-FD – the set of SEC rules guiding fair disclosure of material information to the public. Six weeks later, all hell has broken loose on the stock market (for myriad reasons), and in the news today comes word that even John McCain would fire Chris Cox, the SEC chairman who until now was being credited for bringing the commission into the 21st Century.

But I want to go back to something I said in my August 1 post:

“Instead of waiting for the SEC to catch up to technology advances, social media and blogging companies may want to drive technology advances to catch up with the appropriate need for fair disclosure.”

At issue in this post was whether the SEC was going to allow publicly traded companies to issue material information via company websites and blogs. The SEC position was that at the time Reg-FD was written there were no such phenomena as social networks and blogs, and therefore regulation needed to catch up with technology.

Although a huge fan of social media and true believer in the ability to use them for dispensing news and opinions, I wanted to sound a note of caution. Unlike the wire services that likewise urged the SEC to reconsider whether material information may be distributed via blogs, Mobility PR won’t face an economic impact from the rule changes. My position comes from working in corporate communications at public companies and understanding the need for simultaneous and widespread disclosure of information that impacts stock price.

My concern in August was that while social media is the communications platform about which everyone is buzzing, it’s still very much nascent and in many instances as yet unproven. The purpose for disclosing material non-public information – that is information known only inside a company that once made public will cause a change in the stock price – is so that all investors have access to important information at the same time. Without a simultaneous and widespread release of information, some investors will have an advantage over others. The best method for simultaneous release of information, still today, is the traditional newswire service. Using the blogosphere for such a release assumes that everyone investing has caught up with technology – and perhaps more important, that technology has caught up to the purpose of this regulation.

Reg-FD is designed to protect investors. I think the past two weeks have demonstrated that investors do need protecting. Not from the violent mood swings of the stock market this week (that’s called “inherent risk”), but from incidents like the one that happened last week. The SEC commissioners should pay very close attention to what happened when a “glitch” led to a massive sell-off of United Airlines stock, resulting in a price drop so fast and so large that it forced NASDAQ to stop trading on the stock.

Here’s what I’ve discerned from the reports on the events of last week. On September 8, 2008, a Chicago Tribune online news article from December 10, 2002 about United Airlines’ then-plan to seek bankruptcy protection was inadvertently recirculated by Income Securities Advisors to a Bloomberg stock market website. Investors believed the article to be current news (because all news on these sites is supposed to be current), and the sell-off began. Before NASDAQ halted trading of United, shares had fallen from about $12 to $3.

When a mistake like this is made, everyone wants to blame someone, particularly the parties involved who want the blame to rest with someone else. So the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, laid blame at the feet of Google. A company press release issued two days after the event begins:

“Tribune Company today said the confusion surrounding a 2002 Chicago Tribune article on the Internet this past weekend started with the inability of Google’s automated search agent “Googlebot” to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers.”

Google of course disagrees and thinks the fault lies elsewhere. A Computerworld blog post by Preston Gralla I think best encapsulates the true essence of the problem, and why the SEC needs to pay close attention. Preston writes:

“So who’s at fault here? The Tribune Company, Google, and every other Web site that uses automation rather than human intelligence for determining what is news. The old story showed up as a top link in the South Florida Sun Sentinel because the story was clicked on once during a late hour when there was little traffic to the site. That made it a “top story,” and so it was automatically put near the top of the page. The Google bot saw it, and assumed it was a new story. Things spiraled out of control from there.”

That the fault ultimately lies with the automated mechanisms involved in collecting and distributing news – in this case specifically to investor news websites – should prove to everyone that the online/social media apparatus are not yet mature enough to satisfy the intent of Reg-FD.

What is exposed in this instance is not vulnerability of social media, but an opportunity for social media companies to build a better newstrap. When protecting the public trust, it’s not always a question of regulation catching up to technology. In the instance of using social media to communicate material information to investors, the question must be whether technology can catch up to regulation.

We invite your comments.

There has been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere this week about the value or need for PR. The thesis on which the active online conversation is based is that in the Web 2.0 era great products will eventually find their audiences and therefore the need for PR agencies is greatly diminished. In a world of blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter and social networks, the theory goes, isn’t it easy for journalists and bloggers to find the topics about which to write without being pitched by a PR flack? Well, yeah, perhaps. But what is absent from the discussion – and what I hope to introduce now – is the broader value of PR.

I understand how the view of the PR profession was shaped for people like Robert Scoble and Marshall Kirkpatrick. If I go to Sears only to buy tools, for example, I might think of Sears as a tool store. Someone else might think of it as an appliance store, or a furniture store or a tire store.

Robert and Marshall are on the receiving end of news pitches, and must get literally thousands of irrelevant and off-topic pitches every month. Bad pitches make the entire industry look bad, which is why my friend Richard Laermer of RLMpr exposes them in his Bad Pitch Blog. And I can certainly understand that as a result, many bloggers would rather find the news themselves than receive it from a PR agency. But PR is not a “pitch store.” It’s a complete department store with many different communications tools and services that present a lot of wide ranging value to companies large and small.

Good PR agencies not only target their pitches correctly, they provide additional value to reporters and bloggers that extend well beyond the pitch and the press release. Oh, and by the way, good PR agencies also help strategize that “serendipitous” discovery of a new service too. It’s important for those who are trying to paint PR as “obsolete” or at least doomed to understand the complete context of public relations. Far from obsolete, it is specifically because Web 2.0 has created far more outlets where people get their news, reviews and other information that the need for quality PR and PR agencies is more acute.

Every client at MoPR has heard this mantra: “P.R. does not stand for press release.” It’s a pet peeve of mine, but every time I hear someone say “can you write us a PR…” I go a little nutty. There is so much more to the craft of PR than just writing press releases and pitching them.

Marshall references other activities that PR agencies do for clients, specifically messaging and serving as the voice of the company when good communications skills are needed but not present within the company. This is all true, but barely scratches the surface.

Good PR is about ideas and relationships. Not relationships between organizations and the journalists and bloggers who may write about them. It’s about the relationships between organizations and their various constituents (sometimes referred to as their “publics”; ergo “public relations”). As one means of relating to the public – and yes, it’s the biggest, certainly the most obvious but not always the most important – is working directly with the media to tell a company’s story.

There is tremendous value to a company when a respected third party, like a Robert Scoble, writes or videos a positive story about the company, its product or service. A great many people tune in to what Robert Scoble has to say, and therefore he has the ability to motivate people to do something. For example, when he covered our client Talkster at CTIA last year, his coverage no doubt contributed to the surge in users that Talkster experienced at that time.

Journalists and bloggers are a conduit to the public. I mean this with the utmost respect. If a company tells its story, a handful of people may hear it and a subset of those will believe it. If the story is told by a respected journalist or a respected media outlet, a great many more people will hear it and a higher percentage will believe it. Why? Because people understand that there is a journalistic process that requires research, multiple sources and the vetting of information. So of course we’re interested in writing news releases and pitching them to important publications.

The right story in the right publication can change the game for a company. When we recently launched Cascada Mobile, a mobile application developer tool, it was an article in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ReadWriteWeb – a primary target on our list – that delivered the most traffic to Cascada’s service. As it should; as it was planned by us.

But let’s step back from individual news outlets. If one story is good, aren’t five better? How about ten? Should companies really consider a cross-our-fingers-and-wait approach to telling their story? Will the people who invested thousands or millions of dollars in a company appreciate this approach? I have yet to meet the CEO who would find results like that satisfactory. Not even the CEO of the bootstrapped startup (who is actually needier than the well financed variety).

When we – that is the PR industry – pitch news, we’re not after just one reporter or blogger. We’re after a long list. We don’t want hundreds or even thousands of people to get our news. We want millions. We love when Robert Scoble covers our clients. But when he does, he’s not the only one doing so. Patiently waiting for a blogger to discover a product via viral marketing or RSS feeds is a bad strategy. Especially if your competition has a PR agency.

We recently heard a fellow from a local interactive marketing agency saying that he believes he can just post a press release on his blog and bloggers and reporters will discover it. I am wholly unconvinced that’s true. How many companies are out there? How many of them are issuing press releases? If they all just passively posted their news and waited, how many reporters or bloggers will find it? Guess what, there is no standards body for tags and keywords, and that makes RSS feeds somewhat imperfect as a news delivery service.

In Robert Scoble’s post he cites how excited he was to discover something that was off the grid by having it shown to him by an associate who was part of a company’s private beta. Well that’s PR too.

Good PR agencies get involved in helping companies select the members of their private betas. Why? Because we know that some people have influential friends, and we either want those friends to see it or don’t want them to see it. A great many times we’ve reached out to influential bloggers and invited them to be beta testers themselves. Not just because we want them to cover the service, but more importantly in these instances because they see so much in their respective industries that their feedback as a beta tester is highly valuable.

So far I’ve only talked about news and the launches of new products. But some companies don’t have new products every year, and yet they still need PR. What else does PR do for businesses?

Marhsall mentioned that if there is a circle of Hell for PR practitioners, it is reserved for those who get behind companies, products or services in which they don’t personally believe. Maybe. I can tell you that good PR agencies provide counsel. Just as every defendant (even guilty ones) are entitled to their counsel, every company is entitled to marketing counsel – good counsel.

MoPR had a client that was building a service that we had to counsel was NOT ready for PR. Their service was too nascent, the competition in the space was much farther along in product development and also much better financed. Knowing that a PR campaign would deliver many eyeballs to their service, we had to tell them to wait and develop their product further. The maxim is true: you do only get one chance to make a first impression. As their agency, we wanted our client’s service to not only make a good first impression, we wanted them to have impact in their space. They weren’t ready, so we counseled them to stop doing PR until they were. It cost us a monthly retainer, but it was good counsel.

A good PR agency is also part market research firm. It has its many fingers on the pulse of the industries in which its clients play. It’s important to know about market trends, competitive news and industry developments. What company would not benefit from knowing these things? Yes, a CEO or VP of engineering could probably spend hours every week using the same tools agencies have to come up with the same reports. But shouldn’t they be running their company or building their product?

Don’t underestimate the value of knowing the marketplace. There is an art to timing news so that it makes the biggest impact. We’ve seen tech companies issue press releases on a Thursday afternoon in the midst of CES, CTIA or Interop and wonder why no one paid any attention. (If you don’t know why I referenced Thursday afternoon, then perhaps you need a PR agency too; if you wonder why you issued a press release and no one paid attention you most certainly do).

Companies may also face competition, and that competition may itself be aggressively trying to capture market share. I suppose one could wait until a product is discovered by a single important reporter. But in a competitive environment, it’s probably best to be aggressive oneself. Years ago my partner Melissa and I worked on both ends of the PR table for a company in the Wi-Fi space. Melissa was on the agency side and I was her client. We had a competitor who was not only aggressive in telling its story, it also had a casual relationship with the facts. It claimed that its Wi-Fi network was much larger than it actually was, and we had proof.

In a campaign that we dubbed “The Hotspot Coldwar,” we found the one influential blogger who could tell this story the best and we delivered to him the proof. We also opened our service to him so that he could have all the raw data from us as well, and we let him – a recognized industry expert – audit both networks (he actually audited three). His report on the true size of the respective networks was the Hotspot Coldwar’s equivalent of the “shot heard around the world.” His story was cited as though it was an industry report by trade press in North America, Europe and Asia. Oh, by the way, it was no accident that all these news outlets covered the report; we shared it with them.

In the end, our competitor was forced to adopt fair reporting standards, deemed fair by the industry. Their credibility was dashed and their news was covered far less frequently. Winning in a competitive marketplace has value too, and PR can be a big contributor.

Perception in the industry is always important for companies. Executives want their company to be relevant and important in their industry. PR agencies will speak of “thought leadership.” That’s another important aspect of PR. These activities involve winning awards, speaking at industry events and making company spokespeople sought-after industry experts. When you’re at an industry conference sitting in a panel discussion, the moderator and panelists were probably submitted by PR agencies. It’s particularly gratifying for us when we see a manager or director from one of our clients sitting on a panel with CEOs or VPs from their competitors. Perception matters.

This post has become very long, and I still haven’t covered media training, Reg-FD, crisis communications, product reviews, viral marketing, social networking, messaging and positioning, media training, data mining, press kits or even the craft of writing an executive bio. I’ve been in PR for more than 20 years and I have (I hope) a solid perspective on PR. So trust me when I say, PR doesn’t stand for “press release.”

At MoPR we are big believers in social media. Our clients all have social media press kits and use multimedia elements to tell their story. They all blog and are all extremely accessible to the media. We regularly issue social media press releases and have our own social media newswire. But I cannot stress this enough: we are not sitting on our hands hoping for one good story. We all have Twitter accounts, and so do all our clients. And we make good use of them too. But we’re not relying on Twitter for communicating news to our followers. We use it to take the pulse of our clients’ industries and markets using tools like Summize (please don’t break Summize, Twitter). Social media tools are important, but they are not evolved enough to replace proactive activities of PR agencies. We don’t want thousands of people to hear about our clients, we want millions, and one news story here or there is never enough – particularly for the bootstrapped startup looking to break its way into a market.

The chatter among public relations and investor relations practitioners this week is about pending (read that word again for emphasis, please) new guidelines from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the notorious Reg-FD – the set of SEC rules guiding fair disclosure of material information to the public. On Wednesday this week, the SEC commissioners voted unanimously to “provide new guidance to public companies about how to comply with the securities laws while developing their Web sites to serve as an effective means for disseminating important information to investors.”

While those of us with Reg-FD and Sarbanes Oxley publicity regulations battle scars are waiting to see the official guidelines, some people are couching this vote as the final nail in the press release coffin. Let’s not be too hasty.

Fundamentally, Reg-FD protects investors and prospective investors by making disclosure of material non-public information simultaneous and widespread. In other words, a company needs to broadcast the disclosure of material information – information that will affect a stock price once made public – so that all investors can have access to it at the same time. Traditionally, this has meant using a newswire for such disclosure so that the information can be seen far and wide, and be easily discoverable on the Internet.

The SEC’s vote will (may?) amend this practice to allow Reg-FD disclosure on company websites in, what one IR website refers to as “certain circumstances.” Some people have interpreted this decision to mean that blogs can now be used to disclose earnings information to investors and therefore the press release is dead.

That’s probably too overstated and certainly premature. The SEC guidelines are not yet public information. What is public, as of today, is the 120 page (excluding the appendix) “Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission,” which on page 108 states:

The SEC has issued a series of interpretive releases and rules addressing the use of electronic media to deliver or transmit information under the federal securities laws. The SEC issued its last comprehensive interpretive release on the use of electronic media, including corporate websites, in 2000. Since 2000, significant technological advances have increased both the market’s demand for more timely corporate disclosure and the ability of investors to capture, process, and disseminate this information. Recognizing this, the SEC has adopted a large number of rules that mandate, permit, or require disclosure of the use of corporate websites to provide important corporate information and developments. The SEC has voted to publish an interpretative release to provide guidance regarding the use of company websites under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws.

Nowhere in the 120 pages of the report or the 60 or so pages of appendix will you find the words “blog” or “social media.”

That’s not to say blogs, forums or social networks won’t be impacted. In fact, in the press release issued by the SEC, Chairman Christopher Cox says, “The last time the SEC issued guidance in this area, the idea of ’social networks’ hadn’t yet been developed, and creating a social network where shareholders could meet and exchange views was barely imaginable. Ongoing developments in technology have increased both the markets’ and investors’ demand for more timely company disclosure on the Web, and in turn, raised new securities law issues for public companies to consider.”

Cox’s tenure as chairman of the SEC has been regarded by many as leading the SEC to live in the modern world. No question there is more consumable, and therefore more valuable, information available on the web than in the lengthy tables and text contained in a form 10K – the legally required content of an annual report – for example. That’s really cool, and great news for investors. It may even be great news for web design firms and companies like Wordpress. Likely this does not spell disaster for Business Wire, PR Newswire or Marketwire, nor for the press releases they issue.

No one knows yet for sure, because as mentioned before, the “interpretive release” from the SEC is not yet available. TheMoPRBlog asked Business Wire, PR Newswire and Marketwire for their reaction to this news, and all three had no comment to make because there is in fact nothing official yet about which a comment can be made. Once the SEC issues its guidance, these newswires will issue their own.

What may be of more concern to the PR profession is the notion of “under certain circumstances” as raised in the first sentence of the IR Web Report’s article. By way of analogy, think of how another government institution uses this same notion: stuff you pay for is tax deductible… under certain circumstances.

Guidelines are better when the issues are both easily understood and the outcome is binary; you either can do something, or you can’t. Tax laws aren’t binary, and therefore a great many people are forced to rely on outside help when preparing their tax returns, whether that help comes from a tax accountant or from software. The implications of adding a swath of gray to what is now black and white is troubling. Not only does it mean confusion and the possibilities of making mistakes (mistakes made by public companies can result in fines or even jail time for CEOs), it also creates an environment for potential abuse.

When discussing this issue with a corporate counsel friend of mine, he said “adding a subjective element to this process will open the door for mischief.”

Those like Brian Solis, of whom we’re big fans, who think this is the death knell for the press release are focused on form and not substance. Maybe the social media press release will replace the old text-only press releases of years past. The wire services themselves now offer social media wires and XHTML-based content, and our agency has invested in the in-house development of our own social media newswire to issue these social media enhanced news releases, so it’s fair to say that the traditional release will evolve. But changes to the SEC guidelines are probably not going to eliminate the need to cast a wide net so that material non-public information can be made simultaneously available to all investors, nor should they. Not all investors use social media, despite Jonathan Schwartz’s – and quite frankly, Mobility PR’s – desire to make social media ubiquitous.

Instead of waiting for the SEC to catch up to technology advances, social media and blogging companies may want to drive technology advances to catch up with the appropriate need for fair disclosure. TheMoPRBlog guesses that the forthcoming guidelines from the SEC will create the environment where such advances will be both compelling and profitable.

We invite your comments.