The MoPR Blog

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.