Dr. X's Public Relations Injection

Hard won bits of wisdom from the public relations/information/affairs/media/marketing world.

[drxpr-blog]

Blackberry thorns and benefits, not features

Been gone too long... Stupid job...

In the meantime, I've been screaming at my Blackberry Torch. Often, I scream "Is this the best you can do? A shitty too-slow browser and an OS that freezes constantly when I want to check Twitter?"

And then, a few days ago, I saw this article and it made me think that Blackberry's problem -- one of its problems -- is one we see often in marketing and advertising: We tend to focus on features, rather than benefits, as key differentiators.

The anonymous "senior executive" at Research in Motion who wrote the note linked above noted that the Blackberry marketing folks kept focusing marketing of the Playbook tablet around the concept of "We can run Flash and the iPad can'" as a key differentiator. That's selling a feature, and not a benefit. "True multitasking" is a feature, not a benefit.

Rather than "We can run Flash and the other guy can't," tell me the benefit of that. For instance, tell me that using the Blackbery Playbook, I can view 12 of the top 25 websites, which use Flash. If you're marketing to a younger crowd, tell them that the Playbook gives you unrestricted access to Facebook, rather than having to through the mobile app.

Sell "true multitasking" as "look at how much you can accomplish." Want to hit the younger audience? Tell them they can listen to music and do their homework at the same time. Older crowd? Book a vacation through an app at the same time you can browse where you want to go. Business crowd? Toggle back and forth between the word processor and the spreadsheet and the movie you're watching in a hotel room.

This is something that detergent companies figured out long ago. No one cares about the extraordinary chemistry of your product. They care about if it gets clothes cleaner than the stuff they're using. Direct television advertising gets this more than anyone else. Even OxiClean, which cleaned "with the power of oxygen" was pitched as "get your whites whiter and your brights brighter."

Powered by oxygen is a feature. Look at what it does to grass stains is a benefit.

Features differentiate you from the competition, but what you can do with them -- benefits -- is what wins in the marketplace.

[drxpr-blog]

Berming your mistress

First, let's stipulate that nothing, nothing, nothing good comes off of MySpace.

The first place that the media goes for photos these days is social media outlets.  If there's a handbook entitled "I'm a celebrity having an affair," the first page should have two sentences on it:

1. Your lover needs to make his or her Facebook account totally private.

2. Your lover can't have a MySpace account.

Exposure of a celebrity affair isn't always guaranteed, but once it blows up, the first place reporters are going is Facebook, then MySpace. Like there isn't some 14-year-old at TMZ who can't find it in 10 minutes, anyway, especially if there's an Accurint or other personal info report that's been run (in fact, the only thing that's kept the 13-year-old alleged Schwarzenegger love child out of the news so far is that he doesn't have a credit record and so the reporters have to work the streets and sources, rather than the bio reports).

File this one under "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." As a media consultant, the first advice should be "Don't do it." The next piece of advice needs to be "If you're going to do it, build berms around your indiscretion that make it hard for the toxic goo to leak it if it does." Strict rules help this: Cell phone off when you're together. No social media accounts. And don't text, Tiger.

Otherwise, as we know now all too well, your name will forever be linked to a ripped-from-MySpace photo of a woman who looks like she just got off a motorcycle wearing the world's most amazing bra.

[drxpr-blog]

SM hiring specialist reverse checklist

Listen for these comments when someone comes to you wanting to do social media for you.

1. Have they asked you what your end game is? If they haven't, it shows they're not thinking strategically.

2. Are they talking about a "comprehensive social media presence" without getting beyond the general statements of "Your competitors are doing it" and "It raises brand awareness" ? If not, you may not be dealing with a strategic thinker.

3. Have they considered how social media will integrate with your broader marketing strategy? Because it needs to. It's a tool, not an answer.

4. Have they done their homework on you and your competitors? Fly-by-nighters, sales dudes and SM dilettantes rarely do.

5. Do they have concerns about the depth and breadth of your content, and how it will be posted? Because it's good to be confident, but social media is a beast that needs pretty regular feeding, and content goes a lot quicker than it looks.  

[drxpr-blog]

Companies we use, Vol. 1: CustomScoop

We've been using CustomScoop for our brand monitoring. Love them. They incorporate electronic clipping of traditional media with checks of YouTube, Blogger, Twitter and unprotected Facebook pages and give us a treasure trove of info on our unlimited keywords.

Cheaper than Cision and Vocus, with better functionality in a narrow way (if you want lists, Cision is better compound product, but you pay through the nose).

Combining CustomScoop with Google Alerts pretty much covers the world we care about. 

[drxpr-blog]

How to make reporters hot, Vol. 1

Tension. Reporters want two sides -- at least -- pulling at each other in a story. Tension makes for conflict. Conflict makes for a good nut graf. A good nut graf delivers the essence of the story and controls the story.

Want to get coverage for your issue? Portray it as a struggle: Man vs. the city, old vs. new, animals vs. the system, Autobots vs. Decepticons. 

Clearly define your side. Clearly define the opposite side. Clearly identify the tension. And that's what will clue a reporter in.

[gladwynlewis-blog]

[drxpr-blog]

Stealing shamelessly from Gladwyn Lewis today, but an excellent post on how do you interview someone for a social media position?

gladwynlewis:

It’s interesting that Social Media is the new buzz word. Two years back, businesses shunned Social Media, and today its more of the norm if a business has a Facebook page or a Twitter account. Recruiting personnel for Social Media is a challenge, the standard web 2.0 questions won’t work, and you...

[gadler]

[drxpr-blog]

gadler:

By Cory Bergman, Director, BreakingNews.comThe American Society of News Editors (ASNE) has issued a social media guide for newspapers with lots of good recommendations, but this one stands out: “Break news on your website, not on Twitter.” Read the rest of this post on the original site »By Cory...

[drxpr-blog]

An actual conversation about social media with a client

Client:We're ready to go social media. Can you help us?

Dr. X: Sure. What's your endgame?

Client: We want to be in social media. We think it's time.

Dr. X: No, I mean, what are you trying to achieve? Popularity? Customer service? Visibility for your business?

Client: We think it's time to be doing the social media thing.

Dr. X: Ok. There's lots of different "social media things." It's about tools and not answers. 

Client: (laughing uncomfortably) That's why we want to hire you.

Dr. X : You're very kind. The tools we choose depend on what you want to do. Create community with information and longer posts? That'd be Facebook. Engage in multiple conversations for customer service and building one-on-one relationships? Twitter. Really build a focused community on a subject? Ning. There's a bunch of stuff. 

Client: We thought Twitter.

Dr. X: Why?

Client: It's what our competitors our doing.

Dr. X: Ok. Do you have content ready to go up there?

Client: Um. No.

Dr. X: Can you have content ready to go in a relatively short time that points people to your website? 

Client: Um, no. We need to work on that.

Dr. X: We can work around that for a little bit. Do you have someone who can spend a significant amount of time interacting with customers online?

Client: We hadn't really thought of that...

Dr. X: Will you have the budget to hire a company that can do it for you?

Client: We hadn't really thought of that. Why are you busting my balls? Why can't you just help us set up a Twitter account and then we'll post our press releases there?

[drxpr-blog]

How you melt someone's eyes

A client called some time back: "If I give you the information, how soon can you write a press release that melts people's eyes?"

It's a law firm. They're attempting to settle with a large company in a sexual harassment case of sorts. The case hasn't gotten a lot of attention. In truth, the lawyer doesn't want to get a lot of attention. Also in truth, he doesn't really want to go to trial. But he has a settlement conference and we wants a weapon, and the best weapon in pre-trial is the threat of adverse press coverage.

So how do you do it?

1. Consider the audience. The intended audience is lawyers in a room, and these lawyers are going to be risk managers. You're writing to them, but you can't make it look like you're writing to them. So you're going to write a press release that will appeal to the media and to the stock analyst industry. To risk management types, the latter is more frightening than the former.

2. This is basically the first draft of a release and it's never going to see the wide world, since if it works, it's only going to be seen by 10 people in a conference room. So you can play fast and loose with the facts to make sure the media will pick it up.

3. Take your basic facts -- mentally challenged woman harassed long-term by company managers -- and intensify them with the writing. You could go this approach:

Mildred Jones just wanted a job, and she found one at XYZCorporation. But just two weeks after starting work, Jones, who suffers from [insert name of terrible mental problem here] was pushed against a wall by her boss and forced to perform oral sex."

The 33-year-old -- who had to take a bus from her group home every day just to get to the job -- was terrified and confused. So she said yes. And every time it happened over the next four years -- more than 100 instances -- she said yes because she was afraid not to. 

Jones has brought a lawsuit against XYZ Corporation for $6 million, a small price to pay for being sexually assaulted an average of 25 times a year.

But that approach is too much of a story. You've got good details, including the all-important "25-times-a-year rape" figure, but if you're writing for the coverage industry -- the people who recommend buying or selling stocks -- you've wasted their time.

Let's recast:

A mentally challenged woman is suing the XYZ Corporation for being raped by a manager more than 25 times a year over a four-year period. She is asking for $6 million in compensatory damages.

So now you've hit the bottom line: mentally challenged women, $6 million, 25 times a year. Next, you tell the analysts and reporters where they can find the suit, since they won't take your word for it:

The suit alleges that senior managers forced the women, who suffers [insert name of terrible illness here] as their personal sex toy. It was filed May 13, 2011 in [insert name of appropriate court here].

Now you start telling the story, using lots of sympathetic detals: about her crying at night, about her fear of reporting the instances to the proper authorities -- and about the journal she kept. That will get people's attention. That's the whole show. That's the lurid details. You've played all the emotional points, but God is in the details, and the details are awful to read and powerful. 

And though you'd never mention the journal in a press release that's going to go out to the world, it makes a heck of a weapon in the conference room. 

[drxpr-blog]

Soul Daddy website rant continues

How can you launch a website without optimizing it for social media? Seriously. How can you plan a product launch in the consumer sector without optimizing creating a pathway for word-of-mouth communication?

Back to the site: No Twitter. No Facebook. The two easiest ways for people to spread the word -- generally without negative comment on the food -- have been ignored. Every time someone Likes a page on Facebook, it appears on their wall. The line was out the door at the Mall of America yesterday, according to news reports, and people were Tweeting and updating Facebook statuses from the line. There is hype, there is critical mass.

And if I want to tell people that I ate there in a wide way afterwards, I have no way of doing it from the website. 

We can say "Well, Twitter isn't really the venue for this at start up, since there's three different locations and we want to make sure that we have a unified message." And that's a semi-valid argument, though one that a good social media specialist agency could handle in about 10 minutes. and maybe you don't want to have the customer-service conversation that a Twitter feed creates.

But that's no excuse to not be up on Facebook. Or maybe they are up on Facebook, but its not linked to the site. 

Even Soul Daddy investors Bobby Flay and Steve Ells (Chipotle) have social media links for their places (Bobby's Burger Palace links to Facebook and Twitter, as does Flay's vanity site; Bar Americain, Bobby Flay Steak and the Mesa Grill don't have any SM presence) and Chipotle has a robust SM presence that includes invitations to its customers to submit craft projects.

So why no easy SM optimization?

[drxpr-blog]

The need for good copywritin'

How much money have the investors put into finding, evolving and launching Soul Daddy New Home Cookin', the restaurant concept that won NBC's America's Next Great Restaurant?

You think they could have hired a copywriter for the webpage? There's a hyphen problem in the first line of copy, a comma splice in the first sentence of body copy and passive voice scattered throughout.

The web site itself is very vertical and lacks a really strong typographic identity. And that's fine (we suppose) but then have the words sparkle and carry the user from place to place on the page. 

[drxpr-blog]

Spinning historical events

In which, as an intellectual exercise, we occasionally take on historical events and do key messaging points for them. For the kickoff, the Union defeat at First Manassas (or the First Battle of Bull Run, depending on which side you're on).

Perspective: The Union Army got whomped. It was chaos and many of the Union's troops -- fresh conscripts -- broke and ran after the first volley. This was observed by well-to-do Washingtonians, who came out to the hill overlooking the battlefield to watch the war end with a Union victory on the same day.

Key messaging points from 1861:

-- Damn Rebs didn't fight fair.

-- The Southern cavalry really had a field day and our horses weren't able to be brought to bear.

-- Our commanders were concerned about the safety of the civilians.

This is kind of a tough one, since the nature of messaging has changed in the last decade more than it has in the previous 100 years. You always want to be optimistic, but with the accountability mechanisms in place due to technology -- Twitter, the blogosphere and other viral communications networks -- the messaging trend has been to own up to some portion of the mistake and then discuss how to improve it.

So, if we were looking at this today:

-- Troops needed more seasoning, but showed great heart.

-- Lots of individual instances of gallantry, but a new training regime will translate those to the unit level.

-- Working on leadership development program to bring along junior officers more quickly.

[drxpr-blog]

Stupid call back policy

Company gets a call from a newspaper reporter with a straightforward set of questions -- that require factual answers -- on a slightly sticky subject. The call comes in at 9 a.m.

The company spends all day fretting about what to say, how to say it, who to say it. At 2 p.m., the reporter sends an e-mail essentially saying "These are simple questions. Why can't you answer them?"

At 5:30 p.m., the company  releases a written statement that answers not a single one of the reporter's questions. It does, however, have some fluffy quotes that really say nothing.

So why is the company surprised that the next day the reporter implied three times in the front page story that the client didn't answer questions?

Moral of this story: Answer the questions. If it's sensitive kick it around and wordsmith it. But answer the questions. If you're going to spend all day crafting a response, it damn well better have substance.  The company got punished not because it said something late, but because they said nothing at all, really, late.

[drxpr-blog]

The nut graf

And so yet another release has come across the desk that lacks the basic advanced parts of press releasage.

Let’s assume we have all the info and spelling correct. The two basic advanced parts of the release need to be:

Sell the reader on the benefits, not the features

Have a nut graf. What is the nut graf? It’s the part of the story or release that tells the reader why they care, give a crap and puts things into context. In news writing, the nut graf proves the point. In release writing, it gives the release structure and it communicates to the audience — journalists — that there’s a point to investing the time in reading your release. Example of a nut graf for a trade industry audience:

The widget’s release marks the third time in six months that the Johnson Smith Control Company has released a product that can cut manufacturing costs for its customers. The increased viscosity of Widget3000 can result in 30 percent widget replacements on the production line.

The first sentence of the paragraph provides the context and sets up the specific details of the second. If you wrote the release without context or why-we-care, it would likely wander — and so would your target audience’s attention.

[drxpr-blog]

The Jim Tressel Thing

Yes, I'm late to this. It’s been busy. But I've been thinking about Jim Tressel’s situation at Ohio State: the lying, the covering up, the reluctant falling on swords. We know the coverup is worse than the crime, and that’s been pointed out a bunch, though it’s worth a mention. But this is about something far deeper: competing interests in the marketplace of public opinion.

This is standard market theory: when interests align, usually in the form of buyers and sellers, the market is working. When there are willing buyers but no sellers, or willing sellers but no buyers, you have misaligned interests and the market doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work efficiently.

Same thing in public relations when you have multiple entities, with competing interests. Ohio State’s bext interests wold be served by cutting the coach loose as a sign of integrity, sending the message “We don’t tolerate this kind of behavior, even if it was for the right reasons.” they could exercise the moral clause in the contract — since allegedly lying to and obstructing investigative seems to be at least as bad as, you know, getting a hooker — and make a statement and move on.

Tressel, on the other hand, is best served by preserving his standing — note I didn’t say his reputation — and his salary. It’s not in his best interest to resign with dignity, as Ohio State might like him to do.

Now you have the pursuit of two separate agendas that don’t line up. OSU can play the game and say “Not guilty until proven so,” and will be damaged in the court of public opinion. Tressel will stay as long as he can, which may cause further problems for the program and the school’s reputation.

The world will go on with or without the interests aligning. But watch how this pays out and what the non-football people are saying. You'll be able to sense the damage control starting when the whisper campaign starts.

[drxpr-blog]

The memo you always wanted to write

To: Junior AEs Re: Client relations

Please stop sleeping with the clients. Even if they're Irish.

Also, you smell like smoke when you come in from lunch.

[drxpr-blog]

4 rules for a successful campaign brainstorming meeting

4.  There are no stupid ideas at this point.

3. Respect everyone's opinions.

2. You are not the consumer.

1. When the idea is agreed upon, no one within the group ever speaks badly of it to anyone outside the group.