I just came back from SNCR’s New Communications Forum, a conference I thoroughly enjoyed. There was a lot of talk about PR 2.0, 3.0, new strategies, new tactics, new tools, and a cultural revolution in the way we (should) practice the strategic communication professions (PR, marketing, advertising, etc.). You are all familiar with the tenets of this cultural revolution from books such as the Cluetrain Manifesto, Join the Conversation, Naked conversations, and the blogs of many social media-savvy professionals (see blogroll).
The conversations indicate an evolution, if not a revolution of PR from media relations to relationship management. PR isn’t/shouldn’t be only about making noise, raising awareness, and counting eyeballs. It should be about relationships. Fine. So how are companies supposed to do this? THE answer is: LISTEN.
Listening means setting up search alerts and monitoring everything that’s said about your organization online (on blogs, twitter, flickr, facebook, etc.).
So once you find out what people say about you, what do you do? You respond. You correct misperceptions. You clarify misunderstandings. You show the poor bastards you were right, after all.
But what if you were wrong?
Listening without authentic openness to change is not enough. It’s not PR 2.0. It’s just audience research, a tool used in what we boring academics call scientific persuasion.
The more you listen, the better you know what makes your audience tick, the better able you are to persuade them. Ca-ching!
Nope, this is not PR 2.0. It’s PR 1.0 on several small channels instead of a few large ones.
PR 2.0 involves not only listening, but being open to make organizational changes as a result of naked conversations (known in academic circles as dialogue). This is what relationships are about. Partners in a relationship change to adapt to each other.
Why?
Because ultimately PR is not about listening, not about conversations, not about relationships. What’s the point of listening? Why do you engage in conversation? Why build relationships? What’s the end goal?
No, it’s not brand awareness. It’s not increased sales. It’s not improved reputation.
PR is (OK, should be, or can be) about optimizing your organization’s survival in its environment.
Think about it: Your organization operates in a complex society. Its survival and operations influence and are influenced by a large number of audiences (aka stakeholders). For all to survive and thrive, they need to be constantly adapting to each other. I think that’s called nimbleness.
Is it fair or even wise for the organization to be attempting to constantly change its environment through persuasion, but not be open to changing itself?
We know what happens to organisms that don’t adapt to their environments.
So it’s PR’s role to facilitate the mutual adaptation of organization and its environment. This is why naked conversations and relationships are important.
Now, don’t quote on me on that. All I’ve done is explain a major PR theory. One that has thought of PR 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 since 1984. If you want to cite someone, start with Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing public relations. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
P.S.
The reason why Dell is the model for PR 2.0 is because they follow listening with real changes in the organization’s products and processes, not just talk-back.
P.P.S.
[Edit:] Geoff Livingston’s post this morning about his experience with JetBlue provides a clear illustration to my theoretical point.
Closing keynote: Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer
BlogHer network survey + U.S. representative female online users.
Key findings:
blogs are mainstream
blogs are addictive
blogs are trusted
What do women find in blogs? They are experiencing the unique, transformational power of blogging. Blogs are changing the way we:
Blogs empower people. Do companies empower people?
People don’t trust institutions, they trust each other. What are companies doing to be trustworthy?
SNCR Research presentation
Patterns of influence are changing, and this has a fundamental impact on the PR profession.
Research goals: examine the PR landscape to observe how PR uses social media; to define influencers; to examine how PR creates relationships in social media.
Research methods: survey of nearly 300 PR & marketing professionals, case studies
Survey results
ROI of listening: American Red Cross case study
American Red Cross started monitoring blog posts and responding.
Results:
5-step listening process:
Metrics:
Challenges:
Successes:
Emerson case study – B2B (Jim Cahill)
Services are about people and building belief of trust, competence, commitment, creativity – which brochures cannot do. Emerson needed to market its expertise, not products. Needed to get the experts closer to the customers.
Businesses seeking services started with search engines. So decided to start a blog.
Internal approval process:
Approval process took 2 years. Took Steve Rubel’s advice to “show it, not talk it” and started a blog internally. Had to fight fear. Created worst case scenarios to anticipate what could happen if start blog.
Finally, started www.EmersonProcessXperts.com. Also use RSS feed reader to monitor relevant blogs and respond 2-3 times a week.
Measurement:
[all SNCR coverage cross-posted from New Communications Review]
SNCR Research Presentation
Paul Gillin begins with a profile of Consumerist:
Ripoff Report is a similar websites. These sites are the new “kings” of customer advocacy – recently featured in Business Week cover story.
Consumers have found that they get more results if they complain through these channels rather than contacting the company directly. These websites, along with the attention they get from both mainstream media and digg, point to new dynamics in customer care and brand reputation. Old tactics no longer work. Stories can spin out of control and become storms in a matter of hours. The worst thing you can do: Send in the legal team.
Customer service has moved from a private, one-to-one communication with a disgruntled and unhappy customer service representative to the public domain.
Julia Ochinero, Nuance – a company working, among others, to improve customer self-service technologies. The phone remains the preferred customer service channel and people prefer talking to a live representative rather than an automated system.
Customer care interaction has become a marketing opportunity – a way of differentiating products.
Paul Gillin presents the results of a 400-respondent survey about consumer opinion and complaints websites.
Key findings:
John Cass presents two case studies:
Comcast on twitter
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch twittered his poor experience with Comcast. The Comcast customer service exec. happened to notice, intervened and solved the problem. This incident triggered Comcast twitter outreach program: 5-7 people monitor and conduct outreach on twitter.
Comcast had been monitoring blogs, but Comcast feels twiter is proving to be more direct and quicker to respond than blogs.
Dell case study
If you’re not familiar with it, please review the notes from the Dell Conversation post.
Dell has provided a useful model of how companies can use blog monitoring to identify customer issues and respond to them online.
Research Challenge: Understand how consumers relate to the Internet, from the consumers’ point of view. Created Netpop research framework to tap into consumer attitudes, behaviors, etc.
Tenets of the framework:
1. The interface is broadband – research focus on broadband users only
2. The interface is global – same devices for internet access worldwide
3. The fundamental areas of involvement are the same globally – similar sites, activities (i.e. social networking, gaming, virtual worlds)
• huge population differences, but similar number of broadband users (about 100 million in each U.S. and China – about 50% of Americans but only 10% of Chinese)
• online activities are very similar among American and Chinese users
• comparison of various broadband user demographics
The top level of the framework: attitudinal segmentation: 5 attitudinal groups in the US:
1. online insiders
2. fast trackers
3. social clickers
4. everyday pros
5. content kings
Comparison of attitudinal groups shows the Chinese are early adopters in larger percentages than Americans.
Content contribution in a typical month: 35% of American broadband users publish a personal page on social networks. 28% post comments on blogs. China: 47% post comments on blogs., and overall are much more involved in discussion forums. Chinese users are much more involved in expressing opinions and interacting online.
Entertainment
• Both populations spend about 50% of their spare time online.
• Both populations go online daily for: music, casual games, videogames, reading magazines.
• Time spent on video: 48% of U.S. time spent watching videos is online, vs. 74% in China. However, more money is spent on TV advertising vs. online sources, although people spend about equal amounts of time watching video on TV and online.
• Communitainment activities: Chinese users much more interested than U.S. in meeting people online.
Shopping
• Chinese users spend a considerable amount of money online.
• 73% o U.S. purchase decisions are influenced by an online source vs. 93% in China
• U.S. users shop on eBay, in China on EachNet.com. Top shopping sites in China are auction sites – a community environment
Conclusions
• Online activity has evolved: push > pull > participation
• It’s a global phenomenon
• Everything is interpersonal
• The speed of change is increasing
[Notes from session with Todd Defren, SNCR Fellow, SHIFT Communications, and Maggie Fox, Social Media Group.]
Will SMNR replace traditional releases?
Todd and Maggie are in “violent agreement” – why not add social media features to your release?
Do RSS-enabled news releases have the potential to take over the wire model?
Todd: Probably not; there are regulatory and legal requirements for certain releases that require wire services.
Maggie: If I were a wire service, I’d be very concerned about my business model. All media need to know is the URL the releases are coming from.
Discussion: Corporate America wants the reliability that only wire services can provide. But the RSS technology might improve over time and become reliable. Wire services are much more than distribution – there are other services they offer that RSS can’t compete with.
Todd: The problem with an RSS-only model is that as a journalist you lose some of the accidental discovery piece, you only get the feeds you’re subscribing to.
Comments on SMNRs are not necessary or even desirable.
Maggie: I agree. Companies do not always need to host a conversation. Sometimes they need to provide comment to enable those conversations.
Todd: I disagree. If it’s social media, it has to be social. Richard at Dell is a walking case study about the importance of conversations. I believe in moderated comments, to avoid spam, but why wouldn’t you want as many of the conversations to happen at the SMNR? There you have a better opportunity not to control the conversation but to engage in it, rather than chasing down every single blog post. You can aggregate the conversation at the SMNR site and respond there in an official way.
Maggie: Corporate blogs are where the conversations should take place. If you allow comments on a SMNR, why not just start a blog?
Todd: I see SMNR’s accumulating and being a blog. You link to flickr, YouTube, etc. People can comment there. So why not aggregate the comments and let the conversation happen there?
Maggie: Good point. In the releases we’ve issued for Ford, although there’s a very active online fan community for F-150, we only got about 25 comments. So there’s not an appetite for commenting on news releases. Had we allowed comments on the SMNR, we would have gotten comments from PR people: “nice release!”
Todd: Everyone has an invisible sign that reads “make me feel important.” By allowing comments right there on the SMNR you make people feel important.
Ultimately, the purpose behind creating the SMNR was to help journalists and make it easy for them: easy to find the fact, include all the links they need to research their article, etc.
Maggie: Many people who blog are not used to reading and digesting traditional press releases, so SMNR’s make it easier for them to sift through the information.
Todd: Using bullet points is a way to strip away the baloney and cut through the facts. Press release writing has often buried the facts in poor writing, so now when journalists see the bullets they go “oh, so THAT’s what you meant!” The SMNR strips away the “story” and provides just the facts.
Whitney Drake: At Ford, we’re doing both. We’re placing the bullet points at the top of news releases that need it, for journalists who only look at that. We’ve seen that journalists look at one, the other, or both.
Jiyan Wei, Vocus: Google News blocks some SMNRs because if they’re fragmented they’re not considered real news stories.
Maggie: Our digital snippets template doesn’t go into Google News, but it is findable through keyword search.
Should you have both SMNR’s and an online press room?
Maggie: No, they’re redundant.
What are the characteristics of the most effective SMNRs?
Maggie recalls the Chris Anderson story and how difficult it is to pitch to Wired. Howevered, Wired pulled information and images from a Ford SMNR.
Todd: ultimately, it all comes back to content. If the content is bad and not newsworthy, it doesn’t matter if you do a SMNR or not. You won’t get coverage.
If you’re doing SMNRs, is that all you need to do in terms of social media strategy?
SNCR audience snickers
The entire conference is about social media strategies, which Todd sums up as listening and participating.
Google corporate communication officer in the audience explains that relevant news will be posted on one of Google’s 150 corporate blogs, by an employee, and will reach the appropriate, targeted audience. Google issues very few press releases for a company its size.
[Notes from Shel Holtz' session at SNCR New Comm Forum
What is "brand?" Who owns it? Brand is an aggregate of perceptions & feelings based on all previous experiences with a company. The fact is that employees are participating in social media in ways that affect your customers' brand experience. Examples: Credit card employee responding unofficially to online forum about late fees; Hellmark facebook group for people who hated working at Hallmark.
Organizations should position employees to represent the brand online and contribute to creating positive brand experiences. How?
Strategies for engaging employees in branding. Consider:
[Notes from Track1-session1, New Comm Forum]
Blake Cahill, Visible Technologies overviewed a couple of case studies of Visible Technologies clients and their online conversation analysis efforts.
Janet Eden-Harris, Umbria. Umbria was created to tap into and aggregate “unstructured text” and mine conversations. Umbria analyzes patterns of conversation – different groups of people speak differently. Umbria focuses on 4 areas:
Q&A
Q: Is what you’re talking about monitoring or measurement?
A: If you track monitoring over time, it can become measurement. You don’t track (only) eyeballs anymore. You track the change of sentiment in online conversations, and ultimately, you need to see if the social media campaign ties back to sales.
Q: What is Umbria’s data universe?
A: Umbria has the tools to collect tens of thousands of blog conversations. You can never get them all, but for one client, you might analyze about 10,000 blog posts.
Q: Is traditional business segmentation falling apart? Can you trust computers to analyze the data and come up with categories?
A: You cannot trust computers. You have to oversee the data. But it’s not feasible for humans to analyze every single comment. Segmentation is not dead, but you have to understand that one person fits in different segments for different contexts. The same person might be a bargain-hunter when shopping for cleaning products, but think nothing of spending $5 for coffee at Starbucks. So segmentation makes sense in specific contexts. It can be a useful and powerful tool.
Q: How do you code data? Is “positive” the same for Dell, Ernst & Young and dog food?
A: Jane answers: At Umbria we use natural language processing algorithms to analyze comments and identify: age, gender, and sentiment. If you show comments to people and ask them to identify sentiment, inter-coder agreement will be only 65%. Algorithms can only get close to that, but they can’t get better than that. Sentiment is really hard to identify and code. So you have to keep working on teaching the software how to code and score. Also have to keep in mind that language and language patterns keep changing.
Q: What’s it going to take to move these technologies to analyzing more than text?
A: You don’t look at comments individually, you have to look at interaction and conversation threads. For audio and videos, we look to transcribing the audio to text and having it analyzed.
Q: Is there a way to assess if blogs are increasing or decreasing in importance?
A: K.D. Paine: Don’t ask me, ask your audience. There are all these tools out there, find out what your particular audience is using.
Q: If I’m a nonprofit and don’t have $10,000 to spend, what do I do?
A: Do a quick keyword search on technorati, etc. and look through the conversations. Even if you don’t do the detailed segmentation we do, you can get a very good idea of online conversations on topics you care about. If you don’t use any tool or technology, you just have to read the posts & comments. So, what do you look for when you read them? You can note sentiment, visibility, themes & trends that emerge from those conversations, etc. Richard (Dell) explains you shouldn’t be afraid of going through comments manually. If you have the right searches set up, it takes 60-90 minutes to go through about 1,000 post. Richard responds to about 15% of blog posts. It’s likely that a nonprofit doesn’t have the same volume of comments as Dell, so reading comments using a feed reader is entirely feasible.
Q: Have you thought about open-sourcing your algorithms so smaller companies can use them?
A: Blake: We’re still working on improving those algorithms. We’ve been focusing on perfecting our technology. We’re operating at the enterprise level, but there are many people out there who provide basic services at very low prices. Jane: Companies will probably not do this, but there are tools being developed in academia which will become public domain.
[cross-posted from New Communications Review, I'm live-blogging the 2008 SNCR New Communications Forum]
Notes from Joseph Jaffe’s opening keynote:
There are millions – millions of conversations going on around us: powerful, engaged, influential conversations: Isn’t it time we join them?
The world has changed. The consumer has changed. Why hasn’t marketing?
Is the consumer in control? Are organizations in control? Nobody’s in control – this is total anarchy. We seek order and control, but that’s a fantasy world, a false sense of control. Some organizations, such as P&G, are trying to give that control to consumers – but consumers don’t want control. They want to be listened to, respected, engaged.
Marketing theory is very outdated – based on simple top-of-mind associations. Would you rather have 10 quality relationships or 5 million impressions? Most marketers want the impressions. See the Comcast example – the first thing that comes to mind (and in search rankings) is the video with the Comcast technician falling asleep. That gets a lot of impressions, but are they valuable? If you cultivate 10 quality relationships, those will branch out and in the long term will bring much more value than impressions.
Moving marketing from 4 P’s to 6 C’s: Content, Customization, Commerce, Conversation, Community, Content – all revolving around the Consumer.
The history and future of media: Moving from the one-to-many model to the one-to-one model (personalization), to one-from-me (search). But the model that characterizes social media is the many-to-many model. The model can work, or can suffocate you if you don’t know how to listen. In some ways, social media has gone to a reverse one-to-many model, where the previous targets (consumers) have become the broadcasters.
Communication vs. Conversation: Communication can only take you so far. Communication gets your foot in the door, but conversation gets the consumer to open the door and invite you in. The way you do it is not to spend lots of money: “Don’t outspend… outsmart.”
SNCR survey: What does conversational marketing mean to you? Some definitions include: less hype, faith & trust in your brand, partnering with consumers, etc. Going back to the Cluetrain Manifesto and the ancient bazaars, those people knew conversations: those markets were conversations. Commerce was a social experience. But we’ve moved from the bazaar/market model to impersonal malls. It’s time to put the social & sociability back in media – and in marketing. Marketing doesn’t have to remain a spectator sport. It’s time to entice consumers to come out of spectator/lurker mode.
In a recent SNCR survey, 41% of respondents anticipated spending 10% or more of marketing budget on conversational marketing. Many CMO’s right now get it, and are ready for conversational marketing. You want your customers to trust you – but do you trust them?
The answer is not to spend absurd amounts of money on fireworks displays (advertising) – how many Superbowl ads can you remember?
It’s time to blend and mesh the worlds of marketing, PR, and advertising, to achieve transformational change. The biggest risk is to spend $4 million on a campaign no one notices. 90% of advertising is wasted. It’s time to reconsider our strategy.
The problem is we don’t nurture the young, fresh smart ideas and we don’t invest enough time in them. The seeds of conversation are not magic beans. Conversation will not happen overnight. Companies need to invest long-term in conversation and maintain that commitment.
At the end of the day, I’m a storm chaser. If you want to understand change, you have to be in the heart of the storm. I stick my neck out. It’s been chopped off a couple of times – but it keeps growing back.
Predictions based on recent SNCR research data:
So, where’s the catch?
On the PR network PROpenMic (if you haven’t joined yet, I think you should!), Phil Gomes, VP Edelman Digital answers questions from PR students & faculty. Below is the most recent video, in which Phil and a series of other Edelman employees answer the question:
What questions do you always ask in a job interview?
Find more videos like this on PROpenMicIf you are a PR practitioner reading this, please add your favorite interview questions in the comments. If you’re a student, feel free to add an interesting/difficult interview question you have been asked in the past.