Morgan McLintic on PR

CEO as PR firm?

Jason Calacanis has posted some helpful tips for CEOs of startups about how to maximize PR. Oddly he feels these negate the need for a PR firm. Most of them involve dedicated networking, building personal relationships and, of course, having a newsworthy company to start with.

Many CEOs may struggle to find the time to do this themselves, even if they have the acumen and desire. The CEO-as-brand type of leader is probably in the minority. They make the PR team's job much easier, but most are too humble, team-oriented or focused on building their business to execute this approach themselves, despite the benefits.

If a CEO has an understanding of the media, can describe their company clearly and without hyperbole, and has the time to prioritize this on a consistent basis, then it will certainly be a good asset for any PR program. I wouldn't suggest it be the sole approach, and any effort should be in line with a broader strategy in terms of message, outreach and follow-up. Every team needs to work in concert, even if that team involves the company CEO.

On a related note, I tire a little of the PR (and PR firm) is dead / broken / irrelevant meme. I know it gets a lot of comments (since we read the sites) and wider debate (since PR folk tend to blog), but it's a bit dated. Yes, the low barriers to entry to PR and lack of professional license mean the quality of some practitioners is lacking and they spam reporters and bloggers. But issuing press releases is not the totality of PR. PR does not stand for press release (though i've heard it innumerable times). And not all PR firms are the same.

My recommendation for startups looking to appoint a PR firm is simply to look at the commercial track record of that firm over the last 3-5 years. If they are doing well compared to their peers and growing consistently, then you can deduce they are delivering value. You may feel they are the 'best of a bad bunch', and well, I'm humble enough to admit we've all got room for improvement. But so have the accountancy and law firms I've worked with.

I don't take the criticism personally, and perhaps shouldn't give it airtime, but I'd hate for people to take advice not to appoint professional counsel at face value. If you think PR is bad now handled by firms who do it day in and day out, wait until you see those who go solo. I wouldn't fancy defending myself in the court of the media (see the fates of Arthur Andersen, WMD, Michael Jackson et al), when the firm's reputation is at stake.

agency, PR, PR, Public relations

PR is dead (again)

PR died again today. At best it's broken and at worst irrelevant.

So do tech firms need public relations?
Surely the best technology will rise to the top and gain the attention of key bloggers and the press. Well, yes cream does float (and so does sh*t), but the vast majority of technology is by definition somewhere in the middle. It competes in a crowded space, with narrowly defensible differentiators. Under those conditions, the firm which proactively promotes itself should out-execute its peers.

It's not a strategy to hope that your mousetrap is so good that people will beat a path to your door. Let's hope for that, but let's plan for the opposite. History is littered with better tech which was out-marketed - Palm wasn't a patch on Psion for instance.

So yes, firms do need PR.

Do you need a PR firm though?
You don't need to hire a PR firm, just as you don't need attorneys, accountants, brokers, recruitment firms, lease agents, ad firms, or web design shops. To a greater or lesser degree of success, you can do all these yourself. But it will cost you time and your mistakes will cost you money.

No doubt reporters would much rather talk directly to the CEO of a company than a PR representative. Quite apart from the flattery, they get right to the source of the vision, strategy and planning, which they can directly quote. But the fact is that the CEO needs to do what only he or she alone can do. And while there are times that PR is the most urgent priority, that's not always the case and the CEO must focus elsewhere.

It's best to have some dedicated PR resource. There are many reasons to keep that resource in-house for certain types of firms and at certain stages. And many to outsource to a specialist agency for others. Most firms have a hybrid which works well.

Is PR broken?
Yes - but it has been broken for a long time. My friend Dennis Howlett taught me many of the things which PR firms do wrong in the mid-nineties: not reading the publication; not understanding the reporter's beat; not having a firm grasp of the technology; not having a good story; not following up etc. These things have nothing to do with blogging or new technology.

Fact is, and I'll whisper this, some PR people just aren't that good. And, I'm afraid even good ones make mistakes (yes horrific huh?). And, others frankly are just busy sometimes.

Sure, the technical changes in communications can compound those mistakes and make them more public. And yes, we're all learning how to use each new channel, and write new forms of more and best practice. But there are still low barriers to entry for PR, so there are still poor practitioners out there.

There are also poor reporters and bloggers who fail to understand technologies, miss deadlines, break agreed embargoes, keep review kit, steal ideas, change post timestamps etc. There are low barriers to entry here too - it's just part of the game and in a fair world the best ones survive, and the worst close during a recession. Winter kills a lot of bugs.

Does the debate help?
No-one likes criticism and we can all do better. Some PR folk are thin-skinned and self-important, so get their knickers in a bunch about it. I personally don't think that blogging the problems is the best approach, but if all you have is a hammer, it's the easiest one. And perhaps it's better to say something rather than be silent. I can empathize with the frustrations.

The facts will tell you that PR is not dead or even dying. The industry is growing at double digits and firms are continuing to hire new staff to handle the new clients which approach them. The power of the media is increasing, so firms need resources as both a sword and shield to compensate. There are some seismic changes going through the PR industry as there are in media and advertising. But those changes are not happening as fast as we all might think (or like). It was only in the last year that more than half US households got broadband for instance!

As the blog networks move closer to journalistic norms and look to replace the traditional media, they are learning how to cooperate with the public relations departments of the companies they want to write about. And vice versa -witness the embargo debate for instance. These are industries with a symbiotic relationship. For the most part it's a collaborative and fruitful one, but of course there are pent-up frustrations on both sides. To an extent these periodic outbursts are cathartic, so let's hope it makes us all improve our game.

PR, Public relations, media

Blog stress

Just wanted to reassure all those of you who have read today's New York Times piece, that my prolific blogging is in no way impacting my health. Running a PR firm's a killer though.

Technorati Tags: blogging, NYT, stress

Farewell Navigator, Hello Flock

RIP Netscape Navigator - AOL today finally stops maintenance and support for the browser many of us used in the 90s. I liked Navigator though in later years it became hopelessly bloated on the Mac platform. Its demise is the stuff of anti-competitive history.

From the ashes of NetScape, both Firefox and now Flock were born. Flock is a social media browser, so as well as all the basic web browsing you'd expect, it also connects to FB, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. There's also blog integration (from whence this post), social bookmarking with del.icio.us and an in-built RSS reader. Or you can easily subscribe to your fave online or offline reader from the navbar.

At first, Flock is rather confusing since it has a persistent window on the left hand side with people in your networks or web clippings, as well as streaming pictures across the top, in addition to tabbed browsing and your toolbar favorites. That's a lot of information to take in, but after some acclimatization it becomes more understandable.

I always find with new apps which you rely on so much, such as email or browser, any change can take some getting used to. Now that I have it configured, I quite like Flock. Sure, there isn't the full suite of Extensions you're used to on Firefox and no-one has yet volunteered a single new Theme, but it's clean, fast and has some great features which might suit the social media maven.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Netscape, Firefox

Connecting Twitter and Facebook

Facebook's Status and Twitter serve largely the same purpose - short updates on what you are doing. Updating both individually is duplication, meaning often people prefer either/or.

But you can get them to mirror one another.* [See update below - choose just one of these].

Feeding Facebook's Status with all your Twitter updates is relatively easy. Twitter has a Facebook Application which now allows the integration of the two. Simply add the Application, the hit the 'Want Twitter to update your Facebook status?' option at the top of the page and allow the Application access to Facebook. Usefully it prepends 'twittering:' to your tweets to solve Facebook's additonal 'is' in the status.

Feeding Twitter with your Facebook Status is more convoluted since Twitter doesn't offer a reciprocal arrangement directly (that I can find). But it does have APIs - enter TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed will allow you to import any RSS content into Twitter - like your blog for instance. Or your Facebook Status. Finding the RSS feed for your FB Status is a little tricky. Here's how - go to your Profile, hit See All on your Mini-Feed, choose Status Stories in the right hand sidebar and on the bottom right, you'll see 'Subscribe to these stories: My Status'. This is the RSS feed for your Facebook Status. Thanks to Jeff Sandquist at MS for this tip.

Now you need to log into TwitterFeed which requires an OpenID login. You may already have one if you have a Yahoo or Wordpress account. If not, it's relatively simple and free via IDProxy. Once in TwitterFeed, you can add in your Facebook Status feed. TwitterFeed only updates every hour, or every 30 minutes if you change the options, so this is not real-time. But it should mirror the two to an extent.

One thing which is interesting is which social network will end up as the ultimate publisher. Like others, I've used Tumblr as the aggregator of my Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and blog feeds on Morganutiae. This works as long as those are all separate RSS streams. Now they are starting to merge themselves, you get repetition at the top level on Tumblr. More importantly, which will become the departure site of choice. If you can get Facebook and Twitter to mirror one another - when it comes to status updates, it doesn't matter so much.

*UPDATE - Getting both Twitter and Facebook Status to mirror one another actually turns out not work since they both end up self-replicating the same content in an endless echo chamber. Both of these systems work, but it should be unidirectional only. So it's best to just choose the input interface you prefer and get that to propagate to the other.

Morganutiae

You can now find all my updates to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Del.icio.us and PodBean on my Tumblelog - Morganutiae. If you're unfamiliar with Tumblr it takes feeds from a number of social media sites and general RSS feeds and aggregates them in a lightweight, sparsely formatted blog.

I've called mine Morganutiae because there's probably more detail there than anyone might need but it was quick to set up and I really like Tumblr's clean interface. It's interesting to see the aggregated digital output for each day. Sometimes it's just the odd tweet or FB update. Others, like today, there's video, blog posts, tweets and even a very short podcast. For those with enough time on their hands, the feed is here. Those who are yet to set up their own blog and who don't need much customization might consider Tumblr as their platform.

Technorati Tags: Morgan McLintic

If you can't beat 'em

Technorati Tags: MSM, NYT, TechCrunch

Nick Leonard is blogging

Nick Leonard, MD of OCTANE, is blogging. In fact he has been for about a month, so this post is overdue. Nick is one of the best and funniest creative writers I know. So what's his blog like? I'll leave you to find out...

Disclosure - I'm not sure whether this is really necessary, but just in case, OCTANE is a division of my firm, LEWIS. I've known Nick for about eleven years as a result. He's now heading OCTANE and has already opened in France and Germany and moved into swanky new offices in Victoria, London. Impressive stuff imho.

Technorati Tags: OCTANE PR, Nick Leonard

TechCrunch UK is back

After a hiatus since Jan, TechCrunch UK relaunches with Mike Butcher at the helm. Good to see a focal point for emerging Internet companies in the UK (and newly added Ireland!), and personally a great way for me to keep in touch with the scene over there. Good stuff and good luck.

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch

Tom Foremski celebrates three years as a 'journalist blogger'

Silicon Valley Watcher editor, Tom Foremski, has clocked up three years as a professional 'journalist blogger'. He left the Financial Times in May 2004, starting SVW later that summer. He was the first mainstream journalist, writing for an established and respected daily, to jump the fence into full-time blogging. And three years later he's still going strong.

Not only did he foresee the changes in the MSM, but also predicted some of the changes to the PR industry. For instance, it was under Tom's instigation that the whole social media press release initiative was born.

Congratulations Tom - and thanks.

Technorati Tags: MSM, PR, blogging, Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski