Morgan McLintic on PR

CEO as PR firm?

2008-08-22T21:11:39-07:00

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)

2008-08-13T20:32:08-07:00

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

Timesheets - bane or boon?

2008-04-09T21:53:58-07:00

No-one particularly likes filling in timesheets - why would you? But whatever their model, fundamentally agencies are selling the time of their teams. They may package it in different ways commercially but being consultancies, time is the asset they have to sell. So it makes sense to monitor how that time is spent. Clients want to know they are getting the correct amount of time for the budget they allocate, and agencies want to know they are delivering that time, and not more (certainly not less). Invariably clients get a bit more time but the excess mustn't be chronic or acute.

Equally PR staffers must be able to track their time for their own efficiency. If you work across several clients, as most agency staff will, you need to balance your allocation. There's always a gravitational pull towards a favorite client, or the one you're most comfortable with, the newest or the noisiest. Timesheets help to address that, particularly if they are transparent to the entire office.

Another benefit is that the humble timesheet, although it's an additional admin chore, does prevent over-work. It's clear who is burning the midnight oil and who has some spare capacity. Some staff, particularly juniors, tend to over-work for the wrong reasons. Perhaps they feel they need to, or perhaps they're still mastering the skills of time management. Here again the timesheets can step in since it'll be clear whether excess hours are due to over-commitment or inefficiency. We know what we've committed to so where are these extra hours coming from?

Once you've mastered the use of timesheets, it can transform the way you work. You know the time you have available and the tasks to be delivered each week. Then you can set yourself internal deadlines against each activity, or you can rapidly decide that you're over-committed. This helps in managing expectations and priorities. It also makes you value your own time, and be disciplined with it.

When I was a junior account exec, I gave freely of my time since I wanted to build experience. You do need to get some miles on the clock after all. But long-term, pumping in long days is not sustainable nor really that productive. Each of us will find their own tolerances, and it's true that like any muscle, your brain can sustain higher levels of performance the more you exercise it, but there are limits. Some of us are work sprinters who put in long hours then take a break, others are marathon runners who are capable of sustained periods of effort. Whatever your personal style, the timesheet should be your friend. It helps you monitor the greatest and most fleeting asset you have - your time.

Blog stress

2008-04-06T21:18:49-07:00

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

2008-02-29T20:26:54-08:00

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

Ten ways to reduce stress

2008-01-09T12:54:39-08:00

PR is inherently stressful. It's highly task- and deadline-oriented, fast-paced, collaborative and rapidly-evolving. Any situation where a group of people need to cooperate with several other groups around detailed information within tight deadlines is a good recipe for stress.

Here are a few ways for PR professionals to reduce the stress levels:

1. Get organized - Stress normally peaks when you feel out of control. Take 10 minutes to write down all your actions and prioritize them. Which really need to get done today? You'll feel much less stressed once you can see the magnitude of the task ahead. Write down time allocations next to each if that helps.

2. Tidy up - A tidy desk will help you feel more in control. If papers are flying everywhere, and empty coffee cups encroach on your workspace, you'll subconsciously feel more tense and those items will distract you. Yes, you may know where everything is, and sure, you may feel you work better that way - but you're only kidding yourself really. Same goes from your computer desktop.

3. Get fit - I'm serious. Healthy mind, healthy body is absolutely true. If you are unfit, you are less able to cope with stress and the demands of the job. Plus, getting fitter will help you focus, be more productive and attack the root cause of stress.

4. Drink less - Stimulants, like your morning java, and depressants, like that ice cold beer or glass of wine, are like stepping on the gas and then the brakes for your body. They can contribute to stress over the long term, even though short term they give a boost. In fact, it's best to drink water - probably more than you think you need.

5. Share - Are you the burning martyr who turns the lights on, then off at the end of the day? Could be a sign you need to trust others, and share the load. Sure, your team members might not do it in the same way as you would yourself, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Stress and an inability to delegate are strongly connected.

6. Say no - Try it. Just say no to a few minor requests. Even from clients. It takes practice but not accepting a task when you have more important ones to deliver is perfectly legitimate. Much better than accepting it, and having it rot at the bottom of your to dos. If you explain why you are declining, we'll understand.

7. Say yes - Accept help when it's offered. I'm staggered at how few people accept a helping hand when offered and then stay until 9.00pm slaving on a task for the next day. People don't offer if they don't mean it. Together you'll get through it much faster.

8. Get out - Put your pen down, step away from the computer and just walk around the block. That big yellow thing in the sky will make you feel much better. You'll probably work better when you get back, or sit down with the answer to the vexing question if you get some perspective and fresh air.

9. Get in - Arrive early at work. Before clients, reporters and colleagues. These vital moments can be used to plan your day and do the real mental weightlifting. They can often be the most creative and productive of the day. Then leave promptly at the end of the day.

10. Get off - Close email, IM, Twitter, turn off your Blackberry or cell and put the landline on DND. These are tools to do the job, but they are also distractions and a source of incoming requests. What you need at present is to get across the current ones. Don't drop off the grid entirely, just limit your availability until you hit the deadline. If you have an office or cube, shut the door. If not, then book a room for 30 minutes and work from there. People will respect your space - we've all been there.

It's worth noting that not all stress is bad. No stress at all, can be unproductive too. People work best when under a bit of pressure - but too much can be debilitating. Hopefully these techniques will help you manage your stress levels a bit better. One final thing - smile. There's nothing like laughter and a few gags to reduce the tension.

The fiction of work/life balance

2008-01-09T08:03:56-08:00

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase 'work/life balance' but it's an unhelpful misnomer. Work is an integral part of your life. If you don't see your work that way, you should find a role or profession which you are passionate about and which engages you. Until working becomes a manifestation and expression of who you are, you'll be unfulfilled. Extra vacation, shorter hours, flexitime etc all pale beside the importance of that imperative.

Those looking for 'work/life' balance are often looking for the wrong thing or something which doesn't exist. What they claim to want is a nicely confined role which is satisfying while they are there, and which they can switch off at the stroke of 5.30pm when they go home to get on with their lives. Sorry but if predictable hours are what you want, don't work in PR. The news never sleeps, and so crises can break at any time. Get comfortable with work encroaching on your personal time and vice versa.

Nothing worth having comes easily. Success in PR often means hard work and long hours. If you enjoy what you are doing, this isn't a problem. People who do any activity over a prolonged period, naturally get better at it. So to progress, you need to pump in the hours and improve. Experience isn't necessarily a function of age, but hours at the coal face. There are no short cuts, I'm afraid.

We all have conflicting priorities in our lives. Rather than see them through a paradigm of 'work' or 'life', I prefer to see them as either mental, emotional, physical or spiritual. You need to balance each of those four elements of your life through the activities you do. Your professional career can easily encompass all four, even the spiritual. Spending time with family, going to the gym, seeing friends, meditating, even listening to your iPod all hit different aspects of those needs. Imbalance or even ignoring one of them is what can lead to a nebulous sense of dissatisfaction. It's easy to conclude it's a 'work/life balance' issue when in fact it's something deeper.

Recognize too that no balance or equilibrium is static. Achieving a balance is a process, not a one time event. There will be times when work, family, church, friends etc become demanding and require attention. This is fine and natural. Chronically focusing on just one group, and hence just the one set of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual demands/rewards they bring creates imbalance.

So if your New Year's resolution is to get more 'work/life' balance, look at it through a different lens. Is your work truly satisfying? If so, how can you weave in other elements which you're not getting? That might be as simple as riding a bike to work to get more exercise, or it might be setting up a volunteer club after work to ramp the emotional payback. Blending the needs and rewards is what leads to balance.

Of course, consistently putting it into practice is another matter. And that's one we all face. Here's to health, wealth and happiness in 2008!

UPDATE - Cali and Jody kindly dropped me a note about their upcoming book 'Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It' and their blog which gives some excellent advice about work/life balance, together with their analysis of recent articles on the topic. Thanks - looking forward to reading it.

How to manage email

2007-12-12T19:43:39-08:00

Email has increasingly become the workhorse technology of PR. It makes a good servant but a poor master. Once you start to get above a certain level, which for me is about 200-250, productivity suffers. Most business books advise you to restrict email usage to two or three times per day. For PR consultants that's not practical. Speed of response to reporters and clients mean the delay of several hours between email checks is unacceptable. In fact, most PR people I know can barely last an hour.

Under these circumstances, it's easy to get email urgency addiction and spend the entire day responding to nothing but email. Urgency does not dictate importance, but most of us can't delineate when triaging our email inboxes. Everything gets equal weight.

There are five things you should do with each email - Delete (preferable), Delegate (if poss), Deal with (if it's a 60 second task), Schedule (if it's going to take longer) or Store (if it's just fyi). The main thing to resist is reading all your email and then circling back to the first one again to action it. Inevitably this leads to a sense of lack of control as more email floods in. Plus double-handling each email burns cycles.

You should also try to receive as little email as possible. You need to be proactive to achieve this. It's common in PR to have email aliases for each client which go to the entire team. Normally, there is correspondence back and forth on these channels which are only intend for a few recipients. Either get off this group or set up rules which automatically file them for consumption later. Most of it will be just for info.

Religiously unsubscribe from newsletters which are irrelevant and use spamblockers and white lists to reduce noise. As a PR person, it's your job to be easy to contact. This means you end up on all kinds of lists. Get back off them if you can. CAN-SPAM has made this much easier for legitimate companies in the US.

I've experimented with several methods of filing email - right down to by client and by activity eg Client/Media or Client/Analyst relations. This looks great but does take time. I estimate 95% of email over a week old, you'll never look at again. Search technology (Google Desktop or Spotlight for Mac) has improved to the extent that you can now probably find an old mail if you know some basic details. I now let email pile up (I'm a Piler not a Filer). The advantage of this is that it requires no time and provides a chronological method to find old emails.

The disadvantage is that your inbox can become swiftly overloaded. Much over 10,000 and quite apart from the daunting nature, technically it starts to slow down. If you get 300 mails a day, it only takes a month to get to this stage. My new technique is to dump all the emails in my inbox into an archive folder at the end of every day. I note down all the actions, and just move them across to a file imaginatively called Old Inbox (now on Old Inbox 14!). Then each day you come in to a clear inbox and can immediately see what needs dealing with. It's easy to find recent mails since they're all in one place, and minimal time is wasted filing or sorting.

This system may be basic but it does work (at least for me). Do let me know if you have better ideas. Just drop me an email...or better still give be a call.

UPDATE - Lars Schou has emailed to point out an excellent series of posts on 43 Folders called Inbox Zero, which I highly recommend for the email afflicted.

Technorati Tags: email

Second Utteranz

2007-11-14T20:19:59-08:00

Utterz is presenting at Under the Radar tomorrow so I'll try to find out a bit more about the company if I can. Incidentally, I also posted this via my smartphone but found on returning it hadn't been saved. Pilot error or platform, not sure. I do find their UI confusing tho. And personally not wild on the whole cow thang...

Mobile post sent by Morgan using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Connecting Twitter and Facebook

2007-11-13T21:10:18-08:00

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.

First Utteranz

2007-11-09T19:01:02-08:00

Giving Utterz a whirl. What is this thing?? Mobile micro-podcasting?

Mobile post sent by Morgan using Utterz. Replies. mp3

PR and paranoia

2007-10-31T12:51:59-07:00

Most good PR people are paranoid. Admit it. You are. This is because it pays to think through what might go wrong. For instance, how might this story be interpreted? What potential crises are looming? What happens if the laptop fails in the presentation? What if there's traffic on the press tour?

The mantra is plan for the worst and hope for the best. It's a recipe for long hours and sleepless nights. Get used to it or get out quick.

Personally, I'm fine with scenario planning and asking the awkward questions you're not supposed to ask. But there comes a point where healthy paranoia becomes, well unhealthy. There are plenty of things to worry about in PR. We're paid to do that so clients don't have to - it's called responsibility. But there is a point at which it becomes destructive and you end up chasing phantoms.

Getting the right level of paranoia is hard. Too much and you end up burning cycles and midnight oil on increasingly unlikely events. The trouble is - it's a vicious circle. The one time things go off course becomes a justification for a mountain of purposeless planning.

Paranoia yields decreasing marginal returns. Knowing when to stop can make the difference between a sustainable work rate (and mental state) and burn out. In general, the management of paranoia is a function of experience. Newbies tend to lack sufficient paranoia until they make a mistake and pay the consequences - you don't do it twice. Veterans have seen the cycle a few times and know enough to handle issues if they crop up. I find the crunch point is in between - the account management level - when you know the consequences but lack the flight time to put the risks in perspective. Here be demons.

Sad to say though, the demons are personal. No-one can make you not worry, however much rationalizing they may do. And, heck I'll recruit people who care enough about these details every day over the blase Devil may care types. But recognize the trait and learn to harness and manage it. Healthy paranoia is a good thing, but it has to be just that, healthy.

Happy Halloween

2007-10-30T21:34:23-07:00

Happy Halloween from the LEWIS team.

Technorati Tags: Halloween

I see dead people

2007-10-30T17:32:32-07:00

Lots of them. In this new mag I just learned about - Obit. A magazine choc full of well, obits. It's actually very good. For instance, I just learned this about Colma, south of San Francisco.

People come to Colma mainly to be buried. On San Francisco’s south flank, sharing a fog bank, Colma has 17 cemeteries to San Francisco’s none. Long ago San Francisco booted out the cemeteries and moved most of the graves to this little necropolis.

Colma calls itself a necropolis (“city of the dead” in Greek) despite its 1,500 live residents. It is commonly listed as the country’s only necropolis, incorporated in 1924 to protect the cemeteries that now occupy 73 percent of Colma’s 2.2 square miles.

The necropolis business started with the California Gold Rush in 1849. As people rushed in, so did disease and death, and San Francisco’s 26 cemeteries were mostly filled in the late 1880s. Soon state law forbade backyard burials, or internment anywhere except in an established cemetery. By 1900, land already was too valuable for low-revenue uses like graves, so the noose tightened on San Francisco cemeteries and burials were banned...

You can also go shopping in Colma. I think the necropolis might be more interesting...

Wired editor blocks PR people, outs them

2007-10-30T16:31:33-07:00

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired vents about 'PR spam' in a recent post. It's a common theme and I guess we all reach a point where enough is enough. In fact, who can't sympathize with this sentiment, regardless of your profession?

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public).

I only want those kind of emails too. He then publishes a list of offending email addresses. PR pros probably scanned down the list and like me were relieved not to find themselves or their agency on it. But we knew our firms could have been - or why the relief? Why even look?

The fact is that PR and media do have a symbiotic relationship. And all relationships wax and wane. Email is a useful tool and sometimes people are lazy, short on time or even just learning. So mistakes are made. And there's a list of people who perhaps made them this month.

Their reward will be to get some spam and some more headhunting pitches. And Chris Anderson gets to vent some steam. Perhaps that system works. Or perhaps the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

Personally I think these things reach a balance - you reap what you sow. Some PR consultants send broad based emails because it works for them (or else they wouldn't right?). Occasionally they get flamed. Some reporters are more sensitive to unsolicited mail (or calls even) than others and so get fewer pitches. Occasionally they miss the big stories. The majority fall in the middle - working hard to build relationships, accommodating others' working styles and understanding their pressures.