It’s been impossible for me to avoid information lately about paid content on the internet, subscription models for newspapers online, and Rupert Murdoch’s gaffes when it comes to information distribution in a connected world.

It all started with an article in a recent Vanity Fair about Murdoch’s determined stance on making readers pay for online content. The fact that he told an interviewer last week that he plans to drive readers to the paid content by blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, a move that renders their content invisible to the world at large, shows that, as Michael Woolf posits, perhaps he just doesn’t understand what’s at stake here and just how pervasive Google is.

As Valleywag suggested, perhaps Murdoch should read a recent report from Forrester that says that 80% of the 4,000 consumers polled will not pay for online newspaper content and that the remainder are divided on the payment model they’d agree to (subscription versus paying for individual articles).

The real trouble starts when you factor in that 60% of newspaper executives are working on paid-content models. Yikes.

Today’s media world is transparent for those who wish to see, Have a question for your marketplace? Then pose it in any of the many channels available to you. You’ll quickly learn what your customers want and what they don’t want. The fact that those in control of the traditional media aren’t even trying to really understand the tools available to them and devising new revenue models around this new reality is just pathetic. Perhaps the traditional media deserves to dwindle to the point of irrelevance if it’s so unaware of its environment.

The idea of including marketing in an agile product development strategy, as @FrancisMoran wrote about earlier this week, isn’t all that far removed from what newspaper execs need to do here. Listen to your market as you’re deciding what to do and involve them in the process. Rather than engineer newspaper content delivery to suit your revenue desires, find out how your readers want to access your content and build a revenue strategy around that. Seems obvious…

Technorati Tags: newspapers, Rupert Murdoch, Forrester, Vanity Fair

While I’m an avid reader, I can’t quite imagine reading a novel on an e-reader, though the fact that the Kindle would alleviate the constant challenge we face in our household to find bookshelf space for the masses of reading material we own, is rather appealing. Still, we’ve already placed our order for a new bookshelf from Santa rather than a Kindle. Perhaps next year.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Kindle, Canada

A good example to illustrate this news value is the customer-win announcement. Companies love to be able to announce new customers and often feel that this should always be a newsworthy item among the media. And so it may be, some of the time. There is a huge difference between announcing a deal where the new customer is prepared to speak about the strategic decisions behind a purchase that has a significant dollar value attributed to it, and a deal where the customer is not prepared to say anything more than the fact they are “working with” the new vendor. The news value here is vastly different; one can reasonably be expected to be pitched for real coverage, while all the other can hope for is, at best, a couple of lines pulled direct from the release.

Sometimes this value-assessment exercise can be challenging. Companies often have an inflated opinion of the importance of their news, but taking a clear stance at an early stage helps prevent awkward questions after the fact. News that is simply an FYI to your market should be exactly that - a piece of information to be noted but without anyone making a great fuss.

Conversely, news that you know has real value should be explored to its fullest extent. I’ve had a few experiences in recent months with news stories that had definite value but that took a bit more than just sending a release to media to secure coverage. Follow up is hugely important; it can be amazing how often you speak to editors who claim to have not seen your news story, then checks inbox, finds it and agrees that it’s something they should be covering! For important news, you should never assume that simply sending the email will guarantee it is seen by your targets.

Another common experience is the editor who may have seen the release but “doesn’t cover news” so thought it was irrelevant and deleted it. For this situation, you need to be aware of the deeper issues that your news story addresses. If you are releasing a new product, why does it have the new features and functionality it does? Do they address a trend in the marketplace? Can this trend be explored as part of a feature?

Establishing the importance of news is a crucial exercise for any PR person to undertake for every announcement, helping both manage expectations and ensuring that effort is expended in the most useful areas.

Technorati Tags: News release, public relations, objectives, value for money

Conventional wisdom says the Yanks, and maybe the Brits, are simply more brash than we are; natural-born salespeople, they are simply louder, more confident and more aggressive. Perhaps there’s some truth to that; certainly, I have never come across anything more doggedly relentless than a British ad-sales guy trying to get me to buy space in his publication. But putting poor Canadian performance down to our supposed more docile domestic character prevents us from recognizing a more systemic issue that Peter Hanschke, the product-management specialist who presented at Zone5ive last Thursday, brought to light in his examination of agile product development and how it encourages — even demands — a very tight fit with marketing and early customer engagement. (You can see Peter’s slides here.)

Agile product development is not a new process; it’s been around for nearly a generation. But it is particularly well suited for this era that increasingly embraces concepts like minimal viable product — swiftly develop the bare bones of a product and get it out in front of customers who will equally swiftly tell you whether they like it or not so you can decide whether to enhance or kill it. Agile product development allows for such iterative and ever-evolving product-development cycles that are highly responsive to equally dynamic market forces.

But here’s where Peter’s presentation got really interesting for this marketing strategist.

In order for the process to be effective, agile product development must embrace marketing at every stage. How can you decide what the market wants and will value if you haven’t engaged your potential customers at the very outset? How do you know if you’re meeting customer specifications and requirements if you don’t show them your still-in-development stuff and get their feedback and input? Under an agile regime, product releases are based on having created value for a customer, and how do you parse that without talking to the customer?

More interestingly, it’s not just a case of marketing contributing to the process; we marketers also gain massively. Imagine, Peter told us in a scenario that got the attention of every one of us more accustomed to last-minute demands to go market the hell out of a finished product scant weeks or days from launch, if we were able to build the entire marketing piece alongside, and in lock step with, the product itself? And because customers are inherently and intimately involved along the way, agile product development kicks out early customer references for use in media and analyst relations programs.

All music to my ears until one attendee threw a large bucket of freezing cold Canadian ice water on the whole thing.

How many people here, he asked, have ever actually worked in or for a company that used such a process? Asking for a show of hands, he found his one of the very few hands in the air.

And that’s the real issue that can’t merely be chalked up to our alleged more-demur national character. It is my consistent observation that too many Canadian technology companies are engineering-centric, rather than customer- or market-centric. Engineers love to build what they love. Regrettably, this is, far too often, a great distance from what the market would love to buy.

Peter protested that engineers hate to build things that people don’t use, and I’m sure that’s true. But he himself sharply identified a tendency whereby products are developed according to an internally produced specifications sheet and then, fully finished, are tossed over the transom to sales and marketing to go flog. He called it the old way of doing things; I’d call it far-too-persistent, even today.

This is not to say every Canadian technology venture is a solution in search of a problem. With a colleague, I have just finished a strategic marketing plan for an Ottawa company that was sharply market- and customer-focused from the outset. Consisting of a cadre of brilliant ex-Nortel optical engineers, this gang did not look at its collective capabilities and ask, as so many do, “What could we build?” Instead, they researched a number of sharp and immediate pain points within optical networking and selected a few around which huge value could be created if the right solution was developed.

Working with them was a novel experience. Unlike with most of my clients, I was not handed a finished product and told to develop the marketing plan for it. Rather, in what was sometimes a difficult process with which to keep pace, the product and its feature set were constantly in flux; every time we got together with these folks, we needed an updated briefing. Indeed, by the time we finished the plan, it was exclusively in support of a new product that didn’t even exist when we first engaged with them just a few months prior. The first product they had showed us no longer needed immediate marketing support because it had been completed and OEM’d into a major optical equipment manufacturer — the customer! — where it was perfectly meeting that customer’s requirements. (And, not incidentally, generating real revenue that was underpinning the company’s growth and its development of the next products.)

It sounds a bit chaotic but it really wasn’t. At every stage, we could evolve our thinking to make sure our analysis and market research, to say nothing of the go-to-market strategy, continued to synchronize with the product under development and the customers for which it was intended. The product closes a painful network-management gap between the optical layer and application-level IT management tools and so, for example, it posed a critical channel question: Should it be sold on a per-node basis by equipment vendors or on a per-seat license basis by the IT tools vendor? Or both? With eager channel partners in both camps, only an openly collaborative culture that embraced the feedback and input of those channels and of the end customer allowed the client to conclude which approach would best serve the market, and them.

If Peter is right and engineers want to build products that people actually use, then even the most engineering-centric technology company should embrace agile product development methodologies and the close knit with marketing that is stitched in with them. In his experience, he told me after the presentation, it is never a case of engineering resisting marketing once it has embraced agile. If so, marketers should become agile’s most overt evangelists.

Technorati Tags: Agile product development, product marketing, marketing, strategy, Zone5ive

Let me provide some examples, and link back to previous posts on this blog that reveal what we feel are best practices in each area.

Sciemetric Instruments, a quality management systems technology vendor and one-time inmedia client that recently returned to the fold, is in the midst of a series of briefings with the most influential analysts in their field, both at boutique firms and the biggest firms. We counseled the company on how best to present its story to analysts, both those it has spoken with in the past and those with whom it is speaking for the first time. The briefings are going very well and we’re not only increasing awareness for the company but also gathering actionable insight into how the company might engage each of these firms to best effect. Our Danny Sullivan, @inmedian, has written about how best to engage with analysts here, here and here.

As we’re still in the early months of our engagement with Agresso, we’ve been working to set measurable objectives for our work, something @FrancisMoran wrote about in his series on PR measurement here, here and here. Agresso told us they selected us as their PR agency of record against some of the stiffest international competition we have ever faced at least in part because our methodology would give them clear, unambiguous objectives against which they could readily evaluate our performance and their PR ROI.

I’ve been doing considerable pro bono work for Help Lesotho, a charitable organization working to support at-risk youth in a tiny African nation that’s been ravaged by HIV and AIDS. There is a big event coming up and we’re working to create a groundswell of media coverage across Canada by profiling local supporters who have been invited to Ottawa to meet the King of Lesotho, who is coming here to express his gratitude. The process of gathering the information is the same whether our client is a charity or a technology company; it’s important to get the whole story and so we’ve been updating the media kit for Help Lesotho, speaking with internal knowledge-keepers at HL, gathering information from the supporters themselves and developing the right media list.

Singletouch, a vendor of a data-capture platform for contractors, is about to launch into the U.K. and simultaneously make an announcement in North America, which means that it’s time to refresh the media list. This task, though grueling, is vitally important to make sure that our list is up to date so we’re pushing against the right levers on our client’s behalf. @LeoValiquette wrote about the importance of a media list refresh here.

NetCentric Technologies, developer and marketer of document-compliance software, is in the process of submitting bylined articles to its key publications. Contributed articles written by subject-matter experts can be a high-value component of an integrated PR program. They can shed light on issues in the marketplace that are under-reported or misunderstood, provide a solid business case for a technology offering, provide a step by step how to, and on and on. @LindaForrest - that’s me! - wrote about bylined articles here.

I’d list more of what we’re working on but perhaps my time is best spent doing the work rather than writing about the methodology behind it.

As you can see, we’re quite busy these days! Luckily, we’ve got a clear set of best practices in each of our practice areas to abide by, which makes the tasks a whole lot easier.

Technorati Tags: best practices, Sciemetric, Agresso, Singletouch, NetCentric Technologies, media list, analyst briefing, bylined article

The microblogging platform, on which all of the authors on this blog have accounts - @FrancisMoran, @LindaForrest and @inmedian - has recently announced several key partnerships that will move the social media platform from the early adopter stage to the mainstream. Microsoft and Google announced a few weeks ago that they would include “Tweets” in their search results, legitimizing for many skeptics the platform as a bona fide media channel and information source. Then, today, a partnership with LinkedIn was announced wherein Twitterstreams will be included in LinkedIn profiles.

This is a big step, and should increase adoption in the professional world from the dismal figures IDC collected earlier this year. Not to mention how it will impact Twitter’s bottom-line; it’s value was theoretical for a very long time but with a handful of powerful partnerships such as these, the money will be rolling in.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, LinkedIn, social media, partnerships

Some of the data from the study caused me to give my head a firm shake:

“One of the main reasons for the decline of the press release is the recent explosion of the use of social media in public relations and the perception that releases are less relevant in those venues. A majority (64%) of respondents who issue releases say they target them most often to print outlets, while 23% send them to online news and financial sites.”

Uh, what?

It seems to me that what we have here is a nomenclature problem.

Press release. News release. Social media release.

Do these three designations conjure up significantly different images in your mind? Or is the name of your interface with the media irrelevant and the effectiveness of the tactic and content of the piece what’s most important?

I would argue it’s clearly the latter.

It seems that a large swath of the PR industry would rather spend time arguing about what to call communications materials or complain about how shoddy tactics are ineffective instead of find the most efficient ways to work with media targets, regardless of what the interface is called.

The best practitioners know that one market-facing document does not fit all, and that a range of materials will need to be developed and the pitch tailored for specific targets. That said, the call-it-what-you-will release still has a role to play. An important one.

In our industry, I would argue that people throw around the terms “press release,” “media release” and “news release” and that they are used fairly interchangeably. It’s difficult to find consensus on the internet about what the commonly accepted definition is for each of these terms because there are arguments in a lot of different directions. If you ask me, it doesn’t really matter; it’s merely semantics.

If the study is referring to the antiquated press release that’s merely sent to print media, then yes, of course this is not the most effective methodology to employ in 2009 if you’re hoping to get coverage for your clients. If the study is referring to the effectiveness of news releases, which are more widely distributed to all types of media, then I heartily disagree that they’re “a necessary evil” or not useful.

A well crafted release that contains, without hyperbole, all the facts of a story, a strong lead, meaningful statistics, pertinent contact information and information on how to find out more about the story, is an effective tool and will be welcome to journalists, if the subject matter is of interest to them and if the release is compelling and if the story resonates with the reporter, and if… While some reporters hate releases on principle - and who can blame them, when the least of our industry has been sending out preposterous drivel and sullying PR’s good name for years - others welcome the concise details that either enable them to write a story without further inputs or provide them with the necessary tools to investigate further.

There’s a lot of hullabaloo about the “social media release.” I would argue that any well-crafted release in the year 2009 would contain social media elements. If it doesn’t, you should strongly consider whether your agency is serving you well. SEO should be a consideration when crafting a release and, increasingly, access to photos and videos and direction to interactive channels such as Twitter profiles and LinkedIn profiles are becoming commonplace.

The unfortunately named “spray and pray” style of public relations never garnered the success that considered and focused efforts do. Has any company in history achieved the full potential of its story merely by sending out a “press release?” Probably not. We’ve already talked about the secret to successful PR on this blog: it’s hard work, applied consistently against the right targets. That’s it. A release may or may not be an effective tactic, depending on the nature of the story, but it is by no means an ineffective tool. Media relations is so much more than sending out a release and practitioners, prospects and customers who don’t understand that are fated to be disappointed in their PR efforts because they simply don’t understand the discipline.

Technorati Tags: press release, news release, social media release, PR misconceptions

“It ain’t free, and it ain’t advertising,” I would consistently reply, with not a little vehemence.

My colleagues were, in the main, just poking fun; I believe they knew better. But for far too many people and for far too long, using advertising rates and data to measure the success of a media relations campaign was a broadly accepted practice. Called “advertising equivalent value,” or AVE, the practice consisted of measuring the column inches and seconds of air time of media coverage generated as a result of a media relations campaign and then assigning a value to that coverage based on what it would have cost to buy the same space as an advertising campaign. And, because everyone knows editorial coverage is more authoritative than advertising, many users of this methodology then compounded their malpractice by adding a multiplier. With no coherent rationale or science to support them, many would say editorial coverage was worth twice as much, or five times or 10 times as much, as advertising.

The allure of AVEs is easy to understand. There is undisputed value in getting your message disseminated through the media, and the implied endorsement of editorial coverage is far more influential than the naked sales pitch of an ad. AVEs deliver a single, easy-to-understand dollar figure that purports to calculate an ROI for a media relations campaign and allows straightforward and often compelling comparisons with advertising. In a fight for budget, AVEs were a potent tool that said the a dollar spent on PR would deliver a higher ROI than the same dollar spent on advertising.

Problem is, it’s an utterly bankrupt practice that delivers no meaningful insight whatsoever. It fails at both a strategic and a tactical level, and if its practitioners can’t understand that, they should at least reject it for purely practical reasons.

Here’s what I mean.

Strategically, advertising and media relations are deployed for fundamentally different reasons. Although in an integrated marketing-communications campaign both serve the same objectives, they do so in very different ways. For example, media coverage will rarely convey the call to action that is at the very heart of most effective advertising. On the other hand, it can usually communicate more nuanced, sophisticated and detailed messaging than can an ad.

Tactically, advertising enjoys the advantage of pinpoint targeting; you have absolute control over what is said, where it is said and how often it is said. Further, your advertising messaging will stand alone, unpolluted by opposing points of view. Media relations offers no such control. Although media relations messaging can be focused and efforts most certainly can be targeted at selected media and journalists, you surrender control over what is done with that messaging. Journalists might bite on your pitch or they might not. Even if they do, they will decide which bits of your messaging they will transmit for you. Where and when that happens is entirely outside your control. And reporters will often go to extraordinary lengths to source opposing or, at least, alternative messaging to create the editorial balance they were taught in journalism school must be integral to every story.

This strategic and tactical analysis is beyond the ability of many non-marketing executives to grasp, and I forgive them for it. (Any marketing executive who fails to grasp this, however, ought to be relieved of her or his responsibilities.) But even if they can’t wrap their heads around the strategic rationale against AVEs, executives ought to reject them on purely practical grounds. It ought to be obvious to everyone that an ROI calculation based solely on AVEs should be rejected if only because all media coverage is not favourable, all media coverage does not deliver a positive ROI, all media coverage does not support — indeed, much of it opposes — the achievement of organisational objectives.

What was the value to Nortel (Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff — I could go on forever) of all its recent high-profile media coverage? Point taken, I trust.

Regrettably, even PR measurement specialists could be lured into this easy and utterly faulty approach. In the mid-1990s, I spent six months on a consulting contract with the Canadian branch of what was at that time one of the two largest media relations measurement outfits in the world. Pioneers in the field of computer-aided media content analysis, this company had a well-tested and fairly rigourous methodology for evaluating the results of a media relations campaign. When a client we were pitching asked that AVEs be included in the report we were proposing, the account executive selling to that client acquiesced.

I went ballistic. How could you choose to beggar a potent, effective and scientifically rigourous PR evaluation methodology by hiving on a discredited and scientifically unsupported approach like AVEs, I asked? The best answer the account executive could provide was that the client was demanding it. “If I sell shoes and a customer demands yellow shoes, I’m going to sell him yellow shoes,” this guy told me in an exchange I’ll never forget.

My contract was not renewed and I went on to refine my own media content analysis methodology that continues to inform both my strategic development of a campaign and my post-campaign evaluation. And yellow shoes are never on offer, no matter how much a customer might demand them.

In grudging defence of that misguided account executive, though, it is true that our clients and employers have long demanded we give them AVEs. This is one of the reasons this discredited practice has persisted. But practitioners who know better have an increasing arsenal of resources they can deploy to help sway even the most literal-minded boss.

Chief among these is the Institute for Public Relations, a respected research body, whose Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation recently voted 19 to 2 to reject AVEs. A consistent advocate of the uselessness of AVEs is Katie Paine, who presented at last month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa, and who greeted the IPR declaration as the industry’s “Emancipation Day.” Here in Canada, the Canadian PR Society instituted its Media Relations Media Rating Points System several years ago. It falls well short of being proper content analysis but it is a considerable improvement on AVEs.

I hope I’ve heard for the last time that media relations is free advertising. Even in jest.

Technorati Tags: advertising equivalent value, AVE, media relations, advertising, integrated marketing, measurement, evaluation, media content analysis, Institute for Public Relations, Katie Paine, Canadian Public Relations Society

Francis

October 28: The generalist rises again

October 26: The Ottawa Network’s Startup Boot Camp spawns ventures

October 14: Social media adoption yet to cross the chasm - IDC

October 6: What’s broken — or not — about VC fairs?

October 2: Customer service worth a laudatory blog post

Linda

October 30: Are embargoes dead?

October 29: Seemingly disparate thoughts

October 27: Post suitable for ages two and up

October 16: Garth Brooks’ PR misstep

October 15: Is this better? Or, how about this?

October 13: Word of mouth still reigns

October 9: Oh, Canada. Sigh.

October 7: Hoping we’re not guilty of these Twitter PR faux pas

Leo

October 19: Garnering publicity the right way

October 8: A salty metaphor for letting one’s competitive edge slide off the plate

Technorati Tags: embargoes