This is a complete 180 from how PR used to be done.  But it’s a higher value path because it is organic and scalable – your influence grows by virtue of your presence if you fully embrace a pull strategy.  Bring your desired audience to you where they will listen intently as opposed to unartfully pushing your messages to them.

I could speak from a strategic level on why shifting PR from push to pull is smart, but let’s drill down to a simple example to illustrate it.  PR is far more than just publicity, but publicity is certainly a KPI of nearly all PR programs (if not an objective of many).  In other words:  all PR people can agree publicity is vital.  Yet it’s not working so well from a push perspective anymore.  Consider two major influential groups PR folks target, and why push is failing:

Traditional media are more concerned with if they have a future than whether to write up your pitch.  While just a decade ago, traditional media and PR shared a symbiotic relationship, that relationship is currently on the rocks.  As PR folk become more pushy (and noisy) and traditional media feel the squeeze of a changing landscape, this relationship won’t get better anytime soon.

Bloggers may not be interested in your pitch at all.  Technorati’s 2009 state of the blogosphere revealed that 72% of bloggers are most interested in sharing their expertise and 71% blog in order to speak their minds.  Does push PR really fit into these motivations?

With that said, as push PR fades in relevance, pull PR only continues to grow more potent.

Pull offers sustainable growth

By embracing a pull PR strategy, one that includes tactics such as content marketing, you’ll build out your digital footprint naturally over time.  And more content will attract increasing amounts of attention from all channels monthly – search and social -  as you put more digital hooks in the water.

Pull PR is strategic, push is inherently tactical

Push PR is inherently tactical in nature, whereas pull is far more strategic.  Blogs are the ultimate pull marketing/PR tool, and the reason most fail is because they don’t act strategically, they act tactically.  The problem is success is not easy and results take time to see.  Most simply won’t commit, or will quit before their strategy has started working.  However the returns payoff huge for those who develop an effective pull strategy and follow it long term.

Pull PR lives at the intersection of PR, SEO and social media

Is your PR agency is SEO & social media savvy?  I asked ten questions to asses this at Online Marketing blog:

1. Are you implementing social media marketing, but not SEO?
2. Do your social media and SEO efforts work together?
3. How do you measure the return on investment of your social media engagement efforts?
4. Is social media something you do in your spare time, or is it a core function that requires a dedicated resource?
5. How much effort is put toward managing the search and social media friendliness of your corporate website?
6. How strategic are the recommendations for the company blog?
7. What is your company’s approval process for micro-blogging?
8. Is your current PR agency effectively optimizing your news content for search and social media?
9. What is your PR firm’s true core competency: traditional PR or social media and SEO?
10. Have you considered hiring a social media specialist?

The answers to these questions your firm provides are key to assessing whether they understand pull PR.

Pull creates the right kind of web popularity

By developing a PR strategy to bring people to you instead of always pushing your message to them, you are going to nurture a very different kind of reputation than if you were always badgering people to spread your messages.  It will be a relationship based on permission (they will want to hear more).

Pull PR makes you less reliant on traditional media

And yet, the amazing thing is that in time pull PR will deliver far more truly earned media.  The reason is simple:  it’s more powerful to be found by influencers than seeking them out.

Conclusion

Public relations is evolving quickly and it’s clear why.  When everyone is media, you can carve out your own share of voice in the world.  And as a byproduct of this, you’ll actually attract more media.  When you have the ability to shift your programs to be less reliant on externalities and more on your own strategy it seems shortsighted to ignore this.

Related posts from The Future Buzz

Shutterstock Gets Social – Digital PR Case Study

Matt Cutts Is Representative Of Next Generation PR

10 Skills All PR Pros Need For 2009 And Beyond

image credit: mitzy via Shutterstock

Shift Your PR From Push To Pull is a post from The Future Buzz

He takes social scientist Scott Page’s diversity prediction theorem (collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity) a step further to identify the three conditions which must be in place to know when crowds will predict well:  diversity, aggregation and incentives:

Each condition clicks into the equation.  Diversity reduces the collective error.  Aggregation assures that the market considers everyone’s information.  Incentives help reduce individual errors by encouraging people to participate only when they think they have an insight.

If you think about it, this is one of the core ways we derive value from the web.  Consider:

• The most interesting social areas of the web (especially but not exclusively horizontal networks) have diverse userbases.
• Popular platforms aggregate by design – or if they don’t – external parties are building technologies on top of them to allow for easy aggregation (think TweetMeme for Twitter, Technorati for blogs, Google News for news, etc).
• There are multiple incentives for participation – either personal branding, a passion for the subject matter or desire to build permission with an audience.

The web brings diversity, aggregation and incentives together in a way that is instantly accessible.  But what exactly does this allow for as a marketer, an artist a business or anyone else looking to spread their ideas?

Simple:  it allows you to form a basis for what will succeed tomorrow based on market data that exists today.  I’m not saying you can predict the future with 100% accuracy – that would be impossible.  But you can get close in cases where the problem is complex and specific rules cannot solve it.

This is a key for developing successful media, marketing or PR:  use the larger patterns in the noise to your advantage.  In a world where all media are marketers, and all marketers are media (there’s far too much choice for it to be any other way) gaining an edge against competitors is necessary.  Attention is finite.  And, the crowd may be more powerful than your own intuition as a predictor of where attention will flow in the social web.

Specific advice for leveraging networks where diversity, aggregation and incentives are present:

For those engaged with content marketing or creating media that will resonate: research established networks to form the basis of what the most popular content will be.  You can discover content archetypes that work and use them to your advantage.

A quick example – by doing a search of 204,096 technology-related stories on the network Digg (a place where diversity, aggregation and incentives live) we can see that the top 5 most popular stories on the network have to do with either breaking news or product announcements/scoops.  Any expert in technology media could have told me that.  But I didn’t need them when I have open access to a network of technology geeks.  The data is at our fingertips:

Defining a messaging strategy: look at the messaging/tone/style that resonates highest and let that form the basis of your messaging.  This needs to be just one element of your larger audience acquisition strategy.

For an example of this, look no further than the icanhascheezburger network.  They found a messaging strategy that sticks and used it to create additional, similar networks.  TechCrunch reports on the efficacy of this:

We all know about Cheezburger, which surpassed 1 billion page views last month. But FAIL blog went from zero to 10 million page views-per-month in just 90 days, and the recently launched ThereIFixedIt.com has matched that pace.

It’s important to point out that icanhazcheezburger was an almost completely unoriginal idea.  They ripped it off from the (relatively) underground message board culture of previous years.  Yet all of their sites follow similar messaging strategies, and for it they are successful:  they found a formula that worked and stuck with it.  The formula was what the crowd reacted to, and they knew it.

Creating the next hit product: you can leverage networks where diversity, aggregation and incentives are present to quietly discover the next hit product.  When we conducted the java beta test of more than 1,500 bloggers one of the items noticed was the most common response to the question of “if you could invent a new coffee flavor, what would it be” – was an extra bold, highly caffeinated blend.  This was useful data to create a new product based on the feedback of a diverse audience with aggregated data and an incentive involved.

Conclusion

It’s not that you can’t come up with an original idea as a creative individual that will be successful:  you can.  But if you are able to conduct research in an area where diversity, aggregation and incentives are present you may able to discover valuable data that will be predictive of whether your idea will be successful or not.  It could either support your decision or help you rethink it – but either way, leveraging crowds as predictors of outcome is now possible for everyone.

Related posts:

Influence, Trust And Authority

The Psychology Of Parking

Are You Organized For Failure?

image credit: Losevsky Pavel via Shutterstock

Diversity, Aggregation, Incentives is a post from The Future Buzz

For those not tapped into the marketing event circuit, PubCon is four days of leading edge education and networking in over 90 sessions featuring 200 expert speakers in social media, affiliate programs, search, and SEO/SEM.

Check out the details of the panel, and if you’re planning on attending the event be sure to drop by this session or find me around the conference.

The session will be on Tuesday, November 10^th from 2:55-4:10pm in Salon C.   I’ll be speaking with:

• Sean Jackson, CEO/Creator, Ecordia
• Lisa Buyer, President/CEO, The Buyer Group
• Ben Fisher, President, TechPad Agency

Working on something original and impactful for this panel, if you’re into my social media posts you will not be disappointed.

Also, don’t miss any of TopRank’s 2009 PubCon panels – there are quite a few.

If you can’t attend, I’ll also be doing some liveblogging for Online Marketing Blog or you can follow me for real-time updates on Twitter.

Hope to see you at the event.

See Me Speak On Social Media At PubCon 2009 is a post from The Future Buzz

I’m not talking a shallow understanding of the genres your audience is interested in.  I’m talking about an innate understanding of the content archetypes readers react to, the motivations behind readers as individuals interacting with media, and the steps necessary to develop an interested, activated community.

No longer is this skill-set reserved for the editor.  The writer must now have complete comprehension in the motivating factors an audience has.  Content strategy can’t be reserved only for executives, if so, their publication will slowly lose out to competitors whose writer’s mindsets live at the intersection between strategist and creator.

You can be a great writer, yet if you don’t understand your audience you’ll never create content which sticks.  Content no longer happens in a vacuum as part of a process for eventual consumption.  The friction has all but been removed.  There are many with talent for writing, but few with a talent for writing and the vision for creating strategic content that will resonate with targets and allow them to stand out in a world of infinite choice.

Consider that we have data at our fingertips about:

• Visitors to our content
• Subscriber interaction
• How users are sharing our content
• What the current hot content archetypes are
• What kind of writing style/tone users react to
• What content is resonating in real-time
• The influencers in any given niche
• What activates users behind ideas
• Search trends
• Category specific news trends

And that’s just a high level.  What I’m getting at is you’ve got more than enough data to fully understand your audience in meaningful ways.  As a content producer (or even a social media power user) using this data can let you develop a seriously powerful and effective strategy to win the future.

Questions to ask when developing this type of strategy include:

What type of style will resonate with your audience?

Is your audience typically used to very conservative media brands?  Great – create something stylish and maybe even a bit extreme.  That’s how you permeate the niche, not by cultivating yet another conservative image.  Just because the audience data tells you they’re used to one thing doesn’t mean you should copy a strategy which already exists.

How can I approach my niche in a way that larger competitors will have no defense against taking attention from their audiences?

If everyone in the niche has allegiance to certain brands, styles or tastes and you can position yourself as the antithesis, you’ll siphon away audience members who secretly think your way.  It’s a misnomer that everyone follows the trendsetters.  Many do, but there are plenty who don’t and quietly resent them.  And on the web, even a few percentage points of users can be enough.  Attack the players in subtle ways and you’ll pull their dissenters.  The aggregate amount of attention available daily is finite, you have to take attention away from someone else, it is the web’s – and the world’s – scarce resource.

How can you frame content in a way it will resonate?

Are you framing content in an appropriate manner for your target audience?  All of your content should be framed in such a way to create a referential brand behind your ideas and help them permeate the niche.

Are you taking advantage of ideas your audience can’t resist?

Study the successful tactical items – such as content archetypes or promotion plays.  I’m not advocating the theft of ideas , rather, you can make the ones that work become your own to fit within your unique strategy.

How do you plan on reaching sneezers/connectors?

Without some careful thought to understanding your audience, you’ll never push through ideas that resonate enough, frequently enough, to reach the all important sneezers/connectors of the web.  Seth Godin argues as few as 10 people can make or break a new idea.  This sounds accurate if you have the right idea.

The point is this:  understanding your audience is underrated.  Once you do have audience comprehension, take the time to think about how you can use this knowledge to formulate a content strategy.  With every company (and every person) now a media company, this matters for everyone.

Understanding Your Audience Is Underrated is a post from The Future Buzz

Reaching influencers has been such a core element to so many of my successful campaigns over the years, I want to share both why this is important and how to be successful in doing so.

Why catering to the influencer audience is vital

Simply put:  when influencers take an interest in you, it matters.  Those with influence within any vertical or network or even those with horizontal influence are those who will have real power to help your ideas, content or products spread.  Buzz is a vital element of digital PR, and those with influence are a gateway to buzz.

As numbers of those participating in social media grow, those who matter will have their influence reinforced.  And as digital communications becomes so common they become invisible, the value of that influence will only go up.

Media continues to undergo change at an accelerated rate, and this shows no signs of slowing.  Make relationships with influencers now and when communications shift you’ll ride the waves of change instead of constantly paddling to catch up.

The best part is relationships transcend trends.  So if you are a content producer, marketers, artist or business and have strong relationships with the influencer audience who are first to adapt new tools or techniques, your work will permeate emerging networks even before you participate.  This will provide a layer of security for your own continued influence in the world.

Reaching influencers

Influencers are pitched constantly.  Everyone wants a piece of them and the trust, traffic and authority they can lend.

The solution isn’t complicated, in fact I stated it above:  you need to make relationships with them.  Influencers will and do share content and ideas from those they don’t have relationships with, but if you want to repeatedly reach their networks you’ll need to develop a relationship.  And relationships aren’t built through push:  it’s just so unartful.  The fact that everyone is trying to push content and ideas on this group also means they’re extremely weary of push communications.  Most pitches fail miserably (although some do understand digital PR).

Reach them organically:  join the platforms they use and participate alongside them

If you want to reach bloggers as one example, you should be blogging too.  If you’re not using the platforms that you’d like to gain influence from specifically you’re not one of them, and they’ll always see you as an outsider.  That’s not to say you can’t create ideas that rally a group together behind your content, but it isn’t sustainable and doesn’t allow you to build permission in the same way as a continued dialogue would.

You don’t need to reach all of them

An interesting element about catering to the influencer audience is this:  influencers are generally connected with other influencers.  They form natural networks within niches – therefore having deep relationships with a few key individuals may be all it takes to reach objectives if your ideas are sticky enough.  I’d rather have deep relationships with a small, but interested group than fleeting connections with greater numbers.  The real value of your network can be measured in depth, not volume.

You don’t need to reach them directly

A misnomer is that once you join the network, you should immediately reach out to the most influential people.  You could, but they probably won’t have a reason to interact with you.  A better way to reach them is to do so indirectly.  Carve out your own following and in time social proofing will catch up with you and you’ll attract influencers as organic members of your network indirectly.  If you want to reach influencers effectively, you may need to become one yourself.

It is frequently not the most popular person who has real influence

In many cases those with the largest numbers or biggest names aren’t the most valuable to reach.  They frequently draw from those less obvious influencers who have great ideas, but not access to the same level of audiences or the ability to distill their thoughts to more accessible communications.  Also in many niches, the popular personalities produce  so much, their signal to noise ratio isn’t so great.  Rather, the layer of those below the top or even the tertiary influencers may, in reality, have more pull over time as they’re the ones with real influence over the top.

Nurturing relationships with influencers

I’ve seen businesses do this:  engage influencer audiences with something smart, get positive reactions, and end it there.  This is a missed opportunity as the most desirable outcome is for this audience to help you become a referential source your brand.  And the forgotten thing is the influencer audience knows they have influence and wants to use it to help others rise as this helps their own sphere of influence grow.  They didn’t carve out a digital reputation to do nothing with it.

Conclusion

I’ve discussed the ideas of influence, trust and authority previously.  Marketers need to be cognizent that they are driving their efforts to influence first, as it is through influence that trust and authority are forged.  Catering to the influencer audience can be a powerful strategy to bring you into the mix of the conversations that matter on the web daily.  But without influence, trust and authority are difficult to forge.

Thoughts On The Influencer Audience is a post from The Future Buzz