“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development

All right, just to make sure everyone is caught up and on the same page now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not have a heart attack over the weekend.

But all it took was a bogus posting to CNN’s online citizen journalism portal to demonstrate once again just how viral the web can be and and sucker punch Apple’s stock price. This has sparked plenty of commentary and navel gazing today about the risks of allowing average citizens to break so-called “news” without their scoop first being subjected to scrutiny and third-party verification. Check out Scott Karp’s take on how this was a failure of open systems and Matthew Ingram on how this was not a failure of citizen journalism.

This incident does reinforce the importance of trusted and reliable sources to bring us news and information that has in some way been confirmed and verified. The fact that CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport, allows such misinformation to be uploaded and broadcast to the world, should serve as a wake-up call that content that’s been judged in some way is more important now than ever.

Sure, the nature of the web allowed this false report to be corrected as quickly as it was initially broadcast. But that’s irrelevant. For a period of time, those who were paying attention believed the CEO of a major publicly traded company was in a potentially life-threatening condition, with the hit to Apple’s stock price only the most obvious example of the chaos that can quickly ensure from such misinformation. As Karp says, such uncensored citizen journalism is an open invitation to those with malicious intentions to manipulate the public for their own ends. And the intent doesn’t have to be malicious for damage to be done. Someone with the most honourable of intentions can do similar harm simply by being wrong.

Of course, there should be a distinction made between eye-witness news – such as providing an account as a bystander or participant, or capturing on video a disaster or other dramatic event –and broadcasting unconfirmed rumours or outright lies. Even in this always-on world, we still need gatekeepers of some sort to make that judgment call.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, media, Steve Jobs, Apple, news reporting

I’ve commented before on the impending death of print and how this funeral dirge has evolved to include all traditional media since the rise of social media in all its various incarnations. Many enthusiastic proponents would have us believe that social media will soon emerge triumphant as the medium of choice for people to keep abreast of the latest news and information.

Who needs such staid institutions as daily newspapers and national television networks when citizen journalism can deliver in real-time a street-level perspective of what’s going on in the world through such avenues as Twitter, YouTube and the blogosphere?

Well, perhaps we’re turning in that direction, but there’s a long way to go yet, at least according to a report carried this week on Bulldog Reporter. According to a survey of more than 1,000 adults across the U.S., television, newspapers and radio (in that order) are still considered the most reliable sources of information ahead of online sources.

Now, we are left to assume that “online sources” refers to sources on the web other than the websites of those same television networks, newspapers and radio stations.

I contend that there will always be a distinction between in-depth coverage and analysis of the day’s news and events and the quick blurb or sound bite, from whatever source, that can be easily digested while on the go. They compliment each other, rather than cannibalize. And when it comes to seeing social media displace traditional media, I wholeheartedly agree with the viewpoint that there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality.

As we increasingly turn to online sources of news and information that we can readily access while mobile, non-traditional sources of information will compete for our attention with the traditional. And print, radio and television will increasingly have to offer competitive online services to grab and hold readers. But it’s the commercial printing industry, in the business of killing trees, that will feel the most profound pain from this shift in our habits as consumers of news and information.

Technorati Tags: media, social media, journalism, Bulldog Reporter, radio, television, print

I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.

One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.

Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.

I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.

Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.

The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.

In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.

The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)

Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.

Technorati Tags: Death of PR, public relations, marketing communications, Scoble

There’s been no shortage of commentary about the threat and opportunity posed to traditional media, and the PR profession for that matter, by social media (reference too, my post of yesterday). But, while these new tools of mass communication and interaction are truly disruptive, have we developed the maturity to use them wisely?

Chris Brogan today offered some key etiquette points to keep in mind with social media, whether it be basic e-mail use or the more advanced features of Facebook. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.

There mere fact that Chris finds it necessary to start off his list with the email etiquette, of all things, demonstrates the utter thoughtlessness many of us demonstrate with the casual click of that Send button. Email is the original social media tool (no doubt, others will disagree about that). It’s been widely available to the masses for more than a decade, and yet we still have to be reminded about how to use it judiciously?

It’s the utter convenience of these things that I believe is the problem. These tools are so ubiquitous and available it’s easy to focus on employing them as the ready means to a goal without giving sufficient thought to the impact on those with whom we’re trying to communicate, or those around us we shouldn’t disturb.

Mobile phones are the ultimate example of this. Movie theatres still find it necessary to preface the feature presentation with that annoying “Please, don’t add your own soundtrack” PSA to ensure ringtones have been muted. And that’s a casual social setting. I’d estimate that 90 per cent of the time when I am attending some kind of business function that includes a presentation, at least one person in that audience will receive a call with their ringtone at full volume to interrupt the speaker. Rather than mute the volume, quite often they’ll leap up and sprint from the room with the phone still ringing.

The important thing to remember in this age of instant communication — all communication doesn’t have to happen instantly, people don’t have to respond to you within minutes and the world really doesn’t need to know what you had for breakfast or share in that snazzy new Facebook app you’ve found.

Technorati Tags: social media, etiquette, email, Facebook

Yesterday I enjoyed a lively piece from PR executive and co-manager of The Bad Pitch Blog Richard Laermer about the gradual extinction of the newsprint dinosaur or, at least, the dinosaur mentality of those who run the old-school journals of record.

He asserted that traditional media suffer from a fatal self-importance (I’d say arrogance) that sees most media empires failing to appreciate the threat and opportunity that is social media. As evidence he cited the mass layoffs taking place at major dailies across North America as advertising revenues droop. For PR practitioners, It’s a problem exacerbated by clients who don’t see the value of online media coverage if there isn’t also some ink to stain their fingers.

Bottom line: Blogs, Twitter feeds and the like are giving consumers of information more nimble, responsive and interactive channels through which to get the news and comment most important to them. It’s a point not to be overlooked by PR types either.

As a former journalist, I wholeheartedly agree that print media outlets must go far beyond simply offering their content online, even offering exclusive online content. They must be ready to engage directly with their audiences and provide the news in a much more dynamic fashion than has been the norm.

A perfect example of the way in which a newspaper can take advantage of the tools offered by social media (and one that also demonstrates there is hope for change) cropped up today at A Shel of My Former Self. Shel Holtz talks about how two local newspapers are using Twitter to cover a sensational murder trial in Idaho. One is simply using Twitter to alert interested readers of when there is new content available to read, while the other is taking the truly pioneering step of providing real-time updates of the proceedings direct from the courtroom. Now that’s what you call dynamic news coverage.

There is hope after all.

Technorati Tags: journalism, social media, media coverage, newspapers

In business circles, defining what is social media is immediately followed by the question of how can it can be turned into an effective marketing and communications tool. But who owns this function in an organization? Is that even a valid question? Over at A Shel of My Former Life, Shel Holtz gives a comprehensive rundown of who can, and can’t “own” social media and why.

Chris Brogan, meanwhile, provides a handy list of 50 online applications and sites to consider when developing a social media presence.

Lastly, Robert Geller at Flack’s Revenge discusses user-generated content options for organizations trying to build presence at a time when the number of traditional media channels is on the decline. Youtube anyone?

Technorati Tags: user-generated content, public relations, social media

Over at Glass House, Frank Shaw takes a moment to talk about, taking a moment. The power of silence, the impact of that empty space between words, whether written or spoken.

Not that there’s much chance to enjoy the comfort of one’s own silence, or anyone else’s, for that matter, in this age of social media. As Frank points out, we’ve given up thoughtful introspection for constant distraction and torrents of inane chatter (OK, that’s my phrase, not his), but the point stands.

Meanwhile, the folks over at the Bad Pitch blog continue to showcase the worst of what the PR profession has to offer with another fine example of someone for whom “thoughtful introspection” is an alien concept. Cake, anyone?

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: social media, public relations

I recently commented on a blog post of Piaras Kelly’s about why people hate networking, which in turn spawned an interesting exchange between me and author John Cass on maintaining one’s network (see comment section to the right).

Today’s fresh contribution to the art and science of networking is this insightful piece on the subject from Chris Brogan. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Public relations, networking

One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.