As president of the Silicon Valley chapter of PRSA, I got the opportunity to attend a two-day district conference in Seattle this past weekend.  Many disparate, yet linkable topics were discussed, but for brevity I’ll just highlight a couple.

The first is the perception of the PR industry for those on the outside.  We can debate whether or not the reputation for PR is getting better or worse for eons, but there was one point that PRSA national president Judy Phair brought up I found particularly interesting.  She cited a recent study showing that the general public views PR practioners and publicists as “the same profession.”  This puts us in the same league as the Lizzie Grubmans (http://www.ruminatethis.com/archives/000648.html) of the world.  Scary thought.  The real danger however (for PR firms especially) is that marketing, advertising, and even some law firms are now expanding the definitions of what they do, confusing clients and pigeonholing PR even further. 

The following day, longtime Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble gave a Blogging 101 preso. (SIDE NOTE: I spoke with him briefly beforehand and he said he regularly reads our own Mike Manuel’s blog).  His preso was extremely basic and I was again surprised at how little most PR people know about this stuff.  Many attendees still didn’t even know what blogs look like, let alone understand aggregators and RSS feeds. 

Scoble opened with a pretty cool Mark Twain quote that I’m going to steal.  “A lie can make it around the world in the time it takes for the truth to put its shoes on.”  He then went into a recent occurrence at Microsoft that validates this Twainism.  A blogger with a very small readership posted a note on Scoble’s blog last Wednesday claiming that he had inside knowledge of “bigotry at Microsoft.”  By Friday am, the story was in the NY Times and this blogger was quoted throughout. By Saturday, Google had 137 separate news postings of the story and the noise drove 130,000 readers to this “unknown” blogger’s site. 

Scoble’s point was that in the corporate blog world, you have to work on the “four hour rule.”  If you see a lie in the blogosphere, you have four hours to respond before it’s everywhere. Silence is deadly.

He concluded with Microsoft’s philosophy on blogging, which the company seems to share with our clients, including Yahoo: “To be a part of the conversation, you have to first join the conversation.”  Well said.

– Dave Black

The Voce Nation had the opportunity recently to sit down with Mike Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News and co-author of the SiliconBeat blog to eat pizza, swap stories and share opinions and insights about journalism, public relations and what can best be described as a rapidly evolving media landscape.  In fact, if there was one major theme that colored the entire discussion it was that traditional roles for both the editorial and communications sides of the business are evolving - quickly. 

Mike and his SiliconBeat co-conspirator, Matt Marshall, are part of a growing group of reporters that are redefining the role of contemporary journalism as the mediasphere and blogosphere collide.  Unfortunately, at the moment, being out in front comes at a cost, mostly it’s time.  Mike and Matt are pulling double-duty working in their full-time reporting roles at the Mercury News, but also researching and regularly posting original content on SiliconBeat.  In a very short window of time, SiliconBeat has become a rather popular news source for the Valley tech community and with that popularity follows an expectation (err, demand) that a standard of quality and consistency will be upheld - which is a good thing, but all good things come at a cost, or so the saying goes.  It makes us think that as more publications look to integrate big publishing practices with small ones, it seems inevitable that journalist roles will evolve and full-time “bloggers” will have to be seriously considered as part of a regular reporting staff.

PR roles are evolving too, both in terms of how we work with the media and how we counsel clients.  In fact, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on the new tools communicators have available to them to reach audiences.  For example, syndication technology (RSS) has lots of potential, but most companies are only scratching the surface with respect to its application.  Mike even attested at one point that if for no other reason than to avoid the black holes that are journalists email inboxes, companies should explore syndication of their press materials.  We of course also talked about blogging too, the good and the bad and all the stuff that falls in between, and the new role PR is playing within companies as corporate and employee blogs continue to proliferate.  While no hard conclusions were reached, a lot of good questions were raised and everyone walked away from the discussion with a better understanding of the issues and trends shaping the media landscape, oh, and full stomachs too…

In support of our master plan to take over the PR World, Voce climbed 19 spots this year to #68 (out of 230) in PR Week’s Agency Rankings (released today).  It’s absolute chaos here right now as people celebrate - AP style is being heedlessly abandoned, people are recklessly adding haiku poems to their email signatures and there were even two unconfirmed reports of employees doing the chicken dance in the kitchen.  Crazy stuff…

As mentioned in a previous posting, Voce threw a storage mixer down at SNW in Phoenix last week.   The mixer — which followed Voce’s successful security shindig at San Fran’s RSA show last month - included a healthy mix of attendees, including editors from eWeek, Network World, Storage Magazine, and InfoWorld,  analysts from Yankee Group and IDC, Voce clients from NetApp and Fujitsu, and numerous other FOV’s (that’s “friends of Voce” to the layman).

The healthy beer, wine, or “other” buzz combined with the intimate ambiance and a Red Sox/Yankees game gave the event a relaxed vibe - a chance for attendees to escape the vendor hard sell for a few hours and chat about issues, rumors, technology, the state of journalism, and the 91-degree mid-April heat outside.

For those of you that couldn’t attend, here are a few of my favorite quotes from the evening (names have been removed to protect the innocent):

Re: SNW 2005:
“Most of the presos I saw today seemed to be a cut-and-paste from SNW 2004.  ‘The future of storage is ILM and virtualization’ - ok, I get it!”

Re: NetApp and its recent slew of announcements targeting EMC:
“Dan (Warmenhoven, NetApp CEO) has taken off the gloves, eh?”

Re: Blogs and their impact to journalism:
“Everyone now thinks they’re a journalist.  Do bloggers even know or care about the ‘three source’ rule? Probably not. I refuse to jump on the blogging bandwagon.”

Re: the tone of Symantec CEO John Thompson’s keynote:
“It was very cerebral. He fires me up in that ‘I’m a lot smarter than you are’ kind of way.  Oh, and he’s a lot richer than me too.”

Re: why he/she decided to attend Voce’s mixer, despite being invited to numerous other events:
“I’ve had eleven back-to-back briefings today and I knew you guys wouldn’t annoy me.  Now where can I get a drink?”

– Dave Black

I’m writing this post on a plane returning from the Storage Networking World conference that took place this week in Scottsdale, Arizona.  We had several clients at the show and it turned out to be a great event.  I got to spend some downtime with several journalist and analyst contacts and it reminded me of an important lesson when targeting these folks during a trade show. 

No matter how important you and your clients think your news is, you’ve got to remember that these people are receiving literally hundreds of pitches from other PR folks who think their news is just as important.  We all know this right? We learn this early on in our career and we tell it to our clients and then what? We pick up the phone or write an email requesting a meeting at the show.  So what’s the answer? The problem is there isn’t a clean answer, but the savvy PR consultants understand this and work to find a solution. 

Understanding the position of your media/analyst targets is step number one.  Find a creative way to get the story to them.  Is your client best served in a 30 minute rushed briefing that gets cut short because the journalist/analyst is late from the briefing before and has to run to the next meeting? Start your days a bit earlier and extend them a bit later to allow for some relaxed meetings in the morning and evenings. 

Plan something fun and casual where multiple media/analysts can come and meet with several of your clients at one time.  The number one rule in PR is to know your audience and that must be remembered when your audience is a pre-reg media/analyst list at a trade show.  These folks are buried and if you approach them the wrong way, you’re going to do your client more harm than good.

– Matthew Podboy

From time-to-time, members of our marketing team will be invited to post on things happening here inside the company. This latest post highlights some recent customer wins…
It’s always fun to
welcome new clients to the Voce familia — no awkward hugs involved — just a few
meetings to fully ramp up and review the goals and messaging of our new friends
and then it’s time to get to work. Recently we added two new companies to
the client roster with Peerflix and DigitalPersona. Peerflix is a DVD trading service — think of it as a hybrid between eBay and
Napster. DigitalPersona develops fingerprint recognition
systems for enterprise and consumer computing. Both companies bring some
pretty cool technologies to the table and if you haven’t already heard of them,
you will soon….

As a communications consultant, I am always intrigued by editorial free speech and I certainly do value reporter integrity.  The recent decision by General Motors to pull advertising from the LA Times and possibly other Tribune products raises the old debate of the influence of money in the editorial world.  I can’t help but wonder from a communications perspective what this means for GM.  Granted the LA Times is not The Wall Street Journal but the assumption goes without saying that hopefully customers don’t agree with the editorial opinion of the paper and side with GM, otherwise GM is in a world of trouble.  Will this be a slippery slope from a PR perspective for GM? 

Regardless, this is a situation where an industry typically on the PR defensive has decided to make a head-on reactive move against a key external voice.  This time, a car review in a newspaper has become a heated editorial debate. Unfortunately, an article that would have been kept fairly regional has now become national news.

Is this part of a key trend? Is this part of a larger view on the value of advertising? On the Media had a program last week about how traditional advertising budgets are being cut. The program mentioned that Procter & Gamble, “the largest television advertiser” is significantly cutting their television spend. Other interesting points:

—"When the world’s biggest advertiser, and therefore the world’s biggest underwriter of media content, is looking elsewhere to spend its five and a half billion dollars a year, that makes Madison Avenue and Hollywood shudder."

—"According to Nielsen, the network audience has eroded an average of two percent a year for a decade, while the US population increased by 30 million. In that span, the advertiser cost of reaching consumers has nearly tripled, assuming, that is, that those consumers armed with remote controls and now TiVo are actually watching the commercials, which, research shows, they usually are not."

—”Ten years ago, American Express spent 80 percent of its marketing budget on television. Now it spends less than 30 percent.”

What is behind these shrinking budgets?  Companies are looking to reach audiences through different means.  Remember the segment where Jon Stewart blasted Tucker Carlson?  That attracted 400,000 viewers to CNN. Chances are you did not see that segment on television. That same segment was copied on to the Internet, where it got at least five million views. So, what’s more powerful? The networks the big media companies own, or the networks that they do not?

-John Welton and Janet Martin   

Our own Mike Manuel touches on a collective approach Voce has to the blogosphere in a recent post on his blog called Concentric Circles of Influence.  We’ve been working on online programs here since 2003, but it wasn’t until last year that we formalized our services and began consulting companies looking to identify and communicate with "online influencers," something we’ve coined “Digital Advocacy.”  Each DA program has its own unique needs, but they all typically involve early identification of the A-list bloggers and tracking their points of influence - as Mike describes, by identifying the concentric circles supporting the core group of A-listers who are moving news across the blogosphere and shifting sentiment (for good or bad) toward a brand, product or issue.  It also bears mentioning that a lot of PR firms are issuing reports and jockeying for bragging rights to demonstrate their acumen with social media, and without doubt the noise level will continue to rise, but the risks remain high with online audiences and we think success with these programs will (should) be defined less by theory and glossy sales sheets and more by experience and perhaps even a few war wounds.

As communications consultants, the world of analyst relations and business consulting is very close to our chest.  Therefore, it is interesting to watch the heat turn up as Gartner has completed the “integration” of META. A GartnerWatch post outlines some interesting thoughts on the subject and questions the integration of META. In reality, it is probably no surprise that META has concerns but I found the comments about business consulting in general insightful.  Not many people talk or write about the effects of analyst firm consolidation for McKinsey or Accenture. Competition is assumed for sure…especially when you keeping reading articles about how big business consulting companies can differentiate themselves…

-John Welton