Lose The Word INNOVATION And Focus On What Really Counts: DELIVERING

“Avoid clichés like the plague,” is thrown about frequently in journalism and media circles as it is at ThinkInk. Like a well-worn record, or maybe I should update my own tired imagery to something like an endlessly re-tweeted tweet, clichés usually succeed in getting their point across, but not without the listener rolling their eyes over yet another hackneyed phrase. Too much use with too little care and the force behind the words is totally lost.

In today’s schizoid re-invent-the-wheel-every-day atmosphere – from wordy ways to jump start the job market, to long-winded debates over the commonsense logic of having the US government meet its debt obligations (yawn) – even the word “innovation” has lost much of its sparkle, according to Jack Springman, author and growth strategies consultant in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post.

His advice to readers: jettison the word “innovation” from their business vocabulary. Doing so, he says, refocuses a company’s attention on delivering quality to its customers, not the manufacture of buzzwords directed inward at corporate higher-ups.

While so deliberately discarding a word sounds a little sophomoric, kind of like having a “no-cursing” change jar to dissuade poor language (which definitely hasn’t worked at our agency – we simply love a good swear), Springman is nevertheless on to something. While doing research for his piece, a search of the term “innovation” on the HBR site came up with 4,700 results. Perform a similar Google search for “innovation” and “business” and you end up with 423,000,000 hits. Clearly the term innovation has, wait for it….. had its day in the sun.

Innovation, like guru, and expert, among countless other words, is a term that should be used like salt in a recipe, sparingly and with extreme care to not scuttle the dish. PR and communications firms should also take note Springman’s advice. I don’t know if innovation should be completely excised from our corporate lexicon, but a timeout is certainly in order.

What’s Your Digital Fitness Level?

Work It Social Media!

Earlier this week PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media B.

Bonin Bough again chastised the PR industry for being digitally out of shape. “Digital fitness,” or knowledge about how clients use social media and a 101-understanding of the science behind search algorithms, said Bough, is essential if communications companies wish to stay on top of the ever-changing digital front.

To a large extent Bough’s tonic for the industry falls flat - pun intended. Put another way, if the PR industry –and the country – were as physically fit as we are digitally, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic on our hands. Digital fitness may be a great buzzword that generates web traffic, (of course we wouldn’t know as digital luddites) but the reality is, social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds or the almost-antique email, are already major components of our communications tool belts.

Think about it. Can anyone really imagine a PR company – or almost any successful organization – not relying on social media to promote their brand in some way? Moreover, today’s clients expect social media outreach as par for the proverbial course and not some gimmick-driven extra. Many of today’s college graduates entering the working world have already been using Facebook for a third of their lives, first signing on when they were in early high school in 2004.

A growing number too are graduating with degrees in social media.

And while demographers and the like forecast a graying workforce, data indicates that 78 percent of the US workforce in 2009 was made up of individuals ages 25-54. I don’t know about you, but I know plenty of 40 and 50-somethings who are just as (and if not more) iPad-savvy as the next 20 or 30-something.

To Bough’s point that Facebookers and Tweetters must intimately understand the science behind their media outlets, comparing the process to how children learn to ride bicycles, I cry foul. Yes, it’s true children don’t learn to ride a bicycle watching it sit idly by the curb. That’s why they get on and pedal. But ask a five-year-old about the basic laws of Newtonian motion that lie at the underpinnings of his first successful ride and he’ll draw a blank.

My point: Intimate knowledge of the inner workings of social media is important, to be sure, but just by using social media and receiving immediate feedback from our clients ensures that its usefulness and effectiveness grows organically.

Of all the ailments besetting our economy and the challenges communications companies face at attracting new clients in these difficult times, our collective digital fitness is not one of them. Now that I’m done exercising my fingers with this post I’m off to hit the pavement for a 5-k run.

Feeding The Search Beast: Google Acquires Restaurant Guide, Zagat

Thirty points out of thirty. That’s how restaurant guide Zagat ranked its own acquisition by Google earlier today with a now-famous dining out scale.

Zagat-o-philes, too, will likely approve of the deal, which will help Google deliver even better localized restaurant, foodie, and nightlife search results.

In a letter posted on Zagat’s website husband and wife team Tim and Nina Zagat referred to their 32-year-old company as a longtime innovator in user-generated content. “Google delivers the most relevant and high-quality information, and it's the perfect home for our content,” they wrote. “We are thrilled to see our baby placed in such good hands and to start today as official ‘Googlers.’”

But Brad McCarty, blogger for thenextweb blog rightly points out there’s more going on than just improving Google searches and an older company moving into the "next course" of its career. Besides, the Zagat app for mobile devices is already onto version 4.0.4 and the latest one was launched just last month. Are foodies so ravenous for better search results?

The purchase by the behemoth search engine – and the anything and everything portal to the web – comes some three years after Zagat reportedly put itself up for sale for $200 million but then backed out of the process. Today, Zagat will join ranks with the 100+ other companies already purchased by Google. Considering Google’s increasing forays into other travel-related ventures, there’s no telling what other markets Google plans on gobbling up next.

Advertising Age agrees, and says “the internet giant is starting to look a little more like a media company.”

The Very Hungry Google

From a PR perspective, such developments reinforce the need to make certain our clients figure prominently in Google searches. Our stories and releases must take into account search optimization and search marketing - it's no longer an afterthought, but embedded in our thinking and our products.

The web, and Google, continue to remake how we as communications experts package and deliver our clients’ messages right down to the local dining out guide.

All this talk of restaurants and dining out has made me hungry and on that note, I'm off for a bite.

Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?

Not yet. But a few prayers couldn’t hurt.

Last week Gigaom.com blogger Matthew Ingram resurrected the decade-old question: is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete? His answer – after a nearly 900-word build up:

No. “I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing,” he writes.

Pardon the bluntness, but to me that doesn’t read like a satisfying conclusion. The cells in my stomach are evolving, dividing one by one, millisecond by millisecond, year by year. My stomach expands with each new meal I consume. But without a little help from digestion and peristalsis to keep that expansion in check or DNA coding to prevent runaway “cell evolution,” my body would grow sick and unable to function.

If left unchecked I’d land in the Morgue – the place where humans – and newspapers ultimately retire.

To conclude that today’s twitter-centric and blog-frenzied journalism is “evolving and expanding” isn’t good enough. Chalking the process up to the cyclical “rise and fall” of newspapers and bloggers doesn’t cut it either. A more nuanced question is: how is journalism expanding and evolving and what safeguards, if any, are working to ensure its healthy growth?

Ingram rightly points out that journalism is about: “a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things.” He’s also correct when he references programming scholar Dave Winter’s suggestion that in today’s world, with often zero mass publishing barriers, anyone can do it.

But the fact that “anyone can do it” doesn’t mean that everyone can do it equally well. Possessing a spirit of enquiry, of curiosity, and of wanting to make sense of things are platitudes that can be applied to almost any profession.

Eighteenth and 19^th century journalism, wrought with hyper opinion, political party dominance, and a healthy dose of sensationalism effectively blurred the lines of hard news, soft news, and what today would be called “infotainment.” Not until the middle and latter 20^th century did a more separation of church and state-like thinking transform journalism into today’s polished and professional product.

It’s not that today’s citizen journalists, CNN’s iReporters or Arab Spring bloggers are bad. It’s just that too often their skills are unrefined.

To be sure, gathering facts, observing breaking news, and collecting what else has been written on a topic – termed aggregating on the web – is the first step toward quality journalism. But placing that information into a compelling and concise narrative with context and fact-checked sources is where the professional differences lie. A world where citizen journalists, bloggers, and traditional reporters remember they’re playing on the same team, in equal numbers would be the best way to ensure that the hard fought professional standards achievements of the 20^th century and the internet mass publishing miracles of the 21^st work in concert, not in chaos.

In the last decade, as newspapers and other print formats struggle to engineer the magic bullet of profitable web publishing, thousands of professional journalists have left the profession entirely, jumping ship for the perceived safer and often better-paying waters of public relations, corporate communications and government outreach.

An industry losing its institutional knowledge is an industry in danger of losing itself.

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Only if we let it.

Why Do Some Sabotage Their Own PR Efforts?

If you are in the PR profession, it’s very likely that you have experienced the following scenario: a prime client insists on micro-managing visibility campaigns to the point where it’s almost impossible for us to work, or to focus on the strategy and execution of big ideas, instead of sweating the small stuff. Forget about achieving the results that are expected of us.

The PR industry is not alone in this dilemma: creatives and marketers join us in the struggle of extracting project briefs from some clients, or getting campaign details approved, or media interviews scheduled in a timely manner. And then there is the next-level challenge — the client that consistently misses top opportunities, cherry-picking interviews and walking away from top-tier placements because they can’t see the big picture — all while grumbling about farfetched initiatives planned to avoid the next kerfuffle.

I touched on this subject in a previous post over a year ago, and it continues to baffle me today. So why do companies hire us if they want to control what we do, never fully trusting us to be the experts that they hired us as?

Which also begs the question: “How do they stay in business if they micro-manage all their external resources and consultants?” It turns out that a lot of them don’t.

Hiring for All the Wrong Reasons

Companies don’t sabotage their own campaigns intentionally. It usually starts off with someone in management who thinks that their ideas are well-placed and timely; their interview rejections justified and reasonable — even if these decisions contradict strategies that have been well thought out and agreed upon. They are the CEO, after all. They have reasons and the need for hiring PR professionals, yet don’t end up taking our advice.

Why? Here are a few of my thoughts on why a company so interested in preserving its own good ideas would bother to look outside its own little bubble.

1: A supreme misstep that needs isolation — call in the professionals.

Maybe a firm doesn’t know how badly it has messed up until the legal threats start coming, or there’s an ugly sales dip that has shareholders riled. That’s when the need to call in someone else oversteps the need to micromanage campaigns. For a while, at least…

2: Recent restructuring and little direction — budget changes, hiring-and-firing.

An overzealous primary point of contact — possibly a new hire, perhaps someone who’s feeling pressure in their department — starts to quell campaigns for the sake of their own bright ideas, hoping for some recognition (and possibly a pay raise). This could be ego talking, or it could be fear in a competitive environment.

3: A well-meaning higher-up — not everyone is out to get us.

Someone in management knows what they’re doing — and recognizes that they can’t do everything on their own — but they’re not in charge of dealing with the day-to-day approvals, editing, releases, and interviews. If the “smart boss” was the one you talked with daily, there wouldn’t be an issue — but sadly, they’re not.

4: Power struggles — to seek help or not to seek help?

Maybe somebody got vetoed, and you are the shining cavalry that got called in, much to their dismay. Maybe an entire department got axed, and whoever is in charge now wants to make a point that their group could have done it better. Interoffice politics will almost always affect your dealings, sometimes seriously. Watch your back here because you may be set up to fail.

Apart from firing the misbehavers and walking away, there are a number of ways to compromise (if you want to compromise, that is) when working with a client who is a PR self-saboteur:

• Weed Out Inconsistencies When your company contact is killing ideas and media opportunities (and coming up with their own “great ideas”), try to keep campaigns consistent at the very least. You might find that the same companies that kill ideas and opportunities are extremely prolific when it comes to tossing in-house ideas around. Cohesiveness is a boon, too.
• Increase Communication and Accountability CC, double-check, confirm, and re-confirm. When finger-pointing about missed opportunities comes up, engage in CYA mode. You want to have names of exactly who nixed what and cover your behind at all times. Accountability is critical and it’ll get you to the end of your contract — or to the end of the campaign — without torching your own reputation. Containing sabotage is much better than having people ask: “Who is in charge of this mess?”

There is really only so much we can do for a company that is prone to consistently acting this way. There are fatal marketing mistakes lurking out there, and if the company is truly set in its ways, the mistakes will keep happening again and again. And as much as getting that retainer check was nice every month, you will be glad that the mistakes weren’t on your watch. It’s your reputation — and your sanity — on the line.

I like to think of these types of clients as horses: the ones you can steer to the water, but can never make drink. We may push and force and struggle to get things done with these companies, but in the end they will rear their heads and refuse to cooperate with us. Past experience has taught me (and my still sane team), that the struggle is almost always unsustainable and really not worth having.

Via Media Post: Marketing Daily by Vanessa Horwell – http://bit.ly/op0iml

In PR Today, It’s Adapt Or Die. Or Else.

Considering the speed at which we get information today, it’s really no surprise that there's added emphasis on the “adapt or die” adage – regardless of which industry you’re in. In the case of PR, it’s adapt or die, and do it at warp speed – or else.

PR depends on being incredibly up-to-date, knowing what’s happening in our clients’ industries (sometimes before they do), knowing who is covering what – or not - and managing these developments in a way that benefit clients, media, and just about everyone linked to them. It's sink-or-swim, without a doubt, and in the maturing digital age, it doesn't take very long to sink to the bottom.

As an industry, we can’t get out of this by looking the other direction or playing thumbsies – that's the whole point of “adapt or die.” So where to start? Here are a few ideas worth trying.

1) Refining information received – Information is being hurled at us every few seconds, demanding to be processed and shared, so it is critical that we sift through the noise, clutter and nonsense. Successful companies are able to study – and toss – information as it's ranked according to usability, quality and value. Think beyond the inbox!

2) Managing and managing some more – We need to study our competitors and how they are impacting our clients’ mindshare. (Hint – these may not always be PR firms).

3) Playing the field without floundering – Successful adapters aren't afraid to make some mistakes to reach another level. Failure can be good, otherwise we would never learn. These adapters are able to predict and plan for both losses and successes that come along with experimentation and a bit of risk.

4) Learning and retaining new decision-making skills – While we need to move at an increasingly rapid and demanding pace, we also need to retain those decision-making tactics that don’t always happen immediately. Think, juggle, balance, rinse and repeat.

And then, of course, are our clients. How do we convince them to adapt along with us? We can finesse changes using statistics and case studies to support our decisions, eking things out for those who aren't comfortable with a big change. Creating an actionable plan of little tweaks can get our plan moving, and once positive results are seen, things can happen more quickly. Piece by piece, we can show our clients that altering how we do things won't result in a collapse or their demise. Think baby steps here.

Adaptation isn't easy, but if we know how to do anything well in PR, it is scoping out situations and managing them accordingly. We know how to smooth, rework, and recreate, and so adapting should be second nature to us.

We just need to carve out some non-billable hours to see where our efforts currently stand, and where to go from here. Are you guilty of not taking the time to create an “adaptation plan,” or are you already working on it?

Fixing The PR Industry: Does PR Need A Do Over, Starting With A New Name?

Should we be called PR professionals anymore, or is it time for a name change? A recent Ogilvy PR Peripheral Visions Study showed that 76% of respondents (PR professionals that is) believe that PR should be rebranded. Ouch!!!! But that’s not all: in the same survey, 60% revealed that they think public relations and advertising could be joined or blended into a hybrid, which is something I have been thinking about for a while. There are definitely some discussions brewing….

So the 76% previously mentioned? That sizable group hinted that public relations professionals could be called communications professionals instead. But isn't that a tiny part of the battle, renaming what we do? Wouldn't it be more advantageous and make better sense to actually revamp how we do things, rather than simply putting the proverbial lipstick on a pig. How about redefining public relations from the inside out instead of just a name polish?

And if we were to change the name of public relations, what would it be? “Communications professional” sounds somewhat boring (and we have a policy of no boring in our agency). Besides, PR is so much more than a single layer of duties - where do we start or end? While we should probably stay away from anything that puts “media relations” in our name, given that we've been pigeonholed as it is, besides that, shouldn’t we concentrate more on what we do and how we do it – than what we are called? As any PR rep will tell you, your actions are going to seal the deal, not the fancy wrapping.

In my mind, the first call of order is to show our value. Show that we are so much more than what many people think we are, i.e., press release pushers, a pain in the arse, superfluous and so on, and conversely show what we are not, i.e., press release pushers, a pain in the arse, superfluous.

We also need to communicate that we are not miracle workers, and we can't guarantee results in every crisis situation (News Corp., anyone?). PR done best is done strategically, creatively and thoughtfully —not a bandage to be slapped on after the fact. So if we are to rename public relations, we may have to start by clarifying both what we can and cannot do.

To be sure, PR is more personal than ever and it could be argues that our name is going be way of the press release. RIP press release. Moving beyond mass marketing, we are pressed to make new connections between our clients and theirs, telling a deeper and more compelling story to select groups. Looking at how much public relations has changed over the years, and so dramatically in just a few years, then perhaps a name change does make sense.

So what should we call it, ourselves, the industry?

If we don't change the name of PR, we can still go about making changes behind the scenes. The name's been debated before—and it will be debated again—but we can still help the public understand what it is that we do and the immense value we can bring to our clients... and that we're not just singularly focusing on crisis management or media relations all the time.

Questions time!

1. Should PR have a name change?

2. Do you like the name “Communications Professional”?

3. Do we have a perception issue?

4. Do you have a better name for PR that's NOT “Communications Professional”?

5. Is a name change essential, or should we work harder to clarify what PR professionals do?

6. Do you think that renaming PR has more to do with distinguishing itself in-company?

7. What would you do to “fix” the PR industry?

I would love to hear your views on what, if anything, PR should be renamed to.