The Intersection of Online and Offline

With apologies to others who read this blog, I will be interspersing my regular commentary with information for my students this fall in our class at Georgetown: MPPR-750 - the Intersection of Online and Offline Public Relations.  More often than not, after a lecture, I will ask you to use this blog to post your thoughts, ideas and questions as well as respond to each other.

While I usually tweak the slides before a lecture, I have pasted below what we will go over this week.  We will be meeting in Walsh 390 at 7:40.

Slides are below;  I look forward to meeting everyone on Wednesday.

Mark

Way too many public relations practitioners forget their own principles and/or advice that they give clients when faced with tough times.  Stonewall.  Obfuscate.  Spin. Happens way too often.

That’s why I was simultaneously proud and a little sad when Geoff Livingston and Maggie Fox announced that their companies were, in fact, not going to merge.  Not only did they announce it, but they both blogged about it and even did a call-in with Shel Holtz as part of his “For Immediate Release” series.

I know Geoff, but I do not know Maggie (yet), but I have to give kudos to them for a) having the business sense to explore the deal, b) giving serious thought to it, c) having the guts to call it off, and d) most impressively, being open, honest and transparent about the fact that the acquistion was off.

I urge everyone to give the interview a listen.  It’s isn’t always pretty — and breakups never are — but to anyone considering hiring a social media or communications firm that tells the truth - even when it hurts — can know that Maggie of the Social Media Group and Geoff Livingston of Livingston communications walk the walk.

That counts for a lot.

Mark

David Armano of the excellent Logic+Emotion blog recently wrote about one of the most universally frustrating experiences:  dealing with an ISP when you have an outage.  My own ISP, Verizon (Fios) provides excellent service when it is running, but when it goes down, Verizon actually asks you to run a diagnostic tools THAT IS THEN SENT TO THEM OVER THE INTERNET.  That’s hard to do when your freaking connection is out.

I won’t even get into the fact that I once seached the Verizon site for 30 minutes looking for a tech support number and then finally Googled it and found it posted by some other equally frustrated person who posted the right number on his/blog.

But enough about me.  David has a good story to tell because when he returned home from vacation, the service from his ISP, Comcast, was out.   So after trying the traditional routes David discovered that Comcast has a Twitter account — and a real guy, Frank, behind it.

David wrote:

Within a few minutes on a Sunday evening, Frank responded to my complaint letting me know that it was most likely not an outage in my area, but a problem at my house. He also guided me through a process that would have fixed it (if I had a amplifier vs. a splitter), but it was still nice to get the education on the difference, not to mention the personal touch delivered through what is supposed to be an impersonal medium.”

Amen.  Does Comcast still get a bazillion complaints?  Probably.  But this again validates the fact that increasingly, and at a very low cost, companies can provide services to their customers in the manner in which the customers want to receive it. I, for one, would get on a plane to Bangalore before I have to call Verizon again.  Twitter can be a highly personal experience.

And David even did a screen capture of the conversation  Very cool:

Great post, David.

Mark

Todd Defren’s “PR Squared” post entitled “The Value of PR Agencies, Part II of ???” got me all in a lather - again and is largely a reason, why, after 13 years of being on the agency side of things, I packed in it an decided to go in house.  Recently, there have been a rash of postings from bloggers who openly question the value of public relations if you have a killer product.

And it went on…

Many of the blogosphere’s “luminaries,” or as Jason Falls puts it, guys who “blow smoke up each others’ asses,” got into the fray, including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel.   These admittedly a-list bloggers have built followings that I am assuming have grown organically, thus reinforcing the notion that is you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.  I have to admit my own ignorance of Messers Scoble, Arrington and Rubel’s professional provenance, but anyone who has toiled within the recesses of a large public relations firm can knock this one out of the park in about thirty seconds.  This is elitist, perhaps wishful thinking.

Here is a quote that I think sums up their point:

Scoble, Rubel and Arrington basically made the point that PR firms are unnecessary if you have a great product and are willing to spend a lot of time engaging in the blogosphere.”

Confession:  I am biased because I sold these services in for more than a decade, and it puts a real burr under my saddle when people wax poetic or romantic about the “next killer app” that will grow organically and not need good public relations strategy or tactical execution.  I can’t tell you how many times I had to justify my existence on this planet on a regular basis or listen to a client tell me a) he/she is cutting my budget, or b) that a good public relations plan is “unnecessary.”

After smiling politely I looked like the guy in the picture above.

But fear not,Todd jumps into the fray with not one but two good defenses of the public relations industry.  In this first post, Why Hire a PR Firm?, instead of laying things, out, he shows video of a client (and that’s who matters, by the way), detailing out why public relations is important:

Mike Volpe, VP Marketing HubSpot - Value of PR Firms

But as so many things do in the blogosphere, this one kept coming back like a bad meal, or one of the zombies in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Then Todd came back with a wonderful, succinct response from yet another client about the value of public relations agencies:

Samantha Stone, VP Marketing, Dataupia - Value of a PR Firm

As usual, when others say it better than I can, I don’t have a lot to add, except a suggestion that anyone who thinks that a well-planned, intelligently executed public relations (or marketing public relations) plan is superfluous for a killer app, ask either:

1. someone who has worked in a public relations agency and see a client’s (or more likely, potential client’s) product die on the vine for lack of effective public relations; or
2. anyone out there who is sitting on the next Twitter who can’t get exposure.

‘Nuff said.

Mark

I’ve been reading a ton of tweets this weekend along the lines of “if you received a Facebook message from me about XYZ, please disregard it.”  There is a worm going around Facebook right now.  I don’t know why I keep thinking that anything is, but nothing is sacrosanct from malicious coders and spammers (bad week for Twitter too, because there appear to be a lot of scantily-clad women who are all following me from the same Web site).  These people are the bottom feeders of the Internet society.

Many of the Facebook developers are, ironically, at DEFCON, one of the largest and oldest hacker conventions, but they still issued this statement, buried in a bunch of other “we take our security seriously” mumbo-jumbo:

Even right now, as we’re preparing to leave for DEFCON, we spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.”

OK.  So read up and be careful.  Or buy a Mac.

Mark