Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Tom Murphy, Microsoft Ireland | PR Opinions

Public Relations has arguably never enjoyed a position of greater prominence than it does today. Organizations across every industry and geography recognize the importance of effective communications. Along with the traditional PR strongholds of analyst and media relations, disciplines such as internal communications are now becoming increasingly important as a core requisite for successful business operations. In a competitive global environment companies are looking for new and more effective ways to communicate with customers, prospects and partners. But for all these opportunities, the PR business also faces many threats.

The popular image of Public Relations continues to be driven by the minority. The activities of self-styled spin doctors, the unethical practices of individuals as well as high-profile agencies, contribute to a widespread sense of confusion around what Public Relations is and how it can contribute to a company’s success. There are also the potential threats posed by technology and the Internet, threats, that if ignored, could potentially sideline PR at a time when the industry has the opportunity to extend its influence far beyond where we are today.

Public Relations at its most basic is about helping individuals and organizations to communicate effectively with their audiences. Traditionally this has been primarily about building relationships with the key stakeholders, namely journalists and editors, in an effort to ensure that a company can reach their audience. But there are changes taking place that require all PR practitioners to think long and hard about the best means of communicating on behalf of their clients. I believe that a new pragmatic approach to PR can help us understand the potential threats and more importantly deal with them effectively. With this purpose in mind I have come up with the principles of pragmatic Public Relations.

Principles of Pragmatic Public Relations

1. You must understand your audience

The simple fact is that life is becoming more complex. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them that evening you are bombarded with information. Just think about all the tools you use every single day. You have your home phone, work phone, mobile phone, conference calls, voicemail, text messages, post, newspapers, radio, television, billboards, e-mail, web browser, face-to-face meetings, instant messaging and maybe even a fax or two. The volume and diversity of information you have to receive, interpret, store, recall and use in any given day is staggering. Our response to this deluge of information is to develop sophisticated mental filters. We are becoming more discerning about what information we will allow to pass into our conscious mind. Any information that we deem irrelevant is instantly discarded. This trend has major implications for any profession which seeks to enable effective communication with an audience. This is where I believe the pragmatic practice of Public Relations becomes essential.

If you are conducting PR for a technology company and one of their key audiences is Chief Information Officers then the likelihood is you will be able to rhyme off the relevant publications, editors and freelancers. That’s the value of experience, but do you know how CIO’s in a specific market find information? How they share information? What do you actually know about them?

Building a better picture of the behaviour, habits and preferences of our audiences will enable us to provide better, more effective communications programs than ever before. In addition, as our daily lives continue to evolve, it will become an essential planning element for any campaign to be successful, relevant and measurable.

In case you are feeling a little stressed, I should point out that these changes will take time. The process of building a better understanding of your audience is not something you can achieve overnight, but it is something you should be thinking about today.

2. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

While many of the self-appointed digital blogerati believe that the days of the journalist are numbered, I disagree. The media serves a valuable and important role in providing consumers with a trusted filter on all the news that’s taking place inside and outside our day-to-day lives. What’s more likely is that how consumers use the media may change, based on their needs and desires.

It should be noted that these same doomsayers believe that the future of PR is in doubt because the rise in new online channels such as blogs, RSS and podcasts reduce the need for communication professionals – in effect they believe that the “middleman� will be cut out of the process. In my, not so humble opinion, that’s risible. While it’s inevitable that organizations will increasingly communicate directly with their audience, that development will drive rather than reduce the need for people with good communications skills.

In the real world, away from the Internet echo chamber, PR practitioners spend the majority of their time working with a wide variety of different tools, techniques and media to help clients communicate effectively with their audiences. Whether you work in internal communications, media relations, investor relations or industry analyst relations in any given market sector, you are working on the phone, in face-to-face meetings and over e-mail.

The skills that make you a successful practitioner such as good analytical thinking, good communications skills, good writing skills, attention to detail etc. remain as important today as they have since the advent of modern day Public Relations. Those skills will remain just as important in the future.

3. Embrace your changing environment

The PR industry has been slow to adapt to changing technological developments. For instance we were slow to adopt e-mail alongside the phone, fax and post. We still, as a collective group, do not use e-mail either correctly or well.

While this has not been a fundamental issue for the industry to this point, it will become more acute in the future. We should continue to use our existing tools and expertise to communicate, but we must be open to change where it makes sense or it is driven by the behavior of our audience. Don’t be afraid of these changes, instead recognize them for what they are: new ways to better communicate with your audience.

I believe the key to managing this change is to understand what new tools to use and how to use them and that brings me nicely to my next principle.

4. Be pragmatic in communications

Pragmatic PR is all about being actively aware of changes that affect your audiences. The challenge is that this approach requires a different approach from how we look at PR today. In the past the communication ecosystem has been relatively slow to change. For example, as TV news audiences grew it became apparent that PR needed to address those media. However the Internet provides a different challenge because the audience is more fragmented, their requirements are often more diverse and change at a faster rate. The result is a bigger and more complex communications challenge.

Pragmatic PR is all about understanding how an audience or an audience segment wants to communicate with a company. By developing that understanding you are in a far better position to reach and educate that audience efficiently and effectively. I think if we’re honest, that type of insight is the exception rather than the norm today. The reality is that as audiences become more discerning, they develop more sophisticated filters and the return from the traditional broad stroke tactics and programs will continue to decrease.

As outlined in the second principle, this new generation of Internet tools and channels won’t replace our existing skills or media, instead they will compliment and enhance our ability to communicate. I always warn people about the dangers of the Internet distortion reality field where new tools are hyped to a point where people begin to believe they will change the world as we know it and then those same tools disappear just as fast as they appeared - the digital equivalent of the hoola hoop.

The acid test of the importance of a new communications medium is its adoption among our audience. This is where pragmatism becomes not only important but fundamentally essential in ensuring we take the very best of our traditional practices and marry them with new media that can help make our communication programs more effective.

I believe that if PR people are pragmatic when evaluating these new technologies based on their audience then they can ensure they get the benefits both for themselves and their clients without wasting time or resources with new tools or techniques that will ultimately have little positive or negative effect on their business.

5. Think about conversations

Finally we need to think beyond standard corporate communications and instead think about how the art of conversation impacts our communication programs.

While the 1999 book, The Cluetrain Manifesto sometimes veers into the world of the echo chamber, the central premise of the book, “markets are conversations�, is more relevant today than ever before.

In the 2005 PR Opinions Survey respondents felt that the number one trend for PR was the growth in direct communication between the PR professional and the audience - circumventing third parties. Indeed, the survey found that although media relations was still the most important element (86%), there was a tie between the most popular target audiences: journalists and customers.

If this is the case, how well prepared are we to conduct this communication? It will require more than a word processor and a fax machine.

As people become more sophisticated both in terms of using the Internet and becoming more effective at filtering all the information they receive on a daily basis, it’s likely they will develop more specific preferences for how, where and when they access information. We as communicators must understand those requirements.

If your client sells computer hardware, their prospects may want a whole combination of different information from formal product collateral, well written press releases, corporate backgrounders, blogs, flash demonstrations, in-store literature and possibly a more informal one-to-one conversation etc. We must understand how we directly engage with the audience at a range of different levels and then understand how we can meet their specific needs for information, advice and news.

This is probably one of the biggest differences between the traditional and online environments, but it’s one that will become increasingly important as the Internet continues to evolve.

The PR Hype Cycle

There’s a lot of change taking place on the Internet with new tools and channels regularly being heralded as the new new thing. But how will these tools impact the practice of PR as we know it today? I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try and map out these new tools from our perspective.

Industry research firm Gartner Group use a graph to try and make sense of the maturity of different applications, tools and technologies in any given market. It’s called the Gartner Hype Cycle (See Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 - The Gartner Hype Cycle

Interpreting this diagram PR is complicated by the fact that the adoption and use of tools differs widely between industries, geographies and practice groups. For example while many PR practitioners working in the technology sector will probably pitch, read and write blogs regularly, the same is probably not true in manufacturing PR. As a result I have attempted to provide the most general view and of course it is completely subjective and non-scientific. I am very interested in your thoughts on the diagram that follows (see figure 1.2) and in particular the different elements it tries to position, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me if you have any thoughts.

About the Hype Cycle

As new technologies emerge they start on the left hand side of the graph and typically travel from left to right. Following their introduction tools can be subject to unrealistic hype bringing them to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations�. Once reality sets in these tools then fall into the “Trough of Disillusionment� before emerging at the right hand side where they finally begin to deliver some of the benefits that were originally promised – though never as much as the initial hype would have led you to believe.

There are a couple of additional things to remember about the PR Hype Cycle:

1. Not everything travels the full cycle, some new technologies simply reach their peak and then disappear without trace
2. It’s not sequential, some new technologies move along the cycle faster than others
3. Finally some technologies will remain at a given level forever

Figure 1.2 - The PR Hype Cycle

The first thing to notice is that our traditional tools such as press conferences, press releases, telephones etc. are mostly collected on the right hand side of the diagram in the “Plateau of Productivity� section. They all provide well understood features and returns and are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Some traditional elements such as message control or the fax machine are in all probability becoming less important for many practitioners however they do still exist and can be more important for some practitioners than others.

On the extreme left of the diagram you’ll see a whole host of new tools that many believe will have a fundamental impact on Public Relations. These include “Citizen Journalism� “RSS�, “Podcasts� and “Wikis�. As previously mentioned this is where you’ll begin to see differences between industries, for example in technology PR blogs are probably further to the right.

It may surprise you that I’ve put well established tools such as e-mail and databases only emerging from the trough of disillusionment but I have my reasons.

As I mentioned before, PR practitioners were slow to adopt e-mail and our usage of e-mail is still poor. We continue to misunderstand the best means of using the tool and continue to alienate our audience as a result. There’s a lot more training and education required for e-mail to be more effective. The problem is that people assume that they can use e-mail, but the question is can they use it effectively? It appears not.

On a related matter, the single biggest gripe we consistently hear from journalists is that PR people pitch them irrelevant stories. Now given that any journalist database is relatively small, this points to an alarming lack of internal PR systems. Any popular desktop database such as Access or Filemaker can solve these problems in a flash, yet we continue to avoid using them. What is going to happen if PR people begin to communicate with a client’s customers or prospects, where thousands of people have specific preferences on how they want to receive information? How can PR professionals hope to communicate effectively without understanding how something as simple as a database can remove these issues?

While new tools such as blogs offer obvious communications benefits – many of which are covered in much depth elsewhere in Global PR Blog Week 2.0 - one element that I particularly want to highlight is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If we are trying to help clients reach their audiences, then search engines are an essential element in any online awareness program. It’s vital that PR people build a strong understanding of search engines, be aware of what helps and hinders search engine rankings and how additional tools such as Overture or AdWords can help extend your client’s reach with the online audience.

Finally, I think this graph provides a useful overview of the various communications tools at our disposal; however it is useless if we don’t apply it to our audiences. We as a profession need to build a better understanding of how consumers are finding, using and sharing information. Only when we have this knowledge will we be able to understand how all these tools can help our communications programs to be more effective.

I hope that you may find it useful in terms of looking at the tools you are using today and how or if any of the emerging tools and techniques could impact your practice in the future. Why not take some time to think about it? Why not invest some time finding out how well you use the existing tools and to how intimately you understand your audiences’ actual behaviour?

Conclusion

I believe that a pragmatic approach to Public Relations can make a major contribution to helping us to successfully navigate the potentially difficult changes that lie ahead. While I don’t advocate using new technology, for technology’s sake, I do passionately believe that we are seeing a major shift in how PR will interact with clients and their audiences. There is an opportunity for PR to extend its influence beyond its current remit, but there is also an inherent threat that if we shirk the responsibility then other marketing disciplines will be only too happy to step in and fill the gap. By taking pragmatic decisions based on sound information I believe we can and will navigate this changing environment. The cost of failing to understand how the world of communications is changing is simply too high.

I’m very interested in what you think, you can e-mail me at tpemurphy@hotmail.com or visit: www.natterjackpr.com.

About the author

Tom Murphy has been providing Public Relations counsel to technology companies for over a decade. He has worked in both agency and in-house roles across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America and currently looks after Public Relations and Community Affairs for Microsoft in Ireland. Prior to joining Microsoft in August 2005, Tom was Director of Corporate Communications for Cape Clear Software. His most recent agency posting was as vice president of EMEA consulting for Text 100, where he helped clients plan and execute PR plans in multiple countries across the region.