Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Michael Terpin, Terpin Communications Group | Uncorporate Communications
EDITORS’ CHOICE | Tools & Trends

While I have been involved in both studying and, when feasible, jump-starting the subtle black art known as viral marketing for more than ten years, it’s only been in the past two years that I’ve been able to put together some solid connections between the natural interconnectedness of the blogosphere and mysterious Tipping Point dynamics of viral marketing. While some of the projects I’ve worked on in both my role as CEO of a high-tech PR firm, as well as some pioneering work I did at the first major Internet-based press release distributor, were able to connect viral and traditional media, it wasn’t until this summer that I was able to experience the “runaway attention� effect being amplified by its rapid dissemination through blogs.

My firm was tapped in June to provide both the messaging, strategy and traditional PR tactics for the technology component of the ambitious Live8 concert series put on by Bob Geldoff, Bono and others in support of pressuring the leaders of the world’s richest nations (the G8, which met in July in Scotland) to dramatically increase its aid to Africa. Geldoff, who 20 years previously had been successful in raising more than $100 million in a charity concert to send to Africa, decided that the problem was much too large to solve with mere millions – and only the world’s leading government could make that number into billions.

In support of this cause, America Online, Sun, Nokia and the Mobile Entertainment Forum, coordinated by MEF Americas chairman Ralph Simon, banded together to not only provide the lion’s sum of the funding for visibility raising concerts in nine cities, but to create the platform to enable millions of Internet users to communicate to their nation’s leaders in a variety of methods. Clearly, celebrity power was a prime mover in this mix: in London, Paul McCartney, U2, Madonna, Elton John and a reunited Pink Floyd created a worldwide avalanche of attention, while in Philadelphia, where I was stationed, stars such as Will Smith, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce and Josh Groban helped draw nearly one million people to the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum that Rocky Balboa famously ran up in the original eponymous movie epic.

Yet it was the technology – that did not exist 20 years prior during the original Live Aid – that made this worldwide phenomenon work so smoothly. Certainly, there was already internationalization of traditional news media in 1985, as well as the beginning of the 24-hour television news day (CNN was five years old that year). But CNN was then and is today a single source (although it is joined today by fellow ubiquitous broadcasters MSNBC and Fox), there was only the earliest penetration of the fax machine (which by the end of the 80s was in large part credited with bringing down the Berlin Wall) to interconnect individuals on a ONE-TO-ONE basis and thereby amplify the one-to-many of the broadcast television news experience. Even the now nearly ubiquitous cellphone was barely out of the lab in 1985.

The commercial Internet, which moved from infancy in 1994 to prominence in 1999, stands in relative ubiquity today, with 75 percent of the US population online and north of 90 percent in the 18-49 demographic and households with children . Of course, a recent comScore study showed that more than 50 million people read one of more blogs each month, heightening the fact that the blog phenomenon (and its enabling counterpart, the power of search) has grown more quickly than the Internet or the mobile phone.

So here’s what happened on Saturday, July 2, 2005: some 400 accredited media showed up to Philadelphia (and more than 1,000 additional media to London and other European capitals), where they dutifully reported on both the celebrity aspect of the show (the original draw), as well as the political stance of the day. Our part was to point out the enabling technology goal – to create the world’s largest call to action, with a hoped-for 20 million people contacting the Live8 coordinating organization One.org to sign a virtual petition to the leaders of the G8, be it by mobile text message, instant message or email. We briefed the media for a week on this goal, and kept them informed throughout the day in press briefings strategically placed in between the prominent celebrity interviews that kept the TV crews and newswires glued to their seats.

At the end of the day, the news came in – incredibly, the outlandish goal of 20 million signups was not only reached, it was exceeded – 26.4 million people had signed onto the call to action. This result was read at a single press conference – with no press release and no blog posting from the coordinators. What happened then was more than 200 traditional news stories, including one by Reuters that itself was then picked up by thousands of blogs, with those postings picked up by thousands more. Within 12 hours, there were more than 20,000 stories on Google (100 times the traditional news stories that appeared on Google News). By 24 hours, the number had grown to 65,000 stories, and within 48 hours, it was more than 100,000 posts, mentions and stories. Interestingly, I kept track of this number for the next two weeks and noted that it peaked on day four, at 130,000 mentions, showing that blogs writing about news then pass onto blogs that link to other blogs. Since the average blogger might update their site every 2-3 days (prominent blogs are daily, but many smaller blogs were included in this mix), it is my supposition that the story took about 3-4 days to play out thoroughly in the blogs before it became pushed down by more current news in the search engines (although, interestingly enough, a search today (Monday, September 12, 2005) for “Live 8� and “26 million� still yields 96,000 matches – more than it did the day after it was all over the traditional news..

An interesting note in all of this is that in a great many of the posts, a single news article (the Reuters story) was responsible for a large amount of the posts, showing that the right blend of traditional media, particularly by a highly distributed newswire such as Reuters, can power viral penetration across blogs much faster than any coordinated scheme to create keyword nirvana across search engines or stuffing the ballot box with overly ambitious blog syndication, keyword optimization, site linking or blog-and-pinging. The New Orleans tragedy also shows the speed with which bloggers react, yet they react to the common experience of watching the world on 24-hour cable, even if the blog posts themselves in the end reach as large of an audience as any specific half-hour period when a cable show aired.

In summary, Live 8 provided – certainly to me and ideally, by example, to others – a concrete example of how traditional media coverage plus niche market interest (for example, within specific blogs) plus the timeliness of a news story reaching viral marketing proportions can combine to spin out more stories than traditional media could have ever imagined.

About the author

Michael Terpin is the CEO of Terpin Communications Group, a leading high-tech PR firm specializing in emerging technologies and digital convergence. He also started the first Internet-based press release newswire, Internet Wire, which since its strategic alliance with NASDAQ in 2003 has been operating as Market Wire. Terpin also authors a blog on corporate blogging called Uncorporate Communications. He is a newspaper journalism graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he currently serves as the school’s advisory board, and additionally holds an MFA in Creative Writing from SUNY at Buffalo. He lives in Los Angeles and wrote this posting in Shanghai.

{tags: prblogweek, pr, public+relations, viral+marketing, live8, case+studies}