ARTICULATED

This post is by Scott Warner, principal of Warner Strategies, an old friend and regular partner to Kinkennon Communications. Follow him at @scottpall on Twitter.

After years toiling in PR firms large and small, I enrolled in business school with the goal of running a communications department at a large, multinational company. Fresh with my MBA, what did I decide do next instead? Promptly join the legions of solo PR practitioners.

Over the past three years, I have seen the communications marketplace rapidly evolve, yet some of the same mistakes continue to be made by businesses and organizations alike.

1. The media is dying, yet clients want more ink.
We all know newspaper and magazine subscriptions continue to decline. What we don’t know is will there be any newspapers or magazines in 10 years? Companies and organizations continue to demand ink in the traditional PR mindset, yet can’t understand why they don’t achieve more media coverage when the numbers just don’t exist.

2. The press release is still loved.
Just not by reporters. Companies and organizations will sometimes do battle internally over one word in a press release and spend weeks perfecting it. What they forget is that a reporter has a delete button on their keyboard. The press release can serve as useful purpose, but the time spent should be kept to a minimum as the reporter ultimately will write a story based on an interview and his/her own research.

3. People are forgetting it’s still all about relationships.
By developing relationships with reporters, clients, former colleagues, the community, etc. – those relationships lead to better stories, better business and better networks. Companies and organizations that don’t nurture relationships will never see the fruits of their labor.

As a child in the 70s, I was terrified of the prospect of nuclear war, a naïve young mind paralyzed by helplessness. Over the past few years, the changes taking place to our planet’s climate have inspired a similar ache. I recently stopped reading books on climate change because they were causing me so much anxiety. I’m far from a tree-hugger, and I’ve never been particularly drawn to environmental groups. But I’m genuinely scared of what the future holds.

Enter a workaday Frontier flight, on which I sat beside the CEO of an organization called “The Alliance for Climate Protection.” It’s an organization with millions of members worldwide pushing for common-sense solutions to the climate crisis.

Particularly, she talked about “solvability” — the notion that solutions are, in fact, within our grasp.  It was an eye-opening contrast to my growing fear that things like cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, electric vehicles and green roofs are nothing more than drops in a rapidly rising ocean. I had become convinced that it’s too late.

I stepped off that plane with a bit more hope. So I joined up and will learn more.

This is a guest post by former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, a partner at Public Strategies Washington. Shane Kinkennon spends about 50% of his time helping Mike serve his Fortune 500 and nonprofit clients.

If I learned anything in my White House days as Press Secretary, it is that truth matters, and that the public is forgiving to a point. They can understand and accept sin and the confession of misbehavior. But they hate spin. They hate people trying to explain away or rationalize something wrong or outside the boundaries.

I think this means spin should be dead. The idea that you dress up your “talking points” in flowery (and cloudy) language needs to yield to unvarnished truth telling.

Online and on the social web these days, those who are credible and authentic seem to succeed. Those who rely on traditional PR tactics don’t seem to do as well.

It is amazing how quickly communications strategies are changing. But the new vector is towards truth and not propaganda. I have to believe that is a good thing for us all.

New Media Douchebags in Plain English :: I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this snarky little video. (Be forewarned — it liberally uses the ornery pejorative term “douchebag,” so it’s not for everyone.)  But it’s brilliant in the way it pokes good fun at communications folks who spend much of their time talking to one another on Twitter and the like (admittedly, myself included) about how social media is changing the world. Enjoy it.

Yesterday, a somewhat awkward employee of The Sports Authority who was probably in her late 40s brushed aside my chilly response and insisted on talking while I tried on a pair of cross trainers. I was in a hurry and could have done without the conversation. But by and by, I warmed to her.

She’s been working for The Sports Authority for 15 years, she reported, because it’s important to her to help people find the right shoes. She’s glad she enjoys it, in fact, since her husband the woodworker is unemployed. She beamed over the fact that The Sports Authority is rapidly growing. “We’re opening three stores in Alaska this year!” she gushed. She even opined that, if companies like Nike and Addidas listened to her on topics like the quality of their insoles — since she’s the person actually talking to their customers every day —  they’d sell a lot more shoes.

I bought a pair of Nikes from her.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the insoles feel cheap and uncomfortable.

This post is for my many current and former colleagues who are smart, accomplished PR, marketing, and public affairs pros that are the first to say that you “still don’t quite get the whole social media thing.” It goes, “I think we need a MySpace strategy! Or do we?” Many of you have yet to even dabble in social media on a personal level. You know who you are.

I don’t pretend to be an expert – I’m still wrapping my head around much of it. But in the year now that I’ve been really focused on it, I’ve figured out a few things. And I’m getting a lot of questions.

So I’ve compiled this little “You probably need a social media strategy IF …” list. It’s only three items. It’s what I’d tell you over a beer, if we had the pleasure.

But I’ve tried to make it different and relevant by framing it in terms of the things I’m pretty sure that, knowing you and your conscientious ways, you are trying every day to achieve for your client or organization. I’m not referring to not newfangled things, but the kinds of P.R. and business aims we’ve always pursued together.

So here goes. You probably need a social media strategy IF …

You want to establish “thought leadership.” This one has been a biggie my whole career, certainly working in the issue-advocacy and B2B marketing spaces. If you really want to position your CEO as a thought leader, and I know you do, get him to start capturing his thoughts in writing and publishing them on a blog.

I know, he’s busy. He hates to write. And he hates giving away the contents of his brain for free. And he might just think you’ve lost your mind for the asinine suggestion.

But lots of CEOs are blogging. (Check out a list here.) And lots of CEOs have found it a powerful tool for achieving a wide array of business goals.

The fact is, these days, if you go out claiming Mr. CEO is a “thought leader,” it’s becoming increasingly hard for folks to believe it unless they can find some real “leading thoughts” from him by running a basic Google search.

…..

You want your people more engaged. What organizational leader doesn’t want this? And I’m using “people” broadly. That could mean 75 employees each doing their own thing, 750,000 members who you’re not sure are going to pay their dues next year, or 7.5 million customers who are being courted by the competition.

There’s been about a gazillion words written on this topic by people who are smarter than me. But here’s my dumbed-down take. Because people get to participate everywhere nowadays, thanks to the Internet and the social web, we’ve come to expect participation. We want you to talk directly to us, where we currently are. We want the opportunity to respond, and when we respond, we want to be heard. When we don’t get all of that, we increasingly tend to become ambivalent or bored or freelanced or altogether disenfranchised.

Ms. CEO, I respectfully submit that you are not too busy to have a two-way conversation with your employees or members or prospective customers, hear their ideas, share your vision, and inspire them into loyalty. Social media is a great way to do that. Pretty soon, it may just be an obligation. Certainly already, your people are hungering for it.

…..

You want a stack of clips. That’s what we PR people are here for, of course. But by being engaged in social media, consistent with a well thought-out strategy, your clip-generating work can be more productive because the reporters you want to reach are probably using social media to do their job. A solid social-media strategy gives you a new ongoing way to get and stay in front of them.

But more importantly, the PR people out there who are doing social media strategy all the time argue that the whole notion of generating clips is sort of done. They point out that the readership/viewership of traditional media is shrinking. (The traditional media is shrinking!)  We know that now more than ever, people gather their news and information directly from nontraditional Internet sources.

That means that if what you have to say is good and interesting, and you take the time to say it, you can reach a TON of people without ever generating a single news clip.

Let me be cautious in knocking news clips, because I still get paid good money to do that kind of work. Trust me, I love pitching and securing a Washington Post article (print edition!). But aren’t eyeballs and attention and mindshare and interest what you really want? Aren’t those things, while maybe less concrete when it comes to demonstrating value to the C-suite office, the things that will really support your sales, marketing, advocacy, or retention goals?

I’m pretty sure the answer is now yes. I just don’t think the “stack of clips” is quite as relevant a measure as maybe it once was.
…..

What do you think about these three biggies? I welcome your comments.

Digging through my closet in my DC home office this morning, I was reminded of a horror story.

About this time last year, I headed down toward Pennsylvania Ave. for a meeting with my mentor / boss / client / leader  Mike McCurry. He was hosting the CEO of a new client and asked me to join to talk P.R.

About a block from his office, just before the meeting was scheduled to begin, the fixed-gear bicycle on which I was riding, a piece of equipment I love dearly, launched an unprovoked attack. It grabbed my Banana Republic wool slacks, ripped out the cuff (lengthening the pants by inches), and began a spiral tear up my leg.

With only seconds to spare, recognizing the absurdity of it all, I attempted to repair the carnage with packing tape. I hoped to God I would be able to hide my leg under a table. But alas, we sat casually, table-free and legs exposed. My tattered, shredded clothes became a topic of conversation with the CEO and the former White House press secretary.