KPMG survey identifies concerns over companies’ risk management and crisis readiness programmes

See on www.continuitycentral.com

At the time I got myself nice and fired up about why I was going to agree with the post, albeit with a gripe that a made-up term like “social media” was trumping the decades old practice of public relations in the headline hierarchy. But I got over that.

Hey, he’s Gandalf AND Magneto. I’m doing what he says.

To summarise the part of the original article I believe was most likely to incite the flamewar of all time, here’s a quote from Ken Krogue, the author (it’s nicked from the actual post):

“The bottom line is that all external SEO efforts are counterfeit other than one: Writing, designing, recording, or videoing real and relevant content that benefits those who search.”

While originally I was keen to post on this, it’s taken me until now to actually form a point of view on the topic. In the style of supporting my own pre-existing biases I’d like to whole-heartedly agree, and the fact it’s published by Forbes means I would feel smart agreeing with it.

Check out this guy – he’s spelling it all wrong!

The problem is, I kind of disagree that public relations will necessarily “own” online content, search and social (whatever that is), because at its heart the public relations industry is captivated by words. It makes sense given the inordinate number of print journalists that helped found the industry before TV was invented, but it has also led to our over-reliance today on media relations as a core tactical skill set. It also makes sense because regardless how we think about an idea, the bulk of our day-to-day interpersonal communication comes as words.

And so even away from media, much of a public relations practitioner’s historical skillset comes from verbal communication rather than visual. We make phone calls, we have meetings, we do coffees or lunches or breakfasts…all in order to facilitate conversations. Exploiting new technology is a historical weakness for the PR industry because new stuff is expensive, and if we can get an outcome with a phone call then why would we buy a fax machine?

These are still a thing, right?

When it comes to new forms of communication, whether they be web-based, “social” (you mean, two people talking to each other? No fucking way?!?), or anything else, first-mover advantage always belongs to people with a lot of free time who are able to experiment with the tech, followed by people with a lot of resources behind them who can afford to spend those resources seeking to exploit it.

The rise of the digital agency has shown this – so many great start-ups built on a handful of really smart IP, either growing to a decent small-business size, or getting themselves bought by a wealthy ad agency along the way.

The SEO business is arguably the same. Great technological insight, really clever people, and enough free time to establish a first-mover advantage. BAM – new industry, based on exploiting a loophole left open by the last new industry to arise (i.e. search in its own right). For all the stealth updates to search algorithms there will always be a new generation of wunderkund with enough RAM and ditched class time to come up with a smarter mouse to defeat the trap.

Seriously, this one stunt is going to revive my career and start a whole copycat thing, it’ll be awesome. Who’s got a sofa I can jump on?

So rather than buy into a debate about whether one technical skill set is going to defeat another in the battle for the marketing/communication dollar, I propose that in order for public relations to succeed over the next decade the industry has to attract diversified communicators.

Whether SEO is “counterfeit” as Ken claims, or whether ad agency studios are going to have higher production values than social media agencies shooting everything on hand-held kit, I think the bigger issue is really going to be: who understands the audience best?

Clearly the answer is “Stephanie Meyer”, so long as the question involves…well, anyone who’s into vampires and predictable fairy-tale endings. Oh, did I just give it away? *spoiler alert*

Planted content, if good enough, will always find a willing passive audience. Similarly, invasive communications in any medium will piss some people off, although to be fair I still use the free Spotify despite the ads. What we should be discussing is the route to the most effective communication outcome rather than which horse to ride there.

In this arena I think public relations does have an advantage because as an industry we are not bound by the need to make products. We can write a press release, but we don’t have to if a phone call will also get the story up. We can hire a cammo and an edit suite for a few days to make a video, or we can make a donation to a film school and ask them to do it for us. What’s more important is that as individuals, public relations practitioners develop something of the hacker mindset, and invest some personal time in learning how technology can be used to enhance the communication experience, both for our client organisations and our own relationships.

No, no, no. I set “set a SMART” objective. Not a Get Smart…never mind. #artdepartmentfail

However in the case of an integrated marketing team, it’s difficult to separate out the relative value of each discipline. While this is true overall, the fact remains that the marketing disciplines associated with paid media have a fixed commercial value for their outputs.Page space is worth a retail value to a publisher, regardless of what you put on it in the form of an ad. A TARP is a TARP is a TARP. Surely Twain said that.

I swear Cat, you shall judge my wardrobe only so many times, or so help me…

The challenge for public relations has been that the value of our worth is in influence, not presence. A journalist can kill a pitch if it’s a crap pitch (although to be fair, they shouldn’t have to if we’re any good at our jobs). A sub-editor can delete a quote if it doesn’t fit the available space (although if the quote’s good enough it should be in the first third of the story anyway). And if something more newsworthy happens overnight, well the PR-led story was always a chance to be bumped.

Despite all this, the marketing mindset has, for the life of  my career at least, maintained that “more is more”. Brands (companies) rightly want to maximise their return on investment. They and seek to do this by targeting the highest-circulation publications, be they tabloid newspapers, glossy magazines, or week-night current affairs programs. This is because if a press release costs $5,000 to research, draft, pitch, follow up, arrange an interview for, monitor for, cut out of a newspaper, scan and email to a client, then a circulation of one million readers is conceivably a lower cost-per-touch than if the circulation was one hundred thousand. It’s basic maths.

If a train travelling at 60km/h leaves Station A at 5:10pm, and another train travelling at 80km/h leaves Station B at 6:20pm, how many lotto tickets should the punk buy?

Except, it isn’t. And the reason it isn’t is because…you have stuff-all idea how many people actually read the story. Or who they were. Or why they read it. Or anything else.

I’m seriously so excited about the way you’re a leading company leveraging your innovation platform to provide peerless consumer solutions. Where’s my wallet?

In contrast to this, web-based news gathering skews audiences smaller – because it’s precise. If I click on a link, I register a hit for an article. If the owner of the article wants to she can determine how long I sat on the page, and how far down I’m likely to have read. This precision creates three major problems, all associated with knowing exactly how many people read (or watch/listen to) your stuff, and for how long:

• It’s a smaller audience than the overall ratings or circulation catchment, so advertising real estate must become cheaper in order to represent real value
• Development of content to fit the space doesn’t get any cheaper, so the cost-per-touch is comparatively more for advertising or PR, while lower for media buying since the real estate is cheaper
• It’s interactive, and when people are busy you only attract advocates and detractors. Busy people don’t indulge in ambient news-gathering, they only read what’s important to them, so the comments that eventually appear won’t be representative of the entire population who may be interested in your product/brand/company/story. Your data will be compromised by the selection bias of your audience – a bias that existed before they ever saw your story

What selection bias?

An example of this can be seen in the analysis/commentary of this week’s speech by Australian Prime Minister, Hon. Julia Gillard MP.

Here’s some of the Fairfax coverage. I couldn’t include the News coverage because the site’s search function was down for the hour I spent writing this post, but if you click this link instead you can see some of the other news coverage of the world’s reaction.

Selection bias in media is powerful for media relations strategies because it means your audience has pre-determined a willingness to engage with your story. The implication of online media proliferation is that audiences will increasingly self-select, and self-segment, to the point where an audience may come together to focus on one single point of common interest, completely unrelated to all other socio-demographic factors.

As above.

What’s most important is that the investment in marketing acknowledges the consumer trend towards self-selected news consumption, and that investment is increasingly directed in more targeted, strategic ways than just mass-awareness. It will happen, when marketing as a discipline recognises the opportunities presented by a more engaged customer, regardless of channel. The challenge will come in identifying the right time for a given organisation to take the leap, knowing that going first is always the hardest, and going last is guaranteed to loose you market share.

The diagram in the lower right gives it away really. Pity there isn’t an “affiliate marketing for your WordPress blog for Dummies”, otherwise I’d be making half a cent for every click on this frickin’ image.

This is a Very Good Thing (thanks Pooh), because of the correlation between the rise and Mark Zuckerberg’s highly publicised interview with Tech Crunch.

Let’s have a look at the three important PR questions answered by this interview and resultant impact on share price.

Question 1: Can I measure the value of media relations / PR?

Answer 1: Yes. In this case, 4.6%. Although to be fair if you’re on here this is probably a no-brainer, so here’s how you can explain it to your friends. The impact of PR is highly measurable, so long as your unit of measurement is: benchmarked (it has a resting state of some kind), binary (it changes or it doesn’t) and relative (end state is comparative to resting state). For cases where PR is part of a wider marketing mix, it’s also helpful to make your unit of measurement unique (only applicable to the PR activity), both to evaluate the effectiveness of the work, and also to create a cool acronym like BURB (benchmarked, unique, relative, binary). There are more parentheses in this paragraph than my last five posts.

Answer 1.1: The problem with the above answer is that it highlights a bigger problem. When people ask “is PR measurable” or “what’s the ROI of the PR”, what they’re really asking for is a comparative metric that enables evaluation against more traditional marketing metrics, like TARPs. Zuckerberg’s interview doesn’t answer that question.

Question 2: Why do you PR people keep telling us to do trade media? We want to be in [insert lifestyle brand media outlet here].

Answer 2: That’s a good question, and actually doesn’t require the Zuck to answer (but he helpfully demonstrates the point). One of the main reasons is that consumer media tends toward longer lead times (less so with the interwebs, granted, but seriously half the schlebs on the cover of the glossies put the weight back on before their issue’s even out). That’s probably not true. The Zuck’s interview was with Tech Crunch, and yet the impact of the interview was visualised in the share price (aka Wall Street).

I wanted to call this “2007″. But I didn’t do it, so you should click the link to find out what it’s actually called.

While Tech Crunch has arguably left its “trade rag” status well behind it, it is still seen as a go-to for sector content. The important point here is that with the integration of online publishing and social media, influential people who know things about your brand and can influence its success or failure, will do exactly what they’ve always done. They will self-select their media consumption, and will do so based on their existing biases (culture, political leaning) and the perception that “news” from a given channel is a product that they trust.

By focusing on trade media relations, we build relationships with expert commentators who spend 40 hours a week or more looking at a narrower pool of companies. It makes sense that this would improve the depth of the reporting, because we’re talking to journos who focus on brands like ours. Importantly, higher-quality reporting attracts more discerning audiences – made up of people who have a reputation for “being informed”, so the trust in those media makes them increasingly relevant in their niche. Developing the reputation for quality improves search rankings, leads to contra deals with mainstream news broadcasters, which then leads to mainstream commentary – but through the lens of people actually knowing what they’re talking about.

Answer 2.1: Really smart people get their news as close to the source as they can get. Influencers who value their reputation are masters of this, so they’ll default to the media that asks the kinds of questions they want answered. Trade journos are just more like your actual influencer base, even if that means they’re very dissimilar to the bulk of your customers. The key here is “bulk”. Discerning information consumers do not make up 80% of your market. They do, however, buy earlier and more often.

Question 3: Do I really need to do an interview? (also: can’t we just get them to send an email with some questions?)

Answer 3: Yes, you do. Read this sentence from the Mashable article: “From the moment he took the stage, Zuckerberg made it clear that his intention was to appease investors.” Key word: intention. You can’t convey intention via email. At least, not without some very fucking explicit language (see what I did there). Actually participating in an interview gives you the ability to fill in the corners with impression, intent, context – all things that don’t come across simply in words. A former client, who is a very smart bloke and reads this blog diligently, referred to this as “corporate body language”. By reinforcing your key messages through some kind of physical presence, even if it’s over the phone, it makes your actual message far more powerful. This could be interpreted as “interesting enough to survive sub-editing” or “easily understood as the point you want to get across”. Given that, why would you want to reduce your impact by sending an email?

Answer 3.1: There are a lot of ancillary benefits to being the spokesperson who actually fronts up for an interview. Here are a few: you form relationships with journos so they think to call you for a quote next time there’s a positive category story; you get to correct mis-interpretations of data that may arise from the journalist not having all the information they otherwise need; you get to address follow-up questions immediately. This last point is interesting because from the hundreds of media training interviews we conduct each year we consistently see the best performances from spokespeople who handle follow-up well.

For mine I love that this meets the three Cs of what I’m now inventing – Social Capitalism (I may not be inventing that, I’m just too lazy to see if anyone else already has): cause, case (as in business case) and cheek. See what I did there.

Seriously, go watch the video, then click on the link to the site and do your bit. No pun intended. Here’s the link again to Who Gives a Crap.

And thanks to Lou Pardi for the tip.

Now, if you’re not convinced, let me tell you about Hudsons Coffee.

Hudsons is an anomaly. It’s a coffee chain that actually seems to succeed in Melbourne. We could debate for hours the “why” of that statement – I’m just going to point out that unlike some coffee chains I’ve encountered around the world, when I order a flat white at Hudsons, it tastes like a flat white. And when I ask for a large version, I don’t get a lot of grief about how flat whites only come in one size (small), and that what I’m really after is a tall (or large or ultra), extra-strong no-foam latte.

So actually, what *might* make Hudsons successful is the combination of a quality product that I’m prepared to pay for, delivered with old-fashioned customer service.

As a business, I like Hudsons for the steps the company takes to socialise its customer relationships. A few months ago it held an internal competition for its baristas. Baristae? Coffee makers. Jack and Sheree from my local store came third – I have no idea who they are or how big the competition pool was, but I feel happy for them that they did well.

This time around, the competition is slightly more sophisticated in terms of bringing customers along for the ride:

There’s nothing better than getting to know your barista. Unless of course you count your barista not smiling too widely. Awkward.

Each take-away cup (or a card if you drink it in-store) has your barista’s name on it, so you can log onto the Hudsons website (by clicking that link just back there to your left) and rate your coffee for the chance to win a thousand free coffees of your own.

All of the marketing extensions are opt-in, rather than opt-out, so straight away I feel quite chuffed that I can do the thing I came to do and not worry about exposing myself to push marketing. #winning.

The only catch as I could see is that you have to keep proof of purchase. This is problematic for me as I have no interest in hanging onto a used take-away cup in breathless anticipation of it being magically refilled a thousand times.

Back to the question of socialising your business: this is a great, relatively simple way of forming more human-to-human connections between your staff and your customers. If we think about the relative value of “social business” in the first place, it’s largely this; sure we could argue about the value of a relationship with an employee versus a senior executive, but ultimately what a social business should be doing is embedding greater customer loyalty through mutual benefit…wait a minute…surely that’s not one of those PR things?

I’d be fascinated to know how many customers actually participate in this promotion. It makes for a nice change, not having to Like yet another Facebook page that I’m only going to delete again in a week’s time.

And good luck to the Elizabeth Street team.

This is the premise on which all modern marketing is founded, and can probably be found somewhere on most marketing services firms’ websites (or the blogs of so-minded commentators). My contention: populist trend-surfing content marketing is its own worst enemy and we’re pre-programmed to ignore it and disengage at the first possible opportunity. Go get a coffee or a beer and let’s discuss.

It’s easy to understand why we are where we are. Marketers buy new. Everyone wants to lead, innovation is one of the most important words that can be used inside an organisation, and therefore when the buyers of marketing services go to market, newness is always the new black. Ergo, the rise in social media marketing specialisms.

Unfortunately, this market-driven demand has the blinkers on.

I wouldn’t mind so much if these things were rose-coloured… Source: My Equestrian World

The latest trend in digital marketing is remembering that the Likes, Pins, Re-Tweets and other shares are all the result of real people performing some kind of measurable behavior. Oh, well done us. But regardless of the collective light bulb going on, a deeper issue remains, and it’s this:

Despite the shift in the way content propagates, the physiology of the end user has not.

Why is this important? Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly, desire is an emotional state, and our emotions are regulated by a complex array of neurochemicals coursing throughout our bodies. To over-simplify, our brain and adrenal cortex are very keen to have a say in how much we want something. It makes not a jot of difference where the idea about wanting something comes from – the ability to stimulate a neurotransmitter is channel neutral. This is why you can still buy porn in print form.

Secondly, humans are complex organisms that take years of study to even begin to understand. In a former life I did a bit of that, although I certainly haven’t written any textbooks on the topic.

What I did find fascinating though is the eternal struggle between our DNA and our physiology.  To massively over-simplify in a way that would lose you marks on papers, DNA is primarily interested with replicating itself. It’s how we grow – cells divide and divide and divide, and we get bigger. Its double-helix design is fundamental to its ability to divide and replicate. Physiology, on the other hand, happens at a much higher level of functionality. You effectively have to develop specialised organs in order for physiology to happen, and when it happens, physiology is about maintaining homeostasis. Literally “staying in the same state”, although the process is a dynamic one.

An example of this is your ability to metabolise alcohol – your body breaks down the chemical compound, turning it into calories that are either used or stored, and due to alcohol’s effect on anti-diuretic hormone, compounded by how much heat you generate getting rid of the stuff, you dehydrate and end up with a hangover.

Not only didn’t I wake up with Bradley Cooper, I think I forgot to enter my footy tips… Source: getfityou.com

The only remedy is rehydration, which has to come from outside the body in order to help restore proper balance.

The fundamental truth is that our bodies default back to a position of acclimatised comfort at every possible opportunity, and as we grow, so we absorb the changes our surroundings present to us. Every stunt for an adrenaline junkie is more extreme than the last, because that’s how they get the next high. Jumping motorbikes over busses isn’t seen as a precursor for knitting scarves for a reason.

This digression is important when we think about the world of marketing in an increasingly frantic world of communication inputs.

Great marketing is disruptive. I know this for a fact, because everyone I ever have a meeting with tells me so. Except for subliminal marketing, which is creepy and weird but fun for lots of other reasons.

This image of Brad Pitt from the movie Fight Club is guaranteed to increase both your likelihood of learning about subliminal marketing, and improve the traffic to this blog post.

The problem with disruptive marketing is that your entire physical being is built/designed/evolved to neutralise the disruption as quickly as possible, and return your physical self to a state of normalcy. That’s your physiology working. Spike the adrenaline, increase your heart rate, breathe a bit faster, get a head rush, metabolise the neurotransmitter, take a few deep breaths, reduce your heart rate, see Katie walk past the water cooler, get distracted and forget all about the amazeballs new video your friend just shared on Facebook. At this point the only difference between a share or a Like, and not doing that, is whether something more interesting happens in the seconds immediately after your experience of the marketing.

And if you don’t believe me, look yourself in the eyes and tell yourself about the time you forgot to Like something on Facebook, and spent three hours trawling back through your newsfeed just so you could go back and do it.

No. This is not a neurotransmitter.

So how does this all interlink?

Think about the concept of screening – basically, developing an increasingly sophisticated ability to ignore things you’re not interested in. This is one of the reasons behind the need for marketing to be disruptive in the first place. Screening is essentially a form of mental homeostasis. With each disruptive experience, we go through the process of being interested, excited, engaged…and then we move on. As we move on, our brains adapt to each of these experiences, expanding our mental library of experiences and recalibrating “normal” as it applies to us.

Here’s the rub. Screening has been around for as long as we have been able to consciously believe or disbelieve information we receive second-hand. Even older than that is our ability to chase positive stimuli, and avoid negative stimuli. Such as fire, pain, or paying taxes to Prince John.

The upshot of this is really simple. In order for disruptive marketing to continue to work, the disruption must be increasingly powerful in order to break through the now-increased tolerance of any given individual. It must also be increasingly pleasurable in order to qualify as a positive reward. Think how long video games now play for – the intensity of play escalates the longer you play, and the barrier to entry is barely low enough so as not to dissuade you from continuing after your first try or two. This is why the marketing industry now focuses on the internet – its newness means it’s easier to surprise and delight someone online than it is with a TVC.

Further to this, the volume shift of marketing activity online means that as an industry we’re power-loading the internet with ever-increasing content volumes. We’re actually making a rod for our own backs in doing so, because from a physiological perspective all we’re really doing is training people to ignore ever-more-clever marketing techniques. While content always was, still is, and always will be more important than the channel, we’re making it harder to develop “good content”, on the basis that every time someone neutralises themselves against a given campaign (note this is not necessarily a conscious thing, but a physiological response to increasing exposure to campaigning), then it makes coming up with the next cool thing even more challenging.

What’s more important though is that, as Steve Rubel says, while content is infinite, time and attention are not, and this is the really important implication of this post (so stay with me, I know it’s a long one).

As the average consumer is exposed to an increasing volume of content, that consumer’s ability to screen out unwanted content will increase. It’s what our physiology is hardwired to do. And as each of us does that, we will increasingly self-select the content we do want to be exposed to – based on what stimulates a significant enough emotional response that the brain chemicals start squirting about.

The end result of what is scientifically known as having your brain chemicals squirting about.

Think about how many of your friends you have hidden on Facebook – you don’t want them to know you hate all their irrelevant posts about baby’s first bowel motion, so you don’t de-friend them, but you screen out the content by hiding their updates. With increasing content, increasing screening will follow, and those platforms that don’t moderate the amount of chaff amongst their content will find users disengaging from them entirely. We are engineered to seek comfort with occasional stimulation, not stimulation with occasional comfort.

Because of this fundamental truth in how our bodies work, any innovation in communication technology will drive one universal behaviour: information consumers will increasingly self-select their content for that which is personally relevant or interesting, regardless of trend. The trend we witness from the sidelines will be the result of this biological behaviour – Facebook is only big because a lot of people got onto it. It didn’t attract a billion users by being big in the first place.

Let me be clear, this new form of channel surfing played out by the marketing industries will offer content of value. But because the industry follows the channels, content pushed out into these channels will be perceived to be of lower intrinsic value to the user than content they seek out for themselves.

What I like from this banner is the statement that doing well (performing) and doing good (giving, in some capacity) are not an either/or situation, but rather, increasingly important to both today’s consumers and students, as well as tomorrow’s labour force.

The trend toward profit with purpose has been moving more slowly than the turning circle on the Titanic, but it is happening.

Having been to university twice, I’m not convinced an immediate-term applicant makes the decision to fork over a wad of cash (or enter into another protracted debt scenario) on the basis of some clever ads. What I do believe is that intrinsically the consumers of education – students – make their selections according to pre-determined biases. For example, whether a school is Ivy League, artistic or vocational.

Attracting students is a long-term strategy, just like the uptake or formal corporate responsibility into large corporations. It’s not new, it’s no longer sexy, but growing disposable income and the internet will continue to put pressure on companies to align with consumer expectations. I see this in my daily work with local and global clients, and the recent Edelman goodpurpose research has a load of stats I could quote you if I had it to hand.

This is a great play by Golden Gate University to call on one of the most idealistic, influential and noble demographics out there. Teens.

While out hunting for some respectable Mexican food (NB: so far not to be found in the financial district where I’m staying), I came across this nice piece of work by the people at Coke:

Since I’m new to mobile blogging I don’t know how to caption that.

What I love about this is, while it’s clearly a brand campaign, there’s no product. There’s no “beverage occasion”, there’s not even a suggestion that Coke is waiting at the end of the run…it’s just about parks.

From Golden Gate Park to The Presidio, to Alcatraz Island, San Francisco is a city committed to its parks. This is a great way of tapping into that part of the city without trying desperately to flog a product at the same time. Many Australian brands could learn from such a simple execution.

**MASSIVE CAVEAT: I haven’t yet visited the website from the poster so don’t get on your high horses until after I’ve written the follow-up. The free wi-fi in this city only lasts for a certain number of coffees when the nice man wants to close up at five on a Friday…