Next question… can brands who finance this functionality, make it pay for itself by selling the application to local vendors to be featured? If I’m selling strawberries and ice cream just near Henman Hill, I’m sure it would be a great way to improve your chances of being found and chosen particularly if you ran a promotion. Incorporating a voucher incentive scheme (the voucher redeemable when you showed your IBM map on your phone for example) could tell you exactly how many strawberries and cream sales have been converted and driven by the ad I’ve placed within the IBM map.
Oh yes, and lest we forget, activity like this (with a story), google normally says ‘yes’ to:
Perhaps we obcess a little too readily with personalised media- the ‘information super highway right at our fingertips’… ‘twitter; the personalised newspaper’, ‘RSS feeds; the content YOU want’…. etc etc.
But perhaps, and just perhaps, we are overlooking one of the lovely things about ‘broadcast’ media. Because it isn’t direct, we receive it in the knowledge that we weren’t the only ones to receive it at that time. That creates an event and a moment in time we know has been shared with others.With this comes two things; when we consume content we like, part of the enjoyment in the consumption is the receiving of the content with others, after all, we laugh more when others laugh around us. Secondly, and maybe slightly more overlooked, is the pleasure we take in ‘group derision’ of content; to consume content which we know isn’t meant for us but we deride it within a group of people who we know will appreciate said derision can often be a reason for reading something we know isn’t meant for us.
We probably all do it everyday but it’s perhaps it’s the ‘catch all’ ‘broadcast’ journalism aiming to please many more than just me which we would largely think of mass appealing crap, that becomes a regulatory ‘check in’; not the content itself, but the group derision we exchange with others, helping;
- keeping us all from believing our own echo chamber,
- make sure we don’t believe our own tweets, posts, comments and ‘ecosphere’, (all of the time!)
- and most importantly of all, restraining us from spouting a continuous load of old bollocks
It was born out of Mat Morrison’s excellent PRCA talk the other week on how to ‘position’ digital PR.
This was the second presentation of the morning after Fernando’s.
They both resonated but this one stuck out a bit as it was starting to say something different about the relationship between online and offline. Marketers are the only people who distinguish between the two. People don’t. In a few years, the web will be accessible everywhere too and ‘offline’ innate things will be trackable online through gizmos like RFID tags. Look at what Guinness are doing with balls as an example.
Does this become an online PR campaign now because there is some video content and online chatter about it? No. Our campaigns should enable us to engage the audience we’re trying to reach where they are and through the channels they are using, not dictated by our journalist relationships to guarantee a ‘hit’. And our campaigns should be born out of ideas that can work across the channels we need to reach the audience, on or offline.
Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question here… what about; is digital the way in which to reposition PR agencies?
This brings me onto one of Mat’s final observations in his talk; the best ‘online PR’ campaigns he uses as case studies in his deck are not actually done by PR agencies. And of course, if you work in PR, that’s a bit annoying.
But wait. Perhaps there is an answer. And maybe it’s more obvious than we thought?
How about flogging ideas, not process.
The advertising agencies who, back in the day, pioneered TV, for sure sold the process of getting visual images of branded images onto thousands of little boxes around the country to take a leadership position and become TV advertising gurus. But once TV advertising was commoditised and everyone was doing it, the pitch perhaps reverted back to ideas. If everyone is now arriving at traditionally acknowledged ‘PR’ ideas for communication solutions, and using social tools to tell the story (commoditised by every marketing discipline going), is there therefore an opportunity for PR agencies to be lean, mean, ideas obsessed, marketing G-units with no divisions of labour (or creative departments) and refocus their offering on ideas…(executed by the people who thought them up… flawlessly)?
The other process stuff; ‘menu PR’ and the apparatus to communicate and distribute the idea through earned (and paid for) media should be hygiene factors in the clients decision. I work in an integrated agency and the definition of being ‘creative’ is changing. Portfolios are increasingly filled with iphone apps, youtube contests, stunts, guerilla work, ARG, blog sites, Twitter feeds, content pieces and event ideas. And we have one of the most creative ad agencies on the planet right now (Crispin Porter Bogusky) supposedly using PR techniques to arrive at their ideas.
If public relations agencies execute our own ideas too, on and offline, engaging directly with the ‘public’, wouldn’t this be a great way for digital to reposition PR?
Last year I read my Ogilvy colleague Rohit’s book ‘Personality Not Included’. It’s a reet page turner (you’d be disappointed if a book didn’t have pages that turned wouldn’t you?)
He wrote about the importance of personality and not being faceless. Not just in marketing but in business too in order to stand out, which has become increasingly hard to do in a really quite crowded world.
We are working on a project with IBM at the mo. It’s a series of events we are helping amplify online. One of the ways we’re doing that is creating content on the day of the event to share with a wider SME audience who are unable to attend. Below is one of the videos featuring one of the keynote speakers, entrepreneur Richard Farleigh of Dragon’s Den fame. I got to indirectly ask him a question (my question gets asked after about 2mins 45secs) on the importance of personality, inspired by Rohit’s book and Richard’s reference to Levi Roots’success in his speech today (Richard invested in Levi after seeing his pitch on the Dragon’s Den show). He had some really interesting views on the roles of personality and how smaller companies can leverage the personality within their organisation depending on what they do to boost the bottom line (it’s something I’m trying to get my mumtoapply these principles to for her shop).
And here is Levi’s original pitch on the show. Catchy choon, catchy personality. But in the words of another famous telejudge, “personality has the power to open doors, character is what keeps it open”. Can social media be the door-stop for SMEs to keep the door ajar?
I went to a PRCA breakfast meet-up last week. It was very good. There were two speakers; Mat from Porter Novelli and Fernando from Ketchum. They were the two main reasons for it being very good. Though the pastries were certainly competitive.
Fernando spoke first. (He’s also very nicely recorded his presentation on some clever piece of kit so you can watch it here again). He is head of digital at Ketchum UK. This post will focus on his talk. I’ll write about Mat’s in a bit. Fernando spoke about lots of things and I wrote down lots of his quotes which I thought would make me sound smart. He proposed there were three main pillars to digital PR;
1. Build, borrow or steal an audience
2. Topicality is king
3. Find you niche
One of the main points that struck a chord with me was something that James over at 77pr has reiterated before; we get obsessed with being top of the strategic marketing food chain in PR, yet some of the most beautiful, creative and down-right brilliant pieces of well-timed executions are topical, tactical and reactive. I believe these punctuations of earned activity also have a disproportionate affect on brand equity in comparison to the budget spent on broadcast advertising (though I’m still working on that argument!)
One of the advantages that PR probably underplays is it’s flexibility and opportunistic nature. Fernando demonstrated through case studies how through “listening first” (if you are reading an agency social media creds deck and it doesn’t start with the “the first approach to social media is to listen”, then you haven’t been searching on slideshare for long enough), the team were able to come up with some brilliantly insightful and creative on and offline campaigns by “hijaacking” an undercurrent of conversation identified through listening.
Will a new measure of a PR agency’s creativity be how good they are in ‘positive reactivity’? Rather than firefighting negative stories or public unrest, should reacting to online conversation to drive the news agenda proactively be the focus in an economy filled with unrest?
I love the idea of ‘hijacking’ and I like how it moves PR agencies from their previous USP of media familiarisation to consumer familiarisation. From having a true consumer insight, rather than a journalist one, we should be able to come up with better ideas that will also appeal to journalists and inevitably their audience too.
From the very talented Cassette Boy (someone sign him up quick).
Also worth noting an obvious point; “online”, does not mean cheap or quick.. To quote Mr Cassette boy:
“I’ve been working on this video for a couple of months, on and off. I watched 45 episodes of The Apprentice (most of them several times), and material from 43 of them made it into the final piece. Basically, it was a lot of work.“
Whilst I’m at it, here are a few other amusing things doing the rounds;
Speak your branes “A collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar. All the comments quoted were found on the BBC “Have Your Say” site. Yes, people really have written them. On purpose as far as I can tell.”
Route1to499 “The diary of one man’s quest to cross London, one bus route at a time”
And what is it with cats and the net? Here is one little mog seeing what he can find down the back of his sofa.
Finally, wolf t-shirts are back in a big way. Massive meme doing the rounds last week. Don’t believe me? Check out the reviews on Amazon. They have even commissioned their own music video…
Interesting how these types of “memes” are increasingly being shared on Twitter, rather than being re-blogged about or shared on facebook profiles etc.
“Look and feel” is one of those wanky marketing terms that tends to get banded around agencies quite a lot. We all know it’s important but just as equally, we all know, it requires a fair amount of expertise to “get it right” and not just technical know-how. Because to undertake a ‘look and feel’ task is pretty much one of the most arbitrary jobs you can undertake in an agency; your Van Gogh is the client’s Tracey Emin; not that that would be a particularly informative way in shedding any light on whether either of you actually liked said ‘look and feel’ unless you knew the client liked Tracey Emin and the client was aware you disliked Van Gogh’s handywork.
Anyhow, I digress…
So this weekend, I’ve had a bash at it myself. I took the jump and bought the edit CSS option on wordpress and started playing about with the style sheet.
A few learnings;
- I really am rubbish at CSS but enjoyed splashing a bit of colour nonetheless
- why pay for dreamweaver when you can get Kompozer for nowt. (I know, probably loads of reasons for the pros amongst you).
**Image Pier Madonia for the International Red Cross** One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW). When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty bar - a brand for which you care so deeply [...]
Thanks to Governor Sanford, the Appalachian Trail has received tremendous press this week as a great place to clear one’s head, recharge batteries, and get away from a stressful job. Had Governor Sanford actually hiked the Appalachian Trail and done these things, he certainly would not be in the mess he’s in now. While Sanford’s opponents […]
Several weeks ago, what some might consider the most unlikely government agency to embrace social media decided to launch a blog. The FDA Transparency Blog was aimed at bringing a level of transparency to an agency that its own leader FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently described as a “black box that makes important decisions without [...]
