PR, the changing media landscape and social media
Building on the ‘Stuff/Shit XX say meme’, Hunter PR in the US has created Stuff PR people say…
There are new examples of this meme growing by the minute. The one that kicked it off (at least I think):
Shit Girls say:
Hat tip – Mumbrella for alerting me to this.
Check out the clever video below produced by Carlsberg featuring a cinema full of rough and scary looking bikies.
This type of stunt is not necessarily new, Heineken did something fairly similar not that long ago, which you can see at the bottom of this post.
Though just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean it isn’t successful or effective. For the fraction of the cost it would have taken to create an advertisement, not to mention the spend required to buy media, this clever stunt has generated in excess of 2.7 million views. It only went up a week ago, so this number will likely grow albeit at a slower pace! This number also doesn’t include the additional buzz traditional media and the blogosphere would have created. Check out a small snapshot of the additional buzz on Google.
Regardless of the fact that in retrospect coming up with an idea like this seems simple, I can guarantee it isn’t. Good work Carlsberg – a good fun and effective stunt.
Henieken’s similar stunt, which must be noted has only 900K views:
Keeping up with the scale of the internet and its associated stats and facts is a daunting task. In an attempt to simplify some of the data OnlineSchools.org have prepared a pretty stunning infographic.
I love infographics generally, but this one is extra special special because it is interactive. Once loaded it will calculate how many new internet users there are in the world, the number of new websites being created and even how many dollars have been spent on e-commerce since the page was loaded last.
I have been banging on to colleagues and anyone else that will listen for some time now about the opportunity infographics represent for PRs. They are the ideal way to communicate complex information in a compelling and highly consumable way that is perfect for web consumption. In my opinion every survey or research media release should be accompanied by an infographic to bring the stats to life. There are additional thoughts and examples of infographics on the Edelman Digital blog.
Check out the interactive State of the Internet Infographic here, or simply marvel at its non interactive beauty below.
Hat tip to Digital Buzz Blog where I saw this first.
Does the potential of a PR crisis played out in the modern social media environment keep you up at night? If so, this post and the presentation, created in conjunction with Edelman crisis management expert Grant Smith, at the bottom may provide some guidance.
Last week I was invited to present on the topic of Managing crisis in the digital age at the PR and Communications’ the Future of Social Media Forum.
The event was a three day conference for people in the PR and marketing industries and included presentations from the likes of Gavin Heaton (servant of Chaos), Ian Lyons (who I had never met before), Alexandra Kentman (who I sadly missed) and fellow PR agency staffer Dan Young.
The context:
What do you think? Do you agree? Is there anything you would add to my advice?
The post below has been brought about by what I believe was very poor broadcasting by ABC 2 during tonight’s screening of Tim Minchin’s concert at The Sydney Opera House.
Now before I start, I want to communicate that it is my rule for myself, and anyone else that asks my advice, to not to be negative online. I simply feel it rarely solves anything. However tonight I am going to break my own rule. Tonight’s management of the Tim Minchin concert by ABC TV 2, was very bad in my opinion.
The situation:
At 8.30 pm ABC 2 started broadcast of Tim Minchin’s one off performance at Sydney’s Opera House. A highly publicised event, evidence in the fact that as you can see above it was the most prominent promotion on the ABC 2 website.
Around 20 minutes into the broadcast problems started. At first I wasn’t sure if the problems were my TV, or if it was part of the show. But a quick look at Twitter suggested others were experiencing the same issues. Being an avid watcher of MediaWatch I thus assumed that the ABC was having yet again more problems with its broadcast.
At about 9.00 pm, ABC 2 screened a pre-recorded message from Tim Minchin that explained a ship passing by the Sydney Opera House, may cause issues with the broadcast. At this time ABC 2 switched to a previous Tim Minchin concert. I believe at around 9.30 pm ABC2 returned again to the start of the scheduled Sydney Opera House performance, commencing again from the start. Though I cannot be sure of this as I had turned the volume on my TV down by then and moved onto something else.
Why I think ABC2 Failed:
I understand shit happens. Having worked in PR for some time now, I have managed crisis situations for a range of brands and clients. Whilst this instance is far from a crisis, one truth about any potential issue is; the way an organisation handles the problem has a massive impact on the public perception of how big the issue is.
Based on the broadcast and especially the pre-record, tonight’s failure was not something that was unexpected by the ABC. It seems it was such a real possibility that the broadcaster thought it prudent to create a pre-recorded message from Tim Minchin explaining the issue.
The pre-record begs the question; if the likelihood of broadcast failure was so great why had did it not warn the audience? And further more, if failure was so likely, why did it take around ten minutes for the broadcaster to screen its message acknowledging the failure and next steps on the resolution?
I assume there was not a simple technical solution:
I have absolutely no background in broadcast television, but I assume the ABC explored all options to direct the outside broadcast to another aerial that would not be obstructed by the passing of a large ship by the Opera House. I also assume the ABC had no control over shipping through the harbour during the broadcast. Thus one can assume there was nothing done wrong in this respect.
What I think the ABC could have done better:
Provide a warning and set expectations?
Again, I am not a broadcaster, but I think we can assume that the ABC could have screened a warning at the start of the program stating there was the potential the broadcast of the concert could be interrupted.
A simple message at the start of the broadcast communicating something like:
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ABC would like to warn viewers our broadcast of tonight’s Tim Minchin’s concert may be interrupted. In the occurrence of such an event the concert will be replayed in full at the soonest possible time. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience that may be caused due to technical difficulties.
Had the program not been interrupted nobody would have given it a second thought. In the instance of interruption, which did occur, people would have at least been pre-warned and expectations set.
Moved to resolve the issue more quickly:
I think we can also assume that the ABC could have moved more quickly switched to the pre-recorded message and the pre-recorded concert. If so why not? The ABC obviously knew there was the very real potential of broadcast failure. Why did it take ten minutes for the broadcaster to respond to the issue? Why weren’t ABC staff watching the broadcast ready to instigate the pre-recorded message and concert more quickly? Again a quick resolution to the problem would have resulted in less audience confusion and less negative reaction.
Conclusion:
As I stated above, an issue is all about how you handle it and in my experience people react well to negative situations when expectations are set accordingly. Had the ABC pre-warned the audience, and acted more quickly to instigate its response I suspect the public’s reaction would have been supportive. As they didn’t, the reaction I observed on Twitter was highly negative. I also suspect their switchboard was jammed with complaints.
Of course this is a very first world problem. Nobody lost an eye, but still it erks me when simple things are not put in place to solve issues.
Wow they sure don’t make crises like they used to. In days gone by they used to say that the first you heard of a crisis was when a journalist called you up to find out more details on the reason why one of your employees was drunk when he crashed a company vehicle. Nowadays by the time a journalist has called 40,000 or so people will have seen and shared the twitpic taken by a passer-by of your drunken driver stumbling from the crash.
A true modern digital crisis is currently unfolding for AFL players St Kilda team Capt Nick Riewoldt and teammates Nick Dal Santo and Zac Dawson after a series of naked photos of the players have been posted on the previously unknown Kim Duthie’s Facebook page. As expected the story went viral, very quickly, both in social and traditional mediums.
Following the posting of the first images mainstream media coverage started appearing on 19 December and the media storm continued throughout the day of 20 December. According to Google News there are currently 878 articles on the scandal. I expect this to continue to grow rapidly in the next 48 hours. The graph below highlights the growth of the story.
Facebook has closed down Kim’s page, but it hasn’t stopped her getting her side of the story out. No sooner had her account been closed than she turned her attention to Twitter where she has furiously been posting and responding to tweets throughout the day.
Today, 21 December, the story was a top news item across the nation. She has conducted radio and broadcast interviews, but what is most interesting for me is the way Kim has used traditional media to launch her own content channels, namely Twitter (she has increased her following by 3,359, in the last 24 hours) and most recently Ustream, where she rebutted the tone of the media interviews appearing late today on the validity of the story.
According to some quick research conducted on Tweetreach tweets that mention her Twitter handle have now reached a potential audience of 101,000 people – those are mainstream reach. What you also have to keep in mind is that traditional media have never mentioned her name. So tweets referencing her Twitter handle have solely been because people have sought additional coverage on social media.
To the likely detriment of all involved, the media cycle in this instance will be determined not just by the traditional media, but also by Kim on her own platforms. I have a feeling this story has quite a bit more to run yet.
What can be learned from this from a PR point of view? Below are a few tips from me on managing crisis in the digital age:
What do you think of the tips above? ? On the whole I think St Kilda and the AFL have done a good job of managing this, so don’t read these as solutions for this particular crisis. More observations and tips in general. Do you have other suggestions?
Oprah’s announcement last week that she is bringing 300 of her audience to Australia is in my opinion the best marketing Tourism Australia has done since Paul Hogan’s throw another shrimp on the barbie ads of the mid 80s.
The announcement by Oprah generated global media attention last week and will no doubt generate a lot more when the lady herself arrives in Australia.
The Fairfax press over the weekend wrote an insightful article outlining the events leading up to the announcement and some of the numbers involved. I have summarised the facts below:
Milestones:
The numbers:
Included in the article I mention above was this paragraph:
According to Janice Peck, author of The Age of Oprah, advance notice that a book is to get the Oprah seal of approval is enough to persuade most publishers in the United States to increase their print run by 500,000 copies.
Congratulations Tourism Australia, PR success doesn’t come much greater.
This week I had the honour of presenting to PR students at the University of Newcastle (my old university) on the topic of working in a PR agency. Above is the presentation I gave. It was intended to be light-hearted and was pitched assuming minimal knowledge of the agency environment. The simple reason for this is that when I was at uni I had no idea about what a PR agency did or how it all worked.
I often get asked what skills you should have to get a job in PR and how you go about getting a job at an agency. My advice typically covers the following points:
This is just my advice. What other tips should we be giving to students and others looking to start a career in PR?
Can you believe this? BP actually endorsed a board game in the 70s about offshore oil drilling, which included the potential of oil spills. Ahh the irony.
There has been a lot of PR commenting on the disaster and providing thoughts on how BP should be managing its communication. I have decided to steer clear of the discussion. In my opinion BP’s issue is that there is a hole in the ocean floor spewing forth oil. Until that is fixed no matter how good the thinking or the strategy, the communication is going to be insufficient.
Shame the engineers responsible for the spill didn’t spend some more time with this game learning how to avoid such disasters…
Via Geekosystem.
Image by Greekadman - http://bit.ly/aqw05t
The title of this post was a bit of a link bait exercise, I don’t advocate the use of a #journofail hash tag, but I do think those of us in the PR industry need to end our fear of criticising journalists.
Tiffany Farrington, an Australian PR veteran and someone I respect a lot, recently published a post listing things that PRs dislike about journalists. The post contained a collection of anonymous irks PR people had sent in and was a good read. The post was not a rant, came on the back of a post which asked journalists what they disliked about PRs and was created with the desire of creating harmony amongst the community of PRs and journalists.
I loved the post and left a comment stating:
Thanks Tiff, refreshing to see the PRs’ side of this story told.
Whilst we may not work for the same side, our industries are undeniably intertwined. Over the years I have learnt lots about what to do and what not to do by paying attention to journalists in their articles, blog posts and presentations about how PRs should interact with them.
I hope journalists can benefit in a similar way from this post.
Frustratingly however, this was the only comment from someone in the PR industry on the post. Based on her high profile I assume Tiff’s blog is well visited, the blog was linked to from Mumbrella driving even more traffic, there were journalists that commented on it, so surely PRs were also reading it. Why then had none of my colleagues felt compelled to comment? My only assumption is that PR people are so concerned about the implications of criticising a journalist that it kept them silent.
The non willingness of my colleagues to speak up is not healthy in my mind. As I stated in my comment on Tiffany’s blog, whilst we have different drivers and objectives in our roles, the PR and journalism industries across many sectors (note I am not saying all) are undeniably intertwined. If those of us on the PR side are too scared to provide constructive criticism on how our industries can work better together then we rightly deserve to be treated in a subservient manner by journalists and continue to be frustrated by their actions.
I am not suggesting that en mass PRs should start airing their gripes with their journalist contacts, but when we experience mistakes, or poor practice (and this does happen), these should be addressed in a constructive manner. If we don’t, we risk a gap forming between our industries and a growing frustration on both sides.
In this spirit, my advice to journalists is to keep the mistakes us PR people make in perspective. PR agencies on the whole are filled with really smart, passionate and hard working people. PRs, like you, often work long hours in stressful environments with many demands. Sometimes this results in mistakes that frustrate you. Rather than launching into a tirade on Twitter, or elsewhere, when this happens, why not contact the person in question, or one of their colleagues you have a relationship with. Outline why their actions are causing you frustration and how they can avoid doing that again. I know you’re busy, we all are, but you might be surprised at how this small investment saves wasted time down the track and may even help you better achieve your objectives.
Of course I realise that in many cases what I am advocating above is the norm and there are countless examples of good relationships built on mutual respect between the PR and journalism industries. I am simply writing this post in the hope that we can increase these types of relationships and decrease the negatives ones.
I’d love to hear from PRs or journalists on reactions to this post.
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