Archive for January, 2008
For those who spend any part of their day thinking about the flip side of advocacy: badvocacy (i.e., when people detract against brands, issues or causes), or just enjoy deep thoughts (though not the Jack Handey kind from SNL-days-gone-by)… then you’ll want to read this bigger picture article in today’s New York Times when you get a chance. How this is related to the Wife-Carrying World Championships in Sonkajarvi, Finland (pictured above) I’ll get to in a minute. But I realize I’ve possibly set the bar too high on this one…
“Economists Dissect The ‘Yuck’ Factor” is about how repugnance–at least, how our national culture and the times we live in define what is and what isn’t perceived to be repugnant, how it’s different by country, and how it changes over time–affects decisions about what can be bought and sold. Take a minute to read it if your first reaction is huh?
In plain English the article is about moral outrage and the trade-offs people are willing, or unwilling as the case may be, to make. The PR corollary is the snowballing backlash that’s fueled when something crosses the line. It can be quotidian, such as a YouTube video of a cable technician asleep on a customer’s couch from having tried to get through to headquarters. It can be nationalistic, such as the refusal to serve “French” fries in the Congressional dining room. It can be life-and-death, when a disastrous accident occurs for a company and loved ones don’t get the information they need. Whatever form it takes, the resulting badvocacy from moral outrage moves fast, far and wide. Reputation recovery is often a steep uphill climb.
At a time when companies are increasingly “putting their values out there” by making how they behave, not just what they do, a more public part of how they communicate and compete, the article is a timely reminder. Values are not necessarily universal and are subject to change over time with public sentiment, depending on which way the pendulum swings. We’re entering new territory here — a very positive development in my view but bringing with it new uncertainties too. This makes Leslie Gaines Ross’ new book 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation a must read.
So where does that leave us with respect to the sport of Wife Carrying? Repugnant or righteous? Yessiree or yuck? On this score, I’m happy to put my own values out there: for me neither the reward nor the quest. In my household anyway, the economics are clearcut.
Congratulations to the editors of PR News for their new blog. Diane and Courtney share some refreshing perspectives and blunt commentary about things that are happening in the PR industry — something we need much more of in the industry.
In particular, Courtney’s post about the recent CMO Leadership Forum in NYC was spot on. After several hours of hearing speakers talk about PR-related topics like social media, customer advocacy, thought leadership, word of mouth, measurement and other initiatives — but never once mentioning “PR” in their comments — Courtney spoke up and challenged them on it. Which is *exactly* what we as a PR industry need to be doing on a regular basis. Thanks, Courtney, for “representin’”!
My colleague Antony shared this with me and I wanted to be sure to draw attention to it because it is important. The number of netizen in China has reached 210 million, according to a report just released by CNNIC, the government-linked Chinese internet information organization.
The fast growing online population has made the Internet a new forum for average Chinese to, among other things, express opinions in a way rarely seen in Chinese traditional media. The report underscores the importance of considering online media in China as part of broader corporate marketing strategies.
The report is currently only available in Chinese on the popular Chinese portal Sina.com, but an English version is expected to be available later. This is a summary of the report:
- The CNNIC predicts that at the beginning of 2008, China will become the country with the largest online population in the world. China’s online population was only five million less than the
US, which currently has the largest online population in the world. The US had almost 216 million internet users by the end of 2007, according to research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.
- The 210-million figure marked an increase of 53 percent (73 million) over 2006, fueled by rapid user growth in rural areas and a boom in wireless access. The number of rural Internet users reached 52.6 million by the end of 2007, up a whopping 127.7 percent from a year earlier. The number of Web users accessing through their mobile phones nearly tripled to 50 million. This means about one out of every 10 mobile users use their phone to surf the Net, despite the higher fees and lower speed of wireless access.
- It noted that China’s Internet penetration rate, the ratio of Web user numbers to the country’s total population, was only 16 percent, lower than the global average of 19.1 percent. The figure in the
US is more than 70 percent.
- The most used online service is music, followed by instant messages, movies, news, search engines, online games and email.
- About 24 percent of Netizens had updated their own blogs within the past six months, while only a third of respondents believed what the bloggers write. News in the cyberspace, by comparison, enjoyed more credibility as 51 percent Netizens believed the reports to be true. The first step for 1/5 netizens online is to check online news.
- China’s online gaming population grew 23 per cent last year and is expected to exceed 84 million by 2012.
- Nearly 2/3 netizens have posted their articles/opinions on BBS/forums/blogs in the past one year.
- Chinese netizens spend 16.2 hours per week online.
- The number of internet users under age 18 and above 30 increased rapidly.
- Beijing boasted highest internet penetration ratio, which was 46.6 percent and slightly higher than the 45.8 percent in Shanghai.
As an advocate for advocacy, one of the most shocking things I saw last year was Sprint’s announcement that it was going to “fire” about 1000 customers for being too high maintenance. Now, granted, some customers are unprofitable and some might complain too much. But a mass firing? Of vocal complainers? Who are already frustrated with Sprint’s service?
Yeah, this one’s obvious. And not surprisingly, six months later, the “price of badvocacy” became very clear and very tangible via an unplanned announcement Sprint Nextel had to make Friday. The bottom line: Sprint Nextel lost 885,000 customers during the quarter — and now has to lay off 4,000 staff, cut a bunch of contractors, close 125 retail locations and eliminate 4,000 third-party distribution points.
Of course, Sprint’s bad performance isn’t entirely attributable to bone-headed customer service decisions. But I’m sure every Sprint employee must be wondering: Will the brainiacs who fired those 1,000 customers now be on the firing line themselves?
[Disclosure: Weber Shandwick represents Verizon Wireless. I don’t work on the account, and I share this not to attack Sprint, but to remind other companies of the “price of badvocacy” as they make their own daily business decisions.]
For C-level executives, what better way is there to advocate your company, product or issue than at highly acclaimed business conferences attended by the people you want to impress the most: your competitors, vendors, customers and targeted talent pool?
Apparently, a growing number of the world’s most elite C-level execs find the conference circuit a worthwhile advocacy platform. Reflecting the trend, the number of events available for such opportunities is multiplying.
We just issued the results of an analysis of speaking engagements at top-tier, or “Five-Star,” events among CEOs, CFOs, CMOs and CTO/CIOs from companies appearing on Fortune’s top 50 World’s Most Admired Companies list (”All-Stars”). Here are the big findings…
*The number of Five-Star events increased 50% from 2005 to 2007 indicating the rising popularity of executive conferences.
*All-Star CEO speakers at Five-Sar events increased 35% from 2005 to 2007. In all, more than four-in-ten (43%) have spoken at these events in the past three years.
*C-team executives (CFOs, CMOs, CTO/CIOs) have increased their visibility at these events. In 2005, only 4% of them spoke at these important conferences while in 2007, 25% of them spoke - a five-fold increase.
Companies are certainly leveraging the major forums as advocacy podiums. More will likely join the wave, as business leaders realize that advocacy is a strategic force of influence.
It’s always interesting to see what happens when new media and old media collide, intermingle and morph — sometimes all at the same time. Two stories today reminded me that the typically binary view of “new” versus “old” is completely off the mark.
Case in point #1: Some “old media” vets from the Charlie Rose show have launched a new video-driven “new media” site called Big Think – funded in part by “old academia” guy Lawrence Summers from Harvard and tech/web pioneer Peter Thiel (disclosure: Peter’s a former client and Stanford student journalist colleague of mine). The site uses an interviewing technique created by “old media” documentary maker Errol Morris, and brings the thinking of “opinion leader” types from places like Davos and TED into the public arena. Definitely not your vanilla consumer-generated YouTube videos — but nothing like “60 Minutes” either.
Case in point #2: Ad Age has a new video interview segment hosted by their EIC Rance Crain, and the first interview is with the outgoing chairman of Newsweek Rick Smith. Smith talks a lot about the evolution of Newsweek’s digital properties and the blending of extensive video coverage with a traditional print outlet. Sounds “new media” for a moment. Then he sounds decidedly “old media,” lamenting how reporting is less valued, that the “exclusive” only has a half-life of seven minutes, and is followed by a “gusher of opinion” on cable, Internet — concluding that “talk is cheap” and “opinion is cheap.”
So, who’s old and who’s new? I would certainly argue that a notion like “opinion is cheap” is old school thinking, and a dangerous one for today’s media and marketers, but I would also contend that quality reporting is more important than ever. Does that mean people like Smith and the Big Think founders are old school, new school or a little bit of both? I’m not sure it really matters — as long as they keep listening, engaging and evolving, I think they’ll be all right.
The article below can also be seen in this month’s edition of Marketing Interactive Magazine China online at http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/4467
Overcoming New Media Challenges
How To Engage In Online Conversations, While Avoiding The Pitfalls
By Scott Sykes, VP & Director, Asia Pacific, screengrab New Media Practice, Weber Shandwick I, like many people my age, am a digital migrant, not a digital native. For many of the younger generation the online world is engrained in their DNA. As marketing and PR practitioners, engaging in on online world can feel uncomfortable, because the ground rules are different than many of the tactics we have been using for many years.
Brave New World
What do we do online? Don’t we lose control of the message? How do we know who reads this stuff online? Why does it spread so fast? Why can anyone can have an opinion and make it known to the rest of the online community? What about the well-known flogging PR disasters large corporations have experienced recently? What about the companies that were outed for unfairly modifying their Wikipedia entries?
The reality is that consumers inherently have more trust in opinions from like-minded consumers, than they do in information on branded Web sites or in traditional media. And that’s exactly what is happening online. The capabilities of the Web today make it easy for anyone to have an opinion and make it known to everyone, like it or not, people are talking about your company.
In China where I live, for example, today there are more than 160 million people online. And they are spending more and more time online, an average of about 18 hours per week. There are huge numbers of people creating and consuming information via popular new media bulletin board system (BBS) portals, search engines and video sharing sites Sina, Sohu, Baidu, Tom and Tudou.
Naked Conversations
In preparation for a speech I gave recently in Hong Kong about new media, I contacted Shel Israel, coauthor of Naked Conversations, the now-famous book about social media. I asked Shel for his perspectives, about what had changed since the book was published about two years ago, his thoughts are posted on his blog. This book is amazing because it is so on point — Israel and Scoble called the revolution ahead of time. This book is a must read, in addition to Cluetrain Manifesto, and some other newer books including Infotopia and Wikinomics.
Israel’s three top perspectives about the changes since the book was published are:
- Blogs were the thing then, but so many interesting and powerful social media tools have blossomed since;
- Companies need to embrace social media or perish, at the very least they will lose their young customers to a company that understands the importance of real conversations with customers; and
- The future will again explode with new social media tools that we can’t even dream of now, just like what has happened in the past two years.
That’s not to say that the days of traditional PR and advertising are over, far from it, these types of media are still extremely useful for helping marketing and PR practitioners reach target audiences that care about their companies, products and services. But at the same time, if companies do not include new media elements in their broader plans, at the least they are missing and opportunity to engage all of the people that consume information and entertainment online, and at the worst, they are allowing competitors that are executing campaigns online to steal their business.
Tips For Overcoming New Media Challenges
So given this new media world we now live in, what to do we do about it as marketing and PR practitioners, and how do we avoid the pitfalls? Here are some helpful tips.
Consumers are creating media content themselves. Traditional PR experts who are used to dealing with journalists are now faced with the challenge of how to reach those individual “reporters” and ensure your messages are delivered to the right targeted audiences?
- Identify the most influential new media in your industry through research
- Respect them and talk with them in a polite manner, be aware of their importance
- Communicate with them via e-tools: MSN, QQ, email, but do not be afraid to call them directly or even meet them face to face if possible
- Provide multimedia materials as much as possible including video and audio
- Invite them to attend the offline events including press conferences, product launches, or other events
- For consumers, communicate directly via ecommunications including news letters, corporate blogs, BBS interaction and search engine listings
- Be transparent and ethical, be upfront about who you are and what you are doing, the online community can quickly spot a fake and this could seriously damage your reputation and business
New media can spread good and bad, correct and incorrect information to the world very quickly. How can we ensure we use the most effective, timely and correct response to it?
- Listen and learn, build an online media monitoring and alert system, not only for portals, but also for BBS, and blogs, and take appropriate and moderate actions when necessary
- Provide more background information, fact corrections and multimedia materials as soon as possible, since new media has unlimited space and allows instant interaction
- Build your own new media including websites and blogs, and keep it updated, new media reporters visit these frequently to seek latest information, especially when there is a crisis
- Don’t hide and hope it will go away, prevent an issue from becoming a crisis
- In China, official media, such as xinhua.net are still the most effective online channels to deliver official and influential information
- Encourage influential online portals to post reports from the above media
More and more consumers do not read printed media any more. Is it still effective for us to use traditional PR approaches?
- Traditional media outreach is still an important part of any marketing communications campaign
- At the same time you need to respect and engage with new media
- Do not treat new media the same as traditional media respect the differences
- Don’t be afraid, be brave enough to communicate with the consumers directly
- Use new media tools to communicate with your audiences
- Don’t get left behind, take the time to learn about new media and become an expert
- Know that you can not control new media conversations
- Ultimately, devise dedicated new media programs that complement your marketing strategy
How do we evaluate the effectiveness of a new media campaign?
- Measure how much traffic (page views and clicks) a campaign drives to the targeted website
- Measure how many online conversions were recorded during the campaign
- Monitor how much media coverage was generated
- Monitor how much and what kind of online buzz is happening
- Evaluate impact on sales performance
- Evaluate effectiveness in building consumer’s loyalty to your products and brands
In summary, some of the rules of engagement are different and it is possible for things to go wrong if we don’t give the online community the honesty, transparency and respect it deserves, but make no mistake, the online world can be a critically important part of a broader marketing or PR campaign, and we need to pay attention to it.
Weber Shandwick made an important announcement last week. The appointment of Leo Rayman from the adv agency DDB as European Head of Planning. Leo sent me a book over Xmas - Pollitt on Planning.
Stanley Pollitt is considered by some to be the father of modern day advertising account planning. I believe his story holds important lessons for the PR industry.
Stanley introduced the role of “strategic planner” to the ad industry as “someone who would decide when research would be done and what information was relevant to the creative development process and would remain independent of the pressures of the client and the creative directors”. Fundamentally Stanley saw the role of the strategic planner as the data literate consumer champion who would ensure that the agencies output was always kept on track.
The PR industry has transformed itself in recent years, by putting measurement at the heart of its agenda. Today insight is increasingly being adopted as the new agenda as clients provide increasingly complex challenges that require much deeper insights into the influences behind today’s customer behaviours. As a result we are commissioning research reports, buying into new consumer panels and uncovering new streams of data in a way that never happened before. And this of course is the issue. Does a fantastic publicity person also have the necessary skills to sift through all of this data and identify what is relevant or not? Can a creative guru always separate dreams from reality? Can the slick account man say no?
Historically the PR industry hasn’t divided its roles in the same way as the ad industry. But, as clients see the growing importance of advocacy within their marketing mix and recognise that PR is best equipped to deliver against their needs, things are changing. Every agency man knows that clients buy on trust and for the PR industry that trust is coming from demonstrating, consistently it’s ability to navigate client brands through an increasingly complex and cluttered world. It’s an exciting time for the industry and an exciting time for my company. Welcome on-board Leo!
Since the presidential election has underscored new trends and shifts in public engagement, advocacy seems top of mind. Many of the advocates for the Democratic and Republican candidates came out in force to cast their vote (so to speak) in Iowa and New Hampshire. Not surprising to us, high intensity advocates (see our research, New Wave of Advocacy) are more likely to be influenced by political parties than low intensity advocates or non-advocates (39% vs. 24% vs. 11%, respectively). These hyper-advocates are engaged whether it’s an issue, cause, brand or political candidate. They are passionate and driven and intent on making a difference in a wide variety of spheres. Even the low intensity advocates have some mojo as my colleague Josh Gilbert says. The non-advocates need to get movin’ and get engaged.
A January 6th New York Times op-ed from Mark Mellman and Michael Bloomfield addresses the power of advocacy in this year’s election. The authors describe how word-of-mouth is as potent if not more potent than TV ads on influencing what people think. The example is the Iowa showings by Huckabee and Edwards - a surprise given they were outspent by their rivals on a grand scale (in traditional ad dollars anyway). While their luck didn’t make it to New Hampshire, the op-ed raises a great issue, which is the importance of transforming “talkers” into advocates.
The power of advocacy is no new news to us. Our New Wave of Advocacy research showed that personal sources (friends, family, coworkers) have more than 3 times the influence as political parties when it comes to triggering support for an issue or cause (60% vs. 18%, respectively). Here are some demographic nuances candidates who rely upon word-of-mouth might be interested in:
- Men are more influenced by political parties than women (22% vs. 13%) and so, presumably, party-sponsored TV spots.
- Women are more influenced by WOM than men (63% vs. 58%) and are also more influenced by charities than men (41% vs. 34%). Clearly, this is something the male candidates should be thinking about this year (and hopefully for many elections to come!).
Our study also showed that in the US, religious leaders hold less sway on triggering support for an issue or cause than political organizations (11% vs. 18%). Might be one of the reasons we’re not seeing the once-outspoken religious leaders of our day pounding the campaign trail (yet, anyway).
We all know that this election is like nothing we’ve ever seen before, a sea change has hit the way society communicates. It will be some time before the final analysis of the candidates’ campaign efforts is complete but without a doubt, no candidate should underestimate the power of his or her adovacates. Successfully tapping into that power will mean win or lose.
