Society and business in the 21st Century
One of the new models for journalism is being sponsored by corporate interests.
This works well until the news turns against the corporate sponsor, as Australia’s ANZ now discovers.
For companies there are many good reasons for to have their own media centres, but to pretend they are twentieth century style Washington Post, Watergate journalism is probably hoping for too much.
Understanding how a new technology will change industries is a challenge that has faced every generation in modern times.
Two of the industries most challenged by the rise of the internet have been the publishing and advertising sectors which have seen their established and wildly profitable ways of doing business demolished.
One of the mistakes almost every industry and business facing technological disruption makes is trying to apply their old models to the new methods which almost always produces poor results, the transition from live theatre to movies and then to television through is a good example of this.
So it’s not surprising that the advertising industry is now admitting that display ads on web pages have never worked and from that follows the maxim that print dollars equate to digital dimes.
For the online publishing industry, we’re still waiting for our modern day David Sarnoff to figure out how to make money online.
What does a startup do when it’s faced with a PR crisis? Recently Australia witnessed a spectacular example of what not to do when Sociabl, a startup that promised to connect users with celebrities, flamed out spectacularly.
Sociabl promised to connect punters over video with celebrities for a fee ranging from $500 up to $100,000 for individuals like Richard Branson with half the money going to a charity of the celebrities choice.
The app and its two young founders had plenty of coverage and all looked good until one of them, Brandon Reynolds, appeared on prime time evening show A Current Affair to spruik the service.
Unfortunately for Brandon he was interviewed by one of the celebrities listed by his app and the host, singer and presenter David Campbell, had never heard of the service.
Needless to say the interview didn’t go well with poor Brandon meekly declaring at one point “we’re not a major fraud!” You can watch the train wreck on the show’s website.
To compound the problem Brandon then wrote a defiant Medium post – later removed – accusing the program of slandering him and posting a pile of correspondence with the various celebrities’ agents.
Earlier this week I was invited to join a panel consisting of a journalist, a startup founder and a lawyer who also runs a startup along with myself we looked at how a startup can avoid a Sociabl like disaster. The lessons from it were clear.
Rule one in crisis management is when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop making it deeper.
Brandon clearly missed that memo and his defiant post that accused the journalists and the network of defaming him only antagonised them. What’s worse, the attempt to throw the celebrities’ agents under the bus was only going to take him and his business partners into a new world of pain.
So when things are looking bad, stopping and taking a deep breath is the first thing to do. The absolute wrong action is lashing out publicly at media, advisors or business partners.
There is no doubt Sociabl’s debacle was a crisis, but it’s an outlier and a situation that few startups or any businesses will find themselves. In most cases what appears to be a crisis is just a minor hiccup that looks like a big problem because you’re too close to it.
Most startup founders and small business owners are working hard, under stress and deeply emotionally engaged in their business. It’s understandable to over-react to what is often a minor, or even imagined, crisis.
By stopping digging, or panicking, and taking that deep breath you have the opportunity to get things into perspective. It’s also the opportunity to take advice.
One of the first things any new business should set up is an advisory board or panel. Helping with a crisis is exactly what those advisors are for. Talk to them and get their wisdom, usually they’ll bring some perspective and more experienced friends will know how to manage a crisis (if it exists).
An important aspect of asking for advice is actually taking what’s offered. One way of burning bridges with friends and trusted advisors is to ignore their advice after asking for it.
If you have investors then talk to them, particularly if they have seats on your board. They’ll want to know about the crisis anyway and if they’re experienced may well be the best people to help.
For early stage startups this tip isn’t much use as good PR and crisis communications professionals quite rightly charge a lot of money for their services.
If you do have raised substantial money however, then a good PR agency should be one of the first professional services engaged with the funds. Sociabl claimed to have raised $210,000 which probably wasn’t enough to get a good one.
Had Sociable engaged a competent and professional PR firm, it’s likely they would have avoided the disaster on A Current Affair.
If you have loyal customers, user or supporters then a crisis is the time to get them onside by engaging honestly on the web, through email and on social media. Be honest, be open and be quick to reply.
If you have made a genuine mistake then it’s likely your fans will support you as long as you come clean. All bets are off however if you’re ripping those loyal supporter off.
Early in your business do a risk analysis to identify where things could go wrong and have a plan to deal with known risks. Hopefully you’ll never use it but it’s handy to have when something foreseeable happens.
“We’re not a major fraud” will go down as one of the greatest lines of the current startup mania and one that Brandon Reynolds will struggle to live down for many decades.
At this stage I should point out I don’t believe Reynolds and Sociabl were a fraud of any size – he and his team simply didn’t understand how the world of celebrity engagement and the media work.
The key lesson is don’t be dishonest. Only make claims you can justify and promises you can deliver. Hell hath no fury like customers, investors or journalists who believe they have been misled.
For those raising money through crowd sourcing this is an important point as overstated claims and missed delivery dates will not only cause a crisis but see loyal supporters desert you.
More importantly, a crisis brought on by dishonesty may get the attention of the authorities if you’ve breached consumer law with your customers or securities regulations with your investors. Don’t be evil is a good philosophy for a young business.
In summary, the best advice for a startup in avoiding a crisis is not to put get in the position where you might find yourself in one however sometimes things are outside your control, when they do take a deep breath and talk to your friends.
We may have reached Peak Content suggests Kevin Anderson in The Media Briefing as media companies, social media services and sharing platforms flood the world with information, rendering a lot of what’s being produced by media companies effectively worthless.
For publishers trying to make money from advertising this has been the reality for the last decade as the market has been spread thinner as thousands of new channels have developed and the established players have doubled down on their efforts to churn out content.
To illustrate the content explosion Anderson cites Columbia Journalism Review’s 2010 feature The Hamster Wheel where Dean Starkman described the effect of media outlets’ focus on churning out content with a description of the Wall Street Journal’s output.
“According to a CJR tally using the Factiva database owned by the paper’s parent, News Corp., the Journal’s staff a decade or so ago produced stories at a rate of about 22,000 a year, all while doing epic, and shareholder-value-creating, work, like bringing the tobacco industry to heel. This year, theJournal staff produced almost as many stories—21,000—in the first six months.”
While that was bad enough new players were pumping even more content onto the interwebs as Anderson points out, in 2013 the Huffington Post put out 1,600 pieces a day from its 550 staffers and an uncounted army of unpaid bloggers.
The vast bulk of what is being put out is trash, in Huffington Post’s case well web optimised garbage, that adds no value to readers and is only attracting fractions of a penny per article. The model, as both Anderson and Starkman point out, is broken and no-0ne is paying much attention any more.
Fixing the broken attention model is what online travel site Skift are exploring as they rationalise their operations to focus on delivering more relevant content to their audience.
Skift’s co-founder Rafat Ali described how the company refocused on its core purpose of informing travel industry professionals about their sector and stopped regurgitating syndicated stories and those of less value.
We gave up chasing scale. We took out *all* goals on traffic on the site, for everyone. We could do this because we didn’t have tons of outside money pumping through our veins, and this was a useless pressure we created for ourselves in an effort to show the illusion of growth to investors. And since we weren’t chasing investors, we didn’t need to chase what they would consider scale. It was a vanity metric.
We cut back on spending any money on getting users through Outbrain/Facebook/Twitter. We cut back on the number of stories we were doing on a daily basis, on chasing the tail on disposable news stories. We also cut back on syndicating our stories — in which we put in a lot of effort at the start, publishing on NBC News, CNN, Quartz, Fox News, Business Insider, Mashable and many others, to zero effect on our revenues — and also cut back on publishing useless filler syndicated stories we got from a third party syndication service.
Chasing those ‘vanity metrics’ was killing Skift, just as it is for most of the publishing industry in the views of Starkman and Anderson.
While we’re still some way off finding the model that works for online publishing, Skift’s stripping back to the basics seems to be an important step in finding what’s profitable.
The biggest problem though facing the publishing industry is convincing consumers, or advertisers, of the value they are adding in a world of almost unlimited information. This is a challenge that many industries are going to face.
It appears Marissa Mayer’s tenure is coming to an end at Yahoo! as the company still struggles to find a place in the world
It appears Marissa Mayer’s tenure is coming to an end at Yahoo! as the company still struggles to find a place in the world reports Forbes.
The PR industry needs to better understand and use data analytics to stay relevant says AirPR’s Rebekah Iliff
The Public Relations industry has been mismeasured and undervalued, believes Rebekah Iliff, the Chief Strategy Officer of PR analytics company AirPR.
San Francisco based AirPR is an analytics company founded in 2011 on technology tracking the performance of PR campaigns. Despite being relatively young, the business counts among its customers Fortune 1000 companies such as Rackspace, Experian and the New York Stock Exchange.
The idea behind AirPR is by analysing the responses to stories, be they articles in mainstream media sites, social media posts or the client’s own content, PR people are able to get a much better insight into what is working in the marketplace.
“You can no longer just throw out a PR campaign and say ‘oh, we got 200 million impressions.’ No CEO is going to buy that,” says Iliff. “You’re going to have to have deep data that you can dive into and then report the things that are going to work.”
Part of the reason PR is failing, Iliff believes, is because practitioners are only making decisions on ten to twenty per cent of the data they have. To make the most of the information they have available involves a rethink on how companies get their message out to the community.
“We’re trying to shift people from thinking about PR in a linear fashion to get into thinking about it in a networked fashion. A really good PR strategy or narrative looks like a spider web, there’s all these things connected to each other.”
Making those connections is creating a new set of demands on the PR industry as new tools and communications methods evolve.
“The PR professionals of the future who are be best placed to be successful will be the ones who take an interest in the analytics, who understand how to talk about so they can improve the storytelling.”
In Iliff’s view part of the PR industry’s problems lie with how new entrants are taught is how to pitch to journalists, rather than to evaluate what works for their clients. “The second someone comes into an agency on a green level they should be bought into the analytics conversation and be taught how to measure it.”
“Instead they are taught ‘your job is to create storylines and pitch to journalists’, which by the way ninety percent of what you pitch no-one’s going to return because it’s irrelevant.” She says.
“Journalists give you credibility and they’re a third party endorsement but they can’t tell the story the way you want to tell it. There’s a disconnect between the role of journalist is, the role of the journalist is not to sell to your customers, the role of the journalist is to tell the story from an objective viewpoint that puts you in the context of where you fit in the industry. I don’t think people get that.”
“You should be writing the story, following it through and understanding the metrics around it so you can go back and create a better story. It’s like that connective tissue between parts of PR instead of siloing.”
The siloing of the analytics functions of PR and marketing remains a problem for the industry as well, Iliff stays and her advice to communications professionals entering the fields is to understand the data aspects.
“Get a Google Analytics certification, it’s very simple to do,” she states. “Take a couple of Coursera courses on basic statistics and how to analyse data – what’s the difference between prescriptive, descriptive and predictive data – very simple things that if you know how to talk about so you can have a discussion with the engineers.”
As the media industry evolves as it becomes even harder to pitch to fewer journalists working for a shrinking number of traditional outlets, Iliff thinks the future for the PR industry is with making its own content.
“I think in the next five years a lot of things will change because of a couple of things, one is that we have access to data so owned media programs will become stronger for the people who are focusing on it and it will become a huge component in driving leads and sales. So people will stop spending so much time pitching.”
“Things like owned media will be used in a more comprehensive and compelling manner to offset a lot of the things that aren’t working on the earned marketing side.”
“My hope is that brands just hire an internal storyteller like Dell has done and Adobe has done and HP to tell you the story and connect with their customers. That’s the closest point between A and B.”
Ultimately Iliff believes PRs will be taken more seriously in business is if they show they can use the data they have to show companies how to more effectively communicate.
“The only way you’re going to get a seat at the table, the only way you’re going to be taken seriously, is if you have data and you have the most relevant data.”
With data analytics reshaping most industries, it’s hard to see how the PR sector can resist those fundamental changes. How public relations practitioners apply that knowledge to their work is going to be key to their relevance in the business of the future.
Just as the late 1950s saw a shift in the western world’s society and economy, we’re now seeing a similar change.
Thought of the day. We’re in at point of change in social and consumer behaviour similar to that of the late 1950s.
Sixty years ago the drivers were; the first baby boomers entering their teenage years, the rise of television, an era of accessible and cheap energy, along with rising incomes from the post World War II reconstruction.
Today the drivers are; the baby boomers entering retirement, the rise of the internet, an era of abundant and easily accessible data, the rise of the internet along with stagnant living standards following the late 20th Century credit orgy.
Your thoughts on where this goes?
