media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Crisis management for startups

What does a startup do when it’s faced with a PR crisis?

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.

A true PR disaster

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.

Stop digging

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.

It’s probably not a crisis

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.

Talk to your friends

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.

Get professional 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.

Rally the fans

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.

Have a plan

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.

Don’t be a fraud (of any size)

“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.

Getting off the content hamster wheel

The bulk publishing model starts to fade and media companies’ focus returns to quality

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.

Marissa Mayer’s end of days

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.

Data and the art of Public Relations

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.

Analysing stories

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.

Shifting PR thinking

“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.”

Stopping the pitching

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.”

Breaking the data silos

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.

Focusing on owned media

“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.”

Taking PR seriously

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.

Publishing in an ad blocker world

The era of ad blocking isn’t going to be good for readers

The latest release of Apple’s mobile operating iOS with an inbuilt ad blocker has again raised the issue of blocking website advertising.

Some see it as good for the advertising industry, believing it will force advertisers to think beyond intrusive pop up ads while others point out that ad blocking will devastate most of today’s online publishers.

While both views are probably right, it underscores how the media world is still waiting for a modern David Sarnoff to appear as the current model that sees publishers’ revenues declining is clearly not sustainable.

In the meantime though we’re almost certainly going to see more aggressive ‘native content’ – adverts posing as articles – as publishers try to find revenue and advertisers attempt to get their message across readers can expect more desperate attempts to get attention.

Those cheering for the end of the current advertising model should be careful of what they wish for though, the scramble for revenue and eyeballs is going be unseemly as we enter the era of the blocked advert.

Goodbye to the media buyers long lunch

Big data and analytics are changing roles in the media industry, managers in other sectors should worry about the changes.

Yesterday Decoding The New Economy posted an interview with Michael Rubenstein of AppNexus about the world of programmatic advertising and being part of a rapidly growing startup.

The whole concept of programmatic advertising is a good example of a business, and a set of jobs, being disrupted.

Media buying has been a cushy job for a generation of well fed advertising executives. David Sarnoff’s invention of the broadcast media model in the 1930s meant salespeople and brokers were needed to fill the constant supply of advertising spots.

Today the rise of the internet has disrupted the once safe world of broadcast media where incumbents were protected by government licenses and now the long lunching media buyers are finding their own jobs are being displaced by algorithms like those of AppNexus.

A thought worth dwelling on though is that media buyers are part of a wider group of white collar roles being disrupted by technology – the same Big Data algorithms driving AppNexus and other services is also being used to write and select news stories and increasingly we’ll see executive decisions being made by computers.

It’s highly likely the biggest casualties of the current data analytics driven wave won’t be truck drivers, shelf pickers or baristas but managers. The promise of a flat organisation may be coming sooner than many middle managers – and salespeople – think.

High volume over highbrow media – viral media wins for now

The media is being reinvented but how many of today’s business models are transition effects?

The first industry to face the consequences of an age of data abundance was, not unexpectedly, the news media.

As the web took off, the old model of distributing news through broadcast bulletins and newspapers collapsed along with the advertising model which supported it.

Now the entire news industry is in transition as we look for a modern day David Sarnoff to figure out a business model that works.

Profiting from the transition

In the meantime that transition has opened up a whole range of opportunities for canny and fast moving entrepreneurs with a range of sites looking to profit from cheap or free content.

Most exploitative of these sites are the viral sites who, at best, lightly rewrite someone else’s work before posting it on their own pages. With the rise of Facebook, the social media referrals have boosted the traffic to these sites.

The acquisition of ViralNova by Zealot Media at a hundred million dollar valuation shows the value of those sites at present. Zealot itself is on an acquisition spree as this is the fifteenth acquisition made by the mysterious company this year.

ViralNova and the other viral sites don’t add a great deal to the internet with their glib repackaging of other peoples’ content based around what their algorithms believe will get the maximum traction from Facebook’s systems.

The end of the web

Some even believe this model marks the death of intelligent content on the web with Vice’s Carles Buzz declaring the dream of the highbrow internet is dead as sites like ViralNova and Upworthy come to dominate the web.

Wall Street Journal however sees the opposite in proclaiming the ViralNova move is the highpoint for the content farm business model as the economics and business risks of depending upon Facebook for traffic are ultimately doom these ventures.

Sites like The Awl in the meantime see their future in writing intellectual articles for a small but tightly defined audience. At the moment web advertising economics favour high traffic over highbrow however it may be in the medium term the higher quality will win.

High volume over highbrow

Recent history hasn’t been kind to those backing sites like The Awl however the viral media and content farms have seen their finances become increasingly shaky as online CPM rates decline and Facebook increasingly controls distribution.

The news model does need to be reinvented and someone, somewhere in the world will do it, although the person who cracks the code is as likely to be a smart kid in the Rio barrios or Mumbai slums as some VC backed Stanford graduate in a SOMA loft. For the moment though savvy entrepreneurs like those behind ViralNova will be making a quick buck.

Social media and the changing media landscape

A Reuters report looks at the changing media landscape and how the older news industries’ decline has some way to go yet.

“We seek news on Twitter but bump into it on Facebook” points out the Reuters’ 2015 Digital News Report in its analysis of global media consumption.

The broad trends from surveying over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia are clear – social media is becoming the main way people are finding their news while television is slowly declining.

Probably most concerning for the television networks how younger viewers have turned away from TV with only a quarter of those aged between 18 and 25 tuning in as opposed to two thirds of those aged over 65.

Given the aging of television network audiences it’s not surprising that last week Australia’s Network Ten, part owned by Lachlan Murdoch, found a lifeline from the country’s main cable network as the broadcaster is finding revenues declining.

The question is how long advertisers are going to stick with television as audiences increasingly move online creating a revenue gap estimated by analyst Mary Meeker to be worth around thirty billion dollars a year.

For the moment, the great hope for the online world is Facebook with Reuters finding the service is dominating users’ time. In that light it’s not surprising the company has such a huge market valuation.

The competing social media services are still facing challenges, particularly with Twitter showing a far lower level of penetration with the general public, leading Harvard professor Bill George to speculate the company risked becoming the new BlackBerry.

While the online services struggle for supremacy and television slowly declines, the real pain continues to felt by the newspapers who continue to find their relevance erode and few of their readers prepared to pay for their content.

The Reuters report confirms the trends we already know while giving insights into the unique peculiarities of each market.

Business in an age of data abundance

The economics of cheap data change industries the same way abundant energy defined the Twentieth Century

I’m preparing a corporate talk for next week on the changing economy and one theme that sticks out is how the Twentieth Century was defined by cheap energy and physical mobility as mains electricity and the internal combustion engine became ubiquitous and affordable.

The picture accompanying this post illustrates that shift, Sydney’s Circular Quay a hundred years ago was just at the beginning of the automobile era. The previous fifty years had bought trams, the telegraph and reliable shipping but the great strides of the Twentieth Century were still to happen.

At that stage the steam engine and advances in electrical transmission had bought reliable power to the masses, although it was still expensive. What was to come over the next fifty years was that energy was about to become cheap and abundant. That drove the suburbanisation of western societies and the development of industries around the availability of cheap power and a mobile workforce.

At the time though information was still expensive, the control of broadcast networks by a few license holders and print operations by those who could afford the massive costs of producing and distributing magazines or newspapers made data difficult to get and worth paying for.

Today we’re at the start of a similar shift in information; it’s no longer expensive or difficult to obtain.

What that means for the next thirty years is what industries will develop in an economy where information is basically free and ubiquitous. Just as cheap energy created the consumerist economy, we’re going to see a very different environment in an age of cheap data.

Netflix and the global entertainment network

Netflix’s move into China is part of a global shift in broadcast televison

Streaming video service Netflix is looking to launch in China reports Bloomberg Business.

The Chinese joint venture to be run with Wasu, a company backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, looks to increase Netflix’s global footprint.

Netflix plans “to be nearly global by the end of 2016,” the article quotes a company spokesperson answering questions about a possible China partnership.

The Netflix model is a major departure from the established broadcast television and movie business where studios and producers would enter distribution agreements with local TV stations and theatre chains.

With Netflix and the streaming model, the licensing of rights to local outlets becomes largely irrelevant with the producers – which increasingly includes Netflix itself – able to cut out the local licensees.

A similar thing is happening in sports, one of the mainstays of broadcast television, where the professional leagues are taking control of their own content and leaving the networks, at best, minor players.

Neflix’s move is part of a shift that’s affecting many industries, including those like broadcast television that thought they were untouchable.

Local gets left behind by social and mobile in SoLoMo

Local reminds the poor cousin of social and mobile in the SoLoMo world

One of the tech buzzwords, or acronyms, a few years back was SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile. In reviewing the slides for the Future Proofing Your Business presentation next week, the term came up in one of the notes.

It’s interesting look at the fates of the three different concepts over the past few years; mobile has boomed and redefined computing and social has become big business with Facebook growing into a hundred billion dollar company.

Local though has struggled with Google, Facebook and a host of smaller and newer startups struggling while the Yellow Pages franchise dies. Despite the power of maps and geolocation, local just isn’t doing as well as the other two.

This could be down to the difficulty in harvesting the massive amounts of disparate data available to any service trying to draw an accurate picture of what’s in the neighbourhood.

Google Places tried to standardise that information for local businesses but the complexity of the service and its opaque, arbitrary rules meant adoption has been slow and merchants are reluctant to update details in case they fall foul of the rules.

Local services’ failure to take off has also had a consequence for the media as its in hyperlocal services that publishers have possibly their best opportunity to rebuild their fortunes.

That failure to properly harness mobile has also hurt merchants as many local operations are struggling to find useful places to advertise given Google Adwords and Facebook can be extremely expensive places to advertise.

So the mobile space is still ripe for a smart entrepreneur – a new Google or Facebook – to dominate.