PRSA Counselors Academy: Robert French, Josh Hallett, Giovanni Rodriguez

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Counselors Academy topped off the first day with top level panel discussion of the future of newspapers and the implications for PR. Robert French and Giovanni Rodriguez originally were to be joined by Tom Foremski. However, Foremski came down with a “bad knee”. So, Josh Hallett was recruited to pinch hit fresh off his all star turn in the Bloggety, Blog Blog session immediately prior to this panel. (After almost three hours on stage in two successive sessions, Josh gets the Energizer Bunny award from Counsellors Academy.)

Giovanni RodriguezGiovanni Rodriguez

Rodriguez asked the audience to think of Blogs as Do It Yourself (DIY) publishing; Podcasts as DIY broadcasting; and Wikis as DIY communities, markets and social movements.

These three developments, with their consumer generated character constitute challenges for both journalism and PR.

Giovanni indicated that he is involved in a work thatthe Society for New Communications Research has initiated to understand these challenges and to become an information resource regarding them. Rodriguez laid out a list of 10 things to watch:

10 Historic decline: “We can’t kid ourselves, newspapers have been in decline for a long time.”

9 Consolidation: “There are now three major newspaper chains in the U.S.A. … There are fewer stories being told. There is a troubling uniformity in reporting.”

8. Metros in trouble: “Some major city newspapers are in trouble. … They are in highly populated centres, but they are not getting the circulation and advertising necessary to support them.”

7. Stocks: “Family controlled papers are disappearing. Publicly held companies will tend toward a similarity of voice” as they seek to maximize returns.

6. The Internet – Advertising: Google’s advertising growth is being drawn from media like newspapers and magazines.

5. The Internet – Debundling content: Craigslist and Yahoo Finance are focused content internet channels that break down the newspapers’ model of bundling content.

4. The Internet – DIY Content: podcasts; wikis; blogs

3. Content across platforms: “The future may be about focusing on the content distributed across all channels. Telling a good story is still the core of journalism. Now, the channels are broader.”

2. Talking about “my” generation: myspace.com; Ohmynews; backfence; Greensboro101.

1. Investing in “my” generation: “Rupert Murdoch has not done anything with myspace.com – yet. However, there is no doubt that he and other large organizations are studying social media closely.”

Rodriguez concluded with the observation that, “There are always opportunities for innovation at times of change. … The future of journalism is innovation. Look for the new leaders who understand these ten rules and others.”

Josh HallettJosh Hallett

Josh Hallett’s consulting to both public relations agencies and newspapers gives him a unique perspective on the impact of social media.

Most notably, he is working with the Orlando Sentinel on new media channels. The Sentinel is transferring their columnists and B reporters over to the web.

Looking at the early results, he noted that blogging is having an impact on news gathering and writing. A couple of the Sentinel’s columnists use blogs as opportunities for citizen input on developing stories. Lawyers, interested parties and others comment on their blogs regarding stories. And the coverage can evolve as a result of this input.

In response to a question, Josh added that “In only two cases in the past year have stories been held for the print edition. They post on the blogs that they are working on stories and start to see tips start to come in.”

Josh noted that this development has implications for PR pros as well. As we see the stories develop this way during the day, we may be able to participate in the process of shaping them.

One potential negative impact on the public: “We are getting more and more into the daily need. We can construct our news feeds as content silos in which we do not encounter any news that disturbs you.”

Robert French

The driving force behind Auburn University’s progressive approach to blogging and journalism, Robert French is also a practicing PR pro and a “reformed journalist.”

Auburn is using social media in its classes. And French indicated that this is having a positive impact on the career prospects of his students. In fact, he reported, one student has just been recruited by Edelman in New York to work on the Wal-Mart national campaign. Edelman in New York. A dream job for a new graduate.

So, how are social media integrated into the student’s curriculum?

“All of my students are required to blog,” said French. “They must interact with other PR bloggers. … They must write in their blogs two times a week and they must comment in their blogs two times a week.

“We teach our students to write the new kinds of press releases using wikis,” he added. “Our students have taken to livejournal and myspace.com. They have incorporated SMS into campaigns.

“We practise Experiential learning. We run campaigns for clients in our classes. You cannot graduate unless you have run one of these campaigns.”

French believes that, “More of these programs will pop up in universities and colleges around the world” And he counsels PR executives to look for students who have this kind of interaction.

Robert also reported some recent research findings by both New York University and Auburn on the use of blogs by newspapers:

  • New York University has looked at the major market websites for the top 100 newspapers; 84 were incorporating blogs; some were incorporating podcasts and video.
  • 83% of the newspapers surveyed by Auburn are being updated as events happen on a 24/7 basis.
  • 60% never place anything behind a paywall.
  • 68% do not provide extra services to print subscribers in their online offerings.
  • 35% of their online efforts account for less than 15% of the newspaper’s overall budget — it’s inexpensive to do and many are still wary
  • 69% indicated that their online effort generates less than 15% of revenue — they can’t figure out a way to make money from it

Finally, he observed that the content in print newspapers is beginning to suffer because investigative journalism is being cut and younger, less experienced people are being used as reporters.

PRSA Counselors Academy: Steve Cody

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Steve CodySteve Cody, Managing Partner of Peppercom shared his thoughts about the vital role that having a future-driven vision played in the turnaround and success of his firm.

Cody had to reinvent his firm after the dot com bubble burst. Not surprisingly with a name like Peppercom, his client base tilted heavily to technology. And when the bust hit, many of his clients evaporated.

According to Steve, “Complacency is a killer. It’s critical to figure out how to differentiate yourself because the marketplace is rapidly changing.

“Agencies that just keep on doing what they’ve been doing for years are heading for trouble. The field of dreams approach does not work. We all have the same kind of relationships with journalists. … The more you are seen as just an order taker and a tactical media relations operation, the more your business will be marginalized.”

Cody has based Peppercom’s differentiation on “understanding what is keeping the client up at night and understanding the changes in the marketplace and the business.”

Cody believes in the value of street level market research. He regularly calls “eight to nine people to find out what they see as their challenges.”

He has developed services and solutions that respond directly to the client concerns he has discovered.

For example, after 9-11, he was told by many clients and business executives that they were reining in their communications budgets. When he probed to determine what areas were moving forward, he discovered that companies were looking for ways to heighten their security and ability to respond to a security-related event. Seeing this, Cody sought out and partnered with a security company to develop a CrisisRx program. Through Crisis RX, the two partner firms provide clients with a realistic simulation of their crisis plans in order for them to preview how they will perform should they have to implement them in real life.

Other product offerings developed in a similar way include

Pain-based Selling: Peppercom partnered with a sales training organization to provide clients with hybrid sales training that draws on the basic principals of effective communications that Peppercom offers in its traditional media training.

Business Outcomes: a measurement program development in partnership with a marketing company.

Cody and Peppercom use the intelligence they have gathered through their research as the driver for an aggressive promotion program for Peppercom.

“We are very aggressive in treating Peppercom as a brand. From the very beginning, we treated Peppercom as a brand. Today, we treat it like a $25K to $30K / month client.”

He constantly mines the data for use in articles and speeches. And he says there is a constant appetite on the part of business people to hear “what is keeping their peer group up at night.”

“All of our senior people are tasked with asking what’s keeping you up at night? What’s keeping your firm up at night? Then we publish the results. Every two months or so, we have thought leadership articles coming out.”

Cody has taken much the same approach to establishing a blog: first research what others have done, test his own approach internally and finally launch it publicly.

Recently, he partnered with PR News for a survey of the C-Suite’s opinion of PR, further differentiating his firm in a hot area.

And now Cody is drawing on this research to create PepperDigital to help executives close the gap between traditional reputation management and marketing and what they are doing online. Another need identified through research.

Blogger Relations: The Importance of Transparency Underlined

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I just had the experience of being checked out by a blogger that one of the consultants I work with had contacted via email. And this definitely underlines the importance of being transparent, truthful and straightforward in any blogger relations initiative.

Recently, one of my colleagues at Thornley Fallis, Keelan Green, sent an email to the authors of The Torch, a blog he had been reading for the past month. The Torch had featured a number of posts that discussed Canada’s moves to replace its fleet of tactical transport and Search and Rescue aircraft. Keelan identified our firm as the Canadian public relations firm for Alenia and Lockheed Martin, two of the companies whose C-27J and C-130J aircraft are being considered for this purpose. Keelan offered to provide the authors of the Torch with the same information that we provide to mainstream media. He also provided the URLs for www.c-27j.ca and www.c-130j.ca, the Canadian websites that provide information on both aircraft and their suitability to Canada’s needs.

One of the The Torch bloggers, Paul Synnott, was prompted by Keelan’s email to take a close look at us on his personal Blue Blogging Soapbox blog. He did a pretty thorough job researching our online presence and quoting both from Keelan’s email and relevant passages from some of my earlier blog posts.

Happily, we seem to have passed his test for transparency and genuine commitment to blogging and the conversation it supports. in fact, he concludes that we are “A savvy firm not afraid to embrace a new and changing landscape.”

Public relations practitioners should accept that this level of scrutiny of our actions and how they line up with previous statements will become routine in the blogosphere. What we have said and done is not buried in paper files or hard-to-search microfiche. It is in fact easily and readily available to anyone who knows how to use a search engine.

The bottom line: Avoid shortcuts. If you conclude that the blogosphere is important to you, establish your own voice first. Go ahead, contact the bloggers who you think are the most influential. But let the rest of the world see that you are prepared to say in public what you private encourage an intermediary to talk about.

A giant leap forward for PR Measurement in Canada

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Experienced PR practitioners agree that measurement of what we do is one of our industry’s most pressing challenges.

Tomorrow, a group of volunteers sponsored by the CPRS and NewsCanada will take a major step forward to provide Canadian public relations practitioners with MR2P, a valuable new tool to measure the effectiveness of our media relations programs (disclosure: David Jones, a Vice-President of Thornley Fallis worked on the volunteer committe that developed MR2P and 76design, our webdesign firm, developed the MR2P blog.

And there’s more good news. On the eve of the launch of MRsP, Bowdens announced that it is fielding its own upgraded measurement offering.

Canadian PR practitioners can only benefit from better tools to measure the value and results of what we produce. And the twin offerings by Bowdens and the MR2P group provide choice now and the promise that no one will rest on their laurels.

Congratulations to the MR2P team of PR volunteers, NewsCanada and Bowdens.

FeedDemon 2.0: PC Magazine Review Gets it Right

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Nick Bradbury points with justifiable pride to the positive review of FeedDemon 2.0 in PC Mag.

PC Mag calls FeedDemon 2.0 “simply the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and intuitively organized RSS feed aggregator/reader for Windows.”

The review concludes by pointing to FeedDemon’s

amazing combination of simplicity and flexibility that lets you easily organize feeds into folders, sort and share feeds, subscribe to new feeds, and generally manage everything from within a single interface. Keeping track of your feeds (sometimes even seeing them all) is generally much harder in browser-based RSS readers. You’ll save money using them, but you’ll lose time. If you can’t live without your RSS—and a whole lot of it—and you prefer to keep your feeds in a standalone application instead of teasing them out of an Outlook add-in or a browser, the FeedDemon 2.0’s $29.95 price tag is a bargain.

Amen to that.

Inside PR Podcast launched

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Terry Fallis and David Jones have launched a new podcast, Inside PR, a weekly podcast on the state and future of public relations. Terry and David are President and Vice-President respectively of Thornley Fallis Communications. (I work there too!)

In their inaugural podcast, Terry and Dave say that want to “take a look under the hood” of public relations. They plan to cover “everything from agency life to the tarnished and dubious reputation of our industry.” The guys say they will talk about “what it takes to succeed in our world and also the latest techniques and best practices.”

In their first episode, topics covered in depth include the newly formed Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms, the upcoming Web2.0 mesh conference in Toronto and a new philosophy for media training.

Inside PR should prove to be an interesting perspective on PR from two of Canada’s most thoughtful public relations practitioners. Congratulations guys!

Search Engine Optimization for WordPress

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I’ve come across a couple post that I found very useful in understanding how to optimize my WordPress blog.

DYI Search Engine Optimization
Soup to nuts advice from Lorelle on WordPress covering the basics of optimizing code, keywords and extending through promotion and analysis of site traffic and competitors.

Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips
Nifty coding tips for better permalinks, page titles and post titles from seventeen year old(!) Fintan Darragh

Are there other sources of useful advice on SEO for WordPress that you would recommend?

Linkworthy

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Connecting inputs to outcomes
Angela Sinickas on where to start with measurement, how to connect what we do to outcomes, and how to take the right amount of credit for communication’s impact versus other things the organization is doing to achieve the same outcome

Video From NewComm Forum: Speakers and Attendees Share Top Takeaways
New Communications Review links to Dan Karleen‘s video interviews

Will your PC run Vista? Don’t ask Microsoft.
From Engadget

CIRA’s Public Letter to ICANN
Michael Geist reports that the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has suspended voluntary payments to ICANN and calls on ICANN to follow accountable, transparent and fair processes (transparency: my company has worked for CIRA)