James Crawford's PR and Media Blog
Thoughts on Public Relations (PR), Media Relations, Journalism, Social Media and the World
Hi. I am James Crawford, a PR man. Media relations is my specialism, but public relations is changing and the internet is at the heart of it.
I'm a Manchester dweller and lover of the media. I have too much music, support Manchester United and adore all things French.
I currently work for a Citypress, Manchester's biggest and best PR consultancy, but all the thoughts on here are my own and nothing to do with my employers.
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Posted by jameswdcrawford on July 29, 2010 under Media | 
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This report was published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and looks into the state of the PR industry.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on July 4, 2010 under PR | Read the First Comment
Is Steve Jobs trying to protect Apple’s public relations image by deflecting negative PR attention towards himself?
As public relations crises go, Apple’s iPhone 4 launch is up there in second place behind BP’s oil leak.
The product launch has been besieged by negative press and PR coverage regarding the product’s aerial and connection.
Recently, many bloggers have focused on an email from Steve Jobs, in which he emailed a customer and allegedly said that the phone worked perfectly well and claimed customers are holding the handsets incorrectly.
Steve Jobs has a track record of replying to people personally by email, as illustrated by this Steve Jobs’ blog. As you can see, often his emails are short and terse.
Now, the latest public relations issue is revolving around whether these emails were real or fake.
This made me ask myself the question: is this email exchange an intentional PR tactic-come-stunt by Apple? It sounds like a crazy PR strategy to cook up a stink for your brand in this way. Or does it?
Are people now talking about the incredible failings of Apple’s New Product Development team, or is the focus on the crazy public relations style of Steve Jobs? Or, put more accurately, is Steve Jobs deflecting some of the negative attention away from the brand?
Engadget, Erictric, Gawker, 9 to 5 Mac, Mobility Site, Electronista, Gizmodo, everythingiCafe and Techcrunch have all published the email story. What is more, Steve Jobs’ email is the number two story on Techmeme and a top ten story on aggregator Popurls.com.
There are other famous examples of this tactic working to great effect. Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, is also expert at this type of crisis management.
When his team is in trouble, he will pick a crazy fight with a referee, another club manager etc, just to take the heat off the team. Just read a few of these perfectly executed PR and press sound bites if you don’t believe me.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was what Tony Hayward at BP was trying to do in the US (but badly). Most CEOs have shares in the business, and the last thing they want to see is their investment being hit.
If push comes to shove, a CEO can get another job fairly easily. Of greater importance to them is the value of the business and the return to their shareholders.
It is very easy to measure PR sentiment and other public relations objectives, like public opinion and a move like this can be carefully stage managed.
A large corporate like Apple can control their PR communications in many ways and a brave CEO won’t mind taking a bullet for the corporation, as long as it’s not a terminal blow.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 27, 2010 under Measurement | 2 Comments to Read
PR people from around the globe recently met in Barcelona for a conference on measuring public relations.
The professionals in attendance came up with a seven point measurement standard for the public relations industry.
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The initial reaction from the blogosphere was that these points didn’t offer anything new and told PR people what they already knew.
My guess is that the PR Week article didn’t reflect the depth at which each of these points were discussed. Instead it inspired me to write this post on measurement.
So, just how can you measure PR?
Prior planning
What seems to be missing from most PR blog posts on this subject is that measurement should begin before a proposal has even been written.
Public relations experts use planning tools, similar to those used in advertising, to find out about:
- Markets, products, services, demographics, media and attitudes, e.g. TGI data or Caci for example
- online media profiling, e.g. using www.google.com/adplanner or Metrica’s http://www.metrica.net/ tools, which I have used.
Note, I promised to blog about Metrica because I used their great planning tool but fatherhood distracted me, sorry lads.
By undertaking planning, PR consultants can target campaigns, but also help to inform objective setting. More on this later.
Set public relations objectives
The first important step is to set SMART PR objectives
- e.g. achieve a three per cent sales increase on an e-commerce site by targeting the travel media.
Without SMART KPIs you can’t measure. Don’t be scared to set PR objectives which link directly to business outcomes, rather than media coverage objectives. However don’t neglect media objectives too.
What to measure?
Impact
It doesn’t matter if an article had all your key messages in and was 32 pages long if it had no impact with your target audience. To measure impact you can:
- Use sales or footfall data. Have you seen a return on investment? What was it?
- Monitor behavioural change. Read this post on behavioural economics
- Undertake opinion tracking studies of customers.
- What do they think?
- Has it changed?
- Research the views analysts and industry experts
- Survey your staff.
Competitors
Don’t just monitor yourself. Monitor your competitors PR activity.
- As a percentage has their share of voice decreased?
- What is the impact of their campaign on yours? What do your customers think of them?
- Demonstrate client and competitor social search visibility.
SEO
PR has a huge impact on SEO so measure it. Too many PR agencies fail when it comes to measuring online coverage. IT IS SIMPLE TO DO.
- Use Yahoo Site Explorer to measure backlinks.
- Map out when press coverage was achieved and overlay it to Google Analytics data on site visitors.
- Is there a correlation?
- Referral sites, where did visitors come from?
- Compare news content ranking with competitors.
- Run a keyword ranking report and compare to a competitors.
- Set keyword ranking goals and overlay any changes with PR coverage.
Interaction
Has your campaign created interaction with a community or group, both on or off line? Radian6 is good for online but expensive. In the real world, maybe monitoring the impact on third parties is a job for a community relations officer?
Coverage measurement
Don’t forget that nothing makes the client happier than clippings. Although the real power of public relations is shown with its impact on the business, a managing director loves to see physical results.
- How many clippings, articles, bookmarks, retweets, reblogs, readers or viewers have you achieved?
- Group the media based on importance. Is this a tier one, two or three title (one being most important)?
- Regionality: are you reaching all the right places both globally and locally.
- Photography: it’s a metric for print media, but a picture can really improve page impact, and readability.
- Advertising equivalent value (AVE): Firstly contrary to the CIPR, AVE is OK and is not “dead”, it is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
- Key messages: create key messages and measure their number, prominence and effect on the overall tone of the article. This can be done:
o quantitatively (e.g. how many times these appeared in the article.)
o qualitatively (e.g. was the theme of the article consistently on or off message?)
o by analysing use of spokespeople: where they quoted?
o Favourability.
- Journalists/ analyst/ blogger tracking: what are they saying and why and has it changed over time?
- Social-economic penetration: has the coverage reached your target audience?
- Reach frequency and opportunities to see.
There are lots more different ways to measure, but I am stopping now. I could go on and on and on. If you want to know more about PR measurement, drop me a line or visit AMEC.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 22, 2010 under Links | Be the First to Comment
Here are some top links which put the PR into Public Relations.
2. Another cool news curation tool
3. A tidy post on geeky digital media presences
4. A CIA problem solving check-list- ideal for pitches
Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 8, 2010 under Media | Be the First to Comment
Public relations is all about targeting. Sometimes PR professionals chose online media for their campaigns, other times broadcast is a better channel to get a communications message across.
In a recent PR post about online media and the world cup, it was suggested that FIFA has missed a trick with social media for this year’s World Cup.
My take in this public relations conundrum is that while FIFA has ‘dropped the ball’ with online media, it might have decided to:
1. ignore social media on inclusivity grounds
2. avoid the complex task of running a pan-global social media campaign
Firstly let’s look at point 1. Why would FIFA ignore social platforms on inclusivity grounds? Social media is the most inclusive form of media ever created, right?
My answer is simple. While I can afford a smart phone, a laptop, broadband and other modern luxuries, fans in North Korea or even in parts of host nation South Africa probably can’t.
Would moving parts of the World Cup experience into social media be excluding large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of football fans, from enjoying the tournament on an equal level to the rest of us?
I think it is very easy to argue “yes”. Just look at this map as an example, and look how many missing countries there are with no social platforjms at all.
Fig. 1.1. Click on the image to make it large enough to read on screen
Some might say that a true pan-global campaign should be tailored per country, allowing for use of social sites in some countries and not so in others, but I am not sure that this would be the right thing to do in this instance.
Football is a unifying force, so why exclude people from the experience? We are already seeing poor South Africans being priced out of tickets to matches, and this exclusion doesn’t need to be made any more prominent.
TV is still the number one medium globally, so let’s not forget that. I have been to rural villages in Asia and Africa and found families with TVs. It might be that during the tournament an entire village is crowded around one TV, but at least most villages can access a TV. Therefore a broadcast campaign should be the favoured platform.
Now let’s consider point 2, i.e. that a pan-Global campaign is just too difficult for FIFA. It is a slightly depressing consideration, but probably quite likely.
This presentation below starts to illustrate how difficult FIFA’s task would be. The presentation looks at which online media is popular in different countries, but even this very comprehensive study has lots of gaps, where there is no data, or possibly internet usage, i.e. Africa, parts of South America etc. Again, making a social media campaign is difficult to say the least.
Even in the ‘developed’ world some social platforms are more important than others. In Holland, for example, Facebook is not the number one platform and Twitter is even less popular. The Differences between platforms in other countries is a huge barrier and a complex problem.
Difficulty is no excuse of course for not giving social media a go. To the contrary, but while there are still organisations in the UK, US and elsewhere who are still baulking at trying social media because of a lack of understanding, one can imagine that perhaps FIFA found the task just too challenging.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on May 26, 2010 under Media | Read the First Comment
I am sure I am not the first Public Relations person to trot out the old cliché that talent borrows and genius steals. With this in mind I thought I would share a few PR blogs from which I have learn so much over the past few years.
Firstly let’s get the big two out of the way:
• Steve Rubel is a PR giant and runs one of the most authoritative public relations blogs on the planet http://www.steverubel.com. This PR blog gives clear and concise advice on all things online, without the usual jargon and “social media guru” nonsense
• Brian Solis is another giant of the internet and a leader in PR 2.0 thinking.
• Bridging the gap nicely from the US to the UK PR industry is American expat Fernando Rizo with his blog. Too many PR people fall into the Chris Morris / Nathan Barley school of idiot, but I have met Fernando and not only is he a well rounded human being, he also knows his stuff. His blog is free of the usual pretention which litters public relations
• Litman Live is an exceptional PR blog authored by public relations’ man Mike Litman . His blog is a lifestream of all the great stuff he finds on the web, along with his own posts
• Adam Vincenzini ‘s PR blog is superb, although I prefer his Posterous blog, which is rougher around the edges but full of rebloggable insight
• PR Squared is always worth a nosy
• 72 Point is a UK news agency used by PR professionals throughout the UK. Their hatred of PR spam and crap press releases is always refreshing to hear, especially for any newbies to our industry
• Mark Borkowski is famous as a stuntster and maverick. His public relations blog is at its best when discussing the murky world of celebrity PR
• Citypress is Manchester’s best PR agency and although I am culpable for not writing a post for it since April – gulp – it is worth keeping an eye on it for occasional works of genius
• We shouldn’t forget the young either and Ben Cotton’s PR blog is a great example to ‘new breed’ practitioners of public relations who are trying to enter the world of PR. His blog screams employability as does Kat4pr which is the blog of Katerina Hejralova.
• And finally, who can forget PR Week and its blogs?.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on May 15, 2010 under PR | Be the First to Comment
Being mega direct myself, passive aggression bugs me, so much so it is a mini obsession of mine. Unfortunately because I work in public relations, it is an all too familiar trait…
Alas, this post amused me. It looks like in the future 12 year old kids will be working brand marketers and PRs hard. Here’s a nugget but have a read of the whole post too:
As much as I dislike the general nastiness that can occur on a brand wall or in comment threads, I have to admit that it really gets to me more than just about anything when it’s done by younger kids. Although it’s aggravating to have to delete or defend against a minor (they even have an acronym…ATYO which stands for “annoying twelve year old”), as a father myself I’m more incensed by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any parental monitoring. I see many of these kids say the same things, over and over on different community pages. I wish I could tell you that’s it’s just a few, but it’s not. It feels epidemic. It feels like there are mobs of children doing whatever they want, whenever they want, saying anything they want, online…and nobody is paying attention to them. They aren’t just saying annoying things, they viciously attack other people with racial and sexual slurs. F-bombs are prevalent. They say things like, “join my game and I’ll rape you” to mean “I’ll beat you in an online game”. I’m not holier-than-thou, but if I knew that one of my kids wrote that online, we would have a long talk, and probably not an entirely pleasant one.
Posted by jameswdcrawford on May 10, 2010 under Facebook | Be the First to Comment
Posted by jameswdcrawford on May 8, 2010 under Media | Be the First to Comment
This is one of seven bullet points lifted from post on Boing Boing. It’s about the impact of the internet on TV.
Clearly TV isn’t dying, it’s just the business model that is changing.
The traditional TV model is dying
The broadcast model of networks like ABC and NBC is certainly under a lot of pressure, but cable networks are doing very well. Part of the problem is actually a press issue…the bigger, older broadcast networks get a disproportionate amount of coverage, so when they have issues, it can seem like all of TV is in trouble. For instance, buried at the end of this otherwise doom and gloom filled MarketWatch article is an interesting tidbit:
“Cable was again a positive note for NBC Universal in the fourth quarter, showing an 8% increase in operating profit, with solid growth at USA, Syfy, Bravo and Oxygen, Sherin said. First-quarter advertising rates at the cable networks are up more than 30%, Sherin explained, after increasing by the same amount during the fourth quarter.”
Posted by jameswdcrawford on May 3, 2010 under Media | 2 Comments to Read
Last decade the big story was how technology enabled all of us to become publishers. However, the reality is quality content remains work. Many people don’t have the time or the motivation to consistently churn it out. Truth: those who did manage to attract large followings all worked their tails off to get there. People like Gary Vanyerchuck, Chris Brogan and Jeff Jarvis, just to name three, attained and scaled their influence thanks to a mix of talent and elbow grease. But that was the first chapter of media reforestation. Chapter two is about to begin and tablets and smart phones will take center stage, enabling us to all subconsciously publish and media to form like magic out of algorithms.
Content creation today still requires intent – thought then action. However soon we will be able to put our gadgets on autopilot and have them automatically contribute to the process even when they are safely tucked away in our pockets, pocketbooks and backpacks. When these millions of gadgets become powerful, always-on servers it will revolutionize media.
