I’ve been clearing out some boxes from the spare room and found this cutting from Campaign magazine, July 28 1995. It features a profile of the 27 year old me looking quite marvellously serious.
It’s certainly of its time. Some of my statements still hold up, and some are more dubious. I love the no-irony reference to Information Superhighway and check that URL – www.itl.net/guinness! Someone in the US had grabbed guinness.com, and we eventually got it back by offering him a weekend in Dublin and a trip to the brewery.
I’ve mentioned before a couple of examples where big companies have failed to understand internet culture and ended up paying the price.
Usually in these cases, there is a web-savvy way to deal with the wild west of social media, but in the case of the viciously satirical fake BP PR twitter account, I confess I’m at a loss what I’d do. Sample tweet:
We honestly didn’t think this was going to be a huge deal. No one cares when this happens in Nigeria
Not that I have any sympathy with BP over this, but if you were given the brief of responding to this (and assuming you’d accept the gig), what would you do??
As Kathryn Gregory, director of marketing for the Americas region recently said, “We like to look at what the other airlines are doing in their marketing and then… don’t do that.”
Rumours abound that Murdoch and Microsoft might team up to make Bing the only place where News International content can be found in search.
As a stick to wield at Google, it’s pretty much the only one Rupert has. And as they trail by miles in search share, Microsoft won’t miss an opportunity to team up and gain an edge either.
It must be tempting for Google in turn to consider exclusive deals with Murdoch’s competitors.
But what do consumers want? Imagine a world where you have to know “I can find this kind of content on Google but that on Bing, or that on Google but not on Bing”. It’d be awful. Like having to dial 118 118 for these phone numbers, but 118 247 for those phone numbers.
We want everything in one place.
I wonder whether Google would open up a PR front championing “search neutrality“? i.e. position themselves as wanting to bring you the whole web and de-position others as wanting to fence it off.
Launching Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 in Leicester Square was a terrific PR move. Games are the new movies and this was great example of thinking big
It’s easier than ever to get a PR announcement out there. And easier than ever to cock it up.
A year or two ago, I had a chunky piece of product news to announce, but no budget. No problem I thought, I’ve got all these modern comms assets to play with.
So announce it I did – big bang style – sending the news simultaneously to the website, news wires, the forum, facebook, the press office blog, Twitter etc.
I thought I’d been terribly modern and efficient, but the story got nowhere. It was summed up when the blogger relations guy called me, pretty out of sorts.
I just called up one of our key targets saying ‘I’ve got something for you’ and he told me ‘yeah, I know, I just saw it in my facebook inbox’. It’s old news isn’t it?’
Big lesson. Just because you have multiple comms routes to market doesn’t mean you should use them all at once.
Sequence matters. Think of PR as a fireworks display. You don’t set them all off at once. The impact is much greater if you build up to a crescendo.
Start with this release order and adapt from there:
Inform internal stakeholders
Key staff and shareholders should know first – especially customer service people
Leak to bloggers
Bloggers won’t write positive stuff if they don’t get to break it, so leak news to them and give them exclusive details/pictures.
Tell passionate customers first
Anyone following your brand on Twitter, contributing to your forum, being a fan on facebook or subscribing to your email should be the first to officially know. These people care about your brand. Critically, you should give them material they can share – eg, embeddable videos, pictures they can link to or exclusive offers.
Mass anounce to journalists, visitors and previous customers This is when it’s actually public. Such is the pace of the web that this phase can follow just hours later.
Post-launch management Reputation/news management in the days following the announcement is an intrinsic part of the launch task. Use social tools to monitor the conversation and respond to as many positive/negative comments as you can. In the first 24 hours, the prevailing opinion on your announcement will coalesce and you want it to settle down in your favour.
You’ve surely seen the story of the musician with a beef against United Airlines for damaging his guitar. Being dissatisfied with their response to the incident, he wrote a song lampooning the airline and it’s become a monster hit on YouTube.
Very funny, but not unique. There are many examples of nimble Davids embarrassing organisational Goliaths by savvy use of the web. And how we all love to see things evened out and the big guy look a bit stoopid.
So, say you’re United – this is not good PR. What do you do? How do you respond when someone launches a satirical strike? My advice would include:
1. Be nice There is no mileage in getting heavy. Be humble, generous, transparent and responsive. Give the guy a guitar!
2. Play along
There is no advantage in looking po-faced and corporate. The joke is on you and the only way out is to be a good sport. Perhaps in this instance, they could have made their own video response: a shoddy karaoke version of the same song with edited lyrics.
“We’re sorry about the guitar, and we’re even more sorry about our singing“
