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Media Training, Hoodies and Facebook

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Advertising Age has a fascinating article in its Sept. 5, 2011 issue oriented to the media training of 20-something leaders of tech companies who sit in their hoodies and sweat under drilling questions posed by reporters. These CEOs typically have no concept of media training and have not been privy to the wily nature of seemingly friendly reporters who turn aggressive to get their story.

Mark Zuckerberg proved that correct when he stated  his notorious faux pas, “privacy is over.”

He’s not the only one…every CEO and business leader regardless of age, industry or company needs to be savvier when being interviewed by media. It’s easier in the internet era for reporters to dig up dirt from more channels than just a printed magazine, and thus it’s easier to get hung up during an interview.

Where I have to disagree with this AdAge piece is when Brandee Barker, former VP of PR at Facebook, suggests that Zuckerberg helped “shape a media environment more accepting of the less-structured response or mishap.”  She states in the article, “There’s an authenticity that comes across, and if it’s awkward and they say the wrong thing, that’s OK.”

Really?

This woman is sending entirely the wrong message to young CEOs that it’s OK to come across as a noob and act befuddled. How can this be appropriate media training? When that tech leader grows up and heads to another company will that style be acceptable? In fact, like the Zuckerberg debacle, those situations will stick like glue and be resurrected throughout a leader’s career.

Ask Sarah Palin! She floundered and fell flat on her face in front of Katie Couric during her bid for vice president on the ticket with John McCain. Ask John Kerry who ran for president and all anyone could talk about was that he needed a haircut and acted like a statue in front of the cameras.

Being polished in front of reporters certainly comes with seasoned experience; losing your personality is one thing with too much messaging and training, but getting permission to bumble an answer and be accepted for it is another.

Media training is what we public relations practitioners strive to do with our internal and external clients.

It begins with research. When there’s a story brewing, the PR person must conduct due diligence to find all the stories and reporting style of the interviewer.

Then, we develop Q&A using the company’s approved message map so everyone says the same thing. Approved messages help deliver the facts without straying into murky waters (although this happens frequently).

Role playing is part of media training. A PR team tries to trip up the executive and put him or her in a stressful situation with a barrage of media questions. Using that message map is critical at this point, and knowing the tricks to sidestep a tough question is always helpful.

The onus is on PR only at the back end during prep. Executives must always be cognizant about their accountability to position the company in the most positive light. Often, company leaders forget they’re still on tap at the very end of an interview. This is when reporters swoop in for the kill, when there’s an apparent moment of relaxation. Leaders have been known to really mess up at this time because they think the interview is over.

It’s never over until the mic is off, the phone is hung up, and the reporter has left the building!

If you’re a business owner and you’re seeking the limelight to tell your story, or if you’re a politician running for office, then media training is absolutely a must. There are varying levels of training, and you don’t need to hire the big guns, either. Unless, of course, you’re Sarah Palin or John Kerry seeking the presidency of the United States.

Traditional Media Relations By Firefox

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In the battle for users, the search engine wars  heated up a notch with Mozilla Firefox pulling ahead a smidge with a recent front page Wall Street Journal Marketplace article regarding tracking deterrence.

The irony is that while Firefox announced it had launched a web tool to deter privacy infringement, the sites that scam, phish, scan, and covertly “steal” our data must agree not to practice this behavior for the web tool to be effective. (That’s an LOL if I ever heard one.)

The other two major search engines, Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer have the capability to launch a web tool similarly but Firefox snared the limelight for a minute with its traditional media relations thrust and first-out-of-the-gate positioning.

How important is traditional media relations to companies?

Very.

Imagine the stakeholders and business audiences reading this story. Now look at how much that story will influence users. I, for one, had a positive reaction after reading the piece and was glad I use Firefox.

As for media impact, any time a story appears in a national print daily the likes of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, the cascade of resulting media impressions is fierce.

As a business, your company needs to consider all communications strategies to positively influence your business goals:

  • Start with defining your business goals and set communications objectives and strategies to align to the company’s growth.
  • Conduct messaging to develop your foundation and platform for communicating to various audiences and how.
  • Include in your public relations mix traditional media relations ala what I mention above along with social media communications or online engagement marketing (the term I now prefer).
  • When there’s a good story to tell with all the elements for a national piece, ensure you hire the professionals familiar with pitching media. How we conduct media relations today varies greatly from how we used to secure story hits. The internet has altered how business is conducted; yet, media continue to operate with some of the same principles as pre-internet days.

Who has a success or challenge story to share about media relations these days?

National Media Vitamin D Confusion

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I had no intention of posting today; in fact, I liked my post yesterday, Thoughts on Public Relations, and wanted it to stay front and center one more day.

But this morning’s news stories in our two national papers (sorry USA Today) for the first time I can recall conflict. I’m shocked and keep reading each story to ensure I’m not seeing things or my brain is misfiring. It’s not:

  • In the Wall Street Journal (everyone knows I read it each morning and it’s my muse for blog fodder) in Personal Journal is the story “Triple That Vitamin D Intake, Panel Prescribes” by Melinda Beck. I read that column and reached for my Vitamin D capsule and promptly popped it. Beck’s reporting is taken from “a long-awaited report from the Institute of Medicine to be released Tuesday.”

How on earth can two highly credible, national reporters cover the same report to be released today with two opposite angles?

Should consumers triple their intake of Vitamin D as encouraged in the Wall Street Journal, or should we avoid Vitamin D and calcium because we already get enough, according to the New York Times?

Media Relations Strategy Gone Awry

As a media relations expert, I am disturbed as a professional with these stories. Knowing how national media work, it’s obvious the reporters each got an advance with the institute issuing the report.

  • But, how on Earth did the media relations practitioners not know the angles these two reporters would take and recognize each was covering the story from opposite ends of the spectrum?
  • Should the finger point at media relations?
  • Were spokespeople trained appropriately and was there a message map created?
  • Should the finger point at the spokespeople toplining highlights of the research during media interviews ?
  • Was the strategy to give each paper a different angle?
  • Was there a media strategy?

The national media must clarify the angles they took to cover this research, and that can only happen IF my recommended public relations strategy was executed right now:

  • Issue a press release clarifying to the nation whether consumers need more Vitamin D or not (and calcium).
  • Issue an Internet press release to crawl the Web immediately to rectify the news.
  • Use social media for this entire week to clarify the news about Vitamin D.
  • Launch a special website with highlights of the research and share the clarified message.
  • Put the spokespeople in front of the national morning show circuit to fix the damage these two stories have done.
  • Immediately contact each reporter with the appropriate news peg and asking for their help to rectify the news.

In my 26 years in public relations with a specialty in media relations, I’ve never seen anything like this. Astonishing.

Calculating Media Impressions

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Back in the day, we measured ROI of a public relations campaign with media impressions. We took a story in the daily newspaper and multiplied the circulation by 2.65 (the number of people we believed read a paper including pass-along rate). That’s how the total number of media impressions was calculated and how the success of a story placement or “hit” was determined.

This equation is still in force today; however, the number of people actually reading a newspaper today is lower and suspect. How can we be sure the headline and lead aren’t the only two pieces of a print story to garner attention?

The other way we measured ROI was to calculate column inches for a story to determine how much ink our placement secured.  Other ways we gauged success was to look at story content, tone, quotes, etc. These measurement tactics for traditional media relations haven’t changed, but the two PR ROI calculations for impressions and ink are archaic.

Yet in today’s Wall Street Journal, I was astonished to see “media impressions” used to describe the success of a campaign by Cricket Communications and Samsung Electronics to open new markets with the “world’s largest fully functioning cell phone, the Samsung Messenger ( 15’ x 11’ x 3’).” Not only did this stunt garner “38 million media impressions (the number of people who may have seen an article, heard something on the radio, watched something on TV, or read something on the Web),” it was entered in the Guinness Book of World Records by payment of nearly $5,000 to make the event official with a judge.

Nowhere in the story today is there mention of social media ROI to calculate campaign success; palpable.

If marketing is inviting public relations to the table to brainstorm events not yet designated world records by Guinness World Records, Ltd., shouldn’t social media as a bona fide strategy be included to calculate campaign success?

Media Relations ala Reputation Management

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One of the first pieces of counsel I give to companies embarking on media relations, messaging or message mapping is to know your competitors. By conducting a regular competitive analysis you garner full understanding of the space in which your company plays. While before competitive analysis was a challenging exercise, the onset of social media and social networking has made this research easy and fun.

To know your competition, who’s the spokesperson, what they’re saying, and about what product/service they’re preaching is imperative. This knowledge helps create a defensible or offensive position to tell your story via traditional media relations as well as social media engagement.

The August 2010 story “Rethinking Reputation Management” in Website Magazine says similarly:

“It’s time to rethink reputation management solutions. Ask yourself: How closely am I looking at my competition’s reputation? Identify companies you actively compete against as the first step. Commercial reputation management and monitoring solutions provide the deepest insight.”

The article goes on to say that tracking search terms produce the best information i.e. key words associated with your vertical. Once search terms yield a treasure of info, save them for constant monitoring via online reputation management tools.

What I mean by developing a competitive position relates directly to how informed you are about your entire industry sector. If there is a company with which you continually vie for market share, then learn everything you can about how they play and conduct business.

This knowledge translates directly to your boardroom chats about how to position your company to your peer group, customers, media, and other influencers. With the wealth of information now available online, you can build industry monitoring directly into tasks accomplished three times weekly.

I recommend some basic starting points to drive business intelligence (please add more to enrich these suggestions):

  • Monitor Twitter for trending topics, company spokespeople, and what the Twitterverse is saying.
  • Register yourself with Twellow and Listorious (with your own Twitter account) and regularly track others in your market there. Be sure to follow “people to watch” and get on lists to track the buzz.
  • Set up Trackur or Radian6, a few online reputation monitoring tools, along with Google or Yahoo! alerts, too.
  • Definitely monitor Facebook and YouTube for posted content as well as commentary associated to respective posts/videos within each social media channel.
  • Blogs tracked via Technorati and RSS are a must to monitor. It’s easy enough to subscribe to a competitor’s blog to see what’s going on and how aggressive their messaging truly is (relating to your market).

Rather than get inundated with data you don’t know what do with, monitor other companies for about six weeks to garner a firm understanding of competitors’ messages. This time period is enough to showcase a decent perspective of the alleged market leader. It also provides the backbone you need to begin to develop your own offensive position.

With the aforementioned, your messaging framework is rooted in competitive intelligence, and it strengthens delivery of your company’s external information to the influencers you’re trying to reach.  Your goal is not only to engage social media and create community, but to do it with aplomb! Hard-hitting, influential message delivery by designated spokespeople to traditional media and social media is how you get ahead of the curve and catch up to those already playing in your space.

  • Incorporate learnings from your peer group into your own messages. Package messages that resonate with a sprinkling of key words to satisfy search marketing, and be confident in your own storytelling abilities.
  • After you have a comfortable working message framework, package it into a message map. (Ask me if you’re unfamiliar with this necessary tool.)
  • Develop content that tells your story, issue many online press releases to build link love, drive traffic to your social media and networking outlets and continually garner attention from consumers at large.
  • Conduct traditional media relations with trade media in your market sector, and when a story appears be sure you feature that in all the respective places you publish content.
  • Give it three-to-six months to earn traction, depending on your aggressiveness.
  • Monitor your own company and the key words associated with your business. By doing so, you remain in an offensive position and can more expediently thwart attempts by the competition to gain the leading edge.

What have I missed? Please add your thoughts to the importance of competitive analysis for pretty much everything in which we engage, right?