The Wax Blog

100 million years ago I worked as an executive at a publicly held tech firm. We knew that in order to bury bad news (ie a poor quarter) we would send the release out at 4 pm on Friday. By the time Monday rolled around there would be two to three more days of news covering ours.   Now more companies have become much more ingenious ways at burying their bad news – rather than addressing it properly. (For more on that, read my post on  “Crisis Communications in a 2.0 World“)

Wondering how they do it? Here are just a few methods I’ve seen. Comment with more examples, please!

1) Flood the Internet with alternative messaging. Piling on the social media releases, blogs and Twitter posts can help bury a negative opinion or story quickly by using SEO. Studies show about 60% of Internet users click on a result in the first page. Keeping that page inundated with positive information – particularly if it appears to come from sources that are not your own – can easily bury negative opinions. I agree with the Online Marketing Blog, though, that using this to address a real crisis is not a long-term fix.

2) Bury it on a holiday. At the end of 2009, a story came out about Goldman Sachs selling mortgaged-based CDO’s to clients and at the same time  selling the securities short themselves. Goldman Sachs supposedly made it quite hard for reporters to reach executives for comment and further blocked the story so that it came out Christmas Eve in the New York Times. Thereafter it’s received little press.

3) Make it impossible to fact-check the article. Although bloggers can write pretty much whatever they want, traditional media still needs to check facts in order to run with a story. Keeping CBS or as in Goldman Sachs “allegedly” keeping the New York Times from verifying aspects of a story can bury it too.

4) Divert the issue.  Although most of the messaging surrounding the Toyota recall focuses on sticky floor mats, the real problem may be the pedal or as Steve Wozniak asserts, it could be a computer glitch. (If you haven’t heard, the Woz ’s Prius gets stuck at 97mph while in cruise control) Although Toyota states there “may” be a problem with the pedal in its latest update, much of what we’ve seen in our media is concerning the floor mats. The Woz asserts its a software problem, not a pedal or mat issue. Since the main issue is sudden acceleration – something we haven’t seen in any of Toyota’s messaging – this is probably a good example of a diversion tactic.

5) Lie. It almost worked for Martha and it definitely worked for OJ.

Bottom line is that the organizations with true investigative journalists are dwindling. TV and print media no longer has the budget to spend months on uncovering stories ala Watergate. Companies have learned the game and crisis communications firms have become much more adept at the spin.  And that could be a very bad thing for us.

My blog traffic went up 30% in May. I’ve been writing it for a while now, so it’s not as though I went from 9 visits to 12 or anything, the increase was in thousands. At the same time my Twitter followers tripled.  That’s the only thing to which I can attribute the jump. Good enough analysis for me. Not good enough for some of my clients.

I’m finding that although many companies want to reap the benefits of PR 2.0 (which uses social media, bloggers, websites…) they want to measure it the old-fashioned way. One company was looking at traffic from each online mention and trying to directly measure conversions from traffic. The conclusion was that pitching bloggers doesn’t work, despite the fact they increased their member base by the tens of thousands in a few short months. Another client told me she was “disappointed by the lack of placements.” Even though interest in their new initiative was six times what they had expected.

The point is that if you’re going to use an organic method like word of mouth  to promote whatever it is you’re promoting, you’ve got to look at the end results. You can’t dissect each and every tweet to see if it turned into a visit to your blog and a subsequent affiliate commission from that Amazon book you recommended. (I know this, because I tried it.) I think that’s  hard for companies today in this belt-tightening economy. They’re so trained to understand reach and frequency – which never really made sense anyway – and to measure conversion rates (thanks direct/email marketers) that social media and online PR sometimes doesn’t make sense at a micro level. They can’t attribute ROI to each specific tactic.

But word of mouth has never been easy to measure. Just because it’s captured by technology like Facebook or blogs doesn’t mean you can measure it now. In 2005 an Adweek article (you can download it here – it’s still fantastically relevant) talked about our industry’s failure to measure word of mouth. In fact the author went so far as to say that we should all stop trying to measure word of mouth and focus on the message instead. I agree that we should stop trying to analyze which particular component of the word of mouth campaign triggered the response. Most of the time it’s impossible to really tell. Plus, that analysis will be used to try to manufacture  word of mouth or buzz in the future. And that rarely works.

If we’re going to embrace this next generation of the Web and its potential promotion benefits we have to stop using old tools to measure its success.  One of my clients  held a party recently to celebrate the new outdoor patio of their local restaurant. We contacted bloggers, used Facebook and Twitter to promote it, put it on all the online calendars and the restaurant promoted it internally as well. They had more than a thousand people show up – and this is a little restaurant. The owners’ reaction as to how it happened? They didn’t care. I told them social media would work and they’re thrilled. All they want is to do it again. Was it that one Facebook post that brought them in? Was it the popular restuarant blogger? We’ll never know – and it really doesn’t matter. Our client had a great message, we picked appropriate messaging channels and had a good result. Job done.

So listen traditional PR folks and marketing ‘mavens’. Stop trying to measure PR 2.0 the old fashioned way and PLEASE stop training your clients to do so.  Teach them to envision the end result, craft a strong message and pick the mixture of channels.  Don’t worry how new media gets you there. Just be glad that it does.