The Wax Blog

I  had coffee with a fairly new client today. We had a great talk that included his experiences with a previous PR firm. Although he spent thousands of dollars he didn’t get his expectations met. And so at the end of the contract he was discouraged and the PR firm had a dent in their reputation. Now it’s up to me to redeem his belief in our industry. You know what? I may not do that much differently from the old firm except that I refuse to ‘do the dance.’ Here’s what I mean.

PR is a squishy, unpredictable business. You can make a quick phone call one day and land a huge fish or you can spend three months sending elegant pitches, following up on time, and get nothing. Most business owners know that but you can’t help worrying when those placements aren’t coming in…after all it’s your money. Here’s where the problem starts. Many PR firms decide what they need to do at this point is make you feel good. They come in with some great charts, reports on the flurry of activity that’s going on, hints at big things that may happen….you know…it’s THE DANCE. You feel really good after the meeting but then a week later nothing’s changed and you worry again. And worse, you start to feel like a nag for asking all the time.

I’m telling you, trust your gut. This isn’t rocket science and it’s really easy to see if things aren’t going well. If your PR person is good, they’ll be knocking at your door looking for new angles or trying to expand the media list, or even trying new channels. If things aren’t working, they’ll tell you and ask for your help to find more interesting hooks.

If they’re not so good, or a traditional firm that’s just interested in adding up retainers each month they’ll do the dance. So when your meetings start to look something like this…

it’s probably time to look elsewhere.

We’ve had some juicy celebrity crisis’ lately that make writing this post lots of fun. When your company, product or personal brand encounters a crisis it’s important to decide what ‘voice’ you’re going to use.  Choosing the right approach is one of the reasons little-known (but uber-powerful) flacks like Marty Chalmers and Eliot Mintz make the heavy wood.  Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of voices being used most recently – as well as a few thrown in from the past.

Above It – How can I write this post without addressing Tiger Woods’ current situation? As I write this, he has refused to meet with the police and has posted a note on his website thanking his well- wishers and telling everyone the rumors are all lies and he wants to keep this ‘private’. First of all, not cooperating with the police right away sends the message that the guy has something to hide. Second, he doesn’t tell us what happened. Apparently we aren’t privileged enough to hear the real story. How would we feel if Oprah showed up 50 pounds thinner and refused to tell us how she did it? This voice implies arrogance and an attitude that Tiger’s above it all. Not a good move for America’s favorite sports hero and NEVER a good move if the law is involved. (more…)

Hopefully you haven’t had a crisis that made you pull your hair out but chances are, if you stay in business it will come sooner or later. Communicating during crisis is a big topic – but content is scarce on this one so I’m going to write about it in at least a couple posts. For this one I’ll define crisis in the PR 2.0 world, give you an example of a couple bad responses to crisis – and a few ideas for devising your own crisis plan. Would love to hear any stories about crisis you’ve got as well. (more…)

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.