The Access Point

Public Relations is a Full “Contact” Sport

Here at Access, we take the “relation” in public relations very seriously, and we’re lucky to call some of the most esteemed names in media friends. It comes from 17 years of being committed to our clients, their stories, and to the media that help us best tell those stories.

As you can imagine, 17 years in the business has allowed us to build some truly phenomenal relationships with print and broadcast contacts alike, and one of the most long-standing friends of Access is Gary Kaye of Fox Business. Formerly of ABC “World News Tonight,” Gary is a 40-year industry veteran whose career is seemingly one constant deadline. Most recently he was the power beyond the broadcast hot ticket "Three Days in the Valley"  an annual, multi-day series featuring the biggest names among the Silicon Valley elite.

Gary was gracious enough to spend an afternoon at the Access San Francisco Office, letting staffers pick his brain on what works and what should be banished from the playbook when it comes to pitching broadcast media. We talked “do’s” and “don’ts,” but we also got into the bigger picture of how journalists and PR professionals can continue to help each other do their jobs better. 

One of the lessons he imparted was that PR is one of the professions that definitely requires free and creative thinking, and you “don’t always have to be a square peg in a square hole.” Journalists are a creative bunch themselves, and they appreciate fresh thinking and ideas that sell and tell compelling stories. Failing to do this and committing the greatest PR sin of spam blasting media without any intelligence about why they cover and how they cover it will land you in the worst PR limbo – being told by a journalist to be added to a “do not call list.”  Also, with broadcast, a picture paints a thousand words. Remember to include them as part of the pitch and realize that in this day and age of broadcast cuts, b-roll is now more important than ever.

Smart TV is not just about the pitch however, it is also about making sure your spokesperson converts any broadcast opportunity into more than a propaganda piece. Kaye make it clear that it is time for companies to rethink the canned messaging that spokespeople look to communicate at all cost. The first obligation of any interviewee that wants to be booked again is to be relevant and interesting, and look to insert company messaging as part of a larger topical discussion rather than at the expense of it.

Working both smart and hard, being persistent to a point, keeping pitches brief and concise, and retaining a commitment to fostering exceptional relationships are Gary’s biggest “musts” for PR pros. When you picture the shrinking media world alongside the increasingly tough world of public relations, it’s evident that media relations is a full “contact” sport – meaning that who you know is everything, and the strongest currency an agency can have is relationships.

- Cristin Zweig

The New Power for Brands is in Letting Go

The old saw attributed to former House Speaker, Tip O’Neill that “all politics is local” may be in need of a refresh. After the 2008 presidential election, you could argue that all politics is social and we might attribute some of that shift to Jonathan Kopp, Ketchum’s new Global Director for Ketchum Digital.

Jonathan would know. As a partner for SS+K, he served on Barack Obama’s national media team and was tasked with reaching and registering 18-34 year old voters. Last night in San Francisco, Access co-hosted with Ketchum a conversation with Jonathan on lessons corporate marketers could learn from the campaign. Jonathan outlined four strategic imperatives the campaign used to engage this target audience and change the rules of the game:

1. Involve brand advocates by engaging them where they live psychologically and physically.
2. Inspire then empower them to believe they can do it, they can have it, they can be it.
3. Amplify the effect by giving the audience the tools to act.
4. Respect your audience and your respect will be rewarded.

When it comes to political campaigns, Obama changed the rules of engagement and Kopp believes that the Obama campaign can provide many lessons to brand marketers. “Let the game come to you and don’t over-push the brand,” recommended Kopp who claims that in as much as Gen-Yers want to discover and share, it is important to start small and “avoid doing an open mic with the biggest megaphone”. 

In addition to discovering the message, consumers, especially younger audiences, want to personally relate to the message and that means that they want to feel that they were involved in the evolution of the message. They want to hear their words, in their voice and in their medium of choice. Many of the most powerful headlines that fueled the Obama campaign marketing came from the users. Of course the market at large has learned the power of user generated content, and Obama is the first politician who truly empowered the youth demographic to register, act and vote.

As social networking has overtaken email as the internet activity used most, brand owners may be concerned about the shift in power to the consumer, but Kopp believes successful marketing lies in giving consumers the tools they need to have conversations about their brands and let those conversations happen without interruption. Kopp pointed out that there is a lot of power in letting go and embracing the distributed power of the consumers (or in the case of Obama, the voters), but it requires a shift in thinking, and dare I say, some hope and change?

- Susan Butenhoff

Digg Meetup and Live Diggnation

More than 3,000 Digg fans, bloggers, media and music enthusiasts crowded Webster Hall on Thursday for the Digg Meetup and live Diggnation show. For those of you who don’t already know, Digg (www.digg.com) is the leading destination for people to discover and share the best content from anywhere on the Web, and also the biggest online news site, by traffic This was a special occasion, as it was a part of Internet Week here in New York. The Access team helped out with event logistics, welcoming attendees and hooking VIP guests up with their all access passes. We also got to enjoy great music from bands such as Fort Knox Five and Ursula 1000 as well as catch the live Diggnation show hosted by Digg founder Kevin Rose and his Diggnation co-host, Alex Albrecht.

What I found most fascinating was how much this event resembled a rock concert. Granted, some of the event was comprised of music, but the majority of it was technology talk - delivered by two total geeks in a legendary NYC venue with screaming fans…but tech talk nonetheless! I found it amazing how electrified the crowd got when Digg CEO Jay Adelson got on stage to give an update on Digg happenings and throw some swag out into the crowd -- they literally screamed and waved their hands like he was a rock God. They were begging for Digg t-shirts and other giveaways. Actually, I was pretty glad I was upstairs in the VIP section, as I was afraid I’d be squished down below in what was quickly turning into a mosh pit (although the crowd was definitely better behaved than a rock concert – no one wanted to sprain a wrist or break a finger and keep themselves from tweeting or Digging the latest story!).

For those of us who have grown up loving both rock music and the latest, coolest technology, the cultural implication that’s most compelling here is that tech gurus and geek elite like Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose at Digg are quickly turning into the next rock stars. Being a recent Bay Area transplant, I’m happy to report that it’s not only happening in Silicon Valley, the trend is also moving east, to Silicon Alley.  

- Meagan McCrystle

E3 2009 – Access Gaming Practice Mixer

The reborn E3 of 2009 marked a return to the booming, bustling style of the show’s heyday, and the spirit of the revitalized event was evident in the energy and enthusiasm of the 41,000 attendees. And while the hundreds of games on display in elaborate booths (often promoted by celebrities and attractive booth models) are the main focus of the week’s festivities, the chance to meet face-to-face and share a pint with distant colleagues, old friends and new contacts is surely one of the best parts of E3.

On Wednesday evening, June 3rd, the Access Gaming Practice hosted a mixer at the Moroccan-themed Hotel Figueroa, where top members of the gaming and consumer press rubbed elbows and reminisced with executives and game designers from some of the industry’s top publishers and development studios. Writers and editors from outlets like the New York Times, Kotaku and GamePro shared stories and enjoyed drinks and taquitos with the folks from Disney Interactive Studios, SEGA, 2K Games and 2K Boston (famed creators of the original BioShock) while the Access Gaming Practice team mingled with old friends and forged new relationships.

It’s hard to overestimate the value of these rare, casual, face-to-face meetings between press, publishers and PR professionals. Too often, busy schedules and crushing deadlines can cause the relationships between media and the PR people who pitch and assist them to devolve into cold, “just business” associations – which ultimately hamper the opportunities for inventive games journalism. Events like the Access Gaming Practice mixers offer a fun and informal way for people on both sides of games journalism to learn about the people they work with, but rarely get to see (mostly without the burden of media being pitched or PR folks being prodded for secret information). When media and PR people get to know each other (which games they are playing these day, what they’re looking forward to most, and even who they’re rooting for in the NBA finals) a professional bond is formed that allows both sides to be more creative and ambitious in their collaborations. 

The Access Gaming Practice will continue to host our media mixers at E3 and other industry events like GDC, so look for your invitation. We’re always eager to talk about games and enjoy making new friends – especially when food and drink are involved.

You can check out the invitation to the E3 mixer (featuring our trademark beer dispensing robot) here:  http://www.accesspr.com/acc/e309/

- Ryan Jones

  

Essential Game Reading for Runners

In the movie Logan’s Run, an entire society lives within a big domed city and are taught to believe nothing exists beyond the walls that contain them. This type of sheltered reality is similar to staffing a booth at the E3 convention, where all of your insight about what is transpiring just mere feet away is obtained from those who unwittingly cross the threshold into your kiosk-inhabited domicile. One major difference is that Logan didn’t have access to a PDA and that gamers don’t get “renewed” when they turn 30 (except for reporters, who are re-born at CrispyGamer). While there are many popular gaming sites that provide the E3 news that game fans are looking for - and by “news” I mean photos of booth babes - they still require actually visiting their sites. Whereas when I’m working the show floor - and by “working” I mean shouting game details at media and hoping one out of ten words is heard - I need the news to come to me. Among my favorite digital newsletters are Edge Daily, MCV, Dean Takahashi’s VentureBeat stories (which always arrive with a tidy TinyURL), and GameDailybiz. Well, it was GameDailyBiz, until it entered the carousel (yes, that’s another Logan’s Run reference).

Fortunately, it has been renewed in the form of IndustryGamers. Under this new name, Editor-in-Chief James Brightman – who is not an advertiser, nor I would guess a reader of this blog - continues to be an invaluable provider of news for the gaming community. So if you’re a runner (yes, it’s another LR reference, so don’t act surprised) and you need your gaming news on the go, then subscribing to these four providers is a great way to ensure you don’t end up behind the times like Jefferson Davis Collie III (Hah! That was a Land of the Lost reference).

- Chase

Getting caught in the new vs. old media divide

From PRWeek Insider:

“Newspapers look like an endangered species,” announced Senator John Kerry at this week’s Senate subcommittee hearing on the serial demise of newspapers. Full of outrage and drama, traditional print media representatives furiously blamed aggregators such as Google for being parasites, “leeching” the work of professional journalists and putting it on their own sites. Meanwhile Arianna Huffington, a celeb-journalist famous for broadcasting a contrarian voice, argued that the future of journalism is not about the traditional print world, but instead is based on a link economy, search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds.

In the middle of all of this, there is the debate among PR professionals as to whether bloggers are the new journalists and if they are, do the old PR rules apply? In a remarkably short time, certain bloggers have built their own brand with increasing impact when they talk about a client’s brand or product.  Today, many blogs are a form of participatory journalism and many online journalists see blogging as a channel for communicating their views and opinions directly to the audience without editorial interference.  

For the PR world, this leads to the reasonable concern that the very lack of editorial interference that is so appealing to bloggers may also be at odds with the definition of objective journalism that we have come to rely on when it comes to pitching stories and making our executives available for comment. Whether it is viral videos, Facebook postings, tweets-on-the-run, or power bloggers, the new direct-to-consumer dialogue has less checks and balances with very visible and uncontrollable ramifications. So how do public relations professionals influence and manage content when the very DNA of the new social media world is more about opinion and less about facts? 

First, we educate our clients that it is less about broadcasting and more about participating. As brand proxies, it is now the communication person’s 24/7 role to penetrate deep into all the conversations happening about a client’s brand where ever they are taking place and help determine when a brand needs to listen, learn and act based on the conversation, or when it needs to just be comfortable letting the free-form dialogue happen. We also do what we always do: we monitor, evaluate and counsel, knowing that we are in the midst of a new media world that is changing in real-time.

- Susan Butenhoff, CEO/president, Access Communications

Don’t neglect metrics when considering blogger outreach

From PRWeek Insider:

Dictionary.com defines influence as “the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behavior, or opinions, of others.” 
 
Earlier this week I talked about blog influence as the new currency for public relations professionals. Blogs can not truly be measured using traditional metrics like circulation and reach, and disparate blog measurement tools only provide a one-dimensional picture. PR professionals need to take today’s metrics further and identify which blogs are influential when executing across the broad range of services we provide our clients, including: planning and development of overall communications programs; deploying rapid response to negative mentions of company or brand; and building online community engagement.
 
We have taken this challenge head on with ABIE, our Access Blog Influence Engine, developed specifically in response to the social media issues we all confront when trying to isolate which of the hundreds of thousands of blogs require our focus, attention and (frequently finite) resources. The short, but sweet, explanation of ABIE is that it enables us and our clients to identify the most relevant and influential blogs, in a single view, and rank them by audience and market segment. This is similar to another compelling example of social media measurement Twitalyzer, which evaluates the activity of a Twitter user and reports on his or her relative influence and other useful measures of success.
 
However, it is not enough to have accurate data. Once we rank a blog’s influence, the next step is to evaluate what it will take to develop effective blog engagement strategies. That is the subject of my final posting this week.

- Susan Butenhoff, CEO/president, Access Communications

Influence is the new online currency

From PRWeek Insider:

Rarely do I have a conversation these days that doesn’t end up on the subject of the increasing relevance of social media and how we as public relations practitioners need to accurately measure the effectiveness of what we do online for our clients.

It is also an all-too-common experience when an executive is irate about a blog posting in which the blogger has been raving about a competitor’s product; and the executive wants to know why we can’t secure the same type of glowing online endorsement. The irony is that for all the so-called authenticity that supposedly defines the social media world, it is not uncommon to find that bloggers are a member of a competitor’s marketing staff, cleverly designing blogs to appear as an independent influencer voice in the blogosphere, or that an executive’s response to such a posting is far greater than the importance of the blog.  

Added to this is the challenge that while social media has taken on an increasingly high visibility role, the ability to identify and measure the importance of blogs is undeveloped and many of the methodologies used to rank and rate blogs don’t address the most critical question. With online communications, influence is the new currency – and the real question is how influential is a blog relative to other blogs within a particular category (technology, small business, eco/green, mommy blogs), and what are the criteria that are most meaningful in defining that. Necessity is the mother of invention and we have set out to develop a way to accurately measure blog influence, but more about this later this week.

- Susan Butenhoff

Turbulence Doesn’t Bark, It Exposes What a Company Is

Part Two on My Time with Jim Collins

“No one has the right to whine about their industry,” announced Jim Collins. Harsh words for a small room of CEOs who for the most part have all experienced a significant downturn in their business and personal financial investments. It was clearly tough love time for all of us as we absorbed his words of wisdom. Collins went on to tell us that every industry is undergoing change and experiencing challenges and that these are not sufficient excuses for a company’s poor performance. His proof point was the airline industry, under siege for years, and yet Southwest Airlines delivered the top ranking returns for all publicly traded companies from 1978 – 2002, despite the effects of de-regulation and 9/11. Southwest Airlines’ founder Herb Kelleher claims their success is largely due to the airline having accurately predicted 11 of the last two recessions, meaning they consistently managed their company as if a recession was around the corner. And even when they made the wrong prediction, such fiscal conservatism was good for the company.

The message is that the paranoid succeed and that a company that gets giddy on market growth exuberance is greatly at risk. In fact Collins strongly argued that it is senior management’s ability to stay consistently focused on internal, controllable dynamics that becomes the cultural touchstone for a healthy company. It is the 20 mile marchers, disciplined about running their companies based on their own consistent metrics, that succeed. In contrast, those companies that exuberantly draft behind the growth market end up building a reliance on external factors that they don’t control, ultimately sealing their fate. In the public relations industry we saw this with agencies that chased the dot com tidal wave and became a casualty when the wave crashed. More recently, a similar addiction to explosive but ultimately unsustainable growth expectations led to the fall-out we are all living with now. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been directly and negatively affected by the market exuberance hang-over.

“Turbulence doesn’t bark, it’s what you don’t see that has the greatest impact. Turbulence exposes what a company is.” This Collins adage goes to the heart of his premise that turbulence amplifies the strengths of strategic, well managed companies, and it amplifies the weaknesses of companies that fail to run themselves based on strategic consistency.

What does strategic consistency mean for the public relations industry? For Access it has always meant a fundamental USP (unique selling proposition) built around high touch client service that is only possible by deeply valuing our staff and giving them opportunities to grow and prove themselves. This also means making hard staffing decisions and understanding that opportunity and intention don’t make the wrong person the right person.

It means honoring the commitment of having senior people stay tightly involved in clients’ business instead of chasing new business. It means saying no to new accounts that aren’t right for us because we felt that we weren’t the best partner for their needs for a variety of different reasons. It means always hitting our key cultural and operational metrics even when hard decisions have to be made because staying focused on core benchmarks means we can react quickly when external dynamics change.

So how does innovation play into this? We are all beneficiaries of Silicon Valley’s abundance of innovations, but history has shown that innovations frequently come at the expense of strategic consistency. Innovations create and expand industries and have created billions in market capitalization; however, the alarming side of this equation is that research has found that only 13% of high tech innovators become leaders in their respective markets and that 50% of high tech innovators fail outright. As business managers we must always ensure that investments in innovations do not come at the expense of our core business.

So much to share and so little blog space, so again I must leave you with the promise of more to come...

Today’s Corporate Lesson: It’s All about the Tortoise, Not the Hare

I recently had the opportunity to spend time with the expert on the golden rules of transforming good organizations into great ones. As a man who can see around corners, Jim Collins’ most recent research and wise words are about how greatness can be attained in environments characterized by immense turbulence. Considering that Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha whose financial acumen is undisputed recently commented that the economy “has fallen off a cliff”, Jim’s words are especially timely, so I will share my take-aways in a series of blogs.

Jim’s headline is that true leaders are able to build something great even amid periods of great turbulence. Reassuring words, considering every day seems to be plagued by unprecedented financial news. Jim is a great believer in the philosophy that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” and that the companies that not only survive but are also positioned to thrive coming out of a downturn are those companies with a strong sense of values, people and process.  Similar to Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare, Jim believes that strategic consistency, rather than the exuberant inconsistency exhibited by companies chasing steroid-type growth, determines a company’s long-term success. In Jim’s words, “a great company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starve from a lack of opportunity.”  Jim also expanded quite a bit on his 20-mile march philosophy: this is about the company that executes with reliable consistency on a 20 mile march across the country will always outpace  the company that sprints out of the gate and quickly into major troubles. In summary, if a company’s growth accelerates faster than its people’s ability to successfully execute across the longer term, it will fail.

In essence, turbulence is a lens through which we get the best optics on the true measure of a company. It amplifies the deficiencies of weak organizations and seemingly infuses great ones with the uncanny ability to gain market share. We see this evidenced acutely by those companies who manage with great rigor and discipline during normal business cycles – they are frequently among the rare organizations who excel in truly challenging times  Key to their success is the discipline that must be consistently applied to talent acquisition, to securing only top quality personnel and not diluting the corporate gene pool with mediocre talent when money and growth opportunity mean anybody becomes the right body. This irresponsible hiring practice is usually driven by the objective of achieving headline-making hockey stick growth, rather than a relentless focus on the 20 mile march through consistent financial performance. Like Goldilocks, companies successful over the long term look for growth that is not too big and not too little, but measured and balanced against realistic forecasts and viable business objectives. Based on Jim’s research, companies who are more consistent with their strategy over time are always more successful than those who weren’t. And for those Silicon Valley companies who believe they are immune to such discipline due to the power of innovation, Jim’s research indicates that innovation will never compensate for a lack of discipline.

Most telling, there are 5 key elements that separate those companies that will do well during turbulent times from those that will become an asterisk in financial history. For that and more stay tuned to my next blog….

Susan Butenhoff