Public relations needs to go where the readers are
Wales Business — By Duncan Higgitt on January 23, 2010 11:46 amADAM Vincenzini is a brave man. He advertises himself as a PR consultant, yet he has decided to bite the hand that feeds him and give up newspapers for a full year, in order to assess what impact it will have on both his work and as an ordinary, every-day news consumer.
He’s detailing his experiences on his blog. He says the whole exercise has been condemned as “heroically pointless”, although it certainly isn’t to anyone interested in the future of news generation. And if the scepticism comes from within his own industry, then that is absolutely mystifying.
The figures speak for themselves. In December The Guardian sold 300,540 copies, a 12%-plus slide from sales for the same month in 2008, and around a 9.5% fall in comparable figures over the six months to Christmas. Yet, just a month before, it announced that monthly unique users for its website had topped 36 million. Now, there are plenty of arguments to be had about the veracity of online stats, but they can’t be so far out as to seriously call into question the clear implication that The Guardian now has three times as many online as physical readers.
“If the Western Mail was to close, that’s half our strategies up in smoke,” a Cardiff PR friend recently told me. No sign of that yet, but the comment demonstrated a worrying absence of planning for the future at her agency. (As an aside, with the Western Mail’s ABC circulation figures of 32,926, or around 1% of the estimated population of Wales, perhaps its clients should be asking some pointed questions about depth and reach of message.) Of course, there are exceptions – WalesHome’s very own Katie Chappelle is a case in point – but there isn’t much evidence to suggest that Welsh PR agencies have moved beyond a focus on newspapers to wholly embrace online news and its possibilities.
Of course, many practitioners are active in social media. But then again so is my 72-year-old father-in-law – and, of course, so are plenty of journalists. You see them chatting to one another socially throughout the day (PRs and journos, not my father-in-law). It’s a break from work, nothing wrong in that. However, according to a new study of 371 US journalists and editors by Cision and the Masters Degree Programme in Strategic Public Relations at George Washington University, 89% said they turn to blogs, 65% to social networks and 55% to Twitter when researching stories. In other words, nearly three in four hacks regard social media as a crucial research tool. That number can only rise.
All Welsh PR consultancies must have some kind of strategy or engagement with online media. Now there seems to be compelling evidence that it should be prioritised ahead of traditional news.
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4 Comments
What a interesting blog. In my day job I regularly meet PR people who are still much more keen on getting articles in the print Independent than online – this is despite the fact that the Indy online picks up half a million uniques a day.
Perhaps PR folk need to move with the times a bit more.
I think it is telling that there has been little comment on this blog. I would suggest that PR-types, of which I am one, recognise the central point as fundamental to the development of their practice but few have much of an idea of how to work effectively with the blogsphere and social media.
Far too much emphasis is placed on media relations within PR practice in any case – and by media I mean print journalists. With the advent of citizen journalists, bloggers and direct access to the public through social media, the channels available to PR practitioners have grown dramatically. This has not diluted the media, rather it has enabled us to focus our messages and, once again, make PR about a dialogue not message dissemination.
The basic tenet of public relations is to identify your messages and your audiences, and then use the communications channels used by those audiences to share those messages. It sounds simple but even when PR practitioners just used media (and many have traditionally and rather narrow-mindedly limited themselves to print and, when they can get it, broadcast media) many struggled to match messages and audiences with the correct channels. I hope the days of the scatter-gun 300 name distribution list are over. Surely few messages can be so pervasive as to be relevant to the readship of 300 separate publications or channels?
I think that much more needs to be done by PRs to understand the blogsphere and how our audience relate to it and use it. What should happen, and this is a good thing, is the quality of writing among PR professionals will improve. Writing insightful and relevant news copy should be the aim of PR professionals. To see one’s copy printed verbatim in a newspaper has always been a source of pride but only if it is worthy of being printed. To the PR-hacks who on occasions feels they have ‘got one over’ because their PR driven (rather than news driven) article has been printed in full – what a shallow success that must be. Do we really believe that the impact of poor copy is the same as a solid ground-breaking news item? If you do, please go and write advert copy from now on.
The COI has recently seized the nettle and abandoned a long-trusted evaluation measure used by the PR industry for, well, ever really. The Advertising Value Equivalent statistics, or AVE, takes the size of the article in which your client or press release is featured and calculates what it would have cost to buy that space as advertising. And then multiplies that figure by three because editorial is perceived as being more trustworthy and impactful that advertising, regardless of whether the article was positive or negative, contained references to your competitors or competing views or was mostly a quarter page picture (and yes, some PRs include the picture in the AVE measurements). What a crock!
This change in the accepted method of evaluating the impact of PR is sending shock waves through the industry. It will force us to take better care of our audiences and the outlets used to communicate with them, be they print, broadcast, blogsphere or social media. The editorial stance and policy of each outlet, often far more focused in blogs and online channels than in the more eclectic traditional media, must be understood and matched with audiences.
I think the advent of special interest blogs, Twitter-lists, et al will eventually make our job easier. We will be able to communicate almost one-to-one with target audiences and, importantly, they will be able to engage with us and our clients, but only once we come to know with whom to work. I think the PR industry has a job to do now to make itself approachable and credible with the new breed of online citizen journalists – be they bloggers, Tweeters or online surfers of the Inde website – the comment section for which generates as much interest and opinion as the words of the paid journalists.
One final point. Please can we try not to consign the printed media to history? We must explore why the readship of these titles has declined so significantly. Is it really because people prefer to get their news online now? There is still something really pleasurable about reading a real newspaper within which every page has a lead story and where images can speak so clearly. Online news sites have templates for content which makes it hard to differentiate from the title and opening stanza which stories are most important. Reading a paper is an altogether different experience and one on which I am not willing to give up.
And another thing…? What impact will copyright lawsuits have on how we access media online? If people are forced to go directly to individual news sites to access content because the search engines are banned from doing so, what then? But that’s a whole blog in its own right. Over to you Duncan.
Thanks, John, for a new first at WalesHome – posting a comment that’s longer than the piece itself…
In all seriousness, however, all of your points are well made, and you appear to be highlighting a problem that paralyses all walks of Welsh life – a lack of imagination. It will put people on the dole queue, if it isn’t already.
As well as hits and readers you need to consider influence. This is impossible to accurately measure or quantify but let’s have a go…
If you work in PR, whether it is in-house or for an agency, then your ultimate client is a boss: a CEO, a minister, a Director General or head of something. These people tend to be more traditional consumers of the media and attach a greater significance to printed media, especially the so-called quality press. It’s what they have grown up with; they measure PR success by a healthy stack of newspaper cuttings stuck in a leather-bound book in their reception.
These people want to use PR to influence a debate and the people they want to influence are their peers, other bosses, who similarly attach greater weight to printed media. So, for this group – for now at least – the measure of PR success is still judged by column inches rather than clicks.
Away from this rarefied but highly influential group, many of us are getting our breaking news from the internet and generating ideas and commenting to debates online – as well as by reading newspapers. Take the debate about X Factor’s Jedward Twins. The biggest influencers in this debate were not the newspapers – not even the red tops – but a small number of highly influential bloggers who were reaching out to millions of people. If you are a consumer brand looking to gain exposure or an organisation that is attempting to communicate directly with consumers, you ignore this at your peril.