Category Archives: PR

E-Voice. Some Thoughts on Social Media.

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I’ve always felt that the line between social media and traditional media was an artificial one, but it occurs to me now that my perspective is shaped by my being, when it really comes down to it, a writer first.

When your primary goal is to communicate, your audience is always there, in front of you. You’re always trying to tell a story that will connect with your readers.

What’s different, with social media, is that readers can talk back.

I recently added the TaylorMade Facebook page to my FB feed, and I was reading the comments this morning to a new post they’ve put up. It’s a short note about some new irons that are now available (Tour Preferred MB, MC, and CB irons), and one of the things that is immediately obvious is that some peoples’ comments are . . . shall we say, feisty.

How different from the days when a PR or marketing communications person would issue a press release without having to exit his or her comfortable mar-com bubble. If someone’s response to your company’s news was negative– “that’s ugly/too expensive/like someone else’s brand better”–you wouldn’t know. Sure, some inkling of those responses might trickle back to you over time, but it would be long after the release was issued, published, and essentially forgotten.

Now you know immediately.

And that’s a good thing, for a couple of reasons. First, it affords companies the opportunity to gather feedback. No, the comments on a Facebook page don’t reach the standards of bona fide market research, but there is data in there, if you know how to qualify it.

Equally important, the feedback ensures you put communication first.

Communication is not a one-way endeavor. It requires listening as well as talking. It’s reciprocal.

Which gets me to what I think of as “e-voice.”

The risk with traditional marketing communications has always been that the company’s voice sounds out-of-touch. You see it in pieces that are “corporate-y.” They speak with marketing department lingo instead of sounding like real people, by which I mean the folks who actually might buy the product or service. The language is stiff and formal, instead of being conversational. At its worst, the communications devolve into flat descriptions of features-benefits, devoid of any humanity whatsoever. It becomes noise–and people tune it out.

Carry that style into the realm of social media, and you set yourself up for mockery or worse. One local business here in Roch, in a particularly egregious example, has used its Twitter account to repeat the marketing tagline created for its radio and television ads. Sorry, but that is no way to win a social media audience.

E-voice is different. E-voice is genuine. It feels like it’s a real human being, not a marketing slogan bot. It is casual, conversational. And it is always aware of that reciprocity. Even when the person tweeting or facebooking or blogging doesn’t respond to commentors, e-voice always sounds as if it’s addressing actual people. It is always an invitation to converse, rather than a one-sided proclamation of some kind.

There was a time when companies, sensing all this, got a bit nervous. And some probably still are. But an e-voice doesn’t need to be out of control. It doesn’t need to diverge from the parameters set by a company’s brand and reputation.

In fact, e-voice is essentially a kind of fictional character, bound as surely as a fictional character by the constraints of personality, habits, values, even decorum.

You could think of e-voice as the 2D textual version of Old Spice Guy. It’s a creation, a manufactured entity, and yet because it has a personality it suggests a life of its own, and so resonates with its audience.

You almost need to start, with social media, by creating this character–this persona–behind the scenes. The rest just follows naturally, and the conversation begins.

I love this

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“I ONCE HAD A GIRLFRIEND WHO QUIT JOURNALISM and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was ‘more ethical.'”

lol

That’s an Instapundit lead-in to a link to this piece, about journalists cheating on an online poll.

As a PR professional, I will say this — about my firm, anyway.

First, our advocacy, when we go to work for our clients, is at least out in the open.

And second, we take credibility seriously, because we have to — if we lose it, our clients get upset with us and we stop making money.

Journalists, otoh — the bad eggs, anyway — seem to think more short term. “If I write a good fake story it will get me a full-time gig at this magazine/win me a Pulitzer/save me having to run around doing actual research.” Forgetting that, ultimately, their shenanigans paint everything it touches with a big ol’ tarnish brush.

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Sorry, but corporations can’t “blog”

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Via Booksquare comes the news that Penguin has a blog.

Okay. Far be it from me to suggest this is an original thought, although it’s only now I’ve articulated it to myself — I know there’s a whole sub-blogosphere obsessing 24/7 about how to leverage blogs for corporate marcom programs, and no doubt this has already been proposed by someone, somewhere — but here it is, fwiw: it’s kind of embarrassing when a corporation launches a blog.

It’s like watching a person of a certain age ape teenage dress and behavior. You can smell what may be a whiff of fear; you sense you’re being asked to play along, almost as if for pity’s sake, in what is at best an act of uncomfortable self-deception; you know the apparent spontaneity is a sham and that the real motive is a desperate grab for whatever bennies (attention, sex) can be wrung from anyone naive or dull enough to be fooled.

Blogs are too much about personality, and with rare exceptions corporations have to suppress personality in the service of brand. Dave Thomas could have done a blog for Wendy’s, for example. But how many corporations really want their executives to be that closely associated with their public personae?

Not very many.

But oh, what a tempting place the blogosphere is. All that conversation. All those prospective customers . . .

So finally, after chewing its nails for a couple of years, a corporation figures maybe it can have the blog without the personality–it can launch a blog, but just won’t let it be naughty.

Sorry. That’s just co-opting the word “blog” as a cover for launching a different kind of corporate website. A pseudo-informal website.

I do think corporations have to pay attention to blogs. It’s like listening to visitors in your tradeshow booth, or reading letters to the editor in your industry’s trade pubs, or tracking stats in your customer call center.

And maybe someday corporate execs — the generation that is growing up, now, blogging — will be able to blog and have it come across as genuine.

But if some established Fortune 500 corporation were paying me the long dollar to advise them on blogging, I’d say save your money. Use it on other things. There are lots of ways for corporations to reach their customers over the net — chats, podcasts — that convey openness and informality without risking you’ll just look strained & foolish.

(Now, if Penguin’s blog turns out to be readable, it’ll be me that looks the fool. Won’t that be something? LOL)

A press release by any other name

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Steve Rubel reports that RSS advertising provider Pheedo has teamed up with PRWeb to display press releases as RSS feeds, and asks

Does anyone see a boy who cried wolf scenario coming where all press releases, even ones that convey news, become irrelevant?

In the past, a successful press release was a collaboration between the writer (as a proxy for the client) and the journalist(s); because the journalist was the ultimate arbiter, the writer’s approach has traditionally been very (wink wink nudge nudge) ritualized. Hence all the rules about what you can and can’t write, how to structure the release, how promotional you are allowed to be, etc.

So pushing releases out as RSS feeds is tantamount to a loss of decorum.

Oh, well.

I’m picturing, not the Fortune 50 company with its byzantine marketing structure, but the small-to-medium business, the guy who owns the local appliance franchise, the technology start-up, the marketing manager of some niche manufacturing sector OEM. For these people — whose opportunities to leverage old-fashioned style releases are, relatively speaking, few and far between — the real question is: will distributing releases this way get the phones to ring?

It’s a cheap experiment. And in any case, as long as there are journalists dedicated to reporting news, there will be PR agencies courting them the old-fashioned way, on whatever terms the journos dictate.