World has changed: PR agencies haven’t

The NMK event earlier this week was well packed with most of the major tech PR firms represented – Edelman, Bite, Hotwire, Midnight, Harvard, Porter Novelli, Liberate, plus some online PR boutiques like Immediate Future - and a smattering of key players (all, notably, bloggers. Q: Were they influential first and then blogged or did they blog and become influential??? Either way the pairing of influential and blogger was clear.).

The brief was to discuss how disintermediation and the tools in the hands of the clients, enabling direct and untrammelled access to their stakeholders, their markets blah blah blah 2.0 etc, was changing the role of PR and particularly agencies, hence the agency community out in force.

Like true agency pros we didn’t particularly stick to that brief, but there was a good chatter between the audience and the panellists Roger Warner, Sarah Ogden, Drew Benvie and token non-PR person, me.

I spoke to a couple of seasoned online-savvy PR bods afterwards, and they didn’t feel they’d learnt anything. Education wasn’t the objective. What we wanted to stimulate was a debate about where PR goes from here – and I particularly wanted to put forward reasonably well-argued challenges only to be smacked down by a room full of vociferous PR people (50 odd people).

It didn’t happen. There was no fight back.
The only responses that had a positive ‘PR’s fine’ outlook, for me, smacked of self-comforting hiding behind the cosy blanked of yesterday:

• ‘PR’s always evolving’,
• ‘things haven’t changed that much – clients still want XYZ’,
• ‘Would HSBC have done their turnaround if the mainstream media hadn’t picked the story up from Facebook?’.

Yada fucking yada.

Where’s the dynamism? Where’s the opportunism? Where’s the ‘we’re picking up the mantle and have done this for these guys, we did this other radical new thing for these guys, we partnered with this little boutique to deliver something entirely new in this area, a first for PR’ etc etc. It didn’t exist.

It was the same old same old and frankly it was disappointing. I’d have been ashamed to have heard a similarly spineless defence from the digital community or from the marketing community (the two camps I’m caught between).

So I wanted to take the time to discipline my higgledy-piggledy challenges to the PR community, who I do feel warmly towards in the main, to be structured and clear about those challenges that I sincerely believe exist.

PR will NOT die at an industry level. That's plain stoopid.
Change is already happening and will accelerate for PR as a business function. Stakeholders, influencers, messages, communication and reputation are becoming more important not less important so the demand for PR is rising.

However, this IS a change or die warning for the agencies with the PR world, for the organisations and consultancies, and within them especially, for the traditionally structured account teams.

Challenges for the PR agency community:

1. You are dated and at risk in your current form
2. You lie about your understanding of and ability to deliver in this new world
3. You market is being encroached by the wider agency community
4. Yet your core abilities are needed now more than ever

One by one -

1. You are dated and at risk in your current form

The traditional team mix of client-facing execs, managers and directors in a leveraged pyramid model is increasingly dated. There is a particular need now for multi-disciplinary teams.

My argument is that the terrain is now impossibly broad to be covered by traditional divisions only e.g. Tech, or Consumer. Within Tech the various media worlds are different enough that a good PR tech team should include a very deep, focused specialist in online - nicking the smart focus from Immediate Future's business model but in a per person way. I know the retort here will be 'well Tom tends to more of that, and Mary does more of this' but what we need here is explicit out-and-out focus, deep expertise learnt over time, an intuitive feel for the norms and quirks of online ettiquette and superb antennae for what's buzzing on the network.

Furthermore, beyond specialised PR pros all agencies now need analysts on board. Yes, digital's great because it can answer the measurement question better than ever, but clients are fundamentally exhausted by and lost in a quagmire of available stats.

Imagine if in a pitch situation you can present an analyst who works at account team level (not in a backroom never to be seen) - this is a hands-on person working with the client servicing team on a daily/weekly basis feeding the team with insights. This addresses the measurement question properly. It also defends against my point below no.3, the encroachment of more analytical agencies into PR's rightful (historicallly at least) domain.

This fundamentally adjusts the time horizon of PR campaigns towards 'business at internet speed' - something that PR and the media does better already than pretty much any other marketplace save finance. But there's room still for big improvements - note the Telegraph's reconfiguring of its whole business to accomodate the change in pace and blend of media consumption. Why shouldn't agenciies be doing the same?

    2. You lie about your understanding of and ability to deliver in this new world

I am on record as congratulating the PR industry as embracing the new online world better than most. Yet I have found, consistently, that PR people talk a good game about 'web 2.0', 'user-generated content' and 'bloogging', but that it's almost all bullshit and hotair.

Most PR people I know and have asked are not heavy users of RSS - in fact in a recent session at a London PR agency I found that 3 consultants of a group of 9 did not use RSS on a daily basis to manage their campaigns. Shocking. Same for social bookmarking - a fantastic tool for collaborating inside an agency, and for servicing, educating and delighting clients.

What I was hoping was that the PRs blogging and getting stuck into social media were the tip of the iceberg and that broader, slower shifts were also occurring further down the 'berg. Not so. It seems there are PR digital-haves and digital-haven't-a-plucking-clues. It turns out the only ones that do really get it are those that publicly participate - the few high profile PR bloggers, almost all in that room that night.

At the moment these buzzwords are nothing more than a bullet point on a powerpoint pitch to a prospective new client, nothing more than a grin and a nod and a 'yeah we do that too'.

Agencies need to either develop, encourage and train willing consultants to lead their internal digital drives, or better and quicker, achieve a step-change by hiring in digital talent. And this can happen in exciting ways - note Mat Morrison heading to Porter Novelli (a direct swap for Antony Mayfield who we digital types nicked from Harvard a year or two ago!). [Note - sorry Mat, you said not to mention who you're with now but everyone else has already 'broken' that story. PR eh?]

    3. Your market is being encroached by the wider agency community

Whilst the trad agencies noodle along (and the digital trad agencies and divisions talk a better talk, but fundamentally still don't evolve in pace with the wider changes in the environment), other agencies are stealing your market.

SEO agencies are all over your rightful turf online.
As they set up social media practices and hire PR professionals like Antony, they threaten you. Deeply.
At Nixon McInnes we're finding that more and more of the website design and build projects we do are involving an element of determing brand architecture, or are catalysts for rebrands - not our rightful terrirtory. But for clients at CEO, CMO, head of marketing-level, digital is increasingly leading as the heaviest used and therefore increasingbly most important marketing asset. Strategy is being set by the digital table. (Drew kicks off a nice discussion of this as the elephant in the room - I did mention it at the talk, but I guess it got lost in the conversation).

And technology measurement providers and buzz monitoring players like Onalytica are getting paid to do the measurement you never quite cracked and claim they can measure influence, sentiment and other core constituents of the PR mix.

Look around you, guys. The pen is closing in around you.

Ged Carroll, a PR man, says that he would get Poke London (a creative digital agency) to set the strategy, and that they were stronger at researching stakeholders, audiences and then telling powerful stories, and that he'd then present that to a PR partner for 'implementation' aka the legwork. 'The strategy's done guys - now go to work...' - is that what the PR community wants for its future?

   4. Yet your core abilities are needed now more than ever

This is the biggest business opportunity for PR firms.
I sincerely believe in a tumultuous thundering sea of networked conversations, happening globally, 24/7/365, where reputations are made and lost and shared in seconds with many others, where campaigns rise and fall within online communities, where democratised news flows freely, WE NEED WHAT YOU OFFER MORE THAN EVER.

The online PR boutiques like Immediate Future, Headstream and Cake (who I hadn’t previously heard of) get this.

It is the biggest hugest bestest biz opportunity for you.

We need people that understand:

• listening first, before talking
• points of view
• angles
• reputations
• crisis management
• how to be a spokesperson
• consistent messaging
• influence, and clusters of opinion
• engagement and influence over broadcast and control

That's what I think.
And I from chatting on Tuesday, I think the PR community is in denial, is losing it's seat at the big table and it needs to wake up and revitalise its structures, services and products to reflect the step-change that's happened. Yes, you're always evolving, and yes, you will eventually, but what about now. You're out of date.

Check Drew's post for links to all the other write ups or use this google search.

Comments

[Ged]

I'd 'work with' the digital agency (Poke London) to create the strategy rather than let them rip on their lonesome :)

Agencies like Cake are much more akin to an integrated marketing agency ATL/TTL/BTL online and offline. Which then begs the question what is PR and how long would it take agencies to 'turn the tanker around'?

[Will McInnes]

Ged - thanks for clarifying who was the daddy in your client / agency relationship :)

In terms of turning around the tanker, it takes one key hire. One brilliant person hired. By hiring Antony Mayfield the leadership at Spannerworks opened brave new horizons for their business and their clients.

Mat Morrison has the digital smarts to do the same for Porter Novelli.

You can support the new school PR peeps like Drew Benvie, Simon Collister, Tim Callington, Waddington etc, but I think it's more powerful and transformative from an empowered outsider coming in.

[Mat]

Well said Will. My experience of working with a large local PR company on a large local website was disappointing. I felt there was a general lack of understanding of anything to do with the web and even more disappointing was a lack of interest in learning anything about it. To me the sum total of their contribution boiled down to:

"Ummm, we could put a piece in the Argus"
"How about a party?"

To me thats not a strategy for a website launch but a boilerplate approach to general PR which doesn't fit into the world we live in today.

I put this down to the PR company in question but from what you're saying will its indicative of the Champagne swilling masses of PR drones whose ideas seem stuck in the 80's.

[Simon Collister]

B.L.I.M.E.Y. I half wished I hadn't rushed to blog this event and taken the time out to pen a polemic as good as this, Will.

Totally pertinent points. Can't add to them really. Partly as it's a Saturday night after a glass of red, and partly as you are spot on.

[Tim Hoang]

Fantastic post Will. Wish i'd gotten a chance to speak to you on Tuesday night. You seem like the sort of bloke whose opinion and tone people either support wholeheartedly or ignore because people are too afraid to admit the PR industry's failings.
RE: point 2 - this stuck in my mind most of all as it was obvious to me that this social media thing is still in its infancy and no one has got close to being able to do it well. I asked several people for examples of when they have used social media - not blogging or SEO to bring in business - but creating conversation and getting poeple talking about brands, and no one gave me a satisfactory answer. The Pr industry's main problem is that we've got shit margins, and little investment in experientation and the time to really look into things - which is why there's all this debate with spam pitching - because we don't have time to do it properly. PR companies need to either invest in it properly and give me proper examples of it working or shut the f*ck up about social media - i don't give a toss if XXX is setting up digital media specialist conversational wank specialist Coca Cola Championship edition division, have they actually done anything? i want to know whether me spending my weeknights reading blogs like this will be worth it - can we forge a career out of it? Is it really going to change the face of PR? because as it stands it's not, certainly not in B2B.

[Daljit B]

Will, I have to say that I agree with you on almost every point.

In response to Simon C's comment above, there is in fact a lot of work being done by PR agencies in social media which is delivering real results for brands (and why ‘excluding’ blogs and SEO?) – he obviously isn’t speaking to the right people. Same goes for B2B, where is this parallel universe where it is somehow magically excluded from the impact of social media?

The 'argument' that because we do not have a rule book on social media we shouldn't discuss it, try different tactics, or demonstrate to clients what is possible is simply naive and misguided. Taken to its logical conclusion this approach would stifle any form of innovation in PR ever. It’s only through discussion, debate and education that the mindsets of clients stuck in the past will change and change for the better.

In terms of the structures of PR, I agree this is important and teams will have to be configured in new ways. The more fundamental problem is one of attitude – the agencies I mentioned above doing amazing work never claimed they had all the answers when it came to social media. What they did have was the insight and the confidence to go to clients with new approaches, to set realistic expectations and to get people really excited. In one example when the results came through, it was the PR agency who was invited to present the findings to the board – with the global ad agency invited to listen and learn about the new communications landscape they were now operating in.

Ultimately it is about being willing and able to take calculated risks and it is arguably the lack of risk taking which is stifling PR innovation. As long as you can get £2000 for writing and distributing a few press releases a month why try something new? Business models which have been hugely successful to date will have to change, but as we are experiencing the resistance to that change is huge.

That said I am very optimistic. There is an ever growing list of PR evangelists who understand the issues and where they lead others will eventually follow. Those that don’t wont be around for long...

[Daljit B]

Sorry, meant Tim's post above not Simon C!

[Will McInnes]

Hi Daljit - thanks for pitching in. Good to hear from someone in the PR biz and already operating in the new era.

Like you, I'm optimistic too. PR is more important than ever.

Cheers.

[ourman]

I'm a PR man. Recently returned to the UK after three years doing volunteer work in Hanoi.

While I was away, because i was working fundraising for a grass roots ngo and I had no budget - we had to be creative in communicating with people.

Sponsors got to see what donations were achieving via flickr, we cut down on our phone bills with skype, my own blog even brought in several thousands dollars worth of donations.

But being out of the UK loop I assumed that everyone was doing this. I thought this was the natural PR evolution.

So when I came back and had my first interview I was amazed at the blank faces when I mentioned Flickr and Felicious, Facebook etc.

I was amazed after my relative successes that people were still more bothered about whether or not I was on first names terms with the business editor for the local rag.

Certainly from my own experiences PRs are making so little progress towards understanding (never mind utlising) all those web 2.0 tools.

[Will McInnes]

Interesting viewpoint - I wonder if its about the UK then? Maybe we can find examples of PR communities internationally advancing things?

Thank you ourman

[kelvin newman]

There's always going to be a gap between the Evangalists and the Curmudgeons.

The question is are the people in between moving in the right direction quickly enough, and will the curmudgeons hold them back.

Like any paradigm shift, some people will be left in the past, but hopefully posts like this will give a few people a nudge to move a bit quicker.

[Wendy McAuliffe]

Hey Will. As you know I wasn't able to attend the NMK event, but Lloyd was there representing Liberate.

As a consultancy investing a lot in social media, it saddens me to read these lines of conversation, often from non-PR people, or from those who've jumped ship into more highly-paid sectors.

Although I appreciate that there is a lot of truth in what you're saying, it's a mistake to always be tarnishing the PR industry with the same brush.

The industry is currently full of a lot of very good talkers and thinkers, but while social media is so new and developments are taking place so rapidly, we'd much rather get stuck in and get our hands dirty, and build useful case studies to talk about...rather than sit back and philosophize.

If you think back to the early days of the Internet, the survivors were those who jumped in at the deep end and went for it. They didn't get too hooked up on whether or not the Internet was going to last...they just believed in it, and learnt and evolved as they went along. That's exactly what we're trying to do at Liberate, and I don't believe we're the only ones!

[Lizzie Wiggle]

Hi Will and Ourman

I'm so refreshed to read your posts. I have been working as a freelance person for client which don't have very big budgets and as such I've had to use as much digital media out there to help me service them properly. Facebook and MySpace have been godsends for my clients. I send all my press releases out as RSS feeds, check out blogs all the time, use Backpack to do online reporting and have all my documents stored in my secure FTP space or via photobucket. It also means I can work anywhere.

Through doing this I've realised how important it is as modern PR person to be technically proficient and have a good understanding of Web 2.0.

However I've been to a couple of job interviews lately and when I've mentioned my skills in Web 2.0 they look at me blankly as if I'm from another planet....and go back to asking me about my print media contacts. Yes they are very important too but you have to be much more switched if there are going to survive.

[Peter Kirwan]

That... rocks. Mmm. I'm thinking Fullrun might be able to find some protagonists for you. If you're up for doing this again and expanding the theme...

[Tim Hoang]

Sorry bit late Thought I’d reply to Daljit’s comments about my post because he probably thinks I was being a bit twatty. True I wasn’t speaking to the right people about using social media to deliver results – but the ones that I had spoke to (from the big agencies to small ones) – disappointed me with their responses about how they use social media in that they haven’t properly yet. Since the event I must say that I have spoken to a lot more people about it and have been impressed with their work, but at the time I genuinely hadn’t spoken to anyone who made me even raise an eyebrow.

In the B2B sector I’ve not seen social media work. I work in B2B PR and haven’t seen the chance to do social media ‘properly. Sorry just haven’t – give me a couple of examples and I’ll agree with you. I don’t include SEO in it because it’s not so much about engaging in conversations – which is where the social bit comes from for me and that’s my opinion. I don’t pretend to be speaking for everyone else. You are right about blogging - it has been used well but people are already doing it and doing it well – I just couldn’t be arsed talking about something what people have been talking about for years.

You’ve got the wrong end of the stick about the ‘argument’ that because we don’t have a rule book we should not discuss social media. Course we should discuss it – what pisses me off are those that go on about their new social media teams purely to set up blogs and not to innovate and try out new tactics – that was all.

[Libby Davy]

I guess I just have to add this. (How great to see the passion in this thread... dat's what it takes).

When I was 17 - getting ready to pop up from the soil as a new type of thing, a strategic stakeholder relations (PR) practitioner in Australia with a pack of old white male ex-journo's wondering what to do with us - I was sold a * two-way * definition of PR. I thought it was about dialogue and participation.

To my idealist young self, with corporations gaining power and governments losing it, I thought working in PR might let me contribute to "mutual understanding between organisations and publics".

By the time I ran away screaming from the Porter Novelli propaganda machine to join academia - I was disillusioned to say the least.

A decade of activism and using my skills on the "other side" of the game, plus marrying an early net uber geek, led me to this. This? Social media evangelism, but with eyes and heart wide open.

Now I am willing to come back in from the cold and go mainstream again. I'm not buying shares in old school PR firms. I'm banking on a phoenix or two. Maybe some new seeds. Maybe some permaculture.

Let's hope we can create some real, social/eco impact, and take this (r)evolution all the way.

With or without the dinosaurs.

Wooo hoo love ya posse MrWillyeem.

[Kevin Rapley]

Absolute, well and truly nail on the fookin' head. I am not from a PR background, I am a web developer for my company but also resonate to the level of social media consultant for anyone who will listen when I am freelancing for my own gain. You need to be hungry for what is changing out there and it is so clear for everyone to see that the lines are being blurred. Like I said I am not PR, but here I am reading PR 2.0 and looking up blogs such as this one. Why? because I am hungry for it and our PR team gets miffed and says something is technical if they have to work outside of MS Office. Come on guys, get a grip and get hungry for what is going on around you! This is a great time for digital PR and if you don't pick up the baton then I sure as hell will.

[Jonathan Hopkins]

what Kevin said. me too