Catching Flack

It may look easy, but creating a smooth-running, entertaining national news or talk show is super-stressful. Simply producing TV is hard, and producing it to compete on the national stage is daunting. The people who rise to that level of the media are talented, tough and hard-working by definition.

So if you want to get on one of their shows, should you a) pitch like you always do or b) spend an extraordinary amount of time crafting the absolutely best pitch you can? It’s a rhetorical question, because the answer is obviously b).

I just finished an hour moderating a fascinating Bulldog Reporter webinar with Susan Harrow, author of “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah,” who discussed the tips and techniques for breaking through with national talk shows.

The overriding message? Bring your A-game. Pitch incredible personal stories or novel products or services, not me-too drivel. Do your homework and be completely ready to go when you get that coveted call from a producer. Think through your entire segment. Practice with a media trainer to hone your skills.

This is true whether you are pitching The Oprah Winfrey Show or the NBC Nightly News. These people have the world, literally, to choose from. If you want to break through, raise your game to their level — don’t expect them to drop down to yours and help you.

Want to be on the top of the search rankings when someone’s looking for your product or service? Who doesn’t?? If so, you’ve got to use search engine optimization strategies when designing your web site and posting content. It doesn’t happen naturally.

What are the proven techniques? Sally Falkow posts an excellent primer called, “How to Get on Page One of Google.” It’s a quick read so check it out. But here’s the exec summary:

1. Get a domain name that contains a top search term for your product or service
2. Include a mix of rich content including video, text and images
3. Make sure your site architecture is bot-friendly (bots are the computers that search the Internet for content)
4. Have a blog on your site
5. Generate keyword-rich inbound links
6. Have a database of content for people and search engines to search
7. Issue search-optimized press releases

I came into the PRSA International Conference expecting what most people come to a conference for: first and foremost, interesting sessions, and then secondly, to meet some nice people in my industry.

I guess I hadn’t been at a conference in awhile, because as usual, it was the inverse: some worthwhile sessions, tons of nice and interesting people.

And really, that’s what conferences are really all about. Unless you are in a very specific situation where you need all the hours of a conference to learn something new (such as new laws or a new software package), the real point of a conference is the people you meet.

And forget about measuring ROI (Return on Investment) in strictly monetary terms, i.e. will you advance your career or, in my case, generate some new client leads. Conferences are good for so much more than that, things that contribute to a larger ROI: commiserating with industry friends who understand your problems, new contacts who may lead either to new business in the future or may lead to other less tangible but still valuable career development, new ideas you never would have thought of sitting at your desk, or maybe just a few laughs with some new people.

The trick to making this work is that you have to attend some of the sessions, so you have conversation starters. For instance, at this conference, I had gone to the Mitch Albom keynote, but missed the Penelope Trunk keynote. So later, I swapped stories with a colleague who had done the opposite.

As we head into 2009, conferences and travel may be the first things on the cost-cutting chopping block, and if so, that will be too bad. First of all, as I reported yesterday, jet travel is actually less environmentally harmful than using electricity back at the office, and secondly, we’ll all miss out on those interpersonal interactions that a) feed our collective soul and b) keep the machinery of business well-oiled and working smoothly.

Here’s a quiz: which of the following environmental terms resonates most strongly with consumers:

a ) Conservation

b) Green

c) Energy Efficiency

d) Sustainable

If you answered “b) Green” — you’re wrong! The answer is c) Energy Efficiency. That’s according to Suzanne Shelton of Shelton Group, who conducts annual surveys of consumer attitudes toward environmental issues. Shelton’s research indicates that only 61.5% of consumers have a positive association with the word “green,” 63.5 percent feel positively about “sustainable,” 74% feel positively about “conservation” and a whopping 88.2% feel positively about “energy efficiency.”

Why? Because it’s a term they can understand. “Energy efficiency” means turning off the lights, lowering the thermostat, buying a hybrid car, and so on — things consumers can actually do. But what does “green” mean? It can be all things to all people, Shelton says, and consumers already see through the hype — that “green” is mostly a marketing buzzword designed to boost sales.

Other excellent tidbits from Shelton’s top-rate presentation at the PRSA International Conference in Detroit:

• Consumers are “armchair environmentalists” — they can see lots of things other people should do, but don’t want to do much themselves, unless it’s easy and saves them money
• People don’t know what the right things to do are — there’s an unmet need for a credible third-party to certify products and services that are good for the environment
• Consumers currently associate “energy efficient” and “green” with “more expensive”
• The economy is definitely having an effect: in 2007, consumers said that the first thing they would do if they had an extra $10,000 to put into their homes would be to replace flooring and countertops; in 2008, it was replace windows and upgrade their heating and cooling systems to save energy
• Most consumers know enough about sustainability and environmentally friendly products and services to “get through a cocktail party,” but that’s about all

And here’s the kicker of kickers: do you know what is the largest source of greenhouse gases? It’s not personal cars and trucks or even all of the transportation sector — it’s coal-burning electricity generation. That’s right — the whole push to do things virtually and plugging in is actually worse for the environment, as a whole, than getting in our cars or taking an airplane.

At first blush, it’s a no-brainer that the PR industry could use a much stronger and enforceable Code of Ethics. The industry is rife with bad practices and shoddy, over-priced work, which is why we still find ourselves on the defensive so often. This is not to say that there aren’t a lot of hard-working, ethical and talented PR people, but unfortunately, it’s not a big enough percentage of the industry.

This is something that the leaders of the PR industry wrestle with on a regular basis, and this week, at least, I’m one of them. I’ve been serving as a delegate to the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) international conference in Detroit, where this was a big topic at the official business portion of the conference.

For the record, PRSA has a good, if somewhat idealistic, Code of Ethics, but it applies only to PRSA members (about 22,000 of the hundreds of thousands of people making a living in this industry) and adherence is voluntary.

It appears that PRSA is going to take another run at this, and they asked the delegates to brainstorm on the topic. This is obviously a big topic, so here are a few things we mulled over:

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Fresh Air on NPR is probably the most desirable radio talk show placement, particularly for an author. You get lots of time, and host Terry Gross will engage you at a level that will really let people get to know you and your point of view.

Naturally, therefore, the competition to get on the show is brutal. After all, it’s on only five days a week, and oftentimes, they don’t even use new interviews, preferring instead to replay an old interview because the person has died, or written a new book or is starring in a new movie. Like I said, it’s a really tough hit to get, making it all the more valuable.

So you can probably use all the advice you can get, right?

So give a round of thanks to Debbie Stier at The 26th Story, who scored an interview with Fresh Air producer Amy Salit. It’s a short interview so you can head over to their blog to read it, but here are a few gems:

What makes a great interview?

[On] radio… you can feel if the person is speaking spontaneously. If they are, you can hear them thinking through their ideas. Their passion and enthusiasm comes through. They need to be talking to Terry instead of giving a lecture. I also like to hear something new, either to help explain a situation in society, or to reveal something new about a celebrity guest.

It’s PR gospel that you shouldn’t “repeat a negative,” that you should instead focus on the positive and turn negative questions into positive answers. I’ve been hammering on this a bit on this blog of late because both presidential candidates have been repeating negatives quite a bit, though it would appear that Obama, at least, has started to learn his lesson.

One of the comments I got asked the following excellent question: how do we know that repeating a negative is bad? What’s does the research say? At the time, I have to say I was stumped — I had always taken it as a given.

But I did some looking around and it turns out that there is definitive support for the theory that you shouldn’t repeat a negative.

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Is there any cheaper marketing strategy than word-of-mouth? You get people talking, and they go out and sell your product or service for you. Perfect for recessionary times.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple or necessarily that effective, but it certainly can be a frugal way to stretch your marketing budget.

So as my contribution to your zero-budget marketing program, here are some tips gleaned from a recent Bulldog Reporter audio conference on word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing:

• WOM Marketing = giving people a reason to talk about you and your stuff, and making it easier for the conversation to take place
• What can you get people to talk about? Something they would be willing to tell a friend. So the way to develop WOM messages is to test them against a very simple standard: would anyone tell their friend about this?

The 5 Ts of WOM:

• Talkers: people who talk about you (duh!)
• Topics: what are they talking about
• Tools: how are you making it easy for them to talk about you?
• Taking part: participating
• Tracking: measuring your WOM impact

How do you know it will work? It’s hard to do that in advance. Trial-and-error is probably best. So the advice is to try a new little WOM strategy every week, and see what hits — then do more of that and less of the things that don’t work.

Resources:

Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Word of Mouth Marketing — the book

My thanks to Andy Sernovitz, Bob Pearson and Mike Manuel for a highly entertaining and informative audio conference.

Let’s say you’re 25 years old and working your first or second job in PR. And let’s say you were a heavy Facebook user in college and still keep an active Facebook account linked to your college days and your college crowd.

The question is this: do you scrub your Facebook account to make yourself more professional, or do you let it all hang out and figure that it’s the way of the world?

I know this is a question that young professionals are struggling with. Us older fogeys have other problems in the online world, but having recent pictures online involving beer bongs or suggestive tattoos typically isn’t among them.

But for the younger set, it can be a problem. On one hand, you can’t deny who you are, and you certainly can’t police the Internet to make sure those pictures from the Senior Year bash (you know, those pictures) aren’t posted on Flickr or elsewhere.  On the other, it’s not always going to help your career (to put it mildly) for the world to know about your, ehem, youthful indescretions.

And on the PR side, while some journalists or other influencers might find your personal life amusing, a lot of others might dismiss you out of hand as a lightweight if you pitch them from your college-oriented Facebook account.

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

I used to be a PC person, and I’m writing this post on a PC. But that’s only because I’m waiting for a new Mac to be delivered. I switched over three years ago. The dirty secret of switching over, if you care, is that Macs are just as frustrating to use as PCs, only the frustrations are completely different.

One quick example: I LOVE the Google toolbar. Can’t live without it. Except I have to, because there isn’t one for the Mac browser I use. 

So I straddle both worlds. The Mac I’m about to get has the ability to run Windows, and I’m not sure what I will do: will I install Windows at all, and if I do, how much time will I spend working on Windows versus native Mac applications? We’ll see.

This is all by way of asking you a question: what do you think of Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” ads? Are they cool, stupid, funny, boring, or just right? And how do they make you feel, whether you’re a Mac person, a PC person, a Linux person or just a person?

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