Archive for the ‘Media & Marketing’ Category

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Agencies the antidote to the dangers of ‘groupthink’

February 17th, 2011 by Louisa

This recession has been the catalyst for many a new trend. You can’t open a paper without reading about something that has been spawned as a result of the economic downturn (although to be fair, the PR industry is certainly partly responsible for this!)

One trend we’ve noticed at Eulogy! is the movement of public relations from agency to in-house, particularly in the B2B space, and drilling down even further – most noticeably within the marketing services and media sectors. Having spent over a decade agency-side and with no in-house experience to my name, I’m definitely not the person to write a well balanced appraisal of the pros and cons of each – I suspect if I did, agency would win. Yet, with a number of friends opting to move in-house over the last few years, and having worked very closely with in-house comms teams at organisations such as Royal Mail, GyroHSR and JWT I am not blind to the advantages that having dedicated resource affords a business (although would obviously argue voraciously against).

That said over the last few weeks I have noticed a series of articles within both the national and trade media focusing on the phenomenon that is groupthink – such as this one in The Telegraph, which blames groupthink for the financial crisis and this one in Money Marketing, which talks about the dangers of groupthink on policy.

Stepping down a bit from the recession and financial policy it is widely recognised that groupthink can also be a destructive force and a real issue for businesses. At its worst it stifles creativity and independent thinking often stilting development, which can ultimately impact the bottom line of an organisation. Typically, however, it manifests itself by championing a status quo and all too often businesses find themselves getting on with the day to day jobs without looking at the bigger picture and creating regular challenges. This I believe is where outsourcing (irrespective of discipline) can really add its value. Working with teams that know you well, but ultimately sit outside of the business, can help inspire and ignite ideas and forward thinking.  This is precisely why we work with people such as the (marvellous) Amber Group, to challenge our thinking and assist us with our own direction. The fact that consultancies, such as PR, have this ability is what I enjoy most about agency life.

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Posted in Economic climate, Government, Media & Marketing, PR industry, Trends | No Comments »

Social media ownership: when will agencies learn to share?

February 8th, 2011 by Melanie

A recurring debate was stirred up once again in the marketing world this week with a feature in PR Week on ‘Who Owns Social Media’ and unsurprisingly many of the familiar players from across the three disciplines (PR, Advertising and Digital) weighed in with their views.

Features Editor Cathy Bussey’s well balanced piece attempts to bring to the surface tensions which have been bubbling away for the last few years between the creative communications sectors that have up until now had fairly clearly laid out stalls which defined their existence. The debate in PR Week puts the three would-be contenders into a boxing ring to see which one emerges the victor.

Whoever it is that surfaces from the final round still standing and with their bloody nose intact will undoubtedly believe that they rightfully deserve to wear the social media crown. The truth of the matter is that they will be wrong: there are no crowns to wear -only matching sets of badges to be worn by all.

Firstly, the idea of any agency owning a channel is laughable and dare I say a little bit arrogant. An agency’s role is not to ‘own’ but to support through expertise and consultancy. Chris Lake, Director of Innovation at Econsultancy echoes this very sentiment in a post he recently wrote on the Econsultancy blog:

“I firmly believe that a company’s social media strategy should be owned and managed by the company itself, rather than by external agencies.”

Those that submit to the notion that social media can readily be claimed in its totality as belonging to the domain of PR, advertising or the newly emerging digital sector clearly do not understand the scope, complexity or potential of social media channels.

Take the telephone, for example. It would be extremely bizarre to restrict its usage to just members the PR team, or have a ‘phone call strategy’ defined by an external marketing agency. It would be equally unlikely that a brand’s digital marketing agency would have the right to decide how the wider company uses email as a communications tool? Social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr… they’re all just tools (with varying degrees of sophistication) that serve to meet multiple needs.

Only when marketers start viewing social media platforms in this way, as facilitators which address multiple needs across numerous departments (comms, marketing, branding, customer services, corporate reputation, stakeholder management, research and development) will the ownership debate be replaced by a discussion that focuses around an integrated approach to social media.

At Onlinefire, whilst we’re often seen as a ‘social media agency’, we actually prefer to work collaboratively with clients and their agencies to allocate defined roles for social media activation. In truth, we’re much more than a social media agency; we’re a creative online communications agency with PR at our heart. Social media is our channel of choice but much of what we do for our clients draws upon multiple marketing touch-points from experiential to events to traditional news generation – regularly drawing upon the skills of the wider Eulogy! Group. It’s no accident that this blog has ended up being posted on the Eulogy! site. It’s all about integration, don’t you know!?

  • We don’t create flash iPad apps, but we work with digital agencies that do.
  • We don’t do search engine pay-per-click campaigns, but we work with many great companies that can do these (and do them really well).
  • Onlinefire isn’t a specialist in organising promoted tweets but we can get your brand trending on Twitter whilst a quality media buying specialist sorts out your specific Twitter ads.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a clear role for PR in social media. In fact, us PRs have traditionally been the gatekeepers of the brand conversation and as such are in a good place to see the potential opportunities that social media offers us. Admittedly the conversation has always been with identifiable mid-point influencers (media, stakeholders, analysts, etc.) but new online tools have allowed us to take this dialogue direct to consumers. Never before have communicators ever been able to have this level of proximity to our end users and this is a gift that the PR industry should embrace rather than shy away from.

Advertisers on the other hand have always been on the receiving end of huge budgets and as such have been able to create truly great pieces of branded content which inspire talkability. However even small advertising budgets on social media platforms can reap great rewards. Executed correctly, Facebook’s social ads can deliver amazing results for the right campaign due to its pinpoint targeting capabilities. This is probably still very much the domain of the media buying agency but the ease of which brands can manage these social ads makes it more difficult for some unscrupulous agencies to play the smoke and mirrors game with their clients. And Amen to that!

Agencies which have previously taken great pride in dining at the top-table with their clients have been forced to reassess their offering in light of direct to consumer alternatives that social media has provided the industry.

Self-defined digital agencies are currently the best equipped to advise and build social apps and widgets which add an extra layer of usability to social networks. This technical knowledge is something that most PR / social media agencies currently do not offer nor would they probably every want to.

So the content versus conversation divide still exists to some extent but for how long?

Huff and Puff…

Three Little Pigs

Three Little Pigs

Remember the story of the three pigs? They all set about making separate houses for themselves. Imagine that instead of each having sticks, straw and bricks respectively, one had just cement, another had a spade to dig the foundations with and the third pig had just bricks.

Individually, neither would be able to build anything resembling a solid structure but collectively, they each bring a different and vital quality needed in the construction of a robust home. Replace ‘pigs’ with marketing agencies (perhaps this doesn’t require too much of a stretch of the imagination) and substitute the act of building a house with the objective of contributing to a successful social media campaign – and that’s where we find ourselves today; everyone working in collaboration to build something that ultimately benefits all parties to serve a larger purpose.

360-degree Implementation

A few years ago when Eurostar were being held up as an example of a brand being overly myopic in its approach to social media comms, few agencies acknowledged the lessons that clearly needed to be learnt from the fall-out. Having appointed a social media specialist agency to carry out a (pretty well-executed) sales campaign on Twitter, Eurostar hadn’t factored in the other internal departments that may need to use the platform in the future. So, when poor weather conditions meant that many passengers were left stranded at Christmas without any information advising them on their options, many turned to Twitter only to be met with a wall of deafening silence.

I remember being invited on to Channel 4 news to comment on how the brand misread its customer’s social media requirements. At the time, I seem to remember a lot of focus being placed on the channel and none on the message itself. Sure, there were some cultural learnings for Eurostar to be gained but any criticism of their trial Twitter campaign merely deflected attention from the real problem which was Eurostar’s inability to communicate with its customers in a time of need.

In this situation, it was clear that the in-house team were not equipped to deal with social media as a 360-degree comms channel and that a specialist social media agency were reluctantly handed ‘ownership’ of Twitter in its entirety wheras in reality they were only allowed responsibility for a small campaign area. The danger of ownership being taken outside of the in-house team becomes apparent when the platform overlaps with other departments’ remits as happened in the case of Eurostar.

Therefore, media ownership (social or traditional) should always remain with the brand gate-keeper (i.e. the in-house marketing team) and not on the agency side. Only by having centralised ownership, can social media be divided accordingly between various internal business groups with weighting distributed in an appropriate fashion that reflects needs and not historical budgets.

Aim for the stars…

The situation reminds me somewhat of the Space and Moon Races which took place between the USA and the then Soviet Union in the mid to late twentieth century where two politically opposed forces fought a very global battle to attain technological and ideological superiority within space exploration. A key marker within this political era was fixed on which would be the first nation to set foot on the moon. After billions of dollars, numerous fatalities and a plethora of disasters on both sides the USA emerged as being the first nation to have representatives step foot on the moon.

The flag was placed, the video images beamed back to the world below and now, over fifty years on, as the Star Spangled Banner continues to fly in solitude on a windless moon are we able to say that the USA managed to claim ‘ownership’ of the moon? The answer is almost certainly no.

One small step for social media

One small step for social media

To learn more about the work we do at Onlinefire, visit our website or alternatively you can follow us on Twitter @onlinefire.

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Posted in Digital PR, Digital media, Media & Marketing, Onlinefire, PR industry, Social media | No Comments »

Basking in the love of my colleagues

February 4th, 2011 by Phil

I’ve been at Eulogy! for ever such a long time, man and boy (and once woman, but we won’t go into that now), and one of the many things that has kept me here has been the people that I work with.

Everyone knows colleagues are important; you’d have to be a pretty cold sort of person to spend the majority of your waking life in the company of people you didn’t enjoy. And even if you’re not best mates with every single one of them, being able to pull together in a crisis, share biscuits at the 3pm afternoon lull, or talk about last night’s TV round the proverbial water cooler, all help to make Mondays to Fridays that little bit more comfortable.

At Eulogy!, and I’m sure the same can be said by many other agencies, we pride ourselves on the culture we’ve created. Even after the changes (in size, staff and structure) I’ve witnessed over the last nine years, our culture has remained intact, and continues to be something that we eulogise about to prospects, clients and peers alike.

And even today; a day when I’ve been left smarting by a particularly well orchestrated ‘let’s all unfollow Phil on Twitter because he’s about to hit 100 followers’ campaign by my (bastard) colleagues, I still love working here. It really is that good.

That or I’m a sadist (which if you’d seen the size of the high heels I was wearing, you’d fully believe).

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“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

January 25th, 2011 by Phil

Churchill01

In his leader column PR Week’s Danny Rogers has given his thoughts on consolidation (or lack of it) in the PR industry. Alongside his top line predictions for 2011, he makes the comment that “few PR agencies have achieved the scale required to challenge management consultancies – or even some advertising shops – for really lucrative strategic comms contracts from big business”.

In many respects he’s absolutely right. Scale is often a necessity when squaring up to the competition, and especially when you’re hoping to catch the eye of the newest big brand (with matching budget), being a fish capable of powerful breast stroke isn’t a bad thing.

But if we put scales (pun intended) aside for a moment, there’s also the issue of whether PRs are actually able to generate this kind of strategic thinking at all. It still amazes me that for every carefully considered, objectively underpinned and strategically directed campaign, a myriad more exist (at least at pitch stage) that go straight for the tactical spectacular, without a moment’s thought given to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.

I think there are two fundamentals at play here. Firstly, a lot of PR agencies and consultants don’t know the difference between a strategy or tactic, and think objectives such as ‘make me / my brand famous’ are enough to govern the campaign. What’s more, they often bypass the ‘thinking’ part of the process entirely, and move straight on to dazzling creativity and tactics.

Secondly (and perhaps more tellingly) is the reticence of some clients to share with their agencies the salient details needed to make these kinds of strategic decisions in the first place. This study from late last year stuck in my mind, as it begs the question, if the marketing function is disconnected from a business’s strategy, what hope for (bolted on) PR?

I would say this (it’s our blog after all), but as an agency we pride ourselves on not only knowing our Os, Ss and Ts, but on our ability to confront clients, regardless of their size or the scale of the challenge, to demand the information and insight we need to make the informed choices necessary to achieve agreed and measurable objectives. Not only does it mean we’re all swimming in the right direction once the campaign goes live, but it also makes for a more exciting and inspiring journey for both us and the brand we’re representing.

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Quora – like the character from Tron?

January 14th, 2011 by Zoe

What is Quora and should we care? No, it is not a vegetarian meat alternative – nor an allergy free equivalent of Flora – but the latest social media platform being talked about on every, well, social media network. A crowd-sourcing, question-and-answer based twitter-type site, Quora has infiltrated the blogosphere and inevitably, exposed itself to intense scrutiny – and that’s before ordinary folk have even had a chance to sign up.

From what the Eulogites can gather, the founders of Quora looked at Twitter and realised a significant percentage of tweets were people asking questions. So they got to thinking about taking this away from the Twitter platform and providing a space where users can build up a network around various subjects and position the question to a more targeted audience. So far, so on-trend –marketing is heading towards an era of personalised messaging that is aimed at carefully segmented audiences.  So the general business proposition seems to be accurate.

Founded by two former Facebook employees (note the invite to link Quora with FB on the homepage) in California, Quora has been steadily feeding a growing obsession over the last few months. It is now in full access mode (after a stint as invite only). Simply put, it is a Q&A platform that is created, edited and organised by its users.

Sound familiar? Well it is different to Wikipedia, apparently. Namely its ability to follow topics and attract reputable users – they are confident that the questioners can trust the opinions of the answerers. Quora has coined the phrase ‘continually improving’, in that once one question has been answered, the page continues to be developed into a stronger and more useful resource – with a narrower focus we can assume. Interestingly, there is no requirement for a neutral point-of-view (like Wikipedia), but a desire for some consensus…between both masterminds and laymen. How refreshing. 

As far as we can tell, contributors aren’t paid for their knowledge. If you are a cynic, this might beg the question of their validity. That is, invariably, the better informed you are, the busier you are and the more likely you might demand payment. But if Quora fulfils its aims and is indeed shared and spread across other social networks, then the revenue potential for experts thus increases. There will be some aspect of editing – by trained individuals who can navigate their way through the quagmire that is libel law. But censorship will be kept at a minimum as much as possible. Busybodies can also amend and edit content as they see fit.

What does all this mean for PRs and marketers? Well the general sentiment is that it actually has mass appeal, by dovetailing with Twitter and Facebook – thus reducing social networkers own network management time. It also nicely hones in on target audiences who are interested in specialist subjects (linked to a relatively sophisticated search function) and offers geeks – and gleeks! – the chance to interact with likeminded users. The blog-like facility may end up in client’s coverage packs and could aid natural search, even complement news aggregation.

However, PRs will need to take an active involvement – we’ll need to be on there, monitoring, waiting patiently for updates. It will also be good for assessing our spokespeople’s competition and another way of seeing who is talking about what. Be aware that Quora users are expected to use their real identity when answering questions, so transparency remains key.

Overall, people seem unanimous in their intrigue with Quora, if not united in their praise. Seasoned social network observers are already asking about the iPhone app – apparently it’s on its way. The mobile site is already live. 

I found out that Quora is named Quora because a group of people coming together and reaching a consensus is a quorum. Apparently it’s got nothing to do with the new Tron character. But the highlight of my Quora-tive research was this Tweet:

http://twitter.com/rhodri
I joined Quora and now I’m a member and people are following me and I’m following them and I don’t know what’s going on and want my mummy.

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Posted in Digital PR, Media & Marketing, PR industry, Social media | No Comments »

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