Category: New Media

PR Growing Faster than Advertising

Thanks to Shel Holtz for pointing out this article in the Charlotte Observer about the growth of PR firms, and how companies are moving their spending from advertising to PR because it’s becoming harder, with fragmented audiences, TiVo and the like, to use traditional advertising to get messages across.

Shel made the good point in his For Immediate Release podcast that the growth of traditional PR vs. advertising may be one reason why PR firms have been slow to adopt social media…just as they were slow to implement the internet. When times are relatively good for your basic service, it probably makes sense to focus on the “bread and butter.”

Still, it’s important to learn some of these newer methods, because times change and the media landscape is changing rapidly. I heard an interesting tidbit at a recent meeting, that in 1965 it was possible to buy 3 ads on network TV and reach 85 percent of households. Today that max (except on Super Bowl Sunday) is something like 15 percent. And I believe Pew found that network newscasts are down 50 percent in audience since the launch of CNN.

With radically democratized content production and distribution with virtually no barriers to entry, the audiences will continue to break into smaller segments.

That’s where social media come in, as a way of aggregating niches of people who share interests. They (we) will point each other to things we find useful. And it means audiences are no longer passive consumers, but also a content contributors.

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Great Resource for PR and Technology Background

Constantin Basturea has established The NewPR Wiki, and now has a roster of a few dozen contributors who have helped to build it into a strong resource, full of links to information on everything from Anti-Astroturfing and Blogging (Business, Non-Profit and otherwise) to White Papers and Wikis (and even White Papers about Wikis).

One page I’m looking forward to exploring is the one on Social Media Optimization, which is the human side to Search Engine Optimization.

There’s lots of good information about more traditional PR topics, such as PR Measurement, too. This is one to bookmark in Del.icio.us. In fact, if you use that social bookmarking site, you’ll see this already is in the first page of search results when you search for “PR.”

This is also the place where you can read the show notes for Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s PR + Technology podcast, “For Immediate Release.”

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Why Will the Google-YouTube Marriage Work?

Jeff Jarvis has an insightful analysis of how and why he thinks Google’s purchase of YouTube makes sense.

YouTube made the new TV social. It enabled people to recommend the good – or at least amusing — stuff not just by their clicks and ratings but also by their actions: YouTube allowed us to put good videos up on our blogs. YouTube enabled us to become network programmers.

I believe that the serving of 100 million videos is the least valuable service that YouTube provides. Serving all those videos was an important and insightful step in the process of exploding television as we knew it and handing its power to the people. But I believe the end of that process will have us serving videos from wherever — from Google or our own blogs and servers or via peer-to-peer technology that vastly reduces the cost of distribution.

Part of the beauty of YouTube is that people can create their own channels, and recommend videos to friends, and there is a way of helping people find the good stuff. As Jarvis says, the combination of smart algorithms honed by social bookmarking has promise to make this new world of a million-plus video channels work.

“Five hundred channels, and nothing worth watching.” That’s the old saying about cable TV and the Dish. Jarvis thinks this Google-YouTube marriage may be able to keep people from saying the same thing about exploded TV (registration required, but worth it).

Google Buys YouTube

In a press release today, Google announced that it had agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. This is an amazing amount, given the reality that YouTube has been giving away storage and bandwidth to create a huge community. I don’t know how YouTube makes money, or even if it does. It looks like, given Google’s ad program based on keyword searches, this will eventually become an advertising-supported community.

As you can see here, and here, and here, and here, I’ve been using YouTube for a few weeks, and I have been amazed at how easy it is to set up and use.

I haven’t really explored that much using YouTube channels, or groups, or anything else other than uploading videos to incorporate into this blog. OK, I have watched a few of the Diet Coke and Mentos videos, and the guy on NBC’s Today show after recording his attempt to Cancel AOL.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=xaaAYVUWP0I]

The fact that this is so easy to incorporate into a blog, to convert almost any video file format to Flash, and it’s all free, means it is going to continue to be used a lot. People have uploaded something like 100 million videos, if I remember correctly. It’s interesting to consider whether these gathering places will be important as ways for information providers to get their offerings “out there.”

Blog Post During Our Session

I am doing this blog entry as part of my presentation at the Wisconsin Healthcare Public Relations and Marketing Society conference in Green Lake, Wisc. The title of my talk is “Integrating Old Tech and New Tech to Multiply Marketing Awareness.”

To help the group get started blogging quickly when they get back home, we will upload some video to YouTube, grab a photo from Flickr, link to a news story and an embedded photo (probably not a good choice of words given the subject of the story.)

A bunch of David Glickman’s jokes have related to the case of former Congressman Mark Foley. Here is a story about candidates whose campaigns had received contributions from Mr. Foley’s campaign. And below, I’m pulling out a photo from that story, a thumbnail image of Congressman Foley.

The point of the talk is that we need a balance in our emphasis between traditional media relations and new media. Far too many communications professionals are not as familiar as they should be with the potential of new media, but there also is an opposite danger: obsessing on the new and neglecting the old.

The reality is mass media reach…well…masses. New media reach important niches, and what’s best about them is you don’t have to “dumb it down” to reach a mass audience, because that’s not the point. We need to reach both the masses for broad awareness, and the narrow audience that may be about to make an important health care decision.

What I hope people will get out of my presentation is that both news media and new media are important, and they can reinforce each other. The video below is a mini-highlight reel telling the story of the Carlsen Twins’ separation. Abbigail and Isabelle are the formerly conjoined twin daughters of Jesse and Amy Carlsen of Fargo, North Dakota.

In the case of the Carlsens, having a web site with condition updates helped make the management of the news media much more efficient. This was a way we could cooperate with Mr. and Mrs. Carlsen’s decision to open their lives to media, including the Star Tribune, Fargo Forum and NBC’s Dateline, not to mention the dozens of other media organizations who were interested. It also gave friends and family back home in North Dakota and Montana a chance to immediately see (immediate = without media intervening) what was happening, as several thousand watched the live webcast of the news conference after surgery.

Lessons learned from the Carlsens will be helpful as we serve another family from North Dakota, the Fitterers. They don’t mind that there are news stories about their conjoined twin girls, Abygail and Madysen, but they don’t want to do media interviews. In this case, new media are even more important to facilitate their wishes.

The news segments were recorded using EyeTV and the piece was edited in iMovie, exported to Quicktime and uploaded to YouTube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r08wJnNmUz0]
In the next session I will be part of a panel on crisis communications. I’m looking forward to hearing those other case studies and learning from them.

Here’s a picture of me, that I had previously uploaded to Flickr. Pretty easy to include in a blog, huh?