The research that wasn’t – how PR agencies do offer digital PR after all

Most people working in agency PR will know about that story from bigmouthmedia – a re-run of 2008’s research by the SEO company - that a staggering 60 per cent of the top 100 agencies in the UK (as ranked in PR Week’s annual list) don’t offer a range of digital services.

I was pretty surprised by this. A number of people, me included (via a Twitter conversation), queried the research and were told that bigmouth had gone through the websites of each of the top 100 firms to ascertain which of them had a digital offering of some description. Social media, online PR and various other terms were included in the research.

I didn’t really think much more of it, apart from being mildly annoyed – bigmouth is a reputable SEO company, and while I didn’t believe the results, it wouldn’t be the first time that statistics have been massaged for PR benefit. And to be honest, not many journalists are going to sympathise with the PR industry being out-PR-ed.

But then it started appearing all over the place, including Marketing and eConsultancy – which both have real influence in the client world – and I got annoyed again.

So a couple of us at Carrot re-did bigmouth’s research, in the way that it had done it (as far as we could tell from its own response to us, and to the PR Week article). Any agency that didn’t mention digital, online PR, social media, blogs, interactive PR and so on went onto the ‘don’t offer digital’ list.

Guess what?

Eighty-three per cent of agencies from that same top 100 list DO specify digital / online / social media, call it what you will, on their website. We’ll come on to those that didn’t, shortly.

So, I thought, what’s going on here? Did bigmouth just make it up?

Assuming that it didn’t, there’s only one explanation. Its research discounted any agency that doesn’t have a separate digital division. So anyone that integrates digital channels across all their work (you know, the way most people do things these days) counted in the ‘doesn’t do digital’ pile.

So who were the 17 or so agencies that didn’t offer any digital? Because we were doing the research in the way that it had been done before, some pretty big names appeared to fall onto that pile.

Freud, for example. This is the agency that works for Sky, TalkTalk, Sony and Lynx (so it clearly does get online. It just doesn’t see fit to list every service on its site). Another was Finsbury – the agency that, according to its website, advised on three of the top five European deals last year. I don’t imagine they’re going to be very threatened by this ‘research’, either. The rest were mostly heavy-duty financial or pharma companies, so less likely to list every means they use to communicate.

Now, I don’t expect to elicit any kind of response or sympathy from journalists (who didn’t check their facts), or for any corrections to be printed. (Perhaps we in the PR industry should have jumped on this story when it first ran in 2008 – we’re not great at keeping our own reputation.) But what I do hope is that bigmouth doesn’t do this research again next year, when even more agencies should be integrating digital across all their services, not offering it separately. Or at least, do it properly.


UPDATE: bigmouthmedia sent me this tweet last night: "Looks like you used a kinder technique than us; allowing a greater "scope" than us. Glad we've two sets to compare. Good work."

Some great links over the last 2 weeks

I’ve been shockingly bad at keeping my blog up to date. Despite advising the odd client on how and when to blog I’ve failed to do it myself. Cobbler’s children…

But I’m back from a break in Cornwall where (too much) fine food and wine softened the blow of hitting 40, and am full of resolve to do better.

The first thing I do when I get back from holiday, after going through a ridiculous number of emails is scan Google Reader. These are my favourites from the last couple of weeks:

Chris Brogan on how to manage Twitter – a great post that will be really useful for clients starting out on Twitter.

On the subject of Twitter, Immediate Future has an interesting interview with Guy Stevens of Carphone Warehouse on how CW uses Twitter for customer service.

Brendan Cooper on words that should be banned (I can bore for Britain on this subject, so I’ll just direct you to the link).

Tia Fisher at eModeration analysing a report from ENGAGEMENTdb on how the world’s most valuable brands engage with consumers and the impact of doing so. (I should say here that eModeration is a client. I'd read its blog even if it wasn't.)

Sally Whittle on protecting yourself (and your fee) from misunderstandings about what was agreed at the start of the project. Very sound advice.

All Will Sturgeon's posts, but especially this one on our new dance minister.

10 reasons to love clients and 10 reasons to walk away

I’m very lucky in that I have a lot of good clients. But there are a couple in particular that I really enjoy working for and probably do too much for, in truth. But the beauty of being your own boss is that you can choose to walk away from the rotten clients - oh yes, we have - and go the extra mile for the good ones.

We had to make a decision recently on whether to stick with a client or walk away, and it got me to thinking about when you'll go above and beyond; and when it’s just, well, over.

Here are my top tens each way.

When you’ll go the extra mile for a client:

1. They say thank you for something you’ve worked really hard to achieve
2. Occasionally, they ask you how you are.
3. They pay you on time. Or at least when they say they will.
4. They employ you for your advice and then listen to it. (Even if they don’t always take it.)
5. They let you have direct access to senior people in the organisation. It really helps you work out what’s needed for the business.
6. You get feedback. Good and bad. We need to know what impact our campaigns have.
7. You call, and they answer the phone (it’s the small things that make me happy).
8. They turn up for interviews / events / meetings (you’d be amazed).
9. They understand that effective communications is about more than just column inches.
10. They recommend us (I really love that). On LinkedIn, to other companies, I'm not fussy. It’s nice to be recommended.
    

When you start working to rule:

1. The only time you speak to the decision maker is at the 6-month review. And s/he hates you.
2. The objectives shift half-way through a campaign. Or it dawns on you that the objectives you agreed with marketing have nothing to do with the expectations of the person paying your invoice.
3. You don’t get paid. Or you’re lied to about getting paid.
4. The client sales team junior thinks s/he can do a better job than you. And tells you so. (I’m getting braver at saying, “fine, you go for it. Oh, and our crisis management rate is XX.”)
5. You don’t get a thank you. Ever.
6. You hear the words: “Can you get our new widget on the telly?
7. Your story gets rewritten to include 18 corporate messages and a sprinkling of grammatical errors. (My own errors, of course, are fine.)
8. You hear: “My wife / partner / friend / cousin has a mate who’s in PR, and they say we should be in the national press with this story.” (Of course they do, they want your cash. See previous blog on giving good advice, and why agencies lie to get business).
9. They resent you going on holiday. Or worse, think that where you’re going is too expensive, and ask for a fee reduction as you’re being paid too much (that really has happened).
10. Slowly, you feel your soul draining away, drop by drop. Get out, people.

Getting a good brief and giving good advice. How hard can it be?

Thanks to Becky Mcmichael who pointed out this blog from Seth Godin that talks about the importance of a good brief to manage talent.

I’m lucky enough to work mostly with smaller, fast-growth companies, where we're involved at board level, and what we do can have a real impact on shaping the business. But we still come across the odd badly thought-through PR brief from a bigger company, written by someone who is so far away from the business that often they can’t even answer basic business questions, like what the company’s turnover is, or what their business objectives are.

You know the kind of brief I mean. Where the ‘objectives’ are to write press releases and get coverage (anywhere); and ROI is ‘measured’ in terms of column inches and AVEs. And you’re required (along with the other 8 people on the short list) to do a media audit among national editors to find out what perception are of the company. (Actually, that last bit’s usually pretty easy. If the company hasn’t had any coverage, journalists either don’t know who you are, or think you’re crap.)

I sat in a pitch recently for a large company that deep down I knew we shouldn’t be pitching for, but greed got the better of us. The minute we walked into the room, we knew we were a bad fit.

We were pitching to a large team, but overall responsibility for the pitch had been given to a junior PR manager who hadn’t been part of the initial briefing process. She wanted to know:

• how much guaranteed coverage we were going to get from corporate press releases that she was going to write (also pretty easy: none. Guaranteed).


• how many national journalists did we know well enough on a personal level to guarantee they would cover her (as yet undefined) press release containing corporate messages? We confidently estimated that no journalist would do this.

I wish we’d known at the briefing stage that these were the criteria we’d be judged against. We’d have saved the tube fare. Unsurprisingly we were ditched in favour of a large-ish agency who had, amazingly, given these guarantees.

The result is predicable. The agency A team who pitched will start to be unavailable once it comes to that nasty business of actually having to deliver on promises. Responsibility will get shunted down the team until it reaches a sufficiently lowly person whose job depends on phoning his or her way through a media list (hoping that someone still does colour seps).

The relationship between agency and client will start to decline at this point. The agency’s least experienced PR person will work with an inexperienced client contact to deliver rubbish to an increasingly frustrated group of journalists. That’s not helping the client’s reputation, or the agency’s.

But it's not just the agency in question that will suffer. PR at its best is about creating and managing reputations. And yet the reputation of our own industry is in the pan. There is some great work being done by PR teams, but the whole industry is damaged when an agency lies in order to win business.

Relevance of Twitter to business - article links

I often hear colleagues in the PR and communications industries saying that some of their clients still need persuading that Twitter has a relevance to business. So I wanted to start making a note of some of the uses we’re seeing of Twitter, and start collecting links to articles that might be useful in helping to show how businesses are using it in a meaningful way. I’ll also put these up onto my delicious profile.

Today’s links are:

Retailers: article from Retail Week by Joanna Perry. Includes analysis of how Shop Direct is monitoring what consumers are saying about the ‘old’ Woolworths, as it prepares to relaunch the brand online.

The Twitter world: a great article from the New York Times that I’ve mentioned in a previous blog

And the flip side: do Twitter and other social media give too loud a voice to a minority of people in some cases? This is a great analysis of the Motrin and Skittles social media issues, from eConsultancy. Very relevant in light of the Dominoes incident.