Amidst the babble and waffle, a voice of sanity from – of all places – the wonderful world of PR
I don’t know if I ever told you this, but in my second job in advertising I was made to try and do PR.
I didn’t want to, but it was that or unemployment. I was spectacularly useless and got fired anyhow. Which was a blessing, as I then got my first really good job as a copywriter.
I was useless because – among other reasons – I knew nothing about how newspapers operate, which is essential.
But I think that in terms of value for money PR is often your best bet. Millions have been made by people like the Kardashians all through PR.
Alex Singleton understands PR because he wrote for people like the Telegraph and, I think, the Mail. He also understands logic and measurement, unlike most of the airheads who are blathering on about social media and the like.
Let me quote him:
Do you find it odd, like I do, when those self-styled “social media gurus” obsess about the supposed benefits of “followers”, “likes” and “engagement”?
As a former computing journalist, I’ve been using social media since the first half of the 1990s, so I’m no anti-technology fogey. The difference is that I – perhaps like you – believe that it’s important that we properly measure the effectiveness of whatever media we use.
Twitter is the single biggest referrer of traffic to this blog. But the quality of that traffic is generally poor. What I want visitors to this site to do is to hang around a bit, visit a number of pages and preferably enter an email address into the sign-up box on the right-hand side.
Yet the Twitter visitors have a high “bounce” rate – that is to say, they visit this blog and then disappear back to Twitter (or on to wherever). They have, perhaps, a short attention span or are always in a rush for their next browsing “hit”.
Blogging isn’t as fashionable among hip Shoreditch types as Twitter. But it does seem more effective. Indeed, a survey published this year from Technorati found that 31.1 per cent of people are influenced by blogs when making purchasing decisions, but only 8 per cent are influenced by Twitter.
Consequently, many PR campaigns are under-investing in blogging and other forms of brand journalism, and over-investing in unproven social networks, purely for the sake of seeming modern. PR needs, however, to take proper note of the results.
Alex’s blog is http://www.alexsingleton.com/blog/.
He is talking about PR, but what he says applies to all of us. Take note!
You only really know how well something works when you put it to the test. We found Facebook a total disaster compared to Google/emails. It cost over 30 times more to acquire a name.
But I am quite persistent.
We are currently conducting an extended test to see how well we can make Linked-in work.
What we discover about these things, and also what we have learned about Passive Income – Mirage or Reality – will be revealed at www.EADIM.com.
To get your discount as a reader of this blog, just email me, Drayton@DraytonBird.com with the one word Blog.
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Thanks, Peter
I could possible catch you guys at about 11pm your time. I’m going to the Real/Milan match thoignt will be back about 11.30pm my time, but might go for a drink after. If I see you I see you. I agree with the structure thoughts, by the way. I might also just get drunk and see what happens.
I have to admit to disliking anyone with oodles of followers or likes. Maybe it comes down to the popular kids at school being talentless tossers. Social media gets a real kicking and I really understand the measurement vacuum here. At the restaurant we “invested” in, we got some good results with Facebook and Twitter. However at the same time we also kept on pushing out blogs and newsletters. All of these things fed each other.
There was research from brandgym of reasons for using social media. 59% to keep up with latest marketing trends, 21% on a gut feel of business benefits, 195 who could show evidence of tangible benefits.
LinkedIn? Well Alex did respond to a question I asked him over a pub we visited at EADIM in less than an hour.
Social media does work if you are “social”. It fails when you consider it “media”.
Many years ago I wrote that “the way we define what we do determines what we do”.
I have yet to discover the definitive answer to two mysteries:
1. What media are not social? They all involve society; I cannot for the life of me think of one that is anti-social – though its effects may be. For example, Hitler’s speeches were highly social.
2. What communication is not content? Do advertisements not contain content? And so on.
In 1981 I was so frustrated by the lack of a clear, simple definition of direct marketing that I had to write a book.
Five years ago I wrote another on Direct Marketing for Legal Firms.
In it I commented that the law has an intellectual tradition dating back to about 1772 BC and the Laws of Hammurabi.
Marketing, however, was a word you never heard when I came into advertising in 1957.
It is a fledgeling with very little intellectual backbone.
As a result a stream of theories – many dubious – muddy the waters and give hope to the witless, idle and gullible.