Public relations consultant /blog

Writing in the Guardian Eliane Glaser finds her belief in so-called ‘ordinary voices’ (mostly web based voices like bloggers and twitterers) shattered by examples of politicians and interest groups rallying the troops. But this ‘touching up the grassroots’ is neither new nor shocking. And much of the time it’s perfectly ethical.

Astroturfing, or faking grassroots enthusiasm, for commercial gain by posting fake reviews to consumer websites, say, can never be justified and an EU directive rightly prohibits much of this. But legitimate astroturfing does not involve such obvious fraud.

Amnesty International has encouraged members to write protest letters to oppressive regimes since 1961. Their guide to ‘Writing letters for Amnesty’ says: ‘You can mention that you are an Amnesty member or you can write as a concerned individual.’

It is not unethical to write as a ‘concerned individual’ even if you are a member of Amnesty International and Amnesty is your primary or only source of information. There is no conflict of interest because members of Amnesty receive no incentive to take part in a letter writing campaign other than a sense that they are standing up for a better world.

Grassroots pick and choose the causes they wish to support. Individuals may be members of political parties, but they can leave those parties on a whim and decide on a level of participation that suits them. If they heed a leader’s call, it’s because they choose to.

When John Prescott asked his grassroots to defend the minimum wage, they railed because they shared his concerns, not because they were following his orders.

Similarly, nearly a quarter of a million people have joined Facebook’s Marmite page because they like Marmite, not because they’re on Unilever’s payroll.

Social Media Library launched recently as a directory of bloggers, Twitterers and other heavy users of social media for the public relations industry.

At face value it sounds like a good idea, but as social media practitioner Jenifer O’Grady says, it risks ‘act[ing] like a plaster for PR agencies who don’t “learn” the basics, giving the contacts without the skills’.

In other words Firebrand Digital, creators of Social Media Library, appear to treat social media outlets in much the same way as traditional media outlets: put crudely, identify the editor and send them a press release. Stuart Bruce reckons the ‘gullible’ will end up spamming bloggers. I already get many press releases aimed at my blogs and I don’t mind, but I’ve yet to use one and can see why others might think of them as spam.

Bloggers do not behave like newspapers. Newspapers are collegiate, feel obliged to fill a predetermined number of pages with news (for which they have a vague definition), have an audience in mind, feel commercial pressures and, while they are often biased, have boundaries for their bias. Bloggers tend to work alone and write as much or as little about whatever they fancy without worrying too much about who, if anyone, is reading.

Public relations professionals understand what news is to a particular newspaper. They spin stories, that make their clients look good, to fit that definition. Newspapers simply print the best press releases and that happens more often than they’ll ever admit. But why would anybody simply publish a press release to their blog?

Social media is social because it encourages conversation. Bloggers write about things that interest them or have happened to them and those things do not have to be news as a newspaper would define it. People update their Facebook status with what’s on their mind and most of the time that has very little to do with what’s currently making news headlines.

The challenge is not build a database of social media users, but to engage genuinely.

Genuine engagement is a challenging prospect to many public relations people, especially those who are used to working as an adjunct to marketing; the kind of people whose work may be measured using Advertising Value Equivalents.

At the same time, genuine engagement can be incredibly fulfilling. A client who becomes a leading blogger in his or her field is a client who is recognised as an industry leader.

More useful than a list of bloggers is a Google blog alert that lets you know when someone writes on your topic of interest. And that costs nothing.

I recently counseled against writing off AVEs, Advertising Value Equivalents, as way of evaluating public relations and have now come across a great example of where AVEs make for a reasonable measure of an initiative’s success.

Over on Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre, I’ve poked fun at Daily Mail writer Paul Scott who is ever so upset with how easily Peaches Geldof makes her money. Among Scott’s claims is that Peaches received £15,000 for modeling Ultimo lingerie.

It’s fair to assume that Ultimo booked Peaches Geldof over more experienced, but lesser known, models because they knew newspapers like the Daily Mail would snap the resulting photos. It’s also fair to assume that this initiative had a fairly simple aim: raise awareness of Ultimo lingerie.

Ultimo could have bought a page of advertising in the Daily Mail, for which the rack rate is £45,612. Giving the Daily photos of Peaches in her underwear led the tabloid to set poor old Paul Scott the task of annotating the photos for readers which were used nice and large. Scott’s copy speculates titillatingly on what Peaches’ father, Bob, might make of it all, but Ultimo won’t have been too concerned about the words. They just want their lingerie well exposed in the tabloids.

Using AVEs as a measure of success seems perfectly reasonable and at £15,000 Peaches Geldof comes off as something of a bargain. But this obviously isn’t a measure that more sophisticated clients could rely on.

‘…what’s sad is the damage these fools do to PR industry.’
– Stuart Bruce, MD Wolfstar

With public relations activity so notoriously difficult, but not impossible, to evaluate, it’s little wonder that measures of success provoke heated debates among industry gurus.

The measure most hated by true professionals is AVEs; advertising value equivalents. Yet 37 per cent of PR agencies use AVEs and AVEs can even make their own stories (wonderful nonsense!).

AVEs are deceptively simple: it’s what your media coverage would cost to buy. On their own, they are tosh. An AVE does not take tone into account, consider whether editorial is more trusted than advertising and so on.

Many PRs work is not so clearly focussed on the bottom line and has very little to do with marketing, but for those who are working with marketers find AVEs very tempting.

Clients are excited by big numbers and AVEs offer that. More sophisticated clients, with large marketing budgets, will invest in econometric modelling which seeks to understand how all marketing activity, including advertising, really impacts on the bottom line.

However, the real secret to evaluating public relations is to build it in at the planning stage and to set clear goals.

Smaller, less sophisticated clients with modest budgets can benefit from a form of evaluation that includes AVEs. Some clients simply want their PR to raise awareness of a product, in the same way most advertising does. In that circumstance, setting an AVE target is not unreasonable.

It’s great to see that the Manchester Evening News has exposed the BNP with a series of campaigning articles that have so rattled the fascists they are asking seeking the support of the newspaper’s advertisers.

The MEN reveals that Britiain’s Nazi party is surprisingly reluctant to discuss race and has piled on the pressure with populist pieces of its own. On his ambition to deport Amir Khan, the British born and bred Olympic boxer, BNP leader Nick Griffin is reported to have said: ‘Perhaps we will lose one good boxer but there are more important things.’

A past supporter of a no-platform policy for fascists, quoting BNP figures doesn’t come easy to me. We can only find truth through rigorous debate if all sides are honest: there is no room for those who claim the Holocaust was ‘Allied wartime propaganda’.

But the climate has been changed by irresponsible news outlets. Express Newspapers, as usual following a trend set by the Daily Mail, got so carried away with racist propaganda the NUJ had to step in.

Constant lies, taken at face value by less media literate readers, have filtered into the national consciousness. The oxygen of this publicity has breathed life into an otherwise moribund fascist movement… but any success the BNP enjoys at next week’s European Elections will instead be blamed on our, admittedly corrupt, MPs.

DJ turned radio station owner Steve Penk came across as a bit of a wally back in September when he told Manchester Confidential that turning former indie station The Revolution into a Radio 2 clone ‘is what freedom of choice is about’ and saying he couldn’t understand why the station’s former DJs walked out on that.

However, the perhaps sad fact is that emulating Radio 2 has doubled Revolution’s audience share albeit from a low base.

I guess the real Revolution will have to wait.

Veronica Wadley and Paul Dacre, former editor of London’s Evening Standard and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers (as well as the Daily Mail), must be fuming at the newspaper’s current advertising campaign, which sees the new owner and editor asserting themselves with a high profile apology to Londoners for being so rubbish.

It is a brave campaign that risks upsetting loyal readers, but the simple truth is that there are not enough miserable curmudgeons living in London to make the Standard profitable. The title was not commercially viable as a Daily Mail clone.

Now, with rumours flying that Dacre may be about to stand down as Daily Mail editor, it’s tempting to wonder if any more apologies might be imminent from Northcliffe House.

I’m no football fan, but these two clips (found on Robin Brown’s Liverpool Culture Blog) must make anyone wonder how low ITV can sink.

The first shows how they missed a goal in a Merseyside derby and the second has them broadcasting Leeds fans chanting ‘ITV is fucking shit’. It seems to take them a while to realise what’s going on and kill the atmosphere mikes, which kind of proves the point.

Freelance terror investigator Glen Jenvey has an impressive CV; he’s spied for ‘London authorities’ and the US, worked with the intelligence services of several other countries and, most James Bond, infiltrated the Tamil Tigers. Or so he claims.

Unlike other spies, who tend to keep a low profile, Glen Jenvey appears particularly keen to supply stories to newspapers and has been very open with blogger Tim Ireland, who alleges that Jenvey is a fantasist.

Tim has published evidence that Glen Jenvey is the source for a number of news stories around the terror threat. Tim’s most serious accusation concerns a front-page splash in the Sun: ‘Terror Target Sugar’. This story claimed that Alan Sugar and other Jewish celebrities were being targeting by Islamic extremists. Tim claims to be able to show that the evidence for the claim was fabricated by Glen Jenvey. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is investigating and the Sun has removed the story from its website. Sugar has also begun legal action against the Sun.

If Tim’s right, Jenvey has fooled a great many national newspapers – The Times, The People, the Daily Star, the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Daily Mail – so it’s incredible that the Glen Jenvey affair has not had a higher profile.

Glen Jenvey’s CV may be impossible to verify, but that’s a reason for newspapers to exercise extreme caution before running any stories he might supply them not an excuse for making a mistake. Online anonymity is largely a myth and Tim’s evidence against Jenvey was easily obtained; the newspapers could and should have checked him out in the same way, but appear not to have bothered. If true, that’s a catastrophic failure.

We know the PCC is investigating and at least one writ has flown, but if the BBC were centre of similar accusations, those same newspapers would be baying for blood. It’s hard to imagine the BBC Trust being given as long to mull over the issues as the PCC has had. And if the BBC had been fooled, heads would rightly roll.

With their business model apparently broken, newspapers are struggling to find new ways of working. The San Francisco Chronicle is talking about a Scott Trust style foundation to remove the need to chase profit.

It sounds like a good idea, but it won’t work. As recent days have shown, the Scott Trust is not so cuddly if you work on local newspapers in Manchester or Reading.

Going not-for-profit is unlikely to be enough. Newspapers appear to require owners who can offer significant subsidies too; benefactors like Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev who has saved London’s Evening Standard.

But hasn’t this always been the case?

The Guardian was founded by a group of businessmen with a political agenda; the Times gave a prosperous coal merchant a voice; the Daily Telegraph was created so its founder could air a personal grievance; and the Sun (launched as the Daily Herald) was created to support striking print workers, which is most ironic.