“I don’t have pet peeves. I have major psychotic fucking hatreds!” said Geroge Carlin in one of his performances. I would add that if you work in PR and marketing, you are bound to have them. No matter whether you work as an in-house specialist or on the agency side. Here are some of mine.

1) I don’t like it!

Sadly enough, there are marketing managers who use the phrase “You have to re-do this because I don’t like it,” when judging advertising visuals or press releases. They should be shot in a town square, while their families are watching. Let me condescendingly pose a question to them. When will you finally understand that your feelings have no place in the evaluation process? The only possible exception is you being a member of the target audience. The decision-making process must focus on how the customer thinks and how he feels, not how a marketer feels.

2) He calls me fifteen times a day

Ad space salesmen who call at least twice a day every day to find out that all our media space is planned out a year ahead are driving me crazy. Persistence is one thing but such behaviour gets you nowhere, except a blacklist on my phone.

3) You’re doing it too theoretically, our customers are idiots

Yeah, it’s a good campaign concept, but it looks too theoretic. I don’t think the customers will get it.

What is too theoretic about having a customer segmentation? Or creating a campaign that plays on associations and is a bit more sophisticated? Can we please stop treating our customers like morons? I am a customer too and hate being treated like a twerp.

I am planning on expanding this list, so if you have any additions, feel free to share them in the comments section!

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Simply put, they hate us because they must. I know this will upset everyone who claims that symbiosis between the journalists and the PROs must be revealed and respected publicly, but I can’t help it. I don’t mean to slam the media in any way – the journalist is doing his job as a PRO does. I’m not hating the player, I am hating the game.

The essence of PR

What are we the PR practitioners trading with? Our currency is credibility and trust. We are reliable sources for the journalists, although we are biased. Before you start criticising the nature and purpose of PR, tell me who is not biased. We need the journalists to trust us. If they didn’t, PR narratives would end up implicitly discarded.

Fact-finding journalists: a convenient myth

The journalist’s job is to present facts and provide space for discussion of all parties involved in a current issue about which the reporter is informing its audience. That’s it for the theory. What about the reporters’ day-to-day reality?

1. Do they have enough time to check the facts? No.
2. Are they encouraged by their editors to seek information from other sources, thereby prolonging date of publication? No.
3. Are they willing to get their hands dirty in pursuit of what they think is truth? Some of them are, most of them aren’t.
4. Do they have enough of information to write in-depth articles? Some of them do, but since the editorial offices keep cutting down staff, the number of generalists greatly increases.
5. Do they have enough of resources to seek out the good sources and critically evaluate their credibility? No.

As you can see, conditions for good journalism are deteriorating, even though the checklist isn’t extensive or complete. How have the journalists responded to the situation? They produce more content, more facts, more sensations. How do they do it? They source a lot of their reports from PR agencies and their clients.

The journalists trade with credibility as well – they need it to keep up their circulation. More credible news equals more subscribers and advertisers.

Necessary hatred

Since the media business positions itself as unbiased, it must by definition reject all biased information, otherwise nobody would believe the journalist is objective. In reality, the journalists happily copy and paste the content of the news releases they receive and move on to another topic.

Imagine they would admit it. “Oh yeah, we do almost zero fact-checking because it’s expensive and time-consuming. Instead of that, we just publish information that looks right to us.

That’s where necessity kicks in. The journalists need to state publicly that they resent PR practitioners and they need to say it aloud in order to preserve the aura of their own credibility.

In reality, they don’t hate or desipise us; they just can’t proclaim this sentiment in public.

I generally don’t publish press releases but this one caught my eye. You can comment on this post to make me feel less like a commercial sell-out. Here is the edited part taken from the news release.

Communications company QuestFore has launched a sweepstakes contest. The agency will award one lucky business $15,000 in internal marketing services. Entry is open to all businesses, large or small, from March 15 to June 30, 2011.

What types of services would the winner have access to? Quest Fore offers comprehensive marketing resources, from research and strategic planning to traditional advertising and interactive services.

Let’s end it with a commentary, shall we? I think it is a good idea for the agency to promote itself this way. What does it cost them? Time and willpower. What do they get in return? New contacts, and if they manage to impress, new client will join their portfolio.

Sweepstakes is an overused marketing tool but QuestFore shows that you can succeed with this old dinosaur, provided you have a good idea. I wonder who will be the first agency to do this on the Czech market?

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Public relations adds value to company’s sales efforts by limiting customers’ frame of  reference and creating a favourable context, in which the products can be easily sold.

When clients ask me or my colleagues how exactly PR helps them to drive sales, we tell them that it doesn’t. Every consumer makes his own decisions and bases them on various facts. Public relations activities cannot change minds of thousands overnight. Instead, they can gradually build up a positive context around the product and encase already known facts in it. That leads to less headaches for the sales team. On the other hand, if you have a lousy product, you can never turn it into a best-seller, regardless of good publicity.

Now onto a practical example. Say you manufacture cars and you are a relatively unknown brand.

I should also add that shifting a context around a product or enforcing behavioural or attitudinal change is a long run and it requires synergy, budget and stamina to keep going through the tough times. The reward is worth it.

PR can also influence the way the customer compares products and which otherwise arbitrary attributes are important to compare, but that deserves another post to discuss all the nuts and bolts properly.

This post was also published in a blog of UNYP Communication Think Tank alumni at iHNed.cz. For its Czech version, head there as well.

Everyone who has had a chance to work for a communications agency or an in-house PR department knows that the reality is very different from what the academicians teach us in the hallowed halls of knowledge. Even though the communications practitioners see the academicians as disjointed from reality of the industry, not everything the teachers try to hammer into the students’ young minds is useless. I will try to illustrate the strong and the weak points of vocational education as we know it today.

You can’t replace experience

“Experienced PR people rely on experience when doing their job.” That sounds like a monstrous cliché, right? Unfortunately, it is one of the deepest truths in communications the industry. When it comes to solving communication-related problems, planning campaigns and defending lost causes, no formal education will help you to succeed. What will make a difference, though, is practice. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out, in order to master a particular task or discipline, you have to practice it properly for about ten thousand hours. Only then you will become an expert.

Soft skills and contemplation – the benefits of education

The aforementioned argument feeds into a question: “Why bother with education when the true mastery lies in practice?” The professional life teaches you to plan and execute campaigns and do your best to make them successful. On the other hand, the academic experience gives you a chance to stop, think about what you are doing and see it from a different perspective. It allows you to ask “Why are we doing business this way?” and gives you time, resources and motivation to contemplate it properly.

You begin developing much-needed soft skills during academic life. It also equips you with a useful rule regarding social systems – every one of them is different but similarities exist across the board. A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have thought that persuading your advisor to change your schedule follows a similar pattern to soliciting your agency’s remuneration with a client? Even though these situations are similar, they differ in details and no education can prepare you for them. Transition from academic to professional environment feels like being dropped in a minefield and provided with a survival manual but not knowing the exact location of the landmines.

Applied ethics is the painful spot

Educational system has a crucial role in providing the students with ethical essentials, yet many universities fail in this aspect. All we are left with after receiving our diplomas is knowledge that conflict of interests is bad and we should try to avoid it. In fairness, no model of ethics can anticipate what is awaiting you out there. However, schools dedicate so little time to applied scenarios and uncovering the world behind the scenes.

It is bound to happen that a fresh graduate will be asked to do something unethical one day or another. Instead of determining that such task is unethical and making an informed decision according to his or her moral compass, the fresh practitioner deems it to be a standard procedure. What’s worse, the tempted cannot justify his reasoning for refusal, while the devil’s advocate usually cites a multitude of reasons to succumb and usually does so in a canny way. We could really use some help from the academic sector on this one.

Judging from experience I’ve gathered so far, there are disconnects and gaps between communications theory and practice. I contend that some of them cannot be solved by education, while others can. Case in point: applied ethics. Universities offering vocational degrees in communication should focus more on helping the students to apply ethical principles to real life. That is the path to 21^st century enlightenment – strong principles grounded in theory and enforced in practice.

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Every now and then I try to introduce a little bit of communication theory into practice. This time, we’ll be dealing with Gricean maxims of communication. They fall into the area of pragmatics and there are four of them – quantity, quality, relevance and manner.

In terms of practical usability, these things will come in handy in a face to face conversation or when talking to a journalist over the phone.

Quality

Be truthful to the journalist. Don’t add any speculations disguised as objective information to your news release. That’s lying, and even though you might get away with it once, it will greatly damage your reputation in the long run. Just stick to writing about what you have sound evidence for or believe it to be true.

Here is a classic example of breaking the maxim of quality. Imagine you are writing a news release, and the journalist has a soft spot for companies that win awards. Your firm has never won one, but you really need to get the news release published, so you get the much coveted coverage. Will you lie?

What’s the danger? The journalist may actually check the factuality of the news. In case it slips through and gets published, the annoyed organizers of the competition will complain. Next step: kiss your relationship with the journalist goodbye.

Quantity

Say only as much as you need to say. The journalist’s time is limited and you have to make it short. Luke Sullivan, a copywriting legend, put it well in his book “Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This!”

Keep your pre-ramble short and unless your client insists, omit it completely.

Tell the facts wrapped into a story, not just a story or just facts. The facts will help you to gain the reporter’s attention and the story supports credibility of your information. A press release should not be longer than one page, however, if the information is truly amazing and won’t fit on one page, feel free to break this rule.

Relevance

This maxim is the most difficult to describe. You have to know what the journalists are after when writing a story and then be as helpful as you can be. There is no general advice I could possibly give. Adherence to this maxim has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Specifically, you have to connect with the journalist and get to know him or her. Then find out what he needs and make his life easier.

Manner

Clarity is the name of the game here. Do not use words from hell like innovative, solution, proactive, groundbreaking, thought leader and other puffery. Bear in mind that not everybody has a thesaurus in his head, so simple language is a must. It makes the story easy to read and easy to remember. You will thank me later for this rule when you start measuring key messages recall.

Stick to Orwell’s rule:

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

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For those of you, who want to read this post in Czech, feel free to point your browsers to Honza Páv’s blog Eikasia.cz.

Czech marketers still perceive social media as a threat and do not realise the potential of the dialogue. Being on social networks and gaining relevance among the customers is so easy, though. Consider this very common dialogue between and agency and a client, where the client is inquiring about his plan regarding social networks.

Client: “We want to be present in social media.”

Agency (full of excitement): “That’s great! We can start building up your image with blogs, then move to Facebook and maybe even start tweeting. Where would you like to start?”

C: “I’m not sure we would like to do any of that.”

A: “What? How do you want to start a dialogue without taking initiative?”

C: “Who said we want to start a dialogue? We just want to be there and listen.”

A: “Sure, that’s an important part of participating in that field but sooner or later, you will have to start talking so you can be recognized and claim your voice.”

C: “Yeah, about that, we don’t want to be recognized and we certainly don’t want to talk openly.”

A: “That’s confusing. Why exactly do you want to be present in social networks?”

C: “Because there are people saying bad things about us and making plans how to destroy our reputation. We have to know about it and stop them.”

A: contemplating the difference between paranoia and insanity “So, you just want to spy on people?”

The interesting part of the dialogue usually ends here and the rest of the meeting is spent on crushing of good ideas (from the agency’s perpective) and yammering about a bogus idea that consumers have power (from the client’s perspective).

Are we stupid?

There is an awful lot of Czech clients who do not see the social media as an opportunity to engage with their customers. Instead, they view it as a breeding ground for dissent and potential harm to their brand. How come the marketers have become so adversarial towards the very people they cater to? I don’t know, but feel free to express your opinion in the comments section. However, it seems to be a prevalent and an ongoing trend among the marketers.

How it really is

The truth is that people talk about your brand on social media regardless of your presence or activitiy. The landscape has shifted and become entirely different compared to the last decade. You can only be a part of the dialogue and try to be either useful or entertaining to the customers. Forget about controlling the message. All you can do is to measure response and decide whether it’s negative or positive. If you decide to use social media as a sales channel, you can also measure conversion rate, but that’s about it.

Getting rid of a communication block

Nothing persuades you of the value of communication over social networks like going on Facebook and searching for your brand. Better yet, get a trial of a social monitoring software and see what people are saying across the social networks. You will be amazed how much publicity your brand gets, even though you don’t know about it.

To have at least some space in the dialogue, you must engage with the customers. Everyone of us views the social media as an extension of his personal space and doesn’t care about your brand. The only two ways to become relevant to the customer on the social network is to be either useful or funny. Nothing else works. Which road will you choose?

Right off the bat: let me invite you to Social Marketers Summit. It is a conference about social media taking place in Prague on 9 September, 2010 at Slovanský Dům (Na Příkopě 859/22, 110 00 Prague 1).

No matter in what city or country you live in, a conference or a workshop dedicated to online PR and social media is bound to happen near you. Most of them are average at best and remind the visitors of pre-ordained kabuki. A local icon or a social media guru comes on stage and starts going on and on about “the challenges facing the marketing and PR industry in the age of new media and user-generated content”, while boring the audience to sleep. This summit isn’t going to be like that.

As every conference depends on the people who organise it, I believe this one is set up for success. Behind the scenes are Pavel Hacker from Viral Booster and Jakub Svoboda from tyinternety.cz, the Czech equivalent of Mashable. Both are very industrious and open-minded individuals. Besides, they have been to a countless number of boring conferences, so they know what to avoid.

It’s not only about the organizers, though. Social Marketers Summit will have a plenty of interesting people who will feed our minds with interesting topics. I’m looking forward to these three speakers. I am sure there will be more

Erica Swallow, an Editorial Assistant at Mashable: Community projects on the rise we have not heard about much yet. I have no idea what I should imagine under the title of this presentation, but it sounds intriguing.

Marek Prchal, a freelance idea maker: PR and social media in commercial sector. This man is a Czech social media trailblazer and it would be very interesting to hear about the thought processes and assumptions that have led to his innovative campaings.

Josef Slerka, the chief of R&D at Ataxo Interactive: Seeing is believing, measuring is knowing. The social media, and especially online PR is suffering from the lack of clear and objective measurement. Josef’s talk isn’t likely to bring anything new into the discussion, but I am hoping to learn how to set the objectives in a way, so they can be tracked and measured.

Update: Josef will not talk about measurement and analytics – I misunderstood what he is going to talk about. The speech bears the title of Selling users is good business. As far as I know, the speech should be geared towards utilising data mined from the social media.

I hope that I gave you enough of reasons for visiting the conference. For more information, look at www.socialsummit.cz or their Facebook page.

As it happens, companies sometimes slip up when it comes to social media outreach to bloggers.  That very thing has happened to Pepsi when it pitched Darren Rowse. Their PR people or “social media specialists” sent out an e-mail blast and expected favourable coverage, which will never come from Darren. Instead he did what every upset blogger or journalist does once in a while – retorted with a stinging message and posted it online.

I am sure that the social media people at Pepsi are sweating but all in all, it’s not so bad. Bad practices should be called out once in a while. Only that way we will improve and legitimise social media outreach as a self-regulating practice.

When you have finished college, the world seemed bright and rosy. Six months later after scouring through job servers every day and hoping that the next offer might be for you, your enthusiasm has started to wane. You had expected the world to make sense and have a job secured the minute you entered the workforce. Cut to the present. You are working for a very average salary (sometimes even less than that) and you are happy that you’re not below the poverty line. What went wrong? A couple of things, actually.

Rigid adherence to the rules

You know how to write a press release and you know what to do with it. You engage with the journalists without spamming them and use the BCC: field properly. When calling the press, you make sure not to say things like “Did you get my press release?” Even though you do everything like you’ve been taught, it still doesn’t work. Understand that PR in theory is detached from the specific social reality you are operating in. The theories help you recognise patterns but will never help you adapt. You have to do that yourself.

Networking fail

Do you finally realise that everything is about contacts and relationships? So many graduates underestimate creating and cultivating the relationships before they enter the workplace. Building strong ties with the journalists in advance will help a great deal when you’re starting up because you will get some of your information published more easily. That means less sleepless nights and less awkward blank monthly coverage reports.

No room for redemption

Very few agencies give you a chance to screw up. They are hard-pressed to be efficient and they have a lot of fresh graduates who to choose from. Even little things, like messing up an invitation or grammatical errors, work against you when the boss finds out. Failing early and failing fast is essential for your success but it’s harmful for the organisation’s reputation.

God just hates you

Interventions of force majeure are sometimes inevitable. While you think you are build a long-lasting relationship, the editor in question decides to leave the industry, often to become a PR man himself. Yeah, that happened to me too. Or that the publication you sought to build a mutually beneficial relationship closes down. That also happened to me – Cristina Muntean’s Czech Business Weekly died at the beginning of this month. I miss it already.

You are just another Gen Y’er

I think that others have articulated the ails of hiring, working and generally coexisting with a member of the Generation Y thoroughly and succinctly. Check out the posts by Bill Sledzik, Todd Defren and Jed Hallam for more inspiration. I would like to single out one quote by Todd Defren regarding employment.

My advice then — and you may see it as biased — is to stay put for a while.  I am talking 3 – 5 years, at least.

Everybody can eventually find a job. Only the good ones can keep it and grow. I have a colleague who has been in PR for about five years and knows the industry, the practices and day-to-day reality inside out. This is a pre-requisite for the upcoming stellar career in the field.

Way out

Don’t worry, there is a way out of this mess. You have to endure and learn. Your self-confidence will take one beating after another but that is no reason to abandon the world of Public Relations. If you truly enjoy what you do and if you have what it takes, you will succeed. There is no other way.

Image credits: debaird(tm), Giampaolo Macorig