Baby boomers and social media, or not

Last week's Wall Street Journal served us an article on why email is dying. For my money, although email has ceded ground to other communications channels, it still has plenty of legs.

Outside of the tech elite, email is still the second best way to reach someone (the phone ranks as the clear first choice). If you are dealing with people outside of your social network, sending an email is the second best way to communicate non-urgent information.

Also, the shiny new social media toys we use today may not be in vogue ten years from now (hello and goodbye MySpace), but it's hard to believe email will ever go away. For example, snail mail, email's close cousin, has held its ground despite being faced with cheaper and faster competition. Fewer people letter, but bills still fill my mailbox.

Other means

That being said, even email can't reach all audiences. Some people aren't online, especially the old and poor.

My mother bought her first computer last week. My father owns an iPhone but has no interest in using the Web or email (don't ask me what he was thinking when he bought the iPhone). My grandmother uses email, but never checks her Facebook page. But, they all send cards and letters. They are not alone. There is large demographic who don't live on the Web and don't miss it. And yes, I know the demographic of people who don't use the Web shrinks every year. I read the survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

• Senior citizens: Broadband usage among adults ages 65 or older grew from 19% in May 2008 to 30% in April 2009.
• Low-income Americans: Two groups of low-income Americans saw strong broadband growth from 2008 to 2009: First, respondents living in households whose annual household income is $20,000 or less saw broadband adoption grow from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009. Second, respondents living in households whose annual incomes are between $20,000 and $30,000 annually experienced a growth in broadband penetration from 42% to 53%.Overall, respondents reporting that they live in homes with annual household incomes below $30,000 experienced a 34% growth in home broadband adoption from 2008 to 2009.
• High-school graduates: Among adults whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, broadband adoption grew from 40% in 2008 to 52% in 2009.
• Older baby boomers: Among adults ages 50-64, broadband usage increased from 50% in 2008 to 61% in 2009.
• Rural Americans: Adults living in rural America had home high-speed usage grow from 38% in 2008 to 46% in 2009.

While those numbers point to an overall rise in Internet usage, they also point to the limitations of social media. If you want to reach baby boomers, you will need to find a channel that speaks to the 40 percent of boomers who do not have broadband access. And if you are looking for the folks who did not attend college, nearly half of them can only be reached through traditional marketing channels.

The takeaway

Those of us in the tech bubble need to remember not everyone lives on the Web and some of the non-Webbies have money to spend. To reach those people, traditional media and marketing technique are required. In other words, just because you have a shiny new stick, you should not throw away the old bat that can still hit the occasional homerun.

WSJ: social media has "consultants"

Yesterday's WSJ brought a fresh look at PR, although in linguistic feat akin to writing about surgery but not using the word "doctor, " the paper avoids using the words "public relations." In short, while the story details how SMBs are turning to "consultants" for help developing and executing social media strategies, these consultants are not called PR people.

Yet, if you polled most consultants who offer these services, they would undoubtedly say they work for PR companies or, at least, marketing agencies. Indeed, Everywhere, one of the firms cited in the article, is a self described "Social Media Marketing and Content Development" company. I would think the agencies named in the article would not mind being labeled marketing or PR shops, but perhaps that's just me.

To be fair, the article includes the following:

Other agencies simply tack on social-media support as part of a package of advertising and public-relations services. Red Square Agency Inc., in Mobile, Ala., charges clients around $200 an hour, and ThinkInk LLC charges $10,000 to $20,000 a month for the integrated services.

But, one quibble here, most agencies would look at social media as part of an overall PR program, not an add on or after thought. Social media is part of an overall PR campaign, not a separate entity. For my money, the WSJ missed the point.

Fear and loathing in public relations

For days after this NY Times article came out on PR in the world of Web 2.0 , many in the PR world were still buzzing about it. It was an frontal assault on the way that business is done. I won't rehash everything that's been said about the article. There's no point in that, and too many others have trampled that ground. I want to look at what PR people aren't saying about the article. (If you want to read other commentaries about the NY Times piece, skip to end of this blog for a suggested reading list.)

Why did that article touch a raw nerve in the PR community?

PR practitioners have always felt that people outside of the marketing communications tent don't understand what we do. And they don't. It's almost impossible to explain to a civilian how PR works to shape and place stories.

For the most part, most everyone carries the common misconception that PR is about spin control, but those in the club know that unless you represent a market mover, it's not about spin, it's about getting attention. As my friend Tony Mackey put it in his blog, not every company is a winner, but that doesn't mean they don't think they deserve press coverage. They are certainly paying for it.

And therein lies the tension, or the dirty little secret PR folks want to hide. You can't lie, that ruins relationships and relationships are hard currency this trade. The Times got that one right. But sometimes you have to push a reporter to write about the slowest horse in the race and make the reporter believe that horse has a chance of winning the race. In the real world, people might call this lying. In PR it's called shading, spinning or positioning.

Reporters get this, and that's why they distrust PR folks. It's a healthy cynicism they have and, to be fair, one they should have and one we deserve.

Like any industry, there are people who don't do PR well, and that gives PR its well-earned black mark. And, well, in addition to the incompetents, there are the liars. Whether we want to admit or not that they exist in this industry, to not acknowledge that is to invite further distrust.

Now, enter the rise of influential blogs and other social media tools, which have slowly but steadily risen to prominence in the past two years, neatly coinciding with the print media's steady march to bankruptcy.

A scant two years ago when print was king, reporters and PR people were reading the same rulebook. They weren't exactly adversaries, because as much as reporters like to decry the work of PR people, we provide a source of information they cannot get elsewhere. True, that information comes with a price, the price of coverage, but show me a free lunch and I'll show you an overly long line at the buffet.

PR people are scared. The rules of the game are changing. Change may be good, but it's not always welcome. A lack of understanding the rules leads to anxiety, and that turns into sleepless nights.

When the Times points out that PR is at a crossroads, it makes our clients question how we do our jobs. There is a conceit among bloggers, reporters and corporate executives that anyone can do PR. It's true, anyone can do it, but not everyone does it well.

In her book about her experience as a speechwriter for the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan noted that while everyone can write, not everyone can write well. PR is a lot like that, and the rise of social media has made it easier for unskilled PR people to do a bad job.

True, the rise of social media has changed the tools and the rules. In some cases, it has made reporters irrelevant and in other instances, it has made PR people into Web copy editors. It's also made everyone confused. When the rulebook gets rewritten in the middle of the game, it puts everyone on edge. It also leads to land grabs, and the articles below are the influencers staking out their territory.

As promised, if you want to read some solid commentary on the flap, see below.

Brian Solis's makes a spirited defense of PR in the new world order, which is very much a continuation of his thoughts from this post on the new state of PR, marketing and communications.

Michael Arrington's posted a vicious smack down of PR. (If you still believe in the power of traditional PR, this isn't reading not for the faint of heart.)

Robert Scoble contributes a good commentary on the basics of how to do PR in the new age. It's a must read for anyone in the Tech industry, whether you are on the communications side of the house or not.

I have only included some of the pieces that received the most commentary, but I welcome other contributions and suggestions for articles to read.

Increased smartphones sales makes us better writers

While the rest of the economy stumbles along, smartphone sales are humming right along. Best Buy and AT&T have sold out of their pre-order allotment of the iPhone 3G S and in some stores the Palm Pre was sold out within hours. Though some claim the tight supply was little more than a marketing gimmick, the point remains: smartphone sales are defining the dark force in the global economy.

The effects of the increase in smartphone sales have big implications for public relations and society. For PR, because smartphones have smaller screen real estate, writers must deliver tight subject lines, attention getting headlines and strong lead sentences. If you think readers skim through email quickly, the small font sizes on most smartphones make reading a chore and writers have to make the reader feel like the extra work is worth it.

The payoff for a good writer is that you can get your message read in more places and at more times. Smartphone users instintively reach for their devices whenever they are bored, have downtime or are stuck watching a dance recital featuring the pre-schoolers of others.

While marketers have more opportunity to reach more eyeballs, turning readers into buyers is still a challenging task. Good writers and strong writing have never been more in demand and fortunately for PR firms with all of the cuts in media, there are more good writers looking for work than ever. Yet, good writers don't always make good PR people.

Many media still think that working for PR is like taking a walk over to the dark side and they don't understand that in PR you not only have to inform, but you must convince someone to take action. And of course, some media people hate pitching or begging their former colleagues to take a meeting.

In England, crossing from working media to PR and back again is much more common and accepted. Of course, British writers also expect the agencies to pick up the tab at dinner or the bar, something their American counterparts think lessens objectivity. Across the pond, pay for play is A-okay.

So my question is: when will the changing media landscape usher in a new wave of pay per play? Perhaps a better question is, given how few technology companies buy ads in key publications, do their ad dollars already influence the tenor of coverage?

Tools of the trade

When I started in tech PR 10 years ago, you did most of your real pitching to reporters on the phone. There were magazines that mattered like the Industry Standard, Red Herring, Business 2.0 and Fast Company and it was all about getting in the print edition because the online world didn't matter.

Today, when PR people talk about bloggers or social media they say, "It's about creating relationships."

That's tripe. It's always been about creating relationships. What's different is that the tools of the trade have changed and technology has changed how the people receiving the message get the message.

The first part of how delivering the message has changed is obvious. Ten years ago, if you had a good story, you called a reporter on the phone and delivered a pitch tailored to their ears. But they published once a week. It would take an enterprising PR flack an hour to two to skim the reporter's last 10 stories and have an good idea about what that reporter covered over the last three months. Today, bloggers can knock out that many stories in a couple of weeks.
Becasue publishing is easier, we have more people with smaller microphones. As a result, today's media is delivering a smaller and more fragmented audience, like the transition from network television to 800 niche cable channels.

With more people writing more stories, developing relationships is statiscally more difficult and professionally more important. Because reporters and bloggers are under tighter deadlines, they rely on PR folks they trust to provide a comment right away.

The second change and the one that has changed how PR works is the rise of the consumer Internet. Corporate Web sites and search engines have greatly changed how end users gather information. Many businesses no longer need a middle man to deliver the message, they can do it themselves, forcing a fundamental shift in PR and marketing.

While newspapers and magazines deliver a targeted and known audience, really interested buyers will have searched the Web for info on purchases. They come into the buying mode with some idea of the products on the market, but look to media, new and old, to help in the reviews processes. It's a paradigm change from waiting for media to push stories to end users and having that drive sales.

What does this mean for PR people? Answer: we are all going to become marketers. Phone skills will fade, writing will rise and SEO will be ever more important. The kids coming out of school today will become multi-talented. They will be able to write, take still pictures and edit video. There will be, and there are specialists for all of these tasks, but those who use to specialize in PR will find ourselves more tightly aligned with the marketing department.

Bet on it.