remarkable communication

Make Compassion a Competitive Advantage

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CSR is the hot new acronym in corporate PR, standing for Corporate Social Responsibility. Essentially, the idea translates into companies taking care of issues other than their own immediate financial interests--the environment, worker safety, the health of surrounding communities, etc. It's certainly not a new idea, but it's gaining a lot more attention lately.

Like most corporate fads, CSR is typically about 90% spin, but there are companies that are doing important work to make the world better (while making themselves plenty of money). The same techniques that work for giant companies will work even better for small, lean organizations with a commitment to ethical business practices.

What kind of programs can you run?
The simplest way to get started is to donate a stated portion of your income to an organization that resonates with your customers' values. (For example, I donate 10% of my copywriting, consulting and editing income to Smiletrain.) You can donate a portion of your gross, a portion of your profits, a percentage of the proceeds for a particular product, whatever works for you.

You can come up with a little more talk value if you physically engage in something that tells a good story. Build a house with Habitat. Cook a meal for a soup kitchen. Pay your employees for their volunteer time working at charity marathons (hopefully while they're wearing your company hat or t-shirt). If you can imagine photographs of your participation appearing in your local paper, it's a good story. (Speaking of photographs, make sure you capture some!)

You can also pledge your company's commitment to some worthwhile large project--maybe building a library for Room to Read. Or you could sponsor a child or children through one of the many great charities (World Vision is one I like) that do that. Be sure to let your customers know how the project (or child!) is coming along.

Design your program for talk value
Whether you're a large organization or a small one, you want your efforts to be a good world citizen to get talked about. This is a lousy time for modesty. The nice thing is, updates on your charitable work make a great excuse to get in touch with your customers (and the press). And you should feel free to add additional information such as a sale or other offer that brings customers to your door.

Your communication will work best if the effects of your program are concrete and measurable. Look for either a number or a human story. ("Our hybrid delivery vehicles save 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions every year.") If they're not concrete and measurable, why are you doing them exactly? It's find to have some "fuzzy" components about respect and values, but make sure you can back that up with results and numbers.

Try to focus your company's efforts on a theme or an individual charity that resonates with what you do. If you're in the construction industry, helping the homeless makes a great theme. (There might even be some good donations in kind that you can make.) If you have a beauty salon, you might consider a charity like Smiletrain that helps the disfigured.

Here's a test of your program's talk value: imagine one of your customers talking with a friend about it. The "My dry cleaner uses silicone-based solvents instead of perchloroethylene" conversation probably isn't going to happen. But "I have a great dry cleaner, and they only use environmentally-friendly stuff" might work pretty well.

Remember to give your customers the language and story points to get out there and talk you up to other people. You'll never say anything about yourself that will be as powerful as what other people can say about you.

It should go without saying, but make sure you're not "greenwashing." It's perfectly ok if your contribution or project is small, but make sure it's authentic and that you feel good about all of the details.

Don't be a nag
Like all communication with your customers, you're here to serve their needs, not yours. It's usually a terrible idea to hit your customers up for donations to your favorite charity. (You can make an exception if that contribution can be used as a payment in full for one of your products.) Contributions are an intensely personal thing. Just do what you do, talk about it in a compelling way, and let the customers who resonate with it respond in their own way. Think of your CSR program as a way to help your customers feel even better about doing business with you, and leave it at that.

Focus on what matters to your customers
Different customers will respond to different kinds of stories. If your customers are women with small kids, find a project that helps poor mothers--and tell your story in a way that brings out your customers' empathy for those women, that puts your customers in the shoes of the people you're helping.

On the other hand, if your clients are CEOs, most of them probably won't put themselves in the place of the homeless--but they may be very receptive to messages about helping the less fortunate. Different story approaches will resonate with different people.

You will, by the way, have at least one customer who will ask "If I don't want to make a donation, can I get a discount?" Smile very nicely and say, "Sorry, that's not how we do business."

Unless you know your customers are very passionate about the environment, you'll usually come up with a more powerful message if your CSR efforts benefit people. Like every animal species, we're biased in favor of our own kind. There's a reason we've reached a tipping point about environmental awareness--it's because so many people can see that global warming doesn't just affect spotted owls. Try to find a human story of individual people who benefit from what you do, and don't be shy about telling that story in vivid detail. (There are a lot of environmental projects that also benefit people--if you want some ideas, visit the WILD Foundation's site.)

Failing that, loveable animal species actually work pretty well too--dolphins, great apes, abandoned pets, etc. Someone should benefit in a way that makes your customers feel good. If your project primarily benefits an endangered centipede, you won't get a lot of customers thanking you for doing such important work.

And of course, consider the political implications of your particular project. Understand who your customer is, what they value, and how they will react to the work you're doing. You should go ahead and do anything you feel strongly about, but don't do it without at least thinking through your customers' reactions.

Feeling guilty about "benefiting" from charitable work?
Get over it. Think of it this way: the more of us who can "do well by doing good," the more attractive it is for others to start pitching in. Leave your hair shirt at home and just get on with it.

Understand that you will almost certainly face some criticism on those grounds. The same argument holds. Doing business without giving back is not morally superior to blending the needs of your business with the needs of the greater society. Not everyone can be Mother Teresa. (Even Mother Teresa found it pretty tough going.)

(This post was inspired by another headline challenge issued by Brian over at Copyblogger. This is a great exercise for sharpening up your own headlines, and whatever you're writing, your headline carries 80% of the impact. As you can see from this post, what you come up with might be pretty far from the original headline source.)

Is Social Media Better for PR or for Marketing?

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Somewhere along the line, a strange distinction grew up between PR and marketing. Each side tends to hold its own set of not-very-realistic stereotypes about the other. (I won't make enemies by describing them here.) I can't tell you how many times I've heard PR pros say "That's just marketing," and marketers say "That's just PR."

Anyone who's read this blog for a bit can probably guess where I stand. The label isn't very important--what matters are communication and relationships. The old message, market and medium have been replaced by conversation, community and connection. And for that new work, the title on your business card can be pretty arbitrary.

Today Chris Brogan asks if social media is better suited to PR or to marketing. PR would seem to have the advantage here--it's public relations after all. And PR is all about fast reaction times--being able to think on your feet, communicate clearly (especially in a crisis) and keep your message from getting muddied in an environment you don't control.

As Dr. Seuss said, "Except when you don't, because sometimes you won't."

Where PR gets it wrong
Here are the mistakes I see a lot of PR pros make again and again with social media:

• They pitch without knowing who they're pitching to.
• They write like corporate robots.
• Their messages are so spun you could knit socks out of them.
• They're stuck thinking in terms of media relations, instead of genuinely public relations.
• They're still pissed off when bloggers tell them traditional media is dead.

I'll get the last one out of the way. Traditional media is not dead, and it just makes bloggers and social media types look dumb when we say it is. Traditional media is going through a radical and painful metamorphosis, and when it's done it will probably look a lot more like social media. But to pretend that most people don't want established authorities to digest their information for them is to grossly overestimate the majority of the population. Most people don't want to be their own citizen journalists--they just want someone to tell them what the hell is going on.

So are PR professionals incapable of learning new habits? That would be a stupid thing to say or to believe, and I don't. But PR shops are going to need a lot of guts and a lot of agility to shake off the habits and practices that define much of their industry. The ones who do are going to make some exciting stuff happen. In the land of the clueless, the one-clued man is king.

Where marketing gets it wrong
So if PR pros face some hurdles, where do the marketers go wrong?

There's one (really big) bullet for this one: Trying to keep control of the brand.

There's a reason marketing projects are called campaigns--the organization and cohesion are nothing short of military. 400 pages of brand standards. Approved colors and fonts and design elements predefined. The definition and redefinition of the target.

Millions of dollars' worth of advertising materials are thrown away every year because the color of a brochure background is a little off. Marketers are used to being able to completely control their message within the confines of the medium they choose, whether it's a 30-second TV spot, a billboard or a magazine ad.

In other words, a good marketer tends to be a colossal control freak. They're not used to (as any decent PR pro is) creating something that's designed to be picked up and used in all kinds of contexts without losing the message.

Social media sucks for control freaks. People take your stuff and mash it up in all kinds of ways you can't predict. They get tattoos of your logo on rude parts of their body. They post videos that show your product being destroyed in interesting and innovative ways. They do what they want with your message, and you can't do anything about it.

Great advertising and marketing minds have always known that customers don't give a rat's ass about us, the consumer only cares about himself. That's one thing when you're making an ad targeted to that customer, and another when you're watching your brand get soaked in gasoline and lit on fire on YouTube.

On the other hand, marketing as a discipline has a big advantage with social media. Marketing includes lots of creative people who can make cool stuff, and cool stuff gets talked about. Companies like Apple and Volkswagon are very smart about making ads that are worth passing around. And the "creatives," in agency jargon, are themselves good coolhunters--when encouraged to do what they find interesting, they have a good instinct for what will appeal to the social media crowd.

What's actually new
Traditional PR and marketing relied on one-way conversations. PR pros shaped media coverage that was delivered to readers or viewers. Marketing pros created advertising that was delivered to consumers. The messages were broadcast out and the results were measured, but no one expected to hear much from the other side of the conversation.

Today the conversation isn't one-way or even two-way, it's billion-to-billion-way. There are an infinite number of permutations, and no way to control the message no matter how big you are.

Good PR pros and marketers have a lot of transferable skills to new social media. They know how to come up with a message that's worth repeating. They know the difference between a good story and a boring one. They have a high tolerance for shit hitting the fan and usually have good skills to deflect/handle it when it does.

For the increasing number of PR/marketing folks who get it, it doesn’t matter if you call it new marketing or PR 2.0: it’s the same work and there's going to be a lot of it to go around.

The new social media pro will combine what's smart about PR with what's smart about marketing. So what do we call this person? Director of Hanging Around Engaging in Conversations? Remarkable Communicationalist? Tortipotamus? Drop me a comment with your own brilliant suggestion.

Related reading:

• Why Your Company Needs New Marketing and PR 2.0
• Does your Agency Make these Boneheaded PR Mistakes?

Does Your Agency Make these Boneheaded PR Mistakes?

Something's in the air lately. I've seen a good half-dozen vitriolic blog posts this week about clueless PR pros, ham-fisted pitches, and birdbrained astroturf attempts. And while a journalist just throws a bad pitch away and rolls her eyes, a blogger will take positive glee in blogging your cluelessness for all to see.

• The Long Tail's Chris Anderson loses his patience with PR spam
• Technosailor roasts the clueless in an Office Space-inspired post
• John Scalzi shreds a particularly inept (appalling was the word he used) pitch, as well as praising one that worked
• Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, a person you do not want making fun of you, making fun of a laughably transparent astroturf campaign conducted by someone who read half a Seth Godin book once
• Social Media Today on why WalMart's Facebook campaign tanked and Target's succeeded

Anderson took a particularly harsh line, publishing the email addresses of dozens of inept pitch perpetrators (maybe I need to start rolling out IPP as a meme), and thus subjecting them to spambots harvesting their addresses and ensuring that they never again run out of offers for free all-herbal VIGARA.

What's interesting is how many of these big, bad bloggers took the time to point out how to do it right. Here's Anderson he had to say about it:

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public).

Now here's the thing. Any decent PR pro is supposed to know better than to pitch (to anyone--reporter, blogger, whatever) without doing some homework. OK, the client wants you to send out 1,000 press releases on his rollout of new HR policies in his Scranton cube farm. If the client wants you to prank call Katie Couric, do you do it?

Every one of these pitches not only makes the agency look terrible, it makes their client look terrible. "Making our clients look stupid in new media" is probably not one of your agency's tag lines. So knock it off.

Know Thy Customer
One of the most common mistakes in media relations is forgetting who your customer is. Here's why it gets confusing: your customer is not your client.

If you're in traditional PR, your customer is the reporter. You give that customer what she needs. You respect her time. You develop a (wait for it) remarkable relationship.

If you're in new media relations, the norms and the standards are different, but you're operating under the same principle. Your customer is the blogger. You take the time to read her blog carefully. You look over the About page. You come up with a couple of interesting questions. You read a dozen posts and look for themes and interests. You post some comments. Then, if you think this is the right blogger for your client, you can pitch a story or send a product for review. You might even ask for a guest post.

The vast chasm that divides traditional and new media
Much is made of the massive differences between new and traditional media relations. One of the ways I make a living is capitalizing on the differences between the new media and the old. I once told Lawrence Ragan, mostly joking, that the problems he was having with a particular blogger came from the fact that "there aren't any rules in a knife fight."

But that was a snarky line, not the truth. The truth is, whether you're talking with customers or journalists or bloggers or nonprofit donors or anyone else you want to persuade, you have to learn the rules before you're going to meet with any success. You have to approach a human being, not a "target." And you have to start with that other human being's needs before your own.

But what the hell, if you know a smart PR agency who's looking for a kickass new media relations expert with a clue, I'd love to talk. That's not the world's worst strategy when you don't have a clue--hire someone who does.