Coop's Corner

If you're still wondering why the media world is getting turned on its head, consider the following anecdote.

A few years back, representatives from the Industry Standard, Wired, and Upside were invited to a public-relations gathering to talk about how they decide what to cover. After they finished their prepared remarks, a young woman in the audience stood up to ask a question.

"You talk a lot about tricks and tips on what we should do," she said. "But I've done all that and I still can't get you to cover my clients."

The reporter from Upside recognized the opening and rammed a Mack Truck right through it. "Ma'am," he replied, "you need better clients."

So much for winning hearts and minds.

When I heard that story, I bolted upright. Talk about tone-deaf arrogance. Would it surprise anyone if that woman is still seething today? So it is that she may take belated pleasure in knowing how the PR industry has since found ways to go around the gatekeepers.

On Thursday, I put up a post commenting on how raw PR releases increasingly rank higher on feeds and Web aggregation sites than reports from professional reporters and bloggers. In the subsequent 24 hours, my in-box filled up with messages from public-relations pros weighing in on my blog. The Reader's Digest version? I don't know the half of it.

"The truth is that there are fewer and fewer of you guys," said a veteran PR-meister I know who works for one of the bigger technology companies. "You can't call the same reporter and expect him to do five stories on your company in the same month. So we have to have other ways to get out that information."

"Search engine optimization and other tools we have are better than they used to be and we're just taking advantage of the technology," this person continued. "We can go direct to audiences and bypass the filters--like the media--and have it picked up."

Rick Sharga, a marketing consultant who relayed to me the anecdote at the top of this story, also left a talkback on my post pointing out that it's worse than I thought--both from a "news" and press release standpoint.

"One of the reasons you see press releases ranked higher in Web measurement surveys is that an increasing number of releases are written not for the press, or even for consumers, but for search engines. Instead of focusing on the news value of the content, the writers are focusing on keyword density. Writers who focus on actual news don't really have that luxury.

Secondly, after being frustrated for so long by being excluded from media coverage by writers who deemed their stories "unworthy," many PR pros just decided to leverage the Internet medium and disintermediate the journalist entirely--the intersection of direct marketing and PR, if you will.

This approach lacks the credibility given by a third party--always a benefit of good press coverage--but at least ensures that the message gets out. And finally, a lot of your fellow journalists are making the transition entirely too easy. Take a look at what passes for "news reporting" on a lot of sites--and in a lot of publications--and decide for yourself how much of what you're reading has been taken verbatim from the press releases themselves.

Intelligent readers who can now find exactly the same content on a "legitimate" publication site, a blog, and on a search engine figure this out pretty quickly. You're right that the lines between what's news and what's hype (or at least what's corporate-speak) are blurring pretty rapidly. Journalists now have the duel challenge of actually competing with the press release, and staying relevant enough that readers will value their perspective more than the company-issued draft. Interesting times, indeed."

Sharga, who these days is a vice president at Realty Track, later told me that in the last couple of years PR firms have tried to saturate their press releases with keywords that get Internet spiders to push their releases up the rankings. It's all about keyword density.

"You even have a category of releases that may never go out on the wires but the spiders still recognize them and can push them up into the rankings," he said.

Talk about reaping what you sow. For PR pros who have been ignored by the media, this is an extra scoop of schadenfreude to enjoy.

How should one measure the value of corporate PR against the coverage it subsequently engenders? A few years ago, that question never would have merited more than a moment's consideration. Here was the way things worked: Flacks sent out releases, the press decided what was important, and readers read what was deemed newsworthy. End of "story."

That's ancient history. During the course of any 24-hour news cycle, PR releases often rank higher on news aggregation pages like TechMeme than do professionally reported articles or blog items. I began noticing the shift about a year ago, and it's only becoming more pronounced.

The value of news is never going to go away, but the definition has changed. Laura Sturaitis, a senior vice president over at Business Wire, told me that in the last couple of years, her firm has pushed its clients to gussy up their press releases by including video or photos with text. It also has encouraged the use of bolding and bullet points, with an eye toward helping releases compete more successfully against other Web pages, when it comes to readers' attention.

"This is stuff that people like to read online," she said. "We're not talking about the content, but the format...so the page becomes a portal or mini Web page to other kinds of information. This is a new way to tell a story."

Maybe it's not a question screaming to get put on the docket of the Oxford Union, but let's not kid ourselves. Definitions are morphing, and there's a risk of blurring the line between press releases and news. Or, I should add, a theoretical risk.

With people getting more information from more different sources than ever before, the reading public is smart enough to discern the difference. The company is not the final word. Instead, it's the start of an ongoing conversation. I can't speak for most of you, but I think we can agree that the more voices, the better.

Oscar Robertson: Few were better.

(Credit: Thebigo.com)

Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have his "Oscar Robertson" moment this week?

Bear with me on this one for a moment.

In case you missed it, Sunday's New York Times sports section carried a wonderful first-person retrospective piece by Robertson, one of the greatest basketball guards in the history of the game. But when he played at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1950s, Robertson was anything but a household name.

That changed after he lit up Madison Square Garden for 56 points in front of the New York media. Unfortunately, the post-game news conference was less stellar. A 19-year-old sophomore from the sticks, Robertson was uncomfortable being on center stage. I'll let him take the narrative from here:

I'm afraid I wasn't a very exciting interview, giving mostly monosyllabic replies and identifying my first state high school championship as my biggest thrill to date. One writer stayed until after all the others had left, and introduced himself as Milton Gross of The New York Post.

"You know, if you're a star, you have to learn how to talk to the media," he said.

"But I don't know them," I replied.

He said he would be willing to give advice on dealing with the press--an offer I was happy to accept--and he became a trusted friend and confidant for the rest of my college and professional careers.

Lesson learned, Robertson subsequently mastered the knack of telling his story to the press with the best of them.

So it was that I found myself wondering about Zuckerberg and his famously press-shy ways. Robertson's column ran the same day as Zuckerberg's now-famous (or perhaps infamous?) interview with Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Festival. Enough ink's already been spilled diagnosing the metaphysical implications of that affair. But this much is clear: If Zuckerberg's handlers are smart, they need to sit down with their meal ticket for a frank one-on-one.

Whether he likes it or not, Zuckerberg's being thrust into the public sphere by virtue of who he is and it's time he got over being shy about dealing with strangers.

As long as Zuckerberg refuses to turn over the CEO reins to somebody else, he is going to find himself fair game for the press' fascination with his personal odyssey as the dropout billionaire boy wonder, etc. So what's the deal with the monosyllabic grunts and the similarly brief--but equally frustrating--verbal evasions? Jeez, the guy went to Harvard for a few semesters. I'm sure he can do better.

If Facebook's CEO is to realize his aspirations, the hoodie, aw shucks routine has to go. The silver lining in the Sunday interview debacle was the magnified public attention to all things Zuckerbergian. For a fair chunk of Sunday and Monday, TechMeme morphed into a 24-hour chronicle of his doings at South by Southwest. You can't buy that sort of coverage these days.

Facebook doesn't have the cyber footprint of a Microsoft--at least not yet. But if Zuckerberg learns how to tell the corporate story to developers as well as the media, he'll turn into the most potent marketing weapon Facebook could ever muster.

And there's no reason he can't. After all, Bill Gates once was a nebbish, too.

All Zuckerberg, all the time.

(Credit: TechMeme)