I’m experiencing one of the more regular PR-induced frustrations today, namely an organisation emitting a press release without having spokespeople ready to explain it.
Here’s what happened.
A release arrived in my inbox and piqued my interest.
I contacted the in-house PR person listed as a contact and sent her an email … then received an “out of office” email saying she is unavailable for a further two days.
So I contacted the agency, who called back and told me they have to discover who the spokesperson is for the press release.
This is a big, fat, contemptuous fail for two reasons.
The first is simple logistics: if someone is out for two days, they simply should not be included as a contact for a press release.
The second is the terrible mixed message it sends. Emitting a release, after all, says “we want to discuss this.” When that experience turns into “actually, we are not ready to discuss this” the company involved looks amateurish. The company also looks cynical and disrespectful, because the idea of communicating with media (I have always felt) is to facilitate the free and rapid flow of information so that media can act on it quickly. And quickly is important these days!
When a vendor and agency are unprepared to actually follow through in a timely fashion, I feel like they simply do not get it and are wasting my time and complicating my life.
The chances that I will respect the vendor and its agency decline markedly* and I become less inclined to reach out to these organisations for assistance in future. I am pretty sure those outcomes are not what PR tries to achieve.
* I try, of course, to remain objective. But poor experiences like this mean I am more likely to turn to reliable sources of information and remember this product in light of the poor experience involved in sourcing information about it.
Okay … so I just got a press release from a company proclaiming that its product has been given a “Gold” award in an independent test.
This is utterly “meh” to begin with.
But then I look up the tests in question and found that this release is actually gold-plated bullshit.
Here’s why.
Firstly, NINE products were given a “Gold” award in the same tests. Two were rated “Platinum ” and one fell over the line for “Silver” status.
So the vendor in question is claiming it is very important for having come somewhere between 3rd and 11th in these tests.
As it turns out, it is actually in 12th place on one of the criteria tested – ability to detect viruses – and 3rd on its ability not to fall for false positives.
The product concerned is in a lonely place on the graph demonstrating competence in its field.
It took about 30 seconds of research to come to this conclusion.
This raises some questions, the first of which is: Why on earth would any self-respecting vendor emit a press release that points out how mediocre its products are?
Secondly: What’s happened in the PR agency responsible? This release is dross, pure and simple. Why isn’t the agency doing 30 seconds of research and advising its client not to emit a release that positions them as mediocre?
I’d argue that this release should never have been emitted, because it only takes a journo half a minute to figure out that this vendor is a follower in a very large market. As luck would have it, I was only dimly aware of the vendor’s existence before this crock landed in my Inbox. Now I’ve mentally filed them under “irrelevant clowns.”
Good work everybody!
Scarcely a day passes on which I am not offered an interview with a supposed expert in their field.
When the alleged expert has a track record of achievement in the field, they are generally interesting interviewees.
But when the expert is a corporate hack visiting executive, I get very sceptical indeed because long experience tells me that most interviewees in this category are very expert in their company’s products, but have little independent insight into a field that lets them share something genuinely new and interesting with me and my readers.
For example, I was recently offered the chance to interview a “VP of Asia” from a network security company who was offered to me as an expert.
The email making the pitch was nonsensical and alleged the individual in question represented expertise because his company had altered its products to take account of changed technical and financial conditions. Moreover, that change had been made in the knowledge that a long list of bad things (including increased risks of natural disaster, fires, terrorism, pandemics and hard disk failure) may well happen. Apparently the revelation that security products which can protect their owners against bad things made this person especially visionary.
None of this sounds at all like the insights of an expert to me. It is merely competent to change products. Asserting that network security products are more necessary due to increased fire risk is somewhere between loopy and insulting.
A true expert would have been capable of sustaining a more elegant pitch, one which offered more than (economic and meteorological) climatic factors as evidence of expertise and insight.
So how can one represent true expertise?
A bio helps. The so-called expert I was offered this week had no background whatsoever offered to me. If the bio shows how the individual came by their alleged expertise, all the better. But it is very hard to believe an allegation of expertise when an individual has held a number of sales and executive positions. That indicates business savvy and decent exposure to the industry, not expertise!
So … who have I recently interviewed and found to be genuine experts?
Here are some examples:
- A chief security officer who has worked on pioneering and high profile projects, in high profile organisations, and whose opinion is sought after by non-profit industry associations and standards bodies
- A researcher for a prominent company whose role is to detect and analyse new vulnerabilities, then develop responses to those flaws. He’s a hands-on guy in an organisation noted for its smarts
- A technical evangelist, employed by a vendor in a role that involves sharing knowledge with customers as part of a never-ending listening tour. This individual is also involved in standards bodies.
The PR who offered me an expert this week eventually said the reason she wanted me to meet the individual in question was that I had never written about them. Oddly, that’s a better pitch than some confected claim of expertise or insight. I often speak to companies just to learn about their activities. I consider it a necessary investment of my time. But dressing them up as an expert when their real claim to fame is that they have a job in which they are allowed to speak to the press is a real turn off that makes a company look fake and desperate. And nobody wants to be an expert at that.
Even if the climate change denialists are right and humans and the fossil fuels we rely on are not the cause of climate change, continued reliance on fossil fuels is not likely to reverse the way the climate is heading, so it’s a good idea to move to low-carbon alternatives.
Even if fossil fuels are a more abundant resource than we think, they are still finite, so it is a good idea to move to renewable alternatives.
Even if fossil fuels are more abundant than we think, they are nasty polluters responsible for lessening the air quality of our planet. People around the world suffer respiratory complaints galore because of pollution from fossil fuels, making it a good idea to find an alternative.
Even if fossil fuels can be made less polluting, they remain a finite resource.
Even if fossil fuels can be made cheap and clean, their concentration in a small number of nations is a constant source of geo-political tension that the world can do without.
Damn! Australia lost the Ashes. 
There’s been a lot of noise about whether captain Ricky Ponting should take the blame, or if the general inexperience of the team is to blame.
I suspect the problems lie elsewhere.
Australian cricket was fortunate to have an extraordinary generation of players arrive in the 1990s. Importantly, most of the players of this generation demanded inclusion in the national team in their early to mid 20s. Sure, some fell out of the team for a time, but most were worth blooding very early in their cricketing lives.
But a glance at last year’s Sheffield Shield averages shows a different picture: players from their late 20s or even early 30s topping the charts for runs scored and wickets taken. So the young ‘uns don’t even stack up stats that makes it worth blooding them!
I suspect this is the reason our current team is mediocre: there’s not much competition to get into the team!
Whether this is a temporary aberration I don’t know. But I feel like if there were more young players with fifteen years cricket in front of them doing well in domestic cricket, our future prospects would be better. After all, a 28 year old picked for the national side and dumped after a few underwhelming performances has no way back. A 22 year old has time on their side.
It might also help to have a coach with experience of Test cricket.
I’m a cricket fan. I adore the longer form of the game.
Part of me understands that a game which spans thirty hours over five days is anachronistic and I see why some say Test cricket is dieing. It’s easy to see the logic that asserts that condensed forms of cricket tailored to the hectic demands of modern life make more sense than a game invented to prevent Victorian men from feeling bored.
Except they don’t, because Twenty/20 cricket still needs a big slab of one’s time to watch. Matches require at least 150 minutes, a long-ish period to devote to a contest that generally lacks the tension that comes with a tactical game in which thrust and counter-thrust are part of the play. Twenty/20, in my experience of the game, has few moods. Things are either going well, or badly. There are few shades of grey.
For me, Test cricket’s ability to provide a finely graded spectrum of states of play is its strength and the reason I appreciate the game. Appreciate, however, may not quite be the word. I’ve long thought of Test cricket as a not-unpleasant anxiety to be endured. Just knowing there is a match in progress makes me ache for information about it. When I can devote my full attention to it, I will do so. At other times, I seek out the less sensorily intensive ways of covering the game. For me, the sound of an Australian summer is a slight increase in urgency of the sounds emitted by an AM radio, the increased noise being a sign to devote more of my attention to the goings-on in a game I cannot stop myself being curious about.
I also adore technology and the way it enables communication. Tools like Twitter allow me to immerse myself in my friends and sources of information I value. Myriad other services let me watch or learn or hear what I want to, when I want to.
Today, those tools are applied to cricket following old models. They insist I pull information, rather than anticipating my needs. Test cricket, it seems to me, can thrive if it inverts the pull and instead embraces the fact that while it is hard to immerse oneself in 30 hours of action, it is possible to deliver a variable drip of information that gives those with interest but little capacity for full attention the essential experience of the game by blending short updates, near-relatime video and other ways of presentingthe game.
If cricket can get this right, I believe it will create an experience more compelling than any two-hour hit and giggle.
And I’ll happily pay for this partial-attention experience, rather than for subscription television. Especially as the latter is giving away summaries for free! But that’s another story.
P.S. I know I owe you all a third way of funding journalism in the future. I’ve also got a fourth. I’m working on them and you can expect a post … eventually.
I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and, as often happens these days, the topic turned to getting more traffic for web sites.
One of my colleague’s foremost requests was for me to stop using British English in my writing, and to stop applying it to stories we source from our content partners.
The reason? “Virtualization” is a mighty search keyword, requested by hordes of folks around the globe every day.
But “Virtualisation,” our genteel Australian alternative, is searched for several orders of magnitude less often. So it makes no commercial sense for us to make the small adjustment to our copy to spell the word with an “s” rather than a “z”.
Some would argue that changing the single letter was a futile act of pedantry in the first place. I argued against because I think that small elements like this can be an important marker of identity that is appreciated by readers, even if only because it shows you care enough to make some small adjustments.
Right now, however, the fact that commercial online publishing is driven by the need for good search engine optimization* outcomes seems to me to be a likely source of homogenisation of the English language.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I find bland opposition to change stupidly antediluvian. But I think it is worth noting that the combination of commerce and technology are creating forces that work upon language in interesting ways.
* Yes, that is a deliberate and ironic reversion to “z” there, folks
I’m very glad that Media Watch had a go at coverage driven by vendor-created research this week, because I have reached the decision not to use them any more.
For ages I have been uncomfortable with the way surveys are used to generate coverage, largely because the methodologies used are far from transparent and the intent – generating media coverage – is blatantly obvious.
Recently, however, I encountered the worst, most dishonest piece of research I have ever seen. I label it as such because it simply asked the wrong questions and the researcher was ignorant of the right questions. For example, the survey contained assertions that business data stored on computers is not well protected. But it had not asked those surveyed about the use of the most common data storage and protection technologies, so was simply not reporting on the real world. The research also asserted that businesses cannot recover lost or damaged data at acceptable speed, citing 40 hours as disastrous. Yet when I pressed the researcher on the fact that many organisations deliberately set recovery time objectives of more than 40 hours, the researcher was ignorant of the term “recovery time objectives” and admitted it was something it should look at in the next version of the research.
That’s not good enough.
Yet the research concerned has been cobbled together into a glossy brochure and will be pressed into the hands of prospects and suspects for a year, until the next edition of the research is produced.
I sincerely hope that no-one falls for this flawed study which has (to mix cliches) pissed in the well and broken the camel’s back, because it is such an obvious example of research being abused to prove a point that I simply cannot contemplate trying to find out what is wrong with other research I encounter.
Independent research created by dedicated researchers without commission remains something I will consider. But I simply feel I can no longer trust anything initiated by a vendor. And if I cannot trust it, why would I present it to my readers?
A few times a year, I pull my old guitar out of a cupboard and play it for a while.
I can still remember a few tunes and chords and I have fun for a while. Back when I was more interested in playing music, I was a competent if talentless guitarist.
I would never, however, call myself a musician or suggest that anyone should go out of their way to behold me playing music. But I can play a little music.
Of late, I have been wondering about how we consider “journalists” vs. “musicians”. I think the comparison is useful because no-one runs down someone who occasionally picks up a guitar, sits down at a piano or plays any other instrument. It’s cool to have a go at playing music! Heck – it’s normal to encourage kids to do it, even though the sounds they produce are sometimes not much fun to experience!
As I swirl around inside the washing machine of debate about the future of journalism, I think we can usefully apply the attitudes we bring to people who play music for pleasure to those who practice the new forms of journalism that have been made possible by Blogs, Twitter and countless other online tools.
These tools mean that those with the inclination to do so can now pick up a journalism tool (maybe instrument is a better word) whenever they feel like it, and produce some journalism.
It may not be good. It may be the journalistic equivalent a tonally-challenged, lyric-mangling, 40-something playing hits from his teens on a cheap acoustic guitar with 15 year old strings.
But I think that rather than agonising over what sort of journalism is legitimate, we should simply say that it’s cool when people have a go at journalism.
The musical metaphor is also useful, I believe, because music is wonderfully fragmented. We have classical, pop, jazz, rock, about ten different sub-genres of each and about a million other top-line genres I haven’t mentioned.
I think journalism could do with similar diversity.
Music, of course, has some common values. It tries to entertain by making pleasing sounds (experimental music, IMHPO, tries to entertain through the self-conscious creation of un-pleasing sounds, but that’s another story).
Journalism also has common values. It seeks to discover and re-present facts, using the journalist’s experience of events and some rules about objectivity.
I believe that if we agree that journalism has very simple ingredients and apply the same liberal thinking we apply to music, we can get to a place where we revel in the diversity of journalism that we have today, rather than agonising over whether those using the new tools/instruments of journalism are any good at it. The quality, to me, is no longer the point. Understanding the diversity is where it’s at.
I’ve been thinking lately about the interface between PR and customer service, in the context of an event in which I was forced to play the “I’m a journalist” card.
Let me explain.
I try to run my micro-business like any other, despite the fact that journalists tend to be offered free support for the products they use even if they are using them in their private lives.
For example, when I tweet about feeling frustration with some software products, PR agencies representing the vendors concerned often contact me and offer free support. I decline, as I feel the way to understand what my readers are going through is to live through some tech support engagements. It is also useful to fix the problem myself, as I can learn stuff!
Occasionally, however, a vendor’s service is so dreadful and an acceptable outcome seems so remote, that I play the “I’m a journalist” card by contacting PR representatives of the vendor concerned to let them know about the trouble I am having.
In nearly every case, they escalate the issue and solve the problem very quickly, a response I suspect is honed by years of interaction with consumer advocacy columns in various publications that name and shame vendors who provide poor service.
I played the card recently when a vendor simply refused to put me in touch with the support team responsible for providing me with a replacement for a faulty product. I had already followed a support process that asked us to post the faulty product to a certain facility, but had experienced no response for several weeks. The incident number provided was recognised by the vendor’s call centre, but there was no information whatsoever about the status of the incident. The vendor concerned refused to provide a phone number for the facility to which we had posted the faulty item, leaving no way at all to understand the status of the faulty product.
At this point, having been denied any chance to understand how the vendor proposed to resolve the issue it had created, and feeling mightily and frustrated us mightily, we did what some members of the public would do and let the vendor’s PR team know about the incident.
They resolved it quickly and very satisfactorily.
Had I been a consumer, this incident could have resulted in some ugly press for the vendor concerned.
What I now wonder is whether vendors ever contemplate the fact that PR can be called in – by the general public or media – to explain failures in support and service processes.
In fact, I’d like to have a discussion on these matters on my customer service podcast, if anyone is interested.
Twitter / ssharwood- ssharwood: [plug] FIRST LOOK: Chrome OS. Why it needs a webapp version of the C:drive to be useful :: SearchStorage.com.au http://ow.ly/ELKE
- ssharwood: I had a "no wonder msm is dieing" moment this evening when radio 702 interviewed the nz speed txt champion
- ssharwood: RT @screelman: Delta Goodrem is coming across as a bit of a sellout. Sick of seeing her in Nintendo, Sunsilk and So Good ads.
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- TechTarget ANZ
- Book extract: Prioritizing security spending
- Role-based access improves applications' power
- IT exec's best practices for application consolidation include SaaS
- How Windows 7's XP mode keeps old apps alive
- FAQ: Agile practices and their role in software development
- Could a containerized, Microsoft-style, data center work for you?
- The state of COBOL
- How to consolidate applications
- Sesame Street's 10 lessons for the IT department
- BAM vs. BPO vs. BPM vs. BPA vs. BPMS
- What I’m listening to
- Smart Call Podcast
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- Smart Call #69 – Who’s the boss?In this episode of Smart Call, we ask: Who’s the Boss? And we do so in two ways. First up, we have Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net sharing the results of her firm’s annual Australasian Benchmarking Report with us. Catriona finds that call centre bosses have some happier challenges at the moment, because fewer workers are leaving [...]
- Smart Call #72 – Electrifying customer service
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