We’ve launched a new video series featuring interviews with PR and marketing specialists filmed in the back of a London black cab.

View full article here: http://www.gorkanapr.com/news/article?news_articles_id=9182

Both social media & online content generation polled way ahead of old school media relations expertise which only 16% think is now key to winning new business.

However the poll did reveal a massive disagreement between the older and younger pollsters. In the 45+ age category media relations is considered most important and social media the least.

Search engine optimization came in last with 7%, underlining that clients do not expect SEO to lead the agenda in PR pitches.

Furlong PR CEO Ross Furlong commented; “The poll confirms that age is a massive factor in the perception of ‘new fashioned’ pr techniques. While the young clearly believe a social media ingredient is crucial to winning a PR pitch in 2011, anyone over 45 just as clearly thinks it isn’t. This is disappointing but not surprising. Convincing senior management of its value is the chief obstacle to adoption.”

232 votes were cast in the month long poll conducted on LinkedIn during April 2011. Full results of the poll are available here:

2) It takes a month to get a press release back. So who’s writing this stuff? Is it going up and down some bureaucratic chain of command at the agency, being amended for style not substance. When it does appear, is it lost in jargon with no discernible news hook?

3) I haven’t seen the account director since the pitch. All the IP and experience you saw in the pitch has been very busy with internal projects and has become merely a CC on hundreds of emails from the AM asking questions, questions, always with the questions.

4) You’re their smallest account. If you’re the smallest account at a large agency, they just don’t care enough about you. Doesn’t matter how well known the agency is, you won’t benefit from their award winning expertise.

5) Reactive not proactive. Your PR agency should be bringing things to the table, not lazily waiting for you to ask them to do something.

6) They don’t do ‘online’. Well that’s a shame because that’s where your customers are increasingly.

7) They don’t reveal their fee structure. As we’re in business, you need to know how your retainer is structured, including how much your account management team are charged out at and how many hours of their time you can expect (see 1).

Interesting too that he was saying it to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP – one of the world’s largest comms groups (138,000 employees in over 2,400 offices in 107 countries) for whom Unilever is a major client.

Weed goes on to say that when working with a big agency, his aim is to make sure he has that agency’s best people on his account, implying that in a big agency, employees are a mixed bag.

While it’s feasible to demand the best staff if you’re Unilever with a budget of £5bn a year, if you’re looking for a PR agency and have say £60K a year to spend, the size and quality of the agency you’re dealing with become more mission critical factors.

There’s a lingering perception that smaller PR agencies may lack resources but when it comes to online pr in particular, the number of people an agency can throw at a campaign isn’t as important as the quality of thinking behind it.

This is what the Head of R&D at Proctor & Gamble meant when he said “my biggest competitor today is a person with an idea” – a quote from the website of Anomaly, a  small agency that won the £50m Sony business last year.

In online pr, everything is measurable and testable so it becomes easier to drill down and understand whether the agency sitting in front of you can really deliver online and if you are in that position, we’ve devised seven questions you should ask.

In the video of the interview below, watch out for Sorrell dodging Weed’s question about if he has the best staff working on Unilever accounts – quite funny.

Well we always knew it was a bit iffy, not least because the well known phrase ‘you can’t buy coverage like this’  is literally true – you can’t buy advertising in many of the editorial situations the PR industry gets clients onto, plus AVE massively undervalues the longtail benefits of positive coverage.

While Barcelona has put it’s foot down on AVE, the great and good of PR haven’t yet proposed an alternative. Offline they may continue to struggle but happily online we’re got plenty of options, here’s a few off the bat:

1) The number of new links to your site/blog – good for reputation, SEO and reach

2) The increase in the number of mentions on Google your brand gets.

3) Website grade – use one of the online tools to measure how well your website scores before and after a campaign.

4) How many new visitors to your blog/website generated.

5) Increase in Twitter followers/Facebook fans/LinkedIn connections.

6) How many results your online press release generates on other blogs/websites.

7) How much money it makes you – assuming you have end to end analytics.

1. The PR Industry is out of touch – and has been slow to embrace social media.

2. Social media is not the remit of the PR industry and is the realm of digital agencies.

3. The top 100 is more likely to consist of ‘older’ practitioners and business leaders – whose expertise lie in traditional media and may not have time to Tweet – but their staff may be fully engaged in social media and their companies are running effective campaigns.

4. Twitter is not for everyone.

5. Twitter may not be that important.

My view is that 1 & 3 are the most accurate and related. The profile of most PR agency CEOs suggests Twitter is something their kids are more likely to use than they themselves.

I remember talking to the MD of a sizeable advertising agency a couple of years ago and he seemed almost quite proud to state that he wasn’t interested in Facebook, didn’t use it. The implication was that he considered himself too senior to have to worry about it. The same is probably true of many PR agency CEOs

Agreeing to contribute his thoughts to a New York Times profile of Fox founder and boss Roger Ailes, Freud said: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

Commentators suspect that his comments don’t so much represent a spectacular gaffe by Freud as a tactical move to destabilise the station chief. Michael Wolff, a biographer of Murdoch said “Matthew Freud, a PR man of extraordinary craftiness, is not going to say anything off the cuff, certainly not that.”

Fox founder and boss, Roger Ailes is known to have had a tempestuous relationship with Murdoch whose family is said to be more left leaning than arch-republican Ailes, a former aide to President Nixon who told the New York Times that he “built this channel from my life experience” and not out of the mould of a liberal media elite.

The US advertising monitor cites the declining number of media outlets combined with the growth of quick fire customer engagement through online communities as drivers of a new approach to PR.

Mastercard,  for example has deliberately pursued a low tech video route, interviewing it’s executives on camcorders, editing on laptops and uploading to YouTube. Mastercard’s PR agent, Andrew Foote at Cohn and Wolfe says:

“They’re realizing they can comment on issues and get the points of view of their experts out there and on the record. Once the videos are up, the company will often tweet the links and follow up with reporters letting them know MasterCard commented on the topic.”

“The traditional one-way media model has definitely had its day,” added Sam Lucas, of Burson-Marsteller. “So agencies are talking to clients about these engagement models much more.”

Results from a survey of 101 journalists by CIPR student Iain Flemming, published on Friday suggests that a move away from the traditional press release will be welcomed by journalists - 83 per cent of them saying they wanted less material sent to them.

See the full Advertising Age article

See the elephant