http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/05/microsoft-india-cloud/#more-5193
Microsoft’s Biggest Cloud Deployment: Make or Break?
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PR Spin Debate: Is Terrafugia Flying on Hype Alone?
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When Being Shallow is a Good Thing
I love telling this story about a CEO who messed up a once-in-a-lifetime New York Times interview. (Granted, he should have been forced fed interview training.)
The problem with this CEO was that he went too deep. Too deep into explaining what his company did, when the article’s focus was not at all about him or his company. He failed to stay on theme.
He also failed to listen, resulting in the reporter’s inability to pose a question.
The CEO simply fire-hosed the interviewer. The result? A one-word mention. This, after talking non-stop for an hour.
A basic interview rule was breached: The interviewee is there to service the interviewer, not vice-versa.
As PR pros, we have to remind our clients that the story/article must come first. We are there to service the press. We are there to service the story. We should be doing everything we can to help the writer write the best story they possibly can.
An interview is not a platform to sermonize how great your “solution” is. Wikipedia editors who are gifted with well-developed draconian noses for smelling puffery, call this kind of puffery “peacocking.”
Expert sources are sought after by the press. Since most stories are about people and not companies, we need experts to humanize our pitches. So-called “domain experts,” like to show off their expertise, more so if they had to suffer through long classroom lectures to earn a coveted certification. And when this happens the interview can suffer. The expert source goes too deep. He goes subterranean. He images himself a professor standing before a lectern.
The interview was about the gains in speed, agility, and convenience that can be achieved by a flying car. The pontificator instead chose to talk about the physics and mathematics involved in making the car fly.
He got too myopic, and he failed to listen. He was the expert, after all.
But he didn’t service the call. A grade ‘F’ showing appeared on the final published report.
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Be aware of Vendor Myopia
As someone who has booked hundreds of one-on-one media interviews with technology company CEOs, I have seen a certain insidious disease crop up again and again.
This disease is something I call Vendor Myopia.
Vendor nearsightedness happens naturally in most closely knit communities. It happens within families, teams, clubs, clicks and clans, just as it happens within companies.
How does this happen? It happens because closely knit groups tend to develop their own private language that can easily alienate outsiders.
It’s a condition developed by too much familiarity among employees sharing common corporate messages that circulate for years inside of walled gardens with little ventilation or outside influence.
Jargon & Acronyms: these are the children of Vendor Myopia.
So when conducting interviews with people outside of your immediate company circle or industry, be aware that these outsiders– people who you need to evangelize to, who you need to buy into your products and services or philosophy — are likely hearing your company messages and POV for the very first time.
So you need to temper your communications accordingly. And make the assumption that outsiders have little to no prior knowledge about your company.
Don’t get caught with Vendor Myopia disease.
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In his own words, Steve Jobs on Life & Death…
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs
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Day 2 of Tidal-Wave Stories is Time to Shower with Pitches
Yet vendors need a good dosing of PR education.
A big challenge for PR people is how well they surf a news wave. Like the waves crashing off Rincon, Puerto Rico, news cycles break suddenly and dissipate gradually.
Tidal-wave news is easy to spot: Michael Jackson, BP oil rupture, Japan’s tsunami, bin Laden, Sony and Michael’s data breach… all tidal waves easy to spot. (I wanted to add the Royal Wedding to this list but we all saw that one coming ashore miles away.)
And here is where the savvy PR person can show his/her surfing talent. It begins with recognition. Real work begins once you spot the sustaining power of certain news stories. Preparing for these in advance of their occurrence correlates to another kind of preparedness: crisis communications.
But really now, most companies have no need for CC. My small tech clients don’t build nuclear plants or food or pills that can actually kill people. Tidal-wave stories need another kind of preparedness: educating your vendor/client to the PR pitch process.
Preparing for the big news cycle is this: the savvy PR person will know that there is always a Day 2.
We cannot predict the Day 1, when front headlines cry for attention. The opportunity is realizing that reporters will be more desperate on Day 2 to find new angles and expert sources; they’ll be most receptive to your pitch.
And the almighty pitch is where it’s at. How can you link your vendor-client into the big picture? What new analysis or opinion or conclusion can be drawn from yesterday’s headline story?
I bring up CC because it has a lesson to teach. Your client spokespeople should be ready to go for Day 2 of tidal waves. They need to be told that daily reporters demand immediate action and response. Press deadlines are yesterday.
And vendors should give their PR people direct access to key spokespeople with no ‘pre-approval’ delay by gatekeepers. Trust is a factor, of course. The vendor needs to respect the PR process and trust the PR person. (Of course PR people must first earn that trust.)
A sense of urgency has to prevail, and PR people must prevail upon the expert source. It starts with education, trust, and some media training.
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The biggest peeve among press
Recently while attending a “meet the press” event for PR pros, someone asked, what is the biggest peeve journalists have about PR people? (Of course there are many.) The answer was surprising and ridiculous. The answer was that PR people are hard to find on vendor websites. That something so easy to mend can be so high on the list of annoyances is a real kill joy. But visit most vendor sites and you’ll see how the PR contact is nowhere to be found.
The first place I tend to look is at a company’s press release. When these are distributed via a wire service, the contact is always there, but for some reason a lot of vendors delete it once it gets posted. Why, I don’t know.
About the best example I’ve seen among vendors for addressing the big peeve is Enterworks (not a client). I’ve never seen a vendor care so much about ‘servicing’ a press query. And service is what it’s all about. They write, “We welcome media and analyst inquiries. We respect the value of your limited time, and will prove it with quick, concise, and substantive responses.”
Now that’s the service model to follow.
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