The difference between companies that communicate well and those that don't

We recently had the privilege of being a premiere sponsor of the NFTE Philadelphia Visionary Gala. The annual event is held by the Philadelphia chapter of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) to celebrate the area's youth entrepreneurs and role models in the business community.

The gala featured sponsors' advice on entrepreneurship, business growth, marketing, and communications. As part of it, we wrote an overview about the importance of effective communications in building value for your company. I thought it had a lot of wisdom in it, and I wanted to share it with our blog readers.

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Why is effective communication critical to the success of your business?

Businesses that communicate well enjoy a 30 percent higher value than those that fail to communicate effectively with their constituents and stakeholders. At the same time, a new era of corporate transparency means that businesses owe it to their customers, employers, partners, and investors to share key information in order to strengthen their brand and enhance their corporate reputation.

A new era of digital communications has opened an array of new channels that businesses can use to educate, enlighten, and engage audiences. Enterprises, both large and small, across the globe are embracing these news channels and using them to better communicate their narrative and control their storytelling in order to win visibility, cement alliances, build relationships, drive sales, and ultimately better connect and influence the decision makers who purchase their products or services.

In this new world order, where businesses are now publishers and many publishers are ironically out of business, those companies that understand the power of information and content, and can effectively deliver it to audiences worldwide are bound to win on the global battlefield, where perception is often just as important as performance.

Fortified in Houston

Public affairs conference on Marcellus Shale reinforces core beliefs of public relations

This week offered a rare opportunity for me to speak in front of 120 public affairs professionals drawn from top energy firms from across the country. The topic was Marcellus Shale, an issue near and dear to my heart and of great controversy here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

More important than what I said, is what I heard from other speakers, all top minds in the industry. Their messages fortified me in many ways, because all too often I find myself defending the power and purpose of public relations.

Yet, there in Houston, surrounded by many whose job it is to provide voice and balance to an industry habitually under fire, I walked away re-energized in delivering the message to clients large and small. Here's just a sampling of what I heard:

1. The need for enterprises to tell their story and control their narratives has never been greater. It was said time and again, in ways big and small. If an organization isn't telling its story, its competitors, antagonists, and opponents are doing it for them. In other words, as one speaker summed it up, "If you don't have a seat at the table, someone else is eating your lunch."

The rarest and purist form of public relations

An honest apology 

How many times in a lifetime do you hear the CEO of a major corporation use phrases like "I messed up" and "I owe everyone an explanation?" But there on his blog, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings came clean.



The company's disastrous decision to increase monthly rates by 60 percent to $16 from $10 resulted in Netflix cutting its subscriber projections by nearly 1 million members, or 4 percent of its total, and losing 56 percent of its stock price from its high. In the blog post, Hastings explains the miscues. "I slid into arrogance based upon past success."

Hastings' honesty is startling, considering that leaders today rarely take the blame and instead choose to pin problems on others. Particularly telling of this entire situation is where Hastings made his confession. Online. On the company's own blog. Direct to customers. Not mediated, deliberated, or reinterpreted by others.

In doing so, Hastings presents a compelling case by sharing his angst and explaining the difficulty any organization faces in embracing change. It's tough, he acknowledges, to accept a changing world, and difficult to know how fast is too fast to move a company forward.

How bad storytelling ruined online grocery shopping

Or the nine most common reasons why so much of corporate storytelling sucks
 
I stumbled upon an interesting article in "Technology Review" when I was traveling last week about a new shopping service in South Korea that transforms a subway station wall into a virtual grocery store. Using cell phones, commuters snap photos of the toilet paper or sushi they want to buy, and the items are automatically delivered to their homes before they return from work. Pretty cool.

It all reminded me of the salad days (literally and figuratively), when online grocery shopping was supposed to transform the way Americans buy groceries, and Gregory FCA was working with a now defunct online grocery concept in New England. The company was admittedly so far ahead of the curve that it eventually ran off the road and into a ditch.

The problems were legion. Slow Internet dial-up speeds back then bogged down shoppers as they waited for the site to load. Delivering groceries to suburban homes proved a logistical nightmare, requiring the company to install free refrigerators in customers' garages for deliveries while working families were not at home. Entrenched behavior prevented shoppers from ever believing they could order the perfect cantaloupe without thumping it for themselves.

Even more disastrous, though, was the company's own narrative. Back in the dot-com days, newly minted and funded companies refused to tell simple, understandable stories, preferring to speak in broad, cultural, or economic terms about their concept and business plan.

The management team argued that the company was not about grocery shopping. Rather, it was a "content aggregator that served as a conduit connecting services and products to the home, completing the all-elusive final mile that was thwarting the online revolution."

It all made no sense to shoppers, who simply wanted the best quality groceries at the best possible price delivered conveniently. No one got it. No one bought it. Like Webvan, another high-flying online grocery store concept that raised nearly $400 million in an IPO back in the day, our client died the same sock puppet death as Pets.com, leaving a bunch of overly smart techies to lament that customers "just don't get it."

Oh, they got it alright. Simplicity rules. Think Apple if you don't believe me, and its uniquely understandable boilerplate.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Or Microsoft, whose entire boilerplate boils down to this.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions to help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Hasn't the world come to realize that the length of a company's boilerplate or story is inversely related to the length of time it has been in business or will be in business? The longer, more convoluted the story, the less significant the business is in the first place. So here, for the first time, I will share with you the primary reasons why so much of corporate storytelling sucks:

1. My investors or investment bank just told me the story we need to sell to get the highest valuation. Oh really? Is that the story that no one can understand? All too often, investors live in echo chambers with the reverberations making it impossible for anyone to understand what's being said.

Are we winning or losing the public relations battle on Marcellus Shale?

What could be the most important new source of clean, domestic energy has hit headwinds in the court of public opinion. New research shows that public sentiment about Marcellus Shale development is positive, but that sentiment is falling. The oil and gas industry now needs to act to shore up public opinion and guarantee that America benefits from this vital natural resource.

America's most important new source of clean, domestic energy is a massive geographic structure buried 9,000 feet beneath some of the most economically depressed regions of our country.

Stretching from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania through Western New York State, Marcellus Shale, a geographic formation formed some 400 million years ago, holds more than 10 years of domestic natural gas supply for the Northeast, and that estimate could be low.

For years, the gas was inaccessible. But new drilling technologies are liberating this vast national resource, and bringing it to the surface to warm U.S. hearths and homes, and power businesses. If ever there was a good news story about U.S. energy, Marcellus Shale is it.

Great moments in public relations stunts

Watson's "Jeopardy!" appearance reminds us all that simple, fun, and creative is often the most powerful PR strategy of all

I just had to tune in. For weeks, I have been waiting for the big showdown between Watson -- the IBM supercomputer -- and two all-time "Jeopardy!" greats, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Truthfully, I do have a dog in this fight, considering so much of my work lately has been with IT consulting firms struggling to tell fresh, iconic stories about their brand.

Well, IBM put on a tour de force in storytelling last night, and by doing so, reset perceptions about mainframes. Funny, in the Google age of server farms, most of us think the mainframe disappeared somewhere in the late 1980s along with Cray supercomputers.

But here comes IBM and a full-blown public relations stunt to reeducate us all and reset the gauge on mainframe computers and their place in the global economy.

How three companies are controlling their narratives through blogging

"Your blog posts are lifeless and dull, and add nothing to the industry dialogue. You are relying on lazy writing that uses vague generalities instead of facts. You take no stand. Deliver no new information. You fail to frame the topic in a way that engages me as a reader. If that's what you want to publish, I can't help you. But if you're serious about engaging new audiences online, and want to learn how, then we'd be delighted to help."

That's what I told a prospective client last week. It rocked the CMO back on his heels. He believed in his online content, and needed education on what makes it compelling. I put it to him this way.

First, would you ever see an article like yours -- one with tired information and hollow conclusions -- ever appear in a respected publication? Then why would you think it would be appropriate for your own?

And second, would any editor who follows your industry ever pay a freelance writer for the content of that post? Then you know it's not worthwhile.

I continually work with clients to improve their online content in order to break through the clutter and attract new audiences. Some actually listen! :-) Here are three of our of clients' blogs I am particularly proud of, and why they work so well.

Most-asked questions about PR & social media

I was talking to a B2B company that learned of Gregory FCA through this blog. We discussed how they can use traditional public relations and social media to reach their target audience, tell their story to the marketplace, and build recognition and awareness for their brand.

They sent me an e-mail with some of their questions in advance of our meeting, all of which we have heard many times before. So I thought I'd post our exchange here as a way to share our insights into how traditional media relations impacts social media, and vice versa.

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Hi Greg!

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us later today. In advance of our meeting, I thought it might be helpful to send you a few questions to educate our management team.

Greg, how can a PR firm help with the launch of our new technology?

On a couple of fronts. Recognition is vital in the introduction of any new service or product, and certainly, as your sales team takes the message out to the marketplace, they will need air cover so prospects will have heard of the newly introduced technology. As the campaign matures, it needs to provide a direct link to your prospect base. That's where social media has taken on a significant role in the public relations equation.

How would you roll out a public relations campaign for our new technology?

That's hard to say without knowing more about your marketing plan, your target audiences, the technology, your advantages over competitive offerings, and so on.

But as a framework, I think you would want to announce the new technology offering you have developed through search-optimized press releases and personal one-to-one pitching of narratives presented to key industry trade media, business publications, influential bloggers, and other online news and information sources. You also will need to develop a way to use social and other digital media to communicate with influencers and targets, and your prospective clients.

I understand the traditional PR side of the equation. But how do you use social media to sell and isn't it best used to reach consumers?

The fact is that social media can be exceptionally effective in B2B marketing. It's highly targeted, and provides a great platform for subject-matter experts to share their knowledge and expertise directly with the audiences who are hungry for and can benefit from such knowledge.

Moreover, done well, B2B social media can become integral to the sales process, and provides a way to connect and engage your sales team with the ultimate decision maker. This is in addition to its effect as a force-multiplier for traditional PR efforts, and a driver of organic SEO.

We manage a number of successful B2B social media campaigns for companies large and small. For many of them, social media has become a crucial strategic weapon for delivering their narrative about a product, service, or technology; providing an on-demand repository of compelling collateral for the sales team; for publishing evidence to potential buyers; for feeding the mainstream and vertical media with storytelling resources; for supporting lead generation efforts; and for ranking well in search results.

So how does that work? Using social media to tell a story to the marketplace?

Well, it starts with research. We use a number of proprietary tools to monitor and measure the online conversation/buzz/coverage (call it what you will). We then determine where the conversation is taking place around topics of interest to clients and the market, and who the key influencers are.

Once we know that, we go to work figuring out how to get our clients and their messages into those conversations, while always remaining within the rules of online engagement.

Sometimes that's simple, and little removed from traditional public relations, where we build a relationship with a blogger or online media point, and introduce them to our client, their product, or whatever. That can result in an interview, a podcast, or a guest blog post from our clients on these sites. Or it could result in a guest appearance by the media point on our client's blog.

And then there's the strategy of helping our clients gain their own voice online. That might, for instance, take the form of a thought leadership blog that covers key topics of interest and importance to our client's targeted audience. The blog aligns to our client's business objectives, and can serve many purposes in addition to publicity and thought leadership, such as lead generation, presentations, media leverage, SEO, content syndication, sales collateral, customer evidence, newsletter support, and so on.

We publish a range of B2B blogs across a variety of industries, all designed to educate and inform prospective clients and the press, and/or have current clients upgrade or otherwise buy more because of what they learn from these publications.

But how do you gain attention? Right now, there are thousands and thousands of online conversations. Is anyone really reading these online forums or blogs?

And there are billions of offline conversations, too. That's always been the magic of PR and earned media: to separate the signal from the noise, and help clients cost-effectively reach their targeted audience amid a confusing and overpopulated media universe.

In fact, with online tools, it actually becomes easier and more cost-efficient for agencies such as ours to do this filtering and targeting. The real magic is gaining a following for your storytelling. That's a function, again, of using sophisticated monitoring and measurement tools to isolate the conversation and target the influencers, and of constantly working your content and leveraging it across the various spheres (Web media, blogosphere, Twitterverse, e-mail, etc.) to drive traffic back to your online properties.

Sometimes we accomplish that by developing white papers or articles and syndicating them throughout the Web. Sometimes we do this by placing stories in online media that links back to your blog. Sometimes we do this by strategically commenting in prime media points and, again, linking back to your blog.

There are all manner of tactics at our disposal -- too many to run down here. But all are optimized for search, which sometimes becomes the ultimate tactic. It surfaces your content on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, where prospects who are at the beginning of the sales process are looking for places to start, or looking for answers to questions or problems.

They see your content, click the link, and are then brought back to your blog where an array of convincing digital assets and resources are at their disposal. One of our key goals is to optimize your content for search around the semantics that define your business, and rank as much content as possible with your name and URL on page one of those results.

I noticed that you haven't mentioned Facebook or LinkedIn yet. How important are they, Greg?

They do have importance. But you have to think hard about which social networks are most appropriate for your story. Facebook, although it has 500 million members, is almost entirely a consumer network.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is business focused and very strong with professionals. We use social networks primarily to drive interest and traffic to our clients' blogs and other digital channels. We integrate them with our client blogs where appropriate (for example, your blog posts could be automatically published on targeted LinkedIn subnetworks).

We also work with client sales forces to raise their personal visibility on these networks as a way of finding new opportunities, and leading the interested back to our client online media channel.

How do we determine the ROI?

For sheer exposure, we benchmark a client's share of awareness versus their competitors at the outset, and then test again as the campaign matures to see if our clients are gaining on their competitors or showing separation. We also provide a secure on-demand SaaS database of all media impressions, complete with copies of clips and audience reach.

We also monitor and measure other business metrics, such as traffic to the blog, impressions, SEO results, trends, e-mail subscribers, top stories, deltas, and a lot more.

Lastly, we use Nielsen BuzzMetrics to measure awareness across several dimensions, including around targeted terms and competitors, and sentiment.

In the end, our clients want meaningful exposure that leads to thought leadership and additional revenue. In the new world of public relations, where behavior is measurable online, that's what we aim to provide.

Anything else to add, Greg?

Just that we're looking forward to talking more with you.

Trend spotting in public relations

How to find hot new media topics to publicize your product, service, or company

You can flog a bad story idea for 1,000 hours with no results. Or you can identify a single strong story idea and move mountains in minutes. So much of media relations is based on the strength of the story. Is it timely? Is it relevant? Is it unique? Does it run with a trend or against a trend?

All these factors determine whether a story can sell, and how easily it can sell to the media. The ability to spot trends and connect your product or service to them is the heart of an effective public relations campaign. Here are some of the hot new trends we've identified here at Gregory FCA in support of our clients:

1. Show me the stimulus. With the mid-term elections only months away, the media will be keen to report on any stories that substantiate real economic impact of government stimulus spending. Companies that can show they have added employees, won new assignments, or grown revenue due to stimulus spending can make themselves the subject of boundless news coverage as media struggles to decipher the effects of massive government spending.

2. On death and dying. Sound moribund? Baby boomers -- their wants, needs, and emotional states -- have dominated everything American, especially the media, since the 1950s. Now that many of us are looking down the barrel of our own mortality, death will take on new meaning, and the media will cover the topic in new, unimaginable ways. Expect to see increased obituary coverage, as record numbers of famous people die. Drugs, solutions, and studies that uncover news ways to live longer and more vibrant lives will fuel news coverage for the next two decades.

3. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs are a huge issue across the country, as pesticide bans and increased international travel have caused outbreaks in hotels, retail stores, and even movie theaters. Just Google the news coverage of bedbugs, and you'll find the scope of the problem. Any product or service that can solve the problem will gain attention, and any business that could be affected by it (hotels, clothing stores, airlines) needs to contend with potential negative news coverage if it becomes infected with the blood suckers.

4. The always-on backlash. Expect to see more news coverage about people and professionals who pull the plug on our always-on culture of e-mail, texting, and social media. As these technologies take over more of our lives, the media will search for the counter story -- technology Luddites who choose to go dark. Expect to see more stories about companies that ban cell phones during meetings, ask employees to turn off e-mail during vacations, and clamp down on more-is-better information sharing.

5. The Republican and Democrat TV networks. We've jumped the shark with regard to bias in media and "newsertainment," as Republicans and Democrats openly attack one another every evening on Fox News and MSNBC. Expect more of the same, as all sorts of media, desperate to find new audiences, take a lesson from these quasi-news organizations. How about a primetime Fox network of sitcoms that openly joke about the Democrats and revolve around rigid conservative family values? Or an MSNBC station of left-leaning gay and lesbian family sitcoms and morning talk shows advancing liberal agendas? There's money to be made in dividing and conquering. More media is bound to learn that lesson, and, for better or worse, adjust their programming.

How conspiracy theories affect reputation management

Why is it that some stories that don't make sense often get stuck in the public's consciousness and can never be dislodged?

Even if they're ridiculous. Unsubstantiated. Absurd. So the story of the Bush Administration's orchestration of 9/11 continues to resurface. And an increasing percentage of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. Conspiracy theory affects the easily influenced and persuaded but it also infects bright minds and the level headed. Why?

Because we all share a basic human need to want to believe that our lives are far from haphazard. Our minds are constantly working to convert chaos to order. We believe that events are somehow driven by a hidden hand, a plan, or even a conspiracy. And so we look for meaning even where none exists.

For us, it's too painful to believe that a nondescript group of hijackers could commandeer commercial airliners, kill more than 3,000 innocent human beings, trigger wars, and inflame global hostility. Similarly, it's impossible to acknowledge that a troubled loner could, with a single shot, murder the most powerful leader in the world. The cosmos can't work in such ways. They are too fantastic of stories that demand back stories, so we fill them in to alleviate our own discomfort.

The human tendency to replace the unexplainable with an explanation has an inverse effect as well. When the evidence suggests that a conspiracy has led to a specific result, we often disbelieve our own eyes and instead replace the obvious truth with an imagined outcome.

Such is the case of my personal hero, Lance Armstrong. I first came to love Lance in 1999, when he won his first Tour de France after beating cancer. I read his books, fell in love with the story, and hung a framed poster of Lance in my office as a reminder of victory over adversity. And even though my own eyes were telling me something different, I believed it all.

Here was a guy who got off death's bed to lift himself over the Alps and Pyrenees, faster and higher than anyone else. His performances were super human. I wrote speeches about Armstrong's accomplishment for my clients to read at sales conferences. I told and retold the stories of how Lance cracked the field and beat the mountains seven times to win the most grueling of athletic endeavors.

And yet, there were signs everywhere that he, like most top-ranked cyclists of that era, had cheated. A number of his lieutenants, those that have ridden on his team, had intermittently come forward with allegations. An alleged positive drug test for EPO was made public by a French newspaper. A teammate testified in court that he overheard Lance tell doctors about his illicit drug use while being treated for cancer.

His retirement from the sport, while at the top of his game, and then his ill-timed return, suggested that he struggled with the risk of getting caught, only to return to the sport once it had cleaned itself up to prove he could win in a clean and fair race.

Then, there was the mushroom cloud effect of US Postal-Lance's old cycling team. Many of its members were Americans. Many became world-class cyclists quickly. Compared to US soccer, where America has worked for decades to achieve international success, cycling did it in a few short years. I should have wondered at that point, could there be more to the story? Could they have just been good at sharing the secrets of doping?

My denial of all things Lance Armstrong was nothing more than a reverse conspiracy theory. Lance was clean because of the back story that preceded his every performance. The dots had already been filled in for me. This was not random. It was the result of greatness with the proof being his conquering of cancer. It allowed me to blind myself to the apparent truth-one that is now the subject of a Federal investigation.

Brutally put, Lance Armstrong cheated. And not only did he cheat, but he probably did it in a revolutionary, systemic way, infecting others by sharing and educating them through his team to the wonders of performance enhancing drugs. Unfortunately, the very greatness of his accomplishments should have raised suspicion. It didn't. The backstory assured me.

So what does this all have to do with reputation management? Truth is often determined more by storytelling (of the lack thereof) rather than the facts of a circumstance. The more we can back fill a story, the greater the chance of we can preserve a legacy or reputation. Without the story, our hands are tied.

I once represented an institution that suffered the grave suicidal loss of a patient under their care. There was no other reason for the loss other than the patient was troubled. But nothing could be communicated about the events out of deference to patient privacy. The story was not there. The dots didn't connect. The Institution paid a terrific price.

On the other hand, there have been instances where clients have faced real threat. But the backstory was intact. The price paid was much lesser than when the story was absent. As public relations professionals, it is our charge to craft the story with truth and humanity to preserve the integrity of those we serve.

Gregory FCA e-book: The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media

Many of you attended our national media panel in April, "The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media." We've provided you several resources as an outgrowth to it, including the podcast, video, and transcript from the event.

Now the last piece has fallen in place. We've published the complete transcript of the event as an e-book that you can enjoy and learn from at your leisure. There are a few ways you can read it.

• Scroll through it on Google Books.
• Download the PDF.
• Read it on your Kindle by right clicking this e-book link, and selecting "save link as." Connect your Kindle to your computer and drag and drop the file over to your Kindle.

We hope you enjoy the e-book and learn something from it. Feel free to share and print it as an educational resource.

The media are not our friends

As PR practitioners, we often fall into the trap of believing that relationships trump all, and that by being open and transparent with the media, we stand the best chance of winning favorable coverage. But underneath it all, the media's agenda is vastly different than our own.

Reporters are rarely promoted or rewarded for writing a positive story about a business, person, or politician. Rather, their own success often depends on exposing the negative, uncovering the wrong, and seeing the opposite in what is projected by the world.

Good thing, too. Without that skepticism, the value of public relations would be forever diminished. It's only through the prism of objectivity that media coverage gains its power. This is precisely why the consuming public values media more than marketing. A reporter's scrutiny confers believability. Skepticism portrays the reality of the world, and plays more authentically to the audience.

That's often not easy for clients to understand. A few years ago, I worked with a financial services company that was profiled in The Wall Street Journal. The story was positive in every way, except for a quote from an outside analyst the reporter turned to for a counterpoint. The client went ballistic, claiming that the entire article had been impugned.

I took up the fight and explained that quite to the contrary, it was the counterpoint that gave the article its weight and legitimacy. By finding a negative, the reporter did us the favor of demonstrating objectivity, and conferred a degree of credibility we never could have achieved through simple advertising.

The client never agreed with me. We went our separate ways. Philosophically we never connected on the real power of PR as more than just a tool for exposure, but rather a vehicle for credibility in a world full of illegitimacy.

So in a world where the media are not our friends, we as PR professionals need to act accordingly, remembering:

A client's interest trumps a media relationship. A dirty little secret of PR is that many practitioners would rather error on the side of the client, rather than alienate a media contact. But the media are big boys and girls. They understand the dance we enter into, and have short memories when you enter the arena as a worthy adversary.

No comment is sometimes the best response. It's become a tired refrain in PR to never say "no comment." Too often, that counsel comes from PR people who simply don't want to alienate a media contact who they might need in the future. After decades of high-risk crisis work, I have come to realize that no comment often does more to protect the interests of a client than some half-baked empty response that nibbles at the corners of liability. No further comment.

The media love no one. This is why Gen. Stanley McChrystal got tattooed last week. He believed that if he could just bring the reporter into his world, and share with him the blood and guts (and finger-pointing) of war, the coverage would be favorable. The big egos often fall into this trap. You see it all the time in sports. Athletes believe they're beloved by the media, and then can't understand when the media turns on them. Tiger Woods fell victim when, during his press conference, he attacked the media for stalking him and his family. In reality, Tiger was devastated to realize that the media never loved him. He was just a story. When access was easy, the storytelling was favorable. When it became difficult, they did what they had to do to get the story. They didn't love him. Never did.

Manage the negativity, but don't discount it. I have used 101 techniques in my day to prevent the negative from being exposed by the media. Heck, I once holed up a Santa Clause in a hotel after he was accosted and the media wanted to report on crime in my client's mall. But important stories have two sides. It's the presentation of both sides that comforts the audience and opens them to a more worthy perspective.

The Philadelphia Inquirer: winning by losing

The loss of The Philadelphia Inquirer to its investors could set the stage for an entirely new way of news gathering and storytelling in the digital age. A call to wipe away all expectations and start anew ...

I tend not to talk local when blogging because so much of our business is national in scope. But I am obliged to reference yesterday's news about the purchase of the bankrupt Philadelphia Inquirer by its creditors. The move marks the end of a long-fought battle by its current ownership and management to keep the paper in local hands, headed by former PR guy and publisher Brian Tierney.

How the Inquirer fell into bankruptcy underscores the plight of traditional media. Pages are falling (8 percent in the past quarter), ad revenue is drying up, and subscribers are turning to free online news services -- everything from Newser to Twitter -- to stay abreast of the day's events.

Personally, I was pulling hard for Brian Tierney, to whom I owe much in my own career for cultivating a local PR market and then moving on. That opened a lot of opportunity for my firm to emerge as the largest public relations company in our region. But alas, the Inquirer is now in the hands of investors, destined to be stripped down and resold to a media conglomerate or private equity play.

It's unfortunate, because so much could have been done to save the paper. To no one's fault, the Inquirer was too deeply in debt and too deeply steeped in legacy thinking and business practices.

That's a hard juxtaposition against what The New York Times or USA Today is doing to be in front of their audiences, "regardless of where they are," as Jennifer Preston, social media editor at The New York Times, told us only two weeks ago at a national media panel we sponsored here in Philadelphia.

Laden with debt, struggling with labor issues, the Inquirer simply couldn't turn fast enough in the water. But all is not lost. As they say, for every door closed ...

If I were Brian Tierney (which, confidentially I have sometimes wished I were), I would go back to my cadre of local partners and present an alternative. The Inquirer sold for $139 million, many more millions than what was expected for this aging brand. While current ownership didn't win the auction, it does have some valuable assets.

Video from Gregory FCA's national media panel

We've been rolling out coverage from our recent national media panel, "The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media." I've shared with you my feedback and reactions to the conversations and insights, the podcast of the entire discussion, and today, we bring you the video capturing the event. You can watch it unfold by hitting play below. Please feel free to share it with colleagues and friends.



When you watch the video, the panelists from left to right are:

• Laurie Burkitt -- Writer, Forbes
• Riva Richmond -- Freelance Writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
• Ted Anthony -- Assistant Managing Editor, Associated Press
• Jennifer Preston - Social Media Editor, The New York Times
• Sara Clemence -- Co-Founder and Editor, RecessionWire.com
• Brian Dresher -- Manager of Social Media and Digital Partnerships, USA Today
• Sree Sreenivasan -- Associate Professor and Dean of Student Affairs, Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

After you watch the discussion, feel free to share what you learned in the comments.

Podcast from Gregory FCA's national media panel

As promised, here is the podcast from Gregory FCA's national media panel round table, The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media. This is the complete audio from the panel discussion, which brought together top reporters, writers, editors, and managers from around the country to talk about how social and digital media is changing news and storytelling.



Panelists that you'll hear from on the podcast include:

• Ted Anthony -- Assistant Managing Editor, Associated Press
• Laurie Burkitt -- Writer, Forbes
• Sara Clemence -- Co-Founder and Editor, RecessionWire.com
• Jennifer Preston - Social Media Editor, The New York Times
• Sree Sreenivasan -- Associate Professor and Dean of Student Affairs, Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
• Riva Richmond -- Freelance Writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
• Brian Dresher -- Manager of Social Media and Digital Partnerships, USA Today

Their insights and perspectives are from right where the rubber meets the road. There was a lot to be learned from the discussion, and I wrote about my short list of take aways the other day.

If you attended the event, give the podcast a listen for something you might have missed or want to hear again. If you didn't make it, lend your ear to find out how the media is using new communications pathways to tell more compelling stories, connect with readers, and build brands online.

If you'd like to listen to the podcast on the go in your mp3 player, you can download it to your computer by right-clicking the podcast link, and hitting "Save Link As." From there, you can upload it to your mp3 player and listen to it in the car, while jogging, etc. Or, you can also read through the transcript if you'd prefer.

We welcome everyone to leave a comment and share their thoughts on the event and what they learned. We'll have the video of the panel discussion on the blog next, so check back to watch it in full.

Seven take aways from Gregory FCA's national media panel

Panelist Sree Sreenivasen kicking off the discussion

This weekend I had the opportunity to take some time and process the findings from our recent national media panel round table that Gregory FCA brought to Philadelphia to help gain national perspective on The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media.

The biggest conclusion is that much of what we heard from a panel that included reporters, writers, editors, and managers from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, USA Today, Forbes, and others is that the media is struggling with many of the same issues facing corporate America.

And in some ways, they are leading the pack in how to leverage these new communications avenues to gain attention, tell stronger stories, and build bonds and brands that resonate with audiences. Here's the DL from top media across the country.

Big turn out for national media panel

FULL HOUSE: Over 100 attendees joined us for the event

More than 100 attendees turned out for our panel discussion yesterday on The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media.

The event brought together agenda-setting thought leaders in media and digital communications for a round table that attracted communications and public relations professionals from inside leading corporations.

Reporters and editors shared their thoughts on how social and digital media is changing news and storytelling. Editors from The New York Times and Associated Press were there. So were reporters, writers, and representatives from and for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Recessionwire.com, and USA Today.

Their insights were timely and leading-edge, fresh from the front line of the new communications revolution. Who said what?

Deconstructing new media: Five ways to show and tell

Harvey Levin beat me to the punch. Nightly, "TMZ's" host challenges a group of 20-something producers to give him the story. He pushes and prods. Laughs and cajoles. I often think our in-house media meetings at Gregory FCA would make similarly great TV, as we challenge each another to find and frame the story, and serve it up.

That serve is increasingly visual. Even print media today wants visuals to spur Web traffic. It can be a video, photo slide show, narrated PowerPoint, or animation. And for their online properties, print media wants the attention-grabbing visuals that engage and hold their audiences.

Rich Levin, our crack Editor-in-Chief and social media director, is the best I've ever worked with in delivering visuals. Collaborating with Kate Richie, one of our top media placement pros, they approached Fritz Nelson at InformationWeek with a challenge: Video our client creating an enterprise application in five minutes, without programming. It's something their editors have never seen before. So it was a good story presented to the right person at InformationWeek.

InformationWeek loved the idea. The resulting video is worth more than a thousand words (or clicks).