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| Vol.
7, No. 5, July 2008|
To The Editor
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Your Measurement Reading List
Book reviews by Katie Delahaye Paine Okay, so it's vacation time, and I imagine most of you are probably stretched out on a beach blanket with the latest from Janet Evanovich, Catherine Coulter or Stephen King. Or maybe you are fighting the glare to peer into your BlackBerries and Kindles. Just in case you want to brush up on your measurement and media skills this summer, we've put together a list of measurement-related (well, pretty much) books that are relatively vacation-friendly. Don't forget the suntan lotion... The short answer: This is a very fun read, and one that every CEO can learn from and enjoy. I'm not sure that the average PR person can take Bhargava's advice and sell it to the board, but it's full of wonderful examples of how companies can and should insert personality into their communications strategy. The principle is simple enough: Companies with personality survive and thrive. Companies that don't have a personality -- or that have lost it along the way (Starbucks are you listening?) -- fail. And, in this day and age of user generated media, it's more important than ever to have a personality. Bhargava's advice is to find the personalities within your organizations and let them have at it: blog, speak, lecture or what have you. And if you don't have personalities within your organization, go out there into the blogosphere and find them. Make your company personality out of spokespeople that you draw from the fans and enthusiasts of your brand or your product or what you have to say. He's also very wise in telling people that they have to attune their antenna to find these moments of personality. The best part is his tips on how to be authentic:
Another book I really like is... The short
answer: Written by veteran business reporter William Holstein, Manage The Media is an excellent companion to Personality Not Included, because it's specifically targeted to CEOs and includes many of the same themes: Be real, don't try to fake it, don't try to dodge and hide, be authentic and as transparent and honest as possible. It's full of great examples of how not to deal with the media, and includes some good analysis of went wrong in many well-known crises. The best part is Holstein's emphasis on incorporating communications into corporate strategy. The chapters Embracing New Media and Creating Organizations That Communicate were my personal favorites. This is a book you can read in an afternoon at the beach. It's short and easily digestible, but full of great stories and good advice.
The short
answer: Gary Hirshberg sprinkles some truly inspired marketing and PR ideas throughout Stirring It Up. Besides saving the planet, its message -- like the two books above -- is that being who you are and having a personality is key to success. The whole book is a really delightful tale of small over big, good over evil, and authenticity over traditional marketing. If you just want the great ideas, then read Chapter 4. Hirshberg puts it brilliantly when he says, "No matter how far we ship our yogurt, whether three miles or three thousand, it's the last eighteen inches -- the distance between the yogurt cup and the consumer's mouth -- that makes all the difference... We are a spoon-to-mouth brand and we expand our customer base largely by making an emotional connection with those who sample our product... We use every interaction to strength the pact we've made." In a brilliant analogy, he calls advertising "the fertilizer of conventional business," likening the spraying of ad messages to what happens in non-organic farm fields. Both treatments are repetitive and wasteful applications that cost more and more money, and yield less and less. This book is written the way Gary talks, with humor, passion and a clear unambiguous style that makes it perfect summer reading.
Here's the 2nd edition of...
If you know nothing about crises or PR or the media, this is a great place to start. If nothing else, it belongs in your reference library. The big addition to the second edition is a chapter on blogs. It's a very good synopsis of the implications of social media on crisis communications, and offers some good advice.
And finally we have a book that you can leave on the shelf...
The short
answer: I don't like David Carriere's 7 Steps to Publicize Just About Anything. In fact, I hate this book. Consider this sentence: "Neither the immediate impact of a publicity campaign or the long-term consequences of its success are actually quantifiable." His measurement advice is to -- get this -- generate "informal and unscientific discussions around your own kitchen table." ARRGGHH! That's how millions of companies have wasted billions of marketing dollars: by listening to the loudest mouths and the biggest egos at the table. He devotes several pages to clipping services, suggesting that you go through all of the articles and select the best quotes, and then bind them in book form. Right: Cut down a forest to create a big meaningless thud factor, to which no one will pay any attention to anyway. Makes perfect sense to me. As for the rest of the book, well, there is nothing wrong with it, just very little that's new. It's mostly basic advice we've heard before: use targeted pitches to key reporters, tailor your pitch to the needs of reporters, create a timeline and a calendar, send out a press release. Okay,
to be fair, if you've never done a launch before there are some
good tips in here. And there's a nice compilation of terms and
tools. But the fact that he lists "email blasts" as a recommended
tactic makes me nuts. He does include a paragraph or two on blogs,
social media releases and the like. But it is all very 1999, and
reflects a traditional command-and-control mentality. It's thinking
like this
that will ensure that PR people continue to be
undervalued, underappreciated, underpaid,
and dismissed as fluff. Thank you very
much
Mr. Carriere. |
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