TechCrunch has a piece on Digital Telepathy, a San Diego-based PR firm that’s morphed into a services shop for web start-ups – and that’s a damned interesting evolution.
Is it the future of our industry? Not for lots of folks. But they are doing some things that are smart and worth paying attention to:

• The services are merged into simplified three-level offerings. PR agencies are notorious for over-complicating and over-customizing their business pitches, loading them up with so much gee-lookit-how-smart-we-are crap that a reasonable CEO can’t really figure out what he/she will get for the money.
• They’ve shifted their core offering from something vague and hard to quantify/understand (PR) to something simple that everyone gets immediately (Biz in a box!).
• They’ve instituted basic time lines so someone kicking the tires at the web site knows how long the process takes. Again, this is sort of a stark contrast to standard PR, where no one in their right mind wants to promise how soon they can get you on Oprah.

I know they’re in a whole other business now and so some of the comparisons to a pure PR agency are unfair. But it’s satisfying to see PR people who understood a lot of the shortcomings of the agency model and left ‘em by the side of the road as they evolved.

Greg

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Your choice of getting a good story for a reporter vs. getting client coverage has a lot to do with your approach to media relations.

Some practitioners are highly relationship driven; they’re at their best when they’re working with reporters with whom they have built up a trusted, long-term relationship. Within that relationship, they can accomplish great things on behalf of their clients.

Other practitioners rely far less on relationships and far more on over-the-top writing and pitching skills. Within this group, relationships with the media are fine, but lack of one doesn’t mean it’s a problem to get top-tier coverage.

Most practitioners use a mix of both approaches, but I’ve found colleagues tend to spend most time in one camp or the other over time.

If you’re a highly relationship-driven practitioner, it’ll force you to take a more strategic approach to your pitching — your coin of the realm consists of reporter relationships far more than pitches, and you don’t want to damage the relationships. If you’re a solo practitioner of this sort and have a client demanding voluminous hits for questionable stuff news, then the best approach may be to farm it out to someone who’s more of a pure pitchman.

On the other hand, if you’re more of a PowerPitcher™, then you fundamentally know that sometimes, you’re going to have a story that’s too subtle or too complex to get a lot of traction on because you’re essentially talking to strangers, and strangers don’t have a lot of time or patience. If you’re a solo practitioner and this is your strength, you trade strategic hits for raw volume sometimes, or partner with someone who’s much more relationship driven in their approach and has experience in the client’s space.

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I’m going to talk about the importance of authenticity in communications. But on the way to that point, I have to touch on movie piracy, economics and lobbying — come along for the ride!

The folks over at NBC Universal, like so much of Hollywood, have a piracy problem. (There’s a conflated problem in that much of their product is crap, but that’s a different discussion.)

So what does a big business do when it has a problem? If it’s smart, it lobbies. As Jonathan Rauch (one of my favorite policy journalists) pointed out more than 10 years ago in Reason, lobbying pays huge returns.:

In a developed economy, a marginal dollar invested in a new die-cutter or inventory-control system might produce a return of, say, 10 percent a year. Compare that with a shrewd investment in lobbying. In 1992, The New York Times reported that a handful of sugar refiners donated $8,500 to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R- N.Y.) and received his successful support for a tariff rebate worth $365 million–a return of about 4 million percent. Only a fool would pass up such an investment, or even the occasional shot at one. “If I throw in a million here or a million there, I might get a hundred million back,” a Washington lobbyist once told me. “And there are probably enough cases like that so they keep throwing money in.”

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Edelman gets a lot of the glory, but Fleishman-Hillard has really embraced blogging and digital PR in a huge way. More than just getting staffers to blog or recommending blogs as a solution to clients, they’ve got one of their internal recruiters blogging as well. This is damned smart, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other large shops and recruiting firms followed suit.

Beyond the fundamental sense of exposing F-H opportunities to the blogosphere — an audience rife with top-notch communicators — there’s more to this than filling the human-capital pipeline.

Having your recruiter blog — and blog well — says a lot about your corporate culture. When’s the last time you thought “open” (Heck, when’s the last time you thought “human?”) when you thought about HR? Betsy Beard’s manner is engaging and open — she doesn’t come across like HR at all. Well played, F-H.

Now I have to find out what Betsy thinks of my five favorite job interview questions.

(And no pro-HR hatin’, please… Despite the occasional genuinely helpful soul, There’s plenty of anecdotal and quantitative evidence about HR’s need, as a management practice area, for an overhaul, a good kick in the ass, or both.)

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A colleague from another shop and I recently talked about hiring and how you ferret out talent in an interview. We traded interview questions and, while I don’t want to post his without permission, you’re more than welcome to use mine.
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