Amplification = how loud
Time = how long
For news, the goal was to reach the largest news outlets in the shortest amount of time. Smaller news outlets were nice to have but not critical. It worked particularly well for clients and CEOs who wanted the instant gratification of Wall Street Journal type coverage.
I decided to take another look at my formula as a result of a recent posting by Robert Scoble. He wrote:
"But lately I've seen a new PR trend. One where companies don't show their cool stuff to the A-list bloggers in expectation for coverage. Kyte.tv was a good example of this. They just turned on new features last week and let the bloggers discover it organically (when I saw the new features I knew I had to go over and get the scoop)."
Imagine that, PR folks downplaying news. Social media challenges our assumptions about news, publicity, distribution, and the time it takes to be digested or, more appropriately, consumed.
It is particularly ironic that in an age when access to information is accelerating, we are experiencing the "slow burn phenomenon."
Slow burn is viral marketing, which is to say no marketing at all. In a Zen-like way, viral campaigns are not really campaigns. They are successful because they happen organically, on their own. Campaigns that try to be viral generally fail. For some successful examples, check out Thomas Baekdal's posting and what HP has done.
Slow burn is not issuing press releases - traditional, social media or otherwise. It is what Mike Manuel calls the art of the unlaunch.
Slow burn is issuing invitation only versions (gmail comes to mind) and beta versions where the product is being assembled out in the open where incremental changes are "announced" in company blog postings.
Slow burn is, as Robert Scoble points out, no proactive publicity at all, where you need to discover the news on your own.
To the uninitiated and the impatient, the slow burn strategy is a hard sell - especially to CEOs and clients who are old school. I am certainly not suggesting anyone abandons the traditional loud bang approach. And it does not apply to financially material announcements that require full open disclosures by public companies.
To a large extent, slow burn is about distribution. We have so many more ways at our disposal to reach the specific audience we want to target. We can go extremely wide or extremely long as in the "long tail." All this is possible because cyberspace provides so much freedom. Column inches and broadcast minutes are no longer restrictions.
And so depending on your perspective, our job has gotten a lot easier or that much more difficult. Not only do we have to choose among new and traditional news approaches; we now have myriad options within new media itself. It is very easy to get caught up in distribution. We can slice and dice news in as many as ways as cyberspace is infinite. It is the complexity of distribution that I believe makes PR that much more valuable to clients and executives alike.
But for me, distribution is only part of the equation. The other part is the news. I maintain that news is novelty and narrative. Without novelty, there is no way to distinguish from what came before. And without narrative, you have no story.
Ultimately, we are storytellers - and all the king's horses and all the king's distribution men (and women) can't piece together great coverage if the news itself does not entertain, inform or make our lives better.
Let me get back to you.
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