Alex Singleton

Insights from an in-house marketer

Archives for January 2014

Stuart Bruce is right: blogging still matters in PR

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Stuart Bruce, a prominent PR consultant and commentator, says that “has significantly helped” his career, but says that “some of the other early pioneers of blogging have recently written about whether blogs are still relevant”.

For those with a message to promote, I’d say that blogging is more important than ever. Twitter and Facebook are fine for directing people to content, but they aren’t as useful as blogs for developing an argument, presenting detailed evidence and convincing people. Unlike press releases (which some people still advocate, wrongly, for SEO purposes), blogs tend to sound like they’re written by a real person – not a corporate machine. They are therefore much more effective at communicating a message than a committee-approved press releases, in which people talk about themselves in the their person.

Of course, blogging takes time. Over the years, many marketers, desperate to get lots of traffic from search engines, tried stupid shortcuts, such as spamming “article directories” with worthless material, or paying to issue hundreds of painfully bad press releases through press release newswires. Most have now come to the realisation that Google just wants websites to produce content that its search customers will value.

So they now they talk about “content marketing”. This is a significant improvement, although some mistakenly think means they can bash out all manner of lightweight copy and expect good results. Content marketing’s upmarket brother, brand journalism, strikes me as a more effective name. That’s because a journalist’s role is to write for the benefit of the reader. In a journalist’s mindset, marketers and PR practitioners tend to write pieces that don’t sound like a sales pitch, but which instead engage the reader’s mind and make a convincing case.

Whatever you call it, brand journalism needs technology and a format. And blogging is one of the best formats for it. In WordPress, we have blogging technology that’s delightful for use and easy to customise. Most people understand how to navigate a blog and they understand that the page is going to be updated regularly.

Newer social networks mean that people don’t just start blogs without thought like they did a decade ago. They can easily write about their cute cats on Facebook. Now it seems like a big decision to start a blog (will I be able to stick at it?). It takes time to build a readership. But blogging’s effectiveness, to my mind, is without question.

O’Dwyer’s PR, the New York-based trade title, reviews The PR Masterclass

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Fraser Seitel, one of America’s best-known PR advisers, has reviewed The PR Masterclass for O’Dwyer’s PR. He says:

In most people’s minds (including, importantly, those who pay public relations people), it is publicity — the ability to earn “endorsement” from an objective, unbiased, indifferent and neutral “third party” – that constitutes the essence of public relations.

That’s why it really is criminal that many people engaged in public relations don’t know the first thing about dealing with the media.

Finally, there is hope.

British daily journalist-turned public relations professional Alex Singleton has authored a new book, “The PR Masterclass,” which provides all you need to know about securing press coverage.

Author Singleton begins his treatise by dismissing the naive contention, fostered primarily by Facebook fanatics and Twit-wits, that the conventional media – principally those hoary daily newspapers – are dead. Nonsense, declares Singleton.

“What is actually happening is that much of it – especially the trade press and daily news – is moving online. That is not death; it is a change of format.”

He points out that many of the leading newspapers – among them, The New York Times, Washington Post, London Daily Mail and London Guardian – have a global daily readership that far surpasses their total print readers.

Singleton argues that most publicity attempts go awry because they are too “low level.”…

Major figure at WPP, the advertising giant, says that advertisers are underinvesting in newspaper websites

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Rob Norman, the chief digital officer at GroupM, the WPP subsidiary which bulk-buys advertising spots, says that advertising haven’t caught up with what the public is doing. He’s an important player – he overseas the expenditure of $5 billion of digital advertising a year. He writes:

The irony… is that news organizations, those with their roots in newspapers as well as TV, have enjoyed an astonishing increase in consumption and now are far more current, enriched as they are by multimedia, by social media and citizen journalism. Furthermore their content is the most-shared across the internet.

This suggests something significant. Advertisers and agencies might take note. Digitally delivered news, both hard and soft, appears to combine reach, popularity, engagement and authority like no other collective of digital assets. And individual news outlets engage their readers and viewers frequently.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that the advertiser has not followed the user. If ever there was a misalignment of time spent and the allocation of advertiser dollars, this is it.

As I write in The PR Masterclass:

Many of the conventional media publications have transformed, or are in the process of changing, into hugely popular destinations online. Newspapers such as The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The New York Times now have a global readership that, on a daily basis, dwarfs what they ever achieved in print. Martin Clarke, the publisher of The Daily Mail’s website, says of his site: “People are addicted to it. It’s like journalism crack.” Meanwhile, there are no signs that viewers are rejecting quality broadcasters. The BBC’s global audience hit 239 million people a week in 2012, up 6 per cent from the previous year.

I explain that, in addition to going online, the significant change is that the media is globalising. In particular, feisty British newspapers are grabbing eyeballs from tedious American rivals, which once had city monopolies.

American newspapers going bust or just being shut down has given some people the impression that the mainstream media is dying, but it isn’t true. The newspaper world is merely going through a process of what economists call creative destruction, and is being reborn. Advertisers, in my view, may have over-invested in social networks like Facebook, where people go to chat to friends, and in their “SnapChat strategy”.

Rob Norman’s article about news websites was written under the standfirst “Marketers Still Aren’t Putting Enough of Their Dollars Where Online Users Are”.

This tells me that there’s plenty more revenue for news websites to soak up – and with a top WPP executive saying so, it looks like they will get some of it.