Obfuscate clearly!

Actually, I have not succeeded in finding the edition in which I recall seeing that phrasing. Probably it was the second, which I presume Paul Kedrosky also had. But in a a subsequent edition somebody (presumable White, as Strunk was long deceased) wrote similarly in their name:

Be clear.

Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. … since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”

Clarity, clarity, clarity.

What makes me think of this dictum most often is not marketing collateral per se, but rather product naming and description. Worst of all can be the names of particular portions of a marketecture diagram. Now, I am on record as believing that all product category names are flawed. But while some vagueness or ambiguity may be unavoidable, there is no reason for names to be meaningless or downright misleading.

• As a consultant to the technology industry
• As a target of public relations myself

Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.

This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.

There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:

• “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
• “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
• Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
• Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
• Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.

In my capacity as a target of PR, I can tell you that clumsy or excessive “selling” of stories creates a backlash. There are a number of us who are LESS likely to write favorably about companies that waste our attention and time pitching inconsequential stories.  You may get ignored (especially in the traditional press or if you’re a larger company).  You may get mocked (especially in blogs and if you’re smaller outfit). Either way, you probably won’t be happy about the result.

In my capacity as a consultant, I can tell you why you should have realized this all along — unless carefully managed, most salespeople will burn their employer’s long-term interests in order to show short-term results. Outside PR agencies on short-term contracts are particularly guilty of this. What’s more, when they are honorable or astute enough to push back against unrealistic management expectations — as is fairly often the case, or at least so they claim — outside PR folks are commonly ordered to produce-or-else nonetheless. The consequences of such bullheadedness are sad.

One of the top trade press reporters covering enterprise technology keeps telling me that he fears for our country if people seriously think that the trivialities he’s hard-pitched are news. Less hyperbolically, he’s given me names of VERY big companies who get less coverage from him than they would if they sent fewer lame press releases. And when he gives me examples of what he hates, I generally agree, except in cases when I can tell him that a terribly-written press release has obscured what is actually an interesting announcement.

A great selling-style PR person can be invaluable, just as a great salesperson is. Those are the ones who know a few target “customers” really well, who are trusted by those “customers,” and/or who know how to listen to what the “customers’” preferences or needs are. Some people like that can be found inside companies.* But they’re almost nonexistent at agencies these days, at least among those folks who pitch me.

*See, for example, Dian Terry’s organization at Teradata. Ditto Rita Shoor, who despite technically being independent might as well have been an Intersystems employee for the past decade-plus.

If most pure “selling” is bad, then what should you do in PR? The answer is “market”. This post will be long enough without me trying to distinguish among the various kinds of marketing — awareness-building, positioning, competitive de-positioning, lead generation, and so on. But I would like to at least point out that there are different categories of people to market to.

In an earlier post, I distinguished among eight different kinds of influencers. For the purpose of this one, it should suffice to highlight three different categories of PR-centric marketing:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. E.g., instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so. When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity. I put quality ahead of quantity because ever more buyers don’t focus on news streams at all. Rather, they go out and search for information when they feel they need it, and when they’re doing that you want them to see a reasonable quantity of highly favorable commentary, even more than you want them to find a large number of decent mentions.
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. When addressing specialized “expert” influencers, you should have two end goals — quality of online mention and quality of word-of-mouth mention. This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one for multiple reasons, including:
  • Specialist/expert influencers have a wider good-to-bad spectrum of commentary than theoretically unbiased reporters do.
  • Even if you don’t see that in print, it certainly happens in private conversation.
  • Their followers are apt to be focused enough to notice what tone the commentary takes.
  • If they have a high opinion of you, quantity will often take care of itself.
  • You probably couldn’t measure word-of-mouth quantity if you tried (although mass consumer markets may be an exception to that rule).
• Reaching out to the broad market directly.  Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles. And a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.

With all that as background, let me now turn to the specific tips that started this all off.

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies.
• If you must use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, for a conversation that BOTH sides want to have, that’s OK. It’s not ideal, but it’s less likely to actually damage you than some of the alternative approaches to PR are.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea. Indeed, it’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will oversell and burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you.  (On your payroll or otherwise.) Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be. The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be.
• Review pitch emails just as you review press releases. If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch email writes itself. Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched. A bad pitch email can piss off an influencer even more than a bad press release does, because it often consumes more of their attention. (Vendors really fall down on this point.)
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process. This is an extension of the previous point. If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better.
• And here’s what I REALLY think: Just treat press releases as documents your post online. Press releases get picked up in various places online.  And sometimes they even appear in venues (mainly online) where they look like they’re press articles. So you’re not actually going to stop issuing them. (Sigh.) But the writing you do for your generic online audience is very different from what you should do for reporters and other influencers.

To reach the latter group, the right model is something that’s at least quasi-personal, quasi-straightforward, and quasi-in-depth. In other words, it’s a lot like a blog — or else like a series of truly personal email correspondences. But, given how long this has already become, that’s a subject for another post.

*There actually are a couple of vendors who drown me in press releases without pissing me off. Why? Because those press releases have instantly comprehensible headlines and topic paragraphs. (Typically they’re user success stories without breathless fluff.) I know what I’m ignoring, without having any work to do to ignore it. The reason I mentioned Rita Shoor’s work for Intersystems above is that she’s great at that kind of thing. (Look around my blogs; you’ll see that it’s really rare that I write a story like this one that Rita induced.)

1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual.  … The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit.  … Agreed.

2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past.  True but overstated.  There are three golden rules of social media marketing:

• Make your messages robust.
• Train and trust many of your employees to deliver the message, implicitly and explicitly.
• Trust your employees to show their own personalities without hopelessly undermining the “personality” of your enterprise.
  

The first two have actually been good management practice for decades, and the third one frequently worked as well.

3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually.  A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes. Agreed.

4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated.  It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own.  But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. Agreed. I have clients who ask me to review a large fraction of their individual blog posts. I think that’s a great use of my time … but then, I think the same thing about press releases.

Most people are looking for an expert to solve a very specific problem. Some examples from within social media:

• They want to learn how to create content that compels Digg users to vote, which will in turn bring them more pageviews and ad revenue.
• They want to use Twitter to build a bigger profile in their field.
• They want to create a blog that turns readers into customers.

Who are they going to hire, all things being equal?

• The expert in creating and marketing Diggable content for pageviews, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in creating super-accounts on Twitter, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in business blogging for conversions, or the ’social media expert’?

On the other hand, people with such narrow expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians.  As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of silos.

Only the largest or most aggressive consumer marketing organizations will be able to afford and make proper use of the range of expertise Skelliewag suggests.

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

That’s all very true in the technology world in general, in the enterprise IT world in particular, and very particularly in my own experience. For example:

• I blog for pay for two of the three major tech publishing groups, IDG and TechWeb.
• I am quoted quite a bit by some of the remaining true tech reporters.
• Those quotes can be delivered on the phone (least likely), by email, or just in one of my blogs (usually DBMS2).

To [bloggers and the like], their online outpost is a display of their passion for the topic that they cover.  They care deeply about the subject matter and they usually know at least as much as the PR person who contacts them.  Often they know quite a bit more.

In the longer form of that, Paul lumps in analysts with overworked and necessarily-superficial journalists rather than thoughtful, reviewer-like bloggers.   I wouldn’t wholly endorse that, in that I think the best analysts can combine large aspects of the old-style analyst and new-style blogger worlds.  But otherwise, I agree with what he’s saying.

You’d better come prepared to this engagement, because some influencers will take lack of knowledge on your part as an insult.  This can capsize junior agency people who aren’t prepared for the depth of questions they will get or the scorn they may endure if they can’t answer.

I’d say that a mouthpiece who pretends more depth than he has — whatever level that may be — is the one who’s in trouble. If you use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, that’s fine.  And if you go into a call or meeting unaware of how the influencer wants to to engage — which, realistically, happens a much larger fraction of the time than it ideally should — you’d better be prepared to adapt quickly.

While journalists are expected not to share any biases, bloggers often do what they do precisely because they have opinions to share.  Fortunately, a little advance reading can often clue you in to someone’s agenda and even help you decide if they’re worth contacting all.  You don’t want to come in with a strong Windows pitch, for example, to a blogger who’s passionate about the Mac.  You also don’t want to be blindsided by someone who has made his or her opinions clear and who is offended by the fact that you don’t know them.  Again, 15 to 20 minutes of reading can save you a lot of aggravation.

Amen! Worst is when somebody insistently tries to “educate” me on something I already — often visibly — know, or even disagree with. or perhaps just don’t care about.

Unlike journalists, [influencers are] probably not interested in analyst quotes or customer case studies.  It’s more likely they’ll want to talk to the VP of engineering or the CEO than to the head of marketing.

Paul overstates that point a bit.  However:

• Few things companies do annoy me more than when they present quotes from my competitors as some sort of authority or, worse, suggest I call those competitors to be educated.
• I absolutely want to talk to somebody who actually understands the technology, rather than being relegated to people who are in “Well, this is what I’m told by the techies” mode. (Ditto “I’ll check on that and get back to you” — that’s a guarantee of obfuscation and lack of opportunity for follow-up.)

The right influencers have as much credibility in their community as product reviewers or analysts.

I’m not sure analyst-vs.-influencer is even a meaningful distinction any more.

Related link

• An example-laden interview with Paul Gillin

• Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
• A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong.

Advertising is only a shallow part of marketing. Classic PR is only a shallow part of marketing. And for the same reasons, the same is true of isolated social media initiatives. Marketing efforts need to span multiple channels, and use them to tell an integrated story.

To see why, please consider two of my major themes in this blog. First, successful marketing requires telling a multi-layered story. In principle you can do that entirely through social media, specifically a blog. But if you try, you have to be very careful to sound — Buzzword alert! — authentic. And for most sets of marketing messages, it’s very hard to simultaneously stay authentic, drive traffic through techniques that social media “experts” favor, and lay out the whole story.

If your whole business is selling Make Money Online! advice to fellow cyberschmoozers, please feel free to disregard the prior paragraph. In that realm, thinly-veiled inauthenticity is the message.

Second, marketing needs to reach many different kinds of people. It is rare that one channel is a good way to reach them all. But your communications with different groups, through different channels, of course have to be managed for consistency.

Anyhow, I’m not a “social media expert.” I’m just a guy who:

• By the standards of the enterprise IT sector, is a successful blogger.
• Compared to other people in the enterprise IT industry, has substantial reach on Twitter.
• Makes much of his living consulting about marketing (to the aforementioned IT sector).
• Reads a lot, including about social media.
• Writes a little bit about social media as well.

With that as background, here are some of my thoughts on how enterprise IT companies and other businesses should pursue social media.

• Publish a blog (or multiple blogs). The biggest single reason is that blogs are the least-constrained of all the communication media. You can say whatever you want in a blog, however you want to say it. All other media have unfortunate limitations.
  
• Your blog should have two main purposes — to express yourself and (optionally) to drive search engine traffic.
• Getting regular readers should not be one of the purposes of your blog. The techniques for doing that clash with too much else that you want to achieve.
• In particular, disregard the usual “rules” about posting frequency. Those are irrelevant to the main purposes of corporate blogging. What’s more, your best people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with that kind of posting frequency anyway.
• Have multiple individuals blogging. Different people in your company have the talent, knowledge, and status to be successful with different styles of blog post. If one person coordinates your blog, however, that’s fine.
• Encourage your senior customer/public-facing personnel to use their choice of personal-page sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace (blech), et al. Think of those sites as steroid-laden business cards. Those sites’ other benefits are oversold, but they truly work for spelling out who you are. Other social media use (if any) should be even more optional, and hence more tailored to your people’s individual personalities.
• Establish a corporate presence on Twitter. It’s a great way to maintain personal relationships with influencers – and to fix them, if for example the influencer is an unhappy customer badmouthing you. (For example, Dell did just that very successfully with me.) And if you’re too small for that to make sense, there’s a good chance you’d benefit just from the interaction with fellow small business folks.
• Send somebody to participate in whichever online forums, blog comment threads, etc. are most important to your target audiences.
  

As for gimmicks and glitz — well, do they have a large role in how you market through other channels too? If so, then it might make sense to get cute in social media as well. Otherwise, play it straight.

Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of

Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:

Bad jargon drowns out good.

Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.

The idea behind the “Law” is this:   If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.

“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction.   Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant.  “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.

By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented:   Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.

But while strategy often needs to be made more complicated, tactics often need to be simplified. This hilarious video — hat tip to my favorite web designer — tells the story.

Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.

If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.

Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:

1. Keep building awareness.
2. Stay on message.

Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:

1. Stay on one or more of your messages.
2. Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way?

Well, I’m clearly at one extreme in my focus on careful, detailed analysis. At the other extreme is that portion of the trade press (and it’s not a small one) accurately described in Dave Kellogg’s rant

most of the IT trade press had degenerated to the following formula:

• Hire 20-something English majors as IT trade journalists
• Have them filter vendor press releases deciding which to cover
• Write stories based on the press releases, one live analyst interview, and one to two customer interviews
• Make money by selling advertising to the vendors
• Don’t rock the journalistic boat too much because of the prior point

Net: they didn’t add much value.

But most analysts, bloggers, and journalists are somewhere in between.

Sure, there’s a school of thought that goes “Oh, it works? Customers say so? Then it must be great stuff.” But many observers really do try to do serious analysis. I talk all the time to journalists who ask “Is this for real?”, and they’re not just looking for customer stories. Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves, whatever their faults, do respectively have categories for “Completeness of vision” and “Strategy.” And while some Gartner or Forrester analysts may be dumb enough to accept any kind of incoherent fairy story as credible future plans, most do at least some critical thinking as to whether those stories could realistically come true.

Among bloggers there’s a similar mix. Some – including some of the most famous – are surely at the “Oooh – shiny!” level of credulity. But the blogosphere, especially when discussing enterprise or other highly-scaled IT, also contains a lot of in-depth, carefully-reasoned technical analysis.

So far I’ve argued that influencers perform more or less careful logical analysis, including of vendors’ forward-looking technology strategies. But I’ve begged the question as to whether such analysis closely matches the specific models I’ve laid out. Let me now address that head-on.

It seems beyond dispute that many influencers use at least the more simplified layered model

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics

The top layer answers the question “Is this good for buyers?”, and the other two layers answer the question “Is this better for buyers than the alternatives?” No other common template seems to do as good a job.

But how do influencers decide whether products really have the features and metrics claimed? Demos, hands-on use, publicly-validated benchmarks, and general vendor claims only go so far. In most cases, influencers have to look further for support. The influencers I talk with are much more likely to believe something if they hear it from customers than if the vendor is the only one saying it. They’re also more likely to believe something if it grows out of a clear technical differentiation – e.g., “MPP/grid” or “columnar” or “FPGA” — that if it arises from no clear technical source that they can understand.*

*These specific examples are all taken from the red-hot market for specialty data warehouse appliances and DBMS.

Bottom line: The two enterprise IT layered messaging templates I laid out really do describe a significant part of how influencers form and support their opinions.