Media Relations Summit: Day 1 Learnings

by Rob Stokes

Today was day 1 of the Media Relations Summit 2008; an event the organisers keep telling us is the largest of its kind globally. I’m not sure how many people are here, but it makes the London and South African conference scenes look a little sad. And its not just about population size, people here are enthusiastic regulars (the Summit has been going for about 20 years) who are squeezing every last drop of value from the event.

We began with a few intros and a PR technology update from MutliVu’s Todd Grossman. There was a lot of talk about online video and my big learning was the strong emphasis he placed on good production values for the success of viral content, in particular lighting. He also showed us photos of a new advertising channel: screens in kids’ toy cars at shopping centres. How does it work? You stick your kid in the car, chuck in a few coins, and let them watch ads while you shop. Sick!

The first keynote address was an interview with Charlie Rose called “The Art of the Story: Finding the Heart of Drama”. Now to be perfectly honest, whilst his name rang a bell, I wouldn’t know Charlie Rose if he walked past me in the street and smacked me in the head. But what do I know is that Charlie is a very successful American journalist and TV interviewer and you can see why. He is one smart guy and I really enjoyed the interview.

That said, my favourite session of the day was the second Keynote, “The Future of PR: How Technologies Will Transform the Way We Communicate” by Duncan Wardle, VP of Global PR for Disney Parks. His presentation was just brilliant. Thorough, insightful content and truly fantastic visuals – I was totally absorbed. His story into Disney’s careful foray into consumer engagement was incredibly interesting. It’s so cool to see such a big company doing such cutting edge stuff and most importantly, getting a great return out of it. 

For example he talked about the “Disney Dream Job” consumer generated media campaign. People had to create a video of themselves as character from a Disney Park like a pirate or an adventure water ride tour guide. It was a campaign that he said cost almost nothing and they got a much larger than expected response. Some of the clips he showed us were hilarious. 

Interestingly, it was actually never intended to be a recruitment drive but ended up being their best ever.

He also talked about tapping into brand evangelists and, in particular, employee evangelists. He said if it were up to him all the Disney staff would be blogging. 

He went on to tell us about their “Mom’s Panel” initiative which overwhelmed them with its response. In fact, they had to stop taking applications for the actual panel. Today it’s evolved into a fully fledged online community.
 
He said mobile and online gaming are huge growth markets for them as they are the fastest growing platform for delivering Disney Content. Going hand in hand with this is virtual merchandise which is now a Billion Dollar industry. (Why someone would pay money for a gift that doesn’t exist is beyond me but apparently people do so in droves).

One of his final comments was that his own kids don’t care about the theme parks. They are quite happy interacting with their friends in kid friendly virtual worlds. He questioned whether that is the future of Disney Parks.

His final comment was the real thinking point for me: in five years time, word of mouth will be the only way you will successfully reach customers. I think the key word is “successfully” in that statement, but it makes you question things. He said no one really knows where all this is going so all you can really do is try as many new things as possible and make sure you learn from all of them. Brands need to develop to allow customers to interact with each other and the brand on their own terms. I couldn’t have said it better myself. For the foreseeable future, I believe that is what marketing is going to be all about. When asked by the audience which type of agency you should be working with to make all this happen, his comment was that you’ve got to look at it holistically. When it comes to online, all the tactics are so integrated.

After the keynote addresses we split into 5 concurrent sessions. This was a real bummer to me as whilst the sessions I attended were all good, I missed four times as much great stuff as I got to see!

The first session I went to was Katie Paine talking about Measuring the ROI of online media. My main takeaways were:

• Define success up front as that’s the only way you’ll know what to measure.
• Her suggested engagement process for brands was: find -> lurk -> engage -> contribute. I loved that lurk part – it’s so true and absolutely necessary!
• She also took us through some of the Google Analytics benchmark data. As I’ve said before, that is the killer app that’s eventually going to destroy most other web analytics companies. At some point the accumulation of all the usage data will make Google a far better search engine and a far better monetizer of clicks.

Katie Paine also said something that struck me: “Google has become our short term memory”. I never thought about it that way, but I think she’s right. I use Google for so much. I think having it built into Firefox was the defining moment when I became an addict. It was just “there” so you start to use it for everything. In fact I’ve decided to work out how much I use it. For the next few days I’m going to keep a tally of how many times I search. My guess is that it’s about 30-40 times a day. That’s 1000 searches a month… crazy!

After lunch, myself and Emily Sobol from Nielsen Online did our presentation on Online Reputation Management. I think it went well and we had some great feedback (and leads, I mean, that’s a big part of why we’re here isn’t it?). That said, if I’m to be honest, I would say that I was slightly disappointed by the number of people we got at our session. In our defence however, we did have to compete with four other fantastic sessions; in particular the one with Sally Falkow and Brian Solis. I’ve worked with Sally before and she’s great, and although I’ve been reading his stuff for ages I only met Brian today. Brian is really a pioneer in the social media space and I can’t deny that if I had to choose between him and me… I’d probably go and see him :)

The final session I went to was a panel discussion on blogger relations with Craig Newmark, founder of Craiglist, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, and Carolyn Pritchard, Managing Editor of Giga Omni Media. Apart from Om Malik, I don’t really know much about Giga Omni, but Craig Newmark is a legend who I was really excited about seeing. There isn’t much to say about Craig, but he is totally cool. He runs one of the most successful sites on the Web and is a self admitted nerd. His words were insightful and he also had some controversial, but subtle digs at the Internet, the world and America, always said with a smile… I liked him. My favourite line was when he was answering a question about ethics on Craiglist, he started with the line “those who are old enough to remember, we used to have a little thing in this country called the constitution”. The audience cracked up.

I didn’t really know what to expect of Tom Foremski. He was the guy who wrote the now very famous blog post “Die press release! Die! Die! Die!” out of which spawned the social media press release (although he thinks that’s a lame name and it should just be called the new media release). He clearly never intended to create the revolution and subsequent evolution that he did but his words certainly did change the game a bit. 

Tom was Mr. Cynical but very cool. It was great to hear straight from the mouth of a really influential journalist/blogger what it takes to get a story written. He said the key is understanding the blogger. Pay attention to what they are writing about, read their blog, read the comments, get into their head. Then you can target your pitches properly. When it comes to the actual pitching he says a lot of PR’s talk about how wonderful the product or service is without actually talking about the product or service. Silly.

Tom also reminded us of the inevitable death of the print medium, specifically newspapers. Put simply he said, the economics of online media are fundamentally different to their offline counterpart. As more people get their news and information online, the business of traditional print media will become completely untenable until it is reduced to a niche speciality medium. We live in interesting times.

I’ll be back with more tomorrow, I’m really looking forward to it. But right now, I’m off to bed.

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