How To Do PR without Looking like You're Selling Something

Valeria Maltoni writes on her blog:
People flee sellers, especially in a bad economy. Public relations was born and thrived for many years on the wave of mass media - newspapers, television news, and magazines, for example. It's quite logical to think that if you get someone else to talk about how great your company is, then you are much more likely to gain public trust. Gaining trust helps you sell your products better.

In a connected world, citizen journalists will also begin and continue to gain credibility and trust. While the demands for news of so many online communities continues to grow, we're already seeing many start to view certain bloggers and peers as filters.

By definition, public relations is the art and science of establishing relationships between your organization and its key audiences. You gain exposure to groups and individuals by using useful topics and timely content directly and through third parties, while no money exchanges hands.

I associate PR closely with branding, they're both about behavior and reputation, sort of the organization infrastructure on top of which sit applications like sales and product development. In that light, then, how do you do PR without looking like you're selling something?

What do you want from PR?
Decide what kinds of relationships you're looking to develop and also what kind of behaviors you're willing to exhibit. When people talk about transparency, what they're really looking for is if you'll do what you say you'll do. That will be the starting point for a strategy.

What resources are you willing to commit?
I find by far the greatest challenge organizations face today is that of committing resources to developing relationships at the Grail of leads. The biggest opportunity companies are missing is internal. Do you have a network inside your organization? Whenever I ask this question at events where I speak, no hands go up. Why? Something that is seen as long term with (potentially) no fast results in the short term.

People answer that it's not their goal to chat up someone in development, for example. Let's not kid ourselves, people, a) if you want to become valued, you need to make the time to mingle with many in the organization at different levels to gain insights into what they know and what your role could be, and b) if you want to build relationships, you need to be in it for the long haul.

Set goals
How are you going to get there? Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. If you set them up that way, you'll be able to track how you're doing achieving them. To help with goal setting, start with understanding the people you're trying to reach. What are they looking to learn?

Execute
This is usually where the best laid out plans fall apart. If you run a search, you will find that the terms business strategy give you 7.9MM entries (I use inverted commas) and business execution only a little more than 88k. Why the disparity? Everyone likes to be a strategist, yet the money is in the execution - and that's where the hard work is, too. Execution is not making lame pitches on Twitter.

Re-evaluate goals in light of interim progress
Since we're talking about a long term strategy, it's a good idea to check in on goals frequently so you can adjust your aim and activity mix. I find deltas helpful - two columns, a) What did we do well? b) What could be done better? In much new media the feedback is instantaneous, and public. You'll be able to capture it, if you're listening.

Execute some more
When you deal with the community in a new media space, thus mostly public, demonstrating you learn from feedback gives you major props at the moment. There will come a time when etiquette will be understood, and you'll be held to much closer scrutiny over not respecting the time and attention people and their communities give you. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The Web presence of the future is composed in thirds - community building, marketing, and editorial impact. This diagram will hopefully help you see the intersections.

On demand means as pulled by the community or people, when they decide they want it, which doesn't necessarily mean real time. The other two are fairly self-explanatory.

And let's not ever forget that just because we may be trying all these new technologies and adopting them, our customers or the people we're working to build relationships with are, too.

Focusing on the Social, Minus the Media

Jenna Wortham writes about her own experience with social media in the following article from The New York Times:
The scene unfolding at the Thai restaurant in Brooklyn was like that of any other casual dinner party. A small group of people sat around a wooden table, passing large dishes of spicy red curry and fried rice, drinking cold beers and swapping war stories about apartment hunting in New York. But the twist was this: Before about 8 that evening, none of us had met before.

My newfound friends came courtesy of a Chicago start-up business called Grubwithus, an online service with the seemingly modest aim of bringing strangers together to have a meal. The concept is simple enough: People browse through a list of dinners in their cities and buy tickets, usually for around $25. Before the event, they can share a few online tidbits about themselves with their dining partners, a precautionary measure against awkward lulls in conversation and a way to ease fears about meeting up with a bunch of unknowns. For example, Eunice, one of my dining mates, wrote in her profile that she was a young nurse who loved to shop and travel.

But the service has deeper ambitions. It is using contemporary techniques to foster a kind of social networking that predates the dawn of services like Facebook and Twitter: old-fashioned conversation among casual acquaintances, without keyboards and screens.

Academics who study how we socialize online say that even in an era of almost nonstop communication across a bevy of platforms, in which so many millions of us are just a few clicks away from one another on the Web, people still crave the intimacy of face-to-face meetings.

People worry that “online contact and networking might replace offline interactions, but offline is still so precious that we’re creating ways to bring offline even more front and center,” said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Physical proximity plays a big role in terms of building relationships.”

Mr. Sundar noted the contradiction of a new generation of services that rely on the ubiquity of social networking to prompt contact that the Web calls IRL, or “in real life,” sometimes known as the real world. People are using social technology to feed their need to meet up and close the gap between all the social networking that they do from a distance.

Grubwithus, which began organizing group dinners last August, says that more than 10,000 people have registered with the site. It’s hoping to turn the concept of social meals into a full-fledged business. Grubwithus helps the restaurant coordinate the menu for the group for the night and then charges a service fee to the restaurant; the amount varies by meal.

It has already sold a handful of prominent venture capitalists on the concept of social dining: the company raised $1.6 million in financing earlier this year from Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, among others.

Of course, there is no shortage of ways to connect with the people you already know or have recently met. LinkedIn, Facebook, Hashable and Foursquare, for starters, have gained momentum and traction for exactly that. The challenge here is to come up with a way of gently expanding that network, something that clubs, ice cream socials and schools have done for generations.

Before the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, it may have been easier to strike up a conversation with a fellow commuter or to exchange pleasantries with another solo diner or drinker. And while that certainly has not vanished, the presence of soft glowing screens may get in the way of casual connections.

Other entrepreneurs have noticed this distinctly modern quandary and are coming up with applications to deal with it. Sonar, for example, is a new mobile application that combs a user’s connections on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and alerts them if they have any friends in the vicinity.

One of Sonar’s founders, Brett Martin, says the company wants to leverage the dozens, or even hundreds, of connections that many people have already made online and see if they can use those to form new, meaningful friendships.

For example, when you turn on the application and check into a movie theater in your location, it pings you — letting you know that a guy named Joe and you share several Facebook friends, and that Joe is lingering nearby. You are given the option of messaging Joe to see if he wants to organize a quick meeting.

Of course, there is also something to be said for not becoming overly dependent on technology. Do we really need the Web to make new friends? My first instinct is to say no — that the most interesting people I’ve met have been through serendipitous and random encounters while traipsing around a new city.

But after our Grubwithus meal wound to a close — four hearty courses and two hours of entertaining chatter later — we trooped into the thick night air, lingering on the sidewalk, shaking hands and saying our goodbyes. Promises were made to keep in contact and plan a reunion meal. I couldn’t help but ask: would we really all keep in touch after this?

Nicolae, a young, bright-eyed entrepreneur, paused on his descent into the subway, smiled and said: “Of course! We’re all on the Internet.”