A few weeks ago, one-time corprate raider now would-be guardian of corporate governance (talk about the Mother Of All PR coups) Carl Icahn won a seat on the Yahoo Board.

Yahoo and Icahn forces issued press releases and seconds later, in the land of digi PR, it’s news on a zillion on-line news services and websites. In time traditional media gets in on the act too.

Moments after the news breaks, I get a call to rush down to Fox Business Channel to appear on air to talk about how a 70 plus year old who doesn’t use a computer winds up on the board of a an Internet giant. I wrote a book, King Icahn: The Biography oF A Renegade Capitalist years ago, and whenever Carl makes news, I am asked to comment on it.

And everything Carl does, makes news. And it all converges: digi,
tv, print, radio….and it all reinforces each other. And that’s the key element for PR pros. In most cases, digi is the first match that gets lit but it all spreads like wildfire throughout the media machine. And the best pros know how to work it from all ends.

Soon after my Fox appearance on tv, the segment appeared on the Fox website. From there, bloggers spread my comments to other bloggers and some of this viral chatter wound up, of all places, at the BBC in London, which then asked me to do a live remote on the radio.

Which I did.

And then comments on my Carl comments wound up on my firm’s website and in my Blackberry email. It all swirls around the world in nanno seconds and its all interconnected. PR pros have to look at this news meteor from a mile up looking down and from the ground looking up. We have to see all of its component parts. We have to see how they come together. We have to know how to orchestrate not any one channel, but the fusion of the channels.

This is the big story. This is the difference between today and any other time in the past. This is the challenge and the exhilarating opportunity.

Yes, if it’s Icahn it’s news. The same is true when your client does something exceptional. Or something terrible. Wins a Nobel Prize or is the Wall. Street scandal of the month.

Un either case, in any case, be prepared to master an entire set of moving parts, flying fast, in different directions, and various speeds. And then all converging.

When you make news, be sure to manage it before it manages you.
You can’t simply ask The Times to hold the story any more. Drudge won’t. Huffington won’t.

Ask Icahn. Ask Edwards.

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Ok, not exactly. But, one of the secrets to Obama’s success has been to take a major page from the Republican playbook, compiling a platinum mailing list of contributors and supporters.

Unlike the Carl Rove variety, this one eschewed snail mail in favor of email. The Democratic candidate whipped Hillary and may do the same to McCain because, in great measure, his machine has mastered the art of everything digi.

When the McCain camp thinks of releasing news, the powers that be turn to the AP, the networks, and USA Today. On the other side of the age/philosophy/political divide, the architects of the new kind of campaign, turn instead to a complex strategy that identifies and addresses voters on specific websites at precise times of the day with highly targeted messages.

There is an interesting interplay here. The Obama camp carefully monitors all manner of Websites and Internet communications and in a legal form of eavesdropping, gathers invaluable intelligence on voter sentiment, opinions, perspectives and trends in thinking on all of the immediate and evolving issues of the day.

Armed with this qualitative and quantitative data, the campaign leadership then develops its digi PR platform, serving up a steady diet of Obama-isms to the bloggers and the news sites its radar keeps track of. It is a continuous loop of gathering and communicating information that can only happen in digi-land.

It’s not that the McCainer’s don’t use the Internet as an important element in their campaign, it’s just that in this aspect of modern politics age does not serve a candidate well. The Obama team has forgotten on any given day more than the McCain-ites ever knew about this form of political blitz.

The knowledge of how to read the voters minds on the Internet and then use this to develop a continuous stream of messaging reminds me of what a Fox tv producer recently ranted about to me:

“Most PR people fail to do their homework. They are just damn lazy. They send me pitches for stories my shows would never run.

“I feel like screaming at them, watch us just once. Just once.”

By “reading” the Internet and then knowing the ideal messages and where to place them, PR people, marketers all, can be as effective as the Obama team in building a universe, a loyal community, around your clients’ products and services.

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A few days ago I had lunch with a producer at the Fox Business Network. He asked me, “Why are PR people so lazy?”

When I asked what he meant, he said, “They send these pitches no one cares about, in part because they have no news angle.”

When I asked him why he attributed that to laziness as opposed to incompetence or another form of failure, he was poised to strike.

“There are all kinds of news stories on the Web - on the top sites- that producers like myself monitor. And we go in search of experts who can comment on these stories. And we find them. But not from the PR people. We have to do it ourselves.

“That we don’t need and opportunity they lose.”

But to this producer-and I have heard this from other producers and his peers in the print media- the real manifestation of laziness comes in the fact that:

“So many of the PR people contact me to say, whoopie, that their client will be in town and available for interviews.

“But not a word about why I would feel compelled to book them. Not a word about the hot stories on the web. Not a word on an angle that will make news on my shows.

“Just that the client will be in town.”

Lazy is being generous, he says. Is he right? Do you monitor the web?

Do you really do your homework? Do you make the connections between the news and your client?

We can’t be angry. We can’t brush off the criticism. We must, as with all in business and life, ask ourselves if we don’t send out paper thin pitches and then point fingers at the journalists when they hit the delete key.

This requires that we admit the fact that today, for the first time, the Web drives the news.

The failure to leverage that is, well, lazy!

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Sometimes , the Internet is like a crazed lover. It does the dumbest things and swears by them.

I mean think about it: I have a Wikipedia page. Why do I have one? When the Encyclopedia Brittanica ruled the information roost, there would no page for me. Not even a footnote.

But then along comes this vast democratization called the Web and anyone and everyone can say anything on it. I’m not at all opposed to the free speech element of it, I mean as a libertarian I applaud it, but then the Internet gets completely drunk on itself and as all drunks (believe me, I know) makes an absolute ass of itself and then pretends it never happens.

This is how I view Wikipedia. Who created my page? Did my team members at MSCO? My mother? Someone who wanted to show how cool they are by manipulating the Web.

I don’t have a Nobel Prize. I never cured anyone of anything. There are no buildings in my name. Mathematicians don’t turn to my theories as foundations or counterpoints to their own.

So why do I have a Wikipedia page? If we created it, which I guess we did, for pure commercial reasons.

“Hey, it’s good for business for Mark to have a Wiki page. When we go out to the media on Mark and MSCO- related stories, they will go to Wikipedia for further evidence that he is the real thing.”

The real what? I never risked my life to sit in front of a bus. I never led a civil rights movement. I never wrote the defining study on the rise and fall of the money supply. If left to my own self-absorbed devices, I’d still think the earth. Is flat. And I don’t know if it really isn’t and I don’t give a damn what shape it is.

And I have a Wikipedia page. And it’s supposedly good for PR. Well, perhaps it is. I did four interviews on the Fox Business Channel, CNN and Bloomberg tv in the last few weeks. Before inviting me on, perhaps they made sure I had the right stuff to earn a Wikipedia page.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with the right stuff. All you have to have is a page and they think that’s good enough. Maybe the page can say, “Mark Stevens eats lunch every day, sleeps at night, takes up space, and has never accomplished in his entire life anything near what Thomas Jefferson did in a day.”

But I would have a Wiki page. And the media likes that? Or are us PR folks are deluding ourselves? Or is the Internet is on drugs.

Ok, it’s just the way the game is played. So find every assistant HR director at your clients’ companies, note they created the groundbreaking rule that you can only wear business casual on Wednesdays in the summer, and post it on the Web. The ones that stick may pay off when HR Intergalactic News believes they may be ready for their 15 minutes of fame.

And be sure to throw in their opinion on the shape of the earth.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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So what happens when you fuse raw commerce with strong journalism on a website?

Well, you get the power of stuff that is greater than the sum of its parts.

And that is the real octane in business and all of life.

You experience it when PR pros land great stories about our clients’ products and services and they take center stage on those clients’ web sites. I know. I know. The IT so-called gurus want to have the sites to themselves. They think it’s all about technology. They have no idea it’s really about marketing and then again, they don’t know what marketing is.

And they think PR is for the birds.

Even though PR, marketing, sales, all roll up to provide their paychecks.

But let’s not confuse them.

People buy Nike running shoes because Phil built a great IT department.

Riiight! Phil doesn’t know what IT is.

But let’s get back to the exponential: one plus one equals three. People tend to spend a nanno second on a website. When they linger-ah, what a thing of beauty that is- it is often because they find great content. Not the cute stuff. Not the animation.

Content they can believe in.

And what is that? Product or service reviews, testimonials from journalistically valid sources, news reports: anything that confirms and supports the advertising hype that is fair game on sites but works well only if it is half the equation: with PR-generated validation the other half, and more!

Think about it: anyone can write fluff copy. Some better than others, sure, but when you remove the lid from the pan, it’s still fluff. And fluff is Willy Loman. And no one buys from Willy. Read the play.

So. So. Let’s keep in mind the power of getting the math wrong from your teachers. And right for your prospects.

One plus one equals three. Don’t let anyone tell you different. PR and Internet marketing should be peas in a pod.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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There is a good chance that the Internet will elect its first president.

Barack Obama.

It is the first true grass roots nomination of a major political candidate in US history. And amazingly, the roots are electronic. Obama advertises in traditional media. His PR team engages with the same print and broadcast reporters every politician has courted forever. He gets slammed for his association with questionable characters. He is worshiped on Sunday talk shows.

All of this goes on but it doesn’t register one iota on the Richter Scale. Obama is the Internet candidate and may very well be the Internet President. While Hillary works the backrooms for money, Obama just watches the riches flow in, like endless waves lapping the coastline, all in small amounts. All through that digital king maker called the Internet.

Think of its power. There, facing off against it, is the once-vaunted and now humiliated carnival act formerly known as The Clinton Machine. A year ago, Czarina Hillary was coroneted by the traditional media as the inevitable Democratic candidate. The only possible choice. The sure thing. The shoe in.

But that was before anyone asked the Internet. Before the Obama bloggers decided to make their voice heard and teach the would-be woman of the people that she was the woman of the old white ladies. Big damn difference. The college kids and the African Americans and the liberals who detested Hillary’s poorly veiled belief that an actual election wasn’t really necessary, well they took over command and control of cyberspace and told old Hillerator that they had different plans for her. And that they wanted a new kind of voice answering the phone at 3 am.

Okay, Hill is madly in love with herself. And kudos to her. She has every right to love whomever she wants to. (Bill taught her that.) But the Internet doesn’t feel the same and it has elected a different candidate. Yes, he’s elected the candidate. It’s not official, but neither is it official that Time magazine is a near fossil but it is one. Two steps ahead of the slide ruler.

But Hillary is screaming back saying, in so many words, I lost to the Internet, my digital PR team doesn’t hold a candle to Obama’s, but I will beat him in the smoke filled rooms with the super delegates. They, she is saying, will bail me out.

To hell with elections, the Hillerator whispers. Who cares about popular votes? Who needs to win a majority of delegates fairly? I am a Clinton. But one thing delusional, desperate, clinging Hillary has overlooked: her super delegates know the power of the Internet. Much better than she does. And they don’t want that tsunami turning against them.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Everyday, on the Internet, millions of people are voting on thousands of things:

• What they think of movies they’ve seen.
• How they rate restaurants.
• Books they recommend or suggest you never even read the first page.
• Hotels they fell in love with or asked for their money back.

What does this have to do with PR? Nothing, if you choose to ignore it as the ranting of amateur critics. And if you have a closed mind about digital PR, that’s precisely what you may do.

So delete this now.

OK, talking to the faithful, it is so closed-minded and myopic to view the Internet reviewers as amateurs. Forget their academic credentials-which you really don’t need to rate a hotel chain- they have something you need and your clients can benefit from mightily. They have power. (Ask Obama)

And this is a form of power you can harness and leverage if you harvest the public opinion on the Web and use it as proof points for your clients’ products and\or services.

The idea is to stop viewing public ratings (PR) and public relations (PR) as two different worlds. More effective is to view the former as a powerful way to reinforce the latter. By gathering positive votes (which is what the reviews really are), we can build independent support into our media pitches, backgrounders and even create polls based on an aggregation of public reviews as opposed to those created by paid consultants. In effect, we are demonstrating public endorsement of our PR positions.

And you can get as creative as you like. Say your client is a movie studio with a low ad budget indie film. Such movies live and die to a great extent by the volume and the quality of the reviews they garner.

If your film is scoring with the public on movie sites, create a landing page of your own to reflect this grass roots appeal and use print, broadcast and Web PR to drive traffic to your page. In a flash, as millions contemplate which movie to see, they recognize that a low profile sleeper may be a better bet than the mega budget star vehicle.

In many ways, the Web is a great town hall with millions of opinions residing on a Balkanized set of Web sites. By linking this opinion to support your clients’ product or service, you demonstrate that the power of the people can propel the power of your PR!

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Say your client makes a miserably boring product. Like a work cap that keeps employees warm when they have to venture into the elements to load customers’ cars.

A welcome piece of apparel for the employee. Root canal for the PR firm that has to generate placements for a double-lined felt cap. Who the hell wants to do stories on that?

Not the New York Times (unless the cap caused a fatal accident and Bush invested in the company). Not People magazine unless Clooney swears it’ s a babe magnet. Not Exciting Work Hat Week because there is no such publication.

Yes, it may make Work Cap News, but the client wants more than three people to read about it.

So where to go with the story. Well, in the traditional media, there isn’t much you can do with a dog like that.

Would you want to pitch it?

But all of that changes in the digi PR world when placed in the right hands. That’s because the Web is a free- for- all that swallows up and spits out a mash up of stories without any concern for their traditional editorial qualifications.

I’m not talking about TheEconomist.com or The WashingtonPost.com They’re still not in the market for felt-lined cap stories. But digi PR does something so unusual and so very human: have fun with stuff that isn’t considered laughing matter anywhere else.

To make it work, you have to break all the rules:

• Take the wiredest looking person you can find.
• Put that person in strangest workplace you can think off. Say a garbage dump in New Jersey (the garden state???)
• Slap the king of caps on their head.
• Have them sing a song about something ridiculosily appropriate, like Maggie’s Farm.
• Place the whole freak show on You Tube.

You will have a hit on your hands. The Hot HAT will be a phenom. Nike will beg for a license. The skinny bitch will wear it on Letterman. Her guy will wear it on the soccer field.

God bless the Internet.

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So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering the Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but its sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.
Mark Stevens
CEO

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You hear so many people whining today that the world is so cold and aloof and impersonal and people no longer relate– and oh God what happened to Mayberry RFD?

To hear them recount it, there is a monster at work here. It is called the Internet and it is driving people apart. No one even knows what emotions are. Instead of talking to each other, writing to each other, they hide behind email. It is a bloodless, forbidden planet. A far cry from the good old days.

But were they really so good?
I write a bunch of blogs that fly out in cyberspace to all kinds of perfect strangers. None are hand written. None of the envelopes are embossed with melted candle wax. None even have envelopes.

What a cold bastard I am. What a frozen electronic world I communicate in.
Just ask the prisoners of the “Good Old Days.” They’ll tell you.

But then, just for the sake of fair and balanced, you will have to ask someone else. Actually, thousands of others. They are the human beings who read my electronic musings and who write back the most personal, sensitive, revealing, heartfelt, vulnerable responses one could imagine writing - not only to a perfect stranger - but to a deep and loyal friend for life.

And I think I know why. When people communicate electronically, they (not all, but many) feel more comfortable than doing it the way it was done in the Good Old Days.

Remember this when it comes to pitches and stories and letters to media contacts and by-line stories. Except for a few clingers to the sides of the Titanic, no one cares how the message is communicated.

They just care about the message.

That will never go out of style.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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