Stepping into something new is always a daunting task. You need a compass to provide some direction. I felt this way when I started exploring public affairs and PR from the lens of social media and Web 2.0. But I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak to Dorie Clark, the CEO of Clark Strategic Communications at her contemporary home office on 26 Feb 2009. We chatted for some 50 minutes on issues ranging from her role in communications in the Howard Dean campaign of 2004, her thoughts about the interface between public affairs and PR, how Web 2.0 has changed the way these two industries operate today, and how new media could help government and corporate communications, among others.
These are some of her thoughts...
Difference between public affairs and PR?
Now here's something to shed some light on this seemingly perennial question. Dorie sees public affairs and PR as two closely related, but generally exclusive disciplines. According to her, they sometimes overlap, but not all the time. "Certainly, when you're doing work for a governmental agency, or a nonprofit that has policy goals they want to advance, they [PR and public affairs] should overlap," she says. And knowing the differences between the two, however nuanced, is key to selecting the right communications agency to work with.
"Some consulting firms or vendors have a really narrow definition of PR, i.e. you tell me about what events you’re doing or the initiatives you have and we will try to get stories about them in the paper." While that’s a nice thought, it's still not enough. It's the big picture perspective that they need to have, she says. "...so if you’re seeking out people to work with, you ideally want to have a company that can do both... getting stories in the news (which is the traditional PR element), but it’s also about [getting] the strategies that can be used to influence the decision makers."
Talking about the new vogue in public affairs called 'grasstops,' she says this is all about targeting a person’s core circle of influence. "You know," she says, "the common thing we've been hearing is how we can mobilize the grassroots. They [grassroots] are sort of the regular people. The new vogue is called the grass-tops. This is a much smaller number of people but they are really influential."
Citing the example of getting a bill passed, Dorie says that a grasstops strategy would see her trying to identify elements that could influence the Senate President. These could be people who fund her, or classmates that she attended high school with, or labor unions that endorsed her. The public affairs agency needs to help think through these issues instead of just a focus on getting the message onto the news, which is conventional PR. Unfortunately, not may people make the distinction between the two, and choose instead to focus on what's most visible.
"The crucial thing is that people who are in this business needs to see the big picture. See, if I'm someone who works for a non-profit or a middle manager in a government agency, I may not know that we need all these things. I may only think about what are the most visible things, which are usually the stories in the papers. So, that’s what I might ask for, but that’s not all of what I need."
"And [so] it’s also about making sure that the vendors that you choose to work with, that they don’t limit what they recommend to you because they only do PR," she argues. "You know, there’s this saying [laughs] that if you have a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. So basically what this means is that if I’m a PR firm, the answer to everything is, ‘Oh, you need PR!’ But you actually need something more than that. You need a broader understanding that [PR] is a piece of it, but it’s not sufficient."
I then asked Dorie to boil the key differences it down to a sentence or two, and she points out that PR is basically the process of gaining earned media coverage for clients while public affairs (which includes PR, but is not limited to it) is like the eagle-eyed stratospheric perspective of influencing key target audiences (usually the key decision makers or opinion leaders) in a variety of strategic ways.
Dorie recalls days of the Dean Campaign and the nomination races...
Daniel: Can you tell me a little bit about the things you did during the Howard Dean campaign, and the impression that you went away with, especially in the campaign’s use of the Internet and social networking platforms?
Dorie: Well, let’s see. Web 2.0. I think the adoption has been really fast… I mean, remarkably fast... When we're doing the Howard Dean campaign, the first thing we did was to invent a number of things, and also made use of a lot of other things. Then of course, there were a lot of technologies that we're not able to tap, which the Barack Obama campaign did. The biggest thing we took advantage of was a company called Meetup.com. Up until the Dean campaign, the only way that people had really understood the power of the Internet for campaigns was through fundraising... What had not been done, which the Dean campaign did to an unprecedented degree, was finding ways to identify supporters online and then get them to take action in the real world, from a field perspective.
Daniel: Was this something that was done from scratch and built upwards?
Dorie: I think, pretty much. Meetup was an independent company and was not initially affiliated with the Dean campaign. What it does is that it allows people to organize groups, and this can be anything from Star Wars fans, it could be new mothers, whatever it is... So Meetup came to the attention of Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for the Dean campaign, and all of a sudden, Howard Dean Meetups were starting, made up of people who were supportive of Howard Dean. Trippi was like, ‘What’s this? This is an interesting thing but we’re not doing anything to support it, so how is it happening?’ And so it just kept growing on its own...
Daniel: Just how big did this movement grow?
Dorie: It was HUGE! We had some 30,000 people meeting across the country one Wednesday a month, and we began devising activities for them to do at the events, so they would phone voters in Iowa, or they would write letters to voters in New Hampshire. You know, it was sort of tangible things that they could do to make a difference. So this is the crux. It was way of translating the sort of theoretical support we had online into concrete action.
"What had not been done, which the Dean campaign did to an unprecedented degree, was finding ways to identify supporters online and then get them to take action in the real world, from a field perspective... So this is the crux. It was way of translating the sort of theoretical support we had online into concrete action."
~ Dorie Clark ~
Dorie: The other thing that we sort of invented for the campaign world was the use of blogs for it. We were the first presidential campaign to have a blog. This really encouraged people to become active in the community. I mean, the goal is really to take people along a spectrum, from being interested and aware, to being active online, and then the culmination is where they are active in the real world. So moving forward four years with the Obama campaign. They were also able to use YouTube and online videos to respond to things. For example, Obama’s speech on race was so critical in defusing the tensions surrounding his former pastor. That was seen online literally millions of times, and it was a huge speech. So [new media] really allows people to gain access to information, and they [the Obama campaign] really plugged that need.
Daniel: The interesting thing about new media... is that it allows you to put your content unabridged on the Web for viewers to access it as it is. Had this just been on traditional media, Barack Obama’s race speech, for example, would’ve been parsed to a 20-30 second clip for television, or excerpts in print. People may not get the full picture...So new media really helps in communication in that sense.
Dorie: Yes it's exceedingly good for democracy
Can new media help to improve day-to-day communications?
The next thing we talked about was the question of how Web 2.0 and new media could be channeled to energize an organization’s day-to-day communication with its publics. Unlike presidential campaigns that are set up to capture the imagination of the nation, the actual litmus test is in designing communication strategies for the mundane issues of the day-to-day.
“Yeah, I mean, you’re right that a presidential campaign is very inherently sexy. People are inherently into it,” Dorie says. And clarifying that it is important not to just ‘regress’ into a herd mentality and follow the crowd, she emphasizes, “People want to jump on the bandwagon… they want to be like, doing the cool thing. But, in an example I gave recently in a talk at Harvard, if you’re a plumber in Medford, you know… don’t waste your time starting a Twitter account… it’s not worth the effort for the kind of business or the kind of target audience that you want. The best thing is to figure out who your audience is and how to reach them.”
It is necessary to turn on the creativity when trying to inject life into less sexy issues like, say, anti-littering or anti-smoking campaigns, for example. There’s more to it than the PR perspective of getting a story into the papers because the crux is whether the matter gains traction with the masses, she says.
“... you may have seen a phenomena online created by this company called Blendtec. The magic phrase is, ‘Will it blend?,’ and you can find it if you type this phrase on YouTube (see the video link below for an example). So what they did was that the created YouTube videos, where people basically write in with ideas about crazy things to blend. So they come up with a list of things like golf balls, and like hockey pucks… you know, all these horribly hard things. And they get a scientist-looking guy in a white lab coat and he puts it in the blender and say, ‘Will it blend?’ And then they just show it and it totally blends it up into little pieces. People are, like, amazed because, you know, some of them are having problems getting their ice blended and these guys at Blendtec are blending golf balls? It’s brilliant!”
Dorie stresses that it’s always about the target audience. If it’s a campaign aimed at a younger demographics, then social media and Web 2.0 is probably a good idea, but think again if you’re dealing with seniors who may not have signed up for Twitter or Facebook yet. “So it’s really something as simple as sussing out who your target audience is, and what their main communication channel is. Recall the Obama Girl advertisements on YouTube. It could turn out to be a really campy thing, but what you want is to raise your brand profile and capture people’s attention.”
Dorie's thoughts on how some new media tools are affecting public communication...
Daniel: So how do you see other social media tools weighing in for this [public communication] matter?
Dorie: I think blogs are key for something like that, and I think having a really good website is important, but you know, for something like Twitter, I’m just a little skeptical because it’s like TMI (too much information) for me. I mean... there are things that people are legitimately obsessed about, that’s cool. But for regular people, I just find it bizarre, and I wonder how effective we’ll be if we’re constantly keeping up with streams from 200 other people for things like, ‘Oh, I just got my Starbucks latte,’ for example. There is a need to find a balance between giving people the information they need, and not giving them too much random crap. I just feel that with Twitter, we haven’t arrived at that yet. So I think Twitter is appropriate in some circumstances, and I think blogs are appropriate in far more circumstances. For Facebook friends, I’m very sold on the idea of keeping up with friends, connections and networking, things like that. [But] the key is that you want to try to find a way to provide value for them. Facebook basically serves the same function as an e-newsletter would. It’s a way you could distribute information to people... We’ve got to ask ourselves how we can give consumers something so that they can make something out of it.
Daniel: Ok… now this may sound like a very tactical question, but do you think it’s possible to run your entire blog on a Facebook platform? Right now, it seems to me that it can potentially be a one stop?
Dorie: Yeah. I think that it may eventually turn into something like that... For now most people who have blogs use Wordpress, Blogger and that sort of systems, but I think eventually it may. I mean, for 20 years we’ve been talking about how our television and computers are going to be the same thing one day, and your phone and iPod and GPS are all going to be on the same device, and we’re getting there. So I think eventually we may end up with something like that.
[Note: A key limitation to Facebook is that you need to be accepted into the group to be part of the conversation while blogs can pretty much be accessed by anyone. This potentially makes FB a good internal or niche communication platform where some form of membership is needed, while blogs are good as 'open-source' communication devices.]
Closing thoughts about the public affairs and PR industry vis-a-vis the Web 2.0 challenge...
Contemplating the issue of key trends in the public affairs and PR industry, Dorie says that a reason why the Web is growing in its clout and influence today is because it's getting harder for PR agencies to place things in newspapers. As a result of a declining advertising revenue, papers are actually shrinking, and this has become a vicious cycle of reducing the already precious 'press' space (which will always be sacrificed for advertisements, which bring in the bucks).
"... they’re fighting a never-ending losing battle where they’re clients want certain pieces of stories in the newspapers, but there’s less room, so it’s much, much more competitive. They, consequently, are expanding more into the Web because it is infinite, it’s very easy to post things online, and you continue to answer to your clients needs too."
While it used to be primarily about getting a story prominently up on the front pages, today it's all about getting a client's story up on a related site with high traffic volume.
"... we’re starting to see more PR firms turn towards web placements, or urging their clients to blog, or place things on blogs, because it’s a way of getting ‘hits’ and making the clients happy. [But] that being said, I think it’s important for this to be doing it strategically for it to have value; you need people who know what they’re talking about because they’re dealing with online media pitching."
Where challenges to the practitioners are concerned, Dorie argues that both the PR and public affairs professional will be facing a rapidly changing landscape, where the pace of change is accelerating. "[Consequently]... you do have to put a foot in the door of a lot of things because you don’t know what’s going to take off. You know, people are jumping on Twitter right now, and that may just become the next killer application, or it may just end up fizzling. I think that eventually, there’s going to be a showdown – or melding – between Twitter and Facebook. The question is how these technologies are going to be used. I mean, are people going to be carrying their phones with them, with the Twitter application on their iPhones, [and] are they really going to be checking it all the time?"
The question to ask is how these applications fit into people's lives, because it is a social and lifestyle issue as much as it is a technological and communicational concern. For now, that remains an open question since there is a multitude of ways that the new media landscape can pan out.
PR and public affairs practitioners will face the challenge of plotting out communication strategies that give clients the biggest bang for the buck. The one thing to avoid is to jump on the new media bandwagon just for the sake of it, Dorie warns.
"I mean, that’s always been a question to think about, but right now, people are scurrying around, and they know they’ll need to be doing Internet things, but they don’t know what, and before we’re going to be able to advise them [clients] properly, we need to take into account their target audiences and how they can best take action. So that’s what I see as the biggest challenge: Trying to see around the corner and making good and targeted suggestions that are suited specifically to who your client is and who they are trying to reach."
MEDIA CENTER
Find this Useful? Save this article as a PDF Now!
ALERT! To save this post only, remember to click on this article's title (to call it up on an exclusive page) before hitting the PDF button below!
Or download the full transcript of the interview...
interview_with_dorie_clark_on_web_2.0__pr_1.pdf | |
File Size: | 1414 kb |
File Type: |
Interviewee Bio:
Dorie Clark is the CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, a Boston-based marketing, branding, and management consulting firm that helps corporate, nonprofit, and government clients in strategic planning and communications. Her specialty is in the areas of marketing, branding, management consulting, strategic planning, media relations and communication trainings.
Dorie graduated from Harvard University with a Master of Theological Study in 1999, and worked as journalist for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe. She also counts serving as the New Hampshire Communications Director for Howard Dean's presidential campaign and Robert Reich's bid for Massachusetts governor, among her rich array of professional experience.