Let me explain myself.

While my time in the PR profession has been rather limited, I’ve been around long enough to know just how much the standard media relations practice sucks – for both parties involved. As a journalist it’s very annoying getting cold calls from PR people trying to pitch them random stories that they care nothing about or don’t have enough time to hear. As a junior PR pro who gets stuck finding the appropriate journalists with the right beat and then reaching out, well, at the very least it’s a huge blow to the ego.

So, to put it in another way, media relations sucks. Influencer relations does not.

In my second year now working with Traackr, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the world of influencer relations (yes, we do practice what we preach). As a Traackr employee, I’m obviously very lucky to have one of the best influencer discovery tools at my fingertips. So, this has helped me really focus my efforts on the people that truly matter to our bottom line as a company.

Good influencer tools like Traackr should give you the ability to focus on a smaller list of people, and provide the insights to be able to understand where they are online, why they’re relevant to your campaign and what you can do to connect with them. I think it’s also important to note that the influencers that show up might be journalists from the New York Times, but they can also be bloggers who have never written for an actual publication before. This is what’s so awesome about influencer relations and why there is so much opportunity to get to know each influencer as a person, not as a media contact.

From my experience thus far, where the practice greatly differs between the traditional and the new is in outreach and engagement. Not once have I reached out to an influencer with the intent of “pitching” to them. True to how I am as a person, I just wanted to talk and get to know more about them. If they showed interest in the tool or expected a conversation around it (which was usually the case), I certainly went into that. But that initial outreach never had some sneaky underlying intent, but rather a simple desire to make an honest connection. As for engagement, my colleague, Derek, wrote a great post on this. In it, he explains that with influencer outreach, it’s about the experience you can provide, not the news behind it. To me, it feels like we’re getting back to the core of public relations and allowing the personable and outgoing personalities that the industry attracts play to their strengths.

In traditional media relations, there really isn’t any true engagement – it’s more of a blind e-mail and call and then a little hoping and praying they cover your story. If you’re good at the practice, not only are you careful about when and who you reach out to, but you also try to develop and maintain a relationship with the journalists you are in regular contact with. However, when you’re charged with blasting pitches out to a large list of media, it’s unlikely anyone will be able to develop – or gain – anything out of that.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there isn’t still the need for traditional media outreach. In many ways I subconsciously follow many traditional lessons I’ve learned. I recently spoke with Jeff Domansky, better known as ThePRCoach, who explained that it’s not all traditional, but it’s not all social either. I think that’s a great way to put it. If you only think about PR from a traditional POV, you’re going to miss out on A LOT. But if you only look at it from a social perspective, you’ll miss a lot of the necessities.

I think the bottom line is that while influencer relations has so much potential for businesses, there is nothing easy about it and if you’re looking for a “magic bullet” you’re going to be looking for a very long time. Lots of research, creativity, strategy and transparency is a good place to start.

I wanted to leave you with a few posts on the topic of influencer communications written by others in the industry. It’s a great place to start if you’re just beginning, and a good justification if you’ve been doing it for awhile.

Marketing Profs: Five Ways to Navigate Today’s Influencer-Relations Avalanche

Social Media Explorer: The Landscape: SME’s List of Influencer Identification Tools

Text 100: Influencer Relations – Five steps to driving competitive advantage through advocacy

Waxing UnLyrical: On Influence In Public Relations And Social Media

Read Pyxl: What is “Influencer Relations?”

What do you think? Agree or agree to disagree? Please share your thoughts and experiences!

First thing’s first – we had a great turn-out for our #siVIP Orlando. Thanks to everyone who stopped by!

We also got some great feedback from Pierre-Loic’s session, Beyond the Influence Hype.

And we had a great time at the booth…

Because of everything we had going on, I was only able to make it to a few sessions so I won’t go into too much detail on that piece of the conference – I’ll leave that up to the likes of Jane Genova, DJ Public Relations and Tori Dumke. Although I do have to mention I was able to make it to Shonali Burke and Katie Paine‘s sessions which were pretty awesome.

What I want to focus on is the overarching take-a-way that we got from all of the sessions, participation in the exhibit hall and all of the other events that took place around the conference. The term “there’s no magic bullet” seemed to be somewhat of a trend throughout. What I took from that is that as the industry continues to become more involved and active in social efforts, PR professionals have to embrace the uncertainty and learn from their own triumphs and mistakes, as well as others. And let’s face it, there are plenty of those mistakes which are posted here, here and here. PR is coming up on an inflection point in which the traditional ways of public relations are quickly diminishing and the new tools and social aspects are what matter and will drive any business to success or failure. But in this change, there’s no magic media list or coverage that’s going to get you to success – it’s simply a lot of hard work and creativity.

Case in point: our booth was next to Pitch Engine. If you haven’t heard of them and you’re in PR you should probably be concerned. The founder, Jason Kintzler took the new and untapped Social Media Release template, originally the brainchild of Todd Defren and the Shift Communications team, and made a platform to support it. And not only a platform – but a FREE platform, with additional low-cost options. In a world of PRNewswire where it cost thousands of dollars to put a static press release out on the wire, this did, and continues to, massively disrupt the industry. Now we are coming in with a new and better option to media databases in which journalists are labeled by beats and limited social presence is available. The world moves too fast now – professionals who want to be on top of their industry need tools like Traackr that can support the changes that are consistently happening.

Fast, untapped and social is where the industry is heading, whether you’re ready for it or not. Many future PR professionals from the PRSSA conference stopped by our booth and our team was surprised to see how much enthusiasm and hunger they had for the industry – maybe not surprisingly, but sadly, they displayed much more hunger for learning than current PR professionals. Many of them were in Jeremy Pepper’s alpha-list of Future PR Stars, and they are a truly great representation of not only the future PR professionals, but also the future audience that PR professionals will be communicating with. They live, breathe, eat and sleep social. It’s time to step away from the known and enter into the world of Pitch Engine and Traackr where social media policies, transparent grassroots efforts and complicated measurement are only a few keys to success.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Derek, myself, Justin, Pierre and Doug hanging out in the Icebar – it was really cold, hence the hooded parkas.

That’s about it on my end. Have anything to add or comment on? Please do!

I read this and wondered in what world do people still whine about an old battle, already decided a decade ago (advertisers won that one btw)? Besides, going after PR firms owned by WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, or IPG to defend your PR dollars is not just the wrong battle to fight but, whether owned by advertisers or not, all PR firms are on the same side of the media war.

Many of TRAACKR’s clients are PR and I can tell you that none of them complain about getting their lunch money stolen by advertising. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: instead of fighting off advertisers to keep their budgets, for the first time PR firms can now compete for advertising dollars!

SOCIAL IS WHERE THE BATTLE IS BEING FOUGHT

For generations, mass media has governed marketing. TV alone would represent over 80% of an average marketing budget. Ad agencies have made a living of charging brands obscene amounts of money for creative and media buy.  A senior exec at one of the top ad agencies told me just a few months ago, “when I meet with a CMO for an hour, do you think I sell them a $15M ad campaign or $200k in social media?” This is still today’s reality in an ad agency. The truth is that the economic model of an ad agency is based on big dollars and social media is small dollars – ad agencies haven’t figured out how to earn money on it, and this is their Achilles’ heel.

For better or for worse, PR firms have experience working with small budgets. They have also cultivated the art of the two-way communication with their target required to perform on social media. In many ways, social media is very much an extension of PR’s existing business model that only requires tweaks to succeed, not a business overhaul. This is the edge PR has over advertising in the land grab for social media ownership and budgets.

SOCIAL IS ELEVATING PR TO CMO-LEVEL

As much as advertising agencies have a basic economic problem dealing with social media (not enough money going around to make the effort worthwhile), brands don’t. Brands owe it to their shareholders to create the most value for each dollar invested. If Social yields better results than other media, it becomes a priority. The ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling you get for having a Facebook page with tens of thousands of ‘likes’ only gets you thus far in spending real dollars though… but social media is changing fast and as social media communication develops and more companies gather metrics, we are discovering some fascinating facts:

1. Well-targeted and executed social media campaigns can yield much higher results and ROI than ad buys. In influencer marketing (our field of work and study), we found that less than 3% of the participants in an online conversation yield over 90% of the results (depending on the campaign, measured as reach, sales leads, viral distribution of a message). Considering only their reach, these same 3% even beat TV programming.
2. The social media component of marketing campaigns is growing. According to Forrester Research, the US market for social media communication doubled last year to reach $1.5B and will keep expanding at the same pace. As the practice of social becomes less of an experiment and more of a component of success for marketing, brands can focus on result-oriented initiatives, measure performance and tune their practice of social media.
3. Brands look for expertise in social media as a key component of selecting a marketing partner. Though anecdotal, I can’t tell you the number of brands we met with who decided to take social media away from their main AOR and gave it to PR or a ‘next gen’ marketing firm and have started transferring budgets from advertising as they see results materialize.

CMOs are now starting to pay attention to social, and as a result to PR. The simple equation each CMO constantly runs in their head (sales per marketing $ invested), has gotten premiere brands like P&G or Pepsico to multiply their investment in social while shrinking their involvement with traditional advertising. External factors, like the economic crisis we’re going through have also contributed to accelerating this transition.

If budgets for social media communication are exploding,  success stories from social campaigns keep coming out and advertising agencies are still chasing their tail in social, why on earth doesn’t PR own social by now?

SOCIAL RELATIONS IS THE NEW FRONTIER

There are really two main reasons why Social is still up for grabs. One legitimate, one not.

Historically, PR firms haven’t been early technology adopters (I see some of our clients cringing here: of course there are exceptions!) and the move towards social media has required PR to embrace new technologies, use new tools in order to perform the work, and learn how to navigate an ocean of data. Mainstream PR is slowly  going over the technology hump, but it’s taken a while. Early technology adopters in PR have long passed that point and can maneuver technology and social media tools easier than I ride my bike.

The second reason why PR has yet to ‘kill it’ as an industry in Social very much relates to the content of the PRWeek article I was quoting at the beginning of this post. I’ll call it the ‘post-traumatic mass media era disorder’ or PTMMED Much of PR still feels like the step child of marketing and fears the mighty advertisers with their lavish lifestyle.

No more! Our PR clients, all early adopters of technology, paving the way to what the PR industry should become, are proving to their peers that through Social they get access, they get budgets, they get more work than they can handle, and they are not afraid to tell advertisers to bring it on!

Interestingly, the fact that mainstream PR has yet to fully embrace their social practice has created a void on the market and a new breed of agencies have emerged as a result to fill it with some success. What innovative PR firms and these ‘next gen’ marketing firms have in common is that they have both understood that the new frontier for communication is Social Relationships. Call it SR, call it PR 2.0, these firms are defining a new industry where much of the money spent on social media is pouring in. My advice: you want to be on that train before it leaves the station…

Official logo of SXSW 2010.

As you can read on the release, we’re partnering with PR powerhouse, Porter Novelli, our long-time friend Crimson Hexagon, and a newcomer  Spredfast to create the ultimate marketing/communication/social media application — complete with sentiment analysis, influencer identification and campaign outreach management. We really like the way this application is shaping up, combining what we consider the three most important elements of any quality social media campaign (at least from a tool perspective) — understanding sentiment, finding the influencers and managing engagement.  It’s a powerful solution and kudos to Porter Novelli for having the vision and commitment to put it all together!  We’ll certainly be talking more about this application and business opportunity as it develops in the coming months.

To learn a little more about it, you can check out the Porter Novelli microsite.  We have a Top 10 Trending SWSX influencers list updating on a daily basis on this page.  Check it out and…as always, let us know your thoughts…

Cheers from SXSW!

The List…Revealed

Without further ado (drumroll please), we can now release the “unmasked”, totally exposed list of the Top 25 Authorities moving PR Forward.  As you can see, the Top 5 Authorities moving PR Forward are:

#5 – Steve Rubel

#4 – Jason Falls

#3 – Sarah Evans

#2 – Brian Solis

#1 – Chris Brogan

Surprised (we were)? Excited?  Disappointed?

Contest Winner

The entries were very interesting.  It was actually difficult to determine the winner with several top contributors offering very similar pics.  With that said, there was not one single entry that picked everyone on the Top 5 — let alone in the right order.  However, the one who came the closest was the team at @PerkettPR (led by @pprlisa) who guessed the Top 3 correctly…making them the closest of anyone in the contest.  So, congratulations @pprlisa and the rest at @PerkettPR — we will be forwarding your $50 Amazon gift card to Lisa’s email today!  Nice job!

In case you are interested here are the % of submissions that selected the Top 5 (respectively):

• Chris Brogan – apx 65%
• Brian Solis – apx 60%
• Sarah Evans – apx 35%
• Jason Falls – apx 20%
• Steve Rubel – apx 20%

Interesting stuff.  A couple of people who were mentioned by many of the submissions were Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch) and Richard MacManus (founder of Mashable)…this is an important point as it refers to Traackr’s methodology.  While both of these blogs are extremely influential — what we do at Traackr is locate the specific author on each site who is most relevant to the topic at hand.  In this case, Sarah Evans is the most relevant Mashable author.  Knowing this is very, very powerful for those trying to gain insight into the influencers in a specific topic area.

One Final Note

After releasing the initial list earlier this week, we received some (passionate) comments about #15: Strumpette (aka Amanda Chapel) is a fictional character that has been created by a PR professional (some say there are multiple authors behind Strumpette) to speak AGAINST social media and the traditional pro-PR 2.0 rhetoric.  So, some people thought she should be removed from the list.   We respectfully disagree.  It happens quite often with our work that influencers from both sides of an issue make the list.  It is important to note that at Traackr we believe that the sentiment of one’s content does not drive or define influence.  The fact that they built a following listening to, engaging with them and amplifying the signal defines their influence.  In fact, we would argue that knowing the influential voices on the other side of the aisle are just as important in almost any circumstance. As for the “fake” identity, Traackr’s philosophy is always to try to identify the person behind the content, rather than a mere URL or Twitter handle. That said, non of our geeky technologists have a background on intelligence gathering or P.I., and nor should they: if influencers we find don’t feel comfortable sharing their “real” name on their public feeds, we won’t look for it – this is really no different from the use of aliases by authors, actors and journalists we have come to accept for centuries.

With all that said — congrats to PerkettPR and thanks to everyone for participating!

We are very excited to release a rare public Traackr A-List today :  The Top 25 Authorities who are moving PR forward.  Check out the list here.  Be aware, however, that if you look at the list now you will notice that the Top 5 Influencers on this list have been hidden.  Why is that, you may ask?  Well because we wanted to have some fun with this list before the upcoming holiday season.  We decided to have a contest and invite everyone to make their best guess as to who they think are the TOP 5 Authorities on our list.

Here’s how the contest is going to work:

The Contest

Rather than just giving away the entire list, we want everyone to work for it a bit.  Not only is there a great prize for the winner, but there are a whole lot of bragging rights too!

Dates:

Opened – Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 8 a.m. EST

Closed – Friday, Nov. 20 at 12 p.m. EST

Winner announced – Friday, Nov. 20 at 1 p.m. EST (Winner announced on the Traackr blog)

E-mail answers to: PRcontest@traackr.com

Make sure to give your answers in ranking order 1-5.  Also make sure that you offer the REAL NAMES of the individuals (as opposed to their blog URL or Twitter handle — we don’t believe influencers are defined by any single platform)

Prize: A $50 Amazon gift card – just in time for the holidays!

Tips from the team: The three Traackr measurement scores, reach resonance and relevance, displayed on the list, can help you make an educated guess. Another tip? You don’t necessarily need to be in PR to move PR forward. The first person to submit the correct answer wins!

Traackr’s Methodology

Traackr’s Authority List is developed through a methodical approach that finds meaning in the massive amount of data that is collected and shared throughout the online space. In other words, we take all the jumble on the Internet regarding online influencers, and turn it into meaningful, understandable and useful information for our clients. Through this approach, we identify the most influential individuals who play a pivotal role in a specific space – in this case, moving the PR world into the next millennium.

*Note: While all of these influencers may not be PR professionals themselves, they still play a significant role online influencing the profession.

Like all of our searches, identifying the top 25 PR influencers began with a keyword-based search using industry terminology. Our main focus for this search was around the PR 2.0 space, so the keywords were made up of more recent terminology trends among public relations professionals. Based on the data received from this keyword search, the influencers were ranked using Traackr’s scoring algorithms; reach (the ability to generate views), resonance (the ability to spark and propagate conversations) and relevance (the ability to cover specific topics or a market).

This methodical approach encompasses all of the social media platforms from Twitter to Facebook through Friendfeed and blogs, which is what makes Traackr’s lists so relevant and useful. Traackr sees the value in each online space, and by focusing on numerous platforms, sometimes it enables us to identify influencers who are making huge contributions to their field but may not have been recognized yet. Our good friends at Corporate Eye put it best; we spot the “king-whisperers”.

If you have any other specific questions about our methodology in regards to this list, just send us a note.

Good luck making your picks.  Don’t forget, we will be releasing the final list this Friday at 1 p.m. EST, right here on this blog…