Behold the Labor Day edition of the Bateman Buzz Meter (technically #5), our semi-regular ranking of recent newsworthy events based on PR and Social Media effectiveness.  As always, please comment on any current news headlines or PR stunts you think are worthy of the Buzz Meter we may have missed.

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BP is damned if they do, and doubly damned if they don’t.

According to Reuters, the company has apparently purchased “oil spill” and related search terms from Google and other search engine providers in an effort to drive traffic to its Gulf of Mexico response website. This SEO strategy is a clear attempt by the company to control communications around the worst oil spill in U.S. history and improve sentiment about its brand within the media.

While BP hasn’t disclosed how much it has paid for these search terms, President Obama has criticized the company for spending $50 million on TV ads in an attempt to turn around consumer perception about the company during the crisis. I agree with Obama that TV ads, an old school tactic used by tobacco and oil companies for years, are in really poor taste. Purchasing the search terms; however, is a very new crisis communications tactic worth a closer look.

A spokesman for BP explained to Reuters: “We know people are looking for those terms on our website and we’re just trying to make it easier for them to get directly to those terms.”

This case represents an interesting dilemma for crisis communication strategists. On the one hand, search term strategies like this will certainly help BP to drive traffic to their site, giving the company more control what’s being communicated. On the other, consumers of online news media today are much more sophisticated and many see right through excessive social media marketing. Moreover, they understand the power of broadcasting their distaste about a company virally across their networks when so inclined.

In a press release issued by BP on June 4th, the company’s Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said:

“The Board of BP has been clear from the outset that all resources available to the company should be applied to meeting BP’s responsibilities in addressing these events.”

If this statement is true, then why not invest $50 million to support the response?

Okay, as a communications professional, I admit this question isn’t entirely fair. There are three crucial communication elements to addressing a crisis:

1) Be a resource to media as well to the public

2) Be transparent about the situation; and

3) Be responsive.

All of these things require an investment, although $50 million seems a bit excessive. The company has issued literally dozens of press releases and videos since news about the spill first broke last month: http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=40&contentId=7061813.

I’ve not done a thorough audit of these communiqués, but upon a brief review, I can tell you they overwhelmingly focus on how much oil BP has collected, not how much has been lost, and how much money the company is donating to environmental project XYZ. Not surprisingly, this canned crisis communications statement is a thru-line among most of these announcements:

As part of its commitment to restore the environment and habitats in the Gulf Coast region…

My take: Try as they may, BP’s high volume of outbound communication and savvy social media marketing tactics aren’t the right band aid – nothing is. BP may be committed to fixing the problem now, but they were never 100 percent committed or prepared to prevent it from happening in the first place. If they can definitively prove that the problem could not have been prevented, that could be their silver bullet, but they can’t. As a result, the losses from brand damages alone, which I’d argue are far greater than the billions of dollars they are investing in environmental damages, will take years to recover.

So the question remains…in light of a disaster, when the conversation on the web reaches a fever pitch, should PR pros jump right in or sit back and wait? Personally, I don’t think we can sit back, but I also think that brands are still trying to navigate how to best handle mishaps and disasters in the social world. The one factor that has emerged as a constant, however, is authenticity. Social media allows brands to speak directly to all their various constituents. If they don’t do so honestly and authentically, they are doomed before they hit tweet.

Let us know what you think of the situation and how BP has handled it thus far?

Today’s post is the second in our series introduced in January on Bateman Banter called The New J-School in which we examine the evolving nature of journalism in today’s digital age.

If you at all pay attention to decreasing ad revenue trends, you’ll find yourself in good company in assuming that traditional media are becoming more or less irrelevant, or at least not very profitable. After all, this sentiment is often coming straight from the horse’s mouth itself. Case in point: The Economist’s recent story on Newsweek going up for bid, calling it “bad news in a business that is supposed to be more resistant to technological shock and structural declines in advertising than the newspaper industry.”

You don’t say.

Another prime example? A month or two ago at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, I attended a panel on “How to Save Journalism.” One of the panelists, the publisher of USATODAY.com, was bold enough to suggest the media need to consider breaking down the sacred Berlin Wall between editorial and advertising to keep traditional media relevant. This elicited a number of gasps from the media-heavy audience, who hold that Berlin Wall near, dear and absolutely sacred (and, in my opinion, rightly so).

If the publisher’s words didn’t represent a fundamental shift in traditional media and their growing pains, I don’t know what will.

Still, I understand why a publisher might think this way. With the explosion of online content, media today have endless Web analytic tools to measure value for advertisers right along with reader engagement to ensure that content stays fresh and everyone can keep their jobs. Yet, media simply writing for the almighty click wouldn’t be a good thing for anyone.

Traditional media’s struggles to stay relevant hit home after returning from Austin. I found myself in a meeting with a client who turned to us, the PR team, and asked, “Does traditional media coverage even matter anymore?”

Damn right it does.

Just look at the recent study by Pew Research on the state of news media. If you’re at all interested in media trends, the study is required reading and apt to shift some of your common misconceptions about traditional media.

A few choice nuggets:

• 80 percent of the links on blogs and social media sites lead back to U.S. legacy media
• The vast majority of the top news sites (67 percent) are still tied to legacy media
• While new media are growing, their ranks among the most trafficked sites are still small

A huge part of our job here at Bateman Group is to keep our finger on the pulse of media trends like these and try to stay one or two steps ahead of change. What’s happening is that extremely targeted, thoughtful coverage in the business or trade publications still has the power to move mountains… and then some. We see it happening to our clients every time they receive coverage in their most coveted publications. The calls start coming and the leads pile up. Coverage like this may just be harder to come by these days, which is where a good PR firm that knows the ins and outs of working with traditional media comes in handy.

Of course, the hopeful statistics about traditional media in the Pew study run in parallel with equally gloomy ones, as well as signs pointing to the continued growth of new media voices on the Web. Social media certainly cannot be ignored either.

This leads me to a key question: Given the changing media landscape, how much focus do you think should be given to traditional media vs. social media in PR programs? I certainly have my own opinion (hint: it depends), but eager to hear yours.

I think it’s just as important in tech PR – if not more important – to be tuned into the pulse of the technology community as it is to craft a great pitch or write the perfect press release. One really fuels the other, even though our visibility into this dynamic community is often gained through obsessively reading our favorite blogs and picking up insights from the Twittersphere. So after zealously livestreaming TechCrunch50 for the last several years, I was happy to have the rare opportunity as a PR person to attend this year’s event here in San Francisco.

Some, such as Ariel Schwartz at Fast Company, called this year’s event downright somber. Others, including TechCrunch blogger Sarah Lacy, said the start-ups lacked passion.

Personally, I think a better adjective might be “responsible.” It was almost as if you could hear that paranoid friend from high school up there on the stage who, just when things were getting exciting, always chimed in, “Wait, couldn’t we get into trouble for that?” This could very well be attributed to the economic conditions over the last year. With less funding going around and all of us generally keeping our pocketbooks near and dear, taking huge risks is just, well, riskier.

Contrary to media opinion, I thought there were a few gems. I think secondary-market, ticket-price forecasting outfit, SeatGeek, has some real potential. No, it’s not a “game-changing” company, but I’m fairly positive we didn’t see any next Googles or Facebooks at the conference. And should that even be the goal? SeatGeek has a solid product on its hands, is already profitable and is targeting an untapped marketplace. Plus, judging by the concert and sports obsessed folks in my own social circle, the company may have just as well called itself “SeatFreak.” A built-in passionate user base never hurts.

Here’s SeatGeek’s presentation from the conference:

The overall winner was RedBeacon, a company that promises to find you local service providers at the drop of a hat. Someone to help make your house look immaculate for the in-laws, anyone?

It will be interesting to see what happens at next year’s event. The touch of recklessness in the start-up community and tech industry in general is what drew me to this business in the first place. Because if you’re going to play hooky and jump over the school fence despite your better judgment, you might as well go do something exciting.

For those of us in PR, it’s our job to keep on top of not only the news, but the conversations most relevant to our clients – whether they happen in the New York Times or the “back alleys” of the Web. It’s no secret, however, there is simply more information to monitor these days: More articles. More blogs. More social networks. More voices.

With this in mind, I asked several of my colleagues here at the Bateman Group about the history of how PR firms have monitored media, how that’s changing and how we, as PR professionals, are coping. Perhaps most importantly, I asked them what tools they would want to manage information overload in their PR monitoring and strategizing efforts.

Check out what they said and chime in for yourself. What tools do you foresee PR professional using in the future?

At the Bateman Group we take our responsibility for being good corporate citizens seriously and our selection process for taking on pro bono work is pretty straightforward. We look for visionary organizations with dynamic founders who are providing creative solutions to real world problems, either locally, nationally or globally. While many of our pro bono clients aren’t technology companies per se, we tend to partner with social entrepreneurs who are using technology in really innovative ways.

My team and I were really excited to recently have had the opportunity to co-produce a fundraiser in collaboration with our friends at Citizen Space for a really cool media advocacy project called WeOwnTV. A spinoff of the critically acclaimed documentary film, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, WeOwnTV will teach film production and storytelling to a group of young Sierra Leonean ex-combatants and survivors of their country’s civil war, and provide a Web platform for their stories to be seen and heard around the world. Development of a media education center in Freetown, Sierra Leone is also in the works, and the WeOwnTV creators have already been approached by media professionals in Haiti and South Africa about extending the program into those countries.

I want to personally thank everyone who was able to show their support and attend the June 10 event, which turned out to be a huge success. Special thanks to Tara Hunt for donating the great venue, to my team at the Bateman Group for rallying a good turnout, and to my event planner maven of a wife for helping us pull everything together in record time.

I caught up with WeOwnTV’s brainchild and my good friend Banker White at the event. For those of you who were unable to attend, here’s the inside scoop on this inspirational project.

BB: What was your inspiration for WeOwnTV?

White: The inspiration for WeOwnTV came clearly from our first documentary film, which followed the lives of a musical band of Sierra Leonean refugees. The spirit of the All Stars film was really collaborative in nature, both because of how we developed relationships with the band members, and also because of what we learned from them in terms of how to live, be creative, and overcome life changing obstacles.

Secondly, the way in which we started to collaborate with the youngest member of the band, Alhaji Jeffery Kamara (aka Black Nature), was a big inspiration. 14 years old at the time, Black Nature was incredibly curious about the film making process and really eager to share his story with other people around the world. For victims of war, living in a refugee situation, they were really conscious of where the footage would go and who would see it. Being around them and appreciating how conscious they were of this was very powerful.

Fast forward several years and formalizing a curriculum for other young people to produce and share their stories was a logical extension. And I am very excited to say that Black Nature is collaborating with us on the project from his new home in San Francisco.

BB: What do you hope to accomplish with the project?

White: WeOwnTV has engaged a wide range of participants from young media professionals and students, to ex-combatant, street kids and child prostitutes. In January 2009 we met with and interviewed over fifty extraordinary young adults to become both project participants and WeOwnTV staff. We selected fourteen extraordinary young adults.

During our time in Sierra Leone we have noticed that there are a lot of NGOs in Sierra Leone that focus on working with children, and others that focus on infrastructure and development. However the generation of young adults who are Black Nature’s age living in Sierra Leone today essentially lost their opportunity for an education due to the war. In many ways they lost their childhood all together and are too old for many services being provided today. With WeOwnTV we want to specifically target this age group since it has been so underserved.

Our curriculum will provide highly customized professional training for video and sound production in a way that is very much balanced with encouragement to help cultivate an inner strength that already exists. For example, all of the participants are incredible orators, up to date on world politics, and have active intellectual minds. Our program is specifically geared towards bridging the gap from having the potential to being active media makers.

BB: WeOwnTV has a pretty significant social media component. Can you explain this?

White: There are really two components. One is how we (the production team) are using social media and the other is how the program participants themselves will be able to leverage these tools.

My team and I are obviously using social media to raise awareness of the project, and also as a catalyst for forming partnerships with other organizations and individuals who can support us on several levels. For example, we’ve been able to put ourselves out there, using mostly Twitter and Facebook, to identify other groups who are doing similar work. In fact, we are using these platforms to help plan the next leg of our trip back to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

On the flipside of this, we want to make sure the community we are trying to serve has the same ability to collaborate with their peers in other places. Our tech training will teach them how to get online and use social media in similar ways for advocacy. Social media and Internet access will obviously give them the ability and added motivation that comes from seeing their videos online to embrace these tools.

BB: Are there broadband infrastructure barriers for the WeOwnTV program participants that will dictate how they use social media?

White: Sierra Leone is only one of a few countries in sub Saharan Africa that has broadband Internet access thanks to the massive UN peacekeeping mission that started in 2001. However, while the technology exists, the affordability doesn’t.

Until the situation changes, we are looking into SMS text messaging because it’s a much more affordable way to distribute and update content for the Web. Actually, there are a lot of great NGO blogs in the region powered by SMS. All of our participants currently have cell phones and Twitter accounts to be able to update their profiles and websites via text messaging.

Until things change, the situation requires us to stay committed to finding creative solutions, not give up.

BB: How can people and organizations get involved with the project?

White: One of the most exciting things about our curriculum and the WeOwnTV social media distribution platform is that there have already been requests for us to do similar things in other countries, including Haiti and South Africa. Forming partnerships will be the lifeblood of the project so we encourage working media professionals around the world to get in touch with us. Everything we did with the All Stars film started with emails between people who shared a common interest, and we would like to see as many people as possible use the curriculum and our platform together.

Of course, WeOwnTV is a natural fit with a lot of the great work that other organizations are already doing. For example, we are already working with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and others to help develop and ultimately replicate the WeOwnTV model.

In addition, you can check out some footage of the event, which includes a special acoustic performance by the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (thanks Amy Ziari!):

We’ll be reporting back on WeOwnTV’s progress. In the meantime, please help us get the word out!