Bateman Group has started off 2012 with a bang!  Today we kicked off our new partnership with a company called Adchemy based in Foster City, Calif. and led by CEO and Founder Murthy Nukala, a veteran leader of innovative, technology-driven businesses.

Adchemy’s mission is to help advertisers leverage consumer intent to create more effective digital advertising experiences. The company is backed by Accenture, August Capital, Mayfield Fund and Microsoft and in 2010 was listed by The Wall Street Journal as one of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S.

Adchemy is a wonderful new addition to our digital advertising and marketing technologies practice. The account will be run by a spectacular team consisting of practice lead and Senior Vice President Bill Bourdon, Vice President Lisa Melsted, Account Manager Shannon Hutto and Senior Associate Kathleen Stuart. I feel confident this will be a long and fruitful partnership for both our organizations. Please join me in welcoming them to the Bateman Group family.

Lo and behold the return of the Bateman Buzz Meter, our 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.

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We’ve all consumed the horror stories from journalists recounting tales of PR folks sending off base pitches, cc’ing journalists on inappropriate emails, or getting irate when an editor won’t take a briefing. The wind blows two ways, however, so we’ve cobbled together some stories from across the agency of some less-than-savory encounters with the media. Believe it or not, there were many stories to tell, so this is a two part series. Read on, and feel free to share your own anecdotes!

Bill Bourdon: Follow through is a key requirement of any successful PR program, or business for that matter. This includes following up with team members to ensure accountability on everyone’s respective roles, following up with clients on their deliverables, and also following up with media around pitches, client interviews, etc. The latter obviously involves a good deal of tact. For example, bombarding a reporter after a client interview via phone, email, IM and Twitter is a surefire recipe to agitate them and potentially get blacklisted. However, tactfully following up with a reporter a week after an interview with a client about a major launch to determine the status of the story and offer further assistance is a necessary part of what we do.

This is why I was shocked to receive a three-paragraph rant back from a certain editor in chief at a certain knowledge management trade publication upon following up with him very tactfully after arranging interviews with a client and one of their customers. Both my client and their customer had taken a lot of time to prepare for the interview and naturally wanted to know if the story was still planned. After politely following up more than a week after the interviews had passed, I received an ALL CAPS diatribe back from the editor threatening to blacklist me and my agency, and inform my client of my incompetence. Little did he know that little email temper tantrum put him on my own blacklist and I’ve never communicated with him ever since.

Elissa Ehrlich:  A former mobile client had us put out a globally generated press release about an analyst report that named their company as having top share of the CDMA handset market worldwide. A mobile trade publication called us to verify the numbers and asked us to speak to the analyst. When we went back to the client, well, it turns out that the report was not yet issued so they didn’t want to speak to any media about the story. We had to go back to the publication and tell them not to publish the story yet, even though we put out a release about it. The editor of the publication called me, yelled at me and said never in all her time has she ever experience such a travesty of PR (really? never anything worse than that?!). Moral of the story – don’t put out a press release about an analyst report without first checking that it has been published!

Amy Ziari: When good news turns to just plain awkward and sad: An editor from one of the largest national dallies called to say that YES, she would take me up on my offer to do an exclusive story on my client. Cue Amy trying but probably failing to contain her excitement! The high was very short-lived though when she then burst into tears, mumbling something about having a family member recently die, and then immediately hanging up on me. To this day, I can’t believe she still did the story.

Tyler Perry:  We were launching a client out of stealth mode. PR was obviously a major component of it, and the debut was happening at an RFID tradeshow in Vegas in a coordinated sales, marketing and biz dev effort.  Leading up to the launch, we lined up myriad pre-briefings, including one with the venerable Don Clark from WSJ. All were completely in agreement with the embargo, and we were very careful to make sure that each journalist got something “unique” for his/her story – a customer reference, an analyst, supporting product detail and images, etc.

So imagine my surprise when I received an angry call from my client a two weeks before the launch- the blog from a major IT trade had written an article on the company! I quickly scrambled to read it and discovered that the journalist had written a piece with language that looked eerily familiar…from my pitch. We had corresponded about the launch, and after he agreed to the embargo we sent him some additional information. He passed on a briefing as he didn’t feel it was right for his column, but obviously changed his mind. Fortunately we hadn’t sent him anything particularly damaging to the launch, but it did make for an awesome weekend of trying to hunt him down and request that he take the story down. He refused.  The launch went incredibly well, but I have never worked with this journalist again.

I am sure there are many more stories to tell…stay tuned for our second installment, but post some of your craziest scenarios in the comments below!

A recent surveyfrom CareerCast.com has gotten our industry in quite a tizzy. The survey looked at over 200 different professions and came up with a list of the Ten Most Stressful Jobs. Public Relations Officer came in at #8. It’s also worth noting that PR pros, advertising execs and CEOs were the only three office jobs in the top ten, alongside firefighters and police officers, and pilots!

Being on this list reminds me of a directory my alma mater, Williams College, was on for the 100 Colleges with the most unattractive women. Although we were excited to be listed toward the bottom, it wasn’t that sweet to be included to begin with. I have a similar feeling here, but unlike during my college days, this situation encourages some critical thinking as to why we in the PR field are on this list, and what could be changed to get us off it.

Here is what CareerCast has to say as to why PR is stressful:

Stress Rank: 193
Stress Score: 78.523
Unemployment: Low*
Hours Per Day: 9
Time Pressure: High
Competition: Very High

Public relations specialists make speeches and give presentations, often in front of large crowds. Because it is a highly competitive field, specialists must work quickly and creatively to meet deadlines. In addition, some PR officers are required to interact with potentially hostile members of the media.

I’ve written about the latter part of this statement beforehand; the threat of public mockery and humiliation at the hands of a spiteful journalist if you make an honest, if not careless, mistake, can keep a PR pro up at night. The other criteria, however, seem fairly applicable to almost any client service position. Here are a few of my thoughts on the challenges we face in PR, and some ways to address them.

Measurement
Measurement can be challenging. As with many marketing communications practices, it is a crucial element to any program.  Budgets are tight and companies need to understand where their PR dollar is going. Measuring PR success is not always a simple equation, however; many of our clients want to be able to track sales leads and market impact. For some clients, success is more easily tracked- take the example of a consumer-downloaded product. A recent product launch that the Panda Security team of Bill Bourdon, Shannon Walsh, Jeana Tahnk and Amy Ziari managed resulted in 213 feature articles, 7,803 blog posts, 28,000 YouTube video views and 930 Tweets. This generated 200,000 visits to the product micro-site, all in a 24-hour period (go team!). The numbers were impressive, but they also drove some pretty significant business impact.

For other clients, measurement is more nuanced. An enterprise software sales cycle is very long, and leads are not always easily tracked, so direct sales impact from PR is not always a realistic benchmark. Sentiment and market position are also challenging, as they are subjective. Last year we were tasked with helping one of our clients transition their focus from one market to another. We created and executed our plan and generated some pretty impressive results in six months (100% increase in feature articles; 556 Blog posts; 721 Tweets), but these numbers alone don’t really address our larger objective- did we successfully transition the company’s perception?

How did we address it?
One of the things I am most proud of at the Bateman Group is how we gear every program toward having an impact on our clients’ businesses. Although big numbers are impressive, we really try to work with our clients to align our efforts with their business objectives and make sure that our writing, editorial and speaking campaigns target and resonate with their audience, whether it is a consumer or an enterprise architect. We collaborate on metrics will move the needle, and hold ourselves accountable to them. Sometimes this is sheer article volume or coverage in certain publications, other times it is increasing association with a given competitor or industry term.

We’ve developed a measurement system called Bateman Benchmarks. We feel our system does a pretty great job at objectively tracking our successes and generating un-biased, automated analysis to see how the media and industry’s perception changes due to our efforts. It is not perfect, but it has been incredibly useful in evaluating our practices to make sure we are approaching client work in the right way, and for our clients to demonstrate the impact of PR to the rest of the company. For the market transition example cited above, Bateman Benchmarks gave us a way to compare our client’s share of voice versus its competitors. We were able to evaluate how their association with their “new” industry changed during the six month timeframe, and measure the sentiment of the coverage. Coupled with the quantitative metrics, this gave us a really strong understanding of how we moved the needle on overall perception.

There are no guarantees.
I can’t tell you how many times I have patiently and persistently worked on securing a high-profile interview or panel only to have something happen at the last minute, dashing my hopes and dreams. I remember a recent situation where we created a beautiful pitch tied to a news event, identified the perfect target, secured interest and had an engaging briefing…and then the customer reference pulled out. On the one hand, it was a huge success for scoring the high profile interview; however since the reporter did not end up publishing a story, that success didn’t really translate to our end goal. Another example–for one of my consumer clients, I secured a spot in a major consumer magazine’s holiday gift guide, a huge sales  driver. Days before the issue was going to print, the editor let me know that they had to cut a few pages from the magazine due to a decline in ad sales, and my client’s product was on one of those pages. Bummer.

How do we address this?
This one isn’t as simple. The mercurial nature of the media (and, on occasion, the ad dollars that drive their publications) means that things happen that are beyond our control but that can affect our end result. To avoid similiar situations, we try to make sure that all of the moving parts are as foolproof and prepared as possible. References are confirmed, embargo dates are agreed upon, products are working, and spokespeople are prepped. The behind-the-scenes work that goes into pitching and coordinating an interview is extensive, but it’s not done in vain. And we also try to anticipate every potential problem and pre-emptively address them. For example, with my gift guide scenario, because that wasn’t my first rodeo, I knew I couldn’t put all of my eggs in that one basket. I had also focused on a few other higher-tier outlets and managed to secure placements in several other gift guides as well to soften the blow in case one fell through.

At the end of the day, some outcomes are simply impossible to avoid, even if you enter in with all of your Is dotted and your Ts crossed. The best that you can do is be as prepared as possible going into them, and be nimble enough to change course if obstacles arise. Despite the stress that these things can cause us, we try to minimize those stresses by being prepared—something most of us in this industry learn early on after a couple of painful mistakes.

These are just the realities of our industry (isn’t that a nicer way of saying stresses? I think so). Does PR belong on the most stressful careers list? Perhaps. But I would venture to guess that any profession involved in client (or public) service could lobby for a spot on this not-so-coveted list. Lastly, in terms of my college list, you know, I just did a quick Google search to find it and was unable to get past the “most attractive student body” listings. Maybe it was an urban legend created by some disgruntled alums? Sigh. One will never know.