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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