This is a transcript of an episode of Inside Communications (host Mike Baco) featuring Don Mittleburg discussing the history and findings of a long-running survey of journalists and the implications for PR. Mittleburg recounts how the survey began in the early 1990s with Columbia professor Steve Ross, led to his 2001 McGraw Hill book Winning PR in the Wired World (240-page manuscript, published 2001, 10,000 copies printed in six languages), and was later resurrected with the Society of New Communications Research and Jen McClure. Key findings reported in the interview: journalists are using social media increasingly (younger journalists more active); 68% of surveyed journalists say social media is a reliable tool for sourcing stories; about 56% of journalists will quote bloggers; bloggers can break stories and obtain exclusives previously reserved for major newspapers. Practical advice given: listen to online conversations, follow and engage journalists, and target niche/influential bloggers for client outreach.
Questions this video answers
Early 1990s (1993 referenced).
2001.
10,000 copies printed in six languages.
68%.
Approximately 56%.
Chapters
Coming to you live from the studios of Media Training Worldwide in New York, this is Inside Communications, and I'm your host, Mike Baco. Today we go inside with the man that literally wrote the book on communicating in today's wired world, Don Mittleburg. All that and more coming up next on Inside Communications. Don, thanks for joining us. This book, Winning PR in the Wired World, is really an outgrowth of a survey that's been about 10 or 15 years in the making. Tell us a little bit about the survey.
Happy to, Mike, and thanks for having me. The survey actually started very innocently when in the early 90s. My first incident of digital communications with an editor was JP Donlon of Chief Executive magazine who asked me to send a manuscript. He said, donnie, instead of sending me the manuscript by messenger, could you put it on a disk? So we had an old five and a quarter inch floppy, a 286. We printed out the.
Which some of our viewers might not even know what that even looks like.
Yeah, well, it was an old typewriter that was made into the early beginnings of a PC. In any case, we messengered this material digitally to JP he thought he was the coolest editor in New York, and we thought we were pretty cool PR firm. And then another fellow, Andy Gluck, who was the business editor of the New York Daily News, asked me to email him something and I didn't know what he was talking about. So it occurred to me that something was going on and eating our own dog food. The idea was to do some research, but we couldn't afford Gallup or Yankee, Lovich or Roper. So next best, find an academic. We called the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and I asked the receptionist, who among your academic staff knows anything about the Internet and journalism? This is 1993. There were two people. The dean of the school doesn't return seven of my phone calls. And then Steve Ross, an associate professor, calls me back in about 12 seconds and he said, I want to do this study with you. If you'll finance it, we'll work on it. And for the next 10 years, Steve Ross and I at Columbia did the largest survey of journalists in the world to try and understand, if you could believe it, whether or not journalists were actually using the Internet. And over the years, of course, we showed that they were. And it became a landmark study. And as a result, I spoke at the communication schools at bu, the Annenberg School, the Newhouse School, at Syracuse, Florida University, Colorado University. And in the course of my discussions, I was asked to speak at a group called Tie Tie. And I didn't want to do it, but it's a group that was located in the Yale Club. And I figured, well, it's across the street from Grand Central. I'll do it and it'll be easy. And it turned out to be 300 of the smartest, sharpest, most exciting people I've met. And I gave this presentation on our study. And at the end of the presentation, there was a line of people wanted to talk to me. And at the very end of the line of some 20 people, there was this little five foot woman who was from Indonesia, but who happened to be the international marketing director of McGraw Hill. And she said, you got to write a book. And I said, I can't write a book. She says, no, you've got to write a book. This is great. So the hardest work I've ever done, five months later completed a 240 page manuscript. McGraw Hill published it in time for the fall season in 2001, 10,000 copies were printed in six languages, including Mandarin Chinese and Japanese and Korean. And it became, by PR standards, a best seller, which allowed me to do more speaking, which allowed me to get more clients, which allowed me to sell my business. My first agency in 2001. Today. I left that firm, of course, after the sale, but very much wanted to resurrect the study because when I left, the study stopped. Professor Ross had left Columbia, but I was put in touch with a group called the Society of New Communications Research, which is a PR think tank. It's not a misnomer. And they do some terrific research. And I was introduced to Jen McClure, who was the executive director. Jen said, let's resurrect the study. And now we're doing work that tries to understand how journalists are using social media in their reporting and their daily work. And some of the results of the study are as groundbreaking as the early study that we did with Columbia. So it's fascinating.
Okay, so let's get into some of those results from the study. 2011. How are journalists using social media? We know how they disseminate news. Everyone's going on Twitter whether the story's already written or not. Reporters want to get out in front of a story. So they're tweeting leads, they're tweeting different parts of their story, and then an hour or two later, you see their story wind up online. We're not waiting for the 6 o' clock news or we're not waiting for the morning paper to come. How are journalists using social Media now.
Yeah. And they're using it in ever increasing frequency. So each year that we do this study, the numbers become higher and higher. And not surprisingly, the younger the journalist, the more active the user of social media. So what we're finding is some very interesting things. For example, 68% of the journalists who we surveyed this year, and that was the study just put out two months ago, say that social media is a reliable tool for sourcing stories. And when you think about it now, if we are following, if we have a client that's in nutrition, we will follow journalists online, usually in their Twitter accounts, and they will often post looking for a source on nutrition. Anybody have anything? And by following them, we can respond right away. So journalists are looking for sources. They're looking for story ideas in greater and greater numbers.
Have you found that journalists, because of this practice, are getting inundated with too many sources, with too many leads? You mentioned looking for a source on specific story. Now with that availability to get in touch with them at a moment's notice, a direct tweet or a message on Facebook. Have journalists said that they are getting too much information or too many sources?
No, because the beauty of Facebook, for example. Facebook wins because it is a great filter. There is no spam. So you and the journalist have to connect on Facebook before you can really have a conversation. A journalist can. If a journalist doesn't know you or doesn't want to know you, they do not have to respond. So the journalist can really determine who they want to speak to and who they don't want to speak to. The same is true with Twitter. I mean, it gives them an opportunity to just kiss off a lot of people who they don't want to. At the same time, it allows them to follow certain PR people who they trust and have confidence in. So there's an awful lot going on right now. Of course, you know the story about bin Laden, when bin Laden was killed, that was first reported by a technology person in Pakistan in the city of Abbottabad, who saw a helicopter flying above. There was something like 4000 tweets per second. It has become. You saw the kissing couple in Vancouver. The New York Times had a front page story today about the. There is no privacy on the Internet. Everybody catches you. The whole dynamic of communicating with journalists has changed. When I grew up 30 years ago, there was what we called the big five, all print. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Business Week and Fortune Business Week and Forbes. And that's all our clients wanted. Get me into one of those five now there are hundreds of blogs, there are hundreds of digital communications tools. There's Facebook, there's Twitter. There's so many ways to communicate with a journalist that we're now seeing. In fact, something like 56% of all journalists will quote from a blogger. This is unprecedented. We recently did a story about PCMag going digital. Two years ago, we gave the exclusive to a blogger. The next day we had the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal fighting for the story after the blogger day.
That's interesting that you bring that up. How important is it to weed out the exact person that you want to feed this story to if you have a technology client to just go to an influential technology blogger, if it's a food client going just to a food blogger who has a great following and a very specific following as opposed to maybe getting buried somewhere inside the New York Times.
I mean, you're right on. The most interesting thing is the tools of communications are the same. Having an ability to communicate and get a message across to get through to a journalist. Now that there are so many different ways and to get the journalists to trust you. But the research tools. When we did the PCMAG story, we did the research that showed that the same blogger, Rafaat Ali, was constantly breaking stories about PCMAG and magazines going digital. So we decided to go to Rafaat and we set up an old fashioned lunch between the publisher and Rafaat, who's based here in New York, got them together, they became fast friends. So when we gave him the story, he gave us a wonderful large and fair story which the other publications picked up on that would have been unheard of even three and four years ago to give a blogger an exclusive over the Times in the Journal. So our business has changed dramatically and.
A lot of the business practices of PR professionals have changed. And since that's our main viewing audience for the people out there who are interested in doing this for their clients, what are the first basic steps that they should be taking in terms of reaching out to journalists or just gaining a better foothold on everything that's going on, social media wise as well as journalism?
Well, the first thing is they have to listen. In order to listen, you have to hear and they have to listen to conversations. So get online, see what communities are out there, see what your journalists are doing. Follow journalists who cover your clients. Try and engage a conversation with the journalists. You'll be surprised how many are wide open to your, to your thoughts, your likes and dislikes about their columns. Talk to them engage them. And that rule was the rule that I started with 30 years ago and it's the same rule today.
Don, thanks for joining us. Thanks for going Inside Communications with us again.
The book is called Winning PR in the Wired World.
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