PR practitioners know that research is a great way to get visibility for your clients. However, sensationalizing results is a bad idea.
Techworld writes that Blogs Now Infested With Offensive Content, based on data from Scansafe’s Monthly Global Threat Report for March. This worried me until I read, “To be added to the list of those deemed potentially offensive within a business context, a site merely had to contain a single post containing profanity, or worse.” In other words, “offensive content” is defined as a single mention of the F-word.
Excuse me? Since when is mild swearing considered “offensive?” Blogs are all about expressing personal opinion, and the inclusion of an occasional expletive is part of the process of self-expression. When used carefully, profanity can actually be very effective in making a point. Under Scansafe’s definition, Catcher in the Rye would be deemed offensive.
This is a non-story, and it’s a black eye for Scansafe because the company tried to make it a story. Don’t follow its lead.
Very interesting.
Here’s what happens, someone comes up with an idea for a study or survey. Everyone gets really excited about it and someone agrees to pay. The excitement and high expectations are based on the assumption that the results will somehow be compelling.
When they are not, everyone starts to scramble to slice and dice the data to come up with SOMETHING that might be interesting. So you have a bunch of people sitting around with dull data (and the people who agreed to pay for the research wondering when the results will start to rolling) trying to come up with whatever they can to show that it wasn’t a bad idea, that it was worth the money and that there’s still a chance to get some news for all the effort.
The longer it takes – and the less interest there is in the results – the more obscure the “data” becomes and the more loudly it is promoted. In the end, you end up with a situation like this – inaccurate or irrelevant information being promoted as news. It’s too bad but understandable.
PR people can do do a few simple things to avoid this fate:
1 – vet the idea for the research with the media or communities they plan share it with. If the best case information elicits no interest it’s probably best to stop right there.
2 – design the survey carefully. It’s easy to come up with questions; it’s hard to come up with good questions that are going to result in interesting, accurate and relevant data. Take the time to craft good questions and be willing to ask the people you want to reach what information would be interesting to them.
3 – work with clients to agree upon how the results will be used and what will be done if the results either don’t support the original thesis or are simply boring.
Having this kind of conversation BEFORE money is spent can help avoid flop-sweats and desperate attempts and making news out of nothing.
Excellent advice, Greg. I would also add that a survey is more useful when it’s repeated at regular intervals. That yields trend data, which is usually more interesting than snapshots in time. CIO Magazine has done a monthly study of CIOs for years and the changes are always interesting to watch. Ironically, the Scansafe survey is built on the same model.
Hmmm. That makes the fact that they had to sensationalize very interesting. Has there been some change in the results over time that have made them less interesting than in the past? I wonder.