So What? How community powers public relations

Hello here everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I am Katie joined by Chris and John. Hi, fellas.

Hello. Uh this week we are talking about something that's really interesting that you know Chris has been working on outside of Trust Insights. Um, but it seemed like a really good opportunity just to sort of walk through uh what it is and uh how it relates to marketers in general, because it is a really interesting uh use case for some of the tools that we use and methodologies. Uh so today we'll be covering how community powers public relations. Um so John, have you uh been keeping up at all with the work that Chris has been doing um for a Netflix show.

Yeah, we did talk a little bit about that, this uh warrior nun thing. I'd yeah, I'd heard some insane stories about him deploying drones in urban areas. So I'm basically expecting the feds to come knocking any moment. Well, uh ahead of that, Chris, do you want to just start a walk us through sort of the origin story of how you got involved and then we can sort of move into um the pieces that well the pieces that are more relevant in terms of like what public relations can learn from an active community, uh, how to extract the data points uh for your pitch and uh the case study, which is what we're talking about. Exactly.

So um this all started about almost three weeks ago now when a friend of a friend um said, Hey, I'm we're I'm with this group of folks that are trying to get persuade uh uh Netflix to renew to create season three of this show Warrior None. Um and the initial ask was really small like hey, we've got some Twitter data, but we're not sure how to how to how to make it a little more granular and easier to work with. Is that something that you would know how to do? I'm like, uh sure, probably. Um so I started chatting with these folks, looking around at what they had and what they were planning on doing and what they were doing already.

It was actually pretty impressive. Just to give you a sense of what the general gist of the campaign was, and it is because it's ongoing, is the fans of this show have decided to uh wage a campaign on predominantly social media, uh saying, hey, we want to draw attention to um this to try and get uh attention from Netflix and folks uh that this show is worth bringing back, that it's you know there's an audience for it, that there's a there's a social aspect to it in terms of representation of of certain minorities within society, and that it's just good entertainment. And so the campaign is essentially every day that a group of folks gets together with some sort of catchphrase along with a hashtag and tweets about it and uses that as a way to try and broaden awareness, uh, create engagement and ultimately hopefully uh persuade people uh at Netflix to uh to do the thing to agree to produce season three. So when I got involved, the data that we initially had that was there was mostly just um Twitter data. Um it was just collected Twitter data.

And the challenge that the folks were having was that they were actually so successful that traditional methods of collecting Twitter data stopped working. Um when you try, one of the things that's that's funky about Twitter, especially now, um, with all the changes in the in management and the back end systems, is that there are limits as to how much data you can get from Twitter itself without you know the the super big enterprise subscription. Some of the days of these campaigns, you're talking 50, 60, 70, 80,000 tweets per hour, right? Um and the API limits are pretty strict, like they say like you you can't pull more than 50,000 tweets per day is is the limitation. So knowing that that's outside the scope of what a vol an all volunteer group of uh folks can do, I said, well, how about we start looking at some of the other data sources that we can bring in um that can help answer these questions?

Uh the first one comes to mind, of course, is our friends and colleagues over at Talk Walker. They do have the super ultra big subscription to Twitter. So being able to put in each of these phrases and essentially extract your data accounts that way uh was a simple way to start getting them the useful insights that they they wanted. But the challenge with um Talk Walker is that in its built-in interface, you can only handle so many queries at the same time. So the first thing that we said was, well, what if we just create some custom code to extract out the data from Talk Walker and visualize it, right?

And so you end up with these um with a much bigger picture, you know, hunt the hundreds of thousands of of tweets per year, these individual things. This is a great way to easily visualize. Hey, this campaign has some attention. Um it also is a pretty straightforward way to uh to look at the big picture, right? So uh from the very beginning, the cancellation was on December 13th.

And so you're talking on a day-to-day basis, you're talking anywhere from 300,000 to you know, averaging about a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand tweets per day uh of this fan base over the span of now more than a month. Um this is as of like 6 a.m. this morning. So today's numbers are are are not baked in here. But from a an analytics perspective, even just having this level of visibility into your campaign helps make it easy to make decisions like is what we're doing working.

So, you know, it's interesting because you know, anybody can activate a fan base. You know, I could I mean, look at all the political communities for lack of a better term. You know, people can activate them to say, hey, everybody needs to get on social media and start talking about this thing so that it's basically flooding timelines and you can't ignore it. You know, this isn't nearly as extreme, but it sounds like the goal was hey, so uh we're really upset that Netflix canceled this show. So let's go ahead and let people know, hopefully getting the attention of Netflix and maybe you know, some of the production team.

Um so it sounds like that's where it started. That's where it started, and the production team, particularly the showrunners, um, and some of the the even the cast and crew uh picked up on it. They they reshared it and stuff like that. And around the same time, uh it there's there's like three or four different large groups independently operating um to just support the show. The group that I'm in is a relatively small, it's about 60-ish people that have a lot of reach and a lot of influence.

Um, so there's uh definitely an influencer management portion of this. Uh one of the things that they wanted to do was also uh and they did this stand up a GoFundMe to buy a billboard, right? Because in in previous campaigns like uh back in the day, uh Lucifer, um, Sense8 and a few other campaigns, that was something that was fairly attention getting. So they had also stood up a campaign to do that and put up a petition over on change.org for people to be able to sign in, which has now gotten like 110,000 signatures from all but 13 nations on the planet. Uh, there's only 13 countries where there's at least one signature.

I found it especially amusing that uh there were three signatures from Vatican City. Huh. Although, you know, so if you haven't watched the show, uh it's a sci-fi-esque show where long story short, uh, a woman takes on the for lack of better terms, superpowers of a superhero, but it's all sort of based around this convent who is protecting, you know, certain, you know, protecting the world from demons essentially. And a lot of it takes place in Vatican City. So that makes sense that there would be some kind of a fan base there.

Exactly. Uh, but it it is uh amusing to think that at least somebody there's going, huh, maybe the show's worth watching. Um so that was where things initially started, and then as momentum picked up, as um various uh people started, you know, that the volume was loud enough for people to start taking notice. That's when uh the organizing team said, what else can we do? Like it's great to tweet a lot.

Um there's certainly value to that, but what else could we talk about? What else could we show that would be proof points that the the cause itself, the uh or the the petition is a valid one. And now we we're starting to get into areas where you really do need uh some advanced analytics uh because you're now starting to sew together different data. So in one of the one of the things that we came up with as an idea was well, what if we assemble a pitch deck, right? That because one of the things that the campaign has talked about is what about trying to pitch this show to other services uh besides Netflix.

There's there are a whole bunch of legal and contract and technical things that go with that, but just the concept. And so we all put our heads together and on the data analysis team, I think it's about five or six people on the data analysis team, of which I'm one of them. I'm not the team lead. Um said, well, what could we come up with? What could we uh think up?

And I pulled out a framework from um Sequoia, Sequoia Capital, uh, which uh you know for addressable markets, obtainable markets, and all that stuff. And we basically revised that to turn it into a five-part uh pitch deck saying here's here's what social media proves, right? You can you can mobilize a group of people. Here's what media coverage proves that you can get broader attention than just the fan base. Here's what um search data proves that you can uh and see what people are really thinking.

Uh, here's the content quality, and then here's what's in it for you. So, you know, I'm not gonna run through this whole whole pitch deck because uh nobody wants to sit through that, but some of the things that I thought were very interesting was when we looked at forecasted search file, this is using trust insights stuff. So uh one of the things we do at Trust Insights is we do predictive forecasting of keyword data uh for SEO. So I said, let's take all the terms associated with the show: Warrior none, stream Warrior none, Warrior none on Netflix, and so on and so forth, bundle them together, take that search volume, and then put it into our predictive analytics tool, run a forecast. What does it look like?

What we found was that since the show's debut back in 2018, the fan base is steadily growing. And when we use the same forecasting software to look ahead, the base continues to grow into 2024. Even though at the time the this uh forecast was done, the show had been canceled and been publicized for several weeks because you know I joined the campaign like three and a half weeks in. So even though people know it's a canceled show, there's still search interest in it. And so it's a pitch point to say to potential investor, hey, if you pick this thing up, you've got to build an audience of people who are looking for it.

They act, they know it, there's brand awareness, and then and and it's it's a growing trajectory. What's interesting, and this is more of a rhetorical question, is how Netflix picks and choose what to promote. So there's certain shows, you know, like I think Wednesday came out uh a few months ago, and they put a lot of heavy promotion behind that show. Whereas I don't believe they put the same amount of effort into this show, Warrior None. And so then they're sort of making decisions based on things that are apples and oranges.

Like they put a lot of heavy money into one show, but nothing into the other. And then when people have never heard of it, they're like, oh, well, I guess we'll just cancel it. Like that to me, when I think about you know, marketing in general and sort of the advice that we give to our clients, like you have to factor those pieces in. And to me, that's what's not here. That's correct.

In fact, for season two of the show, um, which was the most recent season, the promotional budget was approximately zero. Um, they Netflix, I think, did one like video interview and put it on YouTube and just sort of let it languish there. And that was it compared to, for example, bus wraps and billboards and your traditional uh promotional services. So the show definitely um did not benefit from any kind of marketing. Well, even just the way that Netflix will promote things on their own social channels, they only they only tend to promote like a handful of TV shows and movie, and I don't recall this being one of them.

And the first season launched, you know, uh it was sort of a pandemic in the way, and and a variety of other things. So there was there were definitely some um some complicating factors. What has started to happen though, is you know, we basically turned this pitch deck into uh YouTube video. Um we got some uh and and because of uh the generosity of some uh data partners, in particular parrot analytics, um, they were able to send along competing data to say, like, here's what we see in our system over the you know over 90 days, you know, in-demand top 10. And it's interesting on a on a promotional budget of zero, um, the show is consistently within the top 10 and has held that in terms of a demand position uh since the second season aired.

And in fact, it's very interesting. Um, there was a post this morning in the Discord server uh that we're all in that as of today, it's the number three most in-demand show on Netflix um worldwide, which is like, huh, that's that's kind of fun for a show that's been canceled um and that has had no promotional budget besides what the fan base does. Um we wanted to look also one of the challenges about with Netflix is that Netflix has is notoriously closed mouthed about all their data, right? Beyond what they report to the street. Um they don't make their data public.

Uh so companies like Parrot Analytics have to do imputed measures of demand uh and things, and if you can actually see their methodology, which I think is very smart, um, on their website. Um if there's anyone from Parrot Analytics listening, uh let's let's get coffee sometime. I have I have questions. Good questions, good questions. Good questions.

Um good questions. But one of the things we said was, well, what if we did Apple what could we get apples to apples comparison? And so this is something that we talk about a lot with our clients, with our prospective clients with the with the general public, is you need some kind of data to work with. And if you can't get it from a primary data source, where else can you get it? So one of the sources we looked at was IMDB.

So the internet movie database, IMDb has a catalog of I forget like hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows, and every show that's in there has ratings and votes by episode. So if we were to take into account um, you know, the the first two seasons of a series of Netflix shows, how would Warrior Nuns ratings look on a on a a a volume basis? And what we see is that the first season did okay, right? It was in the sevens, decent, right? But kind of core sort of toward the bottom of the barrel for this data set.

And if you watched the show, yeah, that those first five episodes need a little help. Um so we looked at 13 reasons why Bridgerton, Lucifer, and Stranger Things, these uh these five shows, their first two seasons, the IMD re ratings, and then looked at season two. And what we see is go it. The show itself went from bottom of the barrel, essentially, to uh second right behind Stranger Things in terms of the number of the the average ratings on IMDb, which shows that from a an audience perspective, the audience thought the quality was there. And then this is where we start getting inter things interesting.

We can't get Netflix viewing data, but we absolutely can get the number of votes per show from IMTB. And what I find fascinating about this is that when you have the number of votes per show, you could it is a decent proxy for viewership, right? Because if if a gazillion people watch Stranger Things, some percentage of those people are going to go and vote for the show on IMDb. There's no call to action, right? You don't, there's nothing in the Netflix app that says, hey, when you're watching the show, go go leave a thumbs up on IMDb.

Nobody does that. So it's only that community that is very interested in in TV and movies being in there that would do this. And so we see again these five shows. If you're inferring viewership numbers, you see the viewership numbers were kind of kind of weak in in season one, right? Second from the bottom there, with the bottom being uh Bridgerton.

And then by the time the second season ended it, the show from a viewership inferred basis is second only to Stranger Things. But we did not have Wednesday in here because that Wednesday's only had one season. Um, but that's a pretty big difference in terms now. Granted, nothing's gonna touch Stranger Things for a while. Netflix like sells children, this sells like their firstborn children to promote that show.

Um but on a trap on an inferred traffic basis, this is a pretty interesting indicator that that the audience, the viewership audience is there, and again, we don't know what's happening inside inside Netflix, but this this tells an interesting story. Why did you choose those particular shows? Because I can see where the audience overlaps for some of them but Bridgerton is the one to me that kind of stands out as the odd duck uh in terms of the content um and the potential demographic at the time it was because those are the first ones that were in my recommended list on my Netflix applix specific right and two seasons plus also right yeah two seasons plus um but more than anything it was just as a measure convenience I opened up Netflix and to see like what else was in my recommended list. Okay. I guess so like if I was if someone was handing me this data that would be my first question is well I don't necessarily see some of these as comparable series for example again sort of going into content demographics the amount of promotion they put behind these things.

Um you know so that would be my first feedback piece of feedback if someone gave this to me to say now you need to make a decision I'd say well I can't this isn't apples to apples stuff. Exactly and and and that's fair so and one of the things that we did later on was looking at a a bigger basket of shows to uh this was what was in the pitch deck when we made it like two weeks ago now so this is this is a little bit aged but yes that is absolutely valid in terms of well what else could we do? Um this was just a first cut and then the the last thing we wanted to tackle was the value of the fandom and so this is where data from uh stackAdapt, which is a partner that we've worked with for a very long time has come into to uh play, looking at what is the audience worth, right? So, like the Netflix audience as a whole, there's actually a segment in StackAdapt, and many of these third uh display advertising systems such says if you want to reach this audience, here's what they're worth. Uh, and we're able to to come up with some some numbers that basically said it's a very valuable audience.

From a story perspective, the team was able to take all this analysis, atomize it into different social posts and get that circulated, particularly to journalists, um, to say to socialize the individual pieces. We turned this into a YouTube video that got circulated as well. And it created enough momentum that trade publications started picking up the story, right? Um, uh Collider uh and screen rant and a few others started picking up the general story that this fandom was active, the fandom was interested, the fandom was uh extremely vocal and had credible data-driven points to make that the show probably was canceled when there were other shows of uh uh questionable quality that got renewed. Um a couple of reality shows that people are like, we're not really sure why people watch this.

I was gonna say, looking at you, Love Island. Um so the the immediate easy wins for this were the you know, the the just the reporting itself, just helping the team understand what's going on. But then one of the things that we started doing was taking the data itself and slicing it up. So if you look at what comes out of Twitter bios in particular, people list other social media profiles and like, hey, I'm this on TikTok, I'm on this on Instagram. And so taking all the people who are participating, the tens of thousands of people, and pulling their their bio data and saying, okay, now here's the outreach list.

If we want this to spread on Instagram. This is these are the people to talk to because they're already using the hashtag on Twitter. Easy win. If they're already in your camp in one network, get them to help spread the word on another networks. YouTubers, TikTok, and so on and so forth to get the word spreading there.

Um the pitch deck got around. And then this should be a surprise to absolutely no one. Um the one of the first questions they asked uh early on was so what are we doing with the email? And it was sort of a uh a question of um we're not sure, not sure what to do about it. Says, well, let's start a Substack because Substack is one of those vendors that allows you to get an email uh newsletter up and running relatively quickly.

And the the big question people has it had is well, what do we put in the newsletter? Because you know, if we want this thing to be important. Um and what we did was we said, okay, well, we can take this data because TalkWalker is super easy to work with, it export the each day's data, and that goes in a newsletter saying here's how things are going. And so for fans who or were potentially people interested in the campaign, this is what you get every single day. And it is uh within a week of putting up, we had almost 400 subscribers, um, which is terrific for particularly for you know how how things like Twitter work.

But here's where things got interesting, and this is a uh a tenet of public relations. It's like do you remember the one red paper clip story? John does. Do you want to John, do you want to recap it a little bit? The one so the idea is that there was this you know, early influencer who had one red paper clip and traded it to some sucker for two broken corks, and you know, within three months they traded it for a house.

You know, they were able to like swap two cards how cards for a house. So the idea is if you can just get it rolling, there's enough people out there, you'll always find the next sucker. Or in this case, um, with public relations, with news media in particular, news media tends to be fairly risk averse. And understanding the media model that most publications work on is they get paid on views, right? They most media publications are ad-driven, ad supported, so they are get they get paid on views.

So a news publication will generally not cover a story if they don't think it's going to get them views because they're gonna spend time on stuff that'll that'll put money in the bank. However, when you start with smaller trade publications, they may not necessarily make their money that way, or they may make it, you know, it they may just earn more from from niche audiences. So if you can get into trade publications, you can then use that as social proof when you're pitching to other publications. Hey, Collider picked this up already. Here's the link.

You know, do you want to cover this story too? And this group has an entire outreach team of about 10 people doing public relations outreach. Once you start getting any traction, you leverage that, you keep trading up influence and importance in until you get to a point where bigger publications have to pick you up. And so after about um about a week and a half of identifying influencers and doing the outreach and providing data to power a lot of these things, um, we got into publications like IGN, right? Which is uh a gaming publication, and then that turns into more industry publications like NME, that turns into publications like Hello Magazine, and ultimately turns into things publications like Time Magazine, right?

Where the actual um the the actual campaign itself is is being picked up and individuals from the campaign are being cited. And that moves into things like Forbes, right? And Investors Business Daily, Business Insider. So these are all tier one publications from the campaign itself. So this is the this is one of the better outcomes for the campaign is saying on essentially the uh very very little budget can we can we get attention and it culminated finally um with the uh the the purchase of the billboard itself I'm gonna see if we have uh uh actually I know we have images of here somewhere but um the team very very cleverly bought a billboard uh in Los Angeles and the the in it was in Los Angeles uh uh the corner of Sunset and Van Ness um which if you know Los Angeles at all is right across the street from Netflix Studios so the folks who are responsible for um canceling the show um get to look at this billboard for four weeks and uh this of course then sparked a whole new round of coverage right again more publications picking up the story um there are several hundreds of people who are in this fandom who are driving and flying out to take photos and party at this thing and I guess presumably you know from a distance safely not not trespassing flip Netflix the bird uh because there's offices right across the street but it's funny when you look at a map of where this is located every employee of Netflix in that building and in the Burbank Studios building, which is adjacent to it, have to pass by this to get on the highway to go home.

So it, you know, it makes me think in my very, very short tenure working at a PR agency, you know, you said something that resonates with me. It was one of the things that I picked up is that you're gonna find more success starting with the smaller trade publications than you are going after the time magazines right out of the gate. Uh, and that's for a couple of reasons. One is it's gonna be, yes, it's gonna be smaller, but it's gonna be the right audience right away. Uh, and then two, you know, you're gonna have that proof point of yes, we can get coverage of this thing to people who care.

Now what do we do with it? And so when I'm thinking about, you know, what public relations can learn or can take from activated community, you know, you've covered a lot of different reasons why public relations professionals should be working with very specific communities on the topics that they're trying to get, you know, coverage for. Exactly. And here's one of the the neat little uh things that we do, particularly in the newsletter. Um, the daily newsletter obviously features you know some uh social stuff, it has those charts, but then we put the coverage in the newsletter and remind people if we want people to cover this story, they've got to see traffic.

If they get traffic, you gotta click on these links. You gotta visit these links. You don't have to sit there and read every story, you know, top to bottom, but you at least gotta register a page view so that these media outlets know that. And this is a message that we've shared on on social media as well. Don't just share the link.

You gotta click on the link so that a publication says, Wow, this story got a hundred thousand views. Um gosh, maybe we should do another story on it, see if we continue to to to get uh audience on it. As of uh last week, uh the one of the things that TalkWalker does is that they've partnered with SEMrush to bring in more accurate page view data on stories because uh they were previously using a different vendor that that was a little on the wildly inaccurate side. Um the the software and the the system is much better now. This story, this overall campaign and all the coverage it's uh done so far has accrued 1.2 billion page views, right?

Which is why we're seeing Time Magazine and Investors Business Daily and stuff covering it because everyone's like, wow, we want some of that traffic too. So as so let's say, you know, you're a public relations professional, uh, and someone comes to you and says, you know, my client needs you to get you know a hit, you know, coverage, a placement, uh, a byline, anything for Warrior None. You know, I you know, the show was canceled. I think there's a community. As the public relations professional, what's the first thing I need to do?

The first question you ask is tell me about this community. Tell me how how large they are, how motivated that they are, and if there's anyone directing the efforts, right? If there's anyone that is galvanizing the community, because what powers this campaign is the community. All the data and the analytics and and the cool stuff that we can do doesn't matter if nobody takes action on it. And one of the the most uh valuable things that I've I've seen this community do is particularly in the Discord server, A, folks listen to each other, which is nice.

Um, and B, people take action on the data. When I hand over a list of influencers, the outreach team goes and does the thing. I mean, you and I, Katie, we've talked to clients where we'll provide them actionable data and it just sits in a binder and never goes anywhere. This group of folks says, Hey, what does this data do? What do you want us to do?

We're gonna go do it. And then uh they jokingly call themselves the hamsters. They literally just go off and and they and they do the thing, and you see the results. You see the results because people are taking action on the data. So if you're a public relations person, you first say, okay, is there a community?

And if there isn't, you need to build one, because one of the challenges I think that a lot of public relations folks run into and maybe don't even fully understand themselves is if you don't have that community, you can't do anything, right? If it's just the company saying, Hey, we're gonna hand you a pile of money, make news. News has needs to have an audience. And in order for it to have an audience, you need to get people involved. And if there's no community, you're in trouble.

When we look at, for example, at the analytics for marketers Slack community that we run, let's call it over 3,000 people in it. Now, are all 3,000 people active all the time? No. But when we ask people to do stuff, we get a decent number of people to do something. And so this community provides support.

In this case, the Save Warrior None campaign has a community of tens of thousands of people. So as a PR person, I'd be like, this is awesome. It's an orchestra of uh you know 50,000 people. What can I do with an orchestra of 50,000 people? Um, that is the first question.

Then the second question is what's the story? Right? What is the story? Because getting a show to pick uh getting a network to pick up a show, in and of itself, that's not really a story, right? Uh, but it turns out there's two different stories embedded in this campaign that are both newsworthy and that both people that that group various uh journalistic and outlets want to pick up.

One, there's a representation story, right? So for folks who are on social issues, the fact that more uh queer shows get seem to get canceled by Netflix than non-queer shows, and and a question about why that seems to happen when the data supports that the queer shows are doing as well or better than their peers. So that's aspect number one. But aspect number two, and this is something that is being picked up by a lot of the business press is Netflix lying about their data, right? Um, when they're presenting things to the street and stuff, because again, they're very closed-looked about everything.

But when we start to shine a light on, well, if we do an apples to apples comparison with shows in IMDB, when we look at um known budgets, um, there are their uh uh website movie web publishes um budgets from the production of different shows, and and you look at this and go, um, what's going on? And then the the new CEO of Netflix stuck his foot in his mouth the other day. Um when he made the very when asked in a uh there's an interview, like why is you know the these fans of these various shows are protesting, he just goes, Netflix has never canceled a successful show. And digging into the data, digging into all the sources we have access to, looking at services like Parrot Analytics, we're going, well, that doesn't seem to quite be true. So now the press campaign has evolved because you know, people want to take a shot at the the reigning champ on the throne.

Uh a lot of folks, the the story has grown another angle. So as a public relations person, you definitely want to be looking, okay, what are the angles in the story that we can run with? And then what is put what could potentially come out of this that we didn't even anticipate? And are we positioned to make use of that? And that's where, again, having this um this army of activists, when a story angle comes out, you feed it to the arm and say, go, right?

Take this story and run with it, share it, click on it, make sure it's goes in newsletters and things. And so there's this whole orchestration of a campaign powered by a community that to me is it should be the future of public relations. If you want to get success, if you want to hit those tier one publications, if you want big stories and big news, having that community as part of your campaign is indispensable. It's interesting because you know, it sounds like you know, if you swap out the term community for audience research, you know, the first thing that you as the public relations person should be doing is who's the audience, you know, who cares about this thing? And you know, you may find, you know, nobody does.

You know, it really depends on who it is you're working for. Um, so let's say you're working for uh Dice in Vacuums, for example, you know, you may find that there's a very small but particular fan base who could be, you know, advocates and loyalists, because you know, certain brands have people who swear by them, you know. So finding those people first and then start to rally them up like, hey, I'm writing a story about this. Could you like, you know, talk about it, making sure that you these people are featured because then they will then likely share the information. Um, you know, I admittedly am not a public relations person, and so I really have no business speaking about how traditional public relations should work.

But to me, it sounds like if you're trying to activate a community to help get messaging out to help share information, news stories to help, you know, make change. Like you could say that's public relations, you could say that's community activism, you could say that's marketing, that that's just communications. And so it it sounds like it all comes down to who's the audience and what do they care about. Exactly. And one of the things that happens internally with this campaign that has been um a useful way to have sort of get people on the same page is data sharing, you know.

So uh part of the scripts that I wrote to to process the data also just pushes the data straight into, you know, in this case a Google sheet because it's accessible to people. So this is any time that the cut this the code itself runs, it gets pushed into this sheet. And then uh anybody who's in the campaign has access to this, they can download it, you know, even if they've made changes to it, it gets overwritten the next time that uh this happens. And so everyone's working from the same data set, everyone's working from the okay. Well, here's the numbers from in this case, Talk Walker.

Um, here's uh news stories and the URLs and stuff and the the scoring for a page use and things. All of this helps to the data helps to unify people and provide a sort of consistency towards the messaging. If you were to flip this around to the other side to the other angle, let's say you are the head of public relations at Netflix and literally everything is on fire, which is has been the case for about three weeks now. What's the number one thing that you would do to put this fire out? That the easiest thing you could do if you had the approval of the powers that be share the data.

Say, local, here's the criteria. Here's how we make decisions. Here's the data uh, you know, that that that shows why this happened, why this did not happen. And hey, here's the data and the benchmarks that you would need to hit for us to say, yeah, we're we will uh do a third season, and you need to hit these these benchmarks. You give people goals.

And if they hit those goals, then great. You would be partnering with the community rather than opposing it, as opposed to what um the CEO had said in the press. Um Katie and I, you were talking about this. We're gonna be talking about this on Monday's podcast. A statement that says, Oh, well, we big you know, 70% of what we do is gut instinct, and then we just look at the data to confirm our decisions.

Like, well, that that's not how data works. What do you think, John? Are you gonna start your career in public relations now? No, I'm gonna start my own network and I'll I've got season three of Warrior None leading off and uh a few other things. It's just amazing because there's so many levers over there at Netflix, and I can understand why they don't share the data, because there's been such a sea change.

You know, with network television, it was very simple. You would do a show, and then there were all these syndication rules about where the money goes and who gets what, and that was completely wiped out by streaming, you know. So now there's uh definitely an incentive for them also not to share the data, you know, having to deal with shows that you know what do they cancel and why do they do it? Um, I'm sure they still are not gonna tell us why it happened. So, but yeah, I'm looking forward to see how this goes.

You know, you know. The the one thing is it's so random. It's just like you were Katie talking this week about changing cable providers. It's that kind of situation. This show is actually more valuable to another network now because they could they could pick it off and get new subscribers out of it.

So that gives them some value that other networks don't get. So it'll be really interesting to see if somebody else picks this up and where it goes, because it's uh yeah, it's a hot topic and there's some buzz behind it. Exactly. So to kind of bundle this all together, everything that we've done and and my contributions to the campaign have been around what we call the five Ps, right? The purpose, people, process, platform, uh performance.

The purpose was clear and was set on you know by the campaign the moment that I walked in the door. There was no question about the clarity purpose. We want season three of Warrior Not, right? Clear purpose, unambiguous. Um, not much of a user story to pick up because it's it's super easy, right?

The the campaign already had the people. The community was there, the community was strong. Um, and as a public relations professional to be looking for those people. There was a little bit of process, but not a ton. And so a lot of the code, a lot of the the custom code that we've written and the data we've provided stuff, um can help was helping to help fuel some of the processes, like the outreach teams and stuff.

They definitely have you know tons of data to work with. They have and they have processes in place for doing outreach, for doing gift baskets, for putting up billboards and things like that. And one of the bigger gaps was platform not having access to a talk walker or a parrot analytics or uh a brand 24 or a stack adapt. So you know this is something that we were able to provide that again, a public relations, hopefully like a a firm or an agency would have some of those tools to provide to the community to the community to help the community become stronger. And that's a vitally important twist in this PR firms are used to operating in a bubble they they just do their thing they talk to the client.

If there's a community involved your best bet is not to worry so much about the journalists up front but strengthen the community give the community the raw data you know you can see the raw data on here here's the data here's the information here's the stuff that the community can then run with and figure out how to tell the stories that they want to tell so it frees the community to tell more stories. And of course we have the the the performance measures which is things like tier one coverage in the case of public relations and you know whatever happens with the show um we have seen people from other franchises uh pitching in as well and stuff you know whether the uh recurring cast members from Lucifer uh was sharing the campaign and stuff so you there's there's a lot of good milestones along the way but the 5P framework is what a PR person should be looking at to say okay do we have the pieces necessary for a successful campaign and if you don't have all five pieces your campaign's not going to do well I think that makes sense I mean it's comes down to doing all of your research ahead of time so that you know what you're working with and what you can expect that's really the bottom line. Exactly and for working with communities in PR you need to have people who are skilled at that most PR people are skilled at working with the client right the person who signs the checks the head of comms, whatever, and they they're used to just talking to suits, right? When you're working with the community, particularly in especially in B2C, B2B too, but B2C especially, you've got to have people who are skilled at working with rowdy groups of folks that will get things done that uh are are passionate or engaged, but you gotta know how to talk to them. You gotta know how to integrate with them.

Um and you cannot tell them what to do because they don't work for you. Well and I feel like we covered this on a different episode but you can't just drop into any old community especially the private communities and start making demands of them and start asking for things that you need. It's just not the culture of you know these private communities like a Slack or a Discord or you know a Mastodon or even Reddit which is public um you know there's certain cultures you know cultural rules and guidelines that you as the outsider have to abide by so even if you are identifying a community you may not be able to get access to that community because you are seen as an outsider um you know I can't just drop into you know even though I've watched the show I can't just drop into the warrior none community and say hey I'm here like let's start doing things they'd be like who who are you exactly slow your roll yeah um but no I and I think for public relations part of what that industry has to get their heads around is community management and community relations it's ironic because it's literally in the name public relations how you relate to the public but very often a lot of folks in the that industry are more used to media relations um as opposed to the general public. And yet what we've seen with this campaign is that when you involve the public, um, you can get some pretty spectacular results. Have you seen the show, John?

I have not, no. So this is you know, my TV viewing is greatly limited. So I uh have to be a little more picky. I have uh I'm nearly done with season three of Stranger Things, actually. So I've gone to the top of the list.

There you go. It sounds like you need to add this one to your list as well. Not for children, very gory. Yeah, yeah. That is the other thing.

It makes it a little more challenging if it's not kid friendly. But and this is another one too, a comic book crossover, too. You know, you we just see this over and over again. It's this kind of content. The they're proven stories, they fly.

There's no reason not to be doing them. Exactly. All right. Well, I I feel ready to take on a community. Not really.

That'd be a bad idea. It would be it certainly would be interesting, but I I think again, there's a lot of lessons in here for public relations for marketers on how do you how do you work with a passionate community to achieve your campaign goals. Um, and I think if folks take the time to learn how, they will be dramatically more successful, particularly on on a very small budgets than um the the way public relations has been going the last last five or six years. Um PR has not adapted fast enough to the way communities operate now, and if you're good at it, um success is within your reach. So any final parting words before we close out?

Save warrior none. That's it. Thank you, Kyle. All right, folks, take care. We'll talk to you next time.

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