Marketers and communication professionals alike agree that social media is here to stay. Facebook and Twitter have proven to be an effective tool to reach a targeted audience and to engage in a conversation that’s relative and important to business, often resulting in an impactful ROI.
However, there’s one social media channel that all too often is overlooked. I don’t know if it’s because we associate it with our own personal brand, but with more than 200 million users, LinkedIn is an often underutilized resource for B2B marketing.
If you haven’t already engaged in a LinkedIn influence campaign—think about this:
Access to a Targeted, Engaged Audience
Who are you trying to reach? As PR practitioners we hear it all the time: “We want to reach human resource professionals, dentists, surgeons, building property managers, we need a Facebook page!” Wrong. Facebook is a great resource to reach consumers, but not the most effective at influencing strategic business level decisions.
LinkedIn is the biggest professional social network in the world; the Group space within the network creates a forum for colleagues to exchange best practices with industry experts and is a prime platform to exchange ideas and information for marketers. For example, a quick group search on LinkedIn for “human resources” shows more than 3,800 groups with thousands of members and active discussions. It’s an easy opportunity to directly engage with a target audience.
Bolster Your Image
Before you engage first make sure your own LinkedIn page is up to snuff. Are you following relevant third party groups, or industry organizations? Are your employees following you? Your own page is a perfect platform to develop expertise and thought leadership. Create a weekly/biweekly editorial strategy, identify relevant topics and trends and have several different employees post a discussion to engage followers. Remember, it’s not a one-way street, be sure to monitor what’s being said with other groups and chime in.
Evaluate
How do I know it’s working? When communicating with different audiences, include a bit.ly or Google URL tracker to allow for trackable/measureable results. This will permit you to see how many people clicked on the information and if your message is resonating. For example, if your business has an annual award and you’d like to drive nominations, tracking your group discussion posts makes for an easy way to see which group is engaged and interested in the award and furthermore, which of your messages is resonating with them. Be sure to mix it up, post at different times with different messages, rather than using the same message.
Don’t Be a Quitter
Like all social media programs, it takes time and consistent engagement to see results. With a strong strategy in place, active engagement, a clear direction, goals, objectives and a touch of patience, you’ll be a LinkedIn groupie before you know it. And you’ll even have measurable results to support your latest addiction.
As overt and shameless mediaphiles, we PR folks jump at any chance to get an inside look at how the media machine works. You had us at hello, you are the wind beneath our wings, we just can’t quit you and we’d like to wear your skin, media. So, when PRSA hosted a panel titled “Inside the Newsroom of All Things D,” I was ready to rock. Oh, and did I mention this event was held on the Facebook campus? That’s right – the opportunity to check-in atFacebook, on Facebook was not overlooked. Score.
While we waited for the panel to begin, most of my PR brethren were locked to their phones furiously reading Google alerts, re-tweeting and having other out-of-body, media driven experiences. And then, the All Things D panel of Mike Isaac, Ina Fried, Liz Gannes and Beth Callaghan arrived on stage to answer all our burning questions.
“How do you like to be pitched?”
“So...what exactly is your beat?”
“What are you working on right now?”
“What makes for a good story?”
You don’t have to be MacGyver to realize that everyone repackaged the same question in a different way. All we really want to know is “What do we have to do to get you to write about our clients?”
Then, Mike Isaac said something amazing. Brilliant, in fact. I half expected him to drop the mic and walk off of the stage. He said, “Remember that we are both humans just trying to work together in this rat race of news.”
And, here’s what’s beautiful about that.
Obsession with news, and those who make it, comes with the territory. We are junkies with powerful enablers like The Huffington Post, Associated Press and New York Times. While we are all still waiting for the technology that delivers news alerts directly to our frontal lobes in real-time, it is easy to forget what’s behind the curtain at Oz – a real person.
There is no trick, or secret code to good public relations. While we may wish there was a formula of X + Z = WSJ coverage, let’s be real – none of us went into PR because of our stellar math skills. If given a choice between the superpowers of flight or invisibility, most PR folks would ask – which can I trade for a psychic connection with media?
PR superheroes aren’t those who live inside their news feed 24-hours a day. They are the ones who simply tell a compelling story, to the right people, grounded in the real world with relatable, human elements.
Heck, I could get used to this human thing. Now, if I could just figure out how to spin it.
Today was the final keynote speech, a few more break out sessions, and a closing ceremony of sorts where we all got kudos for attending and coupons for next year... what a day!
"The only reason I love social media is only because it sells S#$%. I don't give a S$%& about Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook or whatever, I care about where my customers' attention is going so I can sell them S#$%"
Gary Vynerchuck, curseword user extraordinaire, got into business at 13. He made $1,000 a weekend selling baseball cards and was sitting on a pretty pile of cash ($30k) within a year, that's when his Dad made him go to "work" at the family liquor store. Pretty quickly, Gary realized collecting wine was almost the same thing as baseball cards and by 1997 winelibrary.com was born.
Vynerchuck saw his competitors were sending out catalogues or faxing (yes, sending paper through a machine!) when he figured out e-mail! What started out as a weekly email sales offer turned into bi-weekly email service, then daily email service, then 5 days a week and then daily. At first, it was awesome and everyone opened, read and used the coupons in his emails, but like most things, the more you give the more diminished returns.
He goes on to say that you have to pay attention to culture shifts and get onboard no matter how much time it takes. Didn't we first think the WEB was a fad? Didn't we first think that Twitter was fad!? So, where do we spend our time next? After realizing that EVERYONE is now on email, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Gary declares retention is the next stage in the game. It's not how many customers you get, it's how many you can keep. It's the lifetime value and % of wallet you get from your clients.
With that, similar to the context discussion yesterdsay, the next step isn't just about finding people, but finding what their interested in. Through all of the social media tools out there we can learn about you and then, we give a F*&^, and we can sell to you better. Effort for the end user is such a valuable thing, if they can sense your effort in learning about them, they want you.
"As our world goes more Jetsons, the marketers and business people that act like the Flinstones are gonna win" This is awesome as I have been described as an old soul and my aesthetic as "grandma chic." Gary talked about how our grandparents way of business (showing potential clients you're interested and showing real clients that you are still interested) works!
You've got to build a brand or else it's a tactic, and the brands that win put in the effort. if you can figure out how to afford the allocation of effort, your long term value will be dramatically higher! If you do anything at all, audit what you and your business do and and take the percentage of dumb stuff and put it towards effort in your customers. Use technology to bring us back together and show you care about people. It matters.
In summary, Gary says do nice S*%$ while you've got them, not when they're going!
The other two sessions were: Inbound Marketing Success Within An Enterprise- David Donland @ddonlan, Kevin Karner @kkarner23 (Performable, acquired by HubSpot) and Part 2: The View from the Marketer's Eye by Mark Sneider- Owner/President RSW/US & RSW/ AgencySearch. Lessons learned can be found soon in a little something we are working on! Hope you enjoyed the #Inbound12 play-by-play and that I'll see some of you there next year!
More music, more excitement, more #inbound12! Day 3 and no signs that this team is slowing down. As Darmesh very excitedly shouted, "a few years from now we will say 'remember when Inbound was only 2800 people!'" So to keep it concise- things are moving fast and it's awesome to be on this train.
There's a massive transformation about how we input into the world, now we have an accelerated pace! In the same note, there's a shift in the pattern of shopping and learning and we have to transform to match human behavior. People are getting better and better at blocking out the traditional marketing format.
We used to use the phone and marketers could find us… now we have caller id and can screen! We ignore mail, let it pile up because we know it's nothing important. Email, we can now prioritze our inboxes and send messages to spam and use Ad Blocker to block ads.
We need to create marketing people love! This means we create remarkable content and then use that content to pull people in (stop interrupting people with emails and blasts and let them come to you!)
2. Where's inbound marketing going, what does the next 6 years look like? And how does 1+1=3?
Simply put: We use content to pull them in, and context to pull them through!
The key to context is making magic and making your tools work together in completely new ways. Based off an Amazon example we can all understand, Darmesh and Brian call this magic making effect the 1+1=3! You know how when you go to Amazon.com it's like your best friend recommending a book. For instance, they suggest books on tennis, dogs, and marketing to me... perfect, my three favorite things! The more presonalized it gets, the more we want to use it... this is the context engine in action and the next generation of marketing!
3. What HubSpot is doing to power the next phase
HubSpot3, the biggest release in HubSpot history, is revolutionizing the way our contacts, leads, landing pages, blog posts and social media all can work TOGETHER to get us results. And I, for one, am excited to use it!
Closed Loop Social with HootSuite and HubSpot - Craig Ryomoto @craigryomoto Director, Pro User Growth & revenue HootSuite
Now that we have social media, how do you prove ROI from social media? This is called closing the social loop. Without getting into the details too much, the basics include:
1. Listen to your customers, competitors, and influencers
2. Engage with your audience in their platform of choice
3. Analyze and understand the results and engineer better outcomes
How to create eBooks and Webinars Your Prospects Will Love - Maggie Georgieva, Inbound Marketing Manager, HubSpot
Maggie is an Inbound Ninja and shared some great tips on creating remarkable content:
Base your content decisions on DATA
Look at blog analytics, which posts get the most views?
Look at page performance, which page is doing the best?
Landing page analytics, which people are visiting the page and thought it was compelling enough to fill out the form
Email marketing analytics, look at the names that resonate with people
Look at which format gets you the most return, if it is eBooks do a ton more!
What if you don't have much data? Check other sources of data (Google news and enter an industry keyword, see what's recent and newsworthy and being published)
When to publish? The more social media updates, landing pages, web pages etc… the more leads you get
31-40 landing pages gets you 7x more than 5-6 pages --> PUBLISH MORE
Prefect is the enemy of good, Voltaire… just get good content and stop trying to make it perfect--> PUBLISH OFTEN
Publish more and often:
Repackage the content: Expand a blog and make it longer, reduce an eBook to a blog. Repurposing the content to publish it more.
Combine 20 how-to blog posts into an eBook or guide
Curated Content- re-packaging content! Go to LinkedIn and find a conversation or ask people what they think about a specific topic and gather the quotes and information etc.
101 awesome marketing quotes, 54 pearls of marketing wisdom, learning LinkedIn from the experts (use numbers and images)
Ask yourself:
Is your offer compelling enough?
Did you target the right audience, did you send it to the right people?
Are you not sending enough traffic to it?
Key steps for suceeeding with marketing offers
Don't optimize before you build strong foundations. Use real data to drive your content strategy. Publish often & iterate later do more of what's working
There were three other great discussions today that covered Increasing Facebook ROI, Introverts in Marketing, and an amazing guide to Making Content Work for You in A Sales Pitch! Stay tuned tomorrow for more marketing magic from #Inbound12!
At the risk of using an Olympic metaphor one month too late, public relations has evolved into two forms of running. Social media is the sprinter, or Usain Bolt, and traditional media relations is Meb Keflezighi (if you know who he is), or the marathoner.
Social media is a world of short bursts in which you can largely control the narrative. With 140 character tweets, three paragraph blog posts and spontaneous Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns, it’s possible to create the exact message you want to reach the exact audience at the exact time. If you can drive and control your campaign the way a sprinter rockets down his assigned 100 meters of space on a smooth precise track, you will win.
Media relations doesn’t work this way. You don’t have the control like you do with social media. Just like in a marathon where the weather and the course are as important as the competition, the success of a media relations campaign is not solely based on the quality of your narrative. It is impacted by outside factors such as a reporter’s subjective interest in the story, a larger competitor’s news trumping yours or last second external events that occupy the media agenda for days on end. You also must rely on outside parties like customer references and outside experts to tell your story, in the same way that a marathoner is dead without electrolytes and PowerBars. The campaign cycle for media relations is also a much longer process; results don’t happen overnight. It requires patience, endurance and flexibility, and to never give up until it is over.
Olympic sprinters and marathoners must specialize; endurance is useless to a sprinter and blinding speed is relevant for only the last 10 meters of a marathon. Companies however, must develop and execute a strategic social media and media relations campaign if they are going to win the gold medal of customer awareness that drives adoption.
Thunderstruck, ACDC's awesome track, was the background to a video of Boston in it's glory with sunny skies and a fancy helicopter winding through the neighborhoods below. Flash to Darmesh and Brian (HubSpot co-founders) wearing track suits and aviators enjoying the ride. Finally, after lots of lead up- they "landed" at the conference and gave a funny and formal welcome to #Inbound2012.
1. First up was a discussion about horizontal content. This is content thats broad and thin that people will find when searching broad market category search words. He's a music lover and the example was typing in "indie music concerts" where results span from live music in a particular city to worldwide festivals and bands.
2. After this broad discussion, he explained vertical content that is much more specific and deep. This is content to help drive people into very specific search terms and where you may type in the actual band name in the search like "sts9 tour" bringing you right to the exact content you are looking for. (sound tribe sector 9, yeah, I've seen them!)
3. Last, and most important is Real Time content: discussions and content about whats going on right this moment. This instant. RIGHT NOW! Using a #bostonlivemusic as a search explains what's happening right now.
Lessons learned: Is one of our clients doing something cool today? We CANNOT operate in campaign mode, we have to unlearn this "planning" mode and go live! Discuss current content and keep the conversation relevant!
Did I forget to mention that he brought Cyndi Lauper up and she sang some blues to kick us off?
5 Steps to Becoming an inbound Ninja- Everyone Watch Out!
This discussion was led by Mark Kilens, manager of customer training, HubSpot @markkilens
1. Goal setting- setting smart monthly goals for traffic and leads is a great way to get started on your inbound plans.
2. Traffic generation- Be social. Be fun. And always be creating content! Mark straggly stated, "Live by the 50/50 rule: 50% of your own content 50% other peoples content"
3. Conversion- Create lead generation content (white papers, ebooks, guides, webinars) where the commitment to read that content is a little higher. From there, create a call to action- landing page- and most importantly a thank you page with next steps.
4. Nurturing- nurture leads into becoming customers through both the lead generating content and the social content. Create smart lists: all of the leads that downloaded an ebook and are 4 weeks old and are b2b. Narrow the list and send them a relative blog through EMAIL MARKETING. Build trust by sending relevant info at the right time.
5. Analyze - Measure the views and make sure calls to action are several pages. From there, look at Clicks to determine how many people are actually clicking on the call to action. Finally, analyze the submission rate of that call to action
Keynote Rand Fishkin, @SEOMOZ @randfish "Choose Short Men & Tall Women"
To get the talk going, Rand creatively showed us two graphs:
1. Male Messaging & Female Attractiveness Graph (men think all women are attractive and will talk to everyone)
2. Female Messaging & Male Attractiveness Graph (women think nobody is attractive and will talk to only a very few that could possibly be attractive)
Digging deeper, we saw that women say they will only look at men above 5'9 and it's just completely irrational!
Removal of a single, irrational bias may yield remarkable results!
From there, Rand discussed 12 bias's that we marketers have about SEO. For example, the # bias was listed as: Ranking Position is all That Matters. This is simply untrue. The CTR (click through rate) is influenced by more than position. Sometimes, it's the authors photo listed third in the search results or possibly a link with amazon ratings that's fifth on the list that is more important to viewers etc. It can even be the date of publication that is enticing moreso than the first positioned link!
For a deeper review of this talk and many more, including Social Media 3.0 -a review of the relationship between individuals and brands, stay tuned to for more news from #INBOUND12!
Today was the first day of Inbound 2012, HubSpot's annual production for Inbound Marketing best practices and helpful how-to sessions focused on making social media work for us!
Since we are always working on clear and concise content, here's a glossary to get you going:
HubSpot: "HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company that helps businesses take advantage of the inbound marketing revolution" - Brian Halligan & Darmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot and college pals from MIT
Inbound Marketing: "It's all about getting found online, through search engines and on sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter- sites that hunderds of millions of people use to find answers each day!" (David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules for Marketing & PR)
Social Mediasphere: The world where your company lives online. The goal is to have as many roads, highways, trails, routes, airports, bus stations etc. that bring people to your company's website.
And now for the main event, the topic du jour, drumroll please: Content Creation and Optimization!
Create the content: Keep those keyboards clicking and write the content! Content attracts links from other sites that sends us qualified visitors and lets Google know we are players. Additionally, content can be spread fast through social media, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Once it's written, it's easy to get it out.
Optimize the content: When creating a new piece of content, it's important to look back at how people are currently visiting the site through search. For example, lets say we are Boston's best dog walker. How do people find us? Do they search "help with my bad dog" or "licensed and insured dog agency"? Once you know how they found you in the first place, your new content will align better for organic searches! The more content you give out the more links, visitors, and leads the site gains and moves up the Google ranks.
Publish the content: There are so many options out there, why not use them all? Here's a refresher:
Blog articles- one pagers related to a specific industry or current news that's relevant
White papers- educational pieces about industry trends and challenges
Videos- pieces about something new and exciting within the industry
Webinars- power point presentations about a specific industry topic
Podcasts- audio interviews with industry experts
Webcasts- live video shows
Market the content: Who do we send the content to? Some strategies suggest we send it to everyone while others suggest finding your niche. No matter what, be the best! If you are the best dog walker in all of Massachusetts- send it to everyone. If you are the best dog walker in the southwest section of zip code 02067, you should only reach out to that market! By narrowing your market, you become THAT worlds best.
Measure what's working and what's not: There are so many tools in place to help us learn from our mistakes or to get more from our successes. Using HubSpot keywords and other metrics, we can watch a "marketing event" like a new whitepaper from the moment it's published. We can measure how many views the content gets and from there, how many people download it. Understanding these conversions helps us to create even better content next time!
There's only more we can learn here and I'm just at day one... but can't wait for day two and Cyndi Lauper, yes... she's performing!
As of August 8, Great Britain has seen an overwhelming amount of support on Twitter and Facebook, securing more than 3,000,000 mentions over the past 30 days. Even weeks before the Olympics started, #TeamGB was tweeted thousands of times daily. The public using the hashtag #TeamGB or #TeamGreatBritain included remarks about being proud of their country or would also include the hashtag #OurGreatestCountry. Specifically, there was a lot of support for Jessica Ennis, Tom Daley and Mo Farah on social media.
Even with the gold medal for country spirit, Great Britain is behind USA and China in total medals. But, USA and China spirit on Twitter has been a little short. The USA spirit peaked around the swimming events and then started to die down after Phelps, which makes me question: in the USA, are we more ‘TeamUSA’ or ‘TeamPhelps’?
Conversation around Michael Phelps dominated the social discussion in the Olympics, doubling the total number of mentions for #TeamUSA, and Phelps saw over 500,000 more Twitter mentions than Great Britain’s prideful spirit. Below, you’ll find the top 10 countries with the highest social media discussion.
It’s hard not to be jazzed about American athletes’ tremendous performances this past week in London. So far, the U.S. has won a whopping 18 gold medals.
But when it comes to the individual competitors scoring victories, there’s a fairly stark trend emerging in who U.S. audiences are paying attention to.
Women’s all-around champion gymnast Gabby Douglas and veteran swimming ringer Michael Phelps individually accounted for the majority of the social media discussion over the past few days, after each came out on top of their respective sports yesterday. That’s hardly a shocker.
However, a look at the last three days of social media activity around a handful of high-profile gold-medal winners reveals that, taken together, the Olympic newcomers in the mix generated more than double the social media attention of the athletes who have competed in past Olympics. Douglas, fellow gymnast Aly Raisman, and swimmer Missy Franklin—all teens and Olympic first-timers—collectively drew 68.3 percent of the Twitter, Facebook, and blog buzz over the last three days compared to 31.4 percent for Phelps, judo-champ Kayla Harrison, and swimmers Rebecca Soni, Matt Grevers, and Tyler Clary—all of whom are second or third-time Olympic competitors.
That breakdown presents an interesting possibility: American fans are more excited and impressed by rookies than household names. In the sports world, Jeremy Lin sparked that same type of widespread fervor when he bounded onto the NBA scene last fall.
So what is it about these newcomers that elicit such a response? And, conversely, does that take away at all from the tried-and-true athletes fighting just as hard to perform their best?
Last night, millions of Americans were transfixed by the gold-medal winning performance of the U.S women’s gymnastics team. The “Fab Five,” as members of the media now fondly call them, made history by catapulting the U.S. to its first Olympic gold in women’s gymnastics since 1996.
However, one look at the social media discussion shows that Americans (and the NBC announcers) were far more consumed by concern for Jordyn Wieber—the reigning world champion who was narrowly edged out of the women’s all-around final earlier this week—than cheering on the team or team members who did advance to the women’s all-around final.
At around 11 p.m. last night when the events were airing, Wieber was the subject of at least 9,000 tweets, blog posts, and Facebook posts, compared to Raisman and Douglas who garnered about 3,300 and 2,500 respectively. Even today, Wieber continues to dominate.
Raisman and Douglas will both advance to tomorrow’s all-around final, giving the U.S. another plum shot to win gold. Raisman brought the house down with a floor routine and Douglas overcame a months-long struggle on her balance beam routine to prevail, yet neither sparked much conversation in the blogosphere or Twitterverse.
Wieber also trumped mentions of Team USA in relation to gymnastics by about 4,000 mentions.
Overall, Wieber received about 46 percent share of voice for all discussion about U.S. women’s gymnastics and the athletes competing.
This data raises an interesting question: Do setbacks inspire the American public to chime in more than success stories? And if not, why do you think discussion about Wieber overshadowed the tremendous performances other team members delivered last night?
The Olympic Blog Guest Post is courtesy of Michelle Hirsch, a member of the Schwartz MSL Research & Insights Group
When it comes to social media discussion and celebrity, the answer is a resounding no.
To date, U.S. Olympians have won five gold medals in the 2012 games. They have been mentioned 176,568 times on social media over the past few days. Some, such as Lochte and Franklin are household names. As of now Franklin is a slightly bigger social media phenomenon than Lochte.
But what about the other gold medalists?
Matt Grevers is getting short shrift behind Lochte and Phelps, which just shows the danger of being overshadowed by competition that have bigger brand names to begin with (despite Grevers being tied for the most medals to date).
And if you are Kim Rhode or Dana Vollmer? You are not getting the attention you deserve. Rhode won a Gold in Women’s skeet, yet has been mentioned only 1,598 times over the past few days. To put it in perspective, that is a 0.8% share of voice. Even then, she is beating Dana Vollmer, gold medalist who won the women’s 100m butterfly, who received a bit more than 1,400 mentions.
This reinforces that point that while social media is increasing Olympic buzz to a height never seen before, it is still being driven by the more prominent sports and what NBC makes a focus.
The XXX Olympiad is being called the "first social media Olympics." While I don't agree with the moniker, more attention is being paid to both the social media aspects of the Games and the availability of content as never before.
The members of the Schwartz MSL Research & Insights Group are die-hard Olympics fans. I remember staying up and watching wrestling at 1:00 a.m. for previous Olympics. The breadth of coverage has been great this year – my two sons and I loved watching the women’s foil matches on Saturday afternoon.
As the Olympics approached, we wanted to see - with the democratization of the Olympics through social media, are once niche sports letting their fans and followers communicate as never before?
The answer seems to be a resounding "yes." While swimming and gymnastics continue their dominance (69% share of voice), over the past three days, the other two most discussed sports were water polo and beach volleyball. Although it must be noted, discussion of these events spiked right after they aired on the main NBC broadcasts, showing the power of the network’s spotlight.
Don't believe me? See for yourself…
Most of the conversations for some of the niche sports revolved around people commenting on how cool it was, how surprising they were to watch and how tough the athletes were. There were quite a few jokes as well. When it came to the “majors” more discussion was around the results.
Note: Schwartz MSL used Radian 6 to analyze the social media discussions across Twitter, blogs and other channels since the opening ceremony. We used common event names, plus permutations (i.e. swimming included event types as well as Phelps and Lochte). We only looked at social media in English and the topic spread may well be different in different countries of the world.
What do you think about social media and the Olympics so far?
More and more brands are flocking to Twitter to connect with customers, engage in dialogue and spread their promotions. But recently there seems to be a spate of tweets that can be called clueless at best, and offensive at worst.
Just this weekend, I was exposed to the latest example of clueless marketing on Twitter. In this case it was someone using the horrible incident in Aurora, Colo. to promote their clothing brand.
(Note: I cut their name out so as not to give them any more free publicity).
If this were an isolated incident, I would just shake my head and move on. But it appears we have reached an inflection point where more and more clueless marketers are thinking that any trending hashtag is something to glom onto.
For example...
The now infamous Cairo shoes tweet:
There is also the less popular, but shocking Tsunami alerts are good for business. This one comes from a marketer in Thailand who must have forgotten that 8,000+ people were killed by a Tsunami in Thailand in 2004.
“Let's hurry home and follow the earthquake news. And don't forget to order your favorite [XXX] menu”
Then there is the less well known but still shocking tweet sent out by one coffee chain in the republic of Ireland:
What is my advice to marketers, communicators and public relations professionals on using Twitter hashtags?
Twitter is a great place for sharing news, observations and having two way conversations
Using #hashtags is a great way to label your content and bring it to the attention of those engaged in topical conversations
#hashtags are not a good way to interject your totally off topic or even tangential promotion or brand message into an ongoing debate, tragedy, revolution or social movement.
Never tweet alone. Before sharing a tweet using a trending #hashtag, ask a colleague or better yet three colleagues what they think of your brilliant and creative idea.
Stop. Think.
If you can think of any way that your planned tweet could be considered offensive…step away from the keyboard, iPad or touchscreen. If you don’t – do not blame me when you are pilloried by the Twitterverse
Do you have any other advice or horror stories to share? If so, leave a comment.
More and more, I find myself defending the power of the telephone to persuade people. Have you ever had every committed attendee to a Facebook event invite actually show up for the physical event? I haven't.
Oftentimes, we marketers forget that while we are using Facebook and other social media channels to drive action, Facebook engagement and other social media channels might not be persuasive enough to actually drive action. Consider a recent political campaign I was involved in.
Friends of mine were supporting a group of candidates that hoped to become delegates to a national political convention. To earn a spot, they needed to be elected at a caucus, which is like a town-meeting style gathering of voters. Given the candidates and their supporters (namely, us) had nice social media audiences on Twitter and Facebook, and correspondingly elevated klout scores, this seemed like a natural case for using social media to drive a crowd.
But there was one big problem. The "ask" we were making was pretty significant. We were asking our friends to get out of bed on a nice Saturday morning, drive in their cars for up to thirty minutes to sit in a warm room for an extended period of time. All to cast a vote to send someone to a convention far, far away-- and a long time in the future.
While the likes and positive comments rushed in on Facebook, it took phone calls and personal contact to get people to attend. And in a significant percentage of cases, even those who confirmed on the phone didn't show up.
I have created an index that matches a required level of marketing interaction to specific actions or outcomes from a target audience. I call it the "get off the couch" index. It maps an escalating level of action (from liking on Facebook to physically attending an event) to an escalating level of engagement (from a Facebook ask to in-person persuasion with a reward). My index will be tinkered along the way, but for now, the relationship I have plotted is quite linear.
As B2B marketers, B2B content marketers, and tech PR professionals, we need to constantly be thinking about whether our ask, and the channel we are using to make the ask, is appropriate given the response we'd like to see. It should be a strongly considered variable when evaluating the success of an overall effort. Why didn't we get people to come to the event we hosted at a tradeshow? Maybe it was because for that particular outcome, Facebook engagement wasn't really the best vehicle for rallying a crowd.
I know when I host a party, I call people to remind them of the time and place and what to bring. I just don't want to be embarrassed. We need to apply that same logic to our professional lives as well.
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The opinions expressed via “Wait A Minute” are of the authors and not necessarily of Schwartz MSL or MSLGROUP.
One of the things to love about MarketingProfs is its focus on B2B social media strategies and B2B content marketing. Certainly there is a lot of hype about how various consumer brands are using social media channels to their benefit. Often those stories are the bane of a B2B marketer's daily life. We get to the office in the morning, greeted by a voice mail imploring us to read a [enter business publication here] article about how [enter worldwide consumer brand here] executed a [enter social media tool here] campaign and saw thousands of customers flood in as a result.
Let's face it, B2B marketers, one of the reasons we work with B2B companies is because just adopting social media is not enough. One must carefully consider the end-user audiences that are the result of a given campaign, what tools and platforms realistically are best to reach that audience, and how to measure a given effort's effectiveness. At the same time, we must also put in place processes to make companies truly social companies, alleviating any fears and demonstrating how the long-term benefit will greatly outweigh the short-term pain (without being specific as to how "long-term" we're talking, here).
MarketingProfs agrees with us. Which is why I was thrilled to attend MarketingProfs SocialTech 2012 event last week in Seattle. Without a doubt, the event featured some of the most forward-thinking B2B social media marketers on the planet. The sessions at SocialTech were great. I heard front-line observations from marketers at SAP, Network Solutions, Boeing and Cisco, and I mingled with dozens of other B2B marketing pros who could speak, on and off the record, about their own successes and challenges.
Now that it has been a week since my return to Boston, I have had a chance to take a deep breath, review my notes, and draw up some observations based on my trip. Here goes:
Practicality is not a sin with B2B social media: I have been to a number of events where the "true" social media marketers in the room are aghast if you bring up older B2B marketing techniques that actually might still have an impact today. Many social media zealots think that these older techniques--which they tag under the ignominious "traditional" category--all became juvenile with the advent of the social platform.
It was refreshing at SocialTech 2012 to hear the role that email marketing still plays within a B2B social media effort. (I believe one speaker even said that email marketing is a *vital* part of a B2B social media effort, noting that it is the beginning of the lead generation process.) I also liked how many people talked about incorporating blog content into their social media programs. As an aside, I am often amused at how many marketers don't even consider blogging to be social media. The earliest "social" campaigns I remember tracked a series of influential blogs and made recommendations on how to engage within those blogs' comments sections.
Measurement today still stops with audience reach: At Schwartz MSL, we press our clients more and more to connect our work with lead generation, since for the most part, that's what B2B companies care about. (I should mention I work only with B2B clients at Schwartz MSL.) Most of the measurement discussion at SocialTech centered on how to measure the reach of a given campaign, stopping short of measuring an audience's action. Most campaigns noted website traffic, Facebook likes and other metrics that outline how well a given campaign is noticed. The bleeding edge here, which was also discussed at the event, is creating content marketing programs that connect a given social media campaign to leads--and even sales. At the next SocialTech, I am going to press to see case studies of campaigns where leads were the measured result.
It's entirely possible that my measurement observation at SocialTech is based on an over-fascination with lead generation as a metric. Admittedly, the lead counts provided by various content marketing and marketing automation platforms will under-represent the true impact of a campaign; for one thing, they cannot account for programs or content that greatly impact leads generated at some point in the future.
Further, despite the role content marketing must play in a B2B marketing effort today, it does not mean that other, older, dare I say traditional ways of generating leads are no longer important. Business cards still exist, and people exchange them at physical events. (Here's where I go back and read the description of my first observation again.)
Finally, social media marketers (including myself) just can't seem to stop our love affair with tools. Each and every session at SocialTech devolved for at least a period of time into a discussion about tools. Tools for scheduling content. Social media platforms. Tools for listening. Pinterest. Tools for Twitter (lots of love for Hootsuite---Is it bad I still use TweetDeck?).
Not that discussing tools is bad, but what often gets lost in the discussion about social media tools and social media measurement is the actual juice that drives interest. That's right---the content. One of the best parts of my entire trip came when Ron Ploof, new media strategist at OC New Media, put us through an exercise on how to create "fascinating" content that is still strategic to our businesses. The reality is so much of the content out there within B2B marketing content campaigns, frankly, is just boring.
Always the teacher's pet, I was happy Ploof applauded the "fascinating" content I brainstormed for Schwartz MSL. I focused on a recent popular question from friends about whether my job really is like the setting of "Mad Men" (it's not), and wondered if I could tell a story about a day in the life of a B2B PR pro from the perspective of the scotch bottle that is on every "Mad Men" executive's office table. Don't worry HR, I don't have scotch in my office. As to whether such fascinating content ever does see the light of day, well, I guess you will just have to keep reading this blog.
It’s March, which can only mean one thing to the Schwartz MSL Research Group- it’s time to once again get out our calculators and basketballs- it’s Social Media March Madness time.
Since we first started measuring social media muscle amongst college fan bases back in 2008 (we believe we were the first to do it), the NCAA Social Media rankings have slowly become one of our favorite and most popular analyses of the year. This year, two members of the Schwartz Research Group (Bill Bode and Kiley Phalan) took the lead. As Syracuse alum, Kiley had high stakes rooting on her Orangemen. On the other hand, Bill’s alma mater, Towson University barely missed the tournament. (Just kidding. This year, Towson set a NCAA Division-I record 41-game losing streak. Go Tigers!)
Twitter exploded in 2011, and college hoops fans have taken notice. After years of using Facebook fans as our primary data point, this year, the Schwartz MSL Research Group enhanced and refined our methodology. We realized Facebook fans of the Schools main page did not measure engagement with the basketball team. When analyzing brands it is essential to analyze the right basket. Additionally, with so much sports commentary happening on Twitter, we added that to our analysis for the first time this year.
How do we determine a winner? To determine each school’s SMPR (Social Media Power Ranking), we used the following formula: (# of Facebook fans for each college basketball team + # of Twitter followers for each college basketball Twitter handle/Number of students attending the university, according to Wikipedia.) Sure, it’s not an exact science, but it’s the closest we can get to assess each school’s social media prowess and compare them against each other. This also eliminates school size as a factor in determining the winner.
We won’t keep you waiting. Ladies and gentleman, your 2012 March Madness Social Media Power Rankings:
Observations: • Kansas takes the top prize over Duke, with a SMPR of 5.244 • Last year’s winner, Ohio State, is eliminated in the first round this year to #15 seed Loyola MD. This is likely due to our change in methodology, requiring the Facebook and Twitter fan pages to be basketball-exclusive (Ohio State has 1,135,676 likes, but only 18,042 fans of the Basketball team). This is the biggest upset throughout the tournament. • The West is easily the weakest bracket. Memphis is able to wiggle their way into a Final 4 appearance, despite the fact that Syracuse, UNC, Gonzaga and UConn all have stronger rankings- luck of the draw! • This year’s biggest buzzer beater was the closest match up we’ve seen in the history of Schwartz MSL’s SMPR- Memphis topped Mizzou in the Elite 8 with a difference of .002. • Two members of the Schwartz MSL Research Group, @mcclennan and @kphalan, swear Syracuse will do better in the Dance.
The Top 10 by Social Media Power Ranking: • Kansas- 5.244 • Duke- 4.577 • UNC- 3.957 • WVU- 3.307 • Gonzaga- 3.165 • Syracuse- 2.811 • UConn- 2.205 • Memphis- 1.832 • Mizzou- 1.830 • Michigan State- 1.650
Today was my last full day at SxSW and it was once again filled with great discussions. For once I decided to forgo payments panels, and spent more of my time in panels that discussed B2B social media as well as a panel on brand journalism, and yes, one on the future of money.
The brand journalism panel and B2B panels were filled with a lot of insight and tips that will be of interest to our B2B clients and to B2B communications professionals.
First, it is clear that B2B companies are embracing content marketing. According to a survey from Marketing Profs, 49% of companies plan to increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. The two biggest content challenges these companies face are: 41% their content is not engaging enough and 20% have trouble producing enough content. As trusted advisors, communications professionals need to find ways to help our clients overcome both of these challenges.
This brand journalism panel, and a solo presentation from Tim Washer, Cisco’s Senior Manager of Social Media, hit on a key issue: B2B companies need to remember to talk to people in a human way.
B2B purchasing decisions are made both on facts and emotions. If you sell on just speeds and feeds in a competitive market, you are at a competitive disadvantage. Communicators need to keep this in mind and call out the human elements inherent in any story.
Following are four other key insights it took from the panels today:
Gamification is everywhere and is starting to be used to drive B2B engagement. When people hear about gamification they tend to think of consumer brands, Foursquare badges or Scvngr. But Cisco has added badges to at least some of its blogs. Now visitors can receive badges for visiting the blogs, leaving their first comment, leaving 10 comments, Tweeting the blog post, etc. This is a great step. It is an easy and focused incentive to drive the business outcomes a company desires (engagement and awareness). IBM and Xerox also spoke about how they are using gamification, with IBM using it internally to drive activity and identify those most passionate about social media.
Re-examine how you gather registration information. Cisco and other B2B companies are using Facebook and OpenID to enable social login. Why does this matter? Since Cisco implemented it, they have seen a 40 percent reduction in cost and 20 percent increase in registration.
B2B Needs to embrace video – If your B2B company is not yet using video as part of its communications strategy you are missing great opportunities. Here is a great video from Cisco about how it is helping in Africa. It does a great job humanizing the story and moving it beyond the basics.
Look at humor. This one is near and dear to my heart as I do standup comedy in my spare time, and understand the power of humor in business. Humor in B2B can engage your prospects and customers. It is a positive emotion, humanizes the brand, builds goodwill and cuts through the noise. If you don’t have the budget, go to a film school and ask the professor for his best seniors. Offer them an internship and $1000 if you end up using their final product. One example of humor in action comes from this Cisco Valentine’s video. It has almost 200,000 views and drove coverage in the New York Times, Network World, Light Reading and other outlets. See it here.
If B2B communicators start doing just one of these things that they may not be doing today, they will help their brand prosper and their communications programs deliver greater ROI.
The five most quotable observations from Monday at SxSW:
Content is the new black
Your B2B story may not be good enough for TV, but it is good enough for YouTube, your clients and prospects
Information without analysis in the information age is as valuable as stone in the stone age
We make things complex because frequently we are too insecure to be simple. But look at Apple. Simplicity sells.
Question conventional wisdom. For Trulia, blogs about sports figures drove 3x the traffic as those about celebrities
Today was a great day at SxSW. I had the pleasure of attending three different sessions on payments and mobile wallets, one on the future of retail and a most inspiring session that looked at updating classic iconic ads for today’s technology.
I was prepared to write a very payments-focused post. But as I was thinking about today, I realize the key lessons for PR and business professionals transcend the payments market. Every presenter today, in their own way, was talking about convergence.
What do I mean?
Too often communications, marketing and business professionals think about communications and sales channels. Despite our best efforts we silo our thoughts. What does mobile allow us to do for payments, what business use can we get from mobile devices, what is the future of digital video?
While that thinking is important, it can also be limiting. It was expressed in different ways on the different panels, but it came down to a few observations.
Mobile payments isn’t about payments. If all you think about is taking a contactless card and putting it on a smartphone, you are missing the bigger opportunity and the market won’t grow. Isis is taking it a step further and realizing that for mobile to succeed it needs to be better, faster and cheaper. As I discussed yesterday, they are betting on loyalty, security and a better shopping experience to be the growth drivers.
But the discussion at the FutureShop panel made me realize there is more to it than what even Isis is saying. We need convergence and to see how all the channels can work best together. The retailers on this panel were nowhere near as optimistic about NFC as the payments players in other sessions. But they saw an even bigger picture. Convenience and loyalty offers are great. But that is just looking at one side of the opportunity. When retailers configure their stores to take advantage of mobile technology, it will prosper. The speakers gave examples of one company that had a scavenger hunt like game that lead people through the store to daily specials. These retailers see the iPhone turning into the helpful sales clerk of years gone by.
Seth Priebatsch of Scvngr challenged the status quo, but he added another piece to the puzzle. With loyalty blending with analytics businesses and communicators can adjust consumer shopping habits using game theory. In Philadelphia they ran a 45-day test that showed rainy days correlated to significantly less restaurant revenue. So they designed dynamic deals to encourage people to visit a restaurant on rainy days and saw a significant business lift.
It is only by putting the wallet vision of ISIS together with the bricks and mortar innovations of Future Shop and some of Scvngr’s futuristic ideas that we truly can see the shape of the future of mobile payments come together. Without all three perspectives, without the gestalt of the different perspectives the success will not be complete.
This transcends payments. This is a lesson that communications professionals should take to heart. We need to make sure we are not narrowing our vision to influencer channels, social media strategy or analyst relations. Sure those can drive results. But we need to look not just at how they work together and challenge ourselves to find at new ways in which they can work together.
Google and Coke did just that with projectrebrief.com (along with other brands). The project updated four iconic ads for today’s mediums.
The premise was powerful, yet simple. We don’t want to do social media campaign. We want to do a campaign that is social. What Coke did is amazing. They made it possible for someone to actually send the world a Coke. Consumers could record a video on the site, and send a free Coke to a number of machines around the world. Someone would receive your message in less than 90 seconds (after it was reviewed for content) and could then thank you. You would receive that video a minute later.
It is powerful. It is social and it harnesses physical, digital and social channels to create a result much greater than the sum of the individual parts. More communicators need to think like that. If we do so, our programs will be much more compelling, we will gain better understanding of consumers and drive greater business results.
So join me in always looking for ways to advance convergence. We won’t regret it.
It was so popular yesterday, I decided to end with it again today. The five most quotable observations from Sunday at SxSW:
Pharma is not bad. Pharma is probably going to save your life
Security is not a selling point for consumers. Criminals will find ways, and consumers think the phone is less secure even if it is more secure.
We are on the precipice of shopper 3.0 – The combination of Wed, brick & mortar, and mobile.
Tools today are an extension of our mental, not physical self. The shape of technology tools has changed dramatically over time, this is not the case with many physical tools.
If you want to drive consumer engagement, get people to look forward, not back.
If you have any questions in this post, leave a comment or tweet me at @mcclennan to meet up at SxSWi.
Saturday at SxSW was much more interesting than Friday. I had the pleasure of attending a very wide range of panels. The topics included strategic communications, Dad bloggers, enterprise social media, the future of mobile wallets, a comedian/activist keynote, and a look inside Joss Whedon’s head. The panels were a mix of both aspirational visions and cautionary tales.
The sessions were all great learning experiences, but they present something of a challenge. How do you blend parenting lessons from Leviticus with social analytics and loyalty programs? While many of these sessions merit their own posts (and will likely get them in the future), I wanted to focus on overarching themes that I noticed.
I would say there were two key takeaways from these sessions.
Destroy the labels
Know who you are
From the Mmbile wallet to NFC Chips to Dad bloggers, people and companies are too often failing to reach their full potential because they are succumbing to easy labelization. Don’t get me wrong, there is immense power in the study of groups and flocking, but if you too quickly group someone, you may come to the wrong conclusion or miss opportunities. I saw that time and time again today.
This is particularly insidious when it comes to Mom bloggers. Mom bloggers are too often defined by who they are rather than who they write about. Very few “Dad” and “Mom” bloggers blog about parenting. They are parents who blog. A mom blogger who writes about beer or food, should not be lumped in the same category as one who writes about technology or parenting. I personally have seen too many companies make this mistake. The lists created by influencer tools may serve as a good start, but influencers are not Oreos. Each is unique and needs to be understood and communicated with in context.
The same lesson applies to the mobile wallet. First of all, there is a blurring between mobile wallet and P2P payments and this line needs to be clearly understood. It also applies to enterprise social media when “employees” are lumped together as one audience as companies roll out solutions. Some of the best advice from IBM today was to understand what your corporate culture is like and what tools employees use to work and to communicate, and enhance those existing tools rather than make everyone conform to new tools. If you try to force people to do something they do not want to do, you will end up with an empty wiki, upset employees and wasted budget.
The second point is to know who you are. If you have a niche, carve it out. Just don’t let others put you in that niche.
Isis in the digital wallet space seems to clearly know this. They understand that in order to convince people to move away from contactless cards and Mag Stripe they need to offer more to retailers and merchants. They are betting their success on the premise that bringing loyalty cards and coupons into an integrated whole to provide consumers savings and convenience; and providing retailers a chance to impact consumer purchasing behavior before a transaction will push them over the edge. (That and retailers being penalized by the issuers if they do not adopt NFC by 2015).
I am not sure I agree with them completely, and I know not everyone in the audience did. Consumers have shown amazing willingness to stay with what works. As one panelist pointed out, 10 years ago the cover of Card Transactions was “Mobile Commerce is Ready for Takeoff” and we are still discussing its pending rise today. Additionally, consumers have shown a willingness to have multiple loyalty cards and apps, and there are other alternatives to impact pre-shopping behavior today (such as eGiftcards – technology from a client of mine - and location based deals).
The audience definitely did not all agree about the easy path of NFC. My most popular tweet of the day was “NFC being positioned as the Borg. Do not resist. You will be assimilated.”
Knowing who you are also helped many companies in the first panel I attended of the day. The reaction to Zappos’ data breach was much less negative than most breaches of its type. That was because Zappos quickly communicated in a way that was appropriate for its customers.
This post is getting long, so I want to wrap it up with the five most quotable observations of the day:
Before you make a critical business decision, ask yourself – what would John Stewart say about it?
Great ideas are not always great and not always well received.
Bloggers have more influence over purchasing decisions than traditional celebrity endorsers do
48% of B2B CEOs say social media helped generate qualified leads
Voice of customer research is not for validation, it is for discovery
If today’s registration line is any indication, SxSW Interactive is going to be more popular than ever. Despite coming at an off time, registration still took more than 90 minutes – more than I ever had to wait at CES or COMDEX in its prime.
True to SxSWi though, the time was not wasted. While in line, I had great conversations about the future of interactive marketing, the rise of mobile payments, better uses of technology to aid elections and those suffering in Africa, and the five major design flaws found in most socks today (who knew?).
Based on my (admittedly small) sampling from the first day of the show two of the most prominent themes already at the conference are:
1) The transformative rise of mobile payments 2) The evolution of content
Financial services technology has always had a strong, but limited presence at the show in previous years. But between Isis’ prominent sponsorship to the 13 scheduled sessions looking at mobile wallets or mobile payments, financial technology discussions are becoming much more mainstream. It’s interesting to look at the dichotomy of the sessions’ focus. They range from “The Payment Revolution is Coming” to “How the wallet was won.” There is a very divergent set of perspectives on this topic. Personally, I disagree with both. The payments revolution has been underway for some time and the wallet is most assuredly not won. Expect me to blog more about it in the coming days.
Theme two: Content. This goes beyond Content is King. People are discussing new ways of using content to engage. I had a great 60 minute conversation with a USA Today executive about their new iPad app and new ways they are looking to leverage and use content. There were a few interesting debates on the form of content (video was the most discussed, followed by a debate on how not to lose the richness of language and its ability to subtly shift perceptions as we move to microbite creation and consumption).
All in all, a good first day at the show.
Like anyone, I realize my impressions at SxSW are shaped by the relatively small number of people I had the pleasure of speaking with. I thought it might make sense to take a step back and look at what the overall conversation trends were today:
Over the past day there were more than 140,000 tweets and blog posts about SxSW (98% were tweets). To put this in perspective, the social media volume around SxSW far exceeds that of the recent Mobile World Congress or RSA:
The discussion is relatively fragmented. The only tech brand to break into the top discussion word cloud is Nokia, thanks to its foursquare badge. Most of the discussion is what you would expect, with people surprisingly upbeat despite the rain.
For the second year in a row, the Schwartz MSL Research Group worked with Business Wire to determine how many PR professionals are optimizing their news release headlines for SEO. There was slight improvement compared to last year, but there is still a long, long way to go.
The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.
Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts, including our experts here at Schwartz MSL, advise that companies try to keep the characters in the headline under 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be less effective in supporting a company’s SEO.
This year, the Schwartz MSL Research Group, with invaluable help from Business Wire, analyzed the headlines of more than 16,000 news releases issued over Business Wire in a 31 day period (July 26, 2011 to August 25, 2011). This is the same period we examined last year. Since Schwartz MSL cannot know the keywords that thousands of companies are hoping to use to optimize their content and releases, the Schwartz Research Group focused on headline length as a success factor.
The results?
Most PR professionals are not fully optimizing their headlines. (I am sure Schwartz MSL is guilty of that as well from time to time.) Our analysis showed that only 19.5% of all releases have headlines with 65 characters or fewer, a one percent increase over last year. When we look at 70 characters are less, the total is 23.7%, an increase of less than one percent.
While the majority of releases are under 150 characters, we did see some examples that were much longer than the recommended length. The most egregious cases were the 2% of releases with headlines in excess of 300 characters, with one headline that was over 1,800 characters. The shortest headline we found was 21 characters, which is also probably not ideal for SEO as it’s unlikely that enough of the company’s keywords were included. Overall, the analysis found the average headline length to be 123 characters, unchanged from 2010.
The Schwartz MSL Research Group has written a Research Brief that takes a more in-depth look at this topic. If you would like additional analysis, including buzzword usage, and the geographic headline faceoff, you can download it here
Just about everyone in marketing knows that many B2B companies are having a tough time integrating social media into their marketing mix. They understand they should do it, but oftentimes can't figure out how to do so. Plus, they're generally budget constrained, so can't hire experienced staff or consultants to create a solid strategy and then execute. The result is that many underfund initiatives centered on one or two social platforms and often skip right past the strategy step.
Certainly, there are examples of companies Getting It Right, but they feel like outliers at the moment.
One group of B2B marketers who I think are a part of that majority--those who are trying to figure it out, but not quite there yet--are manufacturers. A few weeks back, Derek Singleton blogged about this issue on Software Advice. Sourcing a Forrester Research report, he states that "only 30 percent of global manufacturers planned to increase social media spending in 2012."
Mr. Singleton is mostly interested in opportunities presented by social media for smaller manufacturers to do things like get feedback from customers and share their own thoughts. He's got several recommendations for those businesses. As I read his post, I wondered whether one additional use of social media for manufacturers, which often rely on networks of distributors to get their products into the hands of customers, might be supporting those partners by producing great social content that they can use.
The idea of creating social content specifically to fuel outreach by partners, who in turn touch customers, has been on my mind since reading "Drive B2B Channel Sales with Social Media Content" earlier this week on the Social Media B2B blog.
It seems to me that a manufacturer looking to explore how social media might work for them could consider the recommendations from both of these posts if they know they want to do more work online to support sales, but often work through distributors or other partners.
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For a reasonably recent (October 2011) look at how B2B marketers are faring with social media, download "Truth from the Trenches" from Penton Marketing Services. A few findings:
"81 percent of respondents told us they find online marketing moderately to extremely challenging."
"58 percent want [their] site to generate sales leads." [I'm shocked that the number is so low.]
"77 percent say their site is not that effective at generating sales leads."
Of those B2Bs using social media, 90% are on Facebook. Just 53% are on Twitter. Surprisingly, only one in three blog.
Yesterday I participated, along with Tom Lynch of interactive web marketing firm Astek Consulting, in a PR News webinar on SEO best practices. I'm not an SEO expert, but have developed a strong interest in search over the past several years. To me, it goes hand in hand with PR.
We all know that PR is about telling great stories. But to tell those stories, communicators have to create more content, and content of different types, than we did even a few years ago. At Schwartz MSL, our target audiences are generally online, so it makes sense to optimize that content for search to increase the likelihood that people who are looking for information on problems that our clients can solve find them online. I can't imagine running communications programs that don't take SEO into account.
If you're looking ahead to 2012 and planning your content and PR strategies, will you factor in SEO? Or do you feel that great content will be found and shared independent of optimization efforts?
Mitt Romney, presidential candidate and former governor of my home state of Massachusetts, was mocked a few weeks ago when he said that "corporations are people." It doesn't matter that it's not literally true, of course. It was his way of expressing the thought that every business, no matter how large, is comprised of individuals.
That's precisely the reason that B2B marketers struggle with use of social platforms such as Facebook. It's not devoted to supporting people's business personas, as LinkedIn is, and there's scant indication that anyone goes onto Facebook looking for information on B2B products. However, it's impossible to set aside the knowledge that Facebook is more frequently visited in the U.S. than Google and all those B2B buyers with their complex decision-making processes are, after all, individuals who more likely than not use it. Fortunately for those companies looking to interact with customers and potential customers on this platform, there are Facebook Pages.
Other B2B marketers are on the fence about use of Facebook. Conveniently, they haven't yet had to worry about another major social platform, Google+. Google made the decision about participation for them--it deletes profiles set up by brands--and today's announcement of nine new Google+ features doesn't include support for business profiles.
Such support is expected to be added, though, and I'd argue that business marketers shouldn't delay getting to know Google+'s features. Why? Three main reasons come to mind:
1. Most B2Bs care about search and Google+ profiles seem to top search results. My profile does, at any rate, and so do those of all of my colleagues. Check out the following chart from a 2011 Optify report (The Changing Face of SERPs: Organic Click-Through Rate). It shows how many more clicks the top search result receives than even positions two and three.
I don't think the need to understand Google+ and to potentially benefit from its favorable placement in search results can get much clearer, unless Google will force companies' Google+ profiles down in search results in a way that it's not currently doing with those of individuals. (For more on how Google+ is bringing search and social media together, check out this Brafton post.)
2. Google+ seems to be pushing other social platforms to adjust their own feature sets. I'd suggest that knowing what's up with Google+ may help marketers better understand how they can use Facebook, for example. Or, more importantly, understand how their "fans" may expect them to use Facebook.
3. Google+ circles, which allow users to present content to friends that's different from what they share with relatives, for instance, may eventually be of use to B2B marketers looking to create a different experience for customers using different product mixes, or individuals at different stages of the buying process.
Do you think Google+ is worth keeping an eye on? Or is it not worth the time if marketers are already reaching people on other social platforms?
I want to share some really exciting news about Schwartz Communications. After 20 years of independence, we’ve become part of MSLGROUP---one of the world’s largest public relations and engagement agencies.
It takes something special to change two decades of independence. And we’ve found it in an amazing organization with talented employees, terrific clients, and a shared passion for storytelling in all its mediums. Our unique and shared strengths mesh very well.
As Schwartz MSL, we’ll continue our focus on “innovation companies of all sizes” and the technologies, treatments and services that transform business, save lives and conserve our natural resources. But as part of an outstanding industry leader, we now have a new assortment of engagement and marketing services, and a network of thousands of additional experts in more than 80 MSLGROUP offices worldwide.
We’ve moved to a truly global stage, and Schwartz MSL will continue to lead the way in delivering the reach, influence and creative service offerings our clients need to create new markets or transform existing ones. We hope you’ll enjoy our next act, which you can follow here in our blogs and on Twitter at @schwartzmsl.
A new survey from Base One, Report 2011: The annual survey of changing B2B buyer behaviour, takes a look at "the extent to which B2B decision-makers are using social media tools and channels to help them in the process of refining their needs and identifying suitable suppliers for major business purchases."
Base One surveyed more than 1,000 people in the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy in spring 2011. If your assignment includes European communications, the report is worth a look. It examines buyers' sources of information and, importantly, which of these have the most influence.
Here's a look at information sources used by UK decision-makers and changes between 2010 and 2011. In each year, the most relied upon sources are corporate websites, searches and industry media.
The report goes on to tease out opinions on social media and whether it's trustworthy or worth the time. It doesn't end with recommendations, but leaves it to the reader to determine what to take and apply to their own marketing strategy.
I read the report because a post on Forbes.com caught my eye, "Social is Intriguing, but Search is Proven." It displays a similar bar chart to the one above and concludes, "Don't let social media detract from the focus of optimizing your corporate website and search, both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC). Social media might pay off in the future, but search is a sure bet today."
Here's what I wish the report or the Forbes.com write-up had done: point out that if search matters to your business, so does social media. The number and quality of links to a website seem to be of great importance to search engines, as do pages on a site devoted to topics that people are searching on (as opposed to just promoting a brand). Blogs are a terrific way to add those pages and keep the content fresh over time and when it comes to links, about nine months ago, Google and Bing both said that they now look at links from social sites and consider the social authority of people who do the linking.
For more info on how social media may be increasing in importance to companies that care about search results, take a look at the SEOmoz report on Search Engine Ranking Factors. SEO experts polled by SEOmoz view "social signals at page level" and "social signals at domain level" as likely growing in importance.
If social media is becoming more important to search engines and search engines and corporate websites matter more to European B2B buyers, then I'd suggest that the role of social media may be obscured or underappreciated to some degree by the report on buyer behavior. B2B decision-makers may not be turning to Facebook and blogs for information as frequently as they do webinars, for example, but all those fresh blog posts and links from social sites and consequent improvements in search rankings may be an important reason that buyers are finding companies' sites in the first place.
Social media should be a part of every company’s communications strategy. Even if the strategy includes deliberately avoiding a particular platform, such as a B2B cloud computing company opting not to create a Facebook fan page, social media has matured to the point that it can’t be ignored. With the scope of social media now ranging from Twitter to blogger relations, every company is involved one way or another.
Likewise, a social media policy is a must for any business. Far too often, companies fail to create a policy because they assume that employees will practice common sense--but that simply means different things to different people. Take any two smart, logical employees with the company's best interests in mind and they may have very different approaches to using social media. Furthermore, as social media creeps from public relations/marketing territory into the domain of customer service, human resources and sales, a set of guidelines needs to be established in writing.
While a social media policy offers no guarantee against a mistake, it can go a long way toward avoiding a serious debacle. Everyday issues, such as multiple employees creating LinkedIn groups or unofficial Twitter handles in your company’s name, can be better managed with a policy in place. At minimum, you should outline what your company is trying to achieve on social media, who is responsible for its management and a standard for content. You should also give employees guidance about how they can talk about your company on their own social media profiles. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that this document will probably be outdated as soon as you finish writing it. Be prepared to update frequently as the social media landscape changes.
With so much already written about social media policy, I thought it would be helpful to collect some of the best resources around the web for your policy-creation pleasure.
•The database of 177 social media policies on Social Media Governance gives you an invaluable peek behind the curtain at many major companies’ social media policies.
There seems to be no shortage in innovation around the short URL. Still shortening with Bit.ly? You’re so 2010! To be fair, Bit.ly continues to offer new functionality, most recently with the even shorter J.mp option. But if you want to do something exciting with your short URLs - while creating more visibility for your brand, here are three new tools to try:
Bre.ad – Still in private beta, we’ve been excited about trying Bre.ad ever since Ben Parr reviewed it on Mashable because it offers the opportunity to promote your brand every time someone clicks on one of your short URLs. With Bre.ad, you create a webpage (called a Toast) that promotes your brand (or product, promotion, etc). When one of your followers or fans clicks on your Bre.ad link, they’ll see your Toast for five seconds before being redirected to the webpage you’ve linked to. Ever the early adopter, Lady Gaga is already using it.
YOURLS – Promote your own company instead of the tool you’re using by creating custom URLs with YOURLS (your own URL shortener). Simply install YOURLS on your server, buy a short domain, point the short domain at your website and you have your own shortening service.
BridgeURL – BridgeURL is brilliant when you want to share a collection of links. You enter your list – favourite YouTube videos, top restaurants to visit during a trade show, mediacoverage, to name a few potential examples, and BridgeURL presents them as a slideshow. Try it here http://bit.ly/jm5Z3M and see a collection of our consumer clients.
Lately, a few outside experts have visited with us here at Schwartz. We love it, because it allows us to test our thoughts about how tech PR and healthcare PR are changing with people "outside the Schwartz firewall." It also allows us to twist the arms of our guests and get them to sit down on camera so we can ask them some questions.
Ann Handley came to Schwartz recently for a couple hours of fun mixed with good discussion about the state of content marketing and how it fits with a company's overall marketing program. Ann recently teamed with C.C. Champan to publish Content Rules, which is a fantastic read and provides an excellent analysis of practical content marketing examples.
Ann sat down with my co-worker, Laura Kempke, to discuss some trends and best practices with regard to content marketing and PR. You can watch below. The Schwartz digital team goes further in an earlier post by poking fun at a particularly "amusing" story related to Ann's visit.
Schwartz friends and family might recall our December 2010 content marketing event with MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley and HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan. We received great feedback on the talk and were happy to see the room packed, but guess it's to be expected--content is very much on marketers' minds, particularly as they consider social media and lead generation.
Yesterday my colleagues John Moran, Matt Duffy, Ross Levanto and I got to meet up with Ann again to chat about topics ranging from the importance of setting content marketing goals (and why "we want a Twitter strategy" is absolutely not an appropriate goal), to how content marketing and PR can work together, to the relative importance of optimizing all that content.
The real question, however, was whether it's acceptable to order and eat two entrees at a business lunch. (Answer: It's absolutely fine, and is best accompanied by your story about the time you vacuumed up 14 Krispy Kremes without getting sick.)
Fortunately, we left time to talk about Ann's new book with co-author C.C. Chapman, Content Rules. The book has become required reading for Schwartzers, not only because we offer content marketing alongside our public relations, social media and public affairs programs, but because its suggestions are valuable across industry segments, I'd argue, and for companies of all sizes.
Most authors and speakers assume that all marketers and communicators find value in hearing about big-budget case studies from major brands, but honestly, I check email when someone starts talking about what car and candy companies accomplished with high six-figure budgets. Content Rules shows you how to work with the story, money and time that you've got.
Check it out if you haven't already to see how content and content marketing might work for your business. I know we'll be pulling the book's recommendations into many of our own programs.
Today, Salesforce announced its plan to acquire Radian6 for ~$326 million in cash and stock. Radian6 is one of the main social media monitoring and engagement tools we use at Schwartz Communications. This is good news for Radian6 employees, but what are the takeaways for the industry?
To my mind, it all boils down to another company betting that even more companies will realize the power of listening, and as a corollary, the power of engaging. Salesforce.com is one of the top sales and CRM solutions.
This is enhanced when you add inbound marketing companies, such as Hubspot, that can help sales and marketing nurture the most valuable customers and promising prospects. That is one reason Hubspot makes such a big deal of their Salesforce integration.
The social listening (and to a lesser extent engagement) offerings provided by Radian 6 are another piece in the customer engagement puzzle.
Good PR has always strived to understand the needs and desires of the customer and other key stakeholders. Only by understanding them can we give the most effective counsel to the organizations we represent. The future tie-in of sales/crm, social listening and nurturing should help companies develop deeper, more meaningful and effective relationships with their customers.
I am intrigued by the possibilities of this acquisition, but it will be interesting to see how it proceeds.
Some of Radian6’s greatest weaknesses are Salesforce's strengths. But I can also see the volume of data that Radian6 regularly captures overwhelming the needs and desires of many users and too much less than useful information being integrated into the Salesforce contact stream. As my wife often tells me, just because you hear what I am saying, doesn’t mean you are listening. The data is only good if it is processed and acted upon.
I don’t think this is the final piece of the puzzle. Integrating capabilities such as Rapleaf into the new Salesforce/Radian6 would create some very targeted and meaningful monitoring and lead to even greater success.
No matter how this acquisition proceeds, the winners will be the companies that increasingly engage with their customers through tailored, proactive communications.
Samsung expected to make a big splash at last week's CTIA Wireless conference with its unveiling of a new Galaxy Tab. They didn't, however, count on a lot of online flak regarding the video they produced to support the launch. Harry McCracken, editor of Technologizer, makes a pretty compelling case that the "real-life" users in the video are actually paid actors. His posts have attracted a good deal of attention and quite a few reader comments. What does this have to do with the merits of the new Tab and how it stacks up against the iPad 2? Absolutely nothing - and that's exactly Samsung's problem.
Well produced videos have the ability to convey an organization's story in a quick, compelling manner. And, hopefully, a sense of trust is established with the target audience. In order to ensure this bond, it should be assumed that discerning viewers will do a little digging to make sure that the claims made by a company are factual. It doesn't have to be many viewers. All it takes is one viewer unearthing something questionable - and the viral power of the Internet may take over, potentially doing serious damage to a company's campaign.
There are times when it makes sense to use hired actors in a video. But any time the project involves customer testimonials, there is no substitute for the genuine emotions and experiences of real users. They may not spit out the PR team's key messages exactly as scripted, but audiences aren't interested in robots reciting lines. Nothing resonates better than honesty.
Be creative, but be completely up front with your audience. Trying to gain traction against competitors like Apple is tough enough; having the attention of customers and industry thought leaders diverted by such silly miscues only makes the challenge more formidbale. No matter what you do, keep it real!
Well it has been a week since the end of SxSW Interactive 2011. By this time, most of the attendees have recovered from the five days of non-stop seminars, parties, meet-ups and informal hallway networking. What did it all mean?
There are a few key takeaways from Schwartz’s discussions at SxSW that I thought would make sense to share with our readers.
Group Communications Overload – The “hot” market is definitely group messaging and communications. Between Foursquare, Gowalla, Scvngr, Whrrl, Hurricane Party, and others, there are more networks than ever before. To be honest, I see significant hurdles for most of these apps. The benefits of the new services are at most incremental over Foursquare and Gowalla, and do not give a reason to move. Hurricane Party impressed with its focus on parties, and is something I will check out at other industry events. But beyond that nice, I did not see market disruptors. We are seeing dot revs, not new products. The true innovators will need to be even more creative to stick out from the group communications babble.
Microblogging back channels are thriving – Every panelist faced competition – the Twitterstream. Between 20-40 people (including me) were using HootSuite or another tool to comment on what was being said, ask questions and be snarky. Those panelists that integrated the Twitterstream into their presentations had much more dynamic sessions. A few panelists even had other folks at their company monitoring the stream and providing real time feedback and commentary so they could focus on the talk, but also capitalize on the back channel discussion.
Uniform Optimism – Aside from the ubiquitous “SxSW isn’t what it used to be,” the people I spoke with at SxSW were uniformly optimistic. It didn’t matter if they were engineers, C-level, PR pros or venture capitalists. The attendees are all preparing for a coming innovation explosion. Most see it around mobile and connectivity, and I find it hard to disagree. This is no just limited to B2C, but B2B financial services markets are seeing the mobile possibilities.
This is just the beginning – Underlying the optimism was another undercurrent. Priebatsch from Scvngr talked about a coming layer (the game layer) that will go on top of the current social layer. I do not agree with all of his ideas, but it does show that there is still significant innovation to come. We are just at the infancy of the group communications. With the explosion of smartphones and apps, more sophisticated data modeling and group communications, what we see today will likely bear little resemblance to what we see in five years. And here at Schwartz we find that to be extremely invigorating.
The last day of SxSWi 2011, I decided to take a brief foray into crisis management, specifically looking at how brands respond to Facebook attacks. The dynamic session was highlighted by Dell and Intel discussing how they handled the issue of brand attacks.
Ekaterina Walter, Intel’s social media strategist and Laura Thomas, a senior consultant at Dell who oversaw its Facebook presence consolidation, provided a few helpful tips that I thought made sense to share with our readers. While many of these are common sense, they shared some good data:
Facebook interaction changes perception—Over the past year, Dell interacted with more than 5,000 customers on Facebook. A set of them had 98% negative view/comment of Dell. After the Facebook interaction, 36% of the 5,000 publicly expressed satisfaction.
Social media crisis response still requires planning—Organizations need to have the right policies and procedures in place, but they also need to test them. Ekaterina from Intel shared an example where Intel had the listening tools in place, and the listeners alerted one department, but not her. This showed they needed to have more practice drills. Companies should plan a few social media crisis drills/year.
Explain your actions—If you are turning comments off, not responding to certain posts, or deleting certain posts, clearly explain why. Laura @Dell emphasized “Make sure you set up at the very beginning what you will/won't allow and enforce it.” For example, Dell allows negative comments but not R-rated language. They will highlight that a response was deleted due to profanity.
Another example that was shared by the panel: A Mayo clinic radiologist had allegedly made some racist comments. Protesters went in and posted the comments on Mayo’s Facebook wall. Mayo allowed the negative comments to run for 2-3 days, then created a discussion tab and thread there, and they posted to the wall, they had moved the discussion there, and if people continue to post on the wall, those posts will be deleted.
Volume (both positive and negative) matters—According to panelists, just 0.02% of posts on Facebook make it into people’s “Top News” feeds. This means a lot of Wall discussion is only seen if you visit the site. If you want to be visible, you need to encourage conversation on the Wall, not on discussion boards. Or as I like to say it: “Links are Google Juice, Wall Posts are Facebook Juice.”
Yesterday, we wrote a blog post that analyzed who would win the 2011 NCAA March Madness Tournament if it was decided solely based on a school's social media prowess.
How is it working out?
Take a look at the Southeast Bracket:
A perfect 100%.
What about the rest? Well, not so much. At least not this year. But we will see how it plays out in the end.
For the past few years, to critical acclaim, the Schwartz Communications Research Group has conducted the NCAA Social Media College Basketball Bracket Analysis (we believe we were the first to do it in 2008). As a PR firm that deals with high-tech, healthcare and services companies, we live social media every day and have a love of metrics. Therefore, we asked ourselves what if the schools in the Big Dance had to compete based on their social media prowess, not their hoop skills? I mean, forget guard play, or how the Orangemen’s zone has been inconsistent…
Two members of the research group (Mark McClennan and Bill Bode) carefully evaluated the field of 64 and had the teams face off solely on social media skills and came up with a power ranking for each school. We kept the NCAA seeds and let them face off.
You may question - does this really work? Well in 2008, the NCAA Social Media Power Rankings were one of the few to predict Davidson's tremendous run deep in the tourney - so mock it at your peril.
How was the power ranking determined? It was determined by (# of Facebook users in the School/Team group or fan page (whichever was larger)/number of students at school according to Wikipedia). Note: Yes that includes alumni, but they count as fans in the stands cheering on the team. And if the students didn't join their schools network or the groups were hard to find...we considered that they didn't show up for the game. We recorded it in Excel and took it from there.
Is it mathematically perfect? No. But wait to you see our plans for next year! Do we encourage wagering on games or any other activity which may take this as anything other than entertainment - no.
Without further ado:
You can see the full size bracket. here. View image
As for surprises?
Ohio State runs away with it all. They have a SMPR of 14.95.
Butler is a strong #2 with a SMPR of 13.47
While Duke does well (8.29) it runs into a reinvigorated Texas team (8.98)
SDSU is the weakest #2 seed, and one in the weakest in the tourney (0.36) but it manages to squeak out a first round win.
The biggest buzzer beater? Wisconsin (2.064) vs. Kansas St (1.987) for a difference of 0.07.
The East and West Brackets are the toughest draw with 7 of the top 10 SMPR teams
For me, Sunday at SxSW could best have been described as analytics day. They decided to have all the research and measurement die-hards make the trek out to the AT&T Executive Conference center. The surroundings were plusher, the seats much more comfortable and the data was fascinating.
There were two interesting panels on measurement and analytics and the most exciting part is none of the speakers were from vendors. Shawn Brown from MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Chris Traganos at Harvard spoke about how they measured Web success and worked to increase traffic; while Elizabeth Winkler from the University of Texas - Austin, discussed how she and her colleagues developed a model that showed how Twitter chatter accurately predicted movie revenues.
Harvard was doing some very interesting things and relies primarily on five social media tools:
These are tools most of our readers know, but it shows that tools like these, used intelligently and backed by great content can deliver very good results. A few practical tips on how they grew traffic included advice such as:
Lots of tags are your friend: every story they push has 30 tags that are fed into blog aggregators
If you aren’t using Facebook’s OpenGraph and you create content, you need to start doing so. Instead of the share button, use the like button. Despite the power of the tool, you should check URL Linter to see what Facebook is getting and not getting.
Chartbeat is a perfect complement to Google Analytics. I haven’t used it on my sites, but I plan to check it out. It gives you real time analytics in a way Google does not.
Probably the biggest “huh” in the session was the tidbit that the smaller the URL, the less dense the QR code is, so it works faster. Keep using those URL shorteners, and make sure they point to a site that is optimized for mobile.
These are great practical tips for growing and analyzing site traffic.
This was a great primer for the next session that looked at how Twitter chatter could be used to tell how good a movie will do on a weekend. Elizabeth Winker and her team used a set of 20 servers to gather and aggregate tweets on movies and store than in a database for further analysis.
They first eliminated the false positives (which was very tricky for the movie “The Hangover”) and broke the results down by positive, negative and neutral using an automated system they built themselves. By then analyzing how many people said they planned to go to the movies and the reaction and buzz afterwards, they showed how positive Twitter chatter mapped nicely to box office sales for the 60 movies they analyzed.
One area Winker touched on briefly, but I think is worthy of further consideration is the power of Twitter and geolocation. They could map the Tweets on a certain movie to the subset of those that have enabled geolocation on their phones and break out the analysis and prediction on a regional level. This could help allocate ad and marketing spends to the areas where it is most needed. One Winkler didn’t explore that I would love to see is if there is greater correlation based on the chatter that is made immediately after a movie (which a movie company should be able to do by mapping the tweets to theatre locations). This also has implications for CPG and consumer technology companies.
The panels weren’t earth shattering, but they gave good practical advice and a glimpse into the future of quick, high-volume analytics.
Within SxSW there is a small group of die hard people that are involved in the financial services and banking industry that meet to discuss the role technology will play in the evolution of this market. Since I work with many companies in the financial services and payments industry, I always make it a point to check out the sessions.
The two most intriguing sessions of the second day of SxSW day both dealt with innovation. The first claimed to look at changes in the way lending happens thanks to new ways of looking at data. It really ended up being an excoriation of payday loans and an examination of new types of lending - from community based business loans to modified payday loans that are designed to focus solely on people paying their bills.
Payday loans and serving the underbanked are two issues that the industry has grappled with for a number of years. While I learned about some new technologies, a key takeaway is one that translates into the second session as well, clearly communicating your deals and offerings is a great way to build loyalty. And if you have a new service people need, they are likely to try it out.
The second panel of the day had a very unassuming name, "Banks, innovate or die!" it ended up being one of the most contentious and interesting panels I have been to in a while. A former Citibank employee, Lendingclub executive, SmartyPig and others were discussing the future of innovation in the banking industry.
The comments were cutting and included such gems as:
Citi is your bank, not your mother! It's not our job to remind you to pay your bills
Customer service is easy when you have just a few thousand customers
The key takeaways from this session were things that I have heard quite a few times in the past but are worth repeating:
People expect greater transparency from their financial institutions. To me though this is not necessarily how they are using your money, but helping customers better understand how their finances are being used as well as what fees they are being charged and what services are available. (full disclosure, Schwartz represents companies that provide services and products for banks and credit unions.)
Customer service is another challenge. Some called it a way to innovate, I see it more as a way to differentiate. It is important to note that the baseline customer service expectations continues to grow, so FIs that aren't using it as a way to get closer to the customer are missing opportunities and giving start ups and credit unions a chance to take their customers.
The most interesting point was made at the end of the session. The next battle for banks will not be against startups but likely against Google and Apple and others.
While the companies differed when discussing competitive threats, there was almost universal in identifying where they expect to see innovation over the next few years - mobile banking and payments. This is a shift even bigger than the introduction of the ATM, particularly as the younger generation that has their mobile phone as their main communications device begins to graduate college and enter the workforce. The moderator stated that by 2015 mobile will be the primary banking channel. The other area for innovation that many identified was in P2P loans.
The only other area of universal agreement was the need to revise FINRA rules to allow for greater social media engagement. Overall though the hours of discussion drove home two points:
The industry is experiencing a significant increase in the pace of innovation which will likely accelerate with mobile.
It is an exciting time to be working with companies in the financial services industry.
SxSW is alternately described as a tech party a la COMDEX in the mid 90s, Spring Break for techies, DEMO for those trying to reach young, hip, consumers and a conference that has jumped the shark. To me it is a great event and a great way to make connections, hear great speakers and have thought provoking conversations.To get myself in the right frame of mind, I listened to Alice's Restaurant on the plane flight to Austin.
For my first session at SxSW I went to hear industry pundit Brian Reich discuss how social media is like an asteroid approaching the earth. Basically his premise was that we need to fundamentally change the way we think about things, and nowhere is this more important than with those issues that transcend business (hunger, oppression, disaster relief). He believes that the way we address serious issues is no longer working.
We are not capitalizing on the power of the connected society. I agree with him in that the "networked" society is still in its infancy, and despite all our activities over the past 15 years, the true impact is still just now being felt.
What really stuck me was that many of the transcendent issues are the issues that businesses have been struggling with since the dawn of social media, and frankly, since communications became a strategic discipline.
How do we impact change?
Are we measuring the right things?
Raising awareness is a great and necessary first step, but it is not enough.
Don't get me wrong, there were great ideas that came out of the session (the crying need for more transparency in how donations are distributed, how giving people choices on how their money will be used will encourage more donations, etc.,)
I disagreed with some of the points being made. People that just gave money were being called lazy. I spoke up at that and pointed out there is a full spectrum of engagement. Business realize not everyone will be an evangelist for their product or spend hours on the messageboards answering questions. You need to treasure those folks, but you need to respect all stakeholders, regardless of their activity level. To do otherwise jeopardizes what you are trying to accomplish.
Another telling point to me is many of the people in the audience were from NGOs and were starting to realize the way they should measure needs to change. (I felt like I was at an IPR meeting). How many people tweeted about your cause is just a measure of activity. It's like the old days of PR measurement when hits were the only thing that mattered.
Even how much money you raise (while still vitally important) is just a measure of activity. The true way to impact change is to have NGOs and charitable organizations report on the tangible results. What did the money do?
In the end, the session was thought provoking and a great start to SxSW. It reminds us as communicators and interested parties that if we keep doing the same thing and just use new channels, we will have same challenges in new channels. We need to think differently and make sure we are solving causes, not just serving them.
One of the mobile industry’s most important shows, CTIA Wireless, is just around the corner. This three-day event, running March 22-24, includes a trade show and a number of educational panel discussions. Widely attended by analysts and media, it’s an excellent opportunity to schedule face time with key influencers.
If you’re just starting your PR planning, you’ve got only two weeks to pull off a successful CTIA campaign. Begin by determining the top news item(s) that can be announced at the show. Although more than 1,100 press and analyst contacts are expected, there’s a great deal of competition for their time from hundreds of exhibitors, including some of the biggest companies in the wireless industry.
You’ll need a strong news hook to garner appointments with reporters, so figure out the best buzz-generating announcement for the show. If the news involves a partnership with a major carrier, remember to get their approval in advance. The top tier wireless providers are selective about announcing partnerships with smaller companies.
After you’ve drafted your press release and pitch, you’ll need to start thinking about social media opportunities. Write three blogs in advance, and post one on each day of the show. Also compose tweets about your company's participation in CTIA, company news, and comments on trends and news in the wireless industry. Prepare nine tweets, releasing three on each day of the show. You can also load your press release into PitchEngine, a social media release platform, in advance. On the day of the announcement, just flip the switch on the console, and your release, along with images and tags, will go live instantly. You can also tweet live from the show as it unfolds, and re-tweet breaking news that’s relevant to your company.
Be sure to take advantage of the CTIA publications issued at the event. The print Show Daily will be handled by Wireless Week this year, and the deadline is this Friday, March 11. You can learn more about getting your news placed by visiting this page. Light Reading Mobile and InformationWeek are the official media outlets for electronic CTIA news, and you can learn more about how to pitch these reporters here.
If you have a booth at the show, it’s a good place to schedule your press and analyst meetings. The show floor encompasses more than 300,000 square feet, so traveling from location to location can easily steal 10 minutes from each appointment. It’s also better to keep your spokesperson situated in the booth for logistical reasons. Will this person have a slide slow to offer? Perhaps a handset to demo or some sample devices to display? If so, it’s much easier to have all of these items ready to go in the booth, rather than lugging a laptop and a bag of products across the show floor.
If you aren’t exhibiting or need a quiet place to meet, you can use the show’s press room. Another option for “booth-less” companies is to pay to participate in ShowStoppers. The organizers promise hundreds of media and analysts in the room, and the opportunity to pitch them on the spot.
It’s essential that spokespeople be well prepared for all media and analyst interviews, so your agency or in-house PR team will need to prepare a briefing book for the show. Be sure to include a picture of the journalist or analyst, as well as their mobile number. It’s also wise to share the spokesperson’s cell phone number with the journalist. Trade shows can be hectic – especially major events like CTIA – and people often run late. By helping the two parties recognize each other and connect on the show floor, you’re less likely to miss out on opportunities.
It's not too late to get started on your CTIA campaign. Follow the guidelines above, and have a great show!
It’s official. Charlie Sheen holds the world record for getting to 1 million Twitter followers in the shortest time: just 25 hours, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, as reported in Mashable.
Sheen joined Twitter on March 1, in the middle of a media frenzy over Sheen’s high profile interviews prompted by the cancellation of his popular series, ”Two and a Half Men.” This week, Sheen made the rounds of top media shows, including Good Morning America, CNN, The Today Show, and ABC’s 20/20. If you turned on your TV this week, it was all Charlie Sheen, all the time.
On 20/20 alone, he reached an audience of 9.3 million viewers, making it the highest rated news magazine in two years. Never mind that he came across as slightly unhinged – the point is that he attracted a bigger audience than any other news story this week.
So is it any surprise that his Twitter following skyrocketed? No – and there’s a lesson in it: Media coverage drives social media discussion. A few years ago, when social media reached critical mass, there was a lot of talk about PR being dead because the media were dead. In fact, it turns out that social media acts as an amplifier for traditional media, not an alternative. Social media feeds on real news content.
Another example from show business: the re-invention of Conan “Coco” O’Brien. The February 23 issue of Fortune reports on Conan O’Brien’s transformation from late night talk show host to social media guru in just a few months. It all began with his brief tenure on The Tonight Show back in May 2009. His ratings went through the roof, but Jay Leno’s show at 10 pm bombed. So NBC re-installed Leno in the 11:35 time slot and O’Brien walked, creating a media firestorm. In the midst of the controversy, a graphic artist and fan named Mike Mitchell created a Facebook page emblazoned with the words “I’m with Coco” and a Twitter account. It took off overnight and within a week, it had 700,000 followers. Conan’s people took notice. Conan created his own social media presence that led to a sold-out 30-city tour.
Tech marketers don’t have the media mojo of a Charlie Sheen or Conan O’Brien, but the same principle applies. Coverage in traditional media drives social media buzz. When you have something to say – significant news, for instance, or a great customer deployment – go after traditional media coverage. Then use social media to amplify the message. They are the yin and yang of PR.
Tots100, publisher of the British Mummy and Daddy blogger index, has just released the Tots100 parent blogging benchmark study 2011. Parent - particularly mummy - blogging has become a massive phenomenon in the States and its popularity is growing quickly here in the UK. This study is not only a great snapshot of who is blogging and why, but how this community of bloggers are interacting with PR people.
Late last year I wrote in our Technology PR Predictions: 2011 ebook, "Consumer brands in the UK are beginning to recognise the potential of mum blogs as a communications channel and, likewise, mums are learning how to commercialise their blogs." This study underscores the trend: today nearly half of parent bloggers receive three to four PR pitches a week and more than a quarter receive over five. In the Tots100 study, the vast majority of bloggers reported seeing an increase in PR pitches over last year, with more than half calling it "a lot more."
UK parent bloggers start blogging to record their lives or for the friendship and networking blogging faciiliates, but many enjoy the perks. In the study, bloggers responded that what they like most about working with PRs is that they get to try new products and their children have new experiences.
The blogger-PR relationship should be mutually beneficial and when done right can generate loads of positive coverage for a brand while giving bloggers and their families the enjoyable experiences they are looking for. Last year Toys R Us launched the UK's first brand-sponsored mum blogger community with its Toys R US Toyologist programme which involved many well-respected mummy bloggers writing reviews of toys with their kids. Google it - there has been plenty of coverage.
As a PR person who has worked extensively with parent bloggers in the US as the head of coupon website RetailMeNot.com's PR team for three years as well as an occasional mummy blogger at VoucherMum.com, I've been on both sides of the PR/blogger relationship. Here are a few tips for brands that want to bring parent blogger relations into the marketing mix:
*Make it relevant - Mummy blogs are personal, so a blogger is telling you all you need to know about how to approach her. Is she receptive to PR? How old are her kids? What part of the country does she live in? What is her real name? Spend a little time on a mum's blog and you'll be able to get these answers and create a pitch that is more personalised and effective. Remember, a blogger's biggest pet peeve is to receive an irrelevant pitch.
*Make it worth her time - Bloggers are busy and parent blogging not a full time job. The top thing parent bloggers look for in a pitch is if it will drive traffic, so think about what you can offer in exchange for coverage. Asking a blogger to mention your new website or study is basically asking her to use her personal time to promote your brand out of the goodness of her heart. If you're not throwing in an incentive, like a free product or a giveaway that will boost her traffic, she'll probably find her time is better spent playing with her kids.
*Build a relationship - The most fun I had working with bloggers was during BlogHer while running RetailMeNot.com's BlogHer Delegate Programme. We sponsored bloggers to attend the conference and took them out to dinner so we could get to know them. As a result, we created relationships that were far more valuable than the conference fees. Following the conference, the bloggers in our programme were not only more receptive to covering our news, they were happy to provide feedback and insight into our future campaigns.
*Make your terms clear - If you want a blogger to review a product, can she keep it? Give it away on her blog? Sell it on eBay? If you're sending her on a holiday, how many posts are you expecting her to write? More and more mummy bloggers are commercialising their content in one way or another and it is reasonable for you to lay out your expectations so that everyone feels they are getting a benefit out of the relationship.
The full Tots100 parent blogging benchmark study 2011 follows:
Last week, popchips and Ashton Kutcher, its president of pop culture, announced that it is looking for a vice president of pop culture. The position will pay $50,000 for a one-year term; and, the person selected for the job will help to oversee social media for popchips, creating digital content and serving as popchips’ on-location reporter at top pop culture events around the U.S.
As stated by the popchips press release on Wednesday, applicants for the position must apply by submitting a short video on the popchips Facebook page that shows their ability to creatively connect social media and pop culture. Fans will then have the opportunity to vote for the applicant they think will be the best vice president of pop culture.
There are several interesting trends coming into play, here:
Brand Ambassadors Emerge in Existing Customers: More and more consumer-oriented brands are empowering customers to become brand ambassadors by creating platforms for them share their thoughts and experiences via existing social media channels. And, since most people trust their friends more than they trust a press release, word is spreading like wildfire.
Employees Become Extensions of the Brand: Employees are becoming more engaged as company influencers. Although many are not as high-profile as Ashton Kutcher, they are the “stars” of their own social graphs -- and smart, well-thought-out campaigns created by their companies are prompting them to proactively engage their online network and drive customer advocacy.
Democratization Yields Participation: Organizations are using social media to attract more brand ambassadors than ever before. By empowering contest or campaign participants to choose their favorites and “have a say” in highly publicized decisions, popchips and other companies are increasing not only engagement, but transparency. A great example of this is Australia’s tourism campaign for the “Best Job in the World,” which would award a lucky winner with $150,000 and a job as a caretaker on an island.
Ultimately, Ashton Kutcher and popchips will decide who the new vice president of pop culture will be by March 14, 2011 -- possibly making a great deal of progress in the popchips social media crusade.
But, I suppose this begs the question: Even if you do get to work with Ashton Kutcher, is $50,000 really a fair salary for this position? (According to Schwartz client SimplyHired.com, the answer is no! The salary should be around $117,000.)
Many of us here are at Schwartz Communications and the Schwartz Research Group are huge fans of American Idol. Some of us for the singing, some for the drama and some for the pure joy of social media analysis and water cooler talk.
Every year, as the season unfolds, Ryan Seacrest talks about how many votes are cast…but anyone who has worked in politics or public affairs knows that in order to get out the vote, you need good connections. The two keys to winning American Idol are great performances and a great fan base.
Now that the Top 24 are known and the voting will be open to the American public beginning on Tuesday night, the Schwartz Research Group decided to look at which contestants are already using social media to reach out to their fans, and who has an engaged, grassroots campaign already underway. With the introduction of Facebook voting, social media will be even more important this year.
Like Seacrest likes to say, the results were...surprising.
While Twitter is a great way to carry on conversations and engage one on one, it is still dwarfed by Facebook when it comes to the most popular way for fans to relate to American Idol contestants.
100% of the contestants had some Facebook presence (even if it was just 43 fans). Much fewer – 66% - had a Twitter presence (and 50% of the Twitter feeds were fan, and not contestant feeds).
If social media determined the Idol champ…today…it would be: Scotty McCreery (but frankly, the Research Group handicappers have him finishing 6th at best). McCreery also happens to be in the lead in VoteForTheWorst Fan voting…
The Bottom Three—When examining the 24, contestants Tatynisa Wilson, Rachel Zevita and Clint Jun Gamboa have the least overall social media fan engagement. With Tatynisa’s relative lack of air time, it will be interesting to see if and how that changes.
There is a definite gap between many of the contestants and it shows that some of them are already quite savvy in how they use social media. It will be interesting to see which gaps close and which expand.
What do you think about the contestants and their social media engagement?
Note: Photos courtesy of Fox. Followers and fan were determined on 2/25. Also, the Schwartz Research group does not believe it is just followers that matter. The intensity of their passion is also something that would need to be tracked over the coming weeks. Those contestants with the largest and most impassioned base are most likely to generate a high number of votes.
As part of Social Media Week, Ning, a social website creation platform, hosted a panel (moderated by Mashable’s Ben Parr) around the “The Future of the Social Web", which I attended along with colleagues Andrea Hawley and Allison Van Nest. It was an interesting discussion, with a bit of debate but most of the panel and attendees were in agreement about two “areas to watch” – Facebook as a tool for news dissemination and how businesses can better interact with the customer base they have already built across various platforms.
Facebook: Actual news in your news feed?
Think about recent events – if you weren’t near a TV (a situation I found myself in) where is the first place you heard that Mubarak was stepping down? “Go Egypt!” and posts of a similar refrain began to populate my news feed as I sat on the bus, commuting in to work. Apart from helping to organize the mass protests, Facebook played a key role in spreading the news of what was going on. How we receive news is definitely changing, and it will be interesting to see how traditional news outlets adapt to the latest shift.
Business and the Social Web One way news outlets and their corporate counterparts may evolve is through the training and empowering of employees and third-party advocates to comment and interact on behalf of the company. CNN already does this in some ways with its iReports, but other businesses are jumping on the bandwagon as well. I read two interesting articles this morning, which highlight the potential benefits and pitfalls of ceding social control. The first looks at a rogue tweet from the Red Cross, the second profiles a Starbucks evangelist.
While increasing social presence is necessary to “stay in the conversation” you have to wonder how this can and will be rolled out and how much regulation companies will need to wield over their employees. It will be interesting to see what industries embrace this new frontier and how successful they are. Looking Ahead What do you think is next for the social web – are we going to turn to our Facebook profile for news? How much of a voice should employees be given on behalf of their brand?
Earlier this week, I wrote about where the VW/Darth Vader SuperBowl ad failed (great ad, great for VW, little mention of the Passat). That caused me to ask myself about the long term social media impact of the SuperBowl ads. Thousands of people were tweeting about the #brandbowl, but after the game, social media discussion turned to identity fraud and other topics. Were these ads a $3 million one-time deal, or did they engender a longer discussion?
To check this, the Schwartz Research Group charted the conversation paths of 11 of the most popular ads according to BrandBowl and USA Today's AdMeter. The results were:
A larger version is available by clicking View image.
Looking at the discussion trends over time, only Chrysler, Groupon and Darth Vader/VW had any sort of notable discussion volume after the first day. All the ads had a slight bump the next morning as the social media world (and the marketing media) discussed what they liked and didn't like. Each of the three commercials had its own notable reasons for the way it performed.
Volkswagen - Notice the discussion around the ad started before the SuperBowl and it was still one of the most discussed commercials during the game. It was widely considered one of the best and has showed the most staying power.
Chrysler - While there are undoubtedly a few false positives in the chart, the Chrysler commercials received critical acclaim (and some pans) and were much discussed - particularly the 60 second Eminem/Detroit commercial.
Groupon - The negative reaction to the Groupon Tibet ad explains its initial spike and why the discussion has continued for so long - although it appears to be finally dying down.
So in the end, the best ads engendered discussion for at least a few days after the SuperBowl. But for most, the tweets and blog posts last just a little bit longer than the game itself.
For many people, the Super Bowl is as much about the ads as it is the game. USA Today has its ad meter, the Boston Globe was highlighting Brand Bowl and numerous pundits and bloggers rank the ads.
My favorite commercial of the night was the Volkswagen Passat Darth Vader commercial, which my six year old son had us watch three times (and led to a bedtime wish for that Darth Vader outfit). Volkswagen broke conventional wisdom with the ad - they put it on YouTube days before the game.
I was also monitoring Super Bowl ad discussions, and one chart the Schwartz Research Group created really jumped out at me.
One of my concerns with Super Bowl ads is the possibility of the brand being lost as people latch on to the gimmick. In this case it definitely didn't happen. VW was mentioned 94.8 percent of the time along with Darth Vader during the largest discussion spike across all major social media channels.
Yet, the ad was for the new 2012 Passat. The Passat was mentioned just 15.9 percent of the time at the biggest spike in discussion and in just 14.7 percent of the discussions overall.
While this was a great ad for Volkswagen and created brand resonance, the Passat was overshadowed. That is always the danger when you are trying to communicate a number of messages. Which messages will the consumers latch onto? In this case, it wasn't that there is a new Passat coming.
If you are interested in getting a marketing message in front of me, here's a quick look at my profile. I am on Facebook. I do use Twitter as well and occasionally will look for something on YouTube. I write as often as I can for this blog as well as my personal blog. I have been in the tech PR business for over 10 years.
What would one surmise from this short little survey? From a B2B perspective, if you are looking to market to a tech PR pro in the Boston area, you probably should develop strategies for social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. And you should evaluate if content I write for a blog has any impact in your lead generation activities. Of course, this assumes that other people in my profession with my length of tenure have the same social media habits that I do.
Unfortunately, there isn't too much research out there on specific social media usage. A recent study by IDG provides some good insight, but it leaves me asking more questions. It would be great to know, for example, if CIOs use Facebook as part of their tech buying decisions. More specifically, it would be great to know if CIOs in a particular market-- say, IT security-- are using the social media tools for this purpose. And those are just some questions I am thinking about today.
Since I get asked (a lot) about appropriate social media usage for B2B marketing, I wrote an eBook outlining some general best practices across all tech markets. Included are some recommendations on social media tools that all B2B tech PR and communication pros should be investigating.
The fact I can't find answers regarding social media usage, in reality, should not be a huge surprise. It's probably due to a couple of things. Even though it's been hyped for a long time, and even though social media programs are a part of every campaign Schwartz's executes for its clients, social media is still a relatively new concept.
However, at the same time, I think many of us marketers can get a bit caught up in the hype. We read about a company that uses Twitter in a major publication and instantly want a Twitter strategy of our own.
In the late fall of 2009, I attended a social media cluster event organized by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (Schwartz is a sponsor of the cluster). I asked the panel how they researched which social media channels their strategic audiences used. The panel universally answered that they didn't conduct research. Social media was a game of trial and error. They tried out a new Twitter handle, or ran a Facebook contest, and if it reached a key audience, they claimed victory.
Fortunately, for those of you out there investigating social media, certain strategies have already proven effective, and you don't need to try them to know they will work. Based on the social media programs we have managed at Schwartz, I offer the guidance in the eBook to the entire B2B tech PR and communications communities. I welcome your feedback.
The new 2010 U.S. census data that is starting to be released today will have a profound impact on our economy. From shifting the balance of political power, to insights into changing American demographics, much of the data will take quite some time to digest.
Yet there are some practical concerns that public relations professionals should start incorporating starting today. Most importantly, the base numbers PR pros use when extrapolating from large, random-sample telephone surveys needs to change.
For the past 10 years of so, the more conservative approach has been to use the following data:
Number of Americans (total): 281,421,908 - It's actually the resident population as citizenship is not factored in to the number.
Number of Americans (over 18): 209.1 million
Number of households : 105.5 million
While we have to wait for many of the new numbers to come out, the main number is:
Number of Americans: (total): 308,745,538
Hopefully in February 2011 we will have updated information on how many Americans are over 18 and how many households there are.
While the Schwartz Communications Research Group typically uses the over 18 number for extrapolation, the overall number is important to note. If a survey found 5% of Americans engaged in an activity, this has shifted from 14 million to 15.4 million.
Note: Public relations professionals need to be careful when extrapolating data to be sure that it truly was a random sample, the sample size was large enough and they are following proper survey methodology.
The other element to stand out for me was the budget for the U.S. Census. It was more than $7 billion. (Although they should be applauded for coming in more than $1.8 billion under budget). Now who else would love a research budget like that?
What other information is striking you based on the Census report?
The Internet user as we know him is dying out. He is no longer behind his desktop computer checking his email or on the couch with a notebook in his lap updating his Facebook status. From an immobile creature, he has quickly evolved into a very mobile being, like a prehistoric fish that has grown a pair of legs and has left the ocean.
Instead of legs, though, evolution has equipped him with smart phones and a 3G network that enables him to move freely, while surfing the net. He is no longer the sitting duck that was an easy target for Internet communities, media, advertisers and marketing departments across the globe. The big question resulting from this is: how to catch him while he is moving?
This is actually an easy task, because he is eager to tell you where he is. Location-based software has created some fast growing communities such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and SCVNGR that allow him to show the world exactly where he currently is located. Those communities let you to mark a place, let’s say your favorite café, with a geo tag. Other community members that come to this place can “check in” indicating to their friends where they are currently at and what they are doing.
As the popularity of those mobile location networks is growing, so are the creative juices of the marketing and PR departments in the chase to find out how to use the new knowledge they confronting them. The first test balloons have already been launched. The campaigns that we have been seeing so far are mainly trying to foster customer loyalty. The café mentioned earlier, for instance, can measure their customers’ loyalty by checking the amount of time they have checked into their place via Foursquare. If they check in ten times, they are awarded a free cup of coffee.
In the next couple of months, we will see more creative and more elaborate campaigns of this kind as the networks are growing. The question then will be what platform to use for your campaign? Those things tend to sort out themselves: Remember the battles Twitter vs. Jaiku, or Facebook vs. MySpace? Each ended with a clear winner.
There is yet one problem: Obviously, Facebook with its Places and Google with Latitude want to get in on the action, too, which could change the outcome of the race. Google for instance has already set things in motion by acquiring Dodgeball, one of the pioneers in geosocial networking, in 2005, only to discontinue it four years later. In the meantime one of the founders of Dodgeball went on to found Foursquare, which is now leading the location-based social networking pack.
Facebook’s contribution to the picture is a recently awarded patent titled “Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members are provided”, which many fear could wipe out all the other communities mentioned in this post. This however still remains to be seen. One thing is for sure. One should keep an eye on location-based social networks as they contain a tremendous communication potential. It is still quite unexplored territory and grants room for experimentation. It is still too early to say who will be the big player in this field in a year or two from now so don’t put your money on just one horse, but keep an eye on all communities out there.
And by the way, while the battle over location-based networking is in full motion, the first person just recently “checked in” at the International Space Station.
You've probably heard it a hundred times: Content is king. It's true that a well-executed blog can establish your executives as thought leaders, improve your site's SEO and help you engage with journalists, customers and prospects. But if you aren't seeing comments on your posts, it can start to feel like all of your work is for naught.
Before you consider give up on blogging, try these tips for increasing engagement and generating more comments:
Write timely and opinionated content. Controversy can get readers riled up enough to fire back, but even if you want to avoid risking offense, your content should be thought-provoking enough to encourage a response.
Ask for help. Send posts to customers, partners, other bloggers and industry contacts with a brief note explaining why you thought they'd find the post interesting and inviting them to respond. This can be effective as long as you don't overuse the tactic.
Comment on other blogs in your industry. If you want someone to read and comment on your blog, you should be commenting on theirs. When your fellow bloggers see you as an intelligent contributor to the conversation, they are more likely to reciprocate.
Make sure your posts are seen by tweeting them, posting them on LinkedIn, highlighting them on your homepage and sending them out in your newsletter.
When someone comments on your blog, respond in your comments to keep the debate going or even just to say thank you. If your readers feel like you're paying attention to them, they'll be inclined to comment again.
Good writing should convey excitement, without the help of punctuation. A number of editors with whom we have spoken have a simple rule: you are allowed to use no more than three exclamation points in your writing your entire adult life.
While the Schwartz Research Group brief released this week looked at serious issues such as:
What are the most overused words in release headlines?
We also examined a few lighter issues. For example. The Schwartz Research Group analyzed the more than 16,000 releases issued over Business Wire in a 30 day period, and the good news is, only 0.5% of all releases contain “!”s in the headline. (Note, Schwartz excluded Yahoo! from the analysis, for that would skew the data).
Only 10 release headlines contained multiple exclamation points. For those who are curious, the Schwartz Research Group also found that only 0.4% of releases contained a question mark.
If you would like the full whitepaper, you can request it here.
The biggest trend words in B2B marketing today are: content marketing, lead nurturing and marketing automation. At Schwartz, we believe that a PR firm has the answers for making those concepts a permanent part of any communications program.
Respected journalist and marketer Bob Scheier agrees with us. While not calling out Schwartz by name, he notes how "forward-looking" PR agencies are using marketing automation software solutions such as Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot. Schwartz recently announced a partnership with HubSpot.
Schwartz sees our services as having an ever-expanding role in marketing, and we are defining new services that connect visibility and influence to lead generation in a way that is measurable. An article in DemandGen Report that Bob Scheier refers to in his recent post quotes a director at Bulldog Solutions: “Marketers need to be able to identify new prospects, engage them effectively and hand them off seamlessly to sales. And they need to be able to prove that they did it." I could not agree more.
Beyond new services, which Schwartz will be rolling out and marketing more aggressively in the coming weeks, we are investing in skills that align directly to marketing automation roadblocks.
The same DemandGen Report article includes an infographic on the roadblocks themselves. According to an Executive Benchmark Assessment from Frost & Sullivan and Bulldog Solutions, 52-percent of respondents say that a lack of resources is the reason marketing automation has not been maximized. Forty-two percent say they don't have the right processes, and 32-percent claim they lack sufficient content.
Schwartz is investing in programs and processes that will address all three challenges. We understand fully the value of content to a marketing program. As Bob Scheier notes, a PR firm is closer to the strategic content of a given company than most audiences. We advocate for closed-loop programs that take an idea from strategy through impact, with methods for measuring effectiveness, repeating what works.
And our relationship with HubSpot (as well as Schwartz's own use of HubSpot) teaches our teams the tools available today that incorporate science and a measurement framework into the innovative and strategic marketing ideas we surmise; ideas that make full use of the multiple channels (traditional media, bloggers, search engine marketing and social media) available today.
CNN released the results of an "inaugural global research study into the power of news and recommendation." They conducted it by surveying 2,300 people around the world between June and August of this year to help advertisers understand the value of news stories that are shared via social media.
A CNN executive, Didier Mormesse, said in a statement that "the commerciality of the social media space is fast becoming apparent and this study means that for the first time, we are able to substantiate the value of shared news from an advertising perspective."
The results indicate, CNN says, that people who receive news from those they know through social networks are "19% more likely to recommend the brand that advertised around that story to others and 27% more likely to favor that brand themselves."
I bear in mind that CNN was looking at ads that accompany stories, not brands or companies mentioned in the stories themselves. As a PR person, I'd care more about the latter. But the study was still informative because it gives some insight into the most popular shared content (not to mention that it shows how CNN's been able to quantify the value of social media to their business). "Ongoing stories" about international or national news make up 65% of shared material, breaking news is 19% and 16% is stuff people are sharing to kill time or to provide a distraction. "Visually spectacular" stories are most likely to be shared via social media, as are pieces on science or technology.
CNN also notes that "the 80/20 rule applies to the findings. 27% of all sharers account for 87% of all news stories shared."
Adapting these survey results for PR, I think that if I can offer a compelling video or interesting photo to a journalist, it may make the resulting story more likely to be shared. In fact, you could back up a step and make what I think is the reasonable assumption that if you have images or video to offer, you may up your chances of being included in a story in the first place.
Another thing I think PR people can learn from CNN's survey results is that once the story appears, I'd want to make sure to get it to the 20% of people who push out 80% of news that travels via social media. Naturally I'd already need to know who in my industry is a prolific sharer or news and have worked to get them following me. If I can find the news just as soon as it appears and share it with them while it's still fresh and not hours old, I'd think it would up the appeal of my news to the 20%.
The Boston Globe is taking a different tack. On September 30, the Globe announced that they'll create a paid version of the site next year and make much of their content available only to subscribers. The paid approach has worked for WSJ.com, certainly. I'll be curious to see how things pan out for the Globe, although I suspect they won't if they don't offer some pretty differentiated content. (Paul Gillin takes a deeper look at what's up with the Globe with "Milking the Circulation Cow.")
I'd think the Globe will still make that content attractive to people who want to pass it around by allowing shared links to work for a short time.
To my eye, CNN's approach of showing the people who really pay the bills--advertisers--the value of sharing content via social networks, putting some specificity behind the kinds of stories that get shared and the resulting impressions that readers have of those advertisers seems more promising than sequestering content on a paid site.
That's just me, though. Which approach do you think is likely to succeed? Or are both strategies to making money smart given the companies' individual situations?
The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. A company’s top keywords should be included in the headline when possible and should be placed early in the headline. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.
Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts, including our experts here at Schwartz, advise that companies try to keep the characters in the headline under 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be less effective in supporting a company’s SEO.
The Schwartz Communications Research Group, with invaluable help from Business Wire, analyzed the headlines of more than 16,000 news releases issued over Business Wire in a 31 day period (July 26, 2010 to August 25, 2010). Since Schwartz cannot know the keywords that thousands of companies are hoping to use to optimize their content and releases, the Schwartz Research Group focused on headline length as a success factor . The findings of this analysis were that the vast majority of PR practitioners are still not fully optimizing their headlines. (I am sure Schwartz is guilty of that as well from time to time.) Our analysis showed that only 18.4% of all releases have headlines with 65 characters or fewer.
While the majority of releases are under 150 characters, we did see some examples that were much longer than the recommended length. The most egregious cases were the 2% of releases with headlines in excess of 300 characters, with one headline that was over 1,000 characters. The shortest headline we found was 18 characters, which is also probably not ideal for SEO as it’s unlikely that enough of the company’s keywords were included. Overall, the analysis found the average headline length to be 123 characters.
This shows that many companies still have room to improve their press releases (even the social media releases).
The Schwartz Communications Research Group has written a Research Brief that takes a more in-depth look at this topic. If you would like additional analysis, including buzzword usage, a geographic analysis of effective headline writing and other headline analysis, you can download it here
The middle of this week, I zoomed off to attend the Digital PR Next Practices Summit put on by PR News. New York is an easy trip, so maybe I shouldn't have packed my "tell me something I don't already know" attitude, but that's how I approach all conferences. If I have to so much as budge from my desk, it needs to be worth it.
PR News didn't disappoint. As I sat and waited in vain for a wireless signal adequate to let me use my computer (let's not talk about why one would hold a tech conference in a building that has an anemic wireless network ... or maybe it's my computer), I scanned the attendee list. About 275 communicators from a range of big companies, including many huge consumer, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and tech brands. Plus universities, non-profits, government agencies and even religious organizations.
I had to resort to tweeting from my BlackBerry, but at that point didn't care because I was excited to be around so many other PR people. They were friendly and you can imagine just how loud a room of nearly 300 professional communicators can get.
The conference turned out to be excellent and well worth the time and money. I won't recap every session, but here are a few of my top observations.
The first panel, "Creating the Digital PR Dream Team," dug into the topic of getting the people and resources together to engage in and measure social media. The three panelists, who were from GM, the Archer Group and Kaiser Permanente, shared very specific info about who's on their social media teams and how they interact with corporate comm's, marcom, legal and so on. They talked about what they collaborate with agencies to achieve and what they prefer to handle internally.
The director of social media and digital communications from GM, Mary Henige, said they create one or two videos a week to share. This reminded me of a fantastic InsideView infographic on social media stats that I'd seen the night before. It says that Fortune 100 companies create an average of 10 videos each month to share online. I don't always think big companies lead the way in PR, but clearly they've got the budgets required to clean up in video.
Lee Mikles, CEO of the Archer Group, urged attendees to "say no to the Twitern," or cheap labor brought on to handle a company's social media interactions.
This resonated with me because I personally can't stand it when companies assume that social is free. I know they want it to be free in the same way that I'd like someone to trim my hair for free. Because darn if it's not expensive and it seems like it should be cheap. But I don't want someone who doesn't listen to me and know what they're doing to take on the job and the same holds true for companies and digital media. Just because someone "grew up online" and uses Foursquare to let the world know every time they enter a Starbucks does not mean they understand your business, your industry or your customers' preferences and problems.
Holly Potter, VP of PR for Kaiser Permanente, answered a question about hiring social media specialists by saying that she didn't find much value in "siloed expertise." Those who claim to be social media gurus almost invariably are not.
I agree that we're all learning and learning quickly and think good sense dictates that one not pretend to be thoroughly knowledgeable about something that's changing as quickly as social media. For a few years now, I've been a very interested observer as individuals or small agencies have pushed a focus on social and claimed that companies can ignore branded media. It's human to have a strong interest in the new thing, but it's shortsighted and shows a basic lack of understanding, however, when companies opt to focus on social alone.
I think the fascination with the new is giving way now and has shifted over the past year to a more balanced perspective. For some companies, it reflects a newfound understanding that digital isn't free and that social and branded media are so thoroughly intertwined that they can't be pulled apart and managed in isolation.
After panels on new social media tools and measuring ROI, I had to take a break to charge my BlackBerry. So I skipped the talk on how VW successfully launched a mobile gaming application. I kind of regret it in that I want to know as much as possible about this stuff, but I think I was also voting with my feet. I'm informed but not always impressed by successful PR campaigns that were accompanied by big budgets.
A thoughtful keynote at lunch by Sarah Evans of Sevans Strategy preceded a panel on identifying and engaging "the right" influencers. Then, on to the discussion that contained the most new info I absorbed all day--digital tactics and crisis communications.
Dallas Lawrence, managing director at Burson-Marsteller, made numerous good points, but one that really rose to the top of the pile was that it's too late for companies to get into social media when a crisis arises. (He said that crises can be brought about online by groups attacking your company or brand, by individuals who just don't like you or by external events.)
I suppose this is a bit like one of the basics of reputation management--if you work over time to develop a good reputation, you're better able to recover from crises. You may draw down your reservoir of good will, but at least you had something to draw upon and you're likely going to recover faster if people had a perception of you and it was positive. Perhaps they see the bad thing that happened as an aberration.
Mr. Lawrence noted that you can't adequately respond online if you aren't already part of online communities. Those communities may not be linked (e.g., people "following" you on Facebook aren't necessarily with you on Twitter), so it's not as if you can communicate through just one channel when things go wrong. You can't, for example, expect that if your company gets dragged through the mud in a video, you're going to be able to address the problem by communicating via a press release or corporate blog. You need to already be using the channels that your audiences choose to use in order to get through to them.
In all, I'm glad I stood up from my desk and attended the conference. What social media events have you found most informative lately?
Some of the brightest minds in public relations research and measurement today gathered for the first day of the Institute for Public Relations’ North American Summit on Measurement. They are here to share their best practices on research and measurement, and to discuss the future of PR measurement.
It was great to hear so many research professionals recommending the types of benchmarking that the Schwartz Research Group does as a matter of course our clients.
The summit began with @kdpaine and Dr. Don Stacks reviewing a number of core measurement best practices. Some of the things that jumped out at me were that:
• 66% of time if people say will do something, they will • PR campaigns that address and engage values can make a seismic shift when it comes to behavior • Research without proper analysis is just pretty charts • You must benchmark at the beginning of an engagement to identify if you met your campaign goals and objectives
While much of this was common sense, there were also very engaging discussions on the evolution of online surveys and best practices for increasing response rates and avoiding accidental bias; seven steps to measurement perfection; and new ways of measuring social media engagement.
To me, the highlight of the afternoon was the opportunity for us to speak with Dr. James and Larissa Grunig, two of the deans of PR measurement. I remember learning about Grunig’s two way symmetric communications model more than 20 years ago, and it is great to see how social media is causing the death of other models, and driving more companies to engage in true dialog (what Dr James Grunig has advocated for decades).
Grunig rightly pointed out many of the growing pain social media is going through, but is confident of its continued evolution and ability to drive deeper connections. He made a point that I have been evangelizing for a while – the core principles of good public relations have not been changed by social media. It has made symmetry, strategy, and engagement even more crucial.
One of the key themes that came across during the discussion was the role PR needs to play in corporate social responsibility and sustainability. While CSR has been a core element of public relations for quite a while, Grunig is seeing some of the largest companies internationally start to want to measure not just at the program level, but at the societal level.
Grunig opined that companies need to beware the CSR trap. CSR does not equal publicity for charitable giving. True corporate social responsibility projects align with the needs of the organization and will positively benefit all stakeholders. Some companies Grunig spoke with in Brazil are starting to consider both the environment and the next two generations of humans, animals and plants as stakeholders.
Overall, an excellent start to the summit. Tomorrow will look at global digital communications measurement, measuring influence and other topics.
Follow updates throughout the day at @mcclennan or #iprmeasure.
In my last post, I focused on how you can go about identifying the main trends and issues in your industry as you start working with social media or work to focus your program. In this post, I’ll discuss how to find out where your target audience is getting information and how to understand what your audiences are saying about you.
Where are your target audiences getting information?
This might seem simple, but have you asked customers what they read online and in print? Are there specific trade publications or journalists they follow? Bloggers? Trade shows? Webinars? Are they on Facebook and Twitter? If so, let them know that you are, too. Displaying it on your website, put it in your company's email signature, add it to press releases, hang signs in your trade show booth and include it in lead gen or online marketing campaigns.
iGoogle is another news aggregator that lets you create a personalized homepage that contains a Google search box at the top and your choice of any number of gadgets. Gadgets come in different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web, without ever having to leave your iGoogle page. Here are some things you can do with gadgets:
- View your latest Gmail messages - Read headlines from Google News and other news sources--use it to track what the media and others are saying about your company - Check out weather forecasts and stock quotes - Store bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer - Design your own gadget
What are your customers, partners, employees and the media saying about you?
Monitoring your reputation is critical. Again, one of the most direct ways to find an answer is to ask. Find out if there are any discussion groups or forums in which you appear. Getting customers to put their thoughts in writing on a questionnaire or survey is one of the most well-established feedback techniques.
As you know, Twitter is a real-time conversation between thousands of people in a public forum. Twitter Search lets you filter those Tweets and find the information you’re looking for. Using the tool’s Advanced Search, you can craft your queries and find out what people are saying about your company and brand. Just type in the word or phrase you want and from there you can find which Tweets contain it.
Take it a step further and set up columns in TweetDeck, your personal, real-time Twitter browser, which allows you to view several contacts you are following at the same time. By connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more, you can better monitor the people you are following on a daily basis. This is extremely valuable during product launches, for example.
You can also set up Tweetbeep to send you a daily email with a list of all the mentions of your defined brand on Twitter.
As with Twitter, there are many ways to evaluate media coverage. Was it the right sort of press coverage? Did it reach the right people? You can judge the tone (positive, negative or neutral) and volume (how much your company was included or quoted). Did the article include your core messages? Or did your competitors dominate the article?
One informative graphic to help you understand the most commonly used words in a blog post, article or other piece of writing is Wordle. Simply paste text into the Wordle engine and see what words dominate. For advanced users, Tagxedo can create dynamic, easy-to-read and customizable word clouds. If Wordle is the average four-door sedan of word clouds, then Tagxedo is your high-end mini-van with options. The highly versatile tool allows users to control to font, color, orientation and even shape of their cloud.
Trying to impress a client? Word clouds allow us to present literally any quantitative data we can imagine in an illustrated format. As humans, we are drawn to visually stimulating graphical representations, and spending the extra few minutes to create a powerful visualization of the words most relevant to your client can go a long way.
Social media…online networking…or whatever we call it…is constantly evolving. Finding your place in this etherworld takes time and there is no one right or wrong way. What works for one launch might not work as well for another. The important thing is to start experimenting with a couple of tools and building up your network…or whatever you’d like to call it.
MarketingProfs has a nice summary of a Booz & Co. B2B Marketing Survey. I thought the numbers were useful, so here they are.
The survey includes feedback from 132 marketing executives across several industries. Not a huge number of respondents, but okay, so let's see what they say.
Looking at expected marketing budget allocations over the next two or three years, 67% of respondents expect to spend more on social media. Digital comes in second at 64% and PR at 61%.
I'm not sure how marketers separate those three things in their minds--social media, PR and digital are very much intertwined these days. For example, I don't think most companies view social media as totally distinct from PR anymore. But you get the idea--these are three areas of anticipated growth.
TV and radio will continue to take a hit, it seems, with 74% of marketers cutting budgets. It makes sense if you consider that social and digital can be more carefully targeted toward desired audiences and that PR is increasingly measurable and more of a precision instrument than it was even just a few years ago.
Looking at the question of digital marketing, Booz finds that 87% of those surveyed want to build deeper insights into their client bases. (I'm not exactly sure what the other 13% would like to do--presumably distancing themselves from their clients isn't part of the overall game plan.) Developing custom content is important to 82% of those surveyed and to fully 90% of those classified as "marketing leaders."
It seems that content has quietly but quickly asserted itself as core to the marketing mix. Companies have obviously figured out that they have to be self-sufficient when it comes to telling their stories--they can't really count on anyone else doing it for them and it's necessary fuel for many a social media program.
We all like to think of ourselves as "marketing leaders," right? So how do these numbers compare to what you've got planned?
The image above is copyrighted by Kev Griffin and covered by a Creative Commons Licence.
Recently in the "You're the Boss" blog on NYTimes.com, Jennifer Walzer, CEO of entrepreneurial tech company Backup My Info!, documented her change of heart when it comes to hiring outside public relations help.
To me, a PR person, this post was fascinating and I give Ms. Walzer a lot of credit for sharing her thought process on a topic that many people make a show of dismissing outright. ("You don't need PR! Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Those people invariably work for companies that I've absolutely never heard of, but that's okay, right? I'm sure they're big in their own worlds.)
Ms. Walzer writes: "You may remember one of my posts from last year in which I talked about not needing a public relations firm because we were getting plenty of media coverage organically. Well, as I looked back on that coverage recently, I realized that it was more focused on me as a business owner than on the company and the team. And right now, I'm so busy building the company, training new employees, and managing my pregnancy that I haven't had time to seek speaking and interview opportunities."
This situation, in which an entrepreneur has had some PR success but needs to devote more time to running the business and to life in general, is a common one for many Schwartz clients. Or maybe something's happened--a competitor is starting to become more visible in the marketplace, the firm is about to achieve a substantial milestone and is ready to talk to a broader audience or industry analysts are telling the company that they're referring it to their own clients, who respond that they've "never heard of them"--and it becomes clear that they need to step it up on the PR front.
Social networking has obviously greased the skids for many smaller companies because it can allow them to attain a decent level of visibility by working through friends, and friends of friends. I've had CEOs tell me that they know it's time to hire a professional because they've tapped out their personal networks.
Have you seen the movie "Finding Nemo"? If so, you'll remember the last scene, in which a group of tropical fish have greatly exerted themselves to get out of their aquarium and make it to the ocean. Each has rolled its way across a busy street protected by a water-filled plastic bag and plopped into the ocean. Nice escape! Yet they're still in their bags, bobbing around. "Now what?" one asks.
The company that's worked hard to handle PR on its own, doing what it can when it can, seeing what's possible and being tantalized by it, but really not knowing what to do next, is a good candidate for hiring an external PR firm.
Ms. Walzer came to the decision that now's the time, but was worried about "shelling out money without any guarantee of performance." If I were her, I'd wonder about results, too--any executive would. In her case, she chose to evaluate the number of speaking engagements or media interviews her agency secured over a relatively short period of time. Some of the people who commented on the Times' blog entry noted that a PR person with a decent amount of experience in the client's industry can simply call in favors or work through established contacts to nail those numbers.
Of course they can. The real value of that project is helping the client get a feel for whether they work well with the PR team. Many companies can achieve a certain set of initial results from any number of firms, but stick around because they feel confident in their team over time--they become "sold" on the people and their ability to answer the "now what?" question, not just schedule a few interviews.
Once the PR team is past that "getting to know you" period and has established some confidence in their skills in generating an initial volley of whatever flavor of results the company is looking for, the question becomes "how extensive is your repertoire?" Just as the entrepreneur worked through her network and then hit a wall, will the PR team stop producing once past those first few months?
PR success over the long term rides on a number of factors and the effort that the PR team puts forth on your company's behalf to hit those initial metrics is only one of them. Here are just a few that come to mind for me:
1. PR team's ability to tell a great story--Running a solid PR program requires that you understand where your company fits against the much broader backdrop of your industry, as well as knowing what stories journalists want to tell. The New York Times did not give a small company an opportunity to talk about data backup; they gave a CEO the chance to explain how she changed her mind about an important business decision. Understanding that those are two totally different stories, but that both lead Times readers to http://www.backupmyinfo.com, is the PR person's job.
2. Willingness of your customers to validate your company's claims--The VP of marketing for a tech company is not, unfortunately, a highly credible media source. But his customers are, so the challenge is to get those customers to tell your company's story for you.
3. Nature of your technology--The tech industry goes through phases, as we're all well aware, and when a technology is hot, the PR team is going to have more tools at its disposal. Without a doubt, it's their job to help mundane technologies seem interesting, but that's a tall order when you're selling something like OEM components. PR success for that OEM is simply going to look different than PR success for other firms. Setting expectations properly is critical.
4. Client's ability to deliver--Even companies with a hot technology and enthusiastic customers can flub PR if they don't respond to their PR team in a timely manner. Any delay--whether it's getting a journalist information they've asked for, delivering products on time, producing a knowledgeable spokesperson for commentary or rising above internal politics and making a decision--causes the program to lose momentum. Many companies fail to appreciate how integral their active participation is to PR success.
5. PR agency's understanding of industry changes--PR, like every profession, evolves. I'd say that we're in the midst of what might, at some point in the future, appear to be a lurch forward brought about by changes in the media world and by the use of social technologies. If you remember your geology or evolutionary biology classes, you know about punctuated equilibrium--the theory that change happens slowly, but then the rate speeds up for a period of time. It's pretty clear that PR is changing quickly right now and your agency's ability to keep up with or lead it can play a part in your success.
What items have you found to be important over the long term when handling PR internally or working with an agency?
This morning a crack member of the Schwartz Research team (Bill Bode) brought the recent Mike Wise kerfuffle to my attention. Basically, Mike Wise, a reporter for the Washington Post, was suspended for one month because he made up a story about Pittsburgh Steelers Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and tweeted it out. Some media outlets ran the story and some people retweeted it.
According to the Huffington Post, he claimed he did it to
See which news outlets would pick up his report, and
Show the inaccuracy of social media reporting.
Wise is missing one key thing. As a proven sports columnist for the Washington Post he has both authority and experience. For years, people have believed what Mike Wise wrote. People also put their trust in the Washington Post.
What he truly showed is how if a credible source wants to spread disinformation, they can have some success the first time, but will then destroy their reputation. This isn’t limited to social media. If an analyst put out a false report, people would use the data, until the analyst was exposed.
This problem goes back to well before the dawn of social media. Remember Janet Cooke (also of the Washington Post) who had her Pulitzer Prize winning story “Jimmy’s World” exposed as fabrication? This was also showcased on WKRP in Cincinnati with Bailey Quarters and Les Nessman in the “Dear Liar” episode in Season four.
If I tweeted about Ben Roethlisberger and cited an inside source I knew at the NFL, no one would retweet it. Why?
I am not a sports reporter or blogger, and
Schwartz has great experience with technology, healthcare and green companies, but our football experience deals primarily with luminescent paper for championship game tickets – not with NFL headquarters.
So yes, Wise showed things can spread on Twitter and some folks don’t check their sources. But he is in actuality a better poster child for how someone with respect and authority can abuse their power, be caught and damage their reputation.
My post last week that highlighted the most overused words in a press releases was very well received. Since so many of you liked it, I decided to take it a step further and turn the top 25 buzzwords into Buzzword Bingo cards. I didn’t want to slight anyone, so I created one card based on Sherk’s recent post, and the other card based on David Meerman Scott’s post from last year.
Here they are for your viewing and reading pleasure. May you never complete a bingo!
Feel free to download, share and use as you want. Give copies to all the PR people with whom you work. Remember, only by acting together can we stop buzzword abuse.
For those that don’t know what Buzzword Bingo is, Wikipedia has a pretty good description.
To paraphrase Tom Foremski, “Buzzwords. Die! Die! Die!”
I remember a time when everything was a robust, scalable, enterprise-wide, mission-critical, client/server, WYSIWYG, CORBA development solution with OLE.
Well, maybe not quite that bad, but there are definitely words that have been overused when it comes to press releases. In some cases, these words have been so overused, their meaning is completely devalued to the point the eye skips over them.
Recently one my clients sent me a link to a great post from Adam Sherk on The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases. He did some great analysis of words overused in press releases for the past year. His post also reminded me of a David Meerman Scottpost on the topic from last year.
The lists are useful, but different people learn in different ways.
I decided to take Sherk’s list and turn it into a word cloud of the most overused words in PR. I weighted everything based on the actual frequency of appearance. To me the word cloud really drives home how some words are so overused they lose their meaning completely, even more than a list of the words.
So without further ado, the word cloud of the most overused words in press releases.
More companies are turning to Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels every day for customer service. When it is done well it creates engagement and a deeper bond with a dissatisfied customer. It can also help publicly turn a dissatisfied customer into an advocate. It also saves money compared to call center operations.
These are all good reasons for using social media for customer service. By the key phrase in the above paragraph is “when it is done well.” Too often companies are not following through on their promises or not creating useful feedback. Paul Gillin wrote about it recently here.
I have my own story to share. It is with the Sheraton Hotel and Marina in San Diego and Starwood Hotels. I was at the hotel last week and was grabbing breakfast before a client meeting. The dining room was less than half full. My colleague and I ordered eggs. Thirty minutes later we were still waiting. We really needed to leave then to make the client meeting on time, but we figured if we drove fast, we would still be OK.
We saw the waiter and asked “Excuse me, do you know if our breakfast will be coming soon?” The waiters helpful reply “I don’t know, if you care so much, why don’t you go in the kitchen and ask the chef.”
To say I was displeased with the response (and the service) is an understatement. I tweeted it out, and within an hour had a response from @StarwoodBuzz “@McClennan Sorry to hear about breakfast. If you DM us your stay details, we can follow up with the hotel for you.”
This was a perfect, textbook response and I was quite pleased. I shared the details with Starwood. They respond and asked me to follow them so they can DM back – even though no sensitive information is being shared, and if they lead with @McClennan, likely only I can see it.
The next day, I get a DM response “Thank you. I'm sending off your comments to the hotel so this can be improved 4 future guests. Pls DM if you wish to include your email add.”
There are a number of things wrong with that.
First, in business communications, there is no need to use “4”. We are engaged in a professional discourse. Second, it sounded from the first message that they were going to “follow up with the hotel for me” (i.e. do something about the situation). The personal message basically says, we will let the hotel know there is a complaint. Thanks. Bye.
I don’t need them to do that. I know how to call a manager, tweet and blog myself. Starwood Hotels failed by not providing a meaningful discussion once they engaged. I provided my email as requested, it’s been a week and I have not yet received a response from the hotel.
The end result? 1) A positive social media engagement turned sour and 2) The next time I am in San Diego, I will be staying in a Hilton.
What lessons can marketers, consumer and services public relations professionals take from this?
It is essential to listen to all social media channels, so you can address negative situations.
Listening isn’t enough – If you engage, you need to provide meaningful resolutions or you can do more harm than good.
Use DMs appropriately. Financial institutions and other regulated industries should use DMs. Hotels should not use DMs for form responses.
Over the weekend, I finished reading Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead. It was an engrossing, powerful read. For those not familiar with Gallipoli, it was a major campaign in World War I involving the British, French, and ANZAC invading a Turkish peninsula. It is a defining moment in Turkish history. In total more than 130,000 people died and there were more than 500,000 casualties. It was also a campaign fraught with missed opportunities.
As I was reading it, I could not help but draw comparisons to some common public relations mistakes that are still being made today. While I know there are perils of adopting military campaigns to business, there are a few lessons that I thought would be good to share.
Don’t be blinded by the new way of doing things—New technology is great, but it rarely completely replaces proven systems. In the case of Gallipoli, some British Generals took the new lessons learned in France and made them the only way to do things, without adapting them to the local setting. They refused to advance without strong artillery (which they didn’t have) even though there were no trenches and few opposing forces. As a result, they gave the Turkish Army time to dig trenches and bring in more forces.
The same can be applied to communications. Social media is empowering. It is an essential component of great communications in the modern communications era. Without it, companies are missing great opportunities and their campaigns won’t be as powerful. But traditional media, influencers, mavens, messaging and listening still apply. Don’t be blinded and only pay attention to the shiny object, or you will miss opportunities. Make sure your communications campaign is designed for your specific needs, and not a cookie-cutter “Social Media Scenario #1.”
If you wait for every “i” to be dotted, you will lose – Careful planning and strategy is essential to any communications campaign (particularly consumer PR), but planning at the expense of decisive action is a recipe for failure. The same applies to communications. Careful research and strategy is essential. But there is always one more question that can be asked. There is the temptation to wait for the perfect opportunity (brand name customer reference, analyst data, etc.,) but those situations are few and far between. You need to find ways to communicate effectively without having everything you need.
Don’t be dissuaded by setbacks and changes– The British were dissuaded a number of times when they could have had decisive victory by a minor setback or something not going exactly to plan. We do not operate in a static world, and plans will change. As communications professionals, we need to adapt to those changes and continue forward. Don’t overreact to minor announcements from competitors or allow them to change your overall strategy. Focus on your goal and keep driving to it. You win by moving forward, not by retreating or moving laterally. The same applies to communications and public relations campaigns.
Trust your people – There were times in the invasion when the senior managers were well removed from the front and couldn’t react to a changing and fluid situation. Even more telling, the junior officers were trained not to move without command from superiors. As a result, there were numerous examples of when the British opened an unopposed new front, but did not advance, because the staff on the ground waited for orders. The opportunities were lost.
The same holds true in communications. Managers need to avoid becoming logjams. Trust your staff and encourage them to seize any opportunity they see. If you train them well, you will avoid the careless mistakes. But if every small decision must be centrally approved, you will miss many great opportunities.
I was standing outside the entrance to the main expo hall at Microsoft TechEd last Monday night when I noticed the board. Staffers at high tech PR companies typically pay close attention to any stimuli at tradeshows-- be it publications, billboards, box trucks, etc. For the most part, activities are standard.
Inserts into tradeshow bags. Decaled sports cars. Free t-shirts.
But what caught my eye on "the board" at TechEd was different. Part of the screen showed a continuous stream of tweets, all with the hashtag #TechEd. Not to lose the chance to help create visibility for my client at the show, ScriptLogic, I pulled out my iPhone and tweeted about the company's activity that night at their booth and included the hashtag. Sure enough it popped up on the big screen.
Suprisingly, Twitter is still a relatively new tool to Microsoft TechEd attendees. That said, all of the IT security clients we represent at Schwartz have some sort of Twitter strategy. For IT security, every second matters. When there is news of an IT security vulnerability or a breach, the industry wants to know yesterday and is hardwired to respond.
The same sense of urgency doesn't exist in other industries. But the board at TechEd showed how Twitter can have other equally impactful uses for community building. In essence, Microsoft TechEd is a yearly gathering for the Microsoft community. The enthusiasm on the tradeshow floor was visceral; these developers and IT opps are passionate about their work and about how Microsoft platforms can help them.
The ongoing Twitter feed on the board showed the attendees how powerful Twitter could be to communicate within a group. It was suddenly common to see attendees posting their observations, including the best evening receptions and I was proud to post ScriptLogic's win for Best of TechEd Award in one category, as well.
Even if a given company's strategy is merely to monitor and engage in a limited fashion, all technology companies need a strategy for Twitter. Across Schwartz's technology PR and cleantech PR programs, Twitter is a key channel to reach a variety of audiences. And our programs evaluate how that channel reaches strategic audiences and develop creative ideas for using the channel.
Earlier this week, the Publicity Club of New England recognized the best public relations and social media campaigns and tactics of the past year. The Bell Ringer judges were senior practitioners from Chicago and Boston.
Schwartz is proud that we have continued the tradition of being recognized with more Bell Ringer Awards for work we have done with our clients than any other PR Agency in New England.
Most gratifying to us this year is that we won 10 Gold Bells for our clients, and that Schwartz was recognized for having the two best campaigns of the year, winning both Gold and Silver Bells, for its work in the business-to-business, healthcare and high-tech public relations categories.
When asked by many, how do we continue to win so many awards, we believe it is based on two key elements:
1) As a strategic communications firm, we understand that we don’t succeed by ourselves. Schwartz works closely with our clients to make sure our communications, content and public relations activities help them realize their business objectives. It is this close relationship, senior level involvement and comprehensive approach - including social media, content marketing and inbound marketing services - that help our programs succeed.
2) We don’t expect our clients (or Bell Ringer judges) to measure our work based on the “thud factor”, or in social media Thud 2.0. Our work, and our award entries, are judged on how we helped public relations close the loop with sales, patient recruitment or other business objectives.
For the 2010 Bell Ringer Awards, this ranged from driving qualified leads from trade articles to creating enough demand to crash one client’s servers. It included driving hundreds of patient inquiries to cutting consumer misperceptions in half. It is based on helping drive hundreds of thousands in product sales to opening new channels with key prospects.
We are proud of the work of our employees and our clients. If you have any questions about how we can help your company, let us know.
Strong month for the Schwartz team with a SABRE Award in "Research for Publicity" for its work with Javelin Strategy & Research.
The Schwartz team and Javelin combined professional and social media to promote Javelin's annual identity fraud report, increasing media coverage 126 over previous years, and a whopping 97 percent of all articles emphasizing at least two key messages.
In addition to Javelin, some terrific clients were honored with nominations: medical device company Bioness, antivirus and desktop security software provider ESET and boutique healthcare investment services provider Leerink Swann. Although they didn't take home trophies, it's the first time Schwartz has emerged with four finalists in the SABRES and the work remains outstanding.
There's a great case study on Schwartz's work with Bioness, including a campaign that delivered $4M in sales leads. Check it out!
The classic 80s movie “When Harry Met Sally” follows two people through the years, originally stuck together for a Chicago-to-New York drive, then by chance bumping into each other and finally into love and a long relationship.
This is not unlike what we've seen happen with marketing and sales. Anyone with tenure in the business world knows that these two organizations need to be brilliantly in love and joined at the hip, moving together or else stumbling separately.
There was a time where a great “story” got ink and everyone was happy. Pump up the volume. But now, every good business is looking to connect the sales impact of initiatives, in marketing, public relations, everywhere. Many chief marketing officers are now experts in inbound lead generation, in addition to the traditional staple of brand, awareness and visibility. And the real magic is where they intersect, with one driving the other.
Today’s announcement of Schwartz's partnership with HubSpot is another great example of the transformational work we’ve been doing for years: tying storytelling to sales at all turns, and even rejecting stories that may seem to have cool headlines, but don’t move a needle on any measurable front.
Some of the most interesting work Schwartz is doing for its clients today is what we’ve dubbed “closed loop communications” --- being able to execute a strategy that loops directly into inbound marketing efforts. We’re creating content of interest, optimizing and pushing it out with professional and social media relations, search marketing and other services. That in turn is driving awareness, measured in web traffic and leads. Then we're reporting back on exactly what’s working, who’s looking and what’s prompting action in a client’s communities.
At Schwartz, we’ve nailed an outstanding strategy and process for doing this through many different types of approaches, tactics and tools, including inbound web marketing (leveraging HubSpot), digital video content (including some brilliant video marketing solutions from Visible Gains) and other strands. Whether you're in healthcare, technology, cleantech or consumer, we understand your business and the right mix of levers to pull, buttons to push, and people to influence to deliver tremendous impact.
The best meal on the menu is closed loop public relations. Order it.
In the bad days of PR measurement, some PR professionals would try to impress clients (or bosses) with the ‘Thud factor’ how big and heavy a clip book could they drop on a desk. It was all about volume, circulation and hits. But as KD Paine says, HITS stands for “How Idiots Track Success.” This lead some to focus on quantity rather than quality and to some inflated circulation and reach figures that didn't tie back in to core business objectives.
At Schwartz, and at many other firms and organizations, we focus on measuring outcomes and results. Impact and Influence are core. What business impact did our PR programs have?
Yes, we use measures such as share of voice and key message penetration. We look at conversion, change in consumer perception, increase in Web traffic, increase in searches and other metrics. These are elements of good PR measurement that have a tie back to business results. Many of these have a direct correlation.
But now I am seeing the poor measurement of yesterday rearing its ugly head in the social media world of today.
I call it Thud 2.0.
Instead of ‘hits’ the new Thud factor is “How many followers/fans” do you have. The bigger the better. People are flexing their social media muscle and getting out the measuring tape.
Of course, they are measuring the wrong thing.
At the Social Media Club Boston meeting Thursday last night, EMC, Vico Software, IDG and other companies showed us how they are measuring the right thing. Most impressive was Holly Allison. She handles public relations and marketing for Vico Software ( a company that makes software for commercial construction). She was showing how her efforts worked throughout the sales funnel and how they translated directly into sales. Yet she seemed apologetic for having such small followers or visits. She is selling to a much smaller B2B universe. The business results were impressive, so it doesn’t matter how big the bicep is…
The SMC session was an interesting contrast to a talk by Paul Gillin with the Mass Technology Leadership Council the day before. He exposed how many B2B executives with whom he speaks are still just looking at the Thud factor when it comes to social media. (Aside from a few that are showing a direct tie to more effective recruiting).
I plan to be writing much more on measurement in the coming months, but I wanted to start it off with a simple call to action. Resist Thud 2.0.
Make sure your social media efforts are tied to business results. Don’t become obsessed with followers. Look at how engaged they are. Do they click through to your Web site? Respond to tweets? Praise you to others? Purchase products?
The goal of social media for business should not be trying to see if you can be the most popular kid in school.
When talking about social media, the truism is that people need to try it for themselves to truly understand it. That much learning comes from trial and error.
Over the weekend, I was reading Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie. The book focuses on naval developments and politics of the later Victorian Age, leading up to World War I. One of the passages in the book struck a strange (and unexpected) chord with me.
Robert Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury (and three times Prime Minister of Great Britain) was one of the key political figures of the time.
He was a quintessential early adopter – having some of the first telephone lines and electric lights in all of England. Yet his approach to child rearing is what struck me.
Lord Salisbury believed in letting his children explore on their own to develop a passion for learning. Most notably he left one of his sons alone for a few days, and (as he wrote) “Having tried all the weapons in the gun-cupboard in succession – some in the riding room and some, he tells me, in his own room – and having failed to blow his fingers off, he has been driven to reading Sydney Smith’s Essays and studying Hogarth’s pictures.”
It’s an amusing, and slightly scary, anecdote to read. Now, to me any gun going off is a warning sign, let alone firearms being discharged in my house. Yet unfortunately, it too well describes the way many companies approach social media. Powerful guns (social media tools) are available to every corporate communications department. They think to truly engage in it you need to let people play with the guns first, and if nothing too bad happens, they can get down to the serious business of learning and fix things for the second attempt.
Schwartz is a strong advocate of everyone being engaged. But instead of seeing if people blow their fingers off, Schwartz is a proponent of rigorous training and guided engagement. Social media needs to be integrated at all levels of a company. Not something less experienced people play with and see what happens, hoping not to blow anything up too much. Experienced, senior level people need to be guiding the discussion and plans. That is how you will get the best results. If your agency or your company does not have senior level resources dedicated to social media engagement, training and strategy, you need to take a step back before any fingers get blown off.
I am not saying anything revolutionary here, but I was just stuck that the same philosophies that were used more than 100 years ago, are unfortunately all too prevalent today when it comes to social media.
Today in advance of its Chirp Conference, stories appeared about how Twitter was going to start offering promoted tweets in 2010. People are commenting - What does this mean? Has Twitter flown the coop? Will fan backlash cause it to soon be singing in the Choir Invisible?
I for one am glad to see at least one way in which Twitter is monetizing its service. Despite what some companies have done, you can only go so far without positive cash flow. What does this mean to the average user?
Probably not that much.
A random, I mean highly targeted, Tweet will be inserted into a user's Twitter stream (not sure what that will do to my multiple TweetDeck stream). Initially they will only appear as a result of Twitter search. Ads/sponsored tweets will be removed if they don’t generate much engagement.
For those that follow a lot of people (like I do), that sponsored tweet may fly right by. For those that follow a few folks (which appears to be the majority of people not in marketing, PR or social media) it might be an unexpected interruption. But people will gloss over it quickly.
Reports have it that only one ad will appear at a time. This may make it difficult for the niche marketers. While I have a passion for personal financial management software, I also love soda and coffee, and expect Starbucks to trump any PFM vendor in terms of volume and response, relegating the PFM ads, I mean sponsored tweets, to much less frequent appearance.
What are some key takeaways for consumer technology, green and B2B marketers and PR professionals.
This is a new and intriguing way to leverage the Twitter channel to drive some short-term engagement and customer response.
Sponsored tweets are not a replacement for authentic, two-way conversations. They may help attract a new audience in a flock, but the audience will not necessarily be loyal, remain engaged or start to follow you. The only way to do that is through interaction and providing value beyond a deal of the day.
The sponsored tweets could be a good complement to existing initiatives and crisis communications campaigns. (I can foresee a day when Toyota uses a sponsored Tweet in the future to spread the word about its response to customer concerns).
This will benefit the brands that have an established Twitter presence. Do not think of this as a solution for building a long-term, loyal, base. You need to reach out to folks to do that, not expect them to reach out to you.
This week I met a young woman who writes a popular blog about dining out in the Boston area. A sophomore at Harvard College, she has built a following for her blog among young foodies, which has generated a second following: PR agencies that represent restaurants.
Like many popular, grassroots bloggers, it seems that she has become a journalist almost by accident. She asked me a simple but important question. “If a PR person invites me to an event for their client,” she said, “Do I have to write something? And if I don’t, will they retaliate somehow?”
“No,” I said, “You don’t have to write anything. You are a journalist. You write only what you care about, what you think is compelling. That’s what journalists do. There is no quid pro quo. You don’t owe PR people anything if you attend their event.”
Typically, I said, when journalists take the time for a briefing or an event, the chances are good they’ll go on to write an article or maybe just a mention on their blog. That’s just being a productive journalist who uses his or her time wisely. And if you never write about their clients, eventually the PR people will stop inviting you to their events.
For me, with more than 20 years of PR experience, this conversation crystallized the shift in reporting created by the social media revolution. Just 10 years ago, the print and broadcast media employed thousands of journalists who graduated from journalism programs fiercely embracing their journalistic integrity. Our jobs as PR people was to bring them stories that were so compelling, so newsworthy, that the reporter would take an interview with our client and write a story.
Now the ranks of journalists are thinning while an army of bloggers has sprung up in their place. Each blogger makes up his or her rules as they go along. If they are lucky enough to become popular, bloggers may start to wonder, as she did, what, if anything, they owe to those friendly PR people who keep offering them story ideas and inviting them to fun events. And another question is even more important: what do bloggers owe to readers who rely on their opinions?
The fact is that independence is the source of a writer’s authority, credibility and power. PR simply mirrors that credibility. Every good PR person prizes the stories about their clients that are written by good, skeptical, independent journalists, whether they write for a popular blog or for The Wall Street Journal. Winning their good opinion is an achievement we value highly, and so do our clients.
So if you are a young blogger, here’s some advice from a PR pro who has arranged interviews with some of the smartest business journalists of our times. Do you owe anything to the PR people who invite you to events or send you interesting pitches? Nope, you do not owe us a thing. Nada. Zip. And that’s just as it should be.
Over the past couple of years, I've watched and wondered as many self-appointed social media gurus have worked to convince technology industry executives that they can market on the cheap, if not for free, using social media.
The idea is so appealing. Entrepreneurial companies are working with limited budgets, their marketing people are being asked to quantify ROI pretty quickly, and if the "I" is supposedly nothing and the "R" is greater than zero, they're in good shape, right? And let's be honest--social media is the newest thing and just sounds like more fun than the options.
What's becoming apparent is that using social media effectively requires a fair amount of knowledge about the industry at hand and more than a few minutes a day of time. In other words, the "I" can be substantial. The fact that many of the tools are free is great, but this doesn't obviate the fact that execs' time is, in fact, money and the people they might hire to use the tools charge for their time and expertise. And then there's the critical question of tangible returns and how they stack up versus returns from other marketing or customer support activities.
Late last week blogger Tony Faustino suggested, in "Successful Social Media Marketing Is Neither Free Nor Easy," that small business owners need to understand that there's not likely to be fast pay-off for using social media. Think several years, not a few months, he says. (I'd personally suggest that there's benefit to be had after several months of consistent use, but understand Mr. Faustino's point.)
"Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.
"Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What's more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives."
The article offers a few anecdotes of success and frustration. What I'd have liked it to suss out, however, is whether the companies that have met with some success with social media employed some strategy other than "interact with customers." I'd also be interested in learning how the small business owners are balancing social media with other forms of marketing and customer support. I assume social media isn't the only tool they're using.
At Schwartz, we generally advise companies that are starting to use social media that they need to work with it consistently for about six months before really starting to judge what it's doing for them. The next step is figuring out, based on early results, how much time and effort should go to social media compared to other customer outreach and support programs.
I suspect that the self-styled gurus are learning along with entrepreneurs and communicators that social media isn't free, that you can measure returns only if you defined a goal at the outset, and that those returns have to be stacked up against those of other marketing programs.
When I learned about this week's launch of a new review site for people, Unvarnished, I was reminded of squatters who reserved domain names for popular brands years ago, patiently waiting to cash in when companies paid to take ownership of domain names that some would argue should have naturally been theirs to claim in the first place.
The new website Unvarnished, which is being called the "Yelp for LinkedIn," allows anyone to create a profile and post an anonymous review about whoever they want. This has several implications, the first of which is how easily you could lose control of your own online identity and reputation if you don't put a stake in the ground by creating your own profile on websites like Unvarnished. The second concerns privacy; people who do not wish to have their information and profiles on social networks could then end up with an unsolicited or unwanted online profile -- positive or negative.
While reviews sites are nothing new, at first blush, Unvarnished appears to be more personal and spotlights the growing need for everyone to have their own personal PR plan that enables them to manage their online reputation much in the same way they manage their credit score and protect against identity theft. One company that identified this trend early and got an early start at helping consumers protect their only identity and persona is ReputationDefender. On the topic of Unvarnished, ReputationDefender founder Michael Fertik asserted last night on CBS news that "You have to take your online reputation seriously," something not a lot of people do. This notion is supported by a recent Microsoft study examining the hiring habits of HR Managers and the weight they place on job candidate's online activities and profiles.
In addition to an emerging market for tools that help you manage your online presence (including establishing a Google Alerts for your own name - something I would recommend for anyone in professional services ), there is also room for someone, or some company, to start educating people on responsible web posting. I am very curious to watch and see who takes the lead in this advocacy ...
There's no standard definition of public relations--it generally includes things like internal communications, media relations, investor relations, community relations, crisis communications and a several other marketing subdisciplines. But one near constant in PR is the need to communicate through someone else--a reporter, an analyst, a blogger, an employee who you'd like to be an ambassador of sorts to other people.
Over the past few years, the media relations world has had to adjust the way it reaches audiences or constituents because the media itself is under such pressure. As advertising revenues have dropped, magazines, newspapers and broadcast outlets have laid off journalists and pushed assignments out to cheaper freelancers, offered more syndicated content than original material or folded altogether.
[Two great and very different resources that can help you keep abreast of these changes are Paul Gillin's Newspaper Death Watch blog ("Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism") and, on Twitter, themediaisdying.]
The media is, as people who are good at commiserating often say, "going through a tough time." As a result, companies can't rely on reporters covering them the way they could in the past, particularly if they're using old tactics to communicate.
So how are forward-looking companies dealing with this bump in the road? Largely by understanding that success in media relations today means ability to create smart, oftentimes visually appealing content that journalists can use. This tends not to be a press release about your latest product upgrade; rather, it's insight about trends, timely expert commentary, a willingness to be controversial, graphics and video, and articles or blog posts that require minimal editing.
Companies, even their marketers, often don't have a feel for what, of all the things they could say or do, is going to capture the most media attention. It's the PR person's responsibility to advise on topics like this.
It's also the PR person's job to help produce content. When companies know they're going to want a lot of it, though--a blog created and constantly updated, extensive white papers written and so on--many healthy mid-sized and large businesses have turned over the past few years to that pool of journalists who have been laid off or chosen to leave their publications for more stable environments.
In a podcast with Fresh Ground, Steve Wildstrom, who covered technology for BusinessWeek for years and is one of the most widely known tech correspondents, talks about how some reporters have become "journalists in residence" blogging for companies, not about products, but about topics of "intense interest" to those companies. He happens to be blogging for NVIDIA. Other examples abound--check out my colleague Tim Whitman's recent run-down of who's employing some very prominent security industry journalists, including Ryan Naraine, Dennis Fisher, Rob Lemos, Brian Fonseca and Joris Evers.
Mr. Wildstrom said that he thought his work might meet with some resistance from former colleagues, but that's not been the case.
I was also reminded of the primacy of good content when I checked out the DK Books video on "The Future of Publishing" that's been making the rounds through March. "Content is more important than packaging," they say. DK is talking about the book industry, but when I look at the changes in tech and business journalism, I think DK's assessment is equally apt.
The intersection of PR and SEO for B2B tech and healthcare companies is My Current Obsession. Naturally, then, I'm fascinated by how Google works. We all know it's a Google world, right, but I care in particular about Google's treatment of news releases and content generated by the media.
I was interested, then, in last week's BusinessWire post on "Why Your Release Might Not Make it Into Google News." Not often, but every now and again a client doesn't find their release on Google News and they wonder what happened. Sometimes they ask us to "call Google and fix it." Tragically, we can't do that, so it's going to be easier to write the release in the first place to maximize its chances of getting picked up by Google News.
In the BusinessWire blog entry, Joseph Miller lists four reasons that releases may not be indexed by Google News: the release is too short (fewer than 125 words), too large (e.g., an earnings release with huge associated tables), appears to be fragmented into unrelated bullet points and, most important, the title is too long. Specifically, Mr. Miller says, a news release headline shouldn't exceed 22 words.
Really long press release titles should be avoided because they're clumsy, of course. Beyond that basic guideline, we've understood for some time the importance of prominently including keywords in press release headlines to improve SEO--they should appear toward the beginning of titles. It's useful to also know now that verbose headlines not only don't help SEO, they likely hurt it by causing releases to be tossed out by Google News altogether.
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the PR News Measurement Summit in Washington D.C. It was a gathering of a few hundred PR professionals interested in advancing PR measurement and sharing best practices for tying public relations to business results. The topics would be of interest to anyone in consumer, technology or cleantech public relations.
There were a half-dozen sessions, but there were a few themes that ran throughout them.
1) The Fallacy of AVE. Last year, the IPR and other professional PR organizations condemned ad value equivalency as a faulty measure of public relations success (and I cheered them on). It was a handy crutch in the past, but not something that measured the right results and did not have a good correlation to an organization's business results. I swear the room was never more energized than when people were criticizing this flawed metric that uses one industry's benchmarks to try to justify something completely different.
One of the presenters at the conference introduced a relatively new metric "Weighted Media Costs" I applaud the work the creators of this metric have done, but I still see it as AVE wearing a tuxedo. I have yet to be convinced otherwise. Anytime you use ad space cost, but remove the dollar signs so as to differentiate yourself from AVE, you are already starting down a very slippery slope.
2) Social media has permeated B2B, B2C and the government. Almost every presentation showcased how companies were engaging and measuring social media. From a personal point of view, it also validated the approach we take at Schwartz. The focus on tying PR to business results was used by all presenters- from the largest agencies to large multinationals. While there was some discussion of tactics and tools (Legistalker, Socialmention and Twiangulate seemed to be the most popular free tools) the focus was on getting meaningful measurement without breaking the bank.
3) Government and public affairs have embraced social media. While many of us know that at some level, and it was definitely proven in the latest Massachusetts Senate race, some of the metrics are telling:
64% of Congressional staff say “blogs are more useful than mainstream media for identifying future national political problems and debates.” (PR Week)
Congress has embraced multiple platforms:
96% have Facebook pages 79% have YouTube channels 41% have Twitter accounts
The key takeaway from the whole conference? One I have been championing for years. For public relations to continue to grow and be an essential element of an organization's business strategy, PR professionals need to relate their activities to business results.
eMarketer's got an informative post from Debra Aho Williamson this week, "Why Social Media Makes Sense for B2B Marketers." She presents some info on the different ways that B2B and B2C companies measure the success of social media programs. The top three for both are website traffic, brand awareness and engagement with prospects.
Here's where they diverge: B2Bs are more interested than B2Cs in using social media to generate a high volume of quality leads and, not so surprisingly, they're less likely to evaluate success by looking at a direct increase in revenue. I assume this is because every B2B marketer knows how difficult it normally is to draw a straight line from any single marketing activity to an actual sale.
To help generate those leads that B2Bs want to see, Williamson mentions a product from Optify. One that a number of technology PR clients at Schwartz have been using is from HubSpot. What's particularly interesting to me, as a PR person, is that HubSpot allows us to see which articles in the media (social or professional) drive traffic and, in turn, sales leads to clients' websites. That helps us fine tune technology PR programs over time.
Another current post I found valuable was from Chris Koch, who offered advice on "How to use social media for B2B." He talks about monitoring, engaging and managing. "Wait a minute," I thought when I read his post, "what about measuring?"
I had a hard time not seeing measurement on his list, so read back over his previous posts to see Koch had stated earlier that "[s]ocial media is notoriously difficult to measure and ROI is unclear. Therefore, social media should be used as a platform to drive traffic to the channels that are easier to measure and have proven ROI. There should also be a way to get customers and prospects from social media into systems for tracking and managing interactions (e.g., CRM)."
I agree with his first and third statements and am still thinking about the second. But clearly his observations and eMarketer's survey results are in line with each other: informed B2B marketers look to social media today for traffic and leads, but not--yet--ROI.
Measurement techniques and the necessary link between social media and CRM or marketing automation systems haven't kept pace with B2Bs' use of social media. Looking at increases in traffic and leads, though, it's natural to expect quantifiable returns to soon become clear.
There was a lot that went on today at SxSW, but it all seemed to revolve around Twitter. From @Ev’s keynote introducing @anywhere to panels, hallway discussions and hordes of techies tweeting while dancing and singing at TechKaraoke.
Twitter does a good job of explaining the new service, but basically it allows any site to tag content to Twitter that let’ people follow feeds from the site (or people mentioned on the site) without leaving the site. It looks cool, but it did not blow the audience away. I see any savvy consumer technology or B2B public relations professional who is creating content making use of it eventually in the content they create for their brands.
The panel after the keynote was moderated by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) and had a number of opinionated, passionate and interesting social media personalities, including @scobleizer and @pistachio.
They basically highlighted their favorite Twitter tools. I thought some of them might be of interest to our readers, so I wanted to highlight a few.
Oneforty.com – Basically, @pistachio’s Twitter App Store, complete with rankings and reviews. Spend time there if you haven’t already.
Friend or Follow – Lets you see who you are following who isn’t following you (TwitterKarma)
For corporate PR folks working to manager a Twitter stream (and have analytics) there are CoTweet.Hootsuite or Tweetriver
The most interesting panel of the entire show (for me at least) happened at 5:00 p.m. in a remote hotel. During the 90 minutes, Citibank revealed the process and procedures they used to secure approval for social media engagement in a heavily regulated environment. I will write more on it later, for it is worth a blog post on its own.
Today was my last day at SxSW. It lived up to the promise. Great sessions, good people and thought provoking ideas. The dominant themes of the conference were mobility, connectivity and crowdsourcing (with a very focused financial services minor). Over the next few weeks I will share additional insights on this blog. There is a lot that I didn’t cover, but hopefully the snapshots over the past few days will give our readers some useful insight. I will be digesting what I learned at the show in the weeks to come.
The day started off with a great Social Media Breakfast Austin/SxSW where I had a chance to hang out with a few hundred other social media professionals. I saw some old friends and met a few new people with some really interesting companies. I ended up reconnecting with many of them at the Microsoft party later in the evening.
Compared to the first two days of the SxSW, the panels were interesting, but not as strong.
The first panel I attended took a look at the use of applications for extending the brand. The main takeaways were the iPhone is now the dominant brand platform, eclipsing Facebook (for the company has more control). The general consensus from the audience and panel ties into the theme I raised yesterday in my banking recap: The future is mobile. They also emphasized the brand needs to take a backseat in the application or consumers won’t stay engaged.
One if the most interesting points in the session was the debate over the use of apps for engaging consumers. The general consensus is one most consumer technology marketing people have heard for years “The days of brands doing traditional marketing are gone. They need to engage customers in social dialogue and provide utility, or they won’t have lasting relationship.”
A strong counterargument that was advanced speaks for itself “I like toothpaste, but don’t want to have a two way conversation with it.”
That being said, what Charmin has done with mothers rating bathrooms shows the type of discussions one can have for common household items.
The second panel I attended was hosted by Scott Kirsner and dealt with effective ways to build a cult (or Facebook and Twitter followers…your choice). While there was little earth-shattering about the discussion, it reinforced that building a community usually takes time, it requires constantly refreshed new content and it has to *be* a community. Talking to customers does not draw a crowd. Talking *with* customers draws a crowd. The filmmaker he interviewed advocated letting fans be part of the process. Engage them. They them use your content, have fun with it and create new things. They will help promote your movie (or software) much more if they feel a sense of some ownership. The final important point was that if your content isn’t embeddable, it’s like you are leaving on a roadtrip without any gas.
Finally I attended a session with Peter Molyneux, one of the most influential game designers of the past 30 years. I went both because I have worked with many game companies and because the topic intrigued me – How can videogames speak to the heart? I thought there are lessons that could be applied to public relations and marketing. To my surprise, I think I was the only non-filmmaker or game designer in the room.
The first thing Molyneux said tied back to the first panel on mobile apps and the theme that emerged today. Movies can never engage like games. Movies want flaccid robots. Think about that in terms of traditional public relations or marketing, and now how PR has evolved. By making consumers’ voices heard, knowing they have a stake in your brand, companies can create an emotional connection they could never create through shouting.
So the question is, how are we as public relations professionals working to create that connection every day?
Were there other panels I missed? Let me know what you think about SxSW.
SxSW today for me was all about something near and dear to my heart (and many of my clients) banking and payments. I managed to carve out enough time to attend three banking sessions. The sessions ran the gamut from tips for personal finance to the future of banking and the role of geeks in finance.
There a few lessons any financial services technology company should carve in stone, but these rules also apply to consumer technology and other markets.
Consumers are dead. (or at least dying). They are evolving into active participants. They don’t want to pick from a menu, or be given one choice, they want to be empowered. Smart banks and financial technology companies are empowering consumers and giving them actionable advice and data.
Financial services UI (user interfaces) need a revamp. I know Mint.com has done it, as has my client Fiserv. Both are putting great emphasis on this. I see it as another variation on death by PowerPoint. Having tons of data can be great, but you need quick, actionable intelligence to make the right decision.
At first the second session was being bit too anti-bank. Banks serve a role, and all agree banks are essential. The challenge is many FIs are risking being disintermediated by third-party developers that don’t work with the bank. That’s what all the panelists in the second session we championing, so banks should pay attention and work on innovation within their services and offerings.
Mint.com has been very successful to date, and its executives were featured on two panels. There were a few key points I thought were of interest:
Mint.com built its following by hanging out where the consumers are, rather than creating their own community. They find it more effective. I believe both have their place, but it ties back into the fundamental premise of successful social media engagement – strategy before social.
Mint also does not buy PPC, they have found creating short videos and making them widely available to be most effective. Their consumers prefer that type of activity, and it lets them provide a richer (no pun intended), more detailed experience.
The consensus in multiple panels was the future of banking is mobile. But mobile information is just the first step, financial institutions need to focus on transactional capabilities, as well as advice and counsel. Getting tailored advice on your cell phone is much more valuable. That’s a message every good marketer knows – tailored, relevant and useful information engenders more loyalty.
Consumers need to pay attention as well. According to the speaker in the first session, Ramit Sethi, consumers are fundamentally delusional when it comes to money: 20% of people polled think they will get rich via the lottery and 3% though an insurance settlement.
While yesterday was all about the human network, Day 2 of SxSW was about the evolving financial network. There are a lot of interesting things on the horizon. As a final note, if you haven’t checked out CreditKarma yet, you should. A very interesting site that brings a lot of value to helping consumers improve their credit score.
It’s a good thing I am a morning person and registered early, as this line demonstrates. Many of the folks in the line missed the first sessions. (This is the line to get into the exhibit hall to register)
The first session at SxSW dealt with social media marketing, and while it covered many thing I already knew, there were a number of interesting insights to take from it. One of the points the speakers (Chris Winfield and Tony Adam) made is one I have been making for years – Web 1.0 (forums) still matter. The power of niche social media sites and networks can trump the power of Digg, Facebook and others. You eliminate much of the chaff and keep just the wheat.
Two key things I was reminded of in the session that I thought might be of interest to technology public relations pros:
When trying to find the most popular niche boards, http://rankings.big-boards.com/ is a good place to start.
Being engaged (without spamming) on Yahoo! Answers can also advance thought leadership campaigns.
The second session, with Brian Solis talking about the themes in his new book, Engage, was a great session packed with good advice. A lot of it was a positive reaffirmation of what many companies engaging in social media are already doing, but there were some new ways of thinking about things that he drove home. He seems to have taken the Tipping Point categories and expanded on them to identify the types of people that you tend to interact with on social networks, and how you can impact their hearts and minds. This has some intriguing implications and is with thinking about much more than most people do.
He also reinforced a point from the first session. The networks don’t matter, the channels will change, it’s the human network that we are all a part of that is truly driving and advancing the social media change and the impact it is having on business. Companies that enter the network in the right way can have a significant impact. Those that do not, may do OK, but will never excel.
He also drove home a point Schwartz’s president, Bryan Scanlon, has been making quite a bit recently - listening and talking aren’t enough. You need content to drive the discussion. Every company is now its own CNN, and they need to promote what they do, listen, and interact. They can’t rely on the media to give them pre-made programs (articles) anymore. There is much more to the channel than their ever was and technology, consumer, green, and healthcare PR pros need to pay attention.
Some other elements on which I will expound in more detail in later posts include:
Most social networks are matriarchies
The social compass is a good guide to developing a coherent and effective social media strategy
Social media engagement fails if there is not a human in some way associated with the brand
B2B Tech companies were the first to adopt social media with developer forums. There are benefits many B2B tech companies are overlooking.
Banks and other location based venues should look at foursquare. Now 1500 venues are giving rewards to their mayors and driving traffic and deeper relationships.
Check back tomorrow for more highlights from SxSW.
If you are reading this and at the conference, what were some of the best lessons you learned today?
SxSW starts today, and there will be five days full of panels, discussions and debates of interest to technology and consumer technology companies, social media and public relations professionals. I checked in this morning, and found out SxSW is not really a morning crowd...
I will be live tweeting and blogging regularly from some of the most interesting panels and sessions. What struck me as I was perusing the program is the amount of attention being given to online banking and the future of finance. There are about a half dozen programs on the topic.
So check in at the Crossroads throughout the weekend for my updates and thoughts on this dynamic gathering.
Traditional and social media relations are connected and shouldn't be viewed as "either/or," Schwartz Communications President Bryan Scanlon says in a new video interview with PRWeek.
He describes how the agency, which serves established and entrepreneurial businesses in industries that include healthcare, technology, cleantech and professional services, performed over the past year and notes that our diversification across industries, lack of reliance of a handful of big clients for revenue, and ability to span social and traditional media at a time when many agencies push one over the other were sources of strength in 2009.
Bryan also answers questions about agency and client PR workloads in 2010 and notes that the recession has forced both ends of the PR team to focus on the highest value activities--those that help bring sales leads, drive website visits and close sales.
On Wednesday I had the pleasure of participating on a webcast panel with two other social media experts, Paul Gillin, the journalist, former IDG Editor and social media maven, and Amy Black, senior marketing communications manger at Kadient.
The webcast idea came from a conversation I had with fellow Schwartz employees in September 2009, when I lamented that numerous discussions with my clients about the role of social media in their PR programs had left me dismayed. Not because the clients didn't want social media in their programs; indeed, they understood our counsel---social media must be a part of any marketing and PR campaign when the people clients are trying to reach are online. It certainly is a part of the PR strategies that we create here at Schwartz.
The problem is the hype around social media had created unrealistic expectations. Many expect it's kind of like flipping on the light switch. Create some YouTube videos, and witness the viral boom. Start a blog, and hopefully your web servers can handle the resulting increase in traffic.
I thought discussing a few common social media myths would be a refreshing way to investigate the proper role of social media within PR programs. Wednesday's webinar is available on the PR Week website; Schwartz teamed up with PR Week to help promote the discussion.
The webinar was a panel, and any panel is only as good as its participants. Paul Gillin and Amy Black were fantastic. Hopefully you will have a chance to watch the webinar; also, Schwartz released a white paper that discusses the myths exposed during the panel discussion. You can download the white paper right from the Schwartz website.
At the same time, what's great about participating in a social media webinar is witnessing the reaction to the webinar---on social media. Searching for the hashtag #prwwebcast shows the discussion that ensued mainly while the webinar was in progress. Some interesting takeaways from the Twitter "gallery":
-- Content may be king, but interaction defines social media. @datingdad tweets that "without conversation, [content creation] is just broadcasting." It's a very important point. We talked on the webinar about the need to create content, given the reducing numbers of professional journalists. However, creating the content is one thing, getting it to the audiences that matter to a given company is equally as important.
-- Social media is a marathon. @sarahweddle notes how there are "no overnight successes." Just like many other marketing functions, repetition and ongoing programs are the key to long-term success from a social media program. Amy Black also described on the webinar how a social media campaign can create content that fuels many other programs. A YouTube video she created includes a song that is now the hold music for Amy's corporate phone system.
-- Mapping a company's level of social media involvement to their corporate culture. Paul Gillin noted how many companies have numerous internal resources capable of creating content for social media. @sarahweddle says that "companies have to decide how social they want to be." At Schwartz, we begin our engagements by mapping the level of social media involvement to a company's culture and the industry they are in. It's quite effective. @sarahweddle continues in her tweet "...but there should always be some level of involvement."
Special thanks to Paul and Amy for agreeing to participate in the webinar.
Technology companies that don't blog but know they should often ask where, exactly, they should blog. Should it be a part of the corporate website or kept separate on a platform like TypePad or Blogger?
Here are the basic factors that I take into account when I get this query:
- Most blogs, and hopefully all of those run by companies, have clear themes. If the general topics that the blog explores are in line with the messages that the business is trying to disseminate, it makes a lot of sense to have the blog on the company website and not hosted somewhere else. Readers will be able to easily jump from your blog to other resources that live on your website and vice versa.
- Plus, if you know you've got great stuff to say and think others might even want to link to your blog, having those inbound links pointing to your website and not to a site like TypePad should, over time, help elevate your site in the eyes of search engines. That's not likely to be the case immediately, but if you go with a blogging platform now--maybe you think it'll be more convenient--and figure you'll move your posts over to your company's website later, don't expect hard-earned links to follow you.
On the other hand, there are perfectly good reasons for separating the company website and blog:
- If your blog will focus on a brand that you're marketing to a different audience than the group of people who typically visit your website, you may do well to have the blog separate from the website and just link to one from the other. In this case, you may benefit (from branding and SEO standpoints) from being able to choose a different domain name and from being able to promote two distinct information resources. This arrangement makes sense if a company is trying to raise awareness of a medical condition, for example, but not promote its own products. It may also be the best course if an open source project has a large and active community apart from the project's corporate sponsor.
- Perhaps people from outside of your company regularly contribute to your blog and need to make clear that they're not too closely affiliated with the business. A situation such as this, where the blog may be viewed as a community resource--albeit one funded and largely driven by one vendor--may also be a good candidate for being hosted separately from the corporate site.
- If the blog isn't a company resource per se, but is really the CEO's or CTO's latest thoughts on a range of topics, it's likely best to host the blog elsewhere and just link to it from the company website.
In sum, I think the blog is best housed in the corporate website for the convenience of readers and to support SEO and branding unless the company intends the blog for a slice of its normal audience, has a specific need to separate brands or wants to underscore that an exec's musings are purely his or her own.
If your company is starting to use social media, the next question you might ask is “Who should own social media in the organization?” This isn’t straightforward and there are different answers depending on the company and what you’re selling. You might consider each area of your organization to determine how social media can open lines of communication, solve problems, improve efficiencies, reduce costs and/or help to generate more revenue.
This assumes that someone must own your social media program, and I agree with that. I don't think an organized, coordinated and valuable social media program can happen organically. There are many people who generate content and foster it along, but like any other large communications effort in an organization, it needs a head of state — someone to set the tone, make the plans and take the plans to the masses.
According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, PR leads digital communications at 51% of organizations, while Marketing leads 40.5% of the time. The report was produced by iPressroom, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA to help marketing professionals better understand and appreciate how organizations are integrating online communications into their business practices. Over the course of a six-week period during spring 2009, they surveyed 278 public relations, marketing and human resources professionals to identify trends regarding their approaches to social media.
One finding, as noted above, is that PR leads social media in most organizations. This makes sense since most social media activities revolve around communicating with external audiences and producing content. If your social media programs call for audience targeting, message strategy and a regular flow of content and interaction with external audiences, PR is best equipped to deal with these programs.
I also think different departments can take ownership of a program or process, particularly if the goal involves direct customer interaction and user forums. For example, the customer support department might use Twitter to respond to common support issues. Facebook is a useful took for the product management department to gather feedback on a beta product or to push out announcements.
The legal department should be involved at some level for social media outreach. Some may argue that legal isn’t required but I believe that it is due to the transparent nature of social media, and how it can expose a company. The company should decide on the best ways to use social media from a business perspective, while staying in the confines of legal and HR best practices. For example, are there limitations on what the company and its employees can/cannot say? What if an employee starts sounding off about a client, and the client sues? What if an employee discloses proprietary information? Can we post trademarked or copyrighted material? The company needs to know what to do in those cases, create policies and understand how to enforce the policies.
According to the study, the most common areas in which PR leads digital communications are blogging, microblogging and social networking. Each organization knows best which people and departments are most likely to find success leading social media programs, so I think the structure will vary depending on what types of programs you’re going to conduct. On the other hand, if your company has a Twitter handle, you can assign a person or group of people to tweet from that handle. But at the same time, you can also encourage employees to Tweet on their own on behalf of the company and personalize the medium that much more.
Another interesting finding was that small to medium-sized enterprises are significantly ahead of larger organizations when it comes to adopting Twitter (64% versus 47%) and social networking (74% adoption versus 38%), but not blogging, which is now squarely in the large organization’s repertoire.
Social media is growing in importance as way to communicate to your diverse audiences. How to employ social media varies greatly by company. There is no formula and sometimes it takes some trial and error. However, in order to get into the game, it can’t be an aside or done in your spare time. Rather, you must consider it a core discipline, such as product development and marketing, and be managed by dedicated resources.
This week, I experienced the best and the worst that social media has to offer. One brand committed an epic FAIL, while another drove home some overlooked points and won respect (and likely customers).
First, let's look at a case study in what not to do. By now, most people have experienced Twitter auto responses when they start following someone. I tend to advise my clients to not use them. Twitter is about personal engagement. A canned response is anything but personal, or engaging.
Yet yesterday, I received an autoresponse that my colleague Tom Parnell stated "could be the textbook example of "what not to do." I agree. While I will not reveal the name of the offender, the message has to be shared.
"Hey there {firstname}, thanks for the follow! I really appreciate it! I can't wait to visit {location} and meet up with you."
There are so many things wrong with this, but beyond the failed script - why would anyone think a Twitter follow is an invitation to visit me in person? Make sure your response is authentic appropriate.
Remembering Old School
On a more positive note, Herb Connolly Acura of Framingham, Mass., is an example of a company that did something very right. Too often in the social media world people focus on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. They forget the Web 1.0 communities that brought people together and still do - listservs and message boards.
Chris Connolly, the president of Herb Connolly Acura of Framingham is not someone who overlooks these communications channels. Framingham has three very active listservs. Framingham is one of the largest towns in the U.S. (66,000 people) and there are more than 1,200 subscribers to the listserv (about 2% of the residents subscribe - a small but engaged group).
Yesterday, a subscriber posted a complaint about the prices at the Connolly dealership and said that people could get the same service for lesser prices at independent mechanics around town. People in Framingham listen to recommendations on this listserv and the wiki, so this type of complaint could have a negative effect.
Chris Connolly's responded directly to the customer complaint. It was prompt, professional, addressed concerns and also highlighted the benefits of the service. (Following is the text used with Chris's permission - I just removed some names.)
"I've seen the messages posted about our prices and our services earlier. I will say that we are always very conscientious about our pricing for our work performed. We constantly check the market against other dealerships and independent facilities. I don't think it's fair to compare the price of services performed when the worked performed is not the same. I know that [X] does not have an alignment rack at their shop. Whenever we perform a 30,000 mile service we also perform a four wheel alignment. That is $99.95, so our prices were actually very comparable, within $20, according to [consumer] when that is taken into account.
"As for the tire we always suggest factory recommended tires. We offer the same brand and the very same speed rating as the vehicle has on it when it's purchased new. Again we're very competitive when we price our tires and all of our tires come with road hazard protection, so if you damage it hitting a pot hole or something else in or next to the road, you can bring it back to us and we'll replace it for free. Of course we can always offer anyone a cheaper option, something that isn't factory recommended, as many of the tires stores do today.
"We always wash, wax and vacuum every vehicle that comes in for any service, including an oil change, for free. We check for any service bulletin that might have been sent out about your vehicle, offer free loaner cars or a shuttle ride to home or work. We also have free Wi-Fi in our waiting areas at anyone of our dealerships. If you find your vehicle is ever returned dirty or the work is incomplete or you feel like you didn't get your money's worth for any of our work, then I want to know about it. Please reach out to me at [cconnolly at herbconnolly dot com] and let me know. We want to take care of your car and make sure that you are happy and we've exceeded your expectations every time you visit."
To me that is a textbook response and one that needs to be applauded. It was on message, addressed the major concerns and was customized.
(Note: I am not a Herb Connolly customer and have never been there. This is not an endorsement of the service or the dealer.)
Companies and communications professionals need to remember - even a customer complaint is a chance to win more customers. And the old channels can't be forgotten.
Social media is an integral part of many companies' marketing programs today. Tech companies in particular no longer view social media as optional or an experiment; rather, it's a core element of their outreach to customers, partners, employees and other constituents. Naturally, companies are starting to think about how to measure social media's impact.
On Tuesday, February 2, Katie Delahaye Paine will speak at a Mass Technology Leadership Council breakfast seminar on measuring social media campaigns. The author of All You Need to Know About Measuring Social Media and the Complete How-To Guide to Measuring Social Media, Ms. Paine is widely known for her expertise in measuring PR, social media, media relations, public affairs, internal communications and blogs.
The February 2 event runs from 8:00-10:00 a.m. at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center located at 1000 Winter Street in Waltham, Mass. Breakfast starts at 7:30 a.m. You can register here.
Schwartz is a sponsor of Mass TLC's social media group. We look forward to seeing you there.
I'm a technology PR person and, as you'd expect, I read a lot. Most days, however, I don't have time to look at blogs that won't give me readily usable information. So lately I've been sorting out the stuff I really must read from sites that provide food for thought, but are maybe a little more academic or philosophical.
I thought I'd share a short list of blogs that I believe consistently give readers relevant, immediately usable information about B2B marketing and PR.
1. Social Media B2B--I recommend this one to clients every time I get the chance. One or two posts a day, many with an eye toward lead generation. This blog's total devotion to B2B is impressive; I think they know their audience well.
2. Journalistics--Practical insight into how media relations is really practiced today. (And no, it doesn't begin with a Vocus or Cision list.) If I were managing a PR agency or in-house program, I'd read this to help gauge whether my team was keeping pace with changes in the media and in PR.
3. B2B Ideas@Work Blog--If you like HubSpot and the concept of inbound marketing, as do a number of Schwartz clients, you'll be interested in this ad agency's blog.
4. CK's Blog--Help for traditional marketers who need a guide on getting going with social media and making it integral to their programs.
5. Social Media Today--Essential (yes, really) compilation of posts on all aspects of social media from dozens of bloggers. Theory plus execution ... what could be better?
Today the citizens of Massachusetts are electing a new Senator. The race has garnered national headlines, and those of us living in Massachusetts have been deluged with ads, calls and editorials for the past few weeks.
We are not taking a position on the election or either candidate, but wanted to answer a simple question - which candidate is using social media to create the most buzz? This question popped into my head when I noticed Scott Brown was trending on Twitter but Martha Coakley was not.
Looking at overall social media engagement, Scott Brown is creating about 46% greater discussion volume than Martha Coakley over the past week. Although it is interesting to note how the discussion spikes are eerily parallel. No one candidate has created discussion without the other.
When we narrow it to Twitter, Scott Brown and his supporters seem to be using the channel more effectively, with 182% greater volume than Martha Coakley.
I also looked at tonality (quickly) and although the tool was automated (and therefore suspect) both candidates were receiving about 28% positive coverage. Scott Brown was receiving 6% more negative coverage than Coakley.
How will this translate into success at the polls? We will find out tonight at 8:00 p.m.
Last night, I read a great blog post from @sixstringsnc. He called out some interesting data from a recent research report from the MarketingProfs on the "State of social media marketing."
There are a number of interesting, useful and compelling stats, and a few very disheartening numbers as well.
I won't rehash his post, he does a great job here.
But I wanted to call out a few things that might be of interest to our readers:
1) The key thing which didn't seem to be mentioned is one that is obvious, but needs to be said. The data is great, but it is essential that you first take a strategic approach to social media and ask yourself - do these channels and campaigns work for you? Just because 6% of corporate twitters have 2000+ friends, you still need to ask if Facebook is the right channel. I talked about it recently here.
2) That being said, one of the most chilling stats was that only 50% of companies use Twitter to monitor for problems in real time. Since a month after Twitter launched, I have been calling it one of the best tools for "free business intelligence." It doesn't matter if you are an active Twitterer or not, you need to listen. Corporate communications professionals need to monitor all channels. I hope to see this number grow dramatically over the next year.
Why? A few years ago, one of my clients was acquired and some rumors started spreading about them via Twitter. I called my client, confirmed they weren't true and we responded within minutes. Our tweets were re-tweeted, and a potentially very negative story was stopped dead in its tracks before it could hit the blogosphere or mainstream media. If we weren't monitoring in real time, that story could have exploded.
3) Only 22% of companies contacted people that had negative things to say about their company on Twitter. So basically, only 50% of those companies monitoring Twitter use it for any sort of "crisis" communications. The rest just take note of the problems and don't respond. These companies are missing out on a great, low-cost opportunity to build deeper relationships with their customers and address negative issues before they spread.
I love PBS and how they have used Twitter to address customer concerns (Unlike Macy's that just seems oblivious to complaints on Twitter). I blogged about it here, but when I expressed discontent over some programming, I had a response from PBS within hours. And the response changed my mind.
What other elements do you find interesting from the study?
Tom Foremski, one of the more thoughtful observers of interactions between PR people and journalists, has a couple of fascinating recent posts on "the killer pitch." In the first, he says that because some reporters' compensation is based on page views, the killer pitch would be the PR person's claim that they can drive traffic to the journalist's website. He goes on to say that PR people don't really know how to do this.
"Well, that's not entirely correct," I thought--PR people understand that clicks matter and we aren't completely unable to influence them now and then. Certainly, we've had people comment, and sound pretty happy, I might add, when they've enjoyed a boost in traffic after a company links to a favorable article. So as I read the first post, I thought, "okay, I may personally not have enormous ability to pump up a story that makes my client look good, but I know how to advise the client on promoting it, which can have the same result."
Then, in a follow-on post, Mr. Foremski puts a finer point on the question and wonders whether agencies can "reliably drive traffic to specific stories." This idea is more focused and far more interesting.
If journalists are evaluated based on page views and, at the same time, PR people create a repeatable approach to promoting the stories their clients like, and do so in a way that affects the reporter/blogger's bottom line, the media's role as a critical observer of an issue or industry can't help but be negatively impacted. (You really want to read the original posts and comments.)
It's a big topic to consider. When I initially read this, I thought that the question of "the killer pitch" was a timely twist on questionable but sadly common tactics like trying to buy positive editoral coverage by advertising or sponsoring publications' conferences, currying favor by giving select reporters exclusives on news items that you know more than just one would find appealing and--the PR equivalent of holding your breath until you turn blue in the face--not communicating with reporters who don't see eye to eye with your client.
However, the issue that Mr. Foremski describes is new. The question is what happens when the reporter covers his or her industry carefully and thoroughly, with an eye to clicks but not primarily motivated by them, but companies become adept at elevating the prominence of coverage they find most flattering. Obviously, companies will effectively hide from search engines coverage that's negtive or even just balanced.
It seems to me that it would take more than a few submissions to Digg and some tweets to do the trick, but when I check out one client's Twitter following of a couple thousand and then consider that some of those people are active re-tweeters of links to our news coverage, I wonder whether the scenario that Mr. Foremski is talking about might really come to pass. In particular, I can envision it in segments of the tech industry that have relatively few reporters left.
Really, it's the flip side of what some companies already do when they try to bury a particularly bad article by stepping up the pace of their own news releases for a few months, thus loading down search engines with fresher content.
At any rate, Mr. Foremski's posts are the most interesting I've read so far this week.
Over the past week, we have had two of the biggest consumer shopping events of the past year - Black Friday and CyberMonday. The media buzz about each of these artificial shopping holidays has been enormous. That caused me to ask - who won the shopping PR war, Black Friday or Cyber Monday? (Note: Schwartz has some clients that capitalized on one or both of these shopping events).
While it seemed obvious to me that Black Friday would dominate traditional media (who can resist a live shot of the lines at 3 a.m., pushing and shoving?) - what would be the case in the social media world, where there was likely a bias towards online shopping?
Last night, I used Radian 6 to conduct a quick audit. The results were surprising. Black Friday crushed CyberMonday when it came to the amount of discussion in the social media world (blogs, Twitter, etc.). The chart below tells the story:
Overall social media coverage volumes for Black Friday were much greater than CyberMonday (and the spike around the actual day was much higher as well). Aggregating data, Black Friday has 84% of the overall share of voice, with CyberMonday securing 16% (482,000 to 95,000).
That is interesting and shows that Black Friday dominated the discussion. But how did it do with key message penetration?
When it comes to promoting deals and discounts, retailers were more effective overall with CyberMonday compared to Black Friday.
Overall, 45% of CyberMonday coverage highlighted deals or discounts, while just 31% of the coverage of Black Friday highlighted deals or discounts. Much of the rest of the coverage was around opening times, lines, etc.
The channels used to communicate the deals were interesting.
Fully one in four deals were communicated via Twitter. With 52% of Black Friday Deals and 64% of Cyber Monday deals communicated on blogs.
What conclusions can we take from this?
1) Both Cyber Monday and Black Friday are very successful when it comes to generating discussion in the social media space, although Black Friday coverage was overwhelmingly dominant.
2) Retailers do a relatively good job communicating deals around both events, although as a percentage, retailers do a better job around CyberMonday.
3) Traditional and social/online work well together in retail, just like they do in public relations.
Note: For my fellow measurement purists. Variant spellings of both BlackFriday and Cyber Monday were used to catch as much as possible.
The Butterball Turkey hot line scene from "The West Wing" is one of my all-time favorites.
Talk about a promotion homerun. The President of the United States (albeit fictional) is calling your hotline.
I always thought that the Butterball Turkey hot line was a phenomenal marketing idea. Certainly Butterball is providing a service, but no doubt the return Butterball has received from a branding perspective far outweighs the cost.
I wondered, has Butterball expanded the Turkey hot line concept onto the Web?
With a few clicks, I found a special Turkey Talk-Line(R) website and a unique hotline email address. I also noticed that Butterball provides biographies on each of their hotline experts. That's a nice touch. The hot line seeks to make the Butterball brand more human, and putting faces and bios on the website only accentuates this quality. I do wonder, however, if the hotline experts actually wear their blue aprons when they stand at the ready to answer phones.
I was initially disappointed not to find a special Butterball Talk-Line Twitter account. Butterball has an account, but not the Talk-Line. On reflection, though, Twitter might not be the best channel for fielding Turkey cooking questions. Why would you go to Twitter if you can pick up the phone or write an email?
I also noticed that the Talk-Line does have a mobile strategy. You can text the word "Turkey" to 36888 and get weekly Turkey cooking tips. They even say on the site that there's a maximum of three text messages per week during the peak turkey-cooking period of the year, in case one is worried about their phones buzzing too many times.
Overall, and not surprisingly, Butterball has nicely enhanced its Talk-Line service with the web and emerging social media channels. Would today's "West Wing" episode have the President firing off an email instead of picking up the phone? While I love the option, the original West Wing scene is just too funny to change.
From all of us at Schwartz, we wish you and your family a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!
Last week analyst Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research led off a social media roundtable hosted by Schwartz Communications in our Boston office and moderated by agency vice president John Moran. The roundtable also included three marketers from high tech and healthcare companies who shared their real world experiences implementing social media techniques integrated with their PR programs.
Social media is very real and marketers need to pay attention to it. According to Corcoran, four out of five online Americans now participate in social media each month. While marketers are optimistic about social media, Forrester found that it’s still only a fraction of budgets, with three-quarters of marketers budgeting $100,000 or less to social media marketing annually.
Having said all this, Corcoran cautioned against “Shiny Object Syndrome” when thinking about social media. If you’ve told your agency, “We need a social media program,” without knowing exactly how social media will help you meet your marketing goals, you’ve been infected with Shiny Object Syndrome – the pursuit of social media because it’s the latest marketing buzzword.
Corcoran advised that marketers resist Shiny Object Syndrome and instead assess their needs so they can adopt social media approaches that make sense. He recommended an approach he calls POST:
People – Assess your customers’ social activities
Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change as you engage in social media
Technology – Decide which social technologies to use
He also advised that marketers start small with social media and get some successes under their belts before expanding into new areas. At the same time, recognize that social media is a long-term strategy, not a campaign that you can turn on and off.
Andrew Levitt, founder and CEO of HealthTalker, recommended that marketers start with a strategy, not a social media strategy. Set specific goals and objectives. If a community exists where you can join the conversation, then join in, but if not, create your own.
Mary Pietrowski, director of consumer & e-marketing for Hologic, another Schwartz client, showed a great example of building community. Hologic created Voices of Mammosite to educate women about the advantages of partial breast irradiation as a treatment for breast cancer. The videos on the site profile women who’ve survived breast cancer, speaking directly to other women about their experiences. It’s a fascinating site and an award-winning social media program.
Matt Hines, marketing communications manager at CoreSecurity, brought a B2B perspective to the round table. Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn are all key technologies that have helped CoreSecurity engage with customers and prospects. For instance, he noted that blogs are a great medium when you want to comment about major news in your market, like the acquisition of a competitor, without formally issuing a release.
Click here to download a PDF file of the presentations given by our speakers. Browse through the Schwartz blogs for more ideas about how to use social media in your PR program at www.schwartz-pr.com/blogs.
Let me start out by saying there's no question that social media has a place in technology PR and any company should look to their tech PR agency for social media expertise. We advise all of our clients about social media. Depending on the audience they are trying to reach and the message they would like to promote, we incorporate appropriate social media tactics into our efforts.
A side project I have been working on is to determine how social media PR can stand on its own---What results can one expect from purely social media tactics?
One premise I can investigate fairly easily---but that is not immediately apparent in conversations I have with colleagues---is that social media is driven in a major way by coverage that is written by professional journalists. Consider the launch of Microsoft Windows 7. Not sure what day Microsoft actually made the announcement? One way to find out is to evaluate social media coverage of Microsoft over the past month.
I created the chart below using Radian6, a social media monitoring tool that Schwartz is now using quite regularly. The red line charts, on an ongoing basis, social media coverage of "Microsoft" and "7." Can you guess, based on this chart, when Microsoft issued the press release announcing Windows 7, and saw the corresponding wave of coverage about the new O/S?
The blue line represents social media coverage that included a link, meaning the coverage was inspired by something else that was written. I am making a big assumption that most of those links refer to media coverage. Don't worry, my research is just starting, and I plan to investigate this more thoroughly.
A few things strike me about this graph. The social media coverage that refers to something (presumably coverage by professional journalists) tracks nearly identical to the overall social media coverage for Microsoft. This would suggest a direct link between coverage by journalists and social media placements. Also, you will notice that there was no uptick in social media activity after the Windows 7 launch. Social media coverage continued to track to coverage by journalists. And, in fact, you will see that social media activity has recently significantly tailed off.
If social media is an animal to itself, why didn't social media coverage continue to rise after the news came out? Where's the viral effect?
Again, there's no question social media is important to tech PR. There are campaigns Schwartz has led where social media proved highly effective in creating visibility while contacting journalists proved futile. It depends on what a company is trying to promote and the audience they are trying to reach. At the same time, the process of contacting reporters and getting them to cover news is a fundamental element to any social media program.
This week at the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo, analysts offered some hope to high tech marketers whose budgets have been trimmed during the recession. According to Gartner, the IT market hit bottom in 2009 and will start to slowly climb out of the trough in 2010 with a 3.3% increase in IT spending. However, IT spending won't rebound quickly. Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research, predicts that the market will not recover to 2008 levels until 2012. Technologies at the top of IT's agenda include cloud services, business intelligence, virtualization and social media.
This is good news for tech marketers caught in the budget squeeze mandated by investors and corporate boards when the recession accelerated. The challenge for marketers now is to position their companies to charge out of the recession in a stronger, more competitive position.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but the bottom of the market is the right time to rev up your PR and digital marketing. Why? Because your competitors are also constrained by tight marketing budgets. The company that bets on growth and invests in marketing now will get more attention while the competition is quiet.
Right now PR and digital marketing are all about smart, creative approaches. Here are a few tips:
- Tap into relevant communities rather than investing in building your own. Use tools like Technorati and Radian6 to track social media conversations and figure out where you need to participate.
- Think like a reporter, not a sales person, when you create content for your blog. Attract prospects with useful information that draws inbound links and traffic. Use lots of photos and video, even for technical products.
- Expand your social media circles through blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Turn employees into ambassadors for your company by guiding them to reinforce the corporate brand. Microsoft's advice to thousands of employees who blog about the company: Be smart.
- Recognize the value of "conventional" media. According to the First Amendment Center, traditional media is still the primary news source for 72% of Americans. Traditional media coverage gets widely circulated on social media like Twitter, blogs, even email. It has a huge impact and credibility.
For some interesting examples of investing in marketing during a recession, check out this article by Andrew Razeghi at the Kellogg School of Management: http://tinyurl.com/6562pf.
A recent post in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy's "Running A Hospital" blog focuses on social media policies at Boston-area hospitals.
The story follows reports that one local hospital recently instituted a six-month social media ban (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace - apparently not LinkedIn?) that will remain in effect until a policy is developed for its use and employee monitoring tools are put in place. Other area hospitals also block social media sites, citing HIPAA compliance, patient privacy fears and concerns over workplace productivity.
While policies are important, outright bans send a message that the very workers selected to run the hospital are not to be trusted. They also neglect social media's community building, information sharing and brand enhancing qualities and send a negative message to employees from a newer generation of talent who embrace these tools.
Would such a ban preclude hospital administration from creating a fan page that offers compelling news that builds community, pride and results in increased loyalty and perhaps donations? Take a look at the "Healthy Living With BIDMC" fan page on Facebook, which you can also follow on Twitter.
With its more open social media policy, BI Deaconess comes off as a progressive hospital whose CEO embraces technology, is at the forefront of healthcare thought leadership and is dedicated to transparency.
On Thursday, October 8, Mark W. McClennan, APR, a vice president here at Schwartz, will be speaking at the PRSA Northeast District Conference in Rochester, New York. The session looks at "What Social Media Lessons Can You Learn From Fruitcake, Caves, Coupons, Viruses, Death and Pregnancy?"
One of the interesting divides that is occurring in the social media world is between those that can discuss the theory, and those that have actually researched, developed and executed campaigns. This presentation will showcase some of the campaigns that Schwartz has helped develop and successfully execute for our technology and healthcare clients.
It's not too late to register to attend Mark's session (and 19 other great sessions) by going to www.prsarochester.org. If you are interested in learning more, contact us.
Tomorrow night (9/16), Schwartz will be hosting a NETSEA Event, "Social Media for Social Creatures: How Do Successful Salespeople Use Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook And More To Make Their Numbers."
The focus isn't on public relations, but rather on how sales can use social media to get closer to their customers and prospects and establish deeper, two-way relationships. It will also point out the things sales executives should *not* do.
While most of our readers are in public relations or marketing, if you think this event will be of interest, sign up. If you know a sales executive who might be interested, let them know.
Here at Schwartz, we've been talking quite a bit lately about measuring results of social media programs. Not just programs we've designed for clients, but those of people who we meet at conferences or with whom we're just chatting.
Without a doubt, many companies are thrilled with their involvement in social media. They love the outlet that participating in blogs or forums gives them, they're able to talk with people on Twitter whom they'd likely otherwise miss and they're connecting with patient communities on Facebook. (One client, Digium, gives us a tour of their use of social networking technologies here to gain "customer feedback, suggestions, highly qualified sales leads" and to talk with people in their industry.)
Some, though, are a little disappointed in social media. When I hear that, my first question is always "what did you hope to gain that you're not seeing?" I often wonder whether they're measuring success based on number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans--today's corporate version of a teenage popularity contest. This would be unfortunate because such metrics are nearly irrelevant for many B2B companies.
PR people need to keep in mind the Cheshire Cat's words of wisdom to Alice: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." It's our job to help clients think through exactly what they're trying to achieve and to recommend use of social platforms because they make sense, not because they exist and are free.
Last week I attended a Mass Technology Leadership Council discussion on social media and lead generation. Mark Roberge, HubSpot's VP of sales, led the talk. Toward the end, he turned the group's attention to measuring social media ROI--certainly a topic of interest to a number of people today. (Some great reads are here, here and here.)
Mr. Roberge talked about website visitors and sales leads--reasonably straightforward things to quantify and important metrics for any B2B company. He also talked about "SEO assets" such as inbound links and improved performance in organic search results. Those things take time to build--perhaps a problem is that some companies look for an immediate impact in this department when it may be more reasonable to expect a change in six months' time.
Just guessing, but I bet some of the letdown that a few companies feel stems from their desire to get something for next to nothing--a measurable impact from use of free technology. Certainly using social technologies is free, but so is calling up The Wall Street Journal or "Good Morning America." Anyone can do it--the question in every case is whether you've got anything interesting to say and can articulate it in something like a compelling manner. In any case, it's your PR person's job to figure it out.
Altogether, these things are a great reminder to me that B2B companies using social media--and their PR people--need to be clear in setting objectives and in understanding the likely timeframe for success.
Marketers and PR professionals have to be living under a rock if they have not heard about Twitter and its power to connect companies, consumers and anyone that wants to share. It is a way for companies to connect with their customers, it is free business intelligence, it is a brand-building complement, it is a low cost focus group, it is what you make of it.
One of the currencies of Twitter is “Retweeting.” Basically, if you see something you like, agree with, find insightful or interesting, many people pass it along with a RT: (and then the original tweet).
Most of the time this can be good. Although there is such a thing as retweet overload. Sometimes, though it can go a bit too far.
For example, last week, I was a victim of Retweet gone horribly wrong.
Like most disasters it started out simply enough.
I was flying cross country on American Airlines and found out they had in-flight wireless. I immediately purchased it and started doing emails and work for as long as my laptop battery would last. In flight wireless let me get some time sensitive things done and to say I was psyched would be an understatement. This has convinced me to give priority to carriers like American, Virgin America, etc., that offer the service.
I was happy (and I am active on Twitter) so I simply tweeted: I love gogo inflight internet from American Airlines.
A few minutes later I see the following tweet: @GogoInflight And we <3 you too! RT @McClennan: I love gogo inflight internet from American Airlines
Disclosure: GogoInflight and American Airlines are not Schwartz clients, and after this may not be in the future. (Even though I do applaud them for being engaged).
Communications lesson #1: I may be a minority among business travelers, but seeing <3 (heart) struck me as odd and inappropriate. Responding to your customers is great, but make sure you use the same language they do. Emoticons are not part of my daily business vocabulary.
If that was it, this would be an interesting conversation point about the appropriate use of <3s and other emoticons. But, wait, there’s more….
A few minutes later, @AAirwaves (the official twitter channel of American Airlines) retweets @Gogoinflight’s tweet. Spreading the strange emoticon heart-love to its more than 11,000 followers.
Right after that I see another 7-10 retweets from those affiliated with the airline industry (and one golf event). I am sure all their followers were just dying to know that I loved GoGo Inflight. One of them was so moved, they retweeted it four times. Think of how happy their followers were. I bet it filled the cockles of their <3s.
Communication lesson #2: Use your retweet capital wisely. You should share things of interest, but if you share too much, you will drown out your valuable content with meaningless noise. Basically ask yourself – is this retweet adding value?
I assure you, while I value my opinion, if my post influenced anyone in the aviation industry’s purchasing decision, there is a problem there.
My counsel would have been to consider:
1) Direct messaging me to let me know you appreciate my feedback 2) If GoGo wanted to be public, aggregate the “Tweets of Praise” it receives each day and say something along the lines of “75 more people shared how much they like the new service, (custom URL).” If someone very influential does tweet about you, sure, consider a one off “thanks. Glad you like our service.”
Instead, 14,000+ people now received a tweet (or 10) letting them know I love the service.
Communications lesson #3: Doing it right: For an example of an organization that did it right, I can point to PBS. I blogged about it earlier here. In a nutshell, I complained about some of their coverage. They responded with a personalized response “@mcClennan sorry for the delay in replying, but what was your wife unhappy about?” and I have been singing their praises ever since.
In all seriousness, I appreciate the retweet and the response. I am just charging companies to drive for even more strategic communications.
The mobile industry is in a conundrum. Companies from Apple to Blackberry to Nokia to Qualcomm are all pushing to make the mobile phone the ubiquitous computing device, wherever ever you are, whatever you are doing. With the growth of data-capable phones doubling since 2005 and now representing 88% of phones on the market in the US according to CTIA, they are succeeding. We are addicted to Crackberries and forbidden fruit.
But is it healthy? Recent Federal studies have demonstrated that driving while texting is bad for you and anyone near your car. It is even worse than drinking and driving; at least you are trying to concentrate when you are drunk. Excessive texting is even changing the political makeup of State legislatures. New York billionaire and wanna be Governor Tom Golisano threw a fit when New York State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith spent a meeting with Golisano playing with his Blackberry. Golisano consequently convinced several Democratic representatives to switch to the Republican Party. And GigaOM just published a story that warns of the harms to relationships and overall health from being too connected.
Given this growing backlash, how can mobile companies market their products and services without perpetuating the problems of the 24 X 7 man? Do iPods and Blackberries now have to come with labels like cigarettes that warn that too much usage could cause harm? Should phone companies invest in medical and psychological research to convince the public that they understand that further evidence is needed to understand the issues? Are we far from a book called “Thanks for texting?”
In an ultracompetitive industry of huge gizmo launches and Tweets that chronicle the minutia of daily life, the marketing pros in the mobile industry have to figure out how to promote the value and cool factor of their devices. They can’t be seen as driving destructive behavior that is no longer funny or annoying but can kill. Otherwise the cute songs in the iPod ads could go the way of Joe Camel.
Wikipedia is undergoing some changes and introducing a layer of editorial approval for certain entries, including living people. This news is certainly getting a ton of coverage; the best summaries are in Tuesday's NY Times and CNET. I'm not going to recap---both are excellent at examing the issues.
What I like about Daniel Terdiman's CNET piece is he nails a couple major issues. Most importantly, he explores human nature and what happens when "unfettered rights" are left to their own devices. Yes, innovation happens. Yes, discovery happens. And yes, there are amazing "gotchas" that uncover corruption and other attrocities.
But there's a flip side. In a perfect world, conscience would drive everyone to behave. But Wikipedia has a lot of individuals and corporations with reputations---and there always seems to be trolls and others out there ready to disparage whatever appears to be clean, just to do so.
Although there is some hand-wringing over this practice, it's actually a very positive thing. It recognizes the rise of Wikipedia as a more credible source looking seriously at the origins and evolution of its content. Wikipedia is often my first stop for information, as it is for 60 million visitors a month. There's a digital transformation underway and Wikipedia now has enough juice to be asked about credibility.
Simply put, this is the future of the modern editorial role. Tomorrow's Perry Whites are going to be found at places like Wikipedia, and whole new rulebook of ethics, values and codes is evolving for the digital landscape.
And if you're struggling with Wikipedia (it's a tad tricky at times), let us help. We're finishing up a Tip Sheet and you should be able to grab it in a week or so at www.schwartz-pr.com. You can also comment on this post, send me a Tweet, or fill out our contact form and I'll make sure you get one when it's published.
Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia. Originally appeared in Jimmy Olsen #22 (August 1957). Art by Curt Swan.
One of the most common questions I hear from people at events and seminars is "What are the best practices for making a viral video? I want to make something viral."
I quickly reply that the PR and marketing folks do not make something viral - Users, customers and fans do. What we can do is create compelling content and make it easy to share. But setting out to catch lighting in the bottle usually leaves you with an empty bottle.
I started thinking along these lines again when I heard a Bud Light "Real Men of Genius" commercial on the radio recently. Yes, this is an ad campaign that has its own, legitimate Wikipedia entry. I remembered these commercial fondly. Commercials such as "Mr. Giant Taco Salad Inventor" need to be remembered.
I also remember back around 2001, before social networking first took off, wanting to listen to a few of these (yes, the commercials were so good I actually sought them out). This is the hallmark of great content. I finally found a site that had them, but when I visited the site again, they had stopped carrying the commercials after Bud Light had contacted them and told them to take them down (according to the site). Talk about killing any viral nature of your content.
When I heard another Real Men of Genius commercial today (Mr. T-shirt Launcher Inventor) , I decided to check back and see if they were available. They now seem to be on a few sites, and when I checked YouTube they are up there. The 10th most popular video in the series has 200,000 views, 668 ratings and more than 280 comments. Talk about engagement!
I applaud the company for letting customers share its advertisements. The additional visibility it is receiving is off the charts. Yet there are still some missed opportunities that any consumer and consumer technology company can learn from.
1) Make it easy for an engaged audience to share your content
2) Go where your fans are. There are 200+ groups on Facebook dedicated to this commercial series, yet I do not see Bud Light's engagement anywhere. (apologies if I missed it) If you have a group of fans - Reach out to them. Let them know you are there and listening and you gain brand ambassadors. The top group also has close to 2,000 members.
3) Give people a place to go. On YouTube there are a number of channels for the Bud Light commercials. Yet none of them are sponsored. We are talking 10 million plus views that could have been driven to a Bud Light channel. The same goes for the company's Website. I couldn't find this campaign on it - forcing folks to go to third party sights.
4) Think of ways to capitalize on passion - People that like these commercials really like them. I have heard them discussed in meetings, around the coffee machine, you name it. If you create content that is that compelling, it behooves a company to find additional ways to capitalize on the passion. I for one would be willing to give my name and demographic information in return for getting the latest commercials pushed to me. And I am confident I am not alone.
So what does this mean? Consumer brands that create compelling content will be rewarded. I rarely see "Real Men of Genius" without Bud Light. But to maximize its potential, the brands need to make this content easy to share and accessible on multiple channels.
Last night it was announced that the Philadelphia Eagles have signed Michael Vick. Every brand in the NFL is a consumer brand, and for the most part they try to give off a family friendly image. In one fell swoop the Eagles went from this:
To this:
For sports fans, this means the Eagles may have a better team this year. Operationally it may make sense for the organization. But it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the long term. I will be most interested to see how the Eagles handle this PR challenge and the role the Eagles PR team played both internally and externally. It is the role of the PR counselor to stand up and point out when business decisions may have a deleterious effect on a company's brand.
I would be surprised if the Eagles PR staff did not do so.
In my opinion, the Eagles brand has been tarnished. The goodwill the team has built up over the years (and the great community and PR work done by Donovan McNabb and his mother) has taken a short term hit.
What lessons can PR professionals take from the Eagles/Vick signing?
1) When presented with a choice like this in your company, remember you are the voice of the brand and the public with whom the company interacts. You need to make sure executives look at the potential negatives of any business decision.
2) Practice, practice, practice - Make sure everyone is on board with the same message. Judging by today's media coverage, the Eagles appear to have done a phenomenal job with Andy Reid, Donovan, Tony Dungee and Vick. It you are going to do something that may negatively impact your brand, do it quickly and have a uniform message. Make sure you keep the lines of dialogue open to those that may have concerns.
3) Monitor and respond - The Eagles (not surprisingly) seem to be doing a great job responding to inquiries on all fronts. If a consumer brand is doing something its core customers may not like, it should not limit itself to just the "friendly" channels.
Be sure to monitor and engage social media and provide people the information they need. The Eagles Website has videos from the press conference and stories. The blog has some good content. I would have counseled them to take it a step further and have a fact sheet and easy access to official quotes (and audio) so any blogger/reporter can use them. I did a quick search and couldn't find an official Eagles presence on Twitter, and this is currently one of the top Twitter topics. This is something they should consider for the future. Not because it is the hot social media channel, but because their fans are there and actively engaged.
While President Obama doesn't like the term, last night's meeting feet from the Oval Office was aptly called "the beer summit."
Just like the Academy Awards ceremony spotlights who's wearing what, the sit-down for the President with Cambridge (Mass.) Police Sargent James Crowley, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, and late-addition Vice President Joe Biden highlighted who was drinking what.
I mean no disrespect at all to the seriousness of the topics that were discussed at the meeting, but there were certainly PR ramifications from the event, given how high-profile it was. The brews chosen by each person are highlights in the news coverage.
For the record, here was the beer menu:
President Obama: Bud Light
Vice President Biden: Buckler Beer
Sgt. Crowley: Blue Moon
Professor Gates: Sam Adams Light
I already had one friend respond to a Tweet I posted this morning on the topic, joking that he would not have voted for a Bud Light drinker had he known the President's preference in November.
The PR winner following the meeting? My guess is millions of people are doing what I did this morning-- They are searching online for "Buckler Beer."
The third result to a Google search for the variety brings back an epinions link that reads: "Buckler is Perhaps the Best NA (Non-Alcoholic) Beer On the Market."
No doubt numerous weekend beer drinkers this weekend will ask for the Vice President's choice.
As a side note, I am curious if the White House actually has Sam Adams Light as part of its regular selection. The choice is hard to find. They do serve it in the Boston area, where I live.
Maybe we will soon hear what type of pretzels were served?
As many Americans know right now, the government Cash for Clunkers program is kicking off. Auto dealers and manufacturers are making a big push behind it - and here in Mass. the push is even greater with the sales tax increasing by 25% shortly.
What stuck me interesting is PR Week's take on the situation. Its Breakfast Briefing newsletter was all about "Automakers are kicking off an advertising blitz to coincide with the federal government's "cash-for-clunkers" program...Among the participants, Toyota began running national and regional ads late last week for the program, which goes until November 1. GM and Chrysler ran full-page print ads as part of the effort."
That's great and advertising is part of the communications mix, but I would be interested in learning more about the full PR effort - not just the advertising push. There are 1,900 videos on the topic on YouTube alone. How are manufacturers looking to stand out from the pack? (Note: Kelly Blue Books video here caught my eye) - but I am not sure the manufacturers want their message communicated in that way. Twitter is also abuzz.
It's an interesting program and many stakeholders are keen to educate consumers and communicate their own key messages. This is a topic all communications professionals should watch over the coming week. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
For me, while I have a "clunker" as defined by the government. I plan to keep it for now. The one message that never seems to get out is that when you trade it in and get a new car - you also get car payments...
The Amazon/Zappos acquisition/deal news today has the blogosphere, tech media and Twittersphere abuzz. There are so many interesting nuances to this story that I expect this buzz to continue over the next few months. (Note: Schwartz does not represent any of the companies directly involved in this deal. I have represented companies that have partnered with Amazon and I am sure many of the companies with whom we work sell to them.)
I am most intrigued by what this will do to the communications culture at the two organizations.
Amazon was a trail blazer when it comes to personalization, @Zappos is the poster-child for senior executive engagement in social media. I am intrigued by what could happen by blending the two and think the gestalt could be greater than the individual parts.
The letter from Zappos' CEO Tony was very well done, and he has made it open to the public - here - no better way to show transparency.
The good news for entrepreneurial consumer technology and retail companies is that innovation, a customer-focus and excellent communications are still being rewarded. Most entrepreneurs I know and work with have never doubted this, but it is good to occasionally see it reinforced.
As July 4th approaches, more and more people in the United States take time to reflect on their country, patriotism, the struggles of our founding fathers, and the courage shown by 300 average citizens in Lexington and Concord, just a few miles from Schwartz's headquarters. Americans think of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, the Constitution and those that gave the last full measure of devotion.
Like many, I believe the Declaration of Independence to be one of the most powerful pieces of prose ever written in the English language.
In honor of the upcoming holiday, we created a word cloud of the Declaration of Independence and decided to look at it from a communications standpoint.
The good news? Not only is it powerful prose, but it is "on message." The key themes shine right through - laws and people are equally balanced. Rights are a close third. Repeated usurpations (a key complaint of the colonists), assent, free and government come through as well. People looking at the word cloud (inserted in this post below) can see the key messages. It is very effective and resonates still today.
If you haven't re-read the Declaration in a while, take the time with your family this holiday weekend to do so. And from all of us at Schwartz, we wish those in the United States, and Americans abroad, a safe and happy holiday weekend.
For a full-sized version of the world cloud, click here.
We've all heard that Google likes short press release titles. Write short, we're commanded--I'd heard that we should use a maximum of seven words. So I'd try to restrain my verbose self and write short. I got more detail on this subject from Malcolm Atherton of BusinessWire's Phoenix bureau and thought it was useful, so wanted to share it.
Here's the deal: Google will truncate press release titles--it will stop reading them--after 61 to 64 characters. Depends on the day and how Google is feeling--some days you get 61 and others you get lucky and get 62. So the "seven words or fewer" rule doesn't really hold--what matters is characters.
This matters because the two biggest factors, by far, that Google takes into account when looking at your press release are the title and the optimized presentation in the body of the release of key words or phrases. When considering the body, the first 200 characters matter more than those that follow, but the body of the release taken in its entirety and the title are The Big Things to Pay Attention To.
So if the title matters, you want to write them so that key words or phrases that your company really wants to optimize on appear in the first 61 characters.
This means that you may, if you can't keep your title to 61 characters, have to put those words first and your company's name later in the title. This is the reverse of how many of our clients want releases written--they like to see their name first. But if they're into SEO, we want them to understand that if the title can't be short, it at least needs to be worded in a way to get that key word or phrase into the first 60 or so characters.
Schwartz and our clients received 26 awards recognizing media, special event and social media efforts in Healthcare, Consumer, Social Media and High Tech PR programs.
Pardon me as I brag for a moment. This work spanned 19 clients across our practice groups. It's like a good rock concert with multiple acts---you're a bit stunned and hard of hearing the next day.
The Bell rang a lot for Schwartz, and it's a tremendous testament to the quality of our clients, and most importantly, the outstanding staff we have and results they deliver.
Hooray!
(P.S. This is on the heels of two 2009 Bulldog Awards for outstanding media relations on behalf of our clients Epocrates and Bill Me Later.)
Today, many Americans were anxiously awaiting the California Supreme Court's Decision on Prop 8. With offices in California and Massachusetts this is something I have been following.
As the buildup was happening to the 10:00 a.m. PT ruling on Proposition 8, I was wondering which communications channel people would turn to for the news. Would it be Google News? CNN? Drudge? Twitter? So I asked on Twitter...One person commented that the most effective channel is the one that is open - and that is an important lesson for communicators to remember.
Yes, you want broad reach when disseminating your message. But if you have timely news, you want to reach the channel in which your customers and prospects are engaged. It doesn't matter if one channel reaches two million and the other three million, if the one reaching 300,000 has 250,000 engaged and interested parties - that may be the best.
For the record, I found the news out first on Drudge, then Twitter and then CNN. The site refreshed more quickly than my Twitter stream. But I could gauge reaction to the ruling much more quickly on Twitter than any of the other channels. Which brings up another key point to remember - the best channel for communicating the message is not necessarily the channel that will energize your base. Once the message is out there, it will take on a life of its own. Communicators need to be aware of these nuances and incorporate them into their plans.
Not sure if I am supposed to give props to a competing agency on this space, but the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) invented by Shift Communications a few years back was a novel idea.
Today, the SMPR means different things to different people:
-- Originally, an SMPR meant content organized online so that it is easily digested by the media. Features are presented in bullets; it's easy to click from content to supporting quotes; and graphics and other content are easy to find to support a story.
-- Some services today describe an SMPR as a press release that is formatted and presented so it is easy to share. A newer example is Pitch Engine, where one finds readily available tools for sharing a release on Facebook, posting a release on Twitter, or using other social media platforms.
-- Certain news distribution services, such as PR Newswire or Business Wire, describe a SMPR as a release that is augmented by multimedia content, including videos or pictures, and a release that includes hyperlinks within the body of the release.
-- Some describe an SMPR as any combination of the above.
The reality is that press releases serve a far greater audience than just the press. Anyone who visits the web can end up reading a press release. Furthermore, since press releases are syndicated by distribution services and are often modified slightly and presented on news web sites, they can have significant SEO value.
The topic of the SMPR was front and center this week, mainly because of a webcast produced by Hubspot that noted how old fashioned press releases, without fancy graphics and presented as just plain text-- are more likely to be syndicated than any form of a SMPR. In addition, Hubspot postulated that the old fashioned releases were better for SEO, since links were more likely carried in the syndicated releases.
The report prompted some debate since Hubspot tried to find away to measure an instrument used in PR-- a marketing function that itself is very hard to measure.
Internally here at Schwartz, we have been debating SMPRs, press release distribution services and the role of a press release for some time. Here are a few points related to the conventional wisdom internally and the discussions this week:
-- Adding visuals or videos to a press release makes the press release more attractive to media and any other audience that views it,
-- For companies especially interested in SEO or web traffic, it's a better course to host visuals, video, graphics, etc. on the company's website, and then link back to the website from the press release,
-- Making the release easier to share is important, and the best press rooms today are those that incorporate tools for sharing content right in the press room,
There is no clear-cut guidance on this issue, and we're experimenting with a number of press release distribution options and press release formats here at Schwartz. If you are interested, keep reading this blog or drop me a line (rossl@schwartz-pr.com).
Newsweek just completed a live interview of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on its Facebook page. In the PR world, we spend a lot of time thinking about the convergence of social and traditional media. This interview marks one of the boldest moves to date by traditional media to bridge these worlds.
This interview also exemplifies the continuing march of consumer technology into the news making process. We’ve all heard about the Twitter reports that were the first wave of “news” from the Mumbai bombings and “Miracle on the Hudson” flight. The iReports from CNN have given virtual media credentials to thousands of citizen journalists and their video phones. Companies post their own news in via YouTube videos and iTunes downloads.
What’s interesting to watch is the way these technologies have moved from the periphery to the epicenter of the news process. It began when new technologies started giving voice to viewers, listeners and readers. Soon a wave of simple consumer friendly applications began turning people into self publishers able to share the news and events that matter to them. Reporters and publications have increasingly adopted such tools to spread the reach of their coverage and to nurture contacts and find ideas for future stories. Newsweek is taking that next step in this process, co-opting a third-party consumer channel for its own news reporting.
Media companies are in innovation mode, trying to come up with new content and attract new audiences while managing costs and headcount. If Newsweek, with its readership of over 2.7 million, can find new readers to engage with via Facebook, then the floodgates will open and consumer technology will move one degree deeper into the inner sanctum of news making.
Creating compelling content for smart consumers was top of mind as Digital Hollywood kicked off with packed sessions, prestigious speakers and conversations that often returned to how to best engage online consumer audiences who are spread out across many, many sites. Everyone agreed that the entertainment industry maxim "content is king" is critical to reaching today’s empowered consumers who pick and choose what they read and watch and for the most part bypass advertisements.
As the role of marketing and public relations increasingly becomes that of content creator, buzz builders can learn from the playbooks of Hollywood marketers. Monday’s session "Strategizing the Campaign; Selling Movies, TV and Video on the Web" revealed tips from top brass at Comcast /Fandango, Microsoft, Fox, Paramount who have kept box office ticket thriving this spring through their creativity, tenacity and innovation
Know your target audience so that you can personalize the online experience to their individual tastes. Survey your customers to determine their interests. You may find some surprising results that can become a part of your online brand experience.
Be experimental, but integrate too. Online allows marketers to try something new and get immediate feedback. Develop your digital marketing strategy in tandem with traditional marketing to create a single multi-faceted campaign.
Budget time and money for "clever" content. Don’t let content be an after thought. Consumers expect free, unique compelling content that intelligently starts a conversation that they can participate in.
Provide depth for online audiences to dig deeper into content, get involved and be "in the know." Make your biggest fans feel special with exclusive content (like WATCHMENS’ multiple trailers and WOLVERINE’s contest for the red carpet premiere) or prizes (swag, anyone?)
iPhone apps are hot - but then you knew that. Fandango had a WAP platform for years, but had little traction until it launched an iPhone app 6 weeks ago with basic functionality to buy tickets on-the-go. Half a million downloads later, consumers are now watching mobile trailers too.
Listen to consumers, and respond - Fast! The beauty of instant online feedback is also a responsibility. Consumer’s told Fandago they wanted to be able to log into their accounts on their iPhones rather than enter credit card info to buy tickets. Fandango listened and built in the functionality within 2 weeks.
Enlist Viral Armies - Every marketing campaign should include an "Alpha Fan Strategy" to engage a Digital Street Team to be your online ambassadors. First you need to get to know your #1 fanboys -- the 10-15% of your audience that wants more than to consume or share content. Give them the tools to create a mash-up, design a T-shirt, build an add-on widget to extend your brand experience.
Don’t Stop the Feed - Keep evaluating engagement measurements to determine what’s working, what’s not and what to do next. Most importantly, keep giving fans more of what they loved, but with innovations. You’ve got their attention - now you need to keep it by getting even more creative.
While in San Francisco last week for the RSA conference, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced he was running for Governor. He made his announcement on Twitter.
At the same time, the Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, announced he was running for re-election. He also first "officially" made his decision on Twitter. [Since I work for a Boston PR firm, I had to get the hometown plug in here.]
I remember that when Hillary Clinton announced she was running for President, she did so on YouTube. It was clever then. Now it seems a political candidate must use a new media method to announce their intentions, or risk being clumped in the "old school" category.
While the new media tools are changing the way communication is done, they are not replacing reporting from reporters. And they are not replacing the content created by reporters.
The same morning Mayor Menino made his announcement on Twitter, The Boston Globe ran a front-page story discussing his planned announcement. The Mayor's campaign website launched the same morning, as did a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. These new-media vehicles were pre-populated with content.
At Schwartz, we incorporate new media into our healthcare PR and technology PR programs. We constantly coordinate the creation of content for press releases, contributed articles, or blog posts. We dovetail published content with our outreach efforts to reporters.
At the same time, we must be cautious. Since new media is a buzz word, new media tactics often overshadow tactics to reach reporters and others who then publish content read by strategic audiences. For all the popularity of new media tools, the results of Schwartz's clients still show that the best way to drive interest is by generating media coverage.
New media cannot be overlooked. Coordination is critical. And the combination of publicity and using new media to attract an audience is vital for marketing success.
By now, people have likely read about the Air Force One "Photo Op" in New York City that caused significant panic among some residents of the city and outrage by the mayor.
This reminds me of two truisms:
1) There is always someone who doesn't get the word.
2) If you can think of a way for what you are doing to be interpreted negatively/inappropriately, thousands of people are thinking of it that way.
But in today's connected communications environment, there are more channels than ever for services companies and organizations to get the word out.
I am admittedly playing Monday Morning Quarterback here, but the Air Force is very good when it comes to social media communications. From the blogging decision chart to the Twitter channel they know how to get the word out. I am surprised they did not use those channels to inform people of the event, or respond to criticism.
I am not here to cast blame, but rather look at best practices services, technology, consumer and other companies can use in their PR efforts to avoid events like this.
1) Game out scenarios and prepare response channels - Proper planning is essential. This is Crisis 101. When developing an event, be ready for what can go wrong and have a response plan in place. Even if nothing goes wrong, it is not a wasted effort.
2) Answer questions before they are asked - If a call comes into 911 or the customer service center, it is often already too late. Yes, those people need to be prepped (and NYC did a good job there), but realize there are multiple channels consumers turn to for information. Have your Website updated, Tweet about it, reach out to all stakeholders, prep your sales force and your marketing team. If it is a big enough initiative, make sure everyone in the company is away - for in today's social media environment, everyone is a company spokesperson. Even better, be proactive and post the information prior to an event if possible.
3) Overcommunicate: Include everyone who can be effected - There are times to talk quietly, but when doing a major public event, make sure all key stakeholders have been contacted and are aware of what you are doing and why. This ties back into proper planning, but there is no excuse for companies not to communicate with all stakeholders.
4) Respond quickly and accurately - Changing the story mid-way is not a good response. Give the facts and give them quickly.
By following these four steps, people would have been better informed and much of the criticism would have been muted.
As pointed out on Mashable this morning, Ashton Kutcher and, now, Oprah get Twitter but, surpringly, most of CNN's audience doesn't. The CNN vs Ashton race and CNN's breaking news alert when Kutcher reached the million followers mark might help bring the CNN audience along. Regardless, no one can deny Twitter's impact as a channel for reaching consumers and even driving behavior. Witness the 111,000 and climbing followers Oprah has amassed since her first post this morning.
Amazon has been on a PR rollercoaster ride since Sunday when gay-themed books began disappearing from the sales rankings and search algorithms. The Twitterverse immediately swung into action claiming a new anti-gay policy and AmazonFail soon eclipsed Easter as a hot topic. Although the sales rankings are returning to normal, the story rolls on with coverage of why and how the site changed and even a claim of responsibility from a hacker.
This turn of events clearly demonstrates how social media compresses the timeline for managing a crisis. It also illustrates an important rule of PR: Either proactively manage your brand or the Twitterverse and other online communities will do it for you.
With that motto in mind, here a few general tips to create and protect consumer brands in today’s communications landscape.
1) People on Twitter are typing what others are thinking. Don’t discount the opinions expressed on Twitter or any other online channel as the “vocal” minority. Vocal yes. Minority, probably not.
2) Don’t let the conversation be one sided. The mantra of social media is – “Join the conversation.” Listen just as much (if not more) than you talk online. The good news is that, by establishing a rapport, you have the ear of the community when you need it.
3) Use the rapport. Do not walk away from the conversation when it matters most. The Amazon Twitter feed’s last update was on April 9, the Friday before this all broke. The Amazon corporate feed primarily features tweets about the Amazon Daily blog. Even though the Twitter feed stopped, the Amazon Daily rolled on. The Amazon Daily on Monday (day 2 of the situation) featured a number of book and product reviews. There was more timely content too: reports on the Obama’s new dog and Phil Spector’s guilty verdict. The CTO of Amazon kept on Tweeting, just not about the controversy.
4) What happens in the Twitterverse doesn’t stay in the Twitterverse. Obviously, the mainstream media follows what happened at Amazon but many smaller events cross over every day. In fact, most reporters are actively using Twitter to track trends, find resources and hunt for story ideas.
5) Brand management in the social media realm is an ongoing process. Just ask Southwest Airlines, which furthers its reputation as a customer centric brand every day by using its Twitter feed as a very public demonstration of fast, effective customer service in action.
For those of you who may not know Merv, he has been a significant figure in the technology analyst community for many years, first with Giga, and then later Forrester. I first met him when we represented Austin-based Pervasive Software for a number of years shortly after its IPO in the 90s. (Ron Harris was CEO and Rob Adams was the VP of Marketing.) Merv really got our story and had no problems setting us straight on the things we didn't get as we waged war with Oracle and Sybase---both of which were trying to move down into the embedded database market.
Like the best analysts, he never knee-jerked his judgement, and pushed in all the places that hurt with great suggestions for repair.
Anyway, enough memory lane. I encourage you to RSS to Merv's blog and reach out to him. He has a fantastic mind and terrific experience.
And this just in: Merv's BeyeNETWORK channel hits in a week. Stay tuned!
Social networking threats are among the security trends we're expecting to hear more about at Infosec. Once the domain of university students and rock bands, social networks are now unquestionably mainstream (my parents recently joined Facebook; I grimaced at the update that they are now "married"). Today, in many industries, we rely on social networks to DO our jobs rather than AVOID our jobs.
A study done by Trend Micro back in July found nearly one in five employees have visited social networking sites on corporate networks (I'd venture to say its actually a lot higher), making companies vulnerable to a wide variety of cybercrimes, from phishing and spam to virus attacks and identity theft. But as social networks become increasingly valuable productivity tools, many companies are hesitant to go so far as to block them.
The answer is not only a robust security solution that arms a company against cyberattacks, but also an alignment between HR and the CIO that supports policies to require employees to get permission before downloading third-party apps and education that warns them to be careful where they click.
Find us on the show floor at Infosec to talk more about social networking threats!
Creating content can be a daunting task. Blogs, contributed articles and commentary, direct marketing communications to prospects and clients – all of these items can be challenging and time-consuming to create.
A growing number of our security PR clients are finding that the fastest path to generating content on pressing topics is to begin with a podcast. A fifteen minute call with a client executive, a customer company, or a partner can quickly yield the necessary content to fuel multiple areas of the security PR mix, with far less effort than was previously necessary.
A good example of this process in action can be seen in eIQnetworks, a Schwartz client with a deep bench of security and compliance experts. eIQnetworks and the Schwartz PR team have worked together to build a process that maximizes the value of the expert interview. These interviews are conducted as discussions of industry trends, emerging regulations like the HITECH Act or commentary on relevant breaking security news, such as the April 1st trigger date for the Conficker worm.
The process is fast – studios and complex editing suites are no longer necessary to produce polished commentary segments. With minimal time investment from company spokespeople, phone interviews are recorded and then edited by Schwartz to create podcasts segments that can be posted in company blog entries and shared through e-mail marketing pieces. These segments are also rich content resource that can be mined to create contributed articles or commentary.
So next time you have a pressing issue that you’re looking to quickly turn into media coverage and marketing activity, let us be your first interviewer – we’ll use it to generate results across multiple high-impact areas of your security PR program. We look forward to discussing this topic more with you at RSA in a few weeks, as well as Infosecurity Europe.
New Media Age today reports on the imminent launch of Twitter Partners – a new consultancy aiming to "help brands, media companies, and celebrities harness the power of the Twitter ecosystem".
Set up by angel investor and serial entrepreneur Peter Read, and backed by a stellar cast of advisors,the company intends to first offer consultancy services to brands, before rolling out a product set designed to analyse Twitter buzz and help companies engage in conversations.
Twitter Partners is already boasting a roster of big name launch clients, including several major labels and studios, quadplay provider Virgin Media, the Knitting Factory music venue chain, and virtual pop band Gorillaz.
While plenty of PR, marketing and social media agencies are already offering consultancy services to brands wishing to dabble with Twitter, the most important element of the Twitter Partners launch is that Twitter itself has endorsed the company by taking an equity stake.
Indeed, Read tells New Media Age that Twitter is more than happy to refer brands on to his new venture, as the majority of its 30-strong staff is engineering and unable to cope with the current volume of commercial interest.
This endorsement must also give us a hint at Twitter’s future business model. Much speculation so far has pointed to monetisation through banner ads or premium accounts for corporate users, but Twitter Partners suggests that selling metrics and analytics around the service is a much more compelling offering.
As my colleague Ross Levanto pointed out last month, many Twitter users are sceptical about following corporate accounts, so their value to brands is minimal. By learning lessons from much-hyped predecessors Second Life and Facebook, where user experience was quickly compromised by brand saturation, Twitter must realise that quietly tapping into the word-of-mouth aspects of the service will be the key to commercialisation, not thrusting logos upon happy users.
If Twitter Partners can, as it promises, offer the first service to comprehensively monitor Twitter chatter and enable brands to use the service as a viable tool for CRM, focus groups or audience profiling, then it may well be the first to turn a profit from the microblogging explosion.
“How do you like to be pitched?”
There is also the less popular, but shocking Tsunami alerts are good for business. This one comes from a marketer in Thailand who must have forgotten that 8,000+ people were killed by a Tsunami in Thailand in 2004.
rd, about their own successes and challenges.
Media coverage drives social media discussion. A few years ago, when social media reached critical mass, there was a lot of talk about PR being dead because the media were dead. In fact, it turns out that social media acts as an amplifier for traditional media, not an alternative. Social media feeds on real news content.
In the next couple of months, we will see more creative and more elaborate campaigns of this kind as the networks are growing. The question then will be what platform to use for your campaign? Those things tend to sort out themselves: Remember the battles Twitter vs. Jaiku, or Facebook vs. MySpace? Each ended with a clear winner. 
The middle of this week, I zoomed off to attend the Digital PR Next Practices Summit put on by PR News. New York is an easy trip, so maybe I shouldn't have packed my "tell me something I don't already know" attitude, but that's how I approach all conferences. If I have to so much as budge from my desk, it needs to be worth it.
In the bad days of PR measurement, some PR professionals would try to impress clients (or bosses) with the ‘Thud factor’ how big and heavy a clip book could they drop on a desk. It was all about volume, circulation and hits. But as 
I was initially disappointed not to find a special Butterball Talk-Line Twitter account. Butterball has an account, but not the Talk-Line. On reflection, though, Twitter might not be the best channel for fielding Turkey cooking questions. Why would you go to Twitter if you can pick up the phone or write an email?
Social networking threats are among the security trends we're expecting to hear more about at 
