Archive for PR/COMMUNICATIONS
LUNCH AND LEARN: CUSTOMIZED STRATEGIES
You provide the lunch, we’ll provide the learning!
Get expert insights from PFS Marketwyse owners and best selling authors on topics related to your specific business needs.
With our new Lunch & Learn program, PFS President Deirdre Breakenridge (author of PR 2.0 and Putting the Public Back in Public Relations) and CEO Jason Miletsky (author of Perspectives on Marketing and Perspectives on Branding) will meet with your entire team to help get your marketing program on track and moving in a positive direction.
Send us your goals, target demos, creative briefs – any information you can share before the Lunch and Learn. We’ll base our meeting on your specific needs, and give your company:
- A full analysis of your current program
- Specific strategy recommendations for improving market share and visibility
- Insights into how you can better integrate Web 2.0 tools
- An action-item list of immediate and long-term next steps
Most importantly – the PFS Lunch and Learn is not a sales pitch – it’s two full hours of no-nonsense, practical strategic planning your brand can actually use – and benefit from.
We’ll also give you five free copies of any one of our books for your team to further learn from. Get your entire department up to speed on new innovations in public relations, general marketing strategies or the true value of brand building.
+ Find out more about PFS’s Lunch and Learn program
Next ‘Quick Clinic’ Scheduled for March 5
If there was one thing that our Feb. 10 ‘Quick Clinic’ made us realize, it’s that a lot of people have a lot of great marketing and communications questions! Way more than we could fit in just a 2 hour period.
So we’ve scheduled a 2nd ‘Quick Clinic’ and invite everyone to come and chat with us one-on-one about any marketing or communications topics you’d like.
When: Thursday, March 5, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
Where: The chat box at talkwyse.com
It’s free, easy, and totally private – even we won’t know who you are (unless you want to tell us!). Some of the more popular questions we’ve been asked have centered around:
- How to effectively market while the recession gets worse (we got a lot of questions about that).
- Making Facebook and Twitter a viable part of a marketing strategy.
- Internal marketing to keep employees moral high when everyone is worried about being laid off.
But the floor is yours – ask us anything you’d like!
IMPORTANT NOTE: Because we get so many questions during our clinics, we need to limit everyone to ten minutes each so we can answer as many people as possible.
The ‘Quick Clinics’ are hosted by PFS partners and best selling authors, Deirdre Breakenridge and Jason Miletsky who offer their personal expertise in these intimate online sessions.
PR 2.0 Reputation Mending
by I can’t remember a time in my PR career when a brand (B2B or B2C) wasn’t in some kind of trouble. From product recalls and e coli poisoning to airline flights cancellations and accounting scandals. Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson resulted in Sarbanes Oxley and more financial transparency and stricter reporting procedures. I’m not sure if social media would have helped those companies. But, today is different. On any given day, a brand that is on top of the world (i.e., athletes and MLB) can fall from grace. Did anyone say Alex Rodriguez? There is a way to restore the trust.
Edelman just came out with a Trust Barometer and it’s not a pretty picture. According a PR Week article on February 2, 2009, “America’s trust in businesses has dropped to its lowest point in a decade ….” It appears that consumers would much rather hear important news and information from their trusted peers and are more apt to believe what their friends in a community say over what a brand may advertise on TV or in print.
With the socialization of media, consumers, more so than ever, will be looking to their brands for transparent communication. I believe that transparency, and, of course, honesty and integrity are the voices of the brands that gain consumer trust in the future. Ask yourself this question: will PR 2.0 and social media help a brand to repair and/or maintain its reputation or will the power of social communication kill the brand? Of course, keep in mind that the answer may depend on the nature of the brand, its current reputation in the community, and the severity of an offense.
I believe that social media will help to repair a damaged reputation if used correctly and will also aid in maintaining a necessary level of transparent communication with customers, media, analysts, bloggers and other important stakeholders. Here’s my short list of why PR 2.0 and social media can help:
- Social media communication gives a brand a voice, a face and emotion. If there’s an apology due, then seeing a CEO or spokesperson address a situation and offer a mea culpa is much more believable than a canned, written statement read from a podium. Of course we know that a PR team was behind the communication, but emotion still comes through the body language and facial expressions.
- Social media will get the right communication to the right people in a short period of time. Communities share information quickly and when crisis occurs, social media doesn’t waste any time. There are no more excuses for a brand that has “no comment.” We can use social media to evaluate the brand damage and then apply the appropriate, transparent communication to rectify any miscommunication or to state the facts.
- When you engage in social media communication your brand becomes a member of a community. If you have a good reputation and you are providing the community with important information (not marketing and promotion), often your blogger evangelists will come to your aid if your brand is challenged. These loyal enthusiasts will set the community straight and help to clear up any communication that is not accurate. The community takes care of its own.
- Social media monitoring allows you to tap into conversations that you were never able to monitor before. When you set up a key word system, whether it’s Google Alerts or through proprietary monitoring software, you are able to evaluate the conversations in the blogosphere. At this point you can make the decision to inject the right communication among certain groups or you can post content on your blog/website and offer appropriate information to the public.
I’m sure there are many other reasons why social media will help a brand with a damaged reputation that’s on the mend. Let me know your suggestions and/or if you have any good examples of how social media helped a brand rebuild its image.
Social Media Release vs. the Traditional Release
Almost daily, I find myself explaining and counseling on the differences between the Social Media Release (SMR) and the traditional news release. When I look at the SMR template and the traditional press release, I immediately notice the differences just based on the information in the SMR and the way it’s organized. SMR’s are not fluffy paragraphs of hype or inflated content. Rather, they are succinct stories with bulleted information, approved quotes and interactive content including podcasts, video, hyperlinks, high resolution images, etc.
However, reviewing my explanations, I think I’ve found the easiest way to make other communication professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs and executives get the major difference – it’s the ability to use the SMR as a viral tool that is shared by people in web communities.
The news wire services such as Marketwire and PR Newswire are successfully providing traditional news releases or multimedia releases with these downloadable elements. Traditional news releases can be search engine optimized (with hyperlinks and key words) and they can also be enhanced with multimedia, but they are generally not equipped with sharing tools and they are not distributed over the wire.
The distinguishing differences are in the sharing and the platform of the SMR. It’s the sharing tools including: Reddit, Digg, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Newsvine, Furl and many other Web 2.0 applications that allow people to gather, organize and share the information in an SMR. The sharing tools make the difference. The other distinctive feature is that the SMR is housed on a blog platform with the ability for people to comment. Although many of the newswire services have added some of what I call the “PR 2.0 sharing tools” (as I mentioned above), SMRs typically don’t go out over the wire. Brian Solis and I wrote about these very differences in Chapter 8 of our new book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations“.
“SMRs should not cross the wire. They should be hosted on a specific company blog channel dedicated to SMRs to complement traditional releases, SEO releases, company blog posts, and all other outward focused communications. Any customizable blogging platform will more than likely serve as an effective-and social-platform. Remember that a traditional Web page isn’t necessarily social, so any published SMRs on a standard Web site will most likely not appear in social search.”
It’s the viral component and the ability to tell many different stories that are meaningful to people in web communities that are the major difference between the SMR and the traditional result. SMRs enable you to share news. They also allow readers to bookmark and share the content with anyone at anytime, with one-click from the news release.
As a result, communications professionals need to recognize when and why they need to use the SMR. It’s more than just a new, shiny object; it can be a very powerful tool that ignites conversations and two way conversations with journalists, bloggers and customers.
Contrary to Popular Belief…
Recessions are NOT the time to increase your marketing budget
by Jason Miletsky
There are two things brands can always count on when a recession hits: less consumer spending, and hungry agencies making the case for why this is the right time to increase their marketing budgets.
It’s a weak argument that’s been repackaged in any number of variations, all basically centering around the idea that brands need to advertise more to get a greater share of a smaller consumer pie. But that’s not reality. The reality is that when recession strikes, companies may be forced to go through severe cost-saving measures, and the marketing budget is the first place they’re going to look. Efforts that strictly work to increase brand exposure are especially vulnerable, as companies shift their focus from long term growth to short-term, measurable ROI.
The truth is, those companies are making the right decision. According to ChangeWave Research, 57% of US consumers plan to spend less through April, 2009 than they did a year ago, and despite a small uptick in January, 2009, future spending levels don’t appear ready to improve anytime soon.
So if brands shouldn’t spend more, what should they do? Clearly companies still need to market themselves to drive sales. But instead of spending more, brands need to spend smarter. There are two ways to do this:
1. Ditch the expensive NYC agency. We recently went on a pitch for a potential client who was interested in hiring us to run a promotion for them for the 4th quarter of 2009. As it turned out, one of the ideas we pitched was the exact same concept that their lead agency came up with, and is currently working on for the 3rd quarter of 2009. Well, not exactly the same – their lead agency (out of New York), charges over double what we charge. So look around – there are great agencies outside major cities that are every bit as creative and talented, definitely hungrier, and can stretch you budget farther, simply because we don’t carry the expense of marble floors and Madison Avenue addresses.
2. Seek out better avenues. Mass media advertising can bring significant exposure, but it’s expensive and the effects typically take longer (and can be harder to measure). During tighter times, brands need to seek out other ways of communication, including online messaging through social media, viral marketing and CPC advertising campaigns. If done correctly, these methods can not only increase brand exposure (even beyond what mass media can accomplish), but they can drive short-term sales and provide immediate ROI analysis – even with a greatly reduced marketing budget.
So as much as I hate to debunk the myth the industry has been fostering since agencies felt the wrath of the very first recession, tough economies are not the time to increase your marketing budget – their the time to spend your remaining budget more efficiently.
Brian Pittman’s spotlight this week: Deirdre K. Breakenridge, President, Director of Communications, PFS Marketwyse
“Web 2.0 technologies have certainly reshaped our industry and approach to PR—starting with having the tools to communicate with our publics and customers directly,” says PFS Marketwise president and author Deirdre K. Breakendridge, who recently finished her fourth Financial Times business book “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations,” co-authored by Brian Solis and set to hit books stores in early 2009. “Before, our work was all about going through third party influencers like the media and analysts. That’s still done, but now we have access to new influencers and can talk directly to the people who matter most to us or our clients.”
That doesn’t mean standard media and analyst relations will disappear—it means…
