Category: Best Practices

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With Social Media Comes Responsibility

I know I have noted in this blog in the past that FaceTime Communications is a client. And they are doing genuinely cool stuff. They are securing online conversations, making it possible for companies to filter and record your activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, and other public social media sites, assuming you are accessing those sites from within your corporate network.

Some consider such activity as being akin to Big Brother, logging your every move online and trying to track down corporate time wasters. But consider that every move you make online is a reflection of your employer, and the watchdogs are watching the corporate watchers,  so they need to track your activity online in order to protect their business. These days, everything has to be tracked, logged, and recoverable in the event of an audit. And your innocent posts to Facebook or LinkedIn could contribute to the downfall of your employer, whether you like it or not. Consider the ambitious sales rep who asks his LinkedIn contacts for help with a secret competitive bid, or the excited guy in the mailroom who posts to Facebook that the head of sales for his publicly traded company just left the company. Seemingly innocent posts that actually can be harmful data leaks. Someone has to monitor the public conversation to make sure that private information remains private.

Not long ago I spotted a most insightful example from Ted Ritter of one of my favorite analyst firms, Nemertes Research. Here’s the scenario Ted paints, which is not so farfetched:

You’ve just arrived in Melbourne for a business trip. While heading to the hotel, you update your MyLinkedBook status page to announce your arrival. Pretty innocuous, right? Well, it turns out that one of your followers is a TechTarget reporter who suspects you’re involved in M&A activity, and this seemingly innocent update has just fueled the rumor that your company is buying Spaceley Sprockets out of Melbourne. Welcome to the world of social networking! It is the next wave of enterprise online collaboration, and the best way for HR and compliance to get out in front of the wave is with a risk-based approach.

So you have to be careful about your online activity because whatever you post online is very public. Remember that you what you post is not only a reflection of your personal brand, but also your employer. And the Web has a long memory. (It amazes me that today’s teenagers don’t realize that those drunken Facebook pictures they post today will follow them to their next job interview.)

So when promoting your online brand, practice common sense and self-restraint. Think before you post. Even if your company is not watching your every move online, you should be practicing self-censorship and remain wary of what you blog about or what you post as your current status. You never know when what you post online could come to back to bite you, or someone else.

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Before You Ask for Service, Show Me The Green

Erin go bragh! It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, which means we are all wearing green and dishing out the blarney. And one of the ongoing bits of blarney that continues to amuse me is the prospective clients who offer promises of untold riches and recognition, but no money. I sometimes think of these prospects as being like Popeye’s pal Wimpy, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday, for a promotion program today.” Today is a day to remember that it’s all about the green.

I use service providers all the time, and I respect what they do, and the fees that they charge. Whether they are doctors, lawyers, accountants, or Indian chiefs, you discuss their fees in advance and come to an understanding – you pay for their services. Even if you ultimately feel their service was inferior, if they fulfilled their contract, they need to be paid.

Which is why it constantly perplexes me when people approach me and offer a piece of the gate or to share in the profits. I’ve had two such offers in two weeks. Clearly, the power of public relations and online marketing is proven, otherwise these types of companies wouldn’t seek out marketing communications assistance, no matter what the price. Naturally, you don’t want to overcharge for your services, but you also can’t work for free.

So stop offering us a piece of your dream or promises of riches to come (assuming you get your funding, or the sales team meets their quota, or the market doesn’t tank, or there isn’t some form of fire, flood, or pestilence). Be prepared to pay a fair rate for quality work. If you are concerned about quality or performance, then check the references. In today’s online world you can learn almost anything about a prospective contractor. Use your resources, and trust your instincts. That’ s what I do before taking on a new client – I check them out to make sure they are worth representing. (Oh, yes, this game is played both ways.)

If you need professional help to market your company or products, then prepare to pay the going rate. You wouldn’t ask a doctor to discount his fees, especially if he is getting ready to conduct surgery. So why trust your marcomm campaign to a hack for hire? Find the right resource and pay the fee. That’s the best way to assure you get quality attention and service.

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Incorporating Social Media into Your Marketing Game Plan

The biggest problem most organizations face when they decide to enter the social media arena is lack of a game plan. They start dabbling with blogging, create a Facebook page, start using a Twitter account, but since they lack focus and commitment, they don’t develop the following and they lose interest. Social media is cheap, but it does require an investment of time and resources to succeed as an extension of your marketing program. More important than hard work, social media success requires a strategy. You need a game plan.

Once again, I have to thank Paul Gillen for sharing his words of wisdom as to how to develop an effective social media strategy. In a recent blog post, Gillen outlines A Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools, which offers a four-step process that will increase your chances of social media success.

  1. Define the Objective: You have to start with a destination before you start out. Understand what you want to accomplish and work backwards. Are you trying to drive brand awareness? Build sales? Extend customer support? As Paul notes, you will probably need both online and offline tools to meet your business objectives. You have to understand what success looks like before you can measure social media results.
  2. Identify Metrics: Which brings us to the second point; you need a way to measure success. The beauty of social media is that it is easy to measure. You can measure the number of followers you acquire, the number of mentions, retweets, etc., but are these metrics of any real value? Consider other, more concrete metrics for ROI, such as increased number of sales, change in number of requests to speak or comment, number of media mentions, etc. Your best strategy is choosing three or four meaningful metrics. Be sure to check periodically to see if you reached your metric goals, then reassess and reset your metrics.
  3. Define Your Tactics: Social media can be really valuable, but it is not a magic bullet. Define your tactics, both online and offline, to assure you can reach your goals. For example, if your objective is lead generation, you may want to support your social media campaign with direct mail or other marketing tactics. If you are looking to build brand awareness, consider supplementing social media with advertising, direct marketing, speaking engagements, and similar strategies.
  4. Choose Your Tools: There are different tools in your social media arsenal, and each serves a different purpose. Twitter is a good news feed, for example. Facebook provides a location where you can interact with customers and others and get feedback in the form of comments. A blog is a good place to articulate your personal brand and package information that you can use to feed other channels. Use the right tools for the right purpose.

I have been working with my clients to build social media into the marketing mix, but as an extension of existing marketing strategies, not as a standalone program. The value of social media has been proven and it’s certainly here to stay, but don’t sacrifice other tried and true programs in favor of a social media campaign. Online social marketing is just another part of the program.

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Overcoming Blogging Inertia: Keeping It Fresh!

This marks my 67th blog post for the PRagmatist, and I realize I am only a neophyte in the world of social media. I started this blog because I recognized that to preach the power of social media, you have to practice it. And I have had some success over the last six months. I have just launched a new social media campaign for a client after talking to them for over a year about using Twitter, Facebook, and other outlets to promote their research.

 We know social media works, but as with so many things, we often don’t pursue those things we know are good for us because they take work. The number of blogs abandoned along the information highway is growing at an astronomical rate, mostly because the bloggers lack the fortitude, insight, and drive to maintain them. And the problem is compounded in a corporate setting because now you are dealing with group processes. You need to get different departments and stakeholders involved, and make them accountable as part of their MBOs or other responsibilities. But people get busy, priorities change, coming up with new topics is hard, and another blog bites the dust.

Which is why I was gratified to see a practical and pragmatic approach to blogging offered by Page One Public Relations out of Silicon Valley. While I question whether their ghostblogging strategy is in the true spirit of social media, their basic methodology has merit. Maintaining a corporate blog as part of your social media strategy is not rocket science, but it requires procedures and protocols to keep the content fresh every week, and Page One has identified the big three to start:

  1. Be a reporter, or perhaps more accurately, an observer. I maintain an electronic clipboard (thank you Microsoft for thinking of OneNote), and as I run across interesting tidbits in e-mail or on the web, I clip them for my blog. As a web commentator, you run into interesting items every day. Record them, revisit them, and blog about them.
  2. Be an editor, and offer a vision for your blog. As with all such projects, someone needs to be in charge. You need an editor to impose editorial rule and make sure content is clean and consistent, and deadlines are being met. In a corporate blog, you will have multiple voices, but someone needs to conduct to make sure they all sing from the same corporate script.
  3. Promote, promote, promote. Once you get your blog up and running, promote it. Seek feedback. Call for comments. And get the word out there. Post everywhere you can think of – Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, you name it. Consider using multimedia to spice things up and leverage YouTube (videos do well in search rankings). Cultivate an audience and keep them engaged. Talk to your followers.

The real challenge for corporate bloggers isn’t so much keeping it fresh, bit keeping it interesting. Don’t sell, converse. Talk about issues, not products. Engage with customers and prospects about topics that are important and universal, and don’t get mired in your own market speak.

And if you run into difficulties, we professionals are here to help you get it sorted.

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Don’t Let Customers Talk Behind Your Back – Join the Conversation

You have to love social networking. It’s not only a great way to keep up with friends and old classmates; it’s also a great way to get pearls of wisdom from former clients. Mitchell Savage works for a cool start-up company called Vidoop, which has an innovative approach to web and password security. (In the interest of disclosure, they’re not only a former client, but I am a daily user of MyVidoop.) Mitchell’s last blog post about joining the social media conversation seemed especially timely, and a topic I can readily relate to having finally convinced a long-time client to launch a social media program.

As I’ve said in this blog in the past, one of the hardest things for marketing people to understand is that to become part of social media, you have to stop trying to control the message and just join the conversation. As Mitchell says,

The reality is that people are talking about you, your organization, your products and services, and the complete experience of your company.  They’re doing it right now while you’re reading this.  So the question is not whether or not the conversation will take place.  The question is whether or not the conversation will have the benefit of including you.

I sometimes have a similar argument with my clients about press coverage. Some say all press is good press, and other only want the good news and blame you when they see the bad news in print or online. In a sense, all press coverage is good coverage because at least you are being included in the conversation. You can’t address negative press if you don’t get any press at all.

So if people are going to talk about you, then the least you can do is joint the conversation so you have some control over what they are saying. It’s not so much damage control as it is being proactive, being positive about promoting your brand message, and being seen.

So what’s the best strategy for proactively joining the online conversation? Mitchell identifies the four cornerstones of effective social media:

  1. Listen – Before you engage, put our ear to the pavement. Listen to what they are saying about you. As Mitchell points out, social media is a great place to hear from your customers, for free. Most comments about companies are normally positive, so see how you fare in the ratings. Are your customers “yelping” about you? Is it good news or bad? The answer will help you form a response.
  2. Speak – Once you year the comments, good or bad, you can formulate an intelligent response. Show your customers that they have been heard and that you care, and you will get their loyalty for life.
  3. Provide value – Don’t just be defensive, be proactive and be positive. Don’t just cover your ass; promote your assets. Give away information, offer insider tips, give away freebies, be a mensch worth following. The more positive your contribution, the more positive the feedback and the more followers you can expect.
  4.  Build community – From the positive response of your followers, others will follow them. It’s a pied piper effect, or the same thing that happens when you stand in the middle of the street and look up. Everyone else will follow you to see what all the fuss is about. Take that positive feedback and share the love through multiple channels. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Digg it – shout it from the rooftops and let people find you and follow along.

You created your own brand image, and all your customers will do is share their experience as it is mirrored in that brand image. If you give them a positive customer experience, they will sing your praises and invite others to join the chorus. Social media is merely the amplifier that lets your customers sing louder than ever before. Don’t try to shut them up; help them. If they are going to talk about you anyway, then listen to your customers, hear them, and give them something good to shout about.

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Understanding Tweetmanship: How Do You Use Twitter?

There are all kinds of ways to use Twitter to promote your personal brands and your clients. I want to thank one of my clients, Kathy Simmons at NETSHARE, for pointing out an article from Jason Falls profiling new insights about how people tend to use Twitter from Social Media Today. Falls breaks Twitter types into four basic marketing categories:

The Conversationalist: These Twitterers offer ongoing chatter about day-to-day activities that serve as an extension of their brand and their company. These folks engage in the online conversation on an ongoing basis, and many can garner a solid following by being sincere in adding to the conversation and weaving their sales message in a natural way.

The Conversational Marketer: These online networkers use a more direct marketing approach. They link to their blogs with greater frequency and tend to promote their latest online post, book, or event. These Twitterers do tend to engage with their audience, but they never lose sight of the fact that their primary objective is to promote themselves. The trick is to promote yourself while adding to the online conversation, rather than just pointing to your online brand and saying, “Buy my stuff!”

The Salesman: Then there’s the Twitterer who is all about the promotion. This person spends more than half of his or her Twitter posts pitching themselves and their products. Is this counter to the social media code of conversation? Only if you don’t add anything. There are ways to promote yourself and your brand and still add insight. It’s all about making what they have to offer part of the online exchange.

The Broadcaster:  These Twitterers don’t engage in conversation but rather provide a one-way shout-out of content. Some might consider this kind of promotion spamming, but not all broadcasters are spammers. Some have real value to add, even if they choose not to engage in conversation. Think about the true broadcasters, like CNN and other specialty newsfeeds.

So whether you are promoting yourself or your clients, think about how you need to engage in the Twitter conversation. Even if you can identify yourself with one of these four basic Twitter types, ask yourself, “Am I adding to the online conversation?” To make Twitter work for you, you need to engage, even if you do so in a way that suits your personal style.

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Understand the Press Release Payoff

press_releasesI have to admit, I have had a good couple of days this week. I have been working with a client looking to break into government computing, and one of their sales executives was presenting at the Government 2.5 conferences this week. In our weekly client call Monday morning, I piped up in my best Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland voice, “Hey boys and girls, let’s put out a press release!”

Okay, I know a press release on a brief pseudo sales pitch at a niche conference isn’t strictly speaking news. But it does offer a chance to create a market presence in a new niche with a new message. Let’s face it, press releases aren’t just for press any more, and they haven’t been for some time. The press release has become the quintessential marketing device for some companies looking to capture the imagination of a well-targeted market segment, and raise their Google rankings in the bargain. It’s a good tool to make a market statement in a format that gets better exposure than a lot of web content. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to write a news release about every new sales idea that comes along; even Web news still has some standards.

I thought this particular opportunity warranted a news release because it would create a number of new opportunites, including (in no particular order):

  • An opportunity to outline features and benefits as they suit a new market.
  • An opportunity to develop a new set of key words and search phrases to help drive new Web traffic in a new market context to promote SEO.
  • An opportunity to reach out once more to our core press and analyst group to remind them that the client is not letting moss grow under their feet but they are aggressively tapping a new market.
  • An opportunity to refresh the social media channel and tell Twitter and Facebook followers what we have been up to.
  • In general, an opportunity to feed the Web!

The release itself was relatively simple to write, and since it was largely internal approvals were a breeze. So within 48 hours we had it on the wire, and distributed it to a few select editors tracking related topics.

And we got a payoff! An editor responded to my e-mail indicating he was working on a similar story on a related technology in a different market: “This looks intriguing. Do you have clients with similar issues in my area of interest?” Or course we do. The interview is pending.

So press releases pay off in a number of ways, and very few of them have anything to do with actual press. With the birth of the Web, the rules have changed.  You need to understanding how and when to apply the format to promote brand and market awareness.

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The Art of the Interview

Conducting interviews can be a tricky business. I used to do a lot of interviews in my days as a trade journalist, either trying to fill in the blanks for a new product announcement, or to develop a bigger story around an emerging company or technology platform. As a PR professional I also do a lot of interviews with client customers to gather information for press releases and case studies. These kinds of interviews are usually fairly straightforward, since companies are usually anxious for publicity and will give you whatever information you need for a story.

However, the real trick to good interviewing is getting your source to reveal more than they are normally willing to share; to provide that additional nuance, anecdote, or fact that will make your story more compelling and give you an angle that no one else has. This is usually more art than science, but there are some lessons to be learned from people who conduct interviews for a living.

One interesting source of interview inspiration I stumbled across recently was a presentation by Marc Pachter, Cultural Historian for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. (And once again thanks to TED for providing such fascinating insights from EG, the Entertainment Gathering, for all to see.) Realizing that the art of portraiture is dying, Pachter has been interviewing famous Americans to create a series of video portraits.

Some of the insights that Pachter shares in this lecture offer additional insights for both interviewers and interviewees (and that means you, mister senior executive). A good interview gets to the persona underneath the professional; the insights that goes beyond the infomercial. A good interviewer will try to break the subject out of their public cocoon and get them to break out of the public narrative. This is a lesson from which many executives can benefit – there is always an advantage to showing a personal or human side to help cement the relationship with the interviewer and his audience.

If you haven’t seen it, rent Frost/Nixon and watch how the two actors spar in the interview scenes. This is a classic example of trying to get the subject to break the narrative. Nixon’s objective is to stick to the narrative; the public story that will protect his reputation. Frost’s objective is to get to the personal story underneath the public figure. It’s fascinating to watch, and actually tells you a lot about effective interviewing techniques.

I also found Pachter’s story of the interview with Claire Booth Luce quite interesting. There is an unspoken adversarial relationship between interviewer and subject, no matter how friendly the interview. In the case of Pachter’s interview with Luce, she was concerned about having to share the spotlight. Effective interviewing is like a dance with give and take. You have to be able to give something of yourself and surrender some control to the interviewer in order to tell your story. And if you are conducting the interview, you have to be willing to work with your subject and give them a platform for their key messages before asking permission to dive deeper; to get that extra information. It’s a power exchange, and if you understand the rules, you can control the interview and get what you want out of the exchange, whether you are conducting the interview, or trying to tell your story.

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Weber Shandwick Study Shows Corporations Are Missing Out on the Twitter Revolution

tweet-retweet-450One of my clients recently sent me a link to a recent study by PR powerhouse Weber Shandwick profiling the Fortune 100’s failure to adequately harness Twitter as a marketing mechanism. The report calls for a Twittervention to help the Fortune 100 wake up and hear the tweeting of their customers and partners.

According to the study, 73 percent of the Fortune 100 had a total of 540 Twitter accounts, but 76 percent of those accounts failed to post to Twitter that often. They also gauged that 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured by the number of links, references, retweets, etc. What’s more, 50 percent had fewer than 500 followers, 15 percent had inactive accounts, and 11 percent had inactive “placeholder” accounts to prevent “brand-jacking.

As the report says:

“Think of Twitter as an uber corporate cocktail party. The influentials, celebs and dealmakers you invite will stay only if the conversation is entertaining, valuable and interesting. So, what makes good conversation? The key is listening and engaging.”

Apparently the listening and engaging aspect is where most corporations fail in their social media strategy. Best practices dictate that Twitterers not only tweet about subjects that are important to them, but they must follow other conversations and retweet and reply to others using the @username convention. More than half of the accounts did not meet the engagement metrics outlined by Twitalyzer, and three quarters (76 percent) had posted fewer than 500 tweets.

I suspect the social media failing of all corporations, large and small, is due to a lack of a cohesive strategy. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other media outlets can be powerful tools to promote a conversation with customers, prospects, and others, but the challenge is what are you going to talk about and who is going to manage the conversation. For example, further analysis shows that 26 percent used Twitter for a one-way data flow, 24 percent of accounts were for brand awareness, 16 percent were for sales purposes, and 9 percent for customer service. Eight percent of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts were being used for thought leadership, and 14 percent were used for other purposes such as recruitment of employee information dissemination.

There are innumerable possibilities here as to how you can harness Twitter and other social media outlets to advance your business. But who manages the conversation? Sales? Marketing? HR? Corporate Communications? Every department has a stake in social media, so managing social media is an interdepartmental discipline. But who sets the rules for use, for what you can and cannot say? Does it come from legal? Human Resources? The CIO’s office? The CEO’s office? Again, it depends, and most likely it will involve input from multiple senior management authorities to make sure that the company’s social media activities don’t violate policies and procedures or, worse, government regulations.

As the Weber Shandwick study points out, there are five essential steps to true engagement: listen, participate, update, reply, and retweet. But before you can engage, you need to have a gameplan, establish some guidelines for conversation, and designate spokespersons. Granted, you can always open the door to everyone who wants to engage in the conversation, and I know of a lot of companies whose employees tweet on a regular basis. But if they are tweeting on behalf of the company or even about the company, you have to give them a playbook to protect your business and your brand, and help you advance your social media strategy rather than hinder it.

Social media levels the marketing playing field. Even if the Fortune 100 can’t connect the tweets, there’s no reason you can’t. Develop a strategy, a playbook, and policies and procedures and turn your social media mavens lose. The results will prove worth the effort.

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Is it Who You Know or What You Know?

How important are personal relationship in public relations? I can’t recall how many new business pitches seem to hinge on the quality of your Rolodex (or for you younger readers, your database). If you can name drop that you just had lunch with Walt Mossberg, or you just had coffee with the producer who handles bookings for Oprah, then people will generally say “Oooh, Ahhh” and be sufficiently impressed. But do those kinds of connections really help your clients tell a mediocre story?

Naturally, prospects want to make sure you know something about their business. You need to be able to demonstrate you understand what their company and its products offer, how they fit in their market, the value they offer target customers, and how to effectively differentiate their brand. The objective of every marketing campaign differs. Some are about brand building, others are focused on thought leadership, and others are to support sales. In fact, most PR campaigns measure success on multiple levels, but never by who you know.

So when I am pitching prospect or talking to a client and asked, “Do you know So-and-so?” or “Who do you know at this Trade Journal Weeky?” I usually respond, “Who do I need to know?” Granted, relationships are built and maintained over time, and I have a number of established and respected journalists that I consider friends as well as professional contacts. I also can name reporters at various technology trade magazines, and even have a lot of history with most of them. I reconnected with a former CMP editor who is now a freelance analyst, and we remembered each other from past stories and pitches.

So it turns out I do know a few journalists. But that doesn’t mean I can pick up the phone to pitch them a bad story. Without the solid foundation of strategy, storytelling, and an understanding of what editors need to make a good story for their readers, it doesn’t matter who you know.