Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
As we kick off 2017, it’s an opportune time to consider media training for your spokespersons.
Consider the following. Since last year, have your messages changed or evolved? Have spokespersons had an opportunity to practice delivering those messages in a clear and consistent manner? Do you have new subject matter experts or executives who need to brush up on their interview skills? Is your organization targeting different vertical press, with whom executives have limited experience or interaction?
If the answer to any of the above questions is an emphatic “yes!” you may be in the market for media training. Whether it’s your organization’s first or fifth media training session, media training provides executives with an opportunity to practice delivering key messages, address tough questions, and receive meaningful feedback and coaching from PR pros.
This week, we conducted media training for a new client and want to recap some of our top tips and tricks for acing your next briefing.
Before the briefing:
- Know your objective: Be clear with the reason you’re speaking to a reporter. Have key messages, data and examples to share before you hop on the phone with a journalist.
- Work to understand the journalist’s angle: Review the briefing document provided to you by your PR team. Understand the journalist’s previous coverage and the story for which you will be a source.
- Practice answering anticipated questions: a PR team worth their salt will provide you a list of anticipated questions. Practice, practice, practice. Infuse your answers with key messages, but do so in a way that feels natural and authentic to you.
- Prepare soundbites: Prepare a list of three-five speaking points and potential soundbites you’d like to see in print. Pithy one liners aren’t always improvised.
During the briefing:
- Strive for simplicity: Use plain language, and avoid jargon. Your role is to educate and engage the reporter.
- Listen for key opportunities: Share your knowledge on industry trends, or bridge to key messages. The goal of a briefing isn’t just to share “your” news or story. It’s also to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
- Write down the journalists’ questions: Particularly if you’re prone to tangents, it’s critical to write down the questions (or have a colleague or PR manager assist with this). Return to the question at the end of your response to ensure you’ve addressed it.
- Ask questions: Clarify a reporter’s questions to assess his/her depth of knowledge. Ask what he/she is seeing in the industry to build rapport and keep the briefing conversational. Check in to ensure he/she understands you. This has the added benefit of showing you’re audience centered.
- Correct misunderstandings/inaccuracies: Anything shared during a briefing could end up in print, so it’s important to nip inaccuracies in the bud during the briefing.
- Communicate with intention: Share your passion! Get the reporter excited about the industry and your company by speaking with enthusiasm.
After the briefing:
Your PR team will likely handle the post mortem, from double checking facts and quotes to following up with the reporter to deliver images or additional information.
If you are owning the relationship with the reporter, however, make sure you deliver on any promised materials. For example, if you mentioned that you’d like to provide more information to better address a reporter’s questions, do so. Establish yourself as a reliable, helpful source – and you’re more likely to have a reporter’s ear in the future.
For more tips and tricks, check out our past posts:
There are a daunting number of conferences held each year and determining which ones are worthwhile to attend can be overwhelming. Conference topics can range from broad, all-inclusive tech to consumer facing to niche conferences focusing on a specific product like smartphones. Some conferences are well known and long established, like SXSW or TechCrunch Disrupt, but recently, a fairly new conference has risen to be one of the biggest tech conferences in the U.S. in just three years, the Collision Conference.
May 2-4, 2017 marks the weekend of the 4th annual Collision Conference. Collision was created by the same team that brings us Web Summit, Europe’s largest technology market place and conference. Over 53,000 people attended Web Summit this past year and much of its popularity stems from the idea that the conference is ‘a little different’ than similar events. In fact, much of Web Summit’s original fame came from one of the conferences networking events back in 2011, a pub crawl through Dublin led by U2’s Bono. This same idea of creating an event that deviates from the normal conference rotation is behind the traction the Collision Conference has gained over the last three years. The 2017 conference is expected to have over 20,000 attendees, almost 10,000 more than last year, and will continue to grow.
Collision has been called “America’s fastest growing tech conference” and there are a few factors that differentiate Collision from other conferences. The conference saw a spike in attendance after moving to New Orleans for the 2016 conference, which many conference attendees found to be a refreshing change from the tech focused cities like San Francisco, New York and Collision’s previous location Las Vegas, where a majority of tech conferences are held. It also coincides with New Orleans Jazz Fest, running from April 28 to May 7, which attracts additional attendees to the conference. The Collision website even has a slogan saying, “Come for Collision. Stay for Jazz Fest.” This, combined with networking events like pub crawls and exclusive VIP and speaker events, creates a laidback and refreshing atmosphere that attracts new startups and business giants alike.
Collision 2016 attracted impressive speakers, media and attendees, a trend that will no doubt carry over to this year’s conference. Past speakers include Max Levchin, founder of PayPal, Gary Briggs, CMO of Facebook, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack and Linda Boff, CMO of General Electric. Media attendance is equally impressive, with over 1,200 media attendees signed up for 2017. This includes top-tier publications like WIRED, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and Business Insider. Media of this caliber is especially enticing to many of the startups that attend the conference hoping to spread awareness of their brand and demo new products.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and IBM will be participating in events throughout the conference, offering valuable networking opportunities for individual attendees and smaller businesses. The conference is known to put a large emphasis on startups, there were upwards of 650 startups in attendance at the 2016 conference, and the number is expected to grow this coming year. Startups can apply for ALPHA, which allots selected companies an exhibition stand, three tickets, and access to investors and workshops. Though there is a startup exhibition every day, each company only exhibits for one, allowing them to explore the rest of the conference for the remaining days. This is an excellent opportunity for new or growing startups to network, secure funding or simply display their product or concept. To complement the startup focus, successful startups like Uber, Airbnb and DropBox will also be speaking and attending conference events.
Collision also covers a variety of industries, which is why it is actually a collection of 12 separate smaller conferences, each with its own name, stage, events and specific focus. Listed at the end of this post are the 10 industry focused mini-conferences with their names and focus ranging from the auto industry to the music industry, but each with an emphasis on how technology is growing and impacting the industry. The final two conferences are actually networking events, Pub Summit and Night Summit, that are held each evening after the main conferences and speakers end at 5 p.m. A ticket to the Collision conference grants you entry to each of the individual conferences; you simply have to choose which one best applies to your business.
When searching for worthwhile conferences for your company or a client’s company, Collision should be one to consider. As with all conferences, you must weigh the costs and benefits to decide if it will be a good fit. Collision has its pros and cons, and while some previous attendees have said they will not return, a majority do and have spoken highly of the opportunities Collision awarded them.
The 10 Mini-Conferences
AutoTech – Collision’s autonomous vehicles, connected cars and the Internet of Things conference
Binate.io – Collision’s data conference, a good fit for data scientists and data and analytics companies
creatiff – Collision’s design conference, over 3000 designers and creatives attend
FullSTK – Collision’s “what does the future hold?” conference, targeted at developers, investors, futurists, engineers and computing experts
Music Notes – Collision’s music and technology conference that brings brands, artists and labels together
PandaConf – Collision’s marketing and ad technology conference
Planet:tech – Collision’s environmental impact, sustainability and environmental technology conference
SaaS Monster – Collision’s SAAS conference for big data
Startup University – Collision’s conference focusing on creating successful startups
Talk Robot – Collision’s conference for artificial intelligence, robotics and hardware
As PR professionals, our success hinges on getting buy-in from clients on our ideas. Without clients’ approval to execute our strategies, we cannot drive results. But getting buy-in can be challenging, particularly if your idea is out-of-the-box. Kodak, for example, chose not to pursue digital cameras after the first one was developed in their lab because they didn’t think it could become better than film and therefore didn’t see it as a good investment.
In order for a client to sign off on an innovative idea, you must develop a strong case to support and sell it. Below are four tips to help you successfully pitch your ideas and gain your client’s approval.
Explain how it helps achieve their goals. When presenting a new idea, you must help your client understand how it will help achieve their overall business and communication objectives. When presenting your idea, be sure to clearly outline your plan for execution, a proposed budget, and an anticipated return on investment. For example, if you propose that your client should invest in a co-branded whitepaper, your presentation should include how much the whitepaper will cost, a summary of the anticipated results, and how those results will help move the needle for your client.
Show examples of success. Back up your argument by showing how this strategy has been executed successfully in the past. Your client will feel much more confident investing in your idea if they see that a similar strategy drove stellar results for another company. If you’re proposing something new that hasn’t been done before, do some research to prove your idea will work. Look for evidence in industry research, information from credible external sources and relevant case studies that support your claims.
Appeal to all stakeholders. Oftentimes, there are multiple stakeholders within an organization who must sign off on your proposal before you can move forward. It is important to understand who those stakeholders are and where their priorities lie so you can ensure your proposal addresses the needs and concerns of everyone involved in the decision-making process. If your client’s marketing director and VP of product development fully support your idea but the CEO isn’t on board, it will not come to fruition.
Encourage collaboration. Make it clear that your proposal is a work in progress and you want your client’s feedback to make it as strong as possible. Collaborating with your client on your proposal will give them a sense of ownership and make them feel more invested in the idea. They will also feel more comfortable committing to a proposal if they know they can work with you to change certain elements so it better suits their needs and preferences.
Getting buy-in from clients can be challenging at first, but if you communicate your ideas effectively and prove that your ideas drive results, over time the process will become much easier.
Many companies implement PR campaigns to drive awareness of their products and services with the goal of reaching buyers. Earned media can be a wonderful way to attract and motivate buyers to visit your web site, research your product, or sign up for a trial. Earned media can help you drive more top-of-funnel activity for your company or client.
As lead scoring within CRM and marketing automation solutions becomes more sophisticated, the PR professional should take a few minutes to become familiar with it. As every good sales person knows, not all leads are equal. PR people need to understand the general concepts of lead scoring as it might inform decisions about campaigns and help them be more effective.
For instance, if I know that my client wants to reach owners of privately held independent insurance firms selling property and casualty insurance with revenues of $20 million in the Midwest, I am going to design and implement a very different PR campaign than if the goal is reaching providers of health insurance with revenues in the billions. Lead scoring can help you hone in on the prospective buyers your campaign should reach.
The first step in understanding lead scoring is to become familiar with the terminology. You will want to understand the difference between lead scoring and grading, how rules-based lead scoring differs from predictive lead scoring, as well as the meaning of a few other key terms. Let us begin.
Lead Scoring. According to Melissa Day, senior consultant with SmartAcre, a demand generation agency, lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical value to a potential buyer based on his or her behavior. For instance, if a potential buyer watches three videos on your website, your marketing automation software might assign a particular score to her. That score is likely to be higher than that of the prospective buyer who watches only one video. Behavior-based scores might be assigned to things like number of live-streamed events watched, surveys completed, tradeshow visits, or web searches.
Lead Grading. This is the process of grading the buyer based on a demographic profile. Common company-specific demographic data used in lead grading are annual revenue, number of employees, and geographic location. Some people also use individual-specific demographic scoring rules based on a person’s title, role, purchasing authority or other attributes.
Rules-Based Lead Scoring. This is the process in which you or software assigns a ranking or score based on a prospect’s behavior, demographic profile, or some combination of behavior and demographic data. You or your software might assign a numerical score, or use rankings like “hot,” “warm” or “cold.”
Predictive-Lead Scoring. Some experts believe predictive-lead scoring will replace rules-based lead scoring. Predictive-lead scoring is the advance process of using machine learning to combine and analyze much larger data sets to identify buyers. According to Valerie Levin, this is “even more accurate than basic [rules-based] lead scoring, because of its correlation between patterns discovered in both a company’s first-party data and general third-party trends.” Other experts believe that they initially will use predictive-lead scoring to identify buyers, however, once those buyers have embarked on their journey and are in the funnel, the sales team will leverage rules-based scoring to nurture them along.
A number of companies have developed specialized predictive-lead scoring software. For instance, Versium Predict which is used by Microsoft Dynamics 363 allows users to leverage predictive lead scoring with Dynamics so sales and marketing teams can build predictive models, score leads and enhance their lead data. Dynamics CRM administrators can download Versium Predict from the Microsoft preferred provider solution site.
“By automating the predictive analytics process and leveraging our LifeData®, Versium Predict removes the dependencies on data science professionals and turns Dynamics into one of the most intelligent CRM solutions in the industry,” said Chris Matty, founder and CEO of Versium. “Initial feedback has been very positive and we are looking forward to announcing additional integrations soon.”
Negative Scores. Some lead scoring systems assign negative scores for actions like unsubscribing to an email, not visiting the website for an extended period, or complaining about spam. Negative scores can be helpful to sales and marketers and can eliminate them wasting time on low-probability-of-conversion leads.
For more on lead scoring, I recommend looking at this blog from SmartAcre. They have a nifty chart that breaks down how to combine grades and scores to determine if the buyer needs more engagement, is ready for a sale, is not a good fit, or should try another product.
For more information on Versium Predict, please check out our blog with links to additional articles.
Finally, I if you are designing your own rules-based lead grading and scoring system, I highly recommend download Marketo’s “Big List of Lead Scoring Rules.” In it, they have listed more than 50 explicit scores and more than 200 implicit scores to help you come up with the right rules for your leads. You can download this guide here.
It’s no question that social media has become second nature for individuals, especially young adults, across the country. Today, people depend on social media for personal interactions, business communications and as a resource for news and live updates happening around the world.
In recent months social media as a credible news source has become a heated discussion. With fake news and Twitter-bullying clogging headlines, it is clear that social media is taking a larger role in the news media landscape, for better or worse.
Further, the 2016 Pew Research report titled, The Modern News Consumer, evaluates the influences that new digital sources have on how people consume news, revealing that the public is overwhelmingly moving into a more complex and diverse news environment. The report shares that 81 percent of Americans get at least some of their news from digital sources such as websites, apps and social networking platforms. Moreover, among the massive number of people who access digital news, more than half prefer to access news via mobile devices than on their desktop computers.
Although many have turned to digital sources, the recent events around fake news reporting, coupled with Americans’ longtime reliance on traditional news organizations, reinforce the Pew report’s conclusion that ”the digital news era is still very much in its adolescence.”
While social media as a news source remains in trial-and-error mode, a large number of media consumers are currently active in this digital environment and depend upon social platforms for their personal and business interactions.
The infographic, 115 Facts You Never Knew about Social Media developed by Skilled.co, shares facts that illustrate just how quickly social media is becoming an integral part of daily life. In particular, several sections of the infographic outline key benefits of social media for businesses including, “How Social Media Influences Purchasing Decisions, Which Social Media Provides the Best ROI, How Social Media Helps with Recruiting and Best Time To Post on Social Media.”
I hope this infographic provides incentive for incorporating social media offerings into businesses and inspires you to update your current posting habits to best connect with your key audiences.
Listen up, kids. It was a grim and archaic time before the days of “The Google.”
Over the holidays, I was reminiscing about the days of looking things up in actual encyclopedias or, even more tragically, having to sit through an entire movie without the ability to pause and search for where we had seen “that guy from that show we saw that one time.”
The fact is, search engines are critical – not just for researching supporting actors in Hallmark Christmas movies but for making sure your press release and your business in general is easy to find online.
Below are some best practices to consider when developing an announcement that can help ensure better search engine optimization.
Consider keyword quality versus quantity. Search engines are dramatically more intelligent than they were 20 years ago – packing a press release with keywords doesn’t ensure better search engine placement. It makes the text cumbersome and difficult to read (at best), turning it into inauthentic spam (at worst). Further, over-reliance on keywords can even get a website banned or penalized from search engine rankings.
In a fantastic article about keyword density, Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers notes that keywords will always matter to an extent, however “as search engines have become more sophisticated, they have started putting far less emphasis on specific keywords, and more emphasis on the meaning or intent behind those keywords.” DeMers uses the example that by using the phrase “wedding cake” on a page, it’s possible that it could be ranked for “bridal bakery,” despite never using those specific words on the page.
Remember your target audience is human (we hope), so you should write your announcement the way that actual humans speak and read, rather than for search engine algorithms. Reusing a keyword or phrase in 20 different ways through a press release is irritating and off-putting; readers will see through it and likely not search for your content a second time.
Likewise, consider the phrases and words that your target (again, human) audience might use when searching for your announcement (or company/product). Those terms have also gotten more conversational and contextual.
Update, refresh and make over your keywords. It’s also important to continually be researching new keywords for your press releases and other online content. The tech industry is constantly creating new products and categories, which leads to new terminology, keywords and hashtags for your related content. Julian Connors, in an article for Search Engine Land, suggests using resources such as Soovle and Google Keyword Planner to identify new keywords that your target audiences might use “when searching for products or services your brand offers.”
Keep your hashtags fresh as well, since tweets appear in Google’s search results thanks to a 2015 partnership between Google and Twitter. Columnist Neil Patel, in writing about the partnership, noted that “Google is about all about information — and preferably timely information. Twitter gets timely. Users aren’t satisfied with the information that is four hours old. They want information that is four seconds fresh.”
It takes a village: Support your news with original content and resources. Keywords are important, but consider them as only one part of the equation in getting your announcement ranked and posted on search engines.
When writing your press release, provide links to external sources such as analyst firms, industry reports or supporting articles. Leveraging third-party perspectives and linking to additional resources makes your release more credible. As Maureen Jann writes in her article, “How to Apply SEO Best Practices to the News Release,” “High quality backlinks from respected news outlets are looked at by search engines as part of the scoring module which helps them rank the trustworthiness and authority of your site, and ultimately your viability as a business.”
DeMers also offers this sound advice: “Instead of spending your time thinking about how to strategically incorporate keywords, focus on covering a variety of subtopics while providing the best possible value for your readers. When you write excellent content that does the best possible job covering your topic, that’s the key to high rankings.”
To this end, create a landing page for your press release that incorporates additional resources such as video, photos, infographics, white papers and product sheets. Link to a post on the corporate blog providing some colorful commentary about the news beyond what was included in the official press release. Having a range of supporting materials and resources posted online helps with search, and it also benefits reporters and bloggers looking to cover your news by giving them a convenient and easy way to find information about your company and its new announcements.
I hope these tips are helpful as you continue building your PR and SEO strategies in the year ahead. Are there other tips you would include that have helped your business with search engine rankings? We’d love to hear about them!