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.
If you’ve spent any time in the media industry, let alone on the Internet, you’ve more than likely encountered the most enduring buzzword as of late: millennial. As many outlets will be quick to tell you, this generation born between 1980 and 2000 is now the largest in the U.S. with the biggest presence in the labor force.
With millennials poised to restructure the economy, it’s no wonder the media compulsively analyzes their attitudes and desires. Millennial stereotypes are an unfortunate byproduct of this obsession – “millennials are self-absorbed,” “millennials are entitled,” etc.
While there is much to learn from this generation, it can be problematic to conflate the characteristics of individuals ranging from 15 to 35 years old. Millennial workplace stereotypes more accurately reflect the modern work environment in general, as opposed to the attitudes of young people exclusively.
Given this, millennial stereotypes can actually reveal valuable PR lessons, including newer roles and strategies. The following are some commonly circulated “millennial” PR tips that can be leveraged to engage modern consumers of all ages.
“Millennials are Digital Natives”
Indeed, millennials grew up right alongside the evolution of the Internet and tend to be more comfortable using social media as a result. But social media proficiency doesn’t stop with the kids – in the U.S., 51 percent of 50-64 year olds and 77 percent of 30-49 year olds are active on social networking sites.
Thus, consumers of all ages now expect to be able to reach brands immediately through channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. PR professionals can cater to this by helping to maintain a consistent and responsive social media presence for their clients.
Shareability has also become a crucial element of any successful campaign. PR people can take advantage of the viral nature of social networks with content like digestible articles and quippy tweets. As more people make themselves at home in the digital world, it becomes mandatory for PR professionals to establish a strong Internet presence for their clients.
“Millennials Trust Peers”
As the “if your friends jumped off a bridge” adage implies, young people of all eras have been highly influenced by their peers. Social media has provided an unprecedented connectivity that happened to coincide with the coming of age of millennials.
Many consumers today look to the Internet for a second opinion of brands, with 47 percent of U.S. readers consulting blogs to follow trends and ideas. Millennials in particular are more likely to trust anonymous consumer reviews over the opinions of people they know.
As the title would suggest, PR people are masters at all kinds of relations, from media to analyst to investor. This online review culture creates an opportunity for PR firms to develop another skill – influencer relations. With up to 70 percent of consumers preferring an endorsement by a non-celeb blogger, PR firms can create additional value for their clients by cultivating relationships with these key individuals.
“Millennials Care About the Greater Good”
Many indicators suggest that millennials are the some of the most progressive thinkers thus far, so it’s frequently posited that millennials care more about social justice and responsibility when it comes to consumption.
Sure, millennials care about the “greater good,” but so do most other 21st century consumers, who tend to be more exposed to and versed in issues like diversity, sustainability, gender equality and the like. Studies have found that over half of consumers worldwide are willing to spend more money for socially conscious products.
PR professionals are well-positioned to address these concerns by developing strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies, especially given their role as a liaison between brands and the general public. The PR people of today and tomorrow will use media relations and communications skills to promote the transparency and ethics of their clients. As long as CSR campaigns genuinely make a positive impact, this strategy will prove to be favorable for both PR pros and brands.
As long as millennials are in their prime spending and earning years, they will be the frenzied subject of speculation until the next generation takes their place. The resulting generalizations of this age group – despite being sweeping and often inaccurate – are indicators of contemporary consumer demands. Thus, PR professionals would do well to have millennial attitudes in mind when forming their strategies. Traditional PR roles are no longer enough; social media mastery, influencer relations and CSR implementation are among the new responsibilities of the PR professional of tomorrow.
In a perfect world, our business-to-business (B2B) clients would all have big-name customers who want to do joint press releases and have a steady flow of company news to share. Spoiler alert: This rarely happens.
All B2B PR professionals are bound to hit a few roadblocks on the path to success, and when you do it’s important to think creatively and strategically in order to find a solution that will help your client meet their business and communication objectives. After all, that’s what our clients hire us for.
Every client’s situation is unique, but some challenges are common across B2B verticals and industries. Below are three common challenges among B2B PR clients and examples of solutions that the Communiqué PR team has implemented in the past to overcome them.
1. No referenceable customers
Customer references are one of the most powerful marketing tools for B2B companies. Positive references show prospective customers how others have benefited from the service and help establish trust. Reporters are also much more open to covering company news and writing feature articles when they can interview a customer about their experience. However, many business customers are averse to serving as a customer reference, particularly in industries that involve sensitive information such as financial services, marketing analytics, and healthcare.
If your client is having trouble securing customer references, first offer to provide guidance to help them negotiate with the customer. As PR professionals, we are more adept at explaining the benefits of PR and can suggest a variety of PR activities that will give the customer more control over the messaging, such as bylined articles or case studies. If the customer is still not comfortable serving as a reference, start brainstorming other ways that you can prove the value of your client’s product or service. For example, offer reporters aggregated customer data to support current trends or ask a trusted industry analyst to provide a quote for a press release.
2. Lack of company news
The easiest way to keep your client in the news is to maintain a regular cadence of company announcements. However, many B2B companies do not have a steady flow of company updates that they can share publicly.
If your client does not have news to share on a regular basis, focus on newsjacking instead. Newsjacking is when you capitalize on a trending news topic to insert your client’s point of view into the conversation. To execute this strategy, monitor trending news stories and when a relevant topic appears, immediately reach out to journalists to offer your client’s expert opinion. To do this successfully, it is important to act quickly because the lifecycle of a news story can be very short. Be sure to set up and nail down key messaging beforehand so you and your team are prepared to speak with the media upon request.
3. Over-allocated reporters who cover too many beats
As newsrooms continue to shrink, the reporters who remain are stretched thin. Gone are the days when every technology topic has a dedicated reporter writing stories about it every day. Now there is often only one reporter covering everything from Amazon to the latest big-data startup. Reporters today are covering more beats than ever before, and they no longer have time to cover every product update or company announcement.
In order to catch reporters’ attention, find a creative angle that fits their beat or aligns with an industry trend. If the news is complex or falls into a niche, make it very clear why it’s important and how it impacts a broader audience. When available, provide other assets to support the story such as statistics, customer or analyst interviews, and images. Strive to make reporters’ jobs as easy as possible by providing as many elements of the story (including a compelling angle) as you can.
B2B PR can be challenging at times, but finding creative solutions to work around roadblocks is fun, intellectually stimulating, and incredibly rewarding when you succeed.
Recently I experienced a rare day without any client or team meetings on my calendar. I hunkered down and took a deep dive into my email, powering through tasks and to-dos, updating clients, reporters and colleagues along the way. I had documents reviewed, edited and approved via email, and checked in with a co-worker about a deadline via Skype.
By the end of the day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really left my office all day and that my interaction with humans – real, live face-to-face humans – was truly minimal. And yet work moved on seamlessly! This got me to thinking about how technology impacts the way we work today and what it means for employees and managers in the years ahead.
In an article for Forbes, contributor Joe McKendrick writes about the impact that digital and cloud technologies are having in today’s workplaces, particularly around the future of management. “There has been an acceleration of automated decision-making capabilities, in which many day-to-day decisions are handled by algorithms,” McKendrick writes.
As access to technology becomes more affordable and integrated into everyday business, employees across the board have become empowered to use online tools to manage work and streamline processes. This eliminates the “need for layers of hierarchy to process and disseminate things,” says McKendrick, which dovetails with the rising trend he refers to as “the smashing of the corporate hierarchy … fueled by an increasingly educated workforce of information workers.”
As enterprises and organizations continue to utilize cloud-based resources and automate many core business functions, the big question then becomes, “Is management an outmoded notion in the age of the digital enterprise?”
McKendrick’s answer – which I agree with whole-heartedly – is no.
Particularly for creative organizations – and I’m grouping PR agencies like mine into this category – there’s really no substitute for the human side of management. Your computer can run spell-check on a press release, for example, but it can’t determine if the content aligns with your client’s strategic goals, or captures the messages from a conversation you had with the VP of marketing last week.
A report from Kinsey substantiates this (“Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)”): “For now, computers do an excellent job with very well-defined activities, such as optimizing trucking routes, but humans still need to determine the proper goals, interpret results, or provide commonsense checks for solutions.”
True, there are (satirical) programs that will randomly generate a startup company website, but there’s never going to be a way to automate the process of brainstorming or troubleshooting a pitch idea that isn’t resonating with media without at least some human interaction. Even if those conversations are held over Skype or Slack or Telepresence, it’s still the human brainpower that gets the job done at the end of the day. For creative firms, our people are our competitive differentiator.
And for organizations managing PR firms, this is also key.
Here at Communiqué PR, we have been longtime users of cloud-based tools such as Smartsheet and Harvest and Cision that are instrumental to keep projects running efficiently for our clients. They also provide our clients visibility and transparency into our activities and budgets, in real-time, which eliminates much of the administrative work that would have been required even a few years ago.
But again, even by providing our clients with access to these cloud-based tools and reports, there’s still no way of automating the collaborative process that a client-agency relationship involves. In fact, over-dependence on electronic communication can lead to crossed wires around deadlines or deliverables and that can have a real impact on hours, budgets and relationships.
McKendrick concludes, “Technology is an incredibly empowering force, supporting a workforce that is fully equipped with the information and resources that will take people well above and beyond traditional and confining job descriptions.” And certainly, having worked in PR focused on technology-based companies exclusively, I’m a fierce advocate for cloud-based and digital tools that make our lives, and work, easier. But the workplace of today (and tomorrow) will always need their carbon-based, human management to keep businesses and teams inspired and moving forward. All that might change is the tools and the means they use to do so.
Instagram recently announced that it will begin rolling out business profiles to users in select markets. These updated tools will be available to companies of all sizes and will provide insights to help them better understand and attract followers to continue to grow their business. Although companies have already been using standard Instagram accounts as a way to showcase their product offerings, company updates, office space and team members, this new tool will offer different features to help companies better engage with their target audiences. A few of the new tools include:
- Contact button. This addition makes it easy for current and prospect followers/customers to speak with an employee at the company. Businesses can choose how followers can contact them (i.e. via call, text or email) – enabling a private and direct-line of communication between the two parties.
- Analytics tool – This feature enables businesses to view impressions, reach, website clicks, engagement, follower activity and demographics. Through viewing these metrics, the company can better understand the types of posts that are resonating best with their audience/followers.
- Promote tool – This update allows the business to turn a popular post into an advertisement within the app. The “promote” tool is only accessible to Business Profiles – the user who converts the post must have admin-level access and the ads must adhere to Facebook’s advertising polices. Facebook Business has shared a helpful step-by-step process for how to use the promote tool.
With these new tools, companies can more efficiently communicate with their target audiences, increase the quality of their marketing efforts, and connect with prospective customers that they may not have discovered or contacted if not through the ease of Instagram’s business profile update. In addition, having an advanced knowledge of the demographics and preferences of your most engaged customers will enable marketing teams to accurately advertise and improve the overall customer experience.
Instagram is a great platform to increase engagement through visual marketing in the form of photos and videos that convey emotional responses, which in turn increase followers’ emotional connection to the company and even brand loyalty. As the number of Instagram users continues to skyrocket, businesses must share meaningful content that will stand out among its competitors and build the emotional relationship and brand awareness with its followers.
Business profiles can help accomplish this. By understanding what type of content triggers high levels of engagement and an emotional reaction (either positive or negative), companies will be able to improve planning and create more successful Instagram campaigns based on popularity and outcomes of their past posts.
One caveat to Instagram and all social accounts, however, is that in order to be successful, companies must establish a firm character and cadence with their posting. If a company posts a photo once every five weeks, followers will likely lose interest, feel no responsibility to engage, and ultimately unfollow the company. Reaching out to an outside party to handle social accounts allows marketing coordinators and VPs to focus on content planning and other marketing initiatives to grow the business. Having to develop and continuously update an editorial calendar for social posting can be a daunting task, not to mention replying to followers’ comments and questions in order to keep the relationship strong and engagement high.
A PR firm that has a close relationship with a company’s business and communication objectives can help align social media activity with company announcements and content development in the pipeline. Capitalizing on the Instagram Business Profiles opportunities will help drive buzz around company announcements and news, as well as increase traffic to the company website.
Is social media stressing you out? Let us know and we will help to find a strategy right for your company.
If you are a small business interested in using Instagram, check out this article:
Four Ways Instagram Can Lead a Small Business to Success
For anyone watching the global investment market, it’s increasingly clear that the first half of 2016 has been something of a surprise in terms of the number of initial public offerings (IPOs). According to a report published by Dealogic, a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research firm, this year has had the lowest volume of global IPOs since the financial crisis of 2009. This represents a decrease of 54 percent year-on-year in IPO volume, with figures totaling $47.8 billion during the first half of the year.
Due to extreme declines in the major stock indexes in 2009, it’s somewhat easy for experts to comprehend that year’s weak IPO market. In 2016, however, with relatively stable markets, a growing economy and improved employment figures, it’s less clear why the global IPO market is experiencing such meager activity.
In his Investopia article, “4 Reasons for the IPO Market Slowdown in 2016,” John Burke puts forth a theory stating that four factors are combining to drag the number of IPOs lower: startups staying private longer, overinvestment in startups, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, and weak performances by 2015 IPOs. Another hypothesis to consider is that for a variety of reasons, companies are choosing to pursue acquisition rather than move forward with an IPO.
Why Acquisitions are an Attractive Alternative to IPOs
For worldwide deal making, 2015 was a record-breaking year, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions, according to data from Thomson Reuters. This explosion of activity and deal value was due in large part to mega-deals—deals that are over $5 billion, such as Pfizer’s $191.6 billion offer for Allergan PLC—which account for 51 percent of the overall M&A value in 2015.
Given that the strength of 2015’s M&A market was unprecedented, it’s not entirely surprising to learn that M&A volume for the first half of 2016 is down 18 percent year-on-year, according to Dealogic. Regardless of this decreased volume, the benefits of M&A deals are often quite attractive and this may be influencing the IPO market slowdown.
Award-winning entrepreneur and value investor Warren Cassell theorizes that there are four reasons why companies may choose acquisition over an IPO: cheaper financing, speed, less stress and more resources. In his Investopia article, “Why IPOs are Becoming Less Attractive for Companies,” Cassell states that because interest rates in the U.S. are at record lows, leveraged buyout firms and corporations are able to finance acquisitions, using debt, inexpensively. This easy and inexpensive access to capital has led to increased M&As.
In addition to cheaper financing, Cassell argues that investors who want to liquidate their stake in a company quickly may opt for M&A because listing a company on the stock market can be extremely time consuming—taking from several months to years to complete the necessary regulatory requirements for an IPO. Stress is another factor noted by the 16-year-old investment wunderkind. Public companies face significant scrutiny from their investors and the press—an experience that is avoided by their private counterparts. Finally, companies that are acquired receive more than just funding from their buyer, with access to a variety of resources including valuable connections, expertise and sometimes a client base.
As experts continue their attempt to solve the puzzle surrounding the 2016 investment market, one thing is clear: Executives considering an exit strategy for their companies are rich with options.
As a firm providing PR counsel to growing technology companies, the team at Communiqué PR has assisted numerous clients through M&A transitions, with at least one client per year being acquired, on average. Keeping with the 2015 trend, we saw an increase in client acquisitions last year, with former clients Volometrix and Mobidia being acquired by Microsoft and AppAnnie, respectively.
For insights into developing effective messaging and communications plans, or for more about how Communiqué PR has helped clients facing M&A transitions, check out the following articles:
Working Yourself Out of a Job – The Right Way
Reflecting on Our Work with Mobidia
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Over the last year, Communiqué PR has been working with Darigold, a dairy co-op, and in that time we have promoted its new naturally white cheddar cheese, planned and hosted an event for the Sunnyside Plant expansion, and shared an abundance of delicious Darigold recipes. After a year of great results highlighting the products, the company and its growth, we wanted to direct some attention to the heart of the corporation: the farmer-owners.
Darigold is a farmer-owned co-op and for those of you who don’t know what that means, the farmers that supply the milk for all Darigold products own the company. Darigold has about 500 farmer-owners, making it one of the largest co-ops in the country. It also means that at the core of Darigold is a group of farmers who are passionate about their farms, their cows and ultimately the milk they provide to consumers. As a partner to the organization, we get to see this passion and dedication firsthand and we thought it only fair that others experience it as well.
Working closely with the team at Darigold, we decided to organize a farm tour that would allow us to share a behind-the-scenes look at where it all begins, a dairy farm. As we planned the tour, there were a few things to consider.
- Who should we take on the tour? For the farm tour, we ultimately decided to invite bloggers to attend for a couple of reasons. With a farm tour, we knew that we would have to drive for at least an hour (in this case two) out of the city and with reporters on deadline, we felt bloggers would be able to work this into their schedule with more ease. Another reason we opted to go with bloggers is the relationship they have with their audience. Consumers often turn to them for suggestions, ideas and reviews on different products as if the blogger is a friend. Lastly, with a little more creative freedom than traditional outlets, we felt that the bloggers would be able to share more openly about their personal experience at the farm and how seeing this side of Darigold influenced their feelings towards the brand and its products.
- Where should we hold the tour? As I mentioned, Darigold has a lot of options when it comes to farms! Distance ultimately eliminated a large portion of the farms. The bloggers that we had invited all have children and needed to ensure that this was only a day trip. With that in mind, we still had an array of options but decided on a farm that was a reasonable distance to drive for a day trip and had experience in hosting tours. I have to admit, I’ve never hosted a farm tour, so I didn’t know what elements of a farm to show off or the order in which we should share information about the farm and how it operates. Luckily, the Coldstream Farm in Demming, Wash., had experience in hosting tours and this allowed us to lean on their experience and expertise in hosting the tour.
- How can we ensure it’s a positive experience? We knew going into it that Coldstream Farms was going to do a wonderful job hosting the event but we wanted to ensure that we had thought of every detail. First, we held a call with Darigold, Coldstream Farms, and the team at Communiqué. On the call, Coldstream shared unique qualities about their farm, state of the art technology and important measures they take to ensure the cows’ health and happiness. With this information, we were able share with Coldstream the important messages Darigold as a company wanted to communicate with consumers and how they tied back to their efforts on the farms. Once we established the key messages and the key aspects of the farm, we built an agenda for the tour that would help manage our time and provide the bloggers with a cohesive narrative. Planning this in advance of the tour allowed for a seamless and smooth event that the bloggers enjoyed. Following the tour, we reached out to all the bloggers to ensure they had all the information they needed for their posts.
Overall, the event was a great success—and a lot of fun, not only for the bloggers but also for me! Sometimes we get caught up in the same routine and strategies, but it’s important to remember to continue thinking outside the box and developing creative ways to tell your clients’ stories. Of course, the traditional methods of outreach will continue to play an important role, but providing a unique experience for media to enjoy will give them with an opportunity to interact with the brand and share their experience with their audience.
Below are a couple of the blog posts that resulted from the tour with more to come!