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.
Content marketing continues to be a top priority for B2B (and B2C) marketers. However, with often limited resources and subject matter, and experts to develop original content and repurpose it across multiple channels, many content marketing programs remained stalled.
Indeed, according to the “2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends – North America” survey report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the top challenges B2B content marketers face include producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content.
If a company is limited in the internal resources it can dedicate full-time to content marketing initiatives, a viable option is to leverage your PR agency team to drive content development and repurpose that content for a variety of audiences.
The benefits of working with your PR agency to draft and develop content are manifold. As columnist Rachel Lindteigen writes in MarketingLand (“Who should create your content?”), agencies can often scale production and have multiple resources working on your account. Further, agency personnel frequently have the backgrounds in PR, journalism and English to get the job done efficiently and without requiring extensive training. “It’s this combination of the number of team members and the educational/background mix that can make your agency a great asset for content development,” writes Lindteigen.
For example, Communiqué PR is assisting our client EMC Isilon by conducting a number of interviews with business unit CTOs to get their perspective about industry trends and issues facing their target audiences. From there, we draft content that is utilized on the company’s blogs (EMC Emerging Tech and EMC Pulse). We also use the information from these CTO interviews and blog posts to pitch and develop contributed articles, proactive pitches, speaker proposals and award submissions. In one case, we were able to take a series of blog posts that weren’t yet published and pitch them as an exclusive three-part contributed series to TV Technology magazine for EMC Isilon’s CTO of Media and Entertainment Tom “T.V.” Burns.
Below are some suggestions for PR agency teams to help support content marketing programs:
Utilize in-house experts. Work with your primary client contact to identify subject matter experts and conduct one-on-one interviews with them about their roles and their experiences interacting with customers, partners and other key stakeholders. For example, who better to talk about the challenges that customers are facing than a customer service executive who speaks with them every day? In just an hour or so, interviewers can access valuable insight and perspective for blog posts, social media channels, infographics, case studies and more.
Consider briefings with C-level executives to get a view from the top, but also try and meet with contacts across all levels, including engineers involved with product development, customer service representatives, or those contacts involved with partners or strategic alliances.
Put your journalist hat on. When conducting interviews, think like a journalist and make sure you get the right information you need for the content. Don’t let them rely too heavily on acronyms or jargon– ask for details and specifics. Recording the call is highly recommended since conversations can easily go off track and it can be difficult to remember details several weeks following the interview.
Here are five sample questions to consider:
- Is there a common pain point you hear about frequently from customers or partners?
- What are the biggest changes coming in your industry over the next 2-5 years?
- What issues/trends are your customers not paying enough attention to? What needs more noise?
- Other than your company, is there someone whose approach in this space you really like and respect? Why?
- What publications/websites/blogs do you read?
Banking on content development and repurposing. So you’ve got your PR agency involved with drafting content and supporting your content marketing initiatives – great! The next step is to get the whole company to access and leverage that content. In a column for Forbes (“60% Of B2B Content Sits Unused, Here’s the Fix”), contributor John Hall discusses the importance of corporate knowledge banks, which are centralized content hubs where sales, social media, recruiting, employee training and other team members can pull content and incorporate them into their own initiatives. As Hall writes in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, these hubs create a single location for employees to find internal knowledge, industry knowledge and data and opinions. The key is making sure it’s updated frequently and accessible to all employees.
Does your company have a content marketing program? Have you used a PR agency or other contributors to develop content? If so, what were the results? We’d love to hear about your experience in our comments section.
I’m admittedly a little too into HBO’s Game of Thrones. Through the months of March, April and May you can find me around the office discussing new theories and predictions and analyzing characters’ developing personalities. With the recent finale and the laundry list of Emmy nominations, I was inspired to take a closer look at four strong Game of Thrones characters and think about what we could learn from them and how we could apply those learnings to our daily work in the PR world (admittedly a far cry from their home of Westeros).
Jon Snow: Jon Snow is undoubtedly one of the most beloved characters on television, but that’s not necessarily the case in the world in which he lives. As a leader, Jon is often faced with tough decisions yet what he sees as right (and his ultimate decision) is often against what others want.
As PR professionals, our clients are seeking our counsel and looking to us to lead them through the media landscape to help them achieve their business and communication objectives. More often than not, they trust our suggestions, however, they occasionally may disagree with our recommendations or request we move forward with an activity that we believe won’t hold much value. Part of our job as the hired experts is to have the hard conversations and inform them what is realistic and what we believe the results will be.
Like Jon, it’s important that we explain the rationale behind what we think is the best course of action. But unlike Jon, at the end of the day, the client has final say, and if it is something that is important to them, then we will do everything in our ability to achieve the best results possible!
Peter Baelish/Little Finger: Most Game of Thrones fans are probably thinking, what could we possibly learn from the manipulative Lord Baelish? Well, it’s true, he is sneaky, devious and betrays one person after another. But the one thing that he knows how to do and to do well is address his audience. He knows exactly what people want, what interests them and usually presents them with a way to get exactly that.
Please note: I am not recommending you operate in a way that is manipulative. Rather, I recommend you take the time to truly understand the audience your pitch or story idea will reach. Know the journalist—consider if what you are sending will be something they are interested in and if it is something their audience will be interested in. Lastly, is this audience the audience that your client is hoping to reach? If not, then rethink your idea or find a new target.
Arya Stark: Over the last couple of seasons, Arya has been on an interesting journey, essentially learning how to be an assassin. She spent time and energy studying the way this group of assassins operates and practiced and perfected a set of skills. But after a couple of mix-ups she decides to return home, bringing with her a completely new set of skills that can be applied regardless of where she is. Arya shows us that skill sets are versatile.
While you may be an expert in PR in a specific field – retail, technology, media and entertainment or consumer products – that doesn’t mean you are limited to one area. The skills you learn while doing work for one company can almost always apply to another industry, and may even give you a unique perspective. To find success, you simply need the skills as a foundation and a creative mind set to apply them.
Daenerys Targaryen: All good things take time. Dany has spent six seasons building an army of loyal followers, gathering ships and conquering cities in preparation to take the iron throne. She’s had her frustrations and setbacks, but with determination, passion and an unwavering focus on achieving her goals (and with the help of three dragons), she is finally headed west, something she has been working towards since we were introduced to the character.
The takeaway is results don’t always immediately present themselves. A major funding story may garner significant coverage with less effort, but getting that feature or trend story may take months of cultivating a relationship and providing countless ideas and updates. These profiles or trend stories aren’t going to happen every day, but if you put significant thought into the idea and meaningful effort into the presentation of it, the results will eventually follow.
This is only a brief overview, by way of Westeros, of some of the qualities we can work to implement into our daily duties as PR professionals. Being confident in your recommendations and expert knowledge, understanding your audience, growing your skill set and having the patience and resilience to build key relationships (journalists can be tough!) are all critical to finding success as a professional and on behalf of your clients.
And as Game of Thrones fans know, I’ve barely scratched the surface with the lessons we could learn from key characters. What other lessons have you learned or what other character qualities can we apply to our role in PR?
In a recent NPR podcast, David Greene and Shankar Vedantam discussed the pros and cons of having a work-based friendship. They challenged the common belief that having friends at work is solely beneficial to a working environment. In reality, they argued, there are mixed blessings. The study confirmed that those who have more friends at work tend to be more productive and happier. However, having friends in the workplace can lead to more interruptions, be emotionally draining, and be extremely stressful and uncomfortable when friends there are competing for the same position. The Rutgers study found that when friends are involved in the same kinds of activities, the success of one person may be painful for the other person.
After learning about some of the concerns of having work-based friendships, people might be thinking that they need to de-friend everyone. However, before taking an oath of silence at work, do keep in mind the benefits of being more productive and having more fun typically outweigh the challenges. This is likely a situation where simply being aware of the pros and cons and taking the time to be thoughtful of your situation and putting up the necessary boundaries can be beneficial.
Workplace friendships can also lead to cohesive work teams that can be extremely valuable in industries that require creativity, collaboration and productivity like PR. Here at Communiqué PR we find that collaborating as a team is a huge part of our success and helps turn good ideas into great ones! It is fun to work in an environment where we have each others’ back and we feel comfortable taking creative risks knowing that we have good support and feedback from our colleagues.
Also, in PR no project is done by a single person. The entire team assists with researching, writing, editing and pitching. It is important for everyone to work well together as a cohesive unit. Another benefit of having friends at work is that we tend to be happier, which makes us more productive, which ultimately leads to stronger work and better results for our clients. Friendships definitely help the overall attitude of a company culture and make it a place where people are excited to be part of the environment. The friendships at Communiqué PR have led to creating a great workplace that was named no. 16 on 100 Best Places to Work For in Seattle 2015 by Seattle Business Magazine.
Some industries may require solitary focus and are not conducive to and don’t necessarily benefit from socialization. However, PR is an industry where creativity is critical to success, where feeling comfortable at work enables and encourages you to think outside of the box. Communiqué PR is a work environment that endorses friendships, which is probably the reason why we stand out as an extremely hard-working and innovative firm.
After surpassing the number of daily Twitter users, seeing more engagement than Facebook and becoming the biggest US mobile game in history, Pokémon Go undoubtedly has the world talking.
For those who have not read or heard about the game, Pokémon Go is a free mobile app that uses your phone’s GPS to enable the digital you to move around and find a virtual Pokémon. The augmented-reality aspect of the game displays the Pokémon on your screen on top of what is actually in front of you in real life. The interactive feature of the app allows individuals to engage like never before, all while operating wirelessly and integrating into players’ daily lives. Snapchat is another recent successful example of augmented reality. The mobile app’s new filters use augmented reality by locating an object in the real world, typically an individual’s face, and displaying a character on top of that object – as it appears in real time. If you open your mouth or lift your eyebrows the filter triggers a new display or special effect to appear on your face.
The success of Pokémon Go and Snapchat is no mystery, and we should anticipate more applications of augmented reality (AR) to surface in company marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. Oculus, with its virtual reality (VR) goggles, found early success and opened the magical door to the world of VR for many executives and gamers alike. Although VR and AR are not new concepts, today’s technology has increased the frequency of use as well as the potential of these realities to evolve outside of the gaming realm. This is spurring executives to take a hard look at the future of VR/AR in their companies and establish whether or not incorporating AR or VR will help them stay ahead of the competition.
In order to integrate virtual reality or augmented reality into your marketing portfolio, it is important to understand what they are and whether or not this strategy will help achieve your company’s communication and businesses objectives. Tech Times describes VR as the creation of a simulated world that users can interact with by wearing a special helmet or goggles; AR is the blending of virtual reality with real life, creating a hybrid world that anyone with a smartphone can access.
A more important difference between the two is that AR is a more social experience where users are able to interact with virtual contents in the real world. As illustrated with Pokémon Go and Snapchat’s filters, what you see on the screen appears according to where you are located and how you are moving. This ability to explore, experience and engage is where AR has an advantage over VR.
For many companies, increasing engagement with key audiences is a chief communication objective. Early adopters that integrate AR will not only innovate numerous opportunities for customers to interact with the company brand and product, they will also generate news opportunities to showcase the creative ways they are able to harness AR into their marketing mix.
Once companies catch on, the number and variety of AR apps will only continue to increase. In 2012, there were 118 million AR apps downloaded. By 2017, that number is predicted to jump to 3.5 billion. The potential is clearly there, but what remains to be seen are the ways these companies will choose to implement this booming technology. Aside from the Pokémon Go and Snapchat examples, additional usages of augmented reality are appearing in:
- Training courses and education
- Map services
- Digital museum tours
- Online shopping
Going forward, it will be interesting to see how companies implement augmented and virtual realities to create buzz around their products and engage with their customers.
Is your company brainstorming how to integrate AR and VR into marketing or advertising campaigns? What results do you anticipate from these efforts? We would love to hear about it in the comments section!
Whether you love them or hate them, there’s no denying that the Kardashians have become a ubiquitous force in American pop culture. Twitter, despite having a notoriously short attention span, has become the most recent site of an enduring Kardashian occupation otherwise known as the #KimExposedTaylorParty.
For background, this frenzy of a hashtag is the result of the latest installment in a feud between musicians Kanye West and Taylor Swift. In a nutshell, West recently released lyrics declaring he “made Taylor famous,” and Swift responded via her Grammy acceptance speech in which she warned fans about those who “try to… take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”
Enter Kim Kardashian West, social media maven and West’s wife. Over the weekend, she countered Swift’s defamation of her husband with a ruthless campaign across both Twitter and Snapchat, releasing video footage that seriously damaged Swift’s credibility and good girl reputation.
The high drama between celebrities is almost always shallow and frivolous. That aside, there are valuable lessons that any brand can glean from Kardashian’s expert command of social media.
Understand each platform and audience
Frankly, most brands will never be able to match the sheer mass of Kardashian’s social media following. Having a lot of followers doesn’t hurt, but it’s actually her precision and understanding of each social media platform that keeps Kardashian ahead of the curve.
For example, Instagram users are drawn to visual content, so she posts photos of her life and projects. Meanwhile, Twitter users are all about dialogue, so she shares personal news and engages in direct conversation with her followers.
She has effectively identified how she uses each platform and why. Consequently, each of Kardashian’s social media accounts is a discrete channel of content tailored to her specific audiences. Companies and brands should also determine which platforms your audience is using and establish the purpose and content of each of your social media channels.
(Swift, on the other hand, made the amateur mistake of copying and pasting the same response on all her forms of social media. Don’t pull a Swift.)
Build a narrative using multiple platforms
Kardashian first hinted at the now infamous video in a GQ interview weeks ago. In the following episode of “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” she mentioned the issue again. While live-tweeting the show, she asked her fans to follow her on Snapchat. Finally, she delivered the coup de grâce by posting the whole video to her Snapchat account.
By using multiple channels to tell her story, Kardashian killed two birds with one stone, creating hype for her narrative while driving more followers to her Snapchat, which she had created only a few months ago. And because she posts distinct content to her social media accounts, she has made it so that her fans will meet her at multiple points.
Tell a cohesive story
Employing various forms of communication is powerful, but it’s equally important to stay on topic. While Kardashian used several platforms to disseminate her story, all messages on all channels aligned with a singular goal. Combined with smart timing, this narrative created excitement bordering on hysteria for her content and her brand. All the while, her methods are in keeping with her overarching brand theme of hypertransparency.
Companies should also tell their stories consistently so as to cultivate a sense of authenticity and integrity. A cohesive narrative distributed across multiple channels builds a comprehensive brand experience and inspires consumer loyalty.
At the end of the day, PR is about powerful storytelling. Despite her many critics, Kardashian has managed to stay persistently relevant by providing a compelling narrative via, of course, social media.
We recently had the pleasure of hosting Vineeta Manglani, a senior consultant and unit director at Sympra GmbH, our German Public Relations Network (PRN) partner. As part of Sympra’s create5 program, Vineeta traveled to Seattle from Stuttgart and spent the last two weeks as an honorary CPR team member.
I thought it would be fun to sit down with Vineeta and learn more about international agency life, her PR journey and her thoughts on where the industry is headed. (Spoiler alert: Pokémon Go is a sign of what’s to come.)
How did you get started in public relations?
After I graduated from university in England, I moved to Germany where I worked in advertising for eight years. At the time, I was doing a lot of copywriting and copyediting and I wanted to do more journalistic writing, as I’ve always enjoyed this style. What attracted me to PR is that it’s content driven and there are more opportunities to develop quality pieces for press.
What’s your role at Sympra?
I’m the unit director for our science and research division so I work with clients like the Siemens foundation and Delta Q to develop strategic communications plans. I also manage and coordinate international business for the agency.
What industry trends are you tracking in your market?
The transition from print to online has been huge and it’s happened a lot faster in the U.S. than in Germany. Everyone is still adjusting to the shift and we at Sympra are developing new and creative ways to devise online publications. We don’t want to just mirror what is done in print in an online medium, we want to make it different.
Our team is also monitoring trends such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for opportunities to adapt it to our business. For example, we specialize in corporate publishing and frequently develop electronic newsletters for clients. We want to see how we can use these technologies to make online experiences for our customers’ publications.
We have also noticed that an increasing number of our global clients have also become more interested in international PR. Companies realize that a uniform approach across the globe doesn’t work. They want a bespoke, individual PR approach in each market and they trust the agency at the frontline in that market to effectively adapt their messaging.
What are the “hottest” markets your clients have expressed interest in reaching?
China and India are the top two currently, but Japan is also on the rise.
What are three PR lessons you’ve learned in your career?
Listen. It sounds obvious, but listening is really important. When you attend the first kickoff meeting with a client, you need to fully understand their business and communication objectives. I tend to listen in the first few meetings rather than anything else because it is only once I understand the whole scenario can I start thinking about target groups and messaging.
Never be afraid to ask. When you sit in the boardroom, you don’t want to look inept, but you have to ask. If you don’t truly understand something, just ask again because how else can you communicate the right messages to media or stakeholders?
Be creative. Don’t automatically assume what works for one client will work for the next. Explore other options and this is what we work very hard on at the agency – finding new ways to drive PR for individual clients. It is only when we have a creative approach will a customers’ message be heard out there.
What will PR look like in the next 5-10 years?
When I look at this Pokémon Go craze, I think it will be incredibly interactive. Companies are going to start asking for PR experiences where people really interact and engage with brands. I predict even more one-to-one engagement, which may not translate into media hits but instead bypasses the press and goes directly to the consumers. There’s so much going on out there that we have to adapt this to PR and communication!
Are you concerned that the distinction between PR and marketing is becoming blurrier?
There’s a fine line between marketing and PR but we’re storytellers and the storytelling component will transfer to other services. For example, one of our clients asked us to brainstorm new ways to educate consumers on his complex healthcare product. As the product needs a significant amount of explanation, we decided that a short, fun explanatory film would make it easy for the average consumer to understand. With films, vlogs and other new tools, there will still be a need to develop a storyline to ensure your client’s message is being heard.
Bonus Round
What activities do you enjoy outside of work?
Going out with friends, watching my son’s football games, swimming and hiking.
If you weren’t in PR, what would you be doing instead?
Writing in another capacity. I love writing fictional crime stories.
Who are your favorite authors?
Stieg Larsson and Philippa Gregory.
What’s your favorite thing about Seattle?
The positivism. I find the people here so open. I’ve been to San Francisco and New York City, and the people here are so friendly, in comparison. I certainly think being so close to nature encourages a positive mindset – you have such an amazing setting here – very enviable!
Thank you for joining us, Vineeta! We’ve loved having you in the office and hope you’ll come back and visit soon!