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.
Automobile recall stories have become more and more frequent in recent years, with dubious management decisions and cover ups causing damage to long-admired brands General Motors, Honda, and Chrysler. Most recently, Volkswagen made headlines for an emissions scandal that has already unseated the company’s CEO and promises to cost the Volkswagen billions of dollars in penalties, as well as the hard-earned trust of its customers.
Each day, new revelations about Volkswagen’s actions are coming to light and, with each new detail, the company that just this summer achieved its goal of becoming the world’s dominant car maker quickly finds its brand diminished and its revenues plummet. From a PR perspective, it’s fascinating to watch how a global institution with an otherwise stellar reputation navigates a crisis of this magnitude. While much is still being learned about the situation, already there are lessons that other businesses can take away from this evolving story.
Cheaters Get Caught
Volkswagen’s scandal began back in 2008, when tougher emissions rules were first implemented. Unlike many other car manufacturers that opted to install a system that uses a chemical catalyst to ensure that unburned fuel doesn’t get into exhaust, Volkswagen decided to go its own way. The path the company chose involved the development of an elaborate scheme featuring software that could identify when cars were being tested in order to reduce harmful exhaust and make it appear as if the vehicle actually met the new requirements.
Unfortunately for Volkswagen, this software, called “the switch,” worked so well that clean-air advocacy group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, honored the company by selecting its cars for a study on how diesel could be a clean fuel. What they found, however, was that two of the three models tested exceeded emissions caps by as much as 35 times, leading the organization to alert the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California Air Resources Board (CARB) last year.
When Caught in a Lie, Fess Up and Try to Control the Message
When presented with the findings by the EPA and CARB, Volkswagen chose to dispute the test results, citing “various technical issues.” Interestingly, the company did implement a voluntary recall of 500,000 cars in order to install a software patch that it said would fix the issue. In the end, the patch didn’t work and Volkswagen remained in the hot seat with the EPS and unable to explain why the diagnostic systems of its vehicles don’t register accurate emissions under test conditions.
This month, Volkswagen did finally admit the truth about the scheme to fix the emissions tests, but it took the company a few rounds of admissions to finally tell the whole truth. First, they admitted to installing the “switch,” then admitted that the number of cars with the switch was larger than originally reported—as many as 11 million worldwide.
When given the opportunity to come clean, the company chose to deflect and deny. For Volkswagen, this was a critical misstep. Sure, the company’s reputation would have taken a hit for the scheme either way, but by admitting the truth earlier, Volkswagen would have had an opportunity to better frame the situation and present a sense of remorse that may have been perceived as authentic. If Volkswagen had opted to trust its customers by admitting fault and taking responsibility when initially caught, the company may have prevented losing the trust of its customers and society-at-large.
It’s likely that more will be revealed in the coming weeks about this elaborate scheme and, for those of us watching, the story promises to remain dramatic. This reputation-crushing misstep also acts as a strong reminder that all companies are vulnerable to potential crises that may threaten their integrity and core values. As such, it is imperative that organizations be prepared to respond to a crisis with a communications plan that can be implemented with lightning speed and transparency. When a crisis occurs, swift, accurate, and controlled communication delivered with transparency and sensitivity during the initial hours and days following the crisis is crucial to preserving a company’s reputation. Unfortunately for Volkswagen, the damage from this crisis may already be done and irreparable.
Even though pumpkin spice products and cozy sweaters just hit the shelves, most journalists and PR pros have already moved on to the biggest shopping event of the year: the holiday season. For PR pros with consumer-facing clients, the guidelines around holiday gift guide pitching are often outlined by editors to streamline the selection process. But for those of us with B2B clients, it’s less clear how our clients’ services fit into the holiday season news cycle.
Following are four strategies for inserting B2B companies into retail reporters’ holiday coverage:
- Leverage Company Data. Does your client have any unique data it can share with journalists? If so, now is the time to leverage it. When clients analyze their data to develop newsworthy statistics or trends, it almost always drives results, but holiday-related statistics can hit a grand slam. This data could include trending products, year-over-year spending habits, or how in-store sales compare to e-commerce sales across geographic areas.
- Promote Holiday-Themed Customer Success Stories. How are your clients’ products or services helping retail customers prepare for the holiday season? If there’s an interesting story to tell, see if your clients’ customers are willing to participate in a case study or speak with the media about how it has helped them during the holiday season.
- Create a Branded, Holiday-themed Infographic. Compelling graphics present important points in a clear, concise way that is sure to capture attention. If you’re not familiar with Photoshop, you can create an infographic with easy-to-use tools like Easel.ly or Piktochart. Then publish it on your client’s website to increase traffic. Studies show that web traffic tends to increase by 12 percent after publishing an infographic.
- Offer End-of-Year Predictions. The New Year brings a multitude of stories and lists predicting which trends are in store for the coming year. Work with company executives to compile a list of unique, well-founded trend predictions for their industry that can encompass everything from new innovations to market consolidations. Be sure to ground your predictions in fact or current trends to back-up your claims.
The holidays offer an excellent platform to drive media results as long as you creatively tailor your strategy to fit your B2B clients’ unique brand story. These are just a few of the strategies that you can tailor to hit a grand slam this holiday season.
When customers have a bad experience with a brand, there’s a good chance they’re going to tweet about it. To help brands improve their customer interactions, Twitter recently released a 122-page customer service playbook. Clearly this is a serious topic since a social media platform known for brevity decided to devote more than a 100 pages covering it.
So how does better customer service on Twitter affect PR? An article by Mashable pointed out “the biggest overlap between PR and social media comes down to customer support. A poorly executed social campaign – or even something as seemingly innocuous as a response to a customer complaint on Twitter – can easily turn into a PR nightmare.”
While reading through the seven steps to customer service on Twitter, I realized they could also be used to build an effective PR plan. The seven steps are:
1. Set Your Vision: Right now at Communiqué, we’re hard at work responding to RFPs and developing presentations for new business opportunities. One of the first things we like to do is research the company and determine what their vision is, what the public’s perception is, and what we think it should be. Identifying the vision helps you to understand the results a company wants and allows you to build a plan to achieve them.
2. Size and Prioritize Your Opportunities: A good PR strategy will outline which opportunities make sense to pursue first and the amount of work needed to make them happen. For example, you could recommend a client pursue a high-profile speaking event to build buzz and then suggest a bylined article to follow up on the momentum.
3. Define the Customer Service Experience: According to Twitter’s playbook, defining the customer service experience consists of five components: establishing the brand voice, delivering relevant content, optimizing response timing, and establishing community. These same components can be applied to effective media pitching. When introducing a journalist to a company, you want to be sure you’re making the right impression, offering them useful information, responding quickly, and building rapport.
4. Set Goals for Performance Metrics: PR should be used to help a company achieve a number of its business objectives. Goals can range from securing four articles in business outlets or submitting three award nominations per quarter. Refer back to the company’s vision and make sure your PR goals directly align with achieving it.
5. Establish the Measurement Mechanism: Decide how you’re going to determine whether or not you’re successful in meeting those goals. Are there certain media outlets the company wants to be featured in? Is there an event or speaking opportunity an executive would like to attend? Establishing how you’re going to measure success for a client allows everyone to understand the desired end result and work towards the same goal.
6. Operationalize Your Strategy: Now it’s time to put that plan into action. Assembling the right team members and developing workflow processes are critical to implementing your strategy. For example, at Communiqué, we use Smartsheet to organize tasks and to create transparency on the account. These documents allow us to see the status of assigned projects and easily update the client on progress.
7. Iterate and Innovate While it may make sense to stick to tried-and-true practices for some things, it’s important to be open to new ideas. Maybe that’s exploring the use of a live video streaming app like Periscope or producing a podcast. You may not be a fan of a particular new trend or tool, but the key is to be aware of what’s out there so you can present an educated recommendation to your client.
In summary, Twitter’s customer service steps not only help brands avoid a potential PR crisis, they also serve as a guide to craft a successful PR strategy for clients.
Want to read all 122 pages of the playbook? You can download it here.
Twitter recently posted its second-quarter earnings. While the company’s revenue exceeded expectations, it reported not feeling fully satisfied with the amount of user-growth. I found this to be shocking considering Twitter is the largest platform for third-party content with the number of tweets averaging around 500 hundred each day from over 300 million users. Twitter is such a unique form of social media as it limits characters per tweet to 140 and yet provides a channel for unprecedented amounts of interactions between users and contains a vast amount of information – to the point that it has become a go-to source of breaking news for many. But, dwelling on how the stock market and quarter earnings are portraying Twitter would be shooting yourself in the foot. In a recent article, 6 Twitter Tips to Score More Sales In 140 Characters, Kevin Tully sums up the benefit that Twitter can bring to you or your company perfectly – Twitter can help you sell!
As mentioned, Twitter is constantly spurting information. However, this can be a double-sided sword if not approached with caution. Diving into the Twitter world without direction will, more often than not, leave you drowning in the “endless stream of news.” Luckily, there are actionable items that, when incorporated into one’s Twitter campaign, can help one sort out the good from the bad, the clutter from the meaningful.
Define your brand – be you!
Twitter has made reaching your customer in real-time possible. Knowing this, it is important to make sure that the message that you are delivering is consistent with your brand identity. Tully encourages aiming to tell a story on Twitter. The most effective way to do so is to first identify who you want to be known as. When using Twitter for your business, it is acceptable to advertise and promote the brand as long as it is kept to a minimum and intertwined with industry news and original content. By over promoting oneself, you might find yourself losing followers. Followers are looking to be engaged. With each tweet ask yourself, am I adding value or just adding to the clutter? Part of defining your brand is also being consistent across all social media channels. Using similar images as profile pictures is a simple way to ensure a consistency visually. Furthermore, social media management tools are also great for aligning posts across channels, as well as for time management.
Let Twitter do the work for you
Two words: Twitter lists. Many Twitter users do not utilize Twitter lists to maximum benefit, however, they can provide you with the ideal newsfeed. Lists are tools that help you segment your followers into categories, something that can be extremely helpful for targeting specific people. Getting your messages in front of the right audiences is crucial for maximum impact and acceptance and lists can aid in this.
In addition, you can monitor lists to see what is trending in one industry versus another. For example, keep up on your competitors by grouping them into a list and monitoring their feeds. Analysis of content as well as patterns, engagement, and tone is a great way to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Don’t be a fly on the wall
According to social media app Buffer, it is acceptable to tweet 14 times on weekdays (with certain limitations and it drops down to seven on weekends), while maintaining an informative air rather than an annoying one. This may seem like an awful lot of tweets coming from one person until you consider just how much information is appearing on one’s feed each minute. On some days, I will step away from my computer for five minutes and come back to 150 new tweets! For best results, it is good technique to be engaging multiple times a day, every day, whether it is through new content or re-tweets. As you post, try out new key words and hashtags to see if some resonate better than others. There is no perfect formula to become a Twitter guru, so researching, predicting, and analyzing outcomes is a great place to start when crafting your technique.
For more Twitter best practices, see our blog on Tips for Leveraging Twitter’s New Analytics Dashboard and How to Merge Twitter Accounts – Without Losing Followers
BlackSky Global is a satellite imaging company and the newest startup in Seattle’s burgeoning space industry. In June, the company announced its plan to deploy a 60-satellite imaging constellation to provide high-resolution images of the globe in near-real time. The company’s “satellite imaging as a service” business model provides cost-effective access to images from space to businesses, organizations, and governments that cannot or do not wish to capitalize their own constellations.
Like many other startups, BlackSky Global was starting from scratch and needed guidance around messaging and strategy to support its public launch. We worked closely with the company’s founder/CEO Jason Andrews to understand his objectives for the launch, which were to drive awareness for the new company in order to support recruitment efforts and raise additional capital. In addition, Andrews wanted the news to create a “buzz” in the space and satellite imaging industry to drive meetings with media and potential customers at this year’s GEOINT Symposium—an influential annual geospatial intelligence conference that draws decision-makers from the defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities.
Once we understood the objectives of the campaign, we then developed and implemented a launch strategy for the company. It included recommendations on timing, a contingency plan in preparation for potential leaks, the launch press release and pitch email, and marketing direction to ensure that BlackSky’s web site and social media platforms remained private prior to the official launch date. In addition, we curated a comprehensive press list and developed internal and external messaging materials, including a company FAQ and mission statement, talking points for staff fielding media calls and participating in interviews, and talking points for communicating with staff and stakeholders about the company’s vision and mission.
In the end, our preparation paid off, with 82 articles placed in June in outlets from the target media categories that map back to BlackSky’s communications objectives. Coverage highlights include placements in space industry publications such as SpaceNews, Aviation Week, and Via Satellite, national business and technology outlets such as TechCrunch, Fortune, and Popular Science, and local business and technology outlets including The Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, GeekWire, and Xconomy. Even more thrilling, the coverage and awareness that was secured in June has continued to drive additional media interest and articles in top-tier outlets including Bloomberg Business and The Washington Post.
BlackSky Global Launch Coverage Highlights
Following are just a few select articles representing coverage in BlackSky’s target media categories. For a look at more coverage from this launch, please visit BlackSky.com/news/.
National Business/Technology
- “BlackSky Global Wants To Launch 60 Satellites To Give You a Near Real-Time View Of Earth,” TechCrunch
- “The Race Is On To Surround The Earth With All-Seeing Satellites,” Popular Science
- “Satellite Images Show Economies Growing and Shrinking in Real Time,” BloombergBusiness
- “These Companies Are Racing To Sell You High-Speed Internet From Space,” BuzzFeed
- “Here’s why small satellites are so big right now,” Fortune
- “A stunning new look from space at nature, North Korea and Chipotle,” The Washington Post
Space Industry
- “BlackSky Global Says it’s Poised To Cover Globe with 60 Smallsats,” SpaceNews
- “BlackSky Global Details Plans for 60 Satellite Earth Observation Constellation,” Via Satellite
- “Startup sees new twist in Earth imaging-via-satellite business,” Sen.com
- “Spaceflight Industries Spinoff Promises ‘Hourly’ Earth Images,” Aviation Week
- “Paul Allen-backed BlackSky Global Plans Fleet of Imaging Smallsats,” Parabolic Arc
Local Business
- “Seattle firm says 60-satellite service will make Earth images faster, cheaper,” The Seattle Times
- “Seattle-area company to launch constellation of image-taking satellites,” Puget Sound Business Journal
- “This startup is launching 60 satellites in space to take real-time photos of Earth,” GeekWire
- “BlackSky Global Aims to Blanket the Globe with Small Imaging Satellites,” Xconomy
What’s the fun in knowledge if you can’t share it with others? A thought leader – a trusted source, in PR parlance – shares what they know, what they think, and what they believe in with other people. A good way to help develop your career is to develop yourself as a valuable expert in your field. But how exactly do you gain credibility and authority?
The answer is simple: through content creation and authenticity. When we talk about thought leadership, what we really mean is value – what value do you bring to X, Y and Z and what contributions do you bring to the table?
Following are five ways I have been helping my clients and my friends build their thought leadership and illustrate their expertise within their respective industries. Recently, I have also taken the initiative to employ these tactics for my own benefit, and I have seen great results so far.
Most of the suggestions below are quite simple and cost-effective, but they require time and critical thinking on your end. Also, you will want to practice these techniques on a regular basis so you stay top of mind and relevant within your respective industry. Writing one blog post a year, for example, will not demonstrate thought leadership.
- Distribute useful content: You can do a number of things, from writing blogs, contributed articles, emails and op-eds, to participating in podcasts and webinars, and developing online videos. If you are the author of the published content, you can also repost it in a long-form post on your LinkedIn, as long as you credit the original source. Be consistent with the content you publish and create content regularly. The more valuable and useful the content, the more you will establish your authority and thought leadership within your field.
- Build a social media presence: Social networks are here to stay so it’s important to consider a social media strategy. People Tweet about everything and post selfies every day on Instagram. If you don’t do social media, I recommend you start. But beyond that, you’ll want to provide value for other users. Journalists and influencers are increasingly leaning on Twitter, for example, to find breaking news, story ideas, and to vet their sources. I suggest you comment on journalists’ posts, ask and answer peoples’ questions, and post/repost relevant content at least three times a day.
- Insert your perspective in timely news/trends: This is a useful technique that can get you in front of many eyeballs. The idea is to add value and contribute to an existing conversation. I suggest spending about 15 minutes every day searching the news to see if you, or your client, can contribute to an existing, important conversation. This is a powerful way to establish yourself as an expert with a valuable POV.
- Have an opinion and be controversial: This is how you will stand out from everyone else, but it isn’t easy. You will want to find your voice by testing the waters and own what you do and say. Some of the greatest leaders went against the status quo and did things that were provocative. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, for example, are some of our history’s strongest and most effective proponents because they did and said things that made them stand out from everyone else. Find something you believe in and stand for it – it may be scary at first because you might stand alone, but people will respect you for it.
- Build trust: It’s important to establish trust with your peers. You want to be seen as reliable, consistent, and transparent with everything you share. Give credit to those who deserve it and make sure the content you create is accurate (this is why it will take time to create good content). Building trust will take time because you can’t demonstrate these human values overnight; however, know that you can ruin it with the click of a mouse or tap of the finger. Once you have built a relationship with a reporter/influencer and other peers within your industry, it will be imperative that you do everything you can to sustain and nurture it, because it’s doubtful you will be able to earn it back if you damage it.
There are a variety of techniques you can use to establish yourself as a thought leader, i.e., a valuable expert. At the core, it’s really about creating content that is useful, understandable, and original to others. The key, however, is to not try to please everyone because you won’t and you could actually lose yourself if you try. It’s a balancing act and it will take time, so be patient – your time will come if you consistently work for it. When the spotlight does shine on you, own it. As Uncle Ben from Spider-Man once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”