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.
Today’s consumer has access to an abundance of information from the Internet and social media, making them the most informed they have ever been. So, this poses an important question: Which information is the most influential? Is it the customer reviews, the social media campaigns, the endless types of advertising, or possibly expert content? The Nielsen Company recently posed this question and was able to discover the impact of content in the consumer decision-making process.
The Experiment
The Nielsen Company recruited 900 respondents from casino floors in Las Vegas and took them to the Nielsen MediaLabs. Next, they placed each respondent in one of the nine product categories (i.e., auto insurance, child seat, digital camera, video game, etc.) and exposed them to three types of content. The content presented was expert content, user reviews, and branded content.
The effect that each type of content had on the consumer would be measured in three stages. The first, familiarity with a new product; the second, affinity toward a brand or product; and lastly, purchase consideration of a brand or product.
The Results
Overall, each type of content showed improvement among the three categories: product familiarity, affinity and purchase intent. But which had the strongest showing? This is when PR professionals can chime in with an “I told you so.” Expert content was the most effective and consistent across all three content types.
Expert content provided the most familiarity lift for seven of the nine products, the most affinity lift for five of the nine products, and the most purchase intent lift for six of the nine products. “On average,” said Nielsen, “expert content lifted familiarity 88 percent more than branded content and 50 percent more than user reviews; they lifted affinity 50 percent more than branded content and 20 percent more than user reviews; finally, they lifted purchase consideration 38 percent more than branded content and 83 percent more than user reviews.”
Now what?
Numbers don’t lie. Expert content is effective. The next step is to capitalize on this information and secure expert content. This can be done by finding the right contact and placing it in the right publication. Spending time to find the publication that reaches your target audience is critical. In order for expert content, or any content, to serve its purpose and be effective, the consumers have to read it. Be sure to consider the audience when reaching out to a journalist or expert.
The other important aspect is making sure you are contacting the correct people. Contact someone who is interested in sharing his or her thoughts about your product. Without the right contact, your product won’t be given a second glance.
Generally, all forms of content have the ability to influence the consumer. However, the results of this study are clear: Customers want the opinion of a credible third party. An objective opinion is going to build trust and be more effective in convincing the consumer your product is the right product.
If you’d like to see more results from the Nielsen Company study, use the link here.
The use of the serial, or Oxford, comma has been a long debated topic. For those unfamiliar with the debate over this “rule,” an example with a serial comma follows: I have traveled to Seattle, San Francisco, and Dallas. Whereas, a serial comma omitted looks as follows: I have traveled to Seattle, San Francisco and Dallas.
The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style have two different views on the topic. The AP Stylebook requires the omission of the serial comma in simple lists, whereas the Chicago Manual of Style requires a comma before a conjunction when joining the last two items in a series.
In the public relations industry, it is important to keep journalists happy, so following the correct style is extremely important if you want your clients’ stories to be covered. However, when it comes to the serial comma, some follow the AP Stylebook, some follow the Chicago Manual of Style and some follow other guidelines (as you can see, our firm tends to follow the AP Stylebook).
If you want a good laugh on the “heated” debate of the Oxford comma, check out Scott Leadingham’s article on Quill. Leadingham makes some interesting points surrounding these “standardized rules.” For example, if standardized rules exist, then what are writers to do when the rules contradict across the industry (think AP Stylebooks’s rule of omitting the serial comma vs. Chicago Manual of Style’s rule of using the serial comma)?
The article also includes an excerpt from “The Book on Writing” by Paula LaRocque, also in favor of restoring the serial comma. LaRocque highlights the confusion surrounding the Oxford comma, providing the AP Stylebook as an example. The stylebook approves of omitting the serial comma in simple lists. However, the AP Stylebook demands the serial comma in a complex series, when the last two items in the list run together, or when the item in the list contains a comma. (LaRocque’s examples: The flag is red, white and blue, vs., The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper attitude.)
Clearly, there is some confusion surrounding the Oxford comma, and to add even more confusion, different stylebooks have different rules. Various experts, including the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, are in favor of the serial comma, yet others swear by the AP Stylebook. What are your thoughts? Retain or omit the serial comma?
Recently, a writer at Newsweek published a story recounting his week-long experiment to read and to reply within 36 hours to every PR pitch he received. Given the volume of pitches that landed in his inbox, it was a noble effort. Some of the experiences he relayed made me chuckle, but a lot of his story also made me cringe as he enumerated the pitches that were completely irrelevant.
We’ve written extensively about the topic of pitching on the Communiqué PR blog and every PR pro worth their salt knows that one of the basic tenets of PR is to appropriately target and personalize your pitch. Nothing will land your pitch in a journalist’s deleted mail folder faster than a pitch that is off base and irrelevant to their beat.
So why do PR pros continue to break this cardinal rule?
Most PR practitioners are exceptional professionals who strive to deliver outstanding results for the organizations they represent as efficiently and expediently as possible. However, it would not be too far-fetched to say that more than once in his/her career, a PR pro has sent a pitch that was off target. Reflecting back on my own experience, there are a number of reasons why this might occur. One of the most notable reasons is having press lists that are so large that having the bandwidth to do the home work required to develop a personalized pitch and to send the individual email is nearly impossible.
Here’s a tip: Rather than going after say, 100 publications, hone your list to the top 10-15 outlets that are the most relevant to your company/client and that will move the needle for their business. Once you’ve identified those outlets, drill down and identify the appropriate writers, read their articles and follow them on social media. Get to know their beats and the topics they cover. It may take a pitch or two to pique their interest, but being laser focused on the outlets that matter and reaching out to journalists with news and story ideas that are relevant to them, will reap greater benefits.
- Organizational Load Index (OLI): OLI is calculated as the total amount of time any given employee consumes from the rest of the organization based on meetings they schedule and emails they send out. For example, if Ed schedules a one-hour meeting with four people, he has consumed four hours of time from the organization. OLI helps employees and executives alike understand to what extent they are consuming an organization’s time through scheduled meetings and emails sent. This metric has made me re-think hitting “reply all” and inviting people whose presence is not critical to a meeting.
- Number of people in cross-collaboration: This metric can be dynamically calculated for any set of two groups within the company. It is based on the number of unique individuals who participated in email communication or attended a meeting involving anyone from the two groups in question. This metric provides unparalleled insight into which teams are collaborating and the frequency and duration of the collaboration. Ineffective or infrequent collaboration across company teams can stifle innovation, growth, and employee engagement.
- Time Fragmentation: Time Fragmentation measures the extent to which meetings fragment the working time of employees. It is calculated as the number of two-hour blocks with no calendared meetings available during normal employee working hours (e.g., if your standard working hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. and you have a one-hour meeting at 10 a.m. and a two-hour meeting at 2 p.m., then you would have two two-hour blocks of time available). Research suggests that it takes people at least 15 minutes to regain focus after an interruption, and employees find it difficult to refocus when there is less than an hour until their next meeting. By understanding time fragmentation data, managers can schedule meetings strategically, so employees have significant blocks of uninterrupted time each day to focus on their actual work.
In addition to these metrics, which provide actionable insights into a company’s organizational health and productivity, VoloMetrix’s technology can predict sales-quota attainment, attrition, performance, and more. VoloMetrix unearthed that internal networking is strongly correlated with sales-quota attainment. By gathering data on employees’ internal networking, VoloMetrix can predict employees’ quota attainment with a high degree of accuracy, as early as one month into the quarter. VoloMetrix’s technology truly is at the forefront of people analytics, an emerging big-data category.
For the full release, please visit MarketWired. VoloMetrix’s announcement also spurred some compelling coverage in key outlets.
- CIO – Is Big Data watching you at the water cooler?—August 22, 2014
- PC Advisor – Is Big Data watching you at the water cooler?—August 22, 2014
- ARN – Is Big Data watching you at the water cooler?—August 22, 2014
- BankITAsia—Is Big Data watching you at the watercooler?—August 25, 2014
- Forbes—Volometrix Attempts To Measure Employee Productivity–But Is It A Flawed Model?—August 27, 2014
- ITBusiness.ca—How productive are your employees? VoloMetrix can give you the numbers—August 27, 2014
- Datanami—Are Meetings a Waste of Time? Data Analytics Weights In—August 26, 2014
- Contact Center Analytics Review—VoloMetrix Files Patent, Featured in Harvard Business Review—August 27, 2014
- News.Now.Co–NEWS: VOLOMETRIX FILES PATENT FOR GROUND-BREAKING PREDICTIVE PEOPLE ANALYTICS SOFTWARE—August 27, 2014
- Software Industry Today—VoloMetrix Files Patent for Ground-Breaking Predictive People Analytics Software—August 27, 2014
As Chantrelle Nielsen, head of customer solutions at VoloMetrix, shared with Datanami, “In a lot of companies, you have to submit a receipt and an expense code for a cup of coffee you bought for somebody. But you don’t have to submit anything and there’s no approval process and no real judgment on whether you’re spending $5,000 worth of people’s time in a meeting that lasts all afternoon.” We are excited to help VoloMetrix change that.
Last week, Facebook quietly announced in a blog post that it has updated its policies around “click-bait” links. According to the post, click-baiting refers to links “with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.” We’ve all seen these—you’re scrolling down your news feed and come across a link with a giant photo and ambiguous caption: “You’ll never GUESS what this celeb did… Click through to see!” These types of in-your-face links often receive a lot of clicks but are not always the most valuable, suppressing content that viewers actually want to read and share.
Facebook has therefore decided (reasonably so) to improve the quality of stories appearing on the news feed and reduce the number of spammy, irrelevant posts. The network has set new criteria for deciding which posts will be featured on the feed, now judging stories based on how valuable they are to readers. This comes down to two main factors, including 1) how much time readers spend away from Facebook viewing a particular post (i.e., longer time spent reading = more enjoyable post); and 2) how often users share and discuss a particular story with friends compared to how many clicks it receives (i.e., high number of clicks but few “likes” or comments = not valuable).
In addition, the network announced it will show more links that are posted in the “link format,” which happens when you paste in a link as you’re drafting a post, rather than just including the URL in the caption that appears above the photo. The link format shows additional details that help readers decide if they want to view a post—such as the story headline and first sentence in addition to the caption.
Here’s an example in link format from our own Communiqué PR page, which includes a photo, the actual headline and first few lines of text:
For PR pros and companies publishing stories and news to their feeds, these updates have the potential to affect content click-through and distribution rates. With the demise of click-baiting, here are a few ways to ensure your posts will still be featured on Facebook:
- Post valuable, share-worthy content. This should be a no-brainer anyway for PR pros, and is also the easiest way to ensure your stories will be picked up on the news feed. By nature, stories that are compelling and valuable will pass the new criteria and have the best chance of being featured. Now is the time to refine your content-creation strategy and put extra-careful thought into what you post.
- Be straightforward. Honesty is always the best policy and that especially applies here. Don’t deceive viewers with misleading, teaser captions to links. Instead, be honest about the content and include the actual headline or context, then leave it up to the reader to decide whether it’s worth viewing. Think your post won’t receive enough clicks on its own without a click-bait headline? Re-read no. 1 above and re-think your methods.
- Use the link format. This is easy enough—when sharing posts, simply paste in the link while drafting the post, rather than including the URL as part of the photo caption. This is a smart move even if Facebook didn’t force you to do it—the company has found that these types of posts receive twice as many clicks compared to links embedded in photo captions.
At day’s end, not much has changed—readers still want valuable content and it’s your job to give it to them. The new Facebook rules just add that bit of extra pressure to deliver awesome, engaging posts—which you’re doing anyway, right?
As PR professionals, we are constantly trying to get into journalists’ heads to determine what they’re looking for from us. What kinds of multimedia elements are most helpful? How in-depth should our pitches be? Should we engage reporters on Twitter? Luckily Business Wire might have some of the answers. It recently conducted a media survey in which it asked a wide range of journalists 30 questions to determine the latest trends in media relations and provide a better understanding of journalists’ preferences around working with PR professionals.
The survey starts off with some unsurprising information around the shift toward digital media – results show that the majority of journalists now work for an online publication, which aligns with the trend toward moving everything online.
It then dives into some interesting insights into reporters’ preferences around press releases. Press releases are still widely used by journalists, with almost 90 percent of the responding journalists using a press release within the past week. Since journalists still commonly use the tried-and-true PR tool, it’s important for PR pros to continue polishing their press-release writing skills. But what kind of information do journalists look for in a press release?
According to the survey, the most sought after type of story information in a press release is breaking news, followed by supporting facts, interesting story angles, quotable sources, company background and trending industry topics. Interestingly, the least important type of information for responding journalists was supporting multimedia. This contradicts a number of other sources that tout the importance of including multimedia in press releases, including a study from PR Newswire stating that multimedia content drives nearly 10 times more visibility than text.
The survey resulted in a number of other compelling findings around media trends. To learn more, download the full report or take a look at the following infographic from Business Wire summarizing the results of the survey.
