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.
This week was an exciting one with the work for our client Smartsheet, a leading provider of a collaborative work management tool that we and 42,000 other businesses use every day. On Monday, May 5, 2014, Smartsheet, already well on its way to changing the way that enterprises work, announced it has secured another $35-million round of financing. As part of this announcement, the company also unveiled the names of some of its largest enterprise customers—Google, U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), Netflix, Office Depot, Groupon, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Pearson, Unisource, Oceaneering, and McGraw-Hill Education, among others.
Reaction to the news was overwhelmingly positive, with coverage in more than 20 news outlets. In case you missed the news coverage, below we have included links to the articles.
- Forbes
- Xconomy
- The Seattle Times
- Hispanic Business
- Bloomberg
- CITEWorld
- GeekWire
- Gigaom
- VentureWire
- Fortune
- FinSMEs
- The Wall Street Journal
- Puget Sound Business Journal
- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- eProfits
- Pulse 2.0
- Techmeme
- TMCnet
I’d like to add how easy Smartsheet makes coordinating a significant announcement such as this. With the Smartsheet tool, we were able to review press lists simultaneously with VC partners, track editorial coverage and access and easily share assets such as images with journalists. We also used the tool to set up a master media interview schedule and share it with our client and VCs. An additional benefit of Smartsheet is that it can be accessed from multiple types of devices.
We are excited about upcoming enhancements and plans that Smartsheet has in the works. From our perspective, the tool just keeps getting better with new features including Resource Management. (We wrote about the Resource Management functionality, which Smartsheet added earlier this year, in a guest post featured on Cision’s website.)
Smartsheet’s Resource Management lets Communiqué PR’s team add allocation data to existing projects and tasks. This information is then compiled into a central sheet, where account managers can easily see all staffers’ project loads in one place. What could be more helpful!
Stay tuned for more news from Smartsheet. With funding totaling $70 million, a valuable product and happy paying customers, the company is well poised for success.
Many articles have been written about the optimal times to post on social media, most with varying opinions, but on this we can all agree: Timing is everything.
A recent infographic published by SurePayroll summarizes the best and worst times for posting, pinning and tweeting. According to the infographic:
- On Facebook, updates posted between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. result in the highest average click-throughs. The worst times are weekends before 8 a.m. or after 8:00 p.m.
- The best time to post on Twitter is Monday through Thursday between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
- For LinkedIn, posting Tuesday through Thursday will increase your chances for engagement.
If you’re trying to reach a business audience, these times make sense and correlate with our own observations and experiences with the social media activities we manage for our clients.
Just as important as knowing when to post is knowing what to post. Unless you work for a large company with a dedicated social media manager, ensuring your social media channels are updated with a regular schedule of posts can be challenging. To help meet this challenge, consider developing a social media editorial calendar.
With an editorial calendar you can map out your posts for the upcoming week and beyond. Your editorial calendar can be as granular as including the actual copy/text for an upcoming post for a specific day. Or, you can use the editorial calendar to assign a theme for a particular day, such as on Mondays you’ll publish posts that revolve around industry research or data, on Wednesdays you’ll highlight one of your products, etc.
While you want to be nimble enough to react to trending topics and breaking news, laying out your publishing schedule in advance with an eye toward the best times to post on a particular social media platform, can maximize your time and effort.
For more information and facts you can use to optimize your social media activities, check out the full infographic below.
You don’t have to be a social media or public relations expert to realize that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) recent and well-intended #myNYPD Twitter campaign quickly turned into an epic fail for the nation’s largest police force. Shortly after issuing an invitation to people to post photos of them posing with the city’s officers, the department received hundreds of images showing New York’s finest engaged in aggressive acts and driving one of the most-trafficked hashtags in the world.
This latest Twitter campaign gone awry joins ranks with epic fails of other brands including JP Morgan Chase and McDonald’s. It also offers marketers an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others and better prepare themselves to conduct successful social media campaigns on behalf of clients.
In this particular case, the NYPD failed to consider two critical tenets of any social media campaign:
- Know your audience
- The only content you can control is your own
According to social media expert Charlton McIlwain, a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, the mistake “shows either a profound misunderstanding of how social media works or a profound misunderstanding about popular perception of the NYPD, or probably both.” If the NYPD had, at the very least, considered its audience and their perceptions, which should be considered when developing any strategic social media campaign, they may have avoided what will certainly become one of the year’s most publicized social media backlashes.
In all fairness, the NYPD did also receive some positive images and messages of support from Twitter followers, and some credit can be given to NYPD Commissioner William Bratton who honestly acknowledged to the Associated Press that “the Twitter campaign may not have been fully thought through.” He also went on to say, “It’s not going to cause us to change any of our efforts to be very active on social media. It is what it is. It’s an open, transparent world.”
While the NYPD’s unsuccessful Twitter campaign won’t change their efforts to be very active on social media, I would be willing to wager that the department’s communications team will more diligently consider their audience and potential negative reactions to any social media campaign moving forward.
The following infographic from Cox Blue provides more tips around building a successful social media campaign. For other tips on social media and crisis communications, check out the rest of our blog.
Credit: Cox Blue (CoxBlue.com).Yesterday I was reading an article offering tips to entrepreneurs who want to grow their startup companies while maintaining ownership of their equity. The article, entitled “Who needs VC Money? Not this profitable startup,” was written by Ryan Shank, co-founder and COO of Mhelpdesk, who opted to focus his company’s limited resources on product development and customer service rather than vying for venture capital.
Shanks’ success in growing his business without venture capital brought to mind one of our agency’s newest clients, Summit Imaging. Like Mhelpdesk, Summit Imaging has experienced significant growth without taking the traditional path of pursuing outside investment. Another similarity between the two companies is an uncompromising dedication to delivering the best quality customer service and a reliance on satisfied customers to help champion the company through word of mouth recommendations.
Summit Imaging is a privately owned ultrasound medical equipment support company that just last month was driven to relocate its headquarters to a 32,000 square-foot facility in Woodinville, Washington. The move marked the company’s fourth relocation due to growth in the past eight years, and while this growth is certainly inspiring, it’s how the company has grown that I find really interesting.
Summit Imaging has grown from an operation of one in 2006, to a profitable and innovative 34-person operation today. It was surprising to learn that with such consistent growth over the years, the company does not have a dedicated sales and marketing team. Rather, Summit Imaging’s success has been realized through positive word of mouth and referrals from customers.
Like so many entrepreneurs before him, Larry Nguyen built his small business out of a humble garage. The solo engineer began refurbishing and selling parts for ultrasound systems and quickly came to realize that there was a growing market for his services. Almost immediately, he invested in further developing skills that would allow him to repair complicated devices down to the component level. This expertise, along with an equally important decision to develop an error database in order to achieve unparalleled customer satisfaction, soon resulted in a reputation for outstanding quality and customer support.
Modeling itself after “urgent care” in the medical field, Summit Imaging strives to offer customers the fastest turnaround times for customer support, rapid repair and parts replacement. The company offers an innovative and highly efficient end-to-end customer service process that minimizes costly downtime and aims to exceed the expectations of biomedical engineers who are responsible for servicing equipment from a variety of manufacturers, and hospital administrators at every point of contact.
Nguyen’s emphasis on core values including innovation, reliability, outstanding quality and customer satisfaction has paid off with word of mouth referrals that have grown Summit Imaging into what it is today: a profitable operation with a 60 percent growth rate year-over-year and a 93 percent customer-retention rate.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Nguyen’s next mission for Summit Imaging is to set a new industry standard for supporting and repairing ultrasound equipment, wherein no matter which company a hospital works with, it will receive the highest quality customer service, minimizing downtimes for healthcare providers and patients, alike. Ambitious? Indeed. But ambition is one of an entrepreneur’s strongest qualities, and given Nguyen’s track record, I’m inclined to believe that he and his highly-trained team at Summit Imaging are well-positioned to inspire others in the industry.
For more about lean startup strategies, see Shank’s article in The Upstart Business Journal . For thoughts on PR’s role in relation to startup business, see “PR and the Lean Start-Up,” or “When Should a Start-up Business Hire a PR Firm?” on the Communiqué PR blog.
When it comes to brand promotion, it can often be easy for companies to overlook the value of LinkedIn as a viable platform. Compared to its “trendier” cousins—mainly Facebook and Twitter—LinkedIn can come across as being more for personal job-hunting and networking purposes than for creative brand engagement and content marketing.
That may be true to a degree, but companies shouldn’t ignore LinkedIn as a powerful business medium. A recent infographic I stumbled upon, created by DegreeQuery and distributed in a recent Ragan post, helps to show just how powerful LinkedIn can be for business. Consider the following statistics revealed by the infographic:
- LinkedIn has a total of 280 million users worldwide, including 84 million in the U.S. (and 36 million millennials). That’s about one-fourth of the total U.S. population.
- Forty percent of those users visit daily and 38 percent from mobile devices.
- Each user joins seven LinkedIn groups on average, while 200 group conversations take place each minute.
- The site includes 3 million business pages and features 1.2 million products and services. Where’s yours?
With stats like these, you’ll likely want to reconsider if you don’t see LinkedIn as having true business value. Instead, think of the platform as a gigantic pool of potential customers and industry connections. Building a company page and engaging networks with compelling content and company news can go a long way in terms of disseminating brand messages, driving traffic to a company’s site and promoting products and services. Journalists also turn to LinkedIn to monitor news and research stories, making it a missed opportunity to not maintain a visible business page.
If in need of some tips on how to best use LinkedIn for your business, check out our blog post: “Best Practices for Company Pages on LinkedIn.” Be sure to also check out the full infographic below for more interesting stats:
Source: DegreeQuery.com.
Summer break is right around the corner for many college students, which means it’s time for aspiring PR pros to plan how they can get a head start on their careers before going back to class in the fall. It may not be as fun as hitting the beach, but there are several items that should be added to every PR student’s summer to-do list:
- Attend industry networking events. Meeting other students and professionals who share your interest in PR can be incredibly valuable, and networking events are excellent places to connect with people who could be your future colleagues. Not sure where to find events? The PRSSA hosts regional and national conferences on a regular basis.
- Work on your portfolio. Writing is a critical part of PR, so it’s important to have a portfolio of samples that show your skills. Your portfolio can include sample press releases, AP Style articles, presentations and published articles or blog posts. Published work is a big portfolio-booster, and knowing how to write a news story is an incredibly valuable skill for PR pros. It’s important to understand what journalists look for in a story idea so your pitches are newsworthy. A great way to get journalism experience is writing for your school newspaper. It’s a lot of fun, but it can be a big commitment. Another way to build your portfolio is by creating a blog on a topic that interests you.
- Get an internship. The best way to prepare for a career in PR is by getting an internship. One of the many benefits of an internship is that it provides real-world experience beyond what you’ve learned in class. Summer is an ideal time for an internship because you have more time on your hands so you can fully dedicate yourself to your position.
- Stay on top of the news. Make time to stay on top of current events. Is there an industry you’re interested in? Find out what the most popular publications are and read them regularly. For example, if you’re interested in tech PR you might want to check out Gigaom or TechCrunch.
- Build up (and clean up) your social media presence. Most employers use social media to research candidates, so make sure you represent yourself well online. Better yet, use platforms like Twitter to provide commentary around current events and PR-related news. Start doing this early so you have a solid inventory of well-worded posts when the time comes to start looking for a job.
These are just a few of the many ways PR students can use their summer break to prepare for their career. What other suggestions do you have? If you’re a student, what PR-related activities are you planning to do over the summer?