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.
Curating content for a social media platform requires time and energy, so it can be disappointing when you find something worth sharing with the Facebook world, and it doesn’t get the shares or likes you thought it would. However, there may be an explanation if your business’ Facebook posts aren’t receiving the attention they might merit. PRDaily recently shared some insight on why Facebook posts and pages tend to lack popularity. I’ve summarized five of these points below; if you answer yes to any of these questions, it might be time for you to reevaluate what you are sharing with your followers or how you are choosing to do it.
Are your questions broad?
People don’t generally want to spend large amounts of time pondering over questions while using Facebook. Facebook is a way for people to connect and explore. The best way to get people to respond to a question is to make it easy for them. Give them choices or create a poll. By doing this, they aren’t required to put in large amounts of time or effort, and consequently are more likely to respond.
Is your tone uninspiring?
Though you are posting on a page that represents your company, it does not mean that the content has to be boring. Every business has personality, so don’t be afraid to show it off to your followers! Having fun and making your posts relatable will make your company more appealing and intriguing to your fans.
Do your posts only consist of words?
Visuals are stimulating, interesting, and can capture the attention of Facebook users faster than words. Try to find an image or infographic that relates to the post or your company. Images will help catch people’s attention as they scroll through their news feeds.
Do you constantly try to sell things?
This page is supposed to share information about your company. Do not use it as another platform to sell products. People do not use Facebook as a way to shop, they use it to connect. Allow your fans to connect to your company’s personality through your Facebook page. If viewers are interested in shopping, they will use another platform, such as your company website.
Do you neglect to offer any deals or specials?
Users will become fans for perks. Offering specials might make your page more attractive, which can cause an increase in traffic and attention to your page’s posts. As noted in the tip above, do not use this as a selling platform, rather use it as a tool to motivate people to visit your website or go to a store. My favorite example from PRDaily is about Sprinkles Cupcakes. Anyone who likes the Sprinkles Cupcakes’ Facebook page learns the “word of the day.” If they tell the cashier the word of the day, they get a free cupcake. That means that everyone craving a cupcake on a particular day will be viewing this page and most likely paying a visit to a Sprinkles location. By providing offers, people will constantly check the page to keep up to date.
If you have answered yes to any of the questions above, take a minute to reevaluate how you are interacting with your Facebook fans. Used correctly, Facebook pages are a great way to communicate with your clientele, and have the potential to drive traffic to your company’s website, increase positive perceptions of your brand and ultimately affect sales. Thinking through the above tips may help inform an improved Facebook strategy for your business moving forward. Good luck!
For more tips regarding Facebook, look at the CPR Blog:
- Spring Cleaning for Your Facebook Profile
- Facebook & Public Relations
- Five Facebook Tips for Social Media Managers
To err is to be human. But how one handles the mistake can make or break a relationship. Businesses, particularly in this era of social media, are in a more difficult predicament when mistakes are made. Rumors spread quickly in the social stratosphere and can lead to negative consequences for a brand’s image. However, when business leaders and others in the public eye apologize appropriately, they are able to minimize damage – and might even benefit from the situation if done right.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review explains how to effectively apologize, breaking it down into a variety of situations based on the audience that may have been offended, such as strangers or acquaintances, partners or friends, and teams at the workplace or even a society. The author reminds us to “remember to ask yourself the following: Who am I talking to, and what is he or she looking for in my apology?”
Most corporate communications departments will immediately pull together a carefully crafted statement. The effort to respond quickly is important but sometimes they can be overly scrubbed, which can turn a heartfelt apology into what appears to be a legal statement protecting the company rather than showing concern, understanding and caring for customers. That’s not to say apologies shouldn’t be carefully and thoughtfully written. This is critical. But if it isn’t direct, the apology may not appear authentic or genuine, which could damage a brand.
Here are four tips to effectively apologize to customers and keep your company image in tact.
- Respond immediately – As the saying goes, it’s easier to eat crow while it’s still warm. A swift apology can stop the rumor mill from spreading. On the contrary, when many hours or days go by without a word, the worst assumptions may be made.
- Look deeper – This could be a sign of a bigger issue that must be addressed. Customers don’t always complain so its up to a business to uncover the fundamental problem. As reported in another HBR article, when TED received complaints about one of its TEDx conferences, executives apologized but it didn’t stop there. They took the time to talk to constituents and learn about underlying issues to ultimately improve the conferences consequently saving its brand image.
- Acknowledge the damage done and take responsibility – Be direct and specific about what happened and who may have been affected. For example, after major operational issues resulting in complaints, JetBlue publicly apologized in a very authentic way, expressing how customers must have felt and taking full responsibility by stating its explicit failures.
- Identify a solution – Using the same example, JetBlue went on to create its “Customer Bill of Rights,” which details how customers will be compensated if future issues arise. If a tangible solution like this isn’t possible (for example if words were offensive, not the actions), take a stand on the issue to clarify your company’s position.
Apologies are not a sign of weakness. On the contrary, they can be a sign of courage and can help customers trust a brand. Circling back to the first sentence in this post, “to err is to be human,” the best way to apologize is through the same vein, by showing you are human. In this era of connecting through words on a screen, people continue to value – maybe more than ever – the human connection.
As online consumers spend more time online, content marketing is playing a more prominent role in the marketer’s tool box. According to some, content marketing is displacing other more traditional forms of marketing including search engine marketing and traditional advertising. So how do you go about creating content?
Recently, I came across an infographic which provides a very basic summary of the dos and don’ts of content marketing. According to the infographic, the four pillars of content marketing are: press releases, blogs, infographics and guest posts. While the infographic is a nice primer, noticeably missing was video and other forms of multimedia content, which, as we’re all aware, are huge drivers for raising awareness and increasing engagement with consumers.
Each of the four pillars mentioned in the infographic (plus multimedia) are deserving of their own how-to posts, but I thought I’d pass along a few additional tips for press releases to augment those mentioned in the infographic:
- Do think creatively and critically about the “news” you’ll be announcing.
- Do consider online press release distribution services for announcements that may not warrant the cost or breadth of distribution of a traditional wire service.
- Do keep in mind that the ideal length for a headline is 90-120 characters.
- Do incorporate keywords into your release, and ideally include your most important keyword at the beginning of a headline.
- Don’t use hyperbole.
Here at Communiqué PR, we’re always on the lookout for tools that make our work more efficient. Recently, we’ve been using one extra handy tool that we thought worth passing along—analytics provider Alexa.com.
Alexa.com offers free website analytics, including traffic data, national rankings, global rankings and more. These rankings give an idea of how a particular website compares to others. Although geared mainly to website owners looking to gauge their site’s popularity, Alexa also has value for PR professionals seeking more information about an online outlet.
Alexa’s service isn’t strictly about measuring statistics—it doesn’t offer a concrete number of monthly visitors, for example—but its rankings are still an excellent means for evaluating an online publication. Alexa allows you to understand which sites are more (or less) popular or engaging, and how a website’s audience compares with audiences at other publications. This material can help inform your messaging and outreach as you work to successfully reach an online outlet’s audience with a client’s story.
Specifically, in our practice we’ve found the following areas of Alexa’s analysis most helpful for PR purposes:
Website Popularity. Alexa combines the number of average daily visitors and number of daily page views of a site to estimate both global rank and U.S. rank, therefore allowing PR professionals to see how an online outlet matches up to its peers. Alexa also displays historical traffic trends that allow you to evaluate a site’s longevity or popularity stability. These longer-term trends include traffic rank, page views per user, the estimated percentage of global Internet users who visit the site and the estimated percentage of global page views on the site, among others.
Consumer Engagement. How influential is a website to users? How meaningful are consumers’ visits to the site? Alexa offers statistics about the daily page views of a site per visitor, daily time spent on the site per user and the bounce rate—the percentage of visits to the site that consist of a single page view. Ideally, the bounce rate will be relatively low and the daily page views and time spent relatively high—if you’re seeing otherwise, you’ll know that an outlet’s content is not effectively engaging viewers.
Audience Demographics. As a PR professional, understanding an outlet’s audience is crucial to creating relevant, compelling content. Alexa offers a breakdown of estimated audience demographics that reveal how similar a site’s audience is to the general Internet population. Statistics offered include age, education level, gender, children (yes or no), geographic location (country of origin) and browsing location (home, school or work). These stats will collectively help paint a picture of the typical viewer, and will therefore help you strategize how to create a message that resonates with an outlet’s audience.
As you may have deduced, one of the ways Alexa is most useful overall is for comparison: assessing how an online outlet matches up to others. In short, the best way to use Alexa is to combine all of the gathered information to determine which outlets are most relevant to clients’ interests, and therefore worth targeting. Once you’ve decided who to pitch, Alexa also helps you strategize how to pitch. Its statistics make it easy to assess an outlet in terms of multiple characteristics. As you craft content, consider using these insights to your advantage.
Have you used Alexa? What information do you find most helpful from the website? Let us know!
Every so often, I get the urge to create a product and have even approached my husband with a variety of ideas. Inevitably, we discuss them for a couple of days and then fail to take any further action. Given my tendency, I was intrigued when I learned that Smartsheet was sponsoring a Startup Weekend at its offices in Bellevue.
For those of you who are not familiar with Startup Weekend, let me explain. Startup Weekend is a nonprofit organization and global grassroots movement with a goal to empower entrepreneurs and help people be better prepared to create startup companies.
Smartsheet decided to host the first ever Startup Weekend in Bellevue because of its commitment to supporting the growing startup community and invited me to come by to see the event in action, which proved to be very inspiring.
The giant game of rock paper scissors.
After a fun icebreaker with everyone in the auditorium playing the giant hand game of rock-paper-scissors, John Creason, chief technology officer and co-founder of Smartsheet, kicked off the evening by sharing thoughts about entrepreneurship.
John’s point of view is that an entrepreneur’s success does not always revolve around skills; more often, success requires the right mindset. Often the entrepreneur who succeeds is the person willing to take risks to get results. Most importantly, successful entrepreneurs know what to do with an idea.
The concept of knowing what to do with an idea struck a chord with me. Clearly, having a good idea is important when forming a startup. However, an idea alone is not enough – one must have a sense of how to take action.
This is where an event like Startup Weekend can help, because individuals get to pitch and receive feedback on their startup ideas. This feedback can often motivate and inspire action, and enables entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off other attendees as well as coaches (e.g., experienced entrepreneurs, industry experts, investors or attorneys). Attendees vote on the ideas and form teams around the most viable ones. Then, everyone goes to work on things like creating business models, coding, research to validate ideas and product planning. On Sunday night, the teams make their final presentations and the judges select winners.
Consider Julian Hurst’s experience at Startup Weekend. Julian had been mulling over an idea for creating a new type of storage business. His vision is to match people looking to store their physical belongings with people who have extra space in their homes or businesses. Specifically, he wanted to create an online marketplace for people to find or list storage at the prices they deemed appropriate. It would provide an easy way for people to monetize their extra space and give those in need of storage a new less-expensive option than corporate storage (e.g., Public Storage).
As an attorney with no experience developing a product or company, Julian was encouraged to participate in Startup Weekend to validate the idea and get help figuring out next steps. He signed up for the event not sure of what to expect.
Working late into the night at Smartsheet during Startup Weekend.
When Julian pitched his idea to the approximately 80 people in the audience, it received the most votes. This led to the formation of his team, which was highly motivated and productive. In the course of the weekend, the team did market research by conducting more than 40 man-on-the-street interviews in three different neighborhoods. Julian came up with a brand positioning and a name – Squirl Storage. The team also developed part of a working website, secured a real paying customer and connected him to someone willing to share space.
On Sunday evening after Julian made his final presentation, the judges voted and Squirl Storage won the competition. Julian’s experience was highly rewarding and he is grateful to Smartsheet for stepping up to sponsor the event. “If they had not hosted the event,” explained Julian, “I would not have been able to validate my idea or demonstrate proof of concept. My teammates suggested we do the market research and were instrumental in the process of securing a customer. The coaches were also really valuable in the process as many of them are experienced entrepreneurs.”
I found Julian’s experience exciting and motivating. It also demonstrates the importance of these events in helping people know what to do with a good idea. So the next time you have an idea for a new product or service, don’t just think about it. Take action. If you’re not sure how exactly to do so, sign up for a Startup Weekend to learn from others in your community. Maybe one of these days, I’ll follow Friday’s innovators and do it too!
With shrinking editorial rosters at publications across the country and an explosion of online publications eager to populate their sites with relevant content, an old-school PR tool stands at the ready to help fill the gap – the classic mat release (also known as a matte release.)
About Mat Releases
A mat release is a consumer-oriented feature story that is written and produced in camera-ready format, including art, and then distributed to publications across the country by a vendor, such as North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS). Publications that are looking for content to fill empty column inches can search the NAPS database of articles, make a selection, then drop the camera-ready features into their layout and run them as-is with no need for editing or formatting.
A mat release can be a good use of PR dollars for any company that has a story to tell with broad consumer appeal and reasonably evergreen content. The company maintains ultimate control over the content, so key messages will always shine through. Tips, advice and seasonal stories are good examples of content styles that work well for this format.
Jennifer Gehrt, founding partner of Communiqué Public Relations, has used mat releases with great success over the years for various clients. “When I worked with Waggener Edstrom on the MasterCard account team, we developed and distributed two very successful mat releases,” said Gehrt. “The first mat release aimed to educate consumers about the benefits of paying bills online while the second story focused on motivating people to use debit cards. Our campaign results were impressive, with the placement of hundreds of articles in more than 24 different states.”
More recently the Communiqué PR team developed a mat release about a new online shopping guide for NASCAR fans. This release generated 204 newspaper articles in 15 different states with a readership of more than 8 million.
Guaranteed Exposure
NAPS, which formed a partnership with Business Wire in 2009, distributes its mat releases to 10,000 newspapers across the country, including 1,600 daily newspapers and 8,400 weekly and community newspapers, according to its website. The combined circulation of its potential reach is more than 200 million.
A typical mat release distributed by NAPS will result in 100-400 print placements and 400-plus online placements, according to the NAPS website. NAPS provides a detailed, graphical report following the distribution of each mat release as well as a clipping service, so companies will have tangible evidence of the ultimate reach achieved for their investment.
NAPS can also provide similar services for companies interested in reaching target audiences through radio and TV.
The Process
NAPS provides free writing services to turn a company’s story into a ready-to-run feature, following specific style and formatting guidelines that have proven successful. The company simply needs to supply raw information (a press release, fact sheet, web page, etc.) and NAPS will come up with a recommendation for a feature story. The company maintains control of the content, providing direction and edits until they are satisfied with the end result.
So if reaching a broad consumer audience is one of your PR goals, think about whether a mat release would be a good tool for telling your story. For the dollars invested, the pay-off is guaranteed. And everyone is happy when money has been well spent.