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.
At the end of January, I attended the PRSA Puget Sound’s event focused on security and privacy, “The Corporate Reputation Drivers of the Digital Age.” Panelists included Aaron Weller, managing director, Data Protection & Privacy Practice at PwC; Christopher Budd, principal and founder of Christopher Budd Communications; and Leigh Nakanishi, Edelman, Data Security and Privacy Group.
Weller, Budd and Nakanishi set the stage by discussing the importance of security and privacy to organizations, which is due to a number of factors, including:
- A changing landscape and increased awareness: Rarely a day goes by that you don’t see news about a data breach, successful hacking or another related issue. Reporters are paying attention to the news and ensuring consumers are informed.
- Increasing use of technology: Nearly every organization or business is at risk. At some point, it’s likely that a data breach or data loss incident will occur.
- Heightened media scrutiny and attention: Not only are media outlets paying attention to incidents, but they’re also analyzing communication, responses and other details. How is a company informing affected customers about an issue? How much detail are they providing? And how long does it take them to react? These are only a few of the questions that reporters look to answer.
- Rise of social media: With social media, the potential audience witnessing your organization’s incident and response is global. Affected customers can easily and quickly publicize details. Unfortunately with social media, rumors can also become fact. Even if your organization didn’t experience a data breach, for example, the mere claim being shared on social networking sites like Twitter can escalate quickly and cause damage to your brand’s reputation because of the perceptions being formed.
The best thing you can do for your organization is to have a plan in place before an incident ever happens. That plan should include the name and contact information of the person in charge of managing the issue. You should also determine ownership on different activities, communication channels and a holding statement to provide to media should an issue occur and an investigation not yet be completed. It’s also helpful to understand who your technical contacts will be during an incident – that is, the person or people you can get information from during an incident investigation. Securing executive approval of your plan before an issue happens will also allow you to work more efficiently.
What other tips would you offer to prepare for the worst case scenario?
Whether you are scanning an email subject line, the newspaper, a website, blog, or press release, a headline is the first thing you see. You only stop to read once a headline has caught your attention.
Many times headlines are too long or send the wrong message. According to a Ragan.com article, “How to write great headlines in 55 characters or fewer,” a headline should be approximately 55 characters. That is not a lot of time to tell part of a story and capture someone’s attention, so make each character count.
When crafting a headline consider the four “u” rule recommended by the American Writers and Artists Association:
- Unique. A headline should be unique. Readers will not be persuaded to read further if the headline is the same old headline. Craft a headline that offers something new or provokes additional thought. Ask yourself, what is different about your news?
- Urgent. A headline needs to have urgency. If not, a reporter has no reason to write today versus next month. You need to answer the question, why does your news matter to me right now?
- Useful. Your concise headline needs to highlight how the news is useful to a reader. If it is not, a reporter has no reason to write. My former news director used to ask, why do I care? Help a reporter understand how the news will help them and you are more likely to secure interest.
- Unambiguous. This is one of the most challenging aspects of creating a headline with only 55 characters. A headline should be very specific. A reader should be able to learn more about the news from the headline. What is the news?
Newspaper headlines offer a good model for inspiration. This headline recently appeared on the New York Times homepage, “Russia Tries to Prosecute a Dead Man.”
The headline captures your attention and draws you in. Let’s measure it against the 4U rule. The headline is definitely unique. It is also urgent. If Russia is prosecuting a dead man this seems like a matter that needs to be looked into immediately and that people should know about. Curiosity pushes the issue. This story based on the headline is useful because as a reader you are wondering if you too could be prosecuted after death. The headline is provocative, but also clear. You know from reading the headline that Russia is trying to prosecute a dead man and it paints a picture in your mind.
Additionally, the headline is under 55 characters.
In my experience the best headlines are provocative, not promotional. You want the headline to help the reader begin to write the story in their head and ask questions. Once you have crafted a headline imagine that you are reading the headline for the first time. Do you have a follow up question? If so, you are well on your way to creating compelling headlines that capture your audience’s attention.
Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, recently posted a piece, “Placing Strategic Bets in the Face of Uncertainty,” on Harvard Business Review’s blog network that offered helpful advice on how to think strategically.
In the business of PR, and in life in general, you are constantly coming upon opportunities to strategize your next move(s), whether for your company’s five year plan or your own career and personal goals. However, as Martin points out, the concept of strategy can be a little deceiving—after all, you can’t effectively chart out the future simply by taking the time to craft a formal strategy. What, then, is the role of strategizing? How can you adjust your perception of strategy to work within our “uncertain world”?
The post addresses these questions by helping to define strategy, outline how it can be effectively used and establish its value. Below are four overarching tips Martin gives:
1.) Understand that there are no guarantees
As Martin states, a common misconception is that strategy is about “turning uncertainty into certainty.” This is not the case, however. The world is an uncertain place, and “no choice made today can make future uncertainty go away.”
2.) Define strategy
With no guarantees, the purpose of strategy is to deal productively “with life’s inevitable uncertainty.” Rather than thinking a strategy can prepare you for anything, think of a strategy as an outline that will help you make good decisions as you move forward, and react to various issues as they arise. Strategy, as Martin puts it, “means making the best possible choices you can make today and then being responsive when the bets do or do not come in as hoped.”
3.) Prepare to be flexible
Be prepared to make revisions to your strategy as things come up. Strategy should be flexible and responsive to changes in outcomes and environment. For example, if you’re starting a company, and you write out a business plan for the next 12 months, something might come up in the first few months that causes a delay—issues in production, for example. Be comfortable with editing your strategy to overcome such obstacles.
4.) Appreciate the value of strategy
After emphasizing the fluidity necessary for comprehensive strategy, you might be pondering what the value of strategy really is. While you shouldn’t expect strategy to eliminate uncertainty, outlining a formalized strategy is an excellent tool to understand what areas of your business/ life are rapidly changing, and help you understand how to improve upon them. In the example above, for instance, if you write a 12-month business strategy and then are having problems with production, you now can improve upon tactics to address production issues and effectively learn from your experience.
Martin does an excellent job of bridging the gap between an idealistic business practice and reality. Next time you’re frustrated by an unanticipated change that is going to throw off a business plan or strategy you are executing, be mindful of Martin’s tips. Setbacks to a strategy help it serve its purpose.
Have you ever experienced a setback that helped you better implement an overall business plan or strategy in the long run?
For more on strategy from Communiqué PR, see:
How to evolve pitching strategies in response to “Page-view Journalism”
When Should a Start-up Business Hire a PR Firm?
The Power of Mission & Vision Statements
For more on Harvard Business Review’s Blog Network from Roger Martin, see:
Strategy and the Uncertainty Excuse
How To Make Companies Think Long-Term
CEOs Must Model the Behavior for Creating Societal Value
You Can’t Analyze Your Way to Growth
The art of storytelling for business has been on the radar screen in recent years as a powerful tool for achieving success in the marketplace. With articles popping up from Fast Company, Forbes and Harvard Business Review, and a number of books published on the topic, there is no shortage of commentary on how storytelling can help businesses meet their objectives, why this is true, and how to be an effective storyteller.
I recently came across a compelling infographic, titled “Storytelling Is Not Just For Campfires,” on the blog for the Content Marketing Institute (original infographic courtesy of Fathom Business Events.) It puts into simple and visual terms the fundamentals of successful storytelling.
While you may have good facts and figures to back up your message, ultimately the art of persuasion – the centerpiece to business activity, according to the Harvard Business Review – requires reaching people at an emotional level. Nothing does this better than a good story. And every business has a story to tell.
By now most people in marketing know that one the best tools for reading journalists’ minds is Twitter. The immediacy and brevity of Twitter almost seems to be designed for reporters who traditionally have been trained to think in sound bites, quotes and headlines. Now, with help of analytics, we are able to track how to leverage these conversations and better measure the multiplier effects of having an article go viral.
One of the analytics tools I’ve come across recently has some promising applications for PR and marketing pros. Muck Rack is a database of thousands of journalists who use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Quora, Google+, and LinkedIn to find sources for their articles and also promote their work. (See an earlier blog post about page view journalism.)
At the beginning of a campaign to promote the Guide to Online Schools annual rankings for our client SR Education Group, I signed up for a trial of a product called Muck Rack Pro, which allowed me to search and create alerts for specific key words, phrases, publications, reporting beats and hashtags.
(Note: The trial was really more like a refundable offer than the risk-free trial they tout on the website. I had to give them a credit card number for the $99 monthly fee. I need to remember to cancel the service by the end of month in order to get a full refund under the terms of the “risk free” trial.)
Using the search term #HigherEd I was able to:
Validate my press list. The search pulled up most of the journalists who were on my press list. It also allowed me to see how active they were in Twitter recently. Some had not Tweeted about higher education issues and online schools in the last two months, indicating that they had changed beats or were less influential that I originally thought.
Expand my press list. Muck Rack directed me to additional reporters, bloggers and other influencers discussing #HigherEd, many of whom are freelancers or assistant editors who did not appear in our traditional media databases.
Eavesdrop on reporters “conversations” and tailor pitches. There are robust discussions occurring among national news media about the value of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS), the affordability of higher education for students, and the general financial health of our nation’s traditional four-year colleges and universities. Using this information, we were able to tailor our pitches to the news trends of the day and suggest future strategies based on reporters’ interests.
Measure the multiplier effect of coverage. I pasted a link to a piece of original coverage we placed in the Seattle Times into the Muck Rack Share counter and learned that the article had been shared 65 times via Facebook and Twitter. This helps validate the importance of pitching to respected journalists and news organizations, and demonstrates the viral effect that a positive article can have for a client.
Follow up with questions in real time. I created alerts that allowed me to pull any mention of the client’s brand name from our target Twitter feeds into my email box so I could respond to questions and repost articles as they were published.
My experience with Muck Rack also led to some unexpected observations and insights. The first is the pressure reporters and journalist feel because of the rapid changes in the news business. In addition to using Twitter to promote their stories, reporters and editors are also using the tool to debate the job changes, layoffs and shuttering of newspapers in this volatile industry.
It also opened my eyes to the potential for and dangers of groupthink in journalism. We often measure the multiplier effect of news cycles. An article that is placed in a newspaper for example can generate multiple placements as broadcast and wire services pick up the story and repost, rebroadcast or build upon an angle. There is a danger to this trend, however.
After a month of watching tweets and re-tweets on Muck Rack and scanning their daily newsletter, I noticed a growing trend of journalists citing or interviewing other journalists and media outlets as original sources. One exaggerated example is multiple news outlets, including CBS News, interviewing Oprah and reporting about her interview with Lance Armstrong, before her interview with Armstrong even aired and we heard his confession to drug use and blood doping while competing in the Tour de France. But there were many other examples as well, across industries.
Is there a danger of losing thoughtful discussion about important issues as reporters use each other as sources? What impact do immediate publishing tools like Twitter have on our ability as news consumers to rank and decipher what are the important issues of our time? How do we as PR professionals change our pitches to ensure our clients have greater credibility as resources than the journalists that position themselves as industry experts? These are a few of the questions that we are challenged with as digital media and traditional media continue to converge and change.
One of the most rewarding aspects of PR is relaying important and relevant information to the public. As such, we were excited to help facilitate an important announcement from Mobidia Technology, Inc. on January 3, 2013.
Mobidia is the maker of My Data Manager, a smartphone application that provides data usage tracking to help people avoid overage charges and make the most of their mobile data plan. Through this application, users can understand and manage their data consumption, and Mobidia is able to provide mobile operators with unique insight into how subscribers are using their data.
Recently, we helped Mobidia launch the third installment of its popular whitepaper in partnership with leading analyst firm Informa. The whitepaper, titled “Understanding Today’s Smartphone Users,” offers new insights into LTE usage in the leading LTE markets of Korea, Japan, and the U.S.
Here are some key takeaways based on Mobidia’s findings:
- LTE subscribers, on average, are using more mobile data, driven by the increased use of services, such as video, that benefit from larger bandwidth
- There is a potential trend towards a decrease in Wi-Fi usage
- The adoption of new pricing plans has increased, and users are moving away from traditional unlimited plans
These trends suggest a positive opportunity for the more than 100 mobile operators that have already deployed LTE. The generational change to LTE is driving increased demand for mobile data and presenting operators with the ability to monetize that data in more sustainable ways.
The announcement immediately generated traction online, garnering the following 11 articles within just a few days of the release:
- FierceBroadWireless, “AT&T, Verizon LTE users suck up 36% more data than 3G users,” January 3, 2013
- The Next Web, “LTE users consumer more data than those on 3G, but it’s big data plans that drive use more than speed,” January 3, 2013
- Converge! Network Digest, “Mobidia: LTE Drives Significant Data Growth,” January 3, 2013
- VentureBeat, “Study: LTE users use less WiFi, eat double the data, and don’t buy the smorgasbord,” January 3, 2013
- Washington Post, “How are LTE networks affecting what mobile phone users do?,” January 4, 2012
- Mobile Entertainment, “LTE usage could cause a decline in wi-fi consumption,” January 4, 2012
- Telecom Paper, “LTE subscribers use more mobile data than 3G subscribers, January 4, 2012
- EVDOinfo.com, “4G LTE Users Consistently Consume More Data Than 3G Users,” January 4, 2013
- Digital Trends, “If you have 4G LTE, chances are you’re using less Wi-Fi, but why?,” January 4, 2013
- USTelecom dailyLead: SmartBrief, “Report: LTE users rely less on Wi-Fi, are data hungry,” January 4, 2013
- TMCNet Mobility Tech Zone, “Mobidia Aims to Leverage Mobile Data Usage Data for Carrier Promotions,” January 9, 2013
Mobidia’s data and corresponding analysis around LTE usage will be extremely helpful for mobile operators and companies in the mobile space, and we were excited to have a role in delivering this important information.
For more on Mobidia, please visit: www.mobidia.com