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.
We all have certain products we are loyal to: a type of gum, a particular kind of soap, or even a specific brand of electronics. Think of Apple for example: many people own the brand’s laptops, phones and tablets. Although we rarely think about it, there is something about our favorite products and brands that keeps us coming back for more– regardless of their similar (and perhaps less expensive) counterparts.
In today’s marketplace, having a well-designed product is often not enough to create a bond with customers. People must be aware of your product and understand how it will be of value to them before it can become their favorite go-to item. As Kathy Cripps points out in a blog post for the Council of PR Firms, it’s not just about getting information out there—it has to be useful information. Oftentimes, this is where a well-orchestrated product PR campaign can help. Positive publicity can give products a competitive edge and build customer loyalty.
So what exactly is product PR? Typically, product PR refers to placing product reviews or generating news coverage of a specific product. Comparative reviews, stand-alone expert reviews, or customer reviews frequently found on retail websites, such as Amazon.com, often have a significant impact on adoption of products and services.
PR professionals must take a “product perspective” before embarking on a campaign. This entails identifying the business problem the product is solving, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the product, learning about the key features and functionality of the product, obtaining compelling data and statistics about the product, and navigating the competitive landscape. It also is necessary to develop credible, memorable and useful messaging to ensure the product you are promoting is easily described and understood.
We have recently been working on securing reviews of Mobidia’s application called, My Data Manager. This application allows Android and iPhone users to monitor their mobile data usage. The app shows consumers how much data they are using and sends alerts to them before they breach their monthly data thresholds to avoid overages and bill shock.
To help journalists understand how this app compares to other ways of checking data usage, we developed the following table.
Taking a product perspective can also be useful for initiatives or campaigns that don’t involve a product because it can refresh the way you think. Since it is a presidential election year, it is easy to see how this product approach might be applied to a politician by his or her campaign team. Smart campaign managers should think through the following:
- How does the candidate measure up against the competition? Where does he win and where does he lose in relation to others seeking votes?
- Are his or her messages easy to understand, memorable and credible?
- What are the areas of weakness that need to be mitigated before they are detrimental to the campaign?
As you can see, approaching non-product initiatives from the product perspective can be extremely useful. Think about educating yourself in some of tenets of product PR. You may be surprised how helpful this approach may be.
Exact Target, the company behind one of the web’s most popular Twitter management tools, CoTweet, announced last month that they will no longer be offering their free service. Instead, they will be offering SocialEngage, an enterprise-ready, premium social media management solution that comes at a high price.
While SocialEngage sounds great, many of the clients we work with are new to social media, or have limited budgets to spend on social media management. Paying for an enterprise-ready social dashboard just isn’t feasible or sensible for everyone. However, we’ve identified a fantastic alternative called Roost.
Roost is a social media management platform that aims to help companies manage their engagement through campaigns and individual posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Offered by Vertical Response, it promises to help smaller companies manage their social media properties and the best part is, it is currently offered free of charge.
What we really like about Roost is the option to schedule Tweets individually or for an extended period of time as a campaign. It even helps you draft your posts by asking for interesting links, quotes, updates and photos. We haven’t yet found another social dashboard that has this rich capability.
As with all PR activity, measurement is essential (we recently posted about the purpose of measurement). Roost provides a scorecard tool that helps you track your level of engagement, and the success of that engagement, on your social media channels. It can even provide tailored tips on how to expand your company’s audience.
If your company doesn’t have the budget to keep up with CoTweet, or if you’re shopping around for a social media management platform, we encourage you to watch the demo and give Roost a try. You can also explore other options to meet your social media needs. Mashable recently posted an article on other CoTweet alternatives to try.
Forbes.com posted an interesting article the other day titled, “How NOT to do public relations: An interview with Peter Shankman.” Peter is a former PR practitioner and founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), an online service connecting journalists with PR people.
In the Q&A, Peter and contributor Jennifer Leggio discuss the relationship between PR practitioners and the media. Notes Peter, “There will always be problems between PR people and journalists, no matter how much we try and repair the rift. Look, fundamentally, the two are simply designed to oppose. On one hand, you have journalists, who have the job of finding actual news – a good story, a trend, something interesting. That’s not easy to do, and they’re being asked every day to do more with less. On the flip side, you have PR people, who are beholden to the request of the clients – A very simple, yet incredibly complex request: ‘Get us press.’”
Managing this balance is exactly what’s so great about being in PR, and at Communiqué PR we pride ourselves on our relationships with both our clients and journalists.
Here’s what we focus on in order to maintain that balance:
- The role of PR is to provide strategic counsel to our clients – first and foremost, our responsibility is to them – even though they might not always want to hear what we have to say. This counsel is based on research and prior experience, and we’re the experts – it’s our job.
- We are also responsible to the journalists whom we are pitching on behalf of our clients. It is imperative that we do our homework to understand their coverage areas so that when we send them a compelling pitch it’s about something they write about.
- As an independent third party, it is essential for us to offer objectivity and vision. Sometimes our clients are too close to an issue to understand why a strategy will be unsuccessful.
- Both the PR practitioner’s and the client’s credibility are at stake if the pitch isn’t newsworthy. After all, it will be much harder to get the journalist’s attention next time.
- Remember, PR is an ongoing process that requires you to continually evaluate your strategy to address changing needs/environments. It’s okay to revisit goals and make a mid-course correction in order to allow for the best possible outcome.
Remember the old saying; it’s a marathon not a sprint. This is true in PR as well, as we work to create new relationships and solidifying existing ones.
I recently read the book “How to Measure Anything,” by Douglas W. Hubbard. As the title infers, the book makes the bold assertion that anything can be measured.
In the context of public relations, measurement is significant. On the Communiqué PR blog, we have addressed topics such as Measuring the Value of PR, Measuring ROI in Social Media, Measuring Media Relations Takes a Multifaceted Approach and Determining Your Share of Voice. Measurement is important because it informs decisions.
But before incorporating measurement into your PR approach, it’s essential to note two things about measurement. First, measurement doesn’t have to be 100-percent accurate; rather, it’s a quantitatively expressed reduction in uncertainty. You may not know how many people actually read what you’ve written on your Twitter account, but you can determine how many people are followers, how many are sharing your tweets and how many send you direct messages. This information reduces any uncertainty you may have about the number of people who may be reading your content.
Second, if you’re trying to measure something, there should be some expected outcome from measuring it. You shouldn’t measure something for the sake of measurement. For example, if you want to measure how effective a particular strategy is, you probably want to do so to know if you should continue with that given strategy.
Prior to measuring something, asking yourself the following five questions will help you determine exactly what you are talking about and why you care about it.
1. What is the decision this measurement is supposed to support?
2. What is the definition of the thing being measured in terms of observable consequences? For example, if you want to talk about “engagement” in social media, what specifically does it mean? Does it mean interactions per person per month? Does it mean “likes,” “shares” or “comments” on Facebook? And what decisions depend on that measurement of engagement?
3. How, exactly, does this thing matter to the decision being asked? Using the example noted above, why does engagement matter to your specific social media efforts? Will the measurement information you glean change the outcome of a particular strategy?
4. How much do you know about it now (i.e., what is your current level of uncertainty)?
5. What is the value of additional information?
The first three questions define the need for measurement. As Hubbard notes, “If a measurement matters at all, it is because it must have some conceivable effect on decisions and behavior. If we can’t identify a decision that could be affected by a proposed measure and how it could change those decisions, then the measurement simply has no value.”
In public relations, we like to talk about “readership.” But to measure readership (such as the readership of a company blog or newsletter), we really need to define what we mean by “readership” in the first place. Does this entail the number of people subscribed? Is this the number of people who click on a link? Does clicking on a link mean they read something? And why specifically are we trying to understand how many readers something has? What decision will be based on us obtaining this measurement? These questions and others should help inform your business decisions.
Question no. 4 is essential to helping you understand what you currently do know about something. As Hubbard notes, “The lack of having an exact number is not the same as knowing nothing.” Rather, he suggests that your answer have a 90-percent confidence level that the correct answer is within a particular range.
For example, if someone asked how many inches long a business card is, you wouldn’t necessarily provide its exact dimensions. You’d note that it was greater than two inches, but less than five inches. So you have a 90-percent confidence level that the exact length of the card is between those two numbers. The goal is not to have a “right” answer, but rather remove uncertainty. If you aren’t sure of something, widen your range.
Back to the readership question: You could guess that it’s between 1 and 5,000 readers. If a readership of 5,000 seems like an extreme stretch for the item in question, you at least know you have an upper limit, and it will help you try to narrow down the range. On the lower end of the range, you could measure click-throughs to determine that approximately 2,500 people open the email. So you would be 90-percent certain that readership includes a range of 2,500-5,000 readers. If you feel that not all of the 2,500 click-throughs actually read the email, you could broaden your range slightly to account for that difference, making it a range of 2,000 to 5,000.
Finally, question no.5 should help you determine if there truly is value in obtaining additional information. For example, if you measure your company’s blog or newsletter readership, discover it’s extremely low, but don’t do anything about it, the measurement is then an exercise in futility. If no value is to be added, then don’t proceed with the measurement. Alternately, you could determine that readership is higher than expected, which will support a decision to continue producing the content.
As you can see, measurement involves a high degree of strategic thinking before even attempting to measure something. Once you’ve determined specifically what you’re after and how it will be useful for your business and communications objectives, Hubbard has a great five-step process (he calls this the “Applied Information Economics” method) to help you approach improving assessment. Giving extra thought to measurement will help you provide more meaningful information to help shape business decisions, and in turn provide more valuable service to your clients.
Joni Kirk
Ever since the Seattle Sonics left for Oklahoma City four seasons ago, the community has held hope that someday we might have another NBA team. As it turns out, we might actually be close to having a team in town as soon as next fall. The city of Seattle’s mayor’s office has quietly been in discussion with Christopher Hansen, a San Francisco-based hedge fund manager (and Seattle native) to help finance a new arena to attract an NBA team. According to news reports, discussions have been going on for almost a year.
A year?! What’s interesting to me is that this is the first time the general public has heard about this. There haven’t been any news conferences or press releases talking about the what ifs but instead the powers that be have been diligently working in the background to try and make this happen before setting any expectations. Instead of spending their time answering questions they don’t have answers to, they focused on putting a deal together to alleviate some of the message spin. The mayor’s office has done an outstanding job of managing the messaging on this for almost a year now, and for this they deserve some kudos.
Nothing would steam Seattle’s milk more than the prospect of publicly financed stadiums and subsidized pro-sports teams, so it can’t be easy to manage expectations and messaging for such a high profile, high-risk initiative.
As PR practitioners it’s our job to think about the before, during, and after; to position the message just so; and to deftly manage the feedback. Imagine the counterproductive buzz that would have pushed these sensitive NBA talks off course had word gotten out sooner. Not good. Instead, questions are answered before they’re asked, strategic partners feel valued and the message has momentum.
Well played.
Did you catch Chrysler’s commercial featuring Clint Eastwood during last Sunday’s Super Bowl? More than 100 million people tuned in to watch the commercials. What makes this Clint Eastwood spot significant over the other commercials is the amount of buzz and media coverage it has received since its airing.
In case you missed it, the ad features Clint Eastwood giving a half-time pep talk to America, saying, “This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and, when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime America, and the second half is about to begin.”
Let’s assume for a minute there was no political agenda – after all, I’ve read pretty persuasive arguments from all corners of the political spectrum – and that the ad was just an ad. Let’s also assume that the ensuing political controversy was unexpected by Chrysler – executives said there was no political message intended – it was just an ad. Now, think about the enviable position Chrysler has found itself in.
The ad is thought provoking and timely. Context and timing are two crucial elements that must be considered in any marketing communications program and Chrysler nailed it. Timing a message appropriately is a key factor, and in this case, is tied to the American public’s state of mind.
While media coverage has primarily focused on the potential political nature of the message, there’s no denying the press coverage has worked to put Chrysler at the forefront of people’s attention. After all, successful public relations campaigns are one of the most strategic tools a company can employ to communicate with their customers and potential customers.
Chrysler and its ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy, made a great ad, there’s no debating that. Since the commercial aired, the company has stated that it wasn’t a political message at all, but a message to Americans in general. Chrysler wasn’t calling for political change nor were they thanking the current administration for the tax-fund bailout. Regardless, it still worked.
Context and timing.