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.
Recently I had the opportunity to conduct a press tour with one of our clients who is preparing to introduce a groundbreaking new software solution. The tour was very successful with every journalist agreeing to write one, and in some instances two, articles about the solution and its likely impact on the industry. Given this outcome, I thought I would take a few minutes to recap what made it a success, as it may help others model future tours from it. Here is a check list of tips and best practices:
- Think through the objectives for each meeting and develop a compelling presentation. A presentation can help you guide the discussion and ensure you touch on your key messages. Be sure to practice it in advance. This will help you deliver it in the appropriate timeframe with the most powerful elocution.
- Remember to check-in with journalists during the discussion. It is vital that you ask for feedback during your conversation so you can determine what parts of your message are resonating and where you might need to provide additional details. If you wait until the end of the meeting to check-in, it may be too late for you to address underlying concerns that a journalist has.
- Bring copies of all your materials. We brought a thumb drive with electronic copies of the embargoed press release, FAQ, PowerPoint, screenshots, whitepapers and spokesperson bios to each meeting. We also brought paper copies of the most important materials, so we would be prepared in the event of a computer malfunction.
- Flag key points. Say things like “Joe, we think you are going to value this key aspect of our solution.” Or “This is an important point.” Then explain your thoughts and back up claims with facts or examples.
- Designate someone to take notes and capture follow-up items. The PR professional is often the best person to do this as the spokesperson is focused on delivering the information and responding to questions.
- Go for the close. At the end of the meeting, it is important for the PR pro to ask, “Now that you have heard from Mike, what is your reaction to the information? How do you think your readers would respond to this story?” You want to probe (in a nonintrusive manner) to determine if the journalist sees a story and plans to write. If he or she does not, you should find out why and determine if you can overcome his or her objectives.
Face-to-face meetings can be a powerful way to connect with journalists to help them understand your story, however, it is essential to thoroughly prepare for each discussion.
Often as part of our PR activities, our clients employ our help in developing case studies of successful product implementations with their products. We’ve worked closely with Toyota Motorsport and Continuum Dynamics, Inc. on behalf of Tecplot, Inc., and several prominent universities on behalf of Serials Solutions, among others.
Over that time, we’ve worked our way through processes that have worked well, and those that didn’t. Therefore, we thought we would share with you a few tips that have helped us succeed in developing strong case studies that highlight the great work of our clients.
- Set-up Customer Interviews – Whether it’s by phone or by e-mail, conducting an interview with your client’s customers will help you get your head around their unique implementation and challenges, and offers an easy way to ask questions. Before you end the interview, make sure to reiterate the key points back to the customer and ask them if there is anything important that you haven’t already asked about. For phone interviews, we also recommend recording the calls in order to easily refer back to the discussion, and pull out sound bites for the creation of the case study.
- Create a Case Study Format – Before you launch into the customer interview, take a few minutes to visualize the final case study. How will you break up the sections? Do you want to focus on the challenge, the solution or the metrics? This will be very useful as you move on to step three and develop your questionnaire.
- Develop a Questionnaire – By developing a questionnaire prior to your customer interviews, you’ll ensure that you have thought through the appropriate angles and all the information you need to gather ahead of time. Ultimately, you’ll want to limit the amount of time spent going back and forth to the customer to address “forgotten” questions after the fact.
- Outline the Case Study – After you have interviewed the customer, it is helpful to go back to your case study format and outline the information you just gathered. Do you have everything you need to begin writing? It’s a good idea to have a clear direction in your head, before you put your creative pen to paper to ensure you are utilizing your client’s time in an efficient manner. In several cases, we have even delivered the outline to our client prior to writing, in order to guarantee we are taking the appropriate direction.
- Get Creative – Often the words “case study” can seem a bit business-like. While case studies are often a sales and marketing tool that help companies demonstrate their value, don’t forget that the people reading them enjoy creativity. While you are writing, be sure to include all the elements of a good story: plot, scene, characters, climax and conclusion.
While not every company chooses to develop case studies, companies that do can ensure a smooth development process if they are willing to outline the necessary steps ahead of time. Just as in every public relations or marketing strategy, the preparation can be just as important as the final product.
Have you successfully used case studies in your organization? We would love to hear your tips or best practices around the creation of these useful documents. Just leave us a comment below.
Additionally, if you need help with strategies around leveraging case studies to generate coverage in vertical publications, check out our post on the topic.
Mashable has a regularly occurring series on its website called “The Social PR Guide Series.” One of the most recent contributions to this series focuses on YouTube, and how PR professionals can successfully implement and manage the solution within their companies. While many companies are becoming quite savvy at using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, YouTube remains somewhat of a mystery. Therefore, I thought I’d share a few points from we gleaned from their article titled, “The PR Pro’s Guide to YouTube.”
According to Mashable, video sharing sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo or VEVO, are “an excellent way to break the ice because nothing online is as personal and human as video.” They also note that in February, there were more than 139 million unique online video viewers in the U.S. that spend an average of four and a half hours watching the videos. That’s a huge potential audience for PR pros and marketers to tap into.
Here are a few ways that Mashable recommends using YouTube:
- Launching a Campaign – Videos offer a great way to raise awareness of news and other announcements. They are easy to digest and are easy to share. By enabling this ease of use, PR pros are making it more likely that the news will spread by word of mouth.
- Crisis Communication – According to Mashable, “video is one effective way to respond to questions and help calm fears.” Videos are also relatively quick to produce, which allows companies the flexibility to respond in a timely manner.
- Discover New Audiences – This is the core of what we do as PR and marketing professionals. We help our clients discover and engage with target audiences that are brand appropriate. By allowing people to comment on your videos, you’re enabling a community of like-minded individuals to connect and discuss the issues you bring up. As an example of this, read our earlier post about Major League Baseball’s unwillingness to allow videos to be posted to YouTube, and the potential audience connection they are missing out on.
- “Extend Your Brand” – Mashable suggests that companies “integrate the look of [its] profile page with [its] website homepage or other online communications channels. Creating consistency and connections to other channels makes it easier for visitors to get more information from your online resources.”
- Enhance Media Relationships – Just as PR pros are discovering that videos are a great way to connect with consumers, journalists are also discovering that videos are a good way to connect with readers. By sharing high-quality videos on a company’s YouTube site, companies can make it easy for journalists to get the content they want and need, quickly and easily.
The article also outlines a few considerations for measuring the reach of your online videos. YouTube’s “video statistics” feature allows companies to see how many viewers each video received, the total number of commenters and their geographic location, and whether or not people viewed the videos from a mobile device. As PR pros, measurement is important and it’s helpful that YouTube makes it so easy to report back.
Finally, Mashable notes that not all videos will receive the same amount of attention. Hey, we can’t all launch a successful “Old Spice Guy” campaign every day. If you are considering implementing a YouTube channel or other video aspect to your communication plan, consider the following questions:
- “How does the use of video fit within our larger communications strategy?”
- “What is the story we would like to tell? Is video the best way to share that story?”
- “What does success look like?”
- “How will we respond if our video receives little or negative attention?”
Have you successfully utilized YouTube or videos in your communication plan? Have you seen any good video campaigns that you can share? We’d love to hear your stories and tips for others reading this post, so feel free to share in the comments below.
So you’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter handle and a corporate blog, now what? Many organizations have realized the value social media can bring including increased brand awareness, improved customer relationships and thought leadership.
While leveraging these platforms to educate and engage with key audiences is critical, oftentimes companies have several different handles, fan pages and owners and processes which can create a fragmented social media program. It’s important that social media programs are tightly integrated to ensure they are easy to manage and poised to positively impact a company.
Consider the following tips if you’re thinking about formalizing your social media program:
- Develop Social Media Policy – Many organizations have a social media policy in place. If you don’t, you need one. According to an article in Inc. , “A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.” Social media policies guides employees about confidentiality, mitigates potential legal issues and protects trade secrets and other proprietary information.
- Educate Employees – With the lines between personal and professional use on Twitter and Facebook and blogs blurring, ensuring that employees understand your organization’s social media vision, policy and best practices is essential. We recently outlined some ideas for how to educate employees on your company’s expectations when it comes to leveraging social media. The goal is to ensure all employees have a good sense of what is appropriate and what is not with regard to the use of social media.
- Formalize Social Media Activity – Taking the time to formalize social media activity can be worthwhile as it ensures consistency, continuity and establishes a clear line of ownership. In order to effectively formalize your social media program it’s important to identify channel owner(s), refine messaging for each Twitter handle or Facebook page as well as develop a process for generating ongoing content.
- Designate handle/page owners – It’s important to identify who will own each of the company’s Twitter handles or Facebook pages. This could be the product manager, or a marketing or PR person.
- Refine messaging –The look, feel and messaging within each Twitter handle or Facebook page will need to be consistent to ensure continuity. For example, you want to make sure how you describe the company is consistent and tailored to each channel. Additionally you’ll want to ensure there is some continuity in company logos or images that are used across multiple Twitter handles or Facebook.
- Develop and ongoing editorial calendar – Successful social media programs include consistent engagement with key audiences. This incorporates a balance of posting content and responding to discussions within the Twittersphere and Facebook. Developing a fluid, ongoing editorial calendar is an easy way manage this process and could include content such as highlighting new blog posts, press releases, key media coverage, videos, company and product updates and events.
Establishing a presence on social media platforms is an ongoing initiative. It takes consistent engagement with key audiences and compelling content. By developing a framework for your social media program, you’ll be in a much better position to develop and maintain your presence on these platforms and garner all the benefits of social media.
On Sunday night, we were reminded once again how prevalent social media is in today’s communications landscape and how quickly information is disseminated through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Prompted by President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Twitter recorded the “highest sustained rate of Tweets ever,” an average of 3,440 tweets per second were sent between 10:45PM EST and 12:30 AM EST.
It was impossible for anyone on Facebook or Twitter on Sunday night not to hear the news. The widespread use of social media is undeniable, but its role in business has yet to be defined. Social media is recognized as an important tool, but the exact ROI is hard to track.
Mashable recently published an article on “9 Digital Marketing Lessons From Top Social Brands,” which examines how MTV, American Express, Xbox, NBA and AT&T have learned to use social media to get results.
The nine lessons are fairly standard, like understanding your audience and choosing the right platform. However, the one lesson that I believe deserves some attention is “be human.” Take into consideration why people follow celebrities on Twitter. Fans want to feel connected to the individual and know this person’s thoughts, feelings or whereabouts. It is quite possible that most celebrities have a whole team carefully crafting their tweets, but a follower wants to believe they are gaining insight into the celebrity’s life.
The same connection is true for any consumer following a business on social media. Consider the following points when crafting a tweet.
- Be Conversational. Developing a consistent tone that resonates with your audience will help establish credibility and make your followers feel a part of your business. “Nailing a tone that resonates with your audience is of paramount importance,” says Tom Fishman, manager of social media and community at MTV. The article says the goal of MTV is “to sound human and conversational and not be the voice of some corporate overload.”
- Use “We” or “I”. Writing tweets in “we” or “I” helps to convey there are “hearts and faces behind the computer screen.” Using “I” makes the tweet personal and whoever is tweeting should identify themselves. Using “we” makes the message sound as if it is coming from the whole company. This helps people establish a personal connection.
- Don’t Sound Like a Press Release. Brands should use social media to promote their message, but it’s important to avoid sounding like a press release. If you are tweeting about a press release, make sure to add a message instead of tweeting the headline.
- Admit Your Mistakes. An important part of being human is making mistakes. While we strive to be vigilant, errors happen. If there is a spelling error or factual mistake in a tweet, don’t delete it and “sweep the mistake under the rug.” Followers prefer to see the human side of a company by admitting their mistake and correcting it.
At the heart, social media is another avenue to disseminate information, but people often forget the human element can go a long way. Infuse a little personality into messages and start making a personal connection with your fans.
As we’ve mentioned previously on this blog, analogies often help make complex topics more digestible for a broader audience. While this normally happens more often in business-to-consumer scenarios, the same principle can be useful for learning lessons in any context.
Earlier this week, Ragan’s PR Daily writer Arik Hanson posted an article about the “4 PR Lessons from Saved by the Bell,” the pop culture TV hit from the ‘90’s. While naturally light-hearted, due to the characters and subject matter, Arik makes some great correlations from the show, which are completely applicable to PR and marketing.
Consider these four PR lessons which Arik notes in his article:
- “Persistence Doesn’t Always Pay Off” –Screech was very persistent in his pursuit of the lovely Lisa Turtle. He tried many angles and approaches, but never achieved the desired results. The same goes for media pitching. When pitching media, it’s tempting to continue to follow-up via phone, email, Twitter, and any other mode possible, but sometimes it’s better to re-evaluate your strategies than continue to force the issue.
- “When Everyone is Zigging, Try Zagging” – Screech is perhaps one of the most recognizable characters from the show. His quirky personality and clothing positioned him as unique, making him memorable. Arik points out that when launching new products or services, it’s good to identify and promote the features or aspects that set it apart from competitors. Ultimately, this is the way that consumers are going to remember why they should choose one product over another.
- “Success Is Never As Easy As It Seems” – One of the most talked about episodes of the entire series was when Jessie Spano decided to take caffeine pills to help keep herself awake for an all-night studying binge. This is a great reminder that it takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes for launches and announcements to run smoothly and, “make it look easy.” It can be tempting to take short cuts or the easy way out, but keep in mind that this may not be the best strategy to keep up momentum in the future.
- “Regular Communication Is Key To Productive Relationships” – Remember how Zack always seemed to be in Principal Belding’s office? Arik opines that maybe this was Belding’s way of keeping in close contact with Zack in the hopes of helping him realize his full potential. The same strategy applies for the relationship between PR and marketing teams – both in-house and agency. When all members of the communications team are in sync and in the loop, it makes for smoother sailing through the entire process of a launch or media announcement.
These four lessons serve as a great reminder that education comes in many forms, and it’s good to think critically about lessons of all shapes and forms can be applied to our professional endeavors. Have you learned any great lessons or utilized strategies that you gleaned from an unexpected place?