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.
Telling the story of your company draws your audiences into your business in the same way a novel captivates a reader, creating a powerful way to shift perceptions. “I think that we human beings have always enjoyed great stories,” says Lee Weinstein, principal of Lee Weinstein & Associates and the former director of global corporate communications for Nike. “It’s part of who we are. It’s built into our evolution. How you tell a story and where you tell a story are really important, and I think PR really allows us to do that in a powerful way.”
So how do you go about crafting your company story? First, you need to have a clear idea of the value proposition of your company. “It all starts with the company’s vision and mission,” says Weinstein. “At Nike, our mission is to provide the innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world. If you think about innovation and inspiration first, then everything that you do in PR should be innovative and inspirational, from the writing to the images to the selection of the campaign you’re going to really get behind.”
In addition, your overarching story should have all the elements of a great narrative: a protagonist, an antagonist, a lively cast of characters, a setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution.
Excerpt from Strategic Public Relations, written by Jennifer Gehrt & Colleen Moffitt with Andrea Carlos
Colleen Moffitt, co-founder of Communiqué PR, will be speaking at the Northwest Environmental Business Council‘s Seattle Luncheon on Wed., Oct. 7. The event, which will be held at McCormick & Schmick’s Harborside restaurant, will focus on social media and business.
Colleen will discuss the following during the presentation:
An overview of the various social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Illustrate how Twitter and other social media platforms can help you achieve business and communication objectives.
Provide practical tips to help organizations get started with social media today.
To learn more about the event or to register, please visit http://www.nebc.org/Events.aspx. We look forward to seeing you there.
To get the most out of PR, you need to know what PR can help you accomplish and what it can’t. A question many of our clients ask is when they should use PR as opposed to advertising. Both play a significant role in the marketing mix; the trick is to know when to use each.
While companies are starting to invest more heavily in PR, they are still spending a much larger chunk of their marketing budgets on advertising. The $4.5 billion U.S. organizations spend annually on PR is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total $775 billion spent on overall marketing communications. Spending a lot of money on ads made sense during a time when most people watched prime-time television and read their local newspaper. But with fewer people watching TV and the circulation of many newspapers and magazines declining, advertising is becoming a less effective medium.
The media landscape is becoming far more fragmented than it once was, with people getting their news and information from a much broader range of sources. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach large numbers of consumers through advertising. As Al and Laura Ries write in their book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, “Yesterday it was advertising. Today it’s PR. . . .In the future clients will be looking to public relations firms to help them set the strategic directions for brands, and advertising will be forced to follow the lead of PR.”
As a general rule of thumb, PR is the best tool for introducing a new product or service, expanding your customer base, or shifting public perceptions. Advertising, on the other hand, is the most effective tool for reinforcing a brand once it becomes well-known and the opportunities for publicity start to dwindle. You reinforce ideas that are already there. Our message is that after a while there is no publicity potential in a new brand. People wrote up Red Bull, but today? Now they have to shift to advertising to maintain the brand. Same thing with powerful brands like Coca-Cola. You’re just not going to get much publicity.
Excerpt from Strategic Public Relations, written by Jennifer Gehrt & Colleen Moffitt with Andrea Carlos
Digonex recently published a contributed article in TicketNews.com about the impact of dynamic pricing on the event ticketing industry. Jeff Eglen, vice president of strategy of Digonex, outlined the challenges the ticketing industry is facing today as the economic climate continues to impact ticket sales. Given this, he says the industry is forced to “re-evaluate alternative pricing structures that provide a fair-to-all solution for artists, promoters, primary ticket sellers, secondary ticket sellers and consumers.”
While the industry is facing many challenges, dynamic pricing, which refers to the practice of changing prices at regular intervals such as every few minutes, hours or days based on actual consumer demand, can help address many of these challenges.
To learn more about dynamic pricing read the article entitled, “Guest Commentary: Dynamic Pricing: A Fair-to-All Solution to Event Ticketing Prices.”
You can also learn more about Digonex by visiting www.digonex.com.
Last week, I had the opportunity to co-present with Lisa T. Oratz of Perkins Coie at Law Seminars International’s Social Media Law workshop. We were the final presenters of the day-long workshop focused on new legal issues arising from social media marketing. Lisa and I discussed the practical and legal considerations for businesses when engaging in social media in a session titled, “Social Media Marketing: Anticipating Legal and Public Relations Issues to Maximize Benefits and Minimize Risk.”
I started the presentation by sharing the approach Dairy Queen has taken with its social media marketing. Dairy Queen has successfully utilized multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and blogs to engage directly with its consumers.
Many companies such as Dairy Queen have started using social media to help accomplish their business objectives. However, not all of these organizations have involved their legal teams or proactively considered how they can mitigate some of the risks involved with using these new mediums.
Gartner analyst Adam Sarner, stated in an interview with CNET late last year that more than 50 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies that engage in social media campaigns will see those campaigns fail. Sarner went on to explain, “(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they don’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail.”
Organizations should consider these best practices before taking the social media plunge:
Clarify the business objectives you are looking to accomplish
Determine your target audience and understand what constitutes value to that audience
Develop a social media plan and vet the plan with key stakeholders across the organization (legal, HR, PR, marketing, customer support, etc.)
Designate who will own the activity within your organization
Develop a social media policy and provide training to your staff
Consider developing a crisis communication plan
By taking a strategic approach to your social media activities, you will be better positioned to maximize the power and benefits of social media while minimizing the risks.
September typically means the end of summer, back to school and fall leaves. But it also means the start of the fall tradeshow season.
While tradeshows can often be a tiresome string of endless networking sessions, seminars, presentations and mixers, in the current economic climate, many companies are being more selective than ever when deciding which tradeshows to invest in.
We often get asked by our clients how they can make the most of attending a tradeshow. You’d be surprised that it doesn’t always involve sponsoring an event or purchasing a booth on the show floor. More often than not, simply attending a tradeshow with a clear objective and strategy can help your organization leverage the show as a platform to drive buzz and build relationships.
Whether you’re planning to attend CTIA, DEMO, AD:Tech or one of the many upcoming tradeshows, we can help. Send us an email at [email protected] to learn more.
