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.
As PR professionals, we are always interested in learning about new search tools that will impact the ever-changing digital media landscape. Virtually everyone utilizes search engines for research including journalists and PR professionals. WolframAlpha, which made its debut on May 15, could change how we find information through search engines.
WolframAlpha is a powerful search service that computes answers to questions using data amassed by approximately 100 employees at Wolfram Research. Creator Stephen Wolfram tells The New York Times, that despite online conversations comparing this service to Google, WolframAlpha is “not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.”
Unlike traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo!, WolframAlpha does not search through Web pages to answer queries. It is “knowledge based” and can provide answers to questions like “what is the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male?” or “Is the Eiffel Tower taller than Seattle’s Space Needle?” It will not provide information about upcoming movie times or help with computer or camera shopping. Clearly, there will be a unique opportunity for companies and journalists to leverage this tool to find complex data as well as science and technology based information.
Doug Lenat, an artificial intelligence expert, comments WolframAlpha “may become a massive player alongside Google,” and says it could eventually turn into a favorite destination on the Web.
With the advent of new search tools like WolframAlpha, we wonder how SEO techniques will change. Currently, SEO is important to ensure a Web site is one of the top search engine results to increase Web site traffic.
Companies can optimize articles, press releases, investor information, white papers and third-party content. Companies that optimize relevant content will achieve the following:
Higher rankings in search engine results
Reach target audiences and articulate your key messages more efficiently to these audiences
Increased Web traffic
There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter about Wolfram Alpha. A few themes include:
Five things WolframAlpha does better than Google: complex queries, localization, precision, calculation and comparison.
WoolframAlpha is too complex for simple inquires and data.
It is a revolutionary way to get answers to computational (math, etc) questions.
How do you think WolframAlpha will impact SEO techniques and the way journalists gather information? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
To learn more about SEO, visit our past blog by clicking here.
Speaking engagements at industry tradeshows or events are a terrific way to build thought leadership amongst peers and potential customers. But for many, the thought of presenting in front of a large group can be a scary one – to say the least.
Preparation is essential to giving a good presentation and with a little work, a speaking engagement need not be a terrifying ordeal. Here are a few tips that have helped us and our clients deliver great presentations over the years:
Know your audience – Will you be presenting to professionals in your field? What is the size of the audience? Will they be managers or C-level executives? Knowing your audience will help you deliver a message they find relevant and useful.
Understand the format – How much time will you have? Are you the only person presenting or will you be on a panel? If you’re participating on a panel, who else will is on it? How will the panel discussion be moderated? Does the moderator understand what each panelist brings to the discussion? Are there a set of questions that the moderator has in mind for the panelists to discuss?
Stay focused – Make sure your presentation has a clear, focused theme. Ideally, you should have three main messages. You will probably lose your audience if you wander off into tangents and try to explain every supporting detail of your story. Instead, deliver a simple message and allow your audience to ask questions at the end.
Provide supporting materials – For many business presentations, a good PowerPoint will do the trick. But resist the urge to fill your slides with lots of text. We find it best to use compelling images with speaking notes to capture important statistics or reinforce an important point. The bottom line is that you should do the talking – not your PowerPoint.
Practice, practice, practice – Mark Twain once said, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” He has a point: by spending time practicing alone and in front of a friend or colleague, you can ease your nerves and find any weaknesses in your presentation. But take note: even if you’ve memorized every word, you should deliver your presentation in a conversational tone on the big day to keep your audience engaged and the discussion lively.
Consider a coach – If you’re still feeling jittery about your presentation consider hiring a coach to help you prepare. A good coach can help you with your subject, supporting materials and speech delivery. Communiqué PR often provides this type of support as we help executives develop their speeches and prepare for their presentations.
Gather Feedback – After your presentation, you can distribute comment cards to your audience or ask the conference producers and moderators for feedback. This information will help you improve your public speaking skills and prepare a more compelling presentation next time.
We hope you find these tips helpful and would love to hear any ideas that have helped you prepare and deliver a stellar presentation.
Twitter has an important role in business. Professionals are connecting over Twitter, building relationships and sharing information. But Twitter is a complex web to navigate and finding others can be difficult, especially because many people use screen names.
As is often the case online, a simple problem breeds hundreds of solutions in the form of Internet start-ups – and the confusing Twitter web is no different. A new crop of Web sites have sprung up to aggregate similar people on Twitter. One such site, JournalistTweets.com, sorts journalists’ Twitter content to provide “a real-time snapshot of what thousands of reporters, editors, bloggers and broadcasters are discussing.” By collecting all journalists on Twitter in one place, JournalistTweets.com helps PR pros find journalists, build relationships and cut through the noise.
Another example is SFGate.com, the Web site for the San Francisco Chronicle. During the beginning of the swine influenza outbreak, the site gathered all swine flu experts on Twitter – including Communiqué PR client Veratect – into one place so readers could easily see updates in real time.
Is this the beginning of a new trend? From my research the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Here are a few sites you may find useful – or at least entertaining:
ExecTweets.com – This site allows people to “find and follow top business execs on Twitter.” The first Tweet I noticed when visiting the site was from Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric.
AthleteTweets.com – This site aggregates tweets from professional athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong and Andy Roddick (who’s Twitter bio simply states “I play tennis”) to Gary Payton and Indy 500 racer Sarah Fisher.
TweetFreak – This site is maintained by AdWeek and follows the marketing, media and ad world on Twitter.
CelebrityTweet.com – This site is a live stream of tweets from celebrities including Rob Thomas and Demi Moore (who is fast approaching her husband’s much-hyped million followers). Watch the magic unfold as Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton carry on a conversation via Twitter.
These sites are likely to keep popping up because, as Bnet.com‘s Catharine P. Taylor writes, “it’s so easy to set one up that it’s a no-brainer of an idea, particularly if you can just attach your new tweet site to a media network and bring in another source of traffic – and ad dollars.”
Have you found any useful sites that help you navigate Twitter?
Heidrick & Struggles, an Atlanta-based recruiting firm, recently conducted a survey to evaluate the success of digital strategies in marketing activities, such as social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and business intelligence. They surveyed 111 senior marketing executives at firms with $1 billion or more in annual revenues and found that while many marketing executives acknowledge the wealth of information about their customers online, many expressed that they’re “not getting what they want out of it.”
Lynn Seid, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles, reports marketing executives are frustrated over the fact that “so much information exists online about consumers – like their search and social media behavior – and yet marketers felt they were accessing it poorly.” Given the current economy, many organizations are focusing on cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers and gaining market share from competitors in order to stay afloat.
A few highlights from the survey include:
Respondents were dissatisfied with their current ability to access information about ROI and metrics on their digital marketing strategies.
Although one of the positive features of digital media is the ability to let marketers respond quickly to new opportunities, only 16 percent of the marketing executives polled rated themselves “very satisfied” with their ability to do this.
The most important features of the digital marketing mix were ROI analysis, Web behavioral analyses and CRM. However, only 18 percent of those surveyed said they were “very satisfied” with their ROI analysis, 13 percent said the same about their CRM program and 19 percent were happy with their search engine optimization (SEO).
A majority of marketing departments would like their IT departments to take the lead on handling analytics including Web traffic and usage reports.
As they look for new ways to market their companies via social networks, SEO and mobile advertising, a majority of marketing executives agree there’s a lot of room for improvement. And while there are a number of digital agencies and suppliers that specialize in social media and search, there aren’t many agencies that manage, integrate and establish best practices in these areas.
In order to implement a successful digital media campaign, you must have a clear understanding of how technology and marketing can effectively work together. A few tips to evaluate your digital media strategies include:
Look at your current digital activity
Have a clear understanding of what your business, communications, and marketing objectives are
Identify how traditional media efforts align with or support your digital media strategies
Understand what your resources and capabilities are
Look at what your key competitors’ digital media efforts are
Outline areas where you can digitally differentiate your business from your competitors
Build a digital media strategy based on your objectives strengths, and capabilities
Frequently review and update your digital media efforts
Understanding and getting the most out of digital strategies such as SEO and social media are also becoming an increasingly important part of PR. We have found that the best way to make sure our clients get the most out of their digital strategies is by clearly understanding their objectives and making sure our outreach aligns with these goals.
How do you rate your digital marketing strategies? Do you agree with the marketing executives polled or have you had a more pleasant experience? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Social media is changing business. Twitter enables anyone to broadcast anything to millions of people in an instant. The short 140 character updates seem casual, yet the impact of one message can have significant and sometimes drastic implications. Known brands such as Ketchum, JetBlue, Southwest and Domino’s have all learned first-hand the effect Twitter can have on their reputations.
With more than 25 million users on Twitter according to TechCrunch, some of your employees, customers and partners are tweeting and chances are that your brand, company name or competitors are being mentioned. Do you know what is being said and how it’s impacting your brand?
So what can you do to protect your reputation, brand and image? In addition to securing your brand or company’s preferred Twitter handle immediately, below are some steps you can take now.
Here are a few initial tips:
1. Be an Active Listener. At minimum ensure someone (or multiple people depending on the size of your company) within your organization is monitoring Twitter and other social media to know what is being said about your brand, company and competitors. This can be done tactically via existing advance search capabilities or tools such as TweetBeep. For more strategic listening platforms check out Forrester’s recently published The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 which can be downloaded for free from Visible Technologies home page http://www.visibletechnologies.com/ .
2. Become a Twitterbug. If you are not using the medium – start. You cannot understand it if you have not tried it. Forrester’s George Colony has a good post on this, “How can CEOs understand social technologies?” There are numerous articles and resources online providing a Twitter 101. Once signed up, I found TweetDeck to be extremely easy to use and easier to use .
3. Educate your Employees. Just as spokespeople receive media training, your employees (who now all have the potential to be informal spokespeople) need to be informed on your company’s business objectives, key messages and target audiences. They also need to receive coaching on the impact their seemingly causal posts can have and the perceptions of those updates can create. A Ketchum employee realized the impact of his tweets when an update jeopardized his company’s relationship with key client FedEx.
4. Update your Crisis Communications Plan. With the pace of communications today, executive management does not have days to discuss how to respond in the face of a crisis. Failure to respond or address a crisis within hours can make it impossible for a company to contain the issue, and as we saw with Domino’s, can significantly damage reputations. Having an established communications plan that outlines how the company will address potential crises will enable a company to react in a timely manner.
5. Build Your Following Now. Don’t wait for a crisis to begin using Twitter. Establish a loyal base of people who care about your company or organization today. Then, as Paul Goodrich, Madrona Venture Group, explained at the Perkins Madrona Twitter Conference, when a crisis happens, you can have them help you respond. Loyal followers may even deflect the issue without a corporate response.
Twitter is still relatively new. I believe we will continue to see changes, and more tools that help businesses leverage this medium and analyze trends and information shared via Twitter. However, it is becoming mainstream and companies cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and wait for Twitter to mature. Evaluate the strategies your company is employing to achieve its business objectives and determine how Twitter and other social media can help execute those strategies.
To ensure you are being thoughtful in approaching this medium, solicit input from your legal counsel in addition to PR and marketing experts. For more information please contact us at [email protected]
Corporate blogs can be an excellent way to establish thought leadership, build communities and drive additional traffic to an organization’s Web site. For example, since Communiqué PR started its blog in January 2008, we have seen a 200 percent increase in Web traffic and the blog has been a terrific way to give our clients additional exposure as well as educate potential clients about our work.
A blog also gives organizations the opportunity to engage directly with customers, partners and potential new employees. However, for a blog to be effective, the topics must be relevant, timely and continually updated to keep readers coming back for more. Potential blog topics ideally include corporate news, customer case studies, executive changes, commentary on industry trends, etc.
If your organization is considering creating a corporate blog, here are some steps to help you get started:
1. Identify two to three internal blog owners or champions. Ideally, these are individuals that can create blog posts and comment on other relevant blogs.
2. Develop a calendar of topics. This will help guide the direction of the blog and ensure the topics align with corporate communication objectives. As you develop this calendar make sure you think about how each post will add value to readers.
3. Establish a process for writing entries and updating the blog on an ongoing basis. This will ensure blog posts are written in a timely manner, well in advance of your publishing deadline.
4. Develop best practices for blogging and interacting with other blogs. This is an essential step in creating a corporate blog. For example, you may want to outline what company information can be shared, and what should remain confidential.
5. Be transparent. In the spirit of open communication, it is important to fully disclose your identity and intention when commenting on other people’s blogs.
6. Manage comments posted by readers. The blog owner should regularly monitor comments in response to his or her articles and respond appropriately.
7. Get others to link to your site. Finally, as you consider building relationships with other bloggers in your circle, you should consider asking them to link back to your corporate blog.
We hope you find these tips helpful as you prepare to create a blog. If you have a success story to share about your blog, please let us know. We would love to hear any additional steps that have worked well for you.