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.
Every day we hear news about the recession: the current state of consumer confidence, how many people are being laid off and how the economy is impacting various industries. PR is certainly no exception. A recent PRWeek article reports that many companies are asking their PR agencies to go on hiatus this year in an effort to weather the financial downturn. While retainer accounts may be hard to come by in 2009, this trend presents a significant opportunity for PR agencies to re-think how they’re working with existing clients and approaching new business to sustain momentum through these tough economic times.
The reality is news doesn’t stop during a recession and while many organizations may be cutting back on spending, they still need to find ways to connect and communicate with their customers and key audiences. PR is one of the most efficient, cost-effective ways to do this.
Cision, a provider of media intelligence services for the public relations, investor relations, marketing and corporate communications sectors recently released some survival tips on how to do more PR with less budget. Here are a few interesting tips:
Align PR tactics with business strategies – This is the philosophy upon which Communiqué PR was founded on and in fact, our founders have even written a book dedicated to this philosophy. It’s critical to align your communication strategies with your business objectives if you want to see true ROI in your PR program. Particularly in a down economy, organizations need to get the biggest bang for their buck. Making sure your communication and business strategies are aligned will produce better results that impact your business in a positive way.
Know what story you plan to tell – As consolidation continues to shrink editorial staffs for newspapers and magazines, reporters have less and less time to devote to the in-depth, niche topics they once covered. It’s important to understand they’re being tasked with covering several beats at once. In order to spark interest and secure coverage, you need to get creative and present compelling story ideas and provide the resources they need to easily write the story.
Leverage emerging technologies – Social media continues to prove to be a budget-friendly, efficient way to reach niche audiences. Blogs and micro blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, podcasts and vodcasts provide innovative ways to relay your company’s message and should be strategically incorporated into your communications plan.
The bottom line is PR can be a cost-effective vehicle for connecting with your key audiences and maintaining visibility during tough economic times. While you may not have the money to do a full blown PR program, many agencies are willing to work with you on a short-term or project basis to devise and execute a strategy that will yield results and drive your business.
For more information on how to leverage PR to help your company maintain momentum during the recession please contact us at [email protected].
We have all seen the news regarding our suffering economy, both nationally and locally. “Company now targets 20% workforce reduction; more layoffs are possible,” “Boeing Layoffs Swell to 10,000,” “Starbucks to lay off 6,700, Close 300 Stores.” These are just a few of the headlines from recent news.
While we will continue to be bombarded with bad news about the economy and additional layoffs, there is a silver lining. These types of news cycles often present a prime opportunity to pitch stories that provide consumers with a counter point, good news, and/or helpful hints for managing during the recession.
For example, last week, we reached out to local broadcast outlets to offer some refreshing stories for local viewers in light of news regarding significant local layoffs. We suggested a segment highlighting that despite the current state of the local job market, Big Fish Games is weathering current economic conditions, seeing its revenues increase and continuing to hire employees. We offered Big Fish Games’ executives to provide advice for job seekers and to speak to business growth despite the recession.
Through our outreach we were able to secure broadcast coverage with both KING 5 News and Q13 Fox News.
The KING 5 segment, “Big Fish Games still hiring,” hosted by Glenn Farley, included an interview with Big Fish Games’ CEO Jeremy Lewis as well as Christine Davis, a new Big Fish Games employee, and outlines the company’s growth over the past year.
Q13 Reporter Amy Allen focused her segment, “Some Local Companies are Hiring,” on Big Fish Games and mentioned other local companies fortunate enough to be hiring. She provided viewers with a tour of Big Fish Games’ headquarters and highlighted some of the great perks of working for the company, including fresh fruit in the lunch room, video games in the break room and the use of Razor scooters as transportation around the office.
Both segments helped promote Big Fish Games as a successful, local company with a fun and energetic work environment and informed viewers that unlike many companies that are laying off employees, Big Fish Games is looking to fill approximately 35 positions.
These news stories come in addition to other recent articles about Big Fish Games including a TechFlash article by John Cook, “Record Revenues at Big Fish and the dawn of a new Chaplin era?” as well as an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Out of Office: Job Loss in the Age of Blogs and Twitter,” which highlights how consumers are playing games from Big Fish Games as a fun, “affordable way to forget” about the economy for an hour or two.
To learn more about how you can leverage news and to secure coverage about your company, contact us at [email protected].
Marketing and public relations go hand in hand, and it is important to understand both disciplines when considering how to best reach your customers. Creating synergy between marketing and PR is one of the best ways to achieve business goals and communication objectives, and successful PR campaigns will often include some marketing aspects.
As we work to build strategic PR campaigns for our clients, we have found it helpful to keep up on marketing news and tactics by reading marketing blogs. These blogs range from critiques of ads and campaigns to tips and tricks of the trade.
Below is a list of hyperlinked marketing blogs we like. Do you have any favorites to add to the list?
Ad Rants
American Marketing Association
Duct Tape Marketing
E-Marketer Daily
Entrepreneur Marketing Blog
Laura’s Marketing Blog
Marketing Journal Blog
Marketing Sherpa Blog
Marketing Vox
Marketing Web Log
Online Marketing Blog
Seth Godin’s Blog
The Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals
A variety of elements determine the newsworthiness of an announcement. As many newspapers and magazines continue to see a decline in readership, they are increasingly looking to achieve relevance with their audience and are striving to publish articles that have a high news value and can capture the interest of their readers.
In order to determine the value of your company’s news, we believe it’s important to look at the merits of the story and evaluate the following elements:
Timing – The word news means exactly that – things which are new. Topics which are current are good news. If it happened today, it’s news. If the same thing happened last week, it’s no longer interesting to many journalists and consumers.
Conflict – Conflict can elevate the newsworthy elements of a story. These can be high profile conflicts or less-evident conflicts.
Significance – Is the story significant? The number of people affected by the story is important. A company that’s preparing to lay off 20,000 people is more significant than a company laying off a dozen.
Proximity/Relevance – Stories that affect local businesses or local residents may be more newsworthy to local outlets – the same story may not have as much relevance to national publications. However, proximity doesn’t always have to mean geographical distance. Stories from countries with which we have a particular bond or similarity can have the same effect.
Prominence – Famous people get more coverage just because they’re famous. If you break your arm, it won’t make the news. However, if the Queen of England breaks her arm, it’s big news.
Human Interest – Human interest stories are a bit of a special case. They often disregard the main rules of newsworthiness; for example, they don’t date as quickly, they need not affect a large number of people, and it doesn’t necessarily matter the story takes place. Human interest stories appeal to emotion. They aim to evoke responses such as amusement or sadness. Television news programs often place a humorous or quirky story at the end of the show to finish on a feel-good note, and newspapers often have an area dedicated to these stories.
Recently, Starbucks announced it will be cutting approximately 6,700 jobs and closing 300 underperforming stores. This announcement is very newsworthy because of the significance of the number of job losses. It is also timely given the recent news about the economic downturn and its effect on companies. It also includes the element of proximity as it affects Seattle residents and employees as well as employees across the nation. Lastly, job loss affects not only the person who is losing their job but also their families. Given the nature of the topic, this announcement also has an element of human interest. Hearing about job loss sparks emotions like empathy and anxiety as people begin to worry about their own job security.
On the other hand, announcements about new hires such as this one from Business Wire, are not very newsworthy because they don’t affect a large amount of people and don’t have an element of prominence, unless the person being hired is a very well known business leader. Although it is not uncommon for businesses to release such announcements, it’s important to note that these are not the most newsworthy announcements and can’t be expected to garner significant coverage.
It’s important to keep these elements in mind when you are evaluating the value of news for your organization. This will ultimately help your company maximize media opportunities and convey your message to the places and audiences that matter most.
Over the past two months I have had the pleasure of working with Mobidia to increase the company’s profile leading up to Mobile World Congress in February. Mobidia’s technology provides mobile operators with a software platform that expands the capacity of their existing networks, and speeds the delivery of data to subscribers. It is a particularly exciting technology which provides mobile operators with comprehensive information about their wireless data networks. The rewards to mobile operators and subscribers are big: wireless operators save money, and their networks are improved for everyone. Data – like videos, images or VoIP – is sent and received faster from smartphones and laptop computers.
Leading up to Mobile World Congress, Mobidia wanted to brief industry analysts to build credibility and create the right perceptions about the company, as well as to generate demand for its technology. These briefings reinforce a positive profile of the company in the research reports written by analysts and purchased and read by potential customers. For more background on why an analyst relations program is important, check out this blog entry.
Chris Hill, vice president of marketing at Mobidia had this to say about our work scheduling analyst briefings:
“As we began the process of driving industry awareness of our technology, we wanted to brief industry analysts about the value of our innovation to gain third party endorsement. Communiqué PR did a fantastic job of reaching out to analysts and securing briefings on our behalf. The insight gained from these briefings and the analyst quotes we received will be instrumental in helping us prepare for our campaign at Mobile World Congress.”
I want to share some of the results we achieved for Mobidia. I hope this will help you gain a better understanding of what can be achieved by investing in relationship building with this very influential group of people.
Mobidia’s technology received a warm welcome from analysts, and we secured briefings with eight analysts, some of whom were able to provide quotes. Here are a few quotes we received about the market demand for Mobidia’s technology:
“Mobile operators’ networks are becoming increasingly stressed as more people send and receive broadband data – such as video, social networking and web traffic – with their laptop computers and smartphones. However the growing traffic volumes are not matched by equivalent growth in revenues, as the trend towards flat-rate pricing coincides with fierce competition. Consequently, there is a need for mobile operators to reduce their overhead costs. Among other approaches, mobile operators are looking at software solutions to optimize their networks, relieve congestion and reduce costs. If Mobidia’s trial results conclusively demonstrate a reduction in costs and congestion, it is likely to be of significant interest to mobile operators.” – Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis
“An increase in laptop, video and peer-to-peer traffic as well as the growing adoption of smartphones is placing tremendous stress on wireless data networks. Mobile operators are also faced with managing uneven data usage amongst subscribers. These challenges will only grow as operators aim to increase data users through subsidies on smartphones and data cards. Rather than putting an expensive band-aid on the problem by adding network capacity, operators should look for intelligent solutions to better manage and understand the data traffic on their networks. Mobidia’s technology provides mobile operators with a solution that increases the capacity of their existing wireless networks allows them to monitor traffic to improve the overall subscriber experience.” – Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, Strategy Analytics
“Today’s wireless networks are struggling to cope with the high volumes of data traffic being transferred by an increasing number of smartphones and laptop computers. Mobile operators need to increase 3G network access and capacity while decreasing capital and operating costs in order to meet the growing customer demand, but the high costs to deploy new infrastructure can be prohibitive. Mobidia’s technology addresses the clear need for cost-effective software solutions that optimize data networks without degrading the end-user experience.” – Phil Kendall, Strategy Analytics
It was an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to support Mobidia’s activities educating industry analysts.