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.
PRWeek recently published an article about the importance of measuring the return on investment (ROI) of PR initiatives. According to Seth Duncan, a research manager at Context Analytics, “in a challenging economy, it is likely many PR pros will see increasing pressure to show their value to their organizations’ bottom line.”Measuring the financial value of our PR efforts is a crucial element in providing Communiqué PR clients with a clear picture of how we are adding value to their company. It also helps illustrate why they should continue to invest in our services.
In the past, PR professionals relied heavily on the measurement of media impressions and public sentiment to calculate the ROI of PR investments. According to PRWeek, today clients are seeking more in-depth reviews of the effects of PR on sales, revenue, stock valuation, Web site traffic, and insight on how a company’s messaging is affecting consumers and target audiences.
There is no all-encompassing technique to measure and evaluate PR effectiveness or show how PR campaigns are improving a company’s bottom line. Some companies want to count impressions, and this can be helpful, but we also believe it is important to identify and examine what constitutes value for our clients.
What one company values may be completely unimportant to another, depending on business objectives, the preferences of executives and the philosophy of the management team. Therefore, when working to determine the ROI of a campaign, it is first necessary to identify a value system.
Given this, to fully demonstrate the impact and value of PR programs we follow these best practices:
- Set specific measurable PR goals and objectives – Specify the target audience and key messages that need to be communicated before beginning any PR program. Set attainable expectations around outreach with clients and outline measurable goals around coverage results.
- Measure PR impressions – Measure the amount of media coverage garnered by an event or an announcement. We also recognize the importance of monitoring online conversations and blogger reactions to the news. Setting up Google Alerts is a great way to easily and cost-effectively monitor online coverage. We find that our clients appreciate it when we provide them with coverage recaps because this allows them to see the results of our hard work.
- Measure the impact on target audiences – Analyze changes in public opinion and public sentiment toward our clients and their company values by distributing a survey to target audiences. This survey asks a portion of the target audience how or if their decisions about buying a particular product were linked to specific PR efforts.
- Measure business and/or organizational outcomes – This involves measuring the return on media impact by tracking the change in sales, revenue and stock value after a PR campaign.
It is important to consider your budget expectations before analyzing PR’s ROI. Completing a full analysis of the effectiveness of a PR program can be time consuming task and require organizational commitment. Depending on an organization’s goals and budget, a full analysis might only be required monthly or quarterly.
Setting expectations with our clients and providing clear, measurable data to demonstrate the effectiveness of a campaign is a great way to prove what we’ve known all along – PR is a key part of any successful business.
According to Dan Gillmor, former columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, the four pillars of journalism include thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency. Understanding a journalist’s creed can help us identify best practices for working with them.
Accuracy is a shared goal between journalists and PR professionals. As we think about how we can help journalists develop accurate articles, it is important to recognize the increased pressure they face today. With newsrooms cutting back on resources, there are fewer journalists to do the same amount of work. In addition, journalists face fierce competition to break stories first in both online and print mediums. Sometimes, journalists do not have time to fact check an executive quote or data point that was discussed during an interview, which can result in an inaccurate article.
Inaccurate articles can leave some executives reluctant to work with the journalist again on future articles, missing a great opportunity to increase awareness for the organization and its products and services. The journalist may also get frustrated and turn to another source -meaning your competitors get ink.
To help ensure an accurate story, we recommend taking the following steps when working with journalists:
1. Seek to understand the journalist’s interview questions and story angle. Whenever possible, request interview questions in advance. This provides the spokesperson with the opportunity to prepare, organize facts and identify supporting data. Furthermore, by asking the journalists for questions it helps him or her focus on the direction of the story and be better prepared for the interview.
Some journalists will not want to share questions in advance. If this happens, it is important to explain your rationale for needing this information. For example, the questions might help you identify the correct spokesperson for the opportunity.
If you don’t feel comfortable asking for the questions, paraphrase back your understanding of the journalist’s angle and interest in talking with your client. This helps ensure you have captured their objectives and can accurately convey them to the spokesperson.
2. Ensure a PR person is present during the interview to make introductions, capture notes, clarify facts, keep the discussion on point and recap action items. Having a third party present helps to hold everyone accountable and can go a long way toward ensuring accuracy.
3. Record the interview. During interview introductions, disclose to the journalist that you are recording the discussion and then give them a written transcript following the meeting. Having a written transcript provides an opportunity for the PR person to double-check facts while also providing journalists with a helpful reference for their article.
4. Ask to confirm quotes and stats. Affirm the journalist’s commitment to accuracy and ask if he’d be willing to let you review quotes or stats before publishing the story. By proactively checking quotes and stats, you also will save the journalist the hassle and embarrassment of making any corrections after the article is published.
While an accurate story can have a tremendous impact, inaccurate information can damage perceptions of your company and its products and services. Being creative and looking for win-win solutions can go a long way to fostering solid relationships with journalists and clients alike.
As newspapers and magazines continue to cut jobs, it is becoming increasingly difficult for small-to-mid sized companies to compete with larger organizations to garner media attention. So how can a company position itself as a valuable asset and tool for journalists while building trust, credibility and brand awareness with its customers? By becoming an industry thought leader.
Thought leadership can help generate coverage and position a company as an important influencer in the industry. Establishing a thought leadership program requires significant time commitment and dedication. There are several key elements to successfully implementing a thought leadership program. In order to become a well-respected thought leader, consider the following:
- Build Credibility – Building credibility requires that you establish yourself as an expert in your field. How do you do that? Educate yourself on what’s going on in your particular field and industry. Once you’ve established a clear point of view, you can communicate your ideas to the media and key audiences in a number of ways including interviews, byline articles, whitepapers, blogging and speaking at industry events. When expressing your perspective offer credible data points and resources.
- Express your opinions – A thought leader is someone with a clear point of view. In order to be “newsworthy” you must provide a compelling perspective on a particular issue and offer insight and predictions about the future of the industry. Think about your audience and make sure the opinions and perspectives that you offer are applicable to the issues they are facing.
- Foster your relationship – Persistence is key. Journalists are often very busy and receive hundreds of e-mails on a daily basis. In order to stay top of mind, follow up with your contacts regularly and look for innovative ideas to share with them. Comment on stories and blog posts. Securing the initial conversation may be difficult but once you have proven that you are a valuable resource, journalists will reach out to you and they will seek your opinion for future opportunities.
As indicated in previous blog posts, some of the ways companies can generate thought leadership include writing byline articles, leveraging newsworthy trends for feature stories and maintaining an informative and engaging corporate blog. In addition, here are other tools such as white papers, case studies and speaking opportunities that can be used to build thought leadership:
Thought leadership can be an effective tool to communicate a company’s passion and commitment to providing its customers and the broader marketplace with valuable perspective and information. We encourage you to generate an ongoing effort towards thought leadership by making it a strategic initiative within your company.
A recent article in PRWeek reports that several of the industry’s top publishing houses have recently reduced their budgets and workforce. One prominent company that is scaling down is Rodale, publisher of Men’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World, Time Inc. owner of Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune and Condé Nast whose titles include Vogue and Men’s Vogue.
For decades, the magazine industry has struggled to maintain and increase advertising revenue to support circulation costs. But much like the tech bubble that popped in the Silicon Valley in the early 2000s and forced companies to lay off workers or go out of business altogether, the recent economic crunch is pushing magazines to cut budgets and staff. This in turn is forcing these publications to move their content online and find other creative ways to remain a ëmust-read’ for audiences.
As budgets and staffs shrink, so do the opportunities to garner coverage. Several publications are relying on wire services and material contributed by contract writers and vendors to help round out the content. This growing trend highlights the importance of strategic media relations.
PR professionals and organizations need to tailor their strategies and tactics to fit in with the current media landscape. In order to build relationships with reporters and ensure coverage, consider the following:
Do your homework – This seems like a no-brainer but remains true even in today’s media climate. With limited staff, reporters are often juggling several unrelated beats. Make sure you are pitching information that is relevant to the reporter.
Make the reporter’s job as easy as possible – Package up all of the story elements such as the pitch, key data points, links to additional background such as industry or analyst reports, surveys, etc. so a reporter can easily digest it. Taking this approach is almost always appreciated by journalists who are crunched for time and don’t have bandwidth to do background research.
Consider alternative mediums – As noted above, most publications are moving to an online format that includes features such as webcasts, podcasts and blogs, which offer other opportunities to secure coverage and interact with reporters.
Byline articles are an excellent way to retain ownership of key messages and establish thought leadership. Executives can insert their point of view and reach target audiences by writing or commissioning these articles. But bylines can be tricky to write and require a careful balance to ensure that they are both informative and readable. Below, we’ve included a list of our top tips for writing byline articles.
Consider your audience. If you are writing for a technology publication, more complicated terms and concepts may be in order. When writing for a lifestyle magazine however, some concepts may need to be toned down. A recent post by New York Times technology columnist and blogger David Pogue makes a humorous case for avoiding technology jargon if at all possible. You can find this post here.
Don’t self-promote. Remember that this is a byline article, not an advertisement. The intent is to establish thought leadership and gain exposure for a product or service with out blatantly pitching it to readers. Check the guidelines of the publication for which you’re writing. Chances are they will remove words and phrases that promote your product and don’t otherwise add to the article.
Develop a strong thesis. Consider the main point that you want your readers to remember from your article, and be sure to weave this into the introduction. Depending on the publication, this thesis might tie a technological concept into a consumer trend or demonstrate how a new service is poised to change the industry.
Construct an outline. It can be helpful to mimic the outlines used in high school English class when writing a byline article. Begin with a broad theme and narrow it down to the thesis in the introduction. Provide evidence for the thesis in the body of the article. In the conclusion, expand on why the thesis matters in the grand scheme of things.
Use subheadings. Subheadings can go a long way towards clarifying the main points and keeping your article interesting. Using catchy phrases that sum up important messages above every few paragraphs will make your article easy to read.
Include quality data. Statistics from reputable sources are a great way to strengthen your argument. Perhaps your client has data from a survey or white paper they commissioned. Backing up your claims with this information will add credibility to the article.
Don’t be boring. Using correct grammar and proper sentence structure is important, but it doesn’t mean that the article can’t have a few conversational sentences or colloquialisms tossed in for good measure. It’s easy to lapse into tech-speak when writing about complicated technological concepts. Avoid this trap and remember that you are writing a news article, not an instruction manual.
For a few examples of byline articles we have written for our clients, check out the links below or e-mail us.
- Improving Business Performance Through E-Learning for Chief Learning Officer (CLO)
- The Power of Pull written for CLO
When facing difficult news such as layoffs, many companies used to draft meticulously scripted press releases – if they shared the news at all. But this strategy is fast becoming a recipe for disaster as employees turn to their blogs to voice frustrations and announce corporate layoffs.
In a recent New York Times article, Claire Cain Miller describes how corporate downsizing for one prominent news company went from bad to worse when a disgruntled employee took to his blog and shared the details of cutbacks at many local papers. This did little to inspire public support for the company and angered many of the blog’s readers.
Miller goes on to share a quote from Rusty Rueff, a former human resources executive at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo. “Today, whatever you say inside a company will end up on a blog,” he says. According to Rueff, you can either be proactive, “or you can let someone else write the story for you.”
So how can you retain ownership of your company’s messages? The answer is simple: blog. An increasing number of companies have implemented blogs where they announce corporate news – be it good or bad. But corporate transparency is a new concept for many executives, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Here are a few tips we have found helpful for our clients as they begin blogging:
Be Honest. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it can be tempting – and dangerous – to blur the lines. When commenting on any blog, be sure to identify yourself clearly. A Microsoft executive posting negative comments on a Mac blog under the guise of a teenage Apple enthusiast could face big problems down the road. It’s far better to be honest from the start than mired in a scandal that could easily have been avoided.
Be Proactive. When facing difficult news, don’t wait until employees have had several days – or even hours – to announce it for you. Instead, you can prepare a blog entry ahead of time to be posted immediately after speaking with employees. Just make sure not to share the news of a layoff before an employee has received the pink slip.
Get Everyone Onboard. As with any important decision within your company, you will need to obtain buy-in from your management and legal departments. Demonstrating the importance of transparency and embracing social media by pointing to the pitfalls of ignoring these trends can go a long way towards building support. Gather proof points about why blogging is cost-effective, beneficial and necessary for your company.
Define Key Messages. From blogs to press releases, it is important to communicate a set of key messages about your company and be consistent. Review your messaging before posting a blog entry to make sure you have included all the important points.
When done right, blogging can be a great way to improve the public image of your company. For more examples of companies who have successfully implemented blogs, see the hyperlinked list below. Happy blogging!
Dell
Nokia
The Mayo Clinic
United States Coast Guard
Wal-Mart
Wells Fargo