Traditional and social media relations are connected and shouldn't be viewed as "either/or," Schwartz Communications President Bryan Scanlon says in a new video interview with PRWeek.
He describes how the agency, which serves established and entrepreneurial businesses in industries that include healthcare, technology, cleantech and professional services, performed over the past year and notes that our diversification across industries, lack of reliance of a handful of big clients for revenue, and ability to span social and traditional media at a time when many agencies push one over the other were sources of strength in 2009.
Bryan also answers questions about agency and client PR workloads in 2010 and notes that the recession has forced both ends of the PR team to focus on the highest value activities--those that help bring sales leads, drive website visits and close sales.
A report today from Conductor, a company that provides SEO technology and services, concludes that "the Fortune 500 fail natural search." Specifically, the report looks at big companies' visibility in natural search results for terms that those companies have elected to purchase for ad campaigns.
The idea is that if an advertiser is paying a lot (and they probably are--the report says that the Fortune 500 pay $3.4 million a day on nearly 100,000 keywords), the word may be important enough to also be supported with a natural search campaign.
Sears, a company that I personally like, received a poor grade. That caught my eye and I asked myself what a business such as Sears, which sells thousands of unrelated things, could do to make its products appear on the first page of natural search results.
I suppose the real answer is that optimizing on all of the most competitive (i.e., expensive) search terms is entirely impractical and so they have to pick their battles carefully by focusing on the company's biggest money-makers, which may not be the same thing as the most competitive keywords.
What does any of this mean for companies that are taking on the industry behemoths?
The most obvious conclusion is that market challengers should be optimistic that they can outmaneuver or at least pull alongside big competitors when it comes to organic search. The simple fact that their product lines tend to be more focused should make it easier for them to build momentum in a way that a company with more offerings may find difficult.
Since great placement in organic search rankings may realistically be within medium and smaller companies' reach, it would stand to reason that they'd want to be attentive to good SEO practices. (Search Marketing Sage; Search Engine Guide, which focuses on search marketing for small businesses; and Search Engine Watch's "search marketing topics" section are good resources for thoughtful SEO advice.)
Most of the companies that Schwartz works with--they tend to be innovators in markets like technology, healthcare, cleantech, materials and professional services--fully appreciate that website design matters. Many have overhauled their websites with things like better navigation, URLs and page titles in mind.
That's good, but they shouldn't lose sight of Google's advice (Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide; Version 1.1; November 13, 2008) that "[c]reating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here," (i.e., more than website mechanics).
So, good website content matters, but so also do things like inbound links from reputable websites to the innovator's website. Securing these links, not via cheesy requests, but through on-message media and blog coverage that points back to the company's website, is part of PR's job these days. As is being aware of the company's keywords and using them intelligently in content like news releases, which can have nice SEO value when syndicated.
Freshness of content and consistency over time also impact SEO. Smaller companies sometimes think they can turn PR on and off. This works in a limited set of cases, but is normally ineffective for an array of reasons.
Reflecting on the conclusions of today's report and considering what we know about the importance of good content in supporting SEO, as a PR person, my conclusion is that market innovators and challengers--those who haven't yet made the Fortune 500--are well served by communications strategies that are created with SEO/lead generation in mind and that are pursued steadily over time rather than in fits and starts.
Macworld is in full swing and going strong this week in San Francisco (Note: Schwartz does PR for the event, but I am not on the team). It was interesting to see the transformation of Macworld over the years. iPhone apps and mobile technology seemed to be the hottest apps at the show and drew some of the greatest buzz.
In speaking with exhibitors and attendees they report attendance appears to be up this year and the quality was high. About all you can ask for in a trade show.
To me, what really stood out were the range of iPhone apps and the ways in which to improve them. One company I spoke with claimed to have put $500 of IP into a $0.99 iPhone app. This shows that more sophisticated tools are constantly coming to the iPhone. The Hypermac folks were drawing some of the biggest crowds at the show with their batteries that help significantly prolong the life of iPhones, iPods and Macbooks. People were primarily talking about the iPhone. I heard very little about the iPad, but that may well have been the company I kept.
Macworld continues to have a much different vibe than CES. For one thing, you can actually see all the exhibitors. For another, the Macworld exhibitors were quite willing to get into discussions and debates with the Mac faithful. I know I took part in a few debates on topics ranging from PR measurement to open source. It was a vibrant and energized crowd.
The session that intrigued me the most featured Scott Kurtz, the author of one of my favorite Web comics (PVPOnline). He had two of the most telling comments of the show, both of which I paraphrase just a bit below.
1) Keep an open mind for retail channels. By giving away his Webcomics for free, he creates merchandise slaves (my words). It's not always about ad revenue, once you have the eyeballs and engagement, revenue opportunities open up. Just keep looking for them.
2) If newspapers die we are all in trouble - Basically, there will always be a need for hyperlocal coverage and the newspapers for non-urban areas still provide excellent value. He also decried the type of stories the reporters cover today, but that is a different post.
Overall, it was an enjoyable show, with some real diamonds of undiscovered technology. What did you think of the show?
On Wednesday I had the pleasure of participating on a webcast panel with two other social media experts, Paul Gillin, the journalist, former IDG Editor and social media maven, and Amy Black, senior marketing communications manger at Kadient.
The webcast idea came from a conversation I had with fellow Schwartz employees in September 2009, when I lamented that numerous discussions with my clients about the role of social media in their PR programs had left me dismayed. Not because the clients didn't want social media in their programs; indeed, they understood our counsel---social media must be a part of any marketing and PR campaign when the people clients are trying to reach are online. It certainly is a part of the PR strategies that we create here at Schwartz.
The problem is the hype around social media had created unrealistic expectations. Many expect it's kind of like flipping on the light switch. Create some YouTube videos, and witness the viral boom. Start a blog, and hopefully your web servers can handle the resulting increase in traffic.
I thought discussing a few common social media myths would be a refreshing way to investigate the proper role of social media within PR programs. Wednesday's webinar is available on the PR Week website; Schwartz teamed up with PR Week to help promote the discussion.
The webinar was a panel, and any panel is only as good as its participants. Paul Gillin and Amy Black were fantastic. Hopefully you will have a chance to watch the webinar; also, Schwartz released a white paper that discusses the myths exposed during the panel discussion. You can download the white paper right from the Schwartz website.
At the same time, what's great about participating in a social media webinar is witnessing the reaction to the webinar---on social media. Searching for the hashtag #prwwebcast shows the discussion that ensued mainly while the webinar was in progress. Some interesting takeaways from the Twitter "gallery":
-- Content may be king, but interaction defines social media. @datingdad tweets that "without conversation, [content creation] is just broadcasting." It's a very important point. We talked on the webinar about the need to create content, given the reducing numbers of professional journalists. However, creating the content is one thing, getting it to the audiences that matter to a given company is equally as important.
-- Social media is a marathon. @sarahweddle notes how there are "no overnight successes." Just like many other marketing functions, repetition and ongoing programs are the key to long-term success from a social media program. Amy Black also described on the webinar how a social media campaign can create content that fuels many other programs. A YouTube video she created includes a song that is now the hold music for Amy's corporate phone system.
-- Mapping a company's level of social media involvement to their corporate culture. Paul Gillin noted how many companies have numerous internal resources capable of creating content for social media. @sarahweddle says that "companies have to decide how social they want to be." At Schwartz, we begin our engagements by mapping the level of social media involvement to a company's culture and the industry they are in. It's quite effective. @sarahweddle continues in her tweet "...but there should always be some level of involvement."
Special thanks to Paul and Amy for agreeing to participate in the webinar.
Most technology innovators are eager for positive, on-message media coverage to build their brands, drive sales leads or support other business goals. But unless you're already a tech industry behemoth, getting consistent, repeated media coverage across a variety of publications and channels takes some creativity, a fair amount of knowledge of what makes a good story and a ton of persistence.
When a technology company has before it an opportunity to work with a journalist, blogger or other influential individual, they're going to want to make that interaction as perfect as possible. Right?
You'd think so, but technology companies torpedo their chances of securing media coverage by doing, or by failing to do, some pretty elemental things. These mistakes have nothing to do with faulty communications strategy or going to the wrong journalist with the wrong story. They're more basic and they're pervasive in some companies' PR programs. Maybe the belief that the problems are small makes some people underappreciate their impact, but they kill coverage all the time.
The good news, then, is that they're fully within the tech company's control and doing this stuff right can make a huge difference in PR results. If the PR team detects these problems as they're occurring, they're remiss if they don't point them out, but ultimately only the tech company can fully correct these media relations errors.
1. Fail to provide a spokesperson. Your PR person has possibly just walked through walls to get a journalist to agree to talk with your company's expert. That reporter wants to hear from one of your smart people and if your industry is driven by breaking news, he needs to hear from that person minutes from now. In some cases, we may have the luxury of a couple of hours or days to provide an expert source. In either case, any small to mid-sized tech firm should be able to get an informed spokesperson on the phone quickly.
2. Neglect to prepare for the conversation. Your PR team will give you information about the blogger or journalist before your interview and tell you what she's been covering lately. You want to look at this information before, not during, the conversation. And there's no substitute for spending a little time reading the reporter's recent articles yourself. You'll feel more confident during the interview and be in a good position to give the journalist information that she'll find useful.
3. Miss scheduled briefings. Everyone's busy. Everyone also has a mobile device that allows them to contact their PR team before missing a briefing. Journalists are as stretched as anyone and we have to respect their time. Along those lines, we need to plan ahead to conduct the interview from an area with a decent cell connection and low background noise. Anything else will guarantee that the reporter will get off the phone with us at the earliest possible moment.
4. Respond on your own timetable. Media relations success is largely about being in the right place at the right time. A big part of that is understanding that reporters work on deadlines that are anything but leisurely; we have to conform to deadlines or forfeit coverage. It's hard for everyone involved, but if options are "I'm in the story" and "my competitor is in the story," priorities become a little clearer.
5. Decline to provide photos or graphics. Technology media are increasingly interested in telling stories that have a visual component. Your PR team should work with you to anticipate these needs, but when requests come for something we don't have on hand, know that providing it can mean the difference between coverage and exclusion from the story. Particularly when all that's required is a photo of the new executive, there's no reason for not being able to quickly provide one. Grab your camera and get it done.
6. Refuse to discuss pricing. Everyone who works in the B2B technology industry understands that there's no set price for anything and that stuff tends to be pretty expensive. And you didn't invent volume discounts--journalists understand the concept. So we need to have an answer to the elemental question, "how much does this cost?" Some journalists can't or won't cover our story without being able to say "pricing starts at ...."
7. Talk about confidential material and then ask the reporter not to use it. The #1 rule of media relations is "don't say anything you don't want to see in print." It's unfair to journalists to give them information that you later ask them not to use. They generally don't want to see you get into trouble, but you, in turn, should understand that it's a problem for them to not use material that they consider interesting. Don't put them or yourself into this painful position--if your PR team has asked you not to talk about how that big customer is using your product and about to toss the big vendor out on his ear, don't do it.
8. Decline to discuss competitors. Maybe we truly don't have any, but most tech companies do. We don't need to offer up information about competitors, but if asked, we do need a coherent answer. Your PR team will work with you to think through how to answer this question, but flat-out refusing to address it makes it hard for the reporter to cover you because he needs to be able to place your company, particularly if it's small, into some larger context. Really, we should view questions about competitors as opportunities to talk about who we're challenging.
9. Ask to review the article prior to publication. Some journalists will allow you to take a peek at quotes, but most will not. And protests about having been misquoted in the past aren't that convincing, so the key here is to work with your PR team before the interview to think critically about the messages you want to convey and then take care not to go off on a tangent. Normally if we prepare for conversations and stay focused, we will come out of interviews feeling comfortable, not worried about what we said and how it might have been interpreted.
10. Speak in PowerPoint. Reporters and bloggers don't want a canned presentation--they want information that's tailored for them. Your PR people should tell you that using a PPT for media briefings is generally discouraged. Nothing says "I've had this conversation with all your competitors" like reliance on canned information.
11. Be boring, ramble, speak in monotone or otherwise fail to sell. Your PR team will help you understand what the journalist wants to learn about, how much time she has and what messages you need to deliver. It's then on the spokesperson to seal the deal by offering informed and timely conversation. Spokespeople from most companies should adopt the mindset, because it's nearly always true, that they need the journalist more than the journalist needs them and that the interview is not going to be an intellectual give and take. The spokesperson's job is to inform or educate the journalist and to convince her that this subject is worth her time. Make it interesting or expect to hear from your PR team that the reporter will "keep the information on file."
12. Assume the relationship is personal. Journalists value connections to people at tech companies if and only if those connections yield useful information. Perhaps they included us in an article or two, and that's great, but the challenge is to keep coming back with fresh info. If we cease to provide that, we should expect to be left off the short list of companies to include in stories going forward.
Your PR team, whether they're inside your company or with an agency, should be working to keep you on the straight and narrow in all these areas. You can help your technology company eke out every last bit of media coverage if you understand that these little mistakes can have a significant impact on your coverage.
Technology companies that don't blog but know they should often ask where, exactly, they should blog. Should it be a part of the corporate website or kept separate on a platform like TypePad or Blogger?
Here are the basic factors that I take into account when I get this query:
- Most blogs, and hopefully all of those run by companies, have clear themes. If the general topics that the blog explores are in line with the messages that the business is trying to disseminate, it makes a lot of sense to have the blog on the company website and not hosted somewhere else. Readers will be able to easily jump from your blog to other resources that live on your website and vice versa.
- Plus, if you know you've got great stuff to say and think others might even want to link to your blog, having those inbound links pointing to your website and not to a site like TypePad should, over time, help elevate your site in the eyes of search engines. That's not likely to be the case immediately, but if you go with a blogging platform now--maybe you think it'll be more convenient--and figure you'll move your posts over to your company's website later, don't expect hard-earned links to follow you.
On the other hand, there are perfectly good reasons for separating the company website and blog:
- If your blog will focus on a brand that you're marketing to a different audience than the group of people who typically visit your website, you may do well to have the blog separate from the website and just link to one from the other. In this case, you may benefit (from branding and SEO standpoints) from being able to choose a different domain name and from being able to promote two distinct information resources. This arrangement makes sense if a company is trying to raise awareness of a medical condition, for example, but not promote its own products. It may also be the best course if an open source project has a large and active community apart from the project's corporate sponsor.
- Perhaps people from outside of your company regularly contribute to your blog and need to make clear that they're not too closely affiliated with the business. A situation such as this, where the blog may be viewed as a community resource--albeit one funded and largely driven by one vendor--may also be a good candidate for being hosted separately from the corporate site.
- If the blog isn't a company resource per se, but is really the CEO's or CTO's latest thoughts on a range of topics, it's likely best to host the blog elsewhere and just link to it from the company website.
In sum, I think the blog is best housed in the corporate website for the convenience of readers and to support SEO and branding unless the company intends the blog for a slice of its normal audience, has a specific need to separate brands or wants to underscore that an exec's musings are purely his or her own.
When the Mass. Health Data Consortium started planning for its big event, HealthIT at a Crossroads, Senator Kennedy was still alive and the healthcare bill looked like a slam dunk.
Things have changed dramatically since last summer. This year will be a crossroads for health information technology. What will the progression look like from the historic enactment of ARRA in 2009 to the availability of billions of dollars for providers to meaningfully use HIT systems in 2011? The Consortium will aim to address these and other questions, reflect on a transformative year, and try to predict the future. Schwartz will be listening from the front row on Friday, February 5.
The forum will feature experts offering their predictions for in 2010, and technology companies unveil their plans to help providers achieve meaningful use. The day will begin with Breakfast Briefings from Covisia and InterSystems, and lunch will feature the presentation of the annual Investing in Information Awards.
The keynote, by Dr. John Halamka, co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee for the National Coordinator for HIT, and CIO of CareGroup and Harvard Medical School, will speak on “Achieving Meaningful Standards for Exchange of Health Information.” This will address which of the meaningful use requirements are expected to be the most challenging and which ones will be the most achievable.
This should be a very packed and informative day. Hope to see you there.
If your company is starting to use social media, the next question you might ask is “Who should own social media in the organization?” This isn’t straightforward and there are different answers depending on the company and what you’re selling. You might consider each area of your organization to determine how social media can open lines of communication, solve problems, improve efficiencies, reduce costs and/or help to generate more revenue.
This assumes that someone must own your social media program, and I agree with that. I don't think an organized, coordinated and valuable social media program can happen organically. There are many people who generate content and foster it along, but like any other large communications effort in an organization, it needs a head of state — someone to set the tone, make the plans and take the plans to the masses.
According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, PR leads digital communications at 51% of organizations, while Marketing leads 40.5% of the time. The report was produced by iPressroom, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA to help marketing professionals better understand and appreciate how organizations are integrating online communications into their business practices. Over the course of a six-week period during spring 2009, they surveyed 278 public relations, marketing and human resources professionals to identify trends regarding their approaches to social media.
One finding, as noted above, is that PR leads social media in most organizations. This makes sense since most social media activities revolve around communicating with external audiences and producing content. If your social media programs call for audience targeting, message strategy and a regular flow of content and interaction with external audiences, PR is best equipped to deal with these programs.
I also think different departments can take ownership of a program or process, particularly if the goal involves direct customer interaction and user forums. For example, the customer support department might use Twitter to respond to common support issues. Facebook is a useful took for the product management department to gather feedback on a beta product or to push out announcements.
The legal department should be involved at some level for social media outreach. Some may argue that legal isn’t required but I believe that it is due to the transparent nature of social media, and how it can expose a company. The company should decide on the best ways to use social media from a business perspective, while staying in the confines of legal and HR best practices. For example, are there limitations on what the company and its employees can/cannot say? What if an employee starts sounding off about a client, and the client sues? What if an employee discloses proprietary information? Can we post trademarked or copyrighted material? The company needs to know what to do in those cases, create policies and understand how to enforce the policies.
According to the study, the most common areas in which PR leads digital communications are blogging, microblogging and social networking. Each organization knows best which people and departments are most likely to find success leading social media programs, so I think the structure will vary depending on what types of programs you’re going to conduct. On the other hand, if your company has a Twitter handle, you can assign a person or group of people to tweet from that handle. But at the same time, you can also encourage employees to Tweet on their own on behalf of the company and personalize the medium that much more.
Another interesting finding was that small to medium-sized enterprises are significantly ahead of larger organizations when it comes to adopting Twitter (64% versus 47%) and social networking (74% adoption versus 38%), but not blogging, which is now squarely in the large organization’s repertoire.
Social media is growing in importance as way to communicate to your diverse audiences. How to employ social media varies greatly by company. There is no formula and sometimes it takes some trial and error. However, in order to get into the game, it can’t be an aside or done in your spare time. Rather, you must consider it a core discipline, such as product development and marketing, and be managed by dedicated resources.
Our very own Liz Woodhouse, VP of human resources, will join a panel of industry experts from the Boston area on Tuesday, February 9 for the Publicity Club of New England’s second annual career seeker & networking breakfast. Kirk Hazlett, a professor of communications at Curry College, will moderate the discussion.
This is a terrific forum to hear how social media is impacting the “rat race.” Across the board, life as we know it has certainly changed with the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the myriad of other social media tools. Liz will share her expertise on how to navigate and network via the social media landscape. Professional protocol, in light of these changes, will be a hot button topic at the program.
