This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Company Executives
You can’t fairly assess work that you don’t understand. We also offer our advice to company executives who need to understand the difference between PR and good PR, and how to be an effective partner in the process.
Understand PR Capabilities and Limitations
First, understand what PR is and what it isn’t. Businesses often expect PR to perform miracles just because they confuse it with advertising, online marketing, media buying, search marketing, and so forth. PR can’t guarantee legitimate coverage in industry publications, no matter how tight the relationship. If PR promises it, they’re lying. We leverage relationships daily to encourage consideration of “stories” packaged in a way that’s most relevant to them. If we took advantage of our contacts to force coverage whenever we needed to deliver on a promise, it would mark the beginning of the end of our relationships.
Although we won’t compare PR to each branch of marketing, we agree that PR is not advertising. Reporters and bloggers don’t stop what they’re doing to write about your company just because you send them a news release. They’re bombarded by PR people from all over the world. Stories are cultivated. If you respect your contacts, do your homework and help highlight the value of a story—coverage is imminent. If you want guaranteed exposure, buy an ad.
Don’t Undervalue PR
When done correctly, PR is extremely valuable to company branding, which results in immeasurable benefits in the long haul. Customers have choices, and if you’re not consistently vying for their attention, it’s pretty easy to fall off their radar screen when they evaluate options. Too many companies try to nickel-and-dime PR, to the point of absurdity. Don’t get us wrong: Expensive PR doesn’t equal success. But shortchanging PR is usually a first step in the wrong direction.
Maintain PR Participation
PR is not a switch. It doesn’t go on and off whenever you have the time or budget to throw at it. The market moves too fast, and if you’re not actively participating in it, you’ll quickly find that company sales and site traffic will begin a downward spiral that might not recover.
Plant the Seeds
In most cases, coverage doesn’t just happen. PR is similar to farming: The more seeds you plant, the more crops (in the form of coverage over time) you will grow (as long as you spend time watering, caring for, and feeding those seeds and new shoots). Although some things force information out quickly (for example, hard news), other stories take time. And when those “slower” stories appear, they help raise brand visibility, drive some people to buy, and also spark others to consider writing about them (which, in turn, influences the cycle to repeat). Don’t assume that all this coverage happens just because you are a popular company or have a killer product. Even the best companies and solutions need great PR to rise above the noise.
Use the Best Spokesperson
Just because you created the product doesn’t mean you’re the best person to sell it. We’ve worked with some of the most passionate executives who just don’t click with the people they’re trying to engage—no matter how hard they try. Suck it up and get a spokesperson who will connect with the people and who will help grow your business.
Recognize Campaign-Specific Factors
Understand that PR is only an umbrella for the specific communications initiatives that will help you reach complementary, simultaneous goals. For example, corporate branding and product marketing require different campaigns.
Use an Array of PR Tactics to Reach Your Full Audience
No matter what industry you’re in, realize that the most popular blogs, newspapers, and magazines are only one part of the process. Your market is divided by adoption and buying behavior and documented through many means: a bell curve rich with chasms, pyramids that further divide and classify them, quadrants that demonstrate competitive advantages, ladders that represent how people use the technology to participate in online media, a “cluetrain” that shows how people carry it through the Long Tail as the new conductors, and, hopefully, the guerilla tactics that propel the hockey stick and eventually force you to evaluate what to do from “inside the tornado” to continue the success. For those who just read that sentence and are shaking your heads wondering if you just missed an inside joke, let us explain. We referenced the most often cited and the most popular business and marketing books, graphs, and tactics that help companies carve up their markets and define how to reach them at every step of the product life cycle. Yes, this was meant to be funny...but it does show that one program no longer serves the masses when you deconstruct it by the markets and the people who comprise them.
This means that you have to embrace both New Media and traditional media in PR. In the tech space, for example, TechCrunch, Mashable, Venture Beat, ReadWriteWeb, and other channels will yield measurable traffic so great that most of the time it knocks out company Web servers. Every executive wants these channels. CEOs cry if they can’t get coverage on them. But by no means do they carry your value proposition to the entire collective of people who might embrace your product and help sustain your business for the whole game.
These channels represent early adopters and pragmatists. However, other worlds of global micro communities rich with horizontal and vertical publications and blogs can carry your story to the more conservative groups of people who collectively converge as the primary base of recurring revenue. In this case, it’s less about traffic and hits as metrics for success and more about quality, registrations, purchases, referrals, and so on that define business growth.
Involve Yourself
Engage in Social Media. We live in a “social” economy, and the only way to succeed in it is to participate:
- Listen to what your customers and the customers of your competitors are saying.
- Blog about industry-relevant topics, not just company accomplishments. Social Media is not just a new tool in the marketing belt. It is a new opportunity to engage customers and cultivate relationships. Be a resource for your community. Comment on other blogs, too. Be part of the conversation.
- Embrace online video and watch how creative, genuine, and cool content becomes incredibly viral. Words can carry the message just so far, but video is an opportunity to showcase the product while entertaining viewers.
- If possible, host a podcast, livestream, or Webcast to share new updates, customer successes, ideas for new product uses, and so forth. Embrace and cultivate the community.
- Bookmark and share relevant links using the popular social tools available.
- Cultivate user-generated content.
- Write Social Media releases in addition to traditional releases.
- If relevant, build transparent profiles in the social networks where your customers can find and support you and where you can find and support them. Go where your customers are.
- Share images, demos, and behind-the-scenes footage using services such as Flickr, Zooomr, and YouTube.
- Hire a community manager. Having someone actively represent the company in all things social will complement New PR by providing proactive information and support to people looking for guidance in the communities they frequent. Don’t market to them—have conversations.
Although this is just an ultrasimplified list of how to jump into the world of Social Media, your initial participation will increase your curiosity, knowledge, and online savvy. You can expect your community profile to increase exponentially with your participation. But first you have to get your feet wet.
Support Your PR Program
Support your PR program and feed it as you do any other branch of the company. Respect it when it works and let your team share in the success. Don’t focus on the shortcomings. Extend congratulations as goals are achieved.
Keep Your Allstars
If you find a PR person who truly lives and breathes the company and the product, never let that person go. These Allstars are a rare breed and deserve support and promotion.
Communicate Regularly
Meet with your PR team regularly to communicate realistic goals and measure progress. Paint a real-world picture of what success looks like each month and listen to the reports to see whether those goals are indeed attainable. You get out of PR what you put into it.
Establish Metrics
Agree upon metrics in advance. Executives often lose sight of what PR is designed to do. The right coverage is invaluable, even when it doesn’t translate directly into visible hits, traffic spikes, or sales. Super Bowl ads, for example, rarely pay for themselves in the short run. Realize that a proactive, intelligent, and consistent PR program will contribute to the bottom line. It shouldn’t be solely responsible for company success or failure. Metrics can be in the form of specific targets every month, registrations, lead generation, links, and, now, conversations.
In the past, a PR person looked at a campaign with a well-known and highly accepted approach: You evaluate the target demographics, develop strategic messages, conduct an audit or focus group, revise messages, determine the broadcast mechanisms to push your content, go live, monitor the response, evaluate the ROI, and repeat the process with enhanced information.
However, communicators who have embraced Social Media and the idea that sociology is a prominent focus, not just the technology that facilitates the process, take a much different approach.
Brian shed some light on this topic when he blogged about an excellent example of a company whose communication team knew the value of dialogue and engagement. Skullcandy (www.skullcandy.com) is a popular Generation Y brand that makes electronic products, including MP3 players and headphones, that can run circles around Sony, Bose, and Phillips. Everything Skullcandy does is reflective of those they want to engage and embrace—from embeddable widgets with valuable content, downloadable music, custom artwork, and peer-to-peer street teams to blogs, communities, events, and social networks, all combined with traditional marketing. Skullcandy makes the customer the center of everything. And it could do even more to reach customers with the right social tools, proactive participation, elevated outbound strategies, and voices.
Here’s an example of a tweet scan from Twitter engaging a community of people in the Skullcandy brand:
The Skullcandy example shows how PR is changing—more than 180 Skullcandy blogs exist, proving that the brand’s customers are its surrogate sales force.
We think the change in PR is for the better. It will take some intense readjustments in thinking, resources, and participation by all. Most important, it requires you to become more than just a communicator. You need to evolve into something more significant than just a publicist. You can be more effective and valuable as a genuine enthusiast for who and what you represent. We want you to become a part of the New PR movement that carries forward all the good of the past, but also moves ahead with a realistic sense of how today’s brands need to communicate in the market. Welcome to the world of PR 2.0 and the socialization of media—a new standard to advance the PR industry and the communication professionals who abide by today’s rules of conversation.