Author: jeremyprobert

Corporate Communications – Trends for 2010

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Marketing, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Following on from the piece in PR Week (issue dated January 29, probably still on sale, this week’s cover price – oooooo – £12.34, or nearest offer – or just click here) about the latest Edelman Trust Barometer (well done the Week – a genuinely useful news piece – I have high hopes of you for the future), I came across this, an article from Entrepreneur magazine.

(Before I go on, I should also say that the author of the article, one Susan Gunelius, also features regularly in Communicate Magazine’s ‘Who’s Blogging What’ section. So do I, actually, so it’s no guarantee of quality.)

Anyhoo – yesterday, btw, was Groundhog Day and the wee critter duly came out of his quarters, saw his shadow and condemned us to six more weeks’ winter. Or maybe it’s just the States. Small creature’s vermin, in any case. The article in Entrepreneur magazine provides – for discussion, obviously – 10 marketing trends for 2010. I have to say that my initial instinct was to discard it as hippy nonsense (and some of it I still do) but in the light of what Messrs Edelman had to say, I can’t help but thinking it needs a further examination, especially in terms of how some of the 10 might affect the corporate communicator.

Thinking caps on, then, chaps – eyes down, here are the trends that we should be pondering:

  • Transparency and trust are paramount (Edelman go as far as to propose that trust and transparency rank higher than product quality – I’m summarising – and that financial return is one of the least important factors in driving corporate reputation)
  • Less interruption, more enhancement and value-add – don’t go disturbing people with your messages (unless you’re Mr T and Snickers) – give them something they can use
  • People want value – sometimes as simply as making their disposable incomes go further with discounts and free stuff – give them that and they’ll love you
  • Show, don’t tell – actions speak louder than words, so demonstrate what the benefit of your stuff is – what will the audience actually get if they give you their hard-earned
  • Peace of mind is the new black – your audiences want reassurance, because they’re hurting right now, and they want to hear it in your marketing and communications messages

OK – I’ve paraphrased it, and I’ve not included all of the 10 Marketing Trends for 2010 – because I still don’t believe in the ‘global conversation’ voodoo, and I do think that there is still an outside chance that social media as marketing, comms and sales tools may still be exposed for the valueless charades that they are. (Oooops – did I say that out loud?)

(Back to Edelman briefly – their study shows that traditional media are still more highly trusted that social media, blogs or websites – so there, social media evangelists and gurus! Eh?)

Finally, and it’s not new, but maybe we can make it work this time round – ‘integrated marketing trumps standalone tactics’. This means a new era of co-operation between sales, marketing and comms, if we are to get it right.

(Less sniggering at the back, please.)

Social Media – News Tweets And Measuring Impact

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Evaluation, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

(Just as an aside, could we dispense with the term ‘press release’, used to describe a piece of writing, carrying a message and sent to a journalist with the aim of generating media coverage? Could we not just say ‘news release’ or ‘media release’? Is it not time we broadened our horizons? Anyway.)

Today, blog snorkellers mine, I give you not one wonderful thing to look at – but two! And, as you know that I am not a great advocate of social media as business or marketing communications tools, you may be intrigued to hear that they are both social media ‘value-adds’. Of course, I will put my spin on both, but you can think for yourselves, can’t you,  and you might just go away with something you feel you can use. Never, as I have said before, never say I don’t give you anything.

First I give you muckrack.com. This appears, as far as I can see – and I can’t go very far into these things, as my eyes mist over, a sense of panic descends and I find myself forgetting how to breathe – to be a sort of happy journalistic tweety site, to which you, the hapless PR practitioner, can post (for a small sum) your press releases, in tweet form. (See what I mean about the use of ‘press release’? In an online medium? Or is it that ‘press release’ is a bit like ‘press gang’ – you read the headline and it hits you over the head and the next thing you know you’re waking up in front of your PC and you’ve written a rubbish story about some crappy feminine hygiene product. Hmmmm?)

Personally, I think Muckrack is a site too far. I think it’s the answer to a question that no-one asked. I think it’s someone, probably with the best of intentions, trying to make Twitter relevant to the communications/media industries. I think the content’s a bit poor and there isn’t really a context. I’m afraid that Muckrack is doing nothing to convince me that I ought to be any closer to ‘social media strategy’ than my current ‘not with a bargepole’ default state.

But ignore me. S’pose you pay a dollar a word to put your news tweet through Muckrack. How will you monitor its impact on the blogosphere and the reactions of consumers, competitors and stakeholders? How will you know whether you achieved an ROI or not?

Fear not – well, OK, be a little fearful, because I do not have a clue and frankly don’t think it can be done, but these guys over at VMR Comms do. Blokey here is talking about Radian6, ScoutLabs and Sysomos – and I have no idea what they are or what they do, but I’d say, if you’re serious about your social, then you should be checking it out. I also check this post because it puts forward a list of questions you may need to ask before embarking on a social media monitoring gig. And they are very good questions – so good I post them here:

  • Are you looking to compare your share of voice online versus that of your competitors and track that over time using easily comprehensible metrics that can be assigned a $ value?
  • Whose voice do you want to listen to? Key influeners? General consumer sentiment? Stakeholders? Traditional Media? Male? Female? In North America or worldwide?
  • Do you need a platform that can be used in focus group fashion to slice and dice general consumer sentiment, key influencer sentiment, and or journalist sentiment?
  • Do you need to know where the fish (your prospects and key influencers) are currently swimming (“conversing”) before you dive into or create an empty pond?
  • Would you like to track how well your PR campaigns have increased share of voice specifically among key influencers or among consumers at large?
  • What about your sales and customer services teams? Are they looking for the actionable
  • intelligence that a social media monitoring platform can provide? Will the monitoring platform you choose need to integrate well with a CRM like salesforce.com?
  • Which social media “venues” are you most interested in monitoring? Blogs? Traditional News Outlets? Forums? Linkedin? Facebook? Youtube? Blogtalkradio? Podcasts? (Check out the conversation prism below to get a better sense for what’s out there)
  • If influencing the influencers is important to you, do you need a platform that helps you identify key influencers by showing you inbound links, comment count, level of engagement?
  • Is yours a global brand where you need to monitor not only key influencer sentiment but also the so-called “Long Tail” of your marketing sales curve?
  • Is your CMO demanding specific and meaningful metrics that can demonstrate a clear ROI from your social media engagement efforts?
  • If you are monitoring global brands, will you need a platform that translates content and sentiment in multiple languages?
  • Do you have the resources, expertise and social media savvy currently to fully leverage the capabilities of whatever platform is best for you?
  • How much historical data will you need? Some platforms have absolutely enormous amounts of historical data. Is that going to be helpful to your PR and marketing teams? Or not worth paying extra for?
  • What about ease of use? Do you need a platform that multiple users in your organisation will learn quickly and easily, thus increasing their level of online engagement?

Social Media – Still, Mostly, A Mystery

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , .

Here’s a list from Communicate Magazine – a very useful list actually, of events and training courses of interest to the communications community, taking place over the coming weeks and months.

I say it’s useful, because it works well as a yardstick, with which you can measure what the medium/long-term concerns of the industry are – a lot of these events depend on the attendance of paying punters, so the organisers are clearly not going to bother with content that people are not interested in or concerned by. Creativity is always a big one, as is handling the media.

All that being said, blog snorkellers, you might also find something here that is of use to you – heaven forbid, something that you might want to stump up some of your own (or your employer’s) cash to attend. Never let it be said that I don’t give you anything.

But for the purposes of this post, I want to re-visit the email that I received from Communicate Magazine, alerting me to their list. In the body of the email – I presume to give me a flavour of the richness of content that awaited my link-clickery – they provided some 27 examples of events happening over the next three days. And of those 27 events, 17 had social media as their subject.

That’s a lot – it’s a preponderance actually, given the amount of differing issues and topics that these events might be addressing.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – there’s an entire industry grown up around the chimaerae that are business’ use of social media, and social media marketing. Some of it is well-meaning – I am sure – no, I am – but much of it is cynical profiteering. You wouldn’t provide your bank account details to a Nigerian emailster – why would you pay someone to ask the question “is effective measurement critical to effective marketing strategy”? (This is a genuine example, btw.)

This is phishing, really – caveat emptor.

(I would also like to add that not all of it is, some appears to be very well-meaning. What it does show however, in clear, sharp relief, is that – despite 2009 having been hailed as the year that business ‘got’ social media – none of the big questions (ROI, for example, or how to make social media pay) have been answered. And the tone of the conversation is now sounding ever-so-slightly desperate.)

Social Media ‘Face Comms Defiance’

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Internal Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Once more, dear B-snorkellers, into the breach of all that’s rationale, sane and – well, normal – that is PRWeek. What’s the Industry’s Bible been up to now, I hear you moan in a gibbering, tortured fashion, that implies you’ve been scalded by the Week’s toxic nonsense before.

Well, in this post, I was going to reference this story from the Bible (issue dated January 22 2010), which carried the headline ‘Blogs and webcasts face comms defiance’. The story is about in-house comms professionals ‘steadfastly resisting the temptation to use blogs or webcasts as the main channel to communicate with staff’ and cites ‘new research’ from Melcrum Publishing which seems to back up their interpretation of the story.

So I thought I’d do a bit on internal comms and digital communications (not necessarily social media, but probably touching on the subject) and how, actually, I’m a great advocate of adopting digital tools in the controlled and clearly-defined arena that is the internal comms space. Like shooting fish in a barrel – if you look on your employees as fish, the workplace as a barrel and you’re in the habit of taking a gun to work. So not an altogether apposite metaphor, perhaps.

Be that as it may, just to reassure myself – why is it that I simply cannot bring myself to trust t’Week – I though I’d track down the Melcrum Publishing research and see if there were any further insights to be gained. And I came across this. For those snorkellettes who cannot be bothered wid de clickery, it’s a blog post, from Melcrum, entitled ‘Research reveals widespread adoption of social media inside the firewall’. I think you can probably already see where this is going.

Yes – it appears to be almost wholly contradictory to the wee story in the Bible. Now, either Melcrum did two pieces of research, the findings of which are completely opposed, and the laddie or lassie writing for the Bible picked on the wrong one – or, once again, PR Week has screwed it up. You decide.

Anyway, because simply having a go at the industry’s mouthpiece is a) too easy and b) not a good enough foundation for a whole post, here’s a few thoughts about digital comms in the workplace. (All of which come from, sometimes bitter, experience.)

  • Don’t, as Melcrum and PR Week seem to have done, confuse digital comms and social media communication. The two things are very different – blogs, pod and vodcasts, webstreaming – these are digital tools – social is Twitter, Facebook et al which arguably have no place in a work environment. There is, of course, Yammer, which is a social media tool for internal communications, but is something of a resource-sharing, experience-tapping, project-co-ordinating tool. Social media is social – does what it says on the tin. Work is not social – work is something you do, sometimes to the best of your ability, to earn money.
  • Digital tools are only as effective as the number of people who can access them and actually do access them on a regular basis. Encouraging participation is another factor. No point having a spanking intranet – with feedback forms, fora and comment boards – if only half your work force can access it and only five per cent use the tools. Do your research, before you commit time, resource and cash in creating stuff that adds no value.
  • Do not treat digital in isolation. It’s a mix – face-to-face, small groups, large groups, print, advertising, exhibitions and events – all of these are also part of the internal comms toolkit.
  • If you do decide to get all social on your employees’ asses, then you’re going to need a social media policy – because, as we all know (don’t we, kids?) social media will bite you on the bum as soon as lick your face. The Coca-Cola Company (who’d have thought it?) have a great – and recent – social media policy which I’ve mentioned in a previous post. Go and have a look at it, and then rip it off mercilessly, twisting it to your own ends. Go on.

Social Media – Best Practice Social Media Policy

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Crisis Management, Crisis Management Guides, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

This was first posted in 2010. Starbucks are still global coffee shop of choice and divide opinion in much the same way as political allegiance, ‘leave or remain’ and the debate over whether Wonder Woman is really a feminist icon and, if she is, why does she go into battle wearing wedges? And yes, I know the answer, which is ‘because she can and because she wants to’. And who’s arguing with a god?

The Coca-Cola Company are still displaying the document that I found so praiseworthy and, revisiting it, I still find it so.

Two firsts in one week – Starbucks display best practice in reinventing themselves through employee and customer care (yes, I know, I had difficulty as well) and now this.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. It is a document entitled ‘Online Social Media Principles’ from The Coca-Cola Company, and it is – dear blog snorkellers mine – as near to a best practice social media policy as you can get.

OK, it’s not quite draconian enough for me – I’d like to see a list of cruel and unusual punishments for those found to be in breach of the policy, but – hey – you can’t have everything.

What I particularly like about it, however, is that it’s not all evangelical. It doesn’t start from the position that social media is the biggest thing since the Bible, and that it is going to transform the world as we know it and everything in it. It is sensible, and considered, and everything I would not necessarily have expected, rightly or wrongly,  from Messrs Coca and Cola.

It also – beautifully – can be easily adapted and plagiarised. These guidelines could be applied to any business or organisation – go ahead, fill your boots. It’s also, as I’ve recommended on this blog before, something of an ’employee benefit’ – in that it advises employees on how to use social media in their personal lives as well as on company time. It demonstrates a duty of care – without ramming it down their throats.

Finally – another big thing of mine – it would sit very nicely in a crisis management plan, and provides a good basis on which to build the social media section of that plan.

It is genuinely brilliant. I’m lovin’ it.

(Oh – hold on……..)

Social Media – Taking The (3) Ps

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , .

This is what happens if you follow links. You end up confronted with stuff that you really didn’t want to see – nasty, horrible, hessian, hippy mojambo that elevates nonsense to an art form. Here is a link to it. Go ‘click’ if you dare.

It’s an ‘article’ (I’m being generous here) entitled “How to build conversations in social media using the 3 P’s (sic)’. It uses an ice-cream parlour as a metaphor (and no, dear blog snorkellers, it is not a good one). The three Ps are (ready?):

  • Passion
  • Planning
  • Promotion

(At this point, I’d like to draw a parallel withe four Ps of marketing – product, promotion, price, placement – nice solid Ps that end in an S. S for sales, chaps, S for sales. Unlike these wishy-washy, unsatisfactory and ultimately, given the media, unimplementable, wee Ps of conversation.)

Let’s ignore Passion for a moment. No-one knows what it means anyway. It’s like ‘quality’. Define ‘quality’. Anyone?

Planning – we’re told it’s important, apparently, to keep the conversation relevant to your business goals. An uncontrolled discussion is of no use. Hello? Social media = uncontrolled, I’d have thought. If I had a unit of Earth currency for every time that I’ve been laughed at by slightly disturbing social media evangelists for wanting to control the message, then I’d be driving a decent sports car by now. And if you can’t control the message – as the socialists tell me – then how can you control the conversation?

Promotion – no-one will find your conversation unless you promote it. Obviously, you’re using your conversation to promote your business. So you’re involved in promoting the promotion of your business. Why not cut out the middleman and just promote your business directly? Do traditional marketing channels require that you promote them? Does anyone advertise their advertising? No, of course not.

We’re shoehorning here people. Shoehorning. This is another example of taking the Next Big Thing and desperately trying to find a way of making it work in a commercial sense.

My current thinking is that social media does have a commercial value – the 7m plus fans of Starbucks must drink at least some coffee, and there must be incremental coffee sales to be had off of Facebook. The point is that no matter what you do, you cannot harness it, and it will bite you as soon as lick you. There are no rules, no acronyms, no strategies – it’s luck, serendipity, happenstance and chancing to create something interesting enough for people to want to view or interact with it.

It seems a hell of a gamble to put some or all (like PepsiCo – $20m diverted from the Superbowl) of your marketing budget into social media on the off-chance.

Corporate Communications – The Power Of The People

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Last Wednesday, Starbucks, the coffee company, released its first quarter results. They showed a four-fold increase over the same quarter last year against, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, a fairly appalling economic background. You can read the commentary in the New York Times for yourself.

As someone who doesn’t follow the company, I find this renaissance absolutely extraordinary. The two most recent things I recall about Starbucks is the company (falsely) being accused of not supporting American troops in the Gulf, and the furore over wasted water from ‘rinsing’ taps being left permanently ‘on’ in stores.

Obviously, and I’ve done a little light research, there has been stuff going on behind the scenes – and the return of Howard Schultz to the top job has obviously paid dividends – but I find the reasoning laid out in this post (on the Corporate Eye blog) particularly resonant.

In brief, top-line summary, it argues that the Starbucks turnaround has been driven by paying attention to employees. It cites an HR Guru, Kevin Wheeler and his Five Steps to Making Your Company Memorable:

  • Gain perspective and know yourself
  • Define the promise
  • Develop a strategy
  • Create a “buzz” to communicate your brand
  • Measure your progress

More than this – and this where I find myself violently agreeing – it’s about applying these same principles to your customer relations. What works for getting and keeping staff, works for getting and keeping punters.

And as, of course, this wouldn’t be my blog without a quick pop at social media – Starbucks appear to have achieved this dramatic success without too much Facebookishness of Twittery (they have 5.6m fans and 765k followers respectively). Have a look at their Facebook page, and gauge for yourself the quality of the conversation – visit their Twitter feed and (sorry Brad) well, it’s not exactly a marketer’s wet dream.

No – my feeling is that Starbucks has achieved this through good ol’ traditional communication, traditional face-to-face and lashings of loyalty-building.

I never though I’d see the day when Big Coffee would become a case history. An example of best practice ‘how to do it’ des nos jours.

Hats off, blog snorkellers.

Public Relations – All Talk, No Substance?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , .

Thanks to PRWeek for this, which talks about a new piece of research from YouGovStone which (apparently) shows that almost 25% of senior UK professionals (sample size 701 – senior professionals from backgrounds including politics, business, academia and health) believe that PR agencies are ‘all talk and no substance’. Further, only five per cent of those questioned regarded PR and communications agencies as vital.

A sad indictment of the industry,  I am sure you’d agree, even if it is rather ‘one size fits all’. Who are these senior professionals? When they were asked to pronounce on the PR/communications industry, were they asked whether they had any specific agency in mind and, if so, in which sector did that agency practise and what were its areas of expertise? Did their opinions stretch to in-house communicators,  as well as agencies – or just agencies? I’m sure all of this was covered – only, during my brief trawl of the internet, I’ve not been able to find any other reference to this new research.

Anyway, I bet the lovely folk at Finsbury, Brunswick and Edelman are mightily relieved (to the tune of their share of the $240m advisors’ fees) that Kraft and Cadbury are amongst the five percent.

As for the rest of us – I guess we’ve got some work to do.

Social Media – The Next Big Thing For 2010?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Meanwhile, over at the super, soaraway Sunday Business Post (of Ireland), they’ve managed to track down Piaras Kelly (PR consultant of that parish) and teased out some thoughts on what 2010 holds, social-media-wise.

Why, you may well ask, blog snorkellers mine, would I bother with this rag of an Emerald hue, and the slightly-less-than-meaningful musings of one who is, after all, selling himself in the cause of promoting his employer. (Hello there, Edelman – see, Piaras, it works!) (How does one pronounce ‘Piaras’? I’m presuming it’s like other well-known Irish names like Aoife and Siobhan and Saoirse, all of which sound a bit like ‘Bob’.)

Well, two reasons.

One, it’s because Piaras had an attack of the honesties in his commentary, and says ‘people will start to realise that there’s a bit of the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome associated with social media’. Hallelujah, preacher.

Two, it’s because Piaras’ tips for trends in online PR (communications) in 2010 are Realtime, Lifestreaming, Location-Based Services, Augmented Reality and Segmentation. All of which may have some element of social media but, tellingly, either aren’t social media tools themselves or specifically reliant on social media to function.

I actually believe that what Piaras is trying to say – and, hey, his opinion is as valid as anyone’s – is calm down, social media hysteria has had its day.

In separate news, this post alerted me to research conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations (gasp), which shows that 89% of journalists polled turned to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites (eg Facebook and LinkedIn), and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter.

The survey then goes on to say that 84% said social media sources were “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media, and 49% said social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards.”  So they then go back to the old staple of calling the company to get the facts.

Social media may well foment a global conversation, where everyone has a voice and everything’s being discussed. But if it’s being discussed with the same depth of knowledge and regard for accuracy that characterised my discussions in the pub late last Saturday evening (yes, very nice, thanks for asking) then it’s of no use to man nor beast.

Public Relations – Tell Me. Do You ‘Get It’?

Posted on by in Communications Strategy.

It started with social media – which is where I learnt to hate it.  I’m sensitive to words – as some people are sensitive to light, or noise – and some words and phrases drive me nuts.

The phrase ‘get it’, or ‘getting it’ rose to prominence in 2009 with the rise of the social media bunny. You, apparently, either ‘got it’ or you ‘didn’t get it’. It was the worst insult they could throw at you. ‘He doesn’t get it’.

Ooooh it irritates me.

Last night on the TV Gordon Brown said, in answer to a question ‘if a Chief constable doesn’t get it, well I’m getting it and….’

‘Getting it’ has gone mainstream.

Get it?