Public Relations

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 ‘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.

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.

Social Media – Reinventing Public Relations?

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

Today’s episode of the popular social media-themed soap opera “You’re ‘Avin a Digital Turkish, Ain’tcha?” revolves around a glorious piece of nonsense from someone who’s made the cut here before – a fond welcome, blog snorkellers, to Brian Solis, Principal at FutureWorks PR, San Francisco Bay Area. (As I may have said before, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys pulling their own ribs out and carving small netsuke figurines from them, then you can enjoy more of Brian here.)

It’s the blurb from his book ‘Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR’ and I reproduce it here in full, so that you too can enjoy the sensation of your brain refusing to believe its eyes and doing its best to hide under its duvet until the bad mojambo goes away.

“Marketing and communications, as is, are dying breeds. They’ve moved away from the public and instead concentrated on broadcasting “top-down,” disconnected messages to as many people as possible.

What we’ve learned and what we know are quickly fading into irrelevance and obscurity.

We now need to expand our scope of participation and outreach by also identifying, understanding, and engaging the everyday people who have plugged-in to a powerful and democratized online platform for creating and distributing information, insight, and opinions – effectively gaining authority in the process.

The very people we had always wished to reach through traditional channels are now the very people we need to convince and inspire directly in order to remain part of industry-defining and market making conversations. This is a new era of influence and in order to participate, we have to rewire our DNA to stop marketing at audiences in order to genuinely and intelligently humanize our story to connect with real people and the online communities they inhabit.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is a critical and mandatory process to shine in today’s social economy. It will help businesses forge meaningful relationships with those who will bridge specific benefits to distinct groups of consumers in order to cultivate a loyal, vocal, and hyper-connected community of customers and influencers.”

Did you enjoy that? I particularly liked how we must stop marketing at audiences (did he deliberately use ‘at’ instead of ‘to’ – it’s not clear) and how we must genuinely and intelligently split infinitives and humanise our story. And what (in the name of all that’s holy) is ‘bridging benefits to distinct groups of consumers’?

Obviously, different people, and different schools of thought, will have different takes on Mr Solis’s meanderings. Personally, I’m not a fan of social media evangelism, I don’t regard it as life-changing and I’m not even sure it’s actually – when it comes down to it – very important as a comms tool. Mr Solis seems to be saying that the future is community and collaboration, and that, through social media, the audience will dictate the shape and future strategy of the business.

I’m not saying this is untrue – in fact I think it’s been true for quite some time. I just don’t think that social media invented audience participation, nor do I think it’s the best way of getting the end user involved.

Look at Microsoft (‘I’m a PC’) and RIM (Blackberry ‘All You Need Is Love’) – both campaigns are all about community, but they didn’t need (and in one case, didn’t really use) social media to get where they are. They (sensibly) used market research.

And as for social media reinventing the ‘aging business of PR’. Please. PR (Corporate Communications) is what it is – social media is simply a new channel, and whether it’s good or bad has yet to be seen.

To put it another way, a new type of hammer does not fundamentally reinvent the way you build houses. Nor, usually, does it require the acquisition of a specific hammering skillset, or the hiring of expensive hammering gurus.

This is Shiny Object Syndrome at its worst.

Public Relations – Making News In The Digital Era – Or Any Era

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

Came across this today, which is a post containing ‘seven strategic steps’ to making news in the digital era. For ease, dear blog snorkellers, I reproduce them here. These steps, according to their author – a communicator of some note – focus the ‘news making’ process to ‘shed old-style communications practices, like press releases, that no longer work’ in order to ‘begin making your own news online in a compelling manner to engage audiences’.

Here they are:

  • Advocate change
  • Avoid compulsively marketing and promoting
  • Start listening and engaging in conversations
  • Embrace storytelling
  • Use plain language
  • Reach out to fewer to achieve more
  • Become the credible voice and face
  • Don’t be afraid to try something new

Initially, I looked at these and thought – here we go again – another set of Utopian guidelines for engaging in the global conversation, where everything goes with the flow and there are no real goals, objectives and outputs; where you’re not supposed to expect anything in return and virtue is its own reward. Not new-style communications, more the absolute antithesis of what lies at the heart of professional business communications.

Then I looked at them again, and realised that these steps are no more or less than a beginner’s guide to media relations. In point of fact, the press release has been dead for 10 years, and these steps are how you develop a relationship with your sector journalists (print, broadcast and online – but mostly print). These steps are your route map to a one-on-one live encounter with a hack who you hope is going to give your business/brand/organisation a good hearing. These are the seven strategic steps to running your conversation over lunch.

As such, they’re very useful.

Social Media – Think Of A Topic, Any Topic……

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

Today, blog snorkellers mine, we roll our eyes skywards in reaction to the latest piece of misengendered and spurious horsehit to grace the pages of the ‘industry’s bible’, the toilet-tissue-esque PRWeek. (Hello, PRWeek, hope you’re well.) This week’s issue has a story which you can find here, on the Week’s website, entitled “Comms Chiefs Predict First ‘Internet Election’ in The UK” (their inverted commas, not mine.)

All well and good, you might say, heaving a sigh of relief that the ‘bible’ has refrained from printing pictures of drunken consultants baring their bottoms out of hotel bedroom windows following yet another product launch and nine-hour lunch.

Unfortunately though, it’s neither well, nor good. Let’s face it, the next general election is not going to be an internet election, not by any stretch of the imagination, if only for the simple reason that only 59% of the UK population have internet access. The first shots in this election have already been fired and they were fired via outdoor. No, I’m not going to ignore the government’s Twitter Czar and the fact that social media and the wider web will be addenda to the main marketing agenda, but it’s not going to be an internet election. IT’S NOT.

And guess what? When you read the ‘story’ in the ‘bible’, you find that the ‘Comms Chiefs’ of the headline, who have, apparently, predicted the first ‘internet election’, have actually DONE NO SUCH THING. In fact, they could hardly be less predictory.

Once again, it’s a simple case of being so over-awed by social media, and so sucked up by the hype, as to try and shoehorn the miserable stuff into anything and everything that has even the smallest communication element.

Once and for all. The Emperor has no clothes on. Social media is not the dawn of a brave new world. It will not replace (although it may add to) more traditional and more direct comms tools. Social media does not affect everyone. Its coverage is by no means blanket. Some people don’t understand it, some people don’t like it. Not everything has to have, or needs, or requires, a social media element.

So please, don’t try to roll everything in social media in the hope that some of it will stick. And don’t make baseless claims.

Thanks.

Social Media – What Value Conversation?

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

After my recent assertion that all this ‘conversation’ voodoo was little more than the next great excuse for not doing very much at all (and being paid, often quite highly, for not doing it) – my reasoning being, simply, that ‘conversation’, as she is hyped by the social media gurus, doesn’t actually exist – I come face to face with this. It is a listing and explanation of the ‘ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road to full social media integration’, created by someone called Brian Solis, who, apparently, is a principal at new media agency FutureWorks. (Should you be the sort of terrifying masochist who seeks out opportunities to peel your fingers or pick at your eyes with fishhooks, you can connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.)

Frankly, dear blog snorkellers, where do I start? It’s delusional and, if it got into the hands of the weak-minded (you’re not weak-minded, are you?) could be seen as dangerous. Take this, for example:

“At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.”

What on earth does he mean – goes mainstream for business? No-one, as yet, and as far as I can see, has managed to make business out of social media. Not even the social media owners are actually making money out of it. Does no-one remember the dotcom bubble of 11 years ago? It’s not the messiah, people, it’s a very naughty boy. 2010 will not be the year social media goes mainstream for business – it might be the year when business pisses away a significant proportion of its total marketing spend following the advice of Mr Solis and his peers, however.

I also cannot help but noting the use of the phrase ‘the path towards social media enlightenment’, deliberately imbuing his subject with some quasi-religious significance and tacitly implying that those who do not run towards social with open arms are both unenlightened and somehow heathen.

And then there’s the assertion that ‘full social media integration often happens in stages’ – as if it’s something that happens all the time, the new normality, an inevitable metamorphosis that will change us all – thereby bestowing credence on what are, after all, little more than crackpot theories.

And that, gentle readers, is just the content of the first paragraph. There’s pages and pages of this insidious and infectious nonsense. It talks about “the conversation” (as you’d expect it would), it talks about ‘finding a voice and a sense of purpose’ and it talks about “humanising the brand”. It goes as far as to suggest that social media both merits and may cause an organisational transformation, in which it is imperative that teams and processes support formal Social Customer Relationship Management programmes.

To be fair, the document pays lip service to the concept of metrics to measure ROI – volumes, locations and nature of online interaction – but at no point does it address true value-adding business goals, such as selling more product, dispensing more counsel or lending more money. In fact it goes as far as to say ‘we report to executives who may be uninterested in transparency or authenticity – their goal, and job, is to steer the company toward greater profits’ as if there’s a special type of person whose job it is to worry about profit, while the rest of us get down and dirty having conversations, creating communities, listening, responding and adapting our products and services.

Don’t get me wrong, social media is here and it’s (probably) here to stay. Ignore it at your peril. But it is not that important. It is not something that has to permeate your business, brand or organisation at all levels. It is not the future of communication as we know it and it is not an excuse to stop what you’re doing now and enter some Utopian world where no-one’s responsible, there’s no control and you simply have to go with the flow – because this is bigger than all of us, man.

Horseshit! Wake up! This is the call of the sirens and the more you listen to it, the more chance you’ll throw yourself overboard and drown in a sea of endless, meaningless ‘conversation’.

Social Media – Why Sell, When You Can ‘Converse’?

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

Mark Zuckerberg (that’s the wee lad who gave us Facebook) says that privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’ – triggering panic selling of stocks in the net curtain and bathroom door sectors – and Robert Phillips (CEO of Edelman, a PR enterprise of some note) adds that “we, the people, have become media in our own right; and everyone………can now participate in the conversation, anywhere and at any moment in time”.

All well and good, but, unfortunately, the removal of privacy gives people an ill-advised sense of liberation and the belief that it’s OK to bare their souls (some of which must be, according to the laws of probability, dark, diseased, twisted, bitter and mis-aligned) and simply giving people the opportunity to participate in the conversation, does not automatically confer upon them the capability to do so. Worse, because of the insidious and ubiquitous nature of t’interweb, often it’s not conversation that we’re seeing – it’s more the foaming rantings of those whose extreme opinions stem from irresponsible journalism and too much free time.

You’ve only got to have a quick trot around the net to see that the vast majority of the ‘conversation’ is not worth the bandwidth it sucks up – it’s of no value to anyone except those involved in perpetuating it. To see that a large proportion of what those advising businesses on social media strategy would term ‘conversation’ is little more than Q&A – where can I get your product and what will it cost, are your trains running on time, can I get tickets to your sponsored gig – all questions that can (and should) be answered on a website. To see that even in those media where you’d expect to find value-adding debate, the conversations are fuelled by a lack of experience and a lack of knowledge – by the anti-privateers who believe that because they can, they should. To see that, even in 140 characters, it can still be all about them to the exclusion of everyone else.

Two things, from a comms perspective.

All of this new-age nonsense about ‘the conversation’ is simply an abdication of responsibility. From where I’m standing, it’s an excuse to give up trying to control the message. Lest anyone be unclear on this, the role of the communicator who is paid to communicate on behalf of a brand, business or organisation IS TO CONTROL THE MESSAGE, THEREBY ENHANCING REPUTATION, THEREBY INCREASING PROPENSITY TO ENGAGE (PURCHASE). All this ‘conversation’ crapola is the foundation of a nice new excuse for a failure to deliver hard, tangible, value-adding results. It – and all the wibbly nonsense that goes round it – is a nice way to get out of selling, which is, after all, what communications is. No-one likes selling and – eureka – now we don’t have to.

And as a reminder, ‘vox populi, vox dei’ is part of a bigger quotation. Which includes the word ‘insanitas’. Look it up.