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Here’s the presentation from last night’s workshop at the Publicity Club of New England in Boston. Great group and lots of fun doing conversational writing and community building workshops. Creativity is everywhere; we just have to ask new questions and collaborate in new ways to get at it.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has put out a request: What makes a brand talkable? Here’s my take.
People send me a lot of press releases, hoping I’ll write about them in this blog. This one came yesterday, which is just terrible. Instead of making the marketing agency look big, it makes them look like small-town, small potatotoes. I’ve omitted the company name, but shared the release so you can avoid ever doing one like this — even if the client or CEO insists.
PS — if you’re moving, send an email to clients, partners and vendors; add the new address to your employees’ email signature, your web site, blogs, Facebook pages, etc.
King of Prussia, Pa., September 28, 2009 – XYZ Group, the premier strategic interactive marketing agency serving the healthcare industry, today announced that it has moved its headquarters from West Conshohocken to expanded professional office space in King of Prussia, Pa. XYZ Group has experienced significant growth since it started business and is now a leading provider of interactive marketing solutions for the healthcare industry.
XYZ’s Group’s new headquarters office is located at …. The 31,000 square foot space is an open floor plan with numerous technology advancements to enable increased innovation and collaboration by its employees.
Creating marketing and public relations campaigns within a social media context requires some new steps– and greater attention to steps that hopefully have always been considered.
Here are eight ideas to “social mediafy” your campaigns.
1. Know what’s relevant and current: First, know what your audience cares about. What issues, topics, ideas are front of mind. Not what your company wants to talk about, which is usually your own products and service features/functions (boring), but what people are already concerned about and interested in. Do this by analyzing the digital ecosystem for your category — blogs, tweets, news articles, YouTube videos, Digg posts/rankings, Google searches, etc. What’s most popular, triggers the most responses? If you have a corporate blog or a customer forum — what are the most popular topics?
2. What’s the business goal: Before doing anything, clearly understand the intention of the campaign. Is it to develop preference for your brand vs. another? Change a perception about your company? Make people more aware of the company’s expertise in a particular area? Help people understand an issue that is an obstacle to sales? Generate leads? Make your brand more likable? The more specific you can be, the more effective your program will be — and the easier it will be to measure it. I see far too little time spent on this important step. “General Awareness” is too superficial — nor does it guide how to execute.
3. Formulate a provocative point of view: What’s your take on a topic of current interest to your audience — and how does your point of view connect with your goal? Make the point of view is fresh, thought-provoking and even provocative. As word of mouth author Emmanuel Rosen points out in an interview with Sean Moffit of BuzzCanuck, one of the worst practices in marketing is having nothing interesting to say. My research has found that there are nine themes that people like to talk about; here’s more on “The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing” from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. My favorite is taking a contrarian or counterintuitive view. Done right, this approach creates interest, debate and longevity — and can help address a number of goals.
4. Put that point of view together in a shareable form: Take your point of view and develop it in a form (or multiple forms) that people can easily share with other people — eBooks, videos, ChangeThis manifestos, blog posts, presentations, white papers. And put those not just on your own site but where people are browsing — YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, etc. Some recent examples of content easy to share: Disney Park’s “make your own personalized video,” which you can then share with friends. IBM’s “Art of the Sale” mainframe videos by Tim Washer. And a great white paper, “EMC/One: A Journey in Social Media” by Chuck Hollis. Having some thing makes it easier to share. Of course, it needs to be interesting enough that you want to share it with your colleagues and friends.
5. Get your views out into the ecosystem: Now stir things up and let people know about your point of view– and where they can go to learn more. Use Twitter, Facebook, blogger outreach, Slideshare.net, YouTube, Digg, Sumbleupon and all the many, many other places out there.
6. Stay in the conversation: As people start talking about the topic, stay in the conversation, adding new perspectives, answering questions, providing other people/places about the issue. Set up Google alerts at a minimum to keep up with the conversation and post responses to what;s being said. The days of dropping a press release, talking to some media, and calling it a campaign are over.
7. Repackage: Take the highlights of what ensued and repackage them to further achieve your goals — use for customer newsletters, sales presentations, management reports, in employee communities/Intranets.
8. Measure what sticks: Lastly, learn from all the issues you initiate. Which garnered the most interest — and why? What fell flat? Was it the topic — or was it the execution. This execute-and-measure-and-learn is the only way to find what works for your audience — and is an ongoing education for you.
I’m getting mighty tired of hearing executives demanding press releases for every little thing, turning smart PR organizations into press release factories with little strategic value.
What gives? I recently heard that one CEO demanded at least 40 press releases a quarter be posted on the company’s news page to impress potential shareholders. (Are investors so dumb as to make decisions on the number of press releases? Seems so 1999 to me.) Another PR group said that the product marketing people had a press release quota as part of their performance evaluation. So whether a product was newsworthy or not, the product marketing people hounded PR for their precious releases.
Then I see a silly release that SAP put out last week claiming that customers were migrating from their competitor Infor to SAP. The release is so full of jargon and marketing speak that’s it’s almost a parody of bad PR.
The really funny part was that I was with Infor folks last week in Europe. When they read the release they laughed (and posted this blog response) because the customers and partners that SAP cited as moving from Infor to SAP did so many moons ago for reasons that certainly wouldn’t be press release-worthy. So much for any “news” in this release.
My guess is that some SAP marketing or sales manager thought it a good idea to do a “momentum release” that they could give their sales reps who are competing in deals with Infor. In other words, press release as sales tool.
If PR gets no respect these days, it’s because too many people mistakenly think that press releases have some magical powers that will cure all types of business issues. If only.
Full disclosure: I’ve worked with SAP and am doing work for Infor. These views are part of my usual rants on dumb company marketing and PR stories.
[photopress:Yang_1.jpg,thumb,pp_image] Jerry Yang of Yahoo yesterday blogged (“OK, so now what?” ) about Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its offer. I give Yang credit for writing something and allowing comments, which is more than most CEOs do.
But Yang’s post doesn’t sound genuine; it sounds like something the corporate PR folks wrote in a committee. Too bad. In today’s world, people want the real language of the person behind the ideas. After reading the post my reaction was, “Does Yang really care — or is this just a PR move?”
A better approach would be to give the CEO a few of the major points that communications thinks should be conveyed — and then let him express it in his own words and style. Who cares if the words and grammar aren’t perfect. Neither are real people.
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I’m so honored and thrilled that my book Beyond Buzz has been awarded a gold prize in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category. I’m especially honored to share the gold with Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing. Here’s a list of all the winners.The awards are sponsored by Independent Publisher, Inc, Jenkins Group, and Padilla Spear Beardsley.
Francois Gossieaux has a good post why social media needs to be a big part of any public relations strategy today. Two interesting stats he cites:
Reporters aren’t opening most emails from PR people or agencies unless they have a really good relationship with them. Forget phone calls. But do remember a blog helps you get good ideas direct to people in your market — and is the new source for journalists.
(Note: Recently reporters from The Wall St. Journal, The Baltimore Sun, Business Week, and The Chicago Tribune have called me based on one of my blog posts. I’m witnessing what Francois writes about.)
Like many, I’m an impulse buyer, especially when it comes to music. I read a review or hear an artist interview and I go right to iTunes to buy. Here’s the problem. Seems like I read reviews, go to iTunes but the music isn’t available for a couple or few more weeks. Frustration! I usually misplace the review, and then forget to check back. Seems like the pr folks in the music industry should wait until the music is available online, then promote. It would make for a better customer experience and certainly more sales.
Who are many CEOs and sales executives most similar to?
a) Al Gore
b) Bob Kerry
c) Bob Dole
The answer is all of the above. The reason is that most CEOs and sales executives, like unsuccessful political candidates, present litanies of facts, figures, and rational reasoning to try to persuade people, and they overlook (or dismiss) the power of emotions.
They rely on dispassionate logic. Yet, neuroscientists and psychologists have proven that the more “rational” a message, the less likely it is to trigger the emotional circuits in our brains that activate behavior and decisions.
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation by psychologist and political scientist Dr. Drew Westen is a fascinating read about the science and practice of persuasion in American politics, particularly about how the Democrats, with the exception of Bill Clinton, have blown it so many times by relying on dispassionate reasoning and policy discussions rather than connecting with people on an emotional level.
People decide by how they feel about you. (Or your company or party.) Republicans and many consumer products marketers are masters at this; most Democrats, business-to-business and professional services are not.
Aside from being a political junkie from a communication strategy perspective, I found the book interesting because the principles of political persuasion are the same for business, and are becoming even more relevant in our video, podcasting, blogging world. Most companies obsessively talk about their products, capabilities, roadmaps, strategy du jour ( Six Sigma, anyone?), and obvious trends (“we’re all about helping customers reduce risk and cut costs.”). But they fail to first connect with people, be they customers or employees, in an emotional way that engenders feelings of competency, trust, and liking.
In my book Beyond Buzz, chapter 3 (“Make Meaning Not Buzz”) explores why emotion is the superhighway to making meaning and understanding. Westen’s exploration of scientific research goes much deeper in showing why the mind is hardwired to tune into emotionally compelling appeals vs. rational reasons, and offers strategies on how to appeal to that neural network of often unconscious decision making.
Here are some takeaways from the book that I found especially interesting for those of us in in business.
“We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest, enthusiasm, fear, anger or contempt. We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance.”
“Emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior. It is no accident that the words motivation and emotion share the same Latin root, movere, which means to move.”
“The implications of these findings suggest that the choice of words, images, wounds, music, backdrop, tone of voice and a host of other factors is as likely to be as significant to the electoral success of a campaign as content.”
“As decades of survey research demonstrate, people are driven in the voting booth by their feelings, and these feelings reflect the extent to which they believe a party of candidate is attending to their interests and values.”
“The data form political science is crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best argument
“Virtually every word that came out of his mouth [Gore, 200 presidential campaign] had been market-tested using focus groups and hand-dials indicating when listeners liked and didn’t like what he ways saying in practice debates. Unfortunately, the more his words seemed market-tested, the less genuine they seemed. And the less genuine he seemed, the less likable
“Political scientist Larry Bartels found, as expected, that voters prefer candidates whose values and policies match their own preferences. But he also found that voters prefer candidates who are clear on what they believe, even if it is not what they believe.”
“Voters tend to ask four questions that determine who they will vote for…Candidates who focus their campaigns on the top of this hierarchy and work their way down generally win.
- How do I feel about the candidate’s party and its principles?
- How does this candidate make me feel?
- How do I feel about this candidate’s personal characteristics, particularly his or her integrity, leadership, and compassion?
- How do I feel about this candidate’s stands on issues that matter to me?
Now, take a look at the sales deck your sales reps are using, the speech your CEO recently gave to employees or partners, the marketing messaging “playbook,” the “look and feel” of your company’s PowerPoint style .
