First Person PR

Perhaps the biggest perk to commuting from Boston to Austin is the time on the airplane between when my laptop battery dies and we land that I use  to catch up on reading. I lost my appetite for the “PR is dying,” the “social media will save PR/marketing,” and the “I have so many followers on Twitter that I’m now an expert” books – primarily because it’s not, it won’t, and you’re not. For the last year or so I’ve been consuming as many branding books as possible, particularly ones that dissect the science behind branding. Many were repeats of my marketing text books from college, but a few stand out.

First up is Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity – And How Great Brands Get it Back by Rohit Bhargava (you know him from his Influential Marketing blog). If you want to judge a book by its cover, the rocking rooster delivers! The book was an easy read and I found myself reading the first several chapters a second time with a highlighter in hand. I loved the book because it delves into branding from a communications perspective:

“Personality is not just about what you stand for, but how you choose to communicate it … This is the social media era, where all forms of media are portable, personal, and filtered – where brands have fewer secrets and have their identities shaped by perception as much as communication.”

He also spends a lot of time at the fallacy of only using approved spokespeople:

“Perhaps no other trend in the marketing and communications processes of companies has been more instrumental in the loss of the personality of organizations than the “employee silencing policy” … employees are already your brand spokesperson to a degree.”

I’m sure PR pros are going to panic when they start reading that section. But it’s less about using the proper spokespeople in PR campaigns and more about embracing individuals in the right settings. If you look around your company, you probably already know people who blog, are tradeshow rock stars, etc. Rohit refers to that person as an “accidental spokesperson,” and I believe there’s value in leveraging their passion – for the company and the employee. A few snippets from that section:

“You are not giving up control, but sharing it … The true power of an accidental spokesperson come from him or her having natural authenticity … This is not about ownership. Embracing them means giving them the content, attention, and access they need to tell a compelling story.”

My only complaint is that wish the book was a paperback — because they fit in my laptop case better. But if you’re looking for a good read on your next flight, I suggest you pick this one up.

While a lot of bloggers are posting their 2010 predictions, I thought I’d share three rules to keep in mind for your 2010 spending. All of these were valid long before the recession, but I became even more important in the last 18 months.

1. Focus on value. One of the first lessons of the recession is to find and eliminate spending bloat. Too often, I think we do things simply because it’s how we’ve always done them. For example, I strongly suggest everyone take a look at your press release distributions. Releases still serve a purpose, but they don’t drive coverage and don’t need to be spammed to the AP News desk at every regional newspaper (agencies are huge culprits of this). If you’re still spending over a grand on your releases, you’re easily wasting $10,000 a year. Now is the time to look at your budget line items to make sure you’re spending levels align with the value received.

2. Know what you’re paying for. When you’re finished looking at your budget, take a look at any existing contracts you have – and read the fine print. It amazes me that some of the old school PR firms still pass on their costs of doing business to companies. Reread your contract and make sure you’re not paying for phone usage, magazine subscriptions or the agency’s access to analyst firms and databases. Other agencies will bill back the donuts they provide for a 10 a.m. planning meeting. The charges may seem small, but often they can eat up almost 10% of your annual agency budget (which could potentially cover your revised release budget). You may decide you’re okay with the fees, but realize you’re paying an added premium. And know that many agencies dropped this billing practice in the last few years.

3. Measure, measure, measure. The fastest route to getting a budget approved is having the numbers on your side. Unfortunately, many PR pros wait until budget time to look at measuring their program. You always pre-define success and measure yourself along the way. And, just as importantly, the results need to be communicated to your execs (whether they ask for it or not). It’s the only way to ensure that what you’re measuring resonates with them. If not, you can adjust along the way. Then, come budget time, ROI is an easy topic to discuss.

As I wrote last week’s post on the MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum, one particular session stood out to me – it was insanely interesting, interactive and valuable. Hosted by Jason Baer (of Convince and Convert fame), the session entailed three actual attendees letting the audience evaluate, analyze and critique their B2B social media efforts – whether it be a corporate blog, a community forum, Twitter, etc. or a combination.

Jason started the session off with an incredibly brief appeal to all B2B marketers to  define what success is, and know your strategy on social media. As he explained, too often the tactics are executed before a company knows what their objective is because someone wants to try Twitter, another wants to add a LinkedIn Group, etc. Even if you’ve been using various social media technologies, he suggested taking a step back to regroup and define the ultimate goal – which then lends itself to measurement and metrics (a major theme of the event).

He also emphasized that social media is not for features and benefits content. It’s to TELL A STORY and add personality (however relaxed or professional) to a brand. The companies most successful with social media have an end goal in mind and aren’t trying to feed data sheets into social networks and on blogs. That’s true for B2B and B2C companies.

I loved this session for many reasons. Mostly, I loved that it took three of my peers – who admittedly did not have the marketing resources (staff or budget) that a Fortune 500 company had – and provided them (and us) with specific, and realistic, suggestions to improve. The majority of them centered around the idea that regardless of whether you “own” all the properties, you need to connect the dots (between your company’s LinkedIn, Twitter, blog, website, etc). When done properly, that can extend each other’s audience and create a cumulative effect. When done poorly, they create an annoying echo chamber that is perceived as corporate spam.

Below are the very tactical, but incredibly valuable, tips/suggestions that I left the session with:

• Every presentation (or podcast or webinar or whitepaper) your company produces can potentially fuel 5-6 blog posts. Make heavy use of content already being created, but keep in mind that the features/function language needs to be pulled out.
• If you have a group contributed blog, include pictures of the authors by each post.
• On your corporate blog, add links to each exec’s LinkedIn profile. Also be sure to add their profiles in your company’s LinkedIn Group page. (Check out this great article by Jason, “22 Ways to Dominate LinkedIn,” for more tips.)
• Use tools to extend your audience beyond the “people in the room” (beyond your blog subscribers, LinkedIn Group members, webinar/tradeshow attendees, etc.):

1. Use slideshare.net to share presentation-based content and then embed in your corporate blog. LinkedIn also has a slideshare app to pull the slides into profiles of execs and the group page. This is a perfect way to extend the reach of tradeshow and webinar presentations.
2. Check out Scribd.com, which is like a “slideshare for documents.” It allows you to embed the cover page of each whitepaper to be downloaded into your blog, and again extends the audience.
3. Make use of tools to incorporate your blog content into LinkedIn profiles (LinkedIn has a blog app that can automate this, too).
4. If you use need to use the whitepapers and webinars as lead generators, just wait a few months before sharing them – and then extend their life and reach.

• Don’t use your corporate Twitter feed as a “link dump.” And if you’re using an automated tool to feed your Twitter, FriendFeed, etc., make sure you’re not spamming the same updates multiple times. Also, recognize that people may be following your brand and multiple employees on Twitter, so be careful that you’re not creating your own “retweeting” echo chamber.
• If you manage a corporate Twitter account, take 15 minutes to brand the background with links to the company’s website.
• If multiple people are involved in the corporate Twitter account, take a look at Cotweet and Hootsuite. They both allow multiple contributors to a single account, and allows staged tweets (here’s a CNET comparison of both).
• Sign up for a bit.ly account to provide shortened URLs across all platforms. It allows you to track/measure how many people followed the link.

The event was great, but this session really made it worthwhile for me. I hope you find the suggestions as helpful as I did.

Earlier this summer, I attended the MarketingProfs’ BtoB Forum in Boston and had every intention of posting my thoughts the following week. In a nice (for me) twist, I came away with so many ideas and to dos that I focused on incorporating them into my existing program and quickly forgot about writing a blog post.

But now I’m finally getting around to sharing the key themes that resonated with me from sessions on social media, marketing in a recession and measurement. Each session built on one another, and as a result my notes felt more like a Twitter stream than the linear notes I usually take. Subsequently, I wasn’t able to directly attribute each piece of marketing wisdom to a speaker. However, at the end I have provided links to all the sessions and speakers I attended — and definitely recommend you check them out.

Without further ado, here’s my Top 10 list from the event (in no particular order):

1. Perspective matters. I’ve attended events focused on “just” communications/PR and always found them to be preaching to the choir. While the event had its fair share of preaching to the choir, there were enough marketing and B2B buyer perspectives represented that added a ton of value. Too often, communications silos itself from marketing and loses sight of the larger, collective goal.
2. There is still a battle over control when it comes to social media. A lot of questions during the sessions highlighted a fear of losing control of the messaging from marketing departments. At the same time, a lot of responses from self-described social media experts took the tone of “the point of Twitter is …” I think they’re trying hard too to dictate the usage the tools when the reality is that the usage depends on the goal – and (gasp) not every campaign is designed to engage directly with a customer.
3. Use social media tools to complement existing marketing/comms/PR campaigns. As Sandy Carter of IBM said, “we don’t have a social media strategy, we have a marketing strategy.” Look at social media tools as new mediums to execute against your strategy. For example: include a link to the blog in banner ads; use Twitter to drive booth traffic; supplement a whitepaper with podcasts, etc.
4. If you pay attention, social media gives you valuable insight. With today’s information overload, everyone agrees that customers and influencers are more savvy and more skeptical – and they can easily detect marketing “hype.” Use videos and blogs and twitter and <insert your customers’ favorite medium> to understand how they want to be marketed to. Listen to the words they use and update your messaging accordingly.
5. 2009 is about doing better with less. As measurement maven Katie Paine told us, “Measuring isn’t always about proving value, it’s about knowing what’s working and what’s not.” Forrester’s Laura Ramos added in one session, “Without understanding your strategy and having measurable goals, social media can easily become ‘purpose-less’ activity.” A quote from Peter Drucker summed it up: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Focus on using measurement to see what works and then dial up/down your mix accordingly (listen, learn and change).
6. Stay true to your company’s goals. Define upfront what success is and how you’ll measure your efforts, including your social media tactics. And don’t confuse popularity with influence. Target your efforts. It’s not necessarily about getting thousands of followers on Twitter, it’s about connecting with people who ultimately influence your sales cycle. Particularly in communications, popularity metrics are an easy out when we don’t have “real” results to report on.
7. Recognize that social media is different. You can’t take traditional content and just “plug” it into social media and be successful. Most presenters also agreed that social media is hard in B2B because you have to find where your customers are, and how (or even if) they want to be engaged.
8. Remember your audience is not necessarily your peers. In several sessions, questions were asked about LinkedIn versus Facebook for marketing efforts. The consensus – from an audience of marketers – was that Facebook had more users and was more fun and was therefore better. But over and over, presenters from B2B companies reminded us that our goal isn’t to get in front of marketers, and many B2B buyers don’t want to be sold to on Facebook. In fact, IBM actually surveyed its SOA customers and found out, hands down, that they preferred to hear about vendors on LinkedIn. They don’t necessarily post and interact with vendors there, but they do join groups and read the Q&As to get informed.
9. Counting is not ROI. Move your metrics framework from the very tactical to being strategic. That’s how to impress the c-suite, but it requires that you can speak in business terms (and if you can’t, focus more on learning about business than social media). Measure business outcomes (market share, share of voice, adoption rate, etc.) not your tactical activity (coverage numbers, leads, downloads, etc.). Realize this means siloed metrics need to feed into broader measurement reports.
10. Don’t be afraid to “fail” once or twice. Time Magazine’s Steve Johnson told us, “Right now, there’s a tolerance of failure [in social media] that we should embrace. Experiment and innovate now.”

Overall, it was great event – one I’d love to attend next year. As promised, here are links to the presentations I listened to, as well as the speakers’ blogs and Twitter feeds:

• All the handouts are available at http://www.marketingprofs.com/events/7/handouts/?adref=ematt528
• Marketing 2.0: Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Mix with Sandy Carter of IBM (blog, @sandy_carter)
• 2009 Economic Impact on B2B Marketing Budgets & Practices with Carter; Laura Ramos of Forrester (blog, @lauraramos); Roy Young of MarketingProfs (@RoyProfs)
• Day 1 Keynote with Steven Johnson of Time (blog, @stevenbjohnson)
• Make Every Investment Count: The Measure of Marketing with Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing (@LauraVEM)
• Social Media Hot Seat with Jason Baer of Convince & Convert (blog, @jaybaer)
• Tales from the Trenches: How Organizations are Measuring Value in Social Media with Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners (blog, @KDPaine)

For the past several months, I’ve been on a high-tech diet. The problem started innocently enough with a minor PDA addiction. I’d randomly check work email in the evenings, on the weekends and even during my commute. Then, with Facebook and Twitter, the socnets took over. And being the news junkie that I am, I was always reading something in between the two.

Like many, I reveled in the always on, always connected, mentality. But I had hit the point where constant connectivity was overwhelming and it actually became counterproductive. Don’t get me wrong, I was always organized (and I rarely have a scroll bar in my inbox). But finding the time to read, digest and file all the content was becoming too cumbersome.

And thus, my high-tech diet journey began with these steps:

I cut out the junk mail: This was the first, easiest and most obvious step. Rather than delete annoying emails (in both my work and personal accounts), I actually started unsubscribing. Within a week, the clutter was clear.

I re-prioritized my RSS feed reader: I’ve used Bloglines since it launched, and I love it. I have dozens of folders (when I was at an agency the folders mapped to my clients), and each folder has its own email address. During step #1, I adjusted my newsletter subscriptions to go directly into my reader. Same for non-essential Google Alerts (and while I was at it, I turned those into daily emails vs. getting them “as it happens”). This made it a lot easier to be off email for extended periods of time without my inbox going out of control and helped me focus.

I trimmed the feeds I subscribe to: Over the years, I’ve added hundreds of RSS feeds. Some have become redundant, and others just didn’t interest me anymore. For several weeks, each Friday I focused on a specific folder and I started deleting feeds. I found I had subscribed to a lot of pundit type blogs that quite honestly were of no interest to me. Those were the first to go.

I created my own socnet boundary: A major challenge with social networks, for me at least, is the overlap of work and personal life (Check out this piece on how/why to keep them separate). It was abundantly clear that I needed to create a boundary and stick to it. I decided that LinkedIn would be my professional contact management system (i.e. address book). I was up to 800 contacts, and I cut it to just under 300 people who were relevant to my  career, and who I actually knew. On Facebook, I’ve been working to make it my personal network. At first, I felt guilty un-friending people, but once I got over that, I transitioned professional contacts to LinkedIn. Now, if a professional contact sends me a friend request I simply respond with a Linkedin invite and explanation. I still have a gray area of coworkers that overlap the two, but I think I’ve found a workable balance. Ultimately this made both networks more useful to me and has eliminated a lot of unnecessary emails.

I re-evaluated my Twitter stream: I fought Twitter initially, but over the past year I’ve found it incredibly valuable. Initially, I did what most marketing people do, and I followed all the thought leaders. Over time, though, I’ve trimmed my stream to about 100 people. For me, that’s the sweet spot for me to follow the various conversations. Too many more, and I can’t keep up with the conversation. Too few, and it becomes stale. At that level, it’s also much easier for me to log off on the weekends.

Finally, I mapped content, updates and notifications to my preferred medium: Trimming my feeds and streams were helpful, and I found I was able to digest more information in less time, but I still wanted to optimize my productivity. The final step for me was to eliminate redundancies and make sure I received valuable content in the best format for my work habits. For example, I loved following Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) on Twitter, but the volume of her tweets were drowning out other voices in my stream. So I un-followed her and instead signed up for her blog. At the same time, a handful of bloggers always link to new posts on Twitter. I un-subscribed to their blogs and read the posts as I see them on Twitter. I’m still getting the same content, but in the format that I prefer. And I’m only being notified once when something new appears.

It took awhile to figure out what I could and couldn’t live without, and how I preferred to digest different types of content. But now, I find it easy to stay on top of things, and when I’m on a socnet or reading my feeds, it’s a lot easier for me to focus. In some areas, I trimmed enough that I was able to add new contacts and sources, which has been great. And, in the midst of all of this, I’ve found more time for offline networking and reading, which has been great.

How about you? Are you in control of your high-tech diet, or is it in control of you?

Yesterday I wrote about the process of finding a new PR agency. Today, I want to continue that (admittedly lengthy) discussion by providing feedback to the PR agencies in general.

I participated in a lot of pitches during my tenure at an agency, so it was interesting to me to be on the receiving side of the final presentations. During all of the presentations, a few things stood out to me:

• Many agencies spent up to a third of their presentation time discussing the state of my company’s market. It led to an interesting discussion, and certainly showed they had done their homework. But it wasn’t new information to us, and I would have preferred they spend more time talking about their recommendations based on the data.
• Almost all agencies claimed to be social media experts and introduced their version of the social media release and blogger relations. Yet only a few could produce client references to talk about social media beyond having a blog. And only one of those references actually used the agency to execute.
• During the initial round of calls through the presentation stage, some agencies presented some very cool ideas. Coming from an agency, I had the sense to confirm they were included in the budget parameters provided. Not surprisingly, none were. I’m all for showing out-of-the-box thinking, but I really wanted to see agencies get creative within my budget parameters.

I realize I’m focusing on the negative, but I do want to say that I was impressed with how many smart PR folks I got to meet during the process. Two agencies in particular had incredible presentations that provided brilliant insight and very creative approaches. They weren’t the flashiest or the most graphic – but they had the best and most relevant content. And they provided out-of-the box ideas that fit within the existing program and budget, and showed the most creativity I’ve seen. It put me in a fantastic position of having two really strong candidates to choose from.

For agencies pitching new clients, I offer the following tidbits to consider (realizing that each client is looking for something slightly different):

• Make the initial fact-finding process easy. I don’t want to wait for a specific VP to return from vacation to get the basic questions asked – particularly when almost anyone can address them.
• Use your time wisely. It’s great that your executives have a lot of history, but we all know they won’t be running the day-to-day activity. I need to be comfortable with the entire team.
• Focus less on me, and more on how you can help me. If you need to state the obvious, do it quickly. But remember we’re more interested in how you can impact the program than hearing the same market sizing stats that we’ve already memorized.
• Creativity counts. But it’s not simply about coming up with snazzy graphics. Content is still king in this industry, and showing that you can be creative with the existing assets is huge.
• Be original. Your client case studies are interesting, but it’s obvious when you’re repurposing their plans for ours. And it’s sad when your plan looks a lot like the other agencies’.
• Be realistic. Don’t wow my executives with consumer projects that will never work in my space, or with ideas that you know I don’t have the money or resources for.
• Be smart about the references you provide. A laundry list of CEOs from past clients is impressive, but hearing how an agency helped a peer of mine be successful is much more meaningful.

For those of you on the client side, did I miss anything?

One of my first projects last summer was to select a new PR agency. I’m currently in my second client-side role, and this was my second time searching for a PR firm. Along the way, I’ve learned that while frustrating, it’s important to embrace the selection process. A lot of information can be uncovered that will help you be successful in your role – like how your executives view PR, what they’re REALLY looking for, what negative agency experiences they’ve had at past companies, etc.

The first time around, I hired a new PR firm after about four months after leaving an agency. At the time, it made sense to simply choose that agency and move on to determining the account setup. In hindsight, while I absolutely think that agency was the right decision, bypassing the selection process is something I’ll never do again – I found it created as many problems as it eliminated.

For example, a year later I found myself in a heated discussion about the value a PR firm delivers. As I defended agencies in general, it was interpreted as me defending “my” agency. In fact, one executive said he felt I had been too loyal to “my” PR firm and was lacking objectivity. Those involved in the initial discussion knew that wasn’t the case, but nevertheless it created a major challenge that could have been avoided.

During my second agency search, I made sure I didn’t repeat my original missteps – and while I was the ultimate decision maker, I understood the value of having everyone fully on board with that decision. At the same time, I still didn’t want to go through the timely RFI to RFP to pitch to another pitch process. So I met with the executives to find out what each was looking for, what their hot buttons were, etc.

Those conversations, as well as the ones immediately following each agency’s pitch, were very enlightening to me. It became apparent to me how each liked to work, and where they believed agencies add value. Even our final discussion highlighted areas of potential concern about the program and client/agency relationship. All of the discussions gave me a roadmap to best manage the agency and, equally important, manage the relationship between the agency and my executives.

I realize now that in my haste to bypass the process the first time around, I missed out on the benefits of the process – primarily educating myself about my own company. I could have discovered some long standing opinions about PR agencies that my executive team held much earlier (for ex., one exec believed that regardless of performance, it was smart to fire the agency after a year and start fresh), and dealt with them proactively. I also think I would have garnered more insight into what each executive expected PR to accomplish, and whether any disconnects existed.

While I’m on the subject, if you’re looking for an agency, here are a few additional pieces of advice:

• Develop a list of what you’re looking for in an agency, and how you’ll prioritize it (for example, is senior counsel important? What about content creation? How will you measure industry knowledge, ability to execute, etc.?).
• Socialize your criteria with your executive team and have an open conversation about past experiences with agencies (with your company and at past companies)
• Read the fine print of the contract BEFORE you make a decision. Additional charges impact your budget. For example, some firms charge a 10% “processing fee” on all expenses. Which means if they put a press release on a wire, pay to submit an award, or even travel for you, you’ll get hit with additional fees that add up. Other agencies still charge you for their phone calls or subscriptions. They’re nominal fees, but they add up quickly (and many agencies no longer charge for that).
• Reach out to your network for recommendations. It’s important to call the references the agency provides you, but call people you trust. And if you can, find a client who no longer works with the agency for a balanced view.
• Don’t be “wowed” by a superstar on a mediocre team. The industry has high churn, and you need to be comfortable with the entire agency team you choose.

What about you? Any advice from past experience you can share?

Over the past several weeks, I  joined millions who are reflecting on the last 12 months and the new year. For me, 2008 was a year of transition — in June, I left ZoomInfo and joined SailPoint as the director of PR and AR. The company is based in Austin, Texas, so I also became a full-time telecommuter.

The summer was a whirlwind of getting up to speed, getting a program in place and figuring out how to work from my home office. By September, I was falling into a routine and now I have a schedule in place that, I think, optimizes my productivity. And it’s amazing how much personal stuff I can get done during the 15 hours I no longer commute.

I definitely hit a few bumps with the transition and more than a few balls got dropped. I haven’t made it to nearly as many networking events, and I certainly haven’t been blogging. But overall it was a great year, and I’m excited for 2009.

Now that things have settled down, I’m clearing the dust off my blog, refreshing the design (with a lot of help from super designer Jeff Clark) and digging back in!

Did you miss me? Sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but a few things happened to cause the blogging break:

• I recently changed jobs, and was focused on wrapping up the old and ramping up the new gig. And of course, a fair amount of interviewing before that. My move ultimately came down to two great opportunities: another internal communications position or an exciting opportunity at a PR firm. I’ll spend more time on that subject soon, because my decision to stay corporate-side ties in nicely with the corporate vs. agency string.
• The “PR Sucks” meme made reading the blogs I love a tedious chore. No one ever said anything new, and honestly, I got fed up with all sides of the mud slinging, so I stopped reading PR blogs and checked out to gain some perspective. It was a nice break, and I’m currently in the process of trimming my reading list to include only the ones I enjoy vs. the ones I think I need to read because everyone else does.
• All the networking, researching and experimenting with social media took up so much time that I found myself leveraging those technologies less in my actual work. Apparently, there can be too much of a good thing! Again, I spent the last few months taking a break (from most, I didn’t go cold turkey or anything) and focused on actually implementing social media in my ongoing communications. So, in fact, while I was blogging much less, I was actually doing much more!

All of that is say that I’m back, and for those of you who sent emails and comments, I apologize for ignoring you. I’m in the process of easing myself back into a schedule, so you’ll be hearing from me a lot more.

~Kari

With all the recession talk (it’s hard to miss it), it’s easy to fear a repeat of the Dot Com bust which resulted in a lot of downsizing in the PR world. I’ve spoken with colleagues at several PR firms in the Boston area, and it sounds like the majority of them are actually seeing more new business activity — and many can barely keep up with demand. Hopefully that trend will continue through the year.

At the same time, though, we need to face reality. Companies are definitely tightening the purse strings and reacting conservatively to the market. The PR industry needs to react, too, continually educating clients and executives about all of PR’s values. David Culver provides six great points in a Manage Smarter piece called “Recession-Proof Your Business with PR.”

David reminds us that that measuring PR is “a must during a recession.” I don’t think our industry can hear that advice enough. Ultimately, PR (along with marketing) is a line-item cost, no matter how strategically it’s approached. So if you need a reason to focus on measuring your PR program, here it is. 2008 needs to be the year of PR measurement. And I don’t mean the simplified metrics like number of articles. I mean substantive analysis that measures PR programs against business objectives. Then, perhaps, we can recession proof our industry (a bit)!

What do you think? Is the current economic uncertainty affecting how you approach PR?