THINKing

Shallow Brands

In Maddie Grant’s blog, Diary of a Reluctant Blogger, today is a great quote (thanks Maddie):

“Once you start these conversations, you have to keep them going. You have to be clever. You have to be engaging. Not too many brands have, what I call, the “intestinal fortitude” to deliver on that very real conversation. Brands tend to be great at busting out of the gates - engaging sites and some content to pique the interests of the consumers, but creating content is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s the ripples that the conversations start, and not the splash-effect of a campaign,” Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation.

This got me to thinking. Here is why, I believe, so many brands are like shallow people. They come on initially with charm, energy and charisma but pretty soon it is clear the suit is empty, and it really is all about them. That’s because brands listen too much to their ad agencies and not enough to their PR firms.

The ad agency folks pull out the glitter to decorate the ratty material. PR folks tell the brand they need to do something about the ratty material first. But that isn’t as much fun, now is it?

So, instead of a long-term focus on content and conversation, they keep pulling out the same old shiny crap and plopping it online. Says Joseph Jaffe, president and “chief interrupter” of strategic advisory firm Crayon,

companies have largely missed that lesson, although they have spent the past few years moving media dollars online. What they have done is recreate online precisely the kind of interruptive advertising that they went online to avoid in the first place.

So, listen up brands: don’t be so shallow. Like Dorothy in Oz, we consumers see through the illusion.

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Mammals 1, Dinosaurs 0

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Crowdsourcing applications, like Knewsroom, are going to kill the traditional media behemoths. Knewsroom is a news publication where readers help decide on content and they get paid to use the system. Here’s how Knewsroom describes itself:

The Knews” gets published every morning, featuring the previous day’s top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. What makes it in? The community decides. The best part? 20% of every dollar we generate in advertising gets split with the people who make the Knews happen: writers, readers, evangelists…anyone looking to turn extra brainwidth into extra cash.

This is where news is headed. MSM dinosaurs continue to lose readers for a variety of reasons I don’t need to dwell on. Read this recent SocialMediaExplorer post for some thoughts on the matter.

Further, Knewsroom explains,

We want to know what YOU think is news. Unlike mainstream media, Knewsroom™ leaves the decision of what’s worth publishing up to you. So yes, if enough people want to see a story about something no one else is covering, it’ll be in tomorrow’s Knews. The more involved you are in Knewsroom,™ the more power you’ll have to shape it. You accumulate watts—our official community currency—by being an active member of the community: suggesting topics, writing stories, voting, and referring other members. The idea is to invest your watts in what you think should tomorrow’s Knews should be. Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics—which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories—which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom,™ it’s entirely up to you.

Citizen journalists - like small mammals - are supplanting the dinosaur MSM. And the bad thing for them is, the large reptiles won’t notice until it’s too late.

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Management: Stay Out Of My Kitchen & I’ll Stay Out Of Yours

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile

No business person in his right mind would ever try to be an engineer or a doctor. They know they have neither the training, expertise nor the experience necessary to do the job. And no matter what they say, men truly don’t believe they could survive an NFL game.

So, why does everyone who speaks English believe that he is a good writer by default? And why does everyone in business believe she can practice media relations without ever having done it? Excellent questions, Mr. Hoover. Do you have answers?

No, but I have some thoughts on the subject. Let me tackle the writing one first. No one reads anymore. Business executives, if they read at all, are reading dry, terse corporate speak. So, naturally they feel they can write better than that. Probably can. But have they read great literature? Have they studied good direct mail copy, or web content to determine what works and what doesn’t? Doubt it. If you are not exposed to great writing, you don’t know that yours is adequate at best.

Let’s turn it around for the media relations question. Mr. or Ms. Executive, were you fully prepared to lead a company the day you graduated from college? No? Then, tell me, how did you learn the skills necessary to do the job? Did it take years of tutelage, the guidance of mentors, as well as moving around the company to get exposed to the various corporate silos? As you moved up the ladder did you learn to delegate tasks to others so that you could focus on your key duties?

OK, now do you really need to add developing relationships with reporters to your list of things to do? Maybe it is better to let your PR people develop the relationships and the media relations plan just like you expect your HR people to develop benefits recommendations without your help.

So, basically what I’m saying is: you stay out of my kitchen and I’ll stay out of yours. Deal?

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Links 5/28/2008

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile

From my browser to yours, here are a few links of interest:

Read Free Magazines Via iPhone

Be A Trend Follower

Does Your Website Socialize?

A Very Social Beer

Top 5 Best Office Pranks

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Marketing Landscape In Flux

A couple of recent items have me thinking about what is happening in the marketing landscape around us. We talked recently about the PR study done at Annenberg School of Communications concerning best practices and how the industry is not doing a good job of measuring its effectiveness.

On the heels of this study, we see items like this one from Ad Age about longtime advertisers pulling the plug on their big broadcast ad programs.

Marketers are moving their budgets into other areas, such as mobile text message advertising. And we read about companies like Hershey’s doing in-home promotions to reach their audiences. Add to that what is happening on the social media front, and I see a full-scale renovation of the marketing landscape.

Finally, marketers are going to have to deal with consumers on a one-to-one basis if they want to differentiate their products and services, as well as build customer loyalty. This is good news for the consumer, and ultimately for the smart marketers out there. Are you among that number?

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PR Needs To Grow Up

Professor Jerry Swerling, who heads the Annenberg School for Communication Public Relations Studies program at the University of Southern California, sent me a note about their fifth study of PR best practices. There are some interesting findings in this research. The study identifies, for the first time, best practices in public relations and organizational communications that the USC Annenberg researchers believe apply to all organizations.

“The term ‘best practice’ tends to be thrown around a lot, often referring to practices that are frequently used or used by respected organizations,” said Swerling. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time correlations have been used to identify best practices with a reasonably high degree of certainty.”

Here’s the elephant on the table for the PR industry. We still don’t have a mutually acceptable way of measuring our effectiveness for the organization.

“We need to find, fund and apply reliable and widely-accepted measurement tools of our own,” said Swerling. “Until we do, we will not see the kind of generous funding that sister-disciplines such as advertising and marketing regularly receive. Communications practitioners know the power and impact of their profession, as do most CEOs. Nonetheless, we do a disservice to our discipline by measuring it solely in terms of media-related outputs and asking that our effectiveness be accepted on faith.”

Amen, brother. Let’s figure it out. If we don’t other disciplines will continue to take our lunch money.

UPDATE: Jason Falls has an interesting perspective on whether to measure social media. My answer for the time-being still is “yes” because top level executives don’t usually come from the marketing ranks and they like their expenditures quantified.

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Communications Planning 101

Developing a communications plan requires a disciplined approach. Your first order of business is reviewing your current program for impact and efficiency. Review your program by:

- Audience (employees, shareholders, in-channel audiences, consumers)

- Vehicle (personal visits, telephone calls, letters, invoices, e-mail, website, newsletters, advertising, POP, trade show)

- Subject Matter (corporate communications messages, marketing communications messages)

- Interval (daily, weekly, monthly)

- Existing programs (loyalty programs, CRM, advertising)

- Competitors (tactics, messages)

Next, as part of the strategic planning process, you need to define your audiences, and determine key business objectives that can be enhanced/supported by communications.

With the above elements completed, you now begin to develop an integrated communications plan.

- Conduct internal, in-channel and in-market communications audit

- Find and review research on audiences that were defined during strategic planning process

- If paid media is to be a part of the program, meet with media allies - editorial and marketing - to determine what programs they can bring to bear internally, in-channel, in-market

Finally, develop a complete communications program based upon the brand’s strategy/positioning that:

- garners internal support by making employees brand emissaries

- fully involves in-channel allies by communicating both corporate and brand messages

- uses a multi-media approach to surround customers with the brand message, and to bring the brand to life

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Links - 5/23/2008

Here are a few things I’ve been reading that you might want to peruse. Let’s start with a little humor. Take Your Dog To Work Day, which is mounted by client Pet Sitters International, is coming in June. So, go see some cute and funny dogs at work photos.

How To Be An A-List Blogger

9 Ways To Find People To Follow On Twitter

Bloggers Misunderstand PR And Vice Versa

It’s About The Relationship, Stupid

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Twittering Tactically

You see a lot of posts about how businesses are using Twitter but most of them talk about the strategic approach, not the tactical application. Let’s brainstorm. Below are a few to get us started, and here is a post from Todd Mintz on a wide variety of Twitter uses. Please wade into the conversation if you have ideas.

My local wine bar, Corkscrew, should adopt this practice. Get a Twitter account (Corkscrew is available). Place table talkers asking patrons to follow them for wine specials that only Twitterers will find out about. On slow nights, Corkscrew can Twitter about “instant specials”.

Then, there is one of my favorite restaurants, Eez Fusion & Sushi. Use Twitter to remind me that Tuesday is $5 martini night, or that there are some new menu items. I’d follow you for that.

We have a lot of local musicians with large followings in our area. Why aren’t they Twittering about their upcoming events and venues?

Taxi! What a great way to order up a ride. Just Twitter your location and the time you need a ride to dispatch. Bam! There’s your chariot. No, that’s good customer service.

Hello, Procter & Gamble. Set up Twitter accounts for your brands and recruit product testers to follow you. You send them beta product, they respond with their thoughts via Twitter. You get good product development advice and pre-launch buzz.

Of course, we’ve been talking a lot here recently about following media folks via Twitter. Keep an eye on your favorite reporters, like Jeff Elder (@JeffElder) at The Charlotte Observer. Jeff is always Twittering for column ideas, and smart PR people Twitter back.

I used to work on the NC Tourism account. This is an organization that should adopt Twitter. The website is VisitNC.com, so naturally the overall Twitter username would be VisitNC, but then they would segment, adding users for mountain lovers (VisitNCMountains), coast lovers and heartland lovers. Here is how it might work. You are planning your NC vacation and begin following VisitNC. You start getting tweets about the cool things to see and do in the state. Once you’ve decided you are going to the mountains, you follow VisitNCMountains for more specific information about your destination. You stay connected to find out about the calendar of events while you are in the state.

Here is another good post with some additional ideas on using Twitter.

Your Twitter ideas, please. Oh, by the way, follow me on Twitter @MyCreativeTeam.

UPDATE: Found another good post on Twitter tactical uses.

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Links 5/21/2008

A few random links for you this morning from my stack of reading stuff:

Facebook Traffic Declines

Hulu Breaks Into Nielsen Top 10

Why Generation X Is Unhappy At Work

Three Successful Pricing Strategies For A Downturn

Marketing Whitepapers

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