THINKing

Leaders Must Understand And Practice PR

Leadership requires an understanding of public relations. To lead you must be willing to listen and gain trust from followers. That’s what PR is about: dialogue and honesty. People don’t always have to agree with you to follow you. But they do have to trust you.

We have just seen – on both sides of the aisle – the largest failure of leadership I’ve ever witnessed. Our elected officials – after saying they had a deal – could not get members of their own parties to go along with an agreement to shore up financial markets. Consider this: 40 percent of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans opposed the legislation. If their own colleagues in the House don’t trust them, why should we?

Our governmental leaders, for too long, have given us the partisan-painted “truth”, have made decisions that benefit their cronies and have cried wolf too many times. Clearly, they were not listening to members who were reluctant to spend $700 billion for what many considered a bailout of failed executives.

If this were a real crisis, many believe, they would have developed a crisis communications plan to get America on board with their plan. And the Congress would have pulled out all the stops and voted last week.

From President Bush on down, we have seen no real leadership, nothing that would indicate this is anything more than a scare to get voters’ attention before the election. For too long partisanship has come before country. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, if really convinced we have a crisis, would have just called for a vote instead of berating Republicans first.

I believe many of these elected officials have just lost their jobs because they don’t understand the elements of PR and how it relates to leadership. What do you think?

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Word

The oldest form of media still is the best when it comes to spurring consumer action. Word-of-mouth from family and friends still is the most trusted source of information, despite all the hype about the digital world and social media. This is borne out by a Mediavest survey on trust in sources of political information. The survey indicates,

…the most credible and influential source of such information comes not from professional media outlets, but from friends, family and colleagues via word-of-mouth.

Now, I’m not saying that online social networks can’t be used to amplify your message through digital word-of-mouth. It can.  But you have to understand both the analog and the digital process of building buzz.

Gord Hotchkiss, in a MediaPost Search Insider column, says,

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.   In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.    If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

 GasPedal has an excellent post on developing your own word-of-mouth buzz program in 5 simple steps. According to the post, it’s as simple as finding your “talkers”, create a way to communicate with them (email would be my recommendation, as well as GasPedal’s), give them something to talk about, make it easy for them to spread the word and then thank them publicly.

Want some more ideas on developing word-of-mouth programs? Check out this THINKing piece.

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Dusty Archives – September 2008 Edition

Once again, it is time to sift through the dusty archives here at THINKing to pull out some gems you may not have seen the first time around. Let me know if there are some posts you particularly enjoyed and I’ll feature them in a future edition.

Shallow Brands

Creativity & You

It’s In The Cards

Activate Your Customers With Email

Good PR, Manipulative PR

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I’ve Got Your Policy Right Here, Dude

Want to know how a company can make me really angry? Well, it makes about anyone angry, really.  All they have to do is indicate their inflexibility by saying “it’s our policy…” We’ve talked about bad customer service here before. But I had something happen just today that blew my mind.

Dixie Homecrafters – yeah, I’m using their real name here – had called a couple of weeks back and I had agreed to listen to their pitch for Gutter Guardian because I have no business being on a ladder 30 feet in the air cleaning out leaves. Something came up and my wife and I couldn’t be here at the same time to hear the pitch. So, we let them know they could come over and talk with the lovely Mrs. Hoover and she could make the decision.

Well, I don’t know if this company has air conditioning in its cave yet, but I doubt it. Here’s what the company rep said,

“Well, we only do these meetings if both spouses can be there. That’s our policy.”

WTF!

So, my wife says, we do this kind of thing all the time. Rarely are we both together to listen to sales pitches. One hears it, gives an opinion and we either do it or not based upon that.

“Well,” says the Neanderthal, “that’s not the way we do business.” Mrs. Hoover tells him cordially that IS the way we do business and ends the call.

Caveman has the nerve to call me to try to reschedule when both of us are here. I did not cordially end the call.

So, if you ever hear me say anything about my company’s policy, shoot me, because I have clearly lost my mind.

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Links – 9/25/2008

Greetings, THINKers. I’ve been on the road this week and have not had time to blog, but I have had time to read. Here are a few things in which you might have interest:

Putting Social Media In The Newsroom

How To Say Nothing In 500 Words

The Truth About Creating A High Traffic Blog

How To Avoid Being A Bozo When Presenting

Global Brands Adapt To Meet Changing Economic Challenges

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Links – 9/19/2008

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile

How To Grow Your Personal Brand (Happy Blog Birthday, Jason)

Where To Find PR Help In The Web 2.0 World

What We Can Learn From EMail Spammers

13 Ways To Promote Your Next Blog Post

From THINKing’s Dusty Archives:

- Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers

- Great Employees = Happy Consumers

- RSS 101 – 16 Links To Get You Started

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Social Media: You Are Wearing Me Out

Apparently, many people are tired of social media. According to a Synovate study about social networks,

We spoke with over 13,000 respondents aged 18-65 years in 17 markets around the world to find out who’s connected and who’s not, as well as attitudes and online behaviours. Some of what we found surprised us… like more than a third of social networkers say they are losing interest in social media. And how many people do not even know what it is.

Jay Small recently riffed on the topic. THINKing also has discussed the topic of social network fatigue before,

Like everything new, people will flock to it initially and then the ones from short-attention span theater move on to the next thing. Bound to happen. It does every time. But that doesn’t mean that social networks are a thing of the past. There still is value in them. I believe the biggest value is in those social networks that center on some niche. Smart marketers will develop their own networks. Think Apple. They had a network of brand evangelists before the term social media was in gestation.

Here’s my advice if you are going to be involved in social media, or anything for that matter: focus. Don’t try to be involved in every new network that comes along. I turn down requests everyday from someone trying to get me into some new network. Pick no more than four and work them.

What are your favorite social networks? Have you abandoned any because you are worn out on them?

UPDATE: I just ran across this and couldn’t leave it unremarked. Social networking has just passed porn as the most popular online activity.

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No Hanging Chads

Hey, THINKers. I need your vote, if you like this blog.

THINKing is in the running for best marketing blog in the Blogger’s Choice Awards. We were leading, but now are #2. This contest requires registration to ensure that the blogger is not voting multiple times. So, I’d really appreciate your effort and support.  Thanks.

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Search Me

Marketers can thank their lucky stars for the best thing that ever happened to them: the Internet. In the past marketers used intuition and research to try to figure out consumer behavior. Today, look at how your customers are searching the web and you’ll be able to see consumer behavior almost in real time.

Some recent research indicates that there are four types of consumer groups with different intentions and motivations for searching online: exploration, entertainment, shopping and information. Your business objectives will affect the type of group you go after and the manner in which you go after them.

Let’s take a look at the prospects for My Creative Team. Search engines send about 20 percent of total traffic to our website, and Google is responsible for nearly 90 percent of that traffic. So, it makes sense to take a look at the Google keywords sending traffic to our site, as well at Google keywords driving traffic to all ad agency sites.

In our business, prospects search for information in a couple of ways. They look for the tactical things that we do and they look from a strategic perspective, as well. People search fairly equally for the tactical term “web design” and the more strategic term “ad agency”.

You can determine what services are of most interest to your customers by evaluating search volume, too. A search shows that consumers seeking out marketing information are interested in these subjects ranked by highest volume to lowest volume search:

• marketing
• web design
• public relations
• email marketing
• print advertising
• press release writing

When I was doing work for North Carolina Tourism, we found that there was a difference in searches based upon whether people were planning a longer vacation or a weekend getaway. Vacationers began searching several months out and wanted detailed information about a locale, things to do, see, places to stay and dine. Weekenders may search only a few days out and they look for events, as well as dining and hotel deals.

I heard Bill Tancer, author of Click, tell an interesting story about online behavior. Tancer says that at one time retailers only emphasized prom dresses in April and May. Makes sense, right?

But guess what a detailed study of online search and purchase data showed? Fashion-forward shoppers were searching out prom dresses in January and budget-minded shoppers were looking in April and May for deals. Retailers were missing out on a bonanza. Those early, fashionable shoppers are willing to spend more to get what they want. That’s high margin business.

I was talking with folks at a company recently about this topic and learned that their marketing department does not routinely get access to web statistics from their IT department. IT can be a marketer’s best friend. You need to make the connection with them so that you can take full advantage of search in your marketing program.

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Social Media Best Practices

The OnlineMarketerBlog threw out the challenge for us to discuss our social media best practice. The blog’s author, DJ Francis, called me “impressively tenacious”. That’s politically correct for cranky, I think! Anyway, here goes.

Social media is public relations. PR is about dialogue, always has been. Social media allows us to extend our conversations beyond our limited geography. Despite that, the best practices haven’t changed from PR to social media. My best practice was said in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: to thine own self be true.

What I mean by this and what Shakespeare meant may diverge a bit. I believe that you must be yourself. No false persona. This is the PR advice I have always given clients and used myself. I don’t want to be one person at work, another at home, another with my friends, yet another online. To have a consistent brand, you must always be the real you. You must not let various publics define you.

This is why we so often dislike politicians. They say one thing in California, another in rural North Carolina. They let the audience and the occasion define what they say and how they say it. This is decidedly not being true to yourself. This also is probably why I’ll never be elected to anything. Want to know where I stand on an issue? Just ask me.

It is just too hard to juggle different selves. Even more so with the advent of social media where everything you say is recorded for posterity and fed by RSS, Twitter, and Friendfeed for the world to see.

So, be yourself. End of sermon.

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