THINKing

Squirrel!

Like Dug The Dog from Pixar’s movie, Up!, marketers too often are distracted by the latest shiny thing. In my view, strategy should dictate tactics. But tactics are fun and strategy is hard, marketers say.  And that’s the way it is with social media. More than half of all marketers are currently engaged in some form of social media, according to eMarketer, but do they really have a grasp of how it fits into overall business objectives?

“With so much intense interest and activity, the big question is, Are marketers doing it right?” said Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer CEO and author of “10 Best Practices for Success with Social Media,” one of the Insight Briefs in the series. “Since social media marketing has the potential to affect so many areas of an organization,” he said, “the enormity of this opportunity leads many marketers to chase after every technique, tactic and metric that passes them by.”

Social media is not about marketing, and that is why I believe an organization’s PR group should take the leadership. Good public relations has always been about dialogue, listening to your publics before you respond.

Do you agree? Tell us who you think should be responsible for social media.

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Front Page Coverage - That’s What I Want!

Does everyone in business seem to think all you have to do is call the local daily paper and they come out to do a page one profile of your business? With all the downsizing, it’s hard enough just to get the media to open your emails or take your calls. Getting a front page story just because you want it: priceless.

I was talking with a prospect once who tossed this off as if it was no big deal, “of course we’d like to have the paper come down, meet our principals and do a profile of our business.” Another one wants to become a “rock star-type celebrity” in his industry.

Well, I’d like to win the lottery, but at least I know I have to buy a ticket first in order to be in the running.

Got any thoughts on this subject?

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Top Content

In case you missed some of our posts, here are the top five read of all time:

Twittering Journalists

Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers

Newspapers: Dig The Grave 

When Billboards Go Bad

It’s The Relationship, Stupid

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Social Media: Nothing New To See Here

Social Fresh, a conference on this thing we call social media, was held in Charlotte August 24.  The presentations were top-notch and the networking opportunities were excellent, but at the end of the day I can report there is nothing new about social media.

If you are in PR and have been practicing it correctly, you can handle social media. PR is about dialogue. So is social media.

If you are in marketing and have followed best practices, you can handle social media. Marketing is about crafting a relevant message and delivering it to the right person at the right time. So is social media.

The big questions about social media are the ones we have wrestled with in marketing for years: how do we integrate social media into the fabric of the organization, and how do we show hard-nosed business executives that social media does have an impact upon the bottom line.

Is social media new and different, or is it the same-old, same-old? We’ll be talking more about this in the days ahead, and would love to have your thoughts on the topic.

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Talk To Me, Don’t Pitch Me

Hey lazy PR people! Now that I have your attention, don’t send off-target information for inclusion in this blog, OK? Just like Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent, I get too many press releases from lazy PR people who can’t take the time to figure out what it is that I write about. To them, I’m just another name on the distribution list. Blast away with the shotgun and you are bound to hit something.

Come to think of it, I don’t really want press releases. Send me a short email with your idea for THINKing. I’ll read it, I promise. And if it is on-target, I’ll do something with it. Same holds true for people wanting to do guest commentary for THINKing.

Any PR people - lazy or otherwise - with a different idea? Tell me.

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Everyman 1, Influentials, 0

Back in the 20th Century, you might remember, PR people were advised to determine who were the influentials in their market and spend the majority of their efforts reaching these elites. The theory was that if you reached these centers of influence - the media or someone who could influence popular culture - you could develop more targeted programs and avoid a mass approach. Approaching influentials was less expensive than mass communications.

The internet changed all that. Information and influence have now been democratized. Like the corporate world, culture is less hierarchical and has fewer layers.We now have a cheap way to reach a mass audience. That’s not to say there is no place for influentials in your marketing program. Although, Duncan Watts disagrees. He thinks it is a waste of money to try to target what Malcolm Gladwell called “tastemakers.” But that is a story for another day.

The media is losing much of its power and its mass appeal thanks to its lockstep liberal media bias and the rise of citizen journalism. I still think PR pros can utilize the media to help reach key audiences, however there are new ways to spread your message. Blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter are the new media PR practitioners need to master.

Guy Kawasaki has some excellent advice for anyone who wants to master these new tools for profit. You’d be well advised to read and put his thoughts into practice.

By Harry Hoover

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Pithy Pitches

Your painstakingly crafted email pitch is completely customized and ready to send to the in box of that carefully targeted reporter. There it goes! Did you hear that? That was your email pitch being deleted.

Here’s why: You didn’t spend more time on the subject line than you did on the email body. Ragan has a feature entitled Email subject lines in eight words or less that provides some good examples of subject lines that worked. One of my favorites was,

“Colorado: Help bring a cow into the world”: This kind of subject line is hard to resist—and Greg Morton, group director of PR for Praco PR in Denver, was counting on just that reaction when he penned this subject line for his client, the Colorado Tourism Office.

In a previous post, THINKing provided Six Tips For Perfect Email Media Pitches. One of the primary tips,

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare could have been giving media relations tips when he penned this gem several hundred years ago. If you can’t get to the point in your subject line in 10 words or less, you need to work on your message. Keep the subject line short and to the point, and include the time frame if it is important to the pitch.

Burrelle’sLuce has a tip sheet on the topic that you may want to register to receive.

What are you waiting for? Start pitching.

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Building Brands One Touch At A Time

Thanks to Jason Falls, I saw this post today about brand touch points, which provided an excellent case study of how to bring your brand to life. So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.

In the old days, that is the 50s and 60s when you could reach all of America with a fairly simple media buy, you could build a brand primarily with advertising. Today, public relations leads - or at least should lead - the brand building charge. Your PR people should audit every contact you have with your publics to make sure those contacts resonate with your brand. Remember, as we discussed recently, that your employees are your primary communication vehicle.

I once worked on a project for an airline in which we looked at every point of contact. Some of these points of contact were out of the brand’s control, although customers didn’t think that they were. For instance, signage and parking at the airport were little things that angered customers that the airline could not control. In fact, out of something like 30 points of contacts customers mentioned, about half were out of the airline’s control. But these were essential to the brand. So, we had to come up with ways to strengthen the ones we could control and mitigate the ones we couldn’t.

This airline had a high percentage of repeat customers. So we offered them an email program that provided them with directional information and parking tips for the various airports this airline flew into. Where we couldn’t control, at least we could inform.

Have you done an audit of your brand’s touch points? Any surprises about what customers thought were points of contact within your control? How have you changed your touch points to better serve customers and build your brand?

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Phelps’ Bad PR “Shot”

Human fish Michael Phelps has two strikes against him and - although I hope I’m wrong - I predict he will strike out.

As you have heard by now, Phelps was photographed taking a marijuana bong shot. He jeopardized his multi-million dollar endorsement deals with this latest in what some call youthful indiscretions.

From a PR perspective, he has done the right things. He quickly apologized to his sponsors and to the public at-large for his “regrettable” behavior. Now, I’m not sure if he was apologizing for the bong hit or for having his photo taken while taking the bong hit. My guess is the latter. He has always been fawned on as being special. I don’t think anyone is giving him solid guidance on how to be gold medal winner, Michael Phelps.

This is not the first for Phelps in the youthful indiscretion category. You might remember his drunk driving arrest in 2004. There’s a pattern here folks.

Michael, a word from an admirer of your athletic ability: if you are going to make a living off being a role model, you have to be a good role model.

I’m not moralizing here. After all, I’m a Baby Boomer. We pretty much invented marijuana. I’m just saying that if you have a squeaky clean reputation, it needs to remain so if you are going to trade off it.

Now, a word for companies who use celebrity endorsers. Stop it. OK, that was two words. I’ve always thought the risks too great and the benefits too slim to justify this activity.

What do you think?

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Quick Hits

A couple of quick PR-related items in which you may be interested:

MediaKitty is an online source for connecting with travel journalists. Sign up and follow them on Twitter.

Bill Stoller, who writes the Publicity Insider Newsletter, is on Twitter as well. Follow Bill onTwitter and sign up for his newsletter.

Finally, here’s the PR Channel Dashboard, an online PR resource for articles, white papers, templates and tools.

NOTE: I’m speaking at the NC Main Street Conference 1/29/2009 on media relations. So, I’m dropping a few other links below for the benefit of my audience.

- Pitchengine

- Press Release Grader

- Instant Press Release

- PRWeb

- PRNewswire

- 20 Online Media Relations Links

- Top 17 Media Relations Links

- Twittering Journalist Wiki

- Six Tips For Perfect Email Pitches

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