By Leo Valiquette
More often than not, clients of inmedia will set their sights on coverage in a flagship business publication like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s or Fortune. Sometimes a client has a story that would appeal to such a prestigious publication, other times they do not. There is also the matter of whether such publications fit the bill as Tier One media targets for a specific client, but that’s a different post.
Regardless of the respect commanded by such publications, their writers and editors, struggling with fewer resources and tightened budgets, are as prone as anyone else to occasional inaccuracies and errors in their work. Perhaps they even, on occasion, fall prey to temptation and give their copy a little extra sensationalist spin to grab the attention of fickle readers.
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By Linda Forrest
It’s been busy around these parts the past few weeks as we had several clients exhibiting at marquee trade shows, and our own Francis Moran attended these shows to support our clients and get a finger on the pulse of our clients’ industries. If his Tweet, upon experiencing Retail’s BIG Show, the annual conference and exhibition of the National Retail Foundation (NRF) is any indication, 2011 is off to a good start: “Mood at NRF, the major retail trade show, is very upbeat. Quote from a veteran CES attendee equally applies here: ‘Woohoo, America’s back.'”
When I saw this, I was curious to know if this positivity denoted an upward trend across the conference and trade show universe, as, with so many marketing activities, investment in trade shows and conferences had waned in recent years for a variety of reasons – lack of budget, increased focus on no-travel events, virtual tradeshows and webcasts, podcasts and other reasonable excuses to put dollars elsewhere.
But as with all things, the pendulum swings and we’re seeing at least what seems to be a renewed investment in attending trade shows and events. Gone, however, are the days when participation in any and all industry events in your sector is a given part of your marketing strategy and budget, as seemed to be the case prior to the dot-com bubble bursting.
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By Linda Forrest
It’s a busy few weeks for inmedia, as our managing partner, Francis Moran, and several clients attend various conferences and trade shows. I expect Francis will write a blog post about his adventures at these events upon his return.
I plan to write next week about whether the tradeshow, a marketing program element that has taken a hit in the past few years due to both the increased adoption of technology and the struggling economy, is back. Just anecdotally, important events never fell completely from the agendas of the technology companies we work with, but it does seem that there’s an appreciable uptick in the number of events we’re seeing clients participate in in the past six months or so. Stay tuned for my post next week that looks at the actual facts and figures.
Meanwhile, here are the comings and goings of several inmedia clients over the next week:
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By Leo Valiquette
For those of you who may have missed it, London has been a battlefield between police and tens of thousands of hostile student protesters over the past week as Britain’s coalition government targets higher education with its austerity measures intended to help with economic recovery.
Now, I don’t claim any deep knowledge of British politics, or more than a layman’s understanding of economics, but I couldn’t look at this powder keg situation without thinking that it is a sterling example of focusing too much on a short-term fix at the expense of long-term gain, a trap that can snare the management team of a company as easily as a government in power.
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Britain’s coalition government are voting through legislation that will allow university tuition to be as much as tripled and other support programs, such as teaching grants, to be canceled.
While this may put money in government coffers in the near term, I find it difficult to understand how making it more difficult to obtain an education serves the best long-term interests of the British economy, or any industrialized economy. I tend to agree with the general sentiments that Ian Parkinson, president of the Bolton branch of Britain’s National Union of Teachers, expressed in an article last week. Talented youth will be priced out of higher education, making it that much more difficult to find gainful employment in a tight job market, he said. And if the next generation of workers cannot secure well-paying jobs and are saddled with huge student debts, what impact will this have on overall consumer spending?
While the immediate economic pressures cannot be ignored, what happens five, 10 and 15 years from now, as baby boomers retire and shortages of skilled labour in key sectors of the economy become more acute? How can a nation innovate and be competitive on the global stage if its young people can’t afford the education that will prepare them to take up the torch?
It is an approach that attempts to fix an immediate problem without giving sufficient consideration to the future. Janice Calnan, a specialist in organizational change with whom I have worked, asserts that any organization in need of change, regardless of whether it is a government, a publicly traded company, or a startup trying to bring technology to market, must focus on a vision of where it wants to be, rather than on the immediate problems it faces. Focusing on the problems, she says, only begets more problems.
My interpretation of this is that focusing too much on your immediate challenges and how to resolve them will cause you to lose sight of the big picture. It is tactics in the absence, and at the expense, of strategy.
At inmedia, we have seen numerous companies fall into the same trap. When times are tough and key stakeholders, such as shareholders and investors, want to see results to improve fiscal performance, out comes the axe. Unfortunately, PR and marketing activities are often viewed as areas of business that don’t have enough impact on the bottom line and take the first hit.
But when the volume of leads filling your pipeline is in decline, the marketing machine must become that much more aggressive. We have consistently advocated that companies that maintain — or even increase — their marketing presence during a downturn emerge from the downturn stronger than their competitors since they are in a position to springboard into the new opportunities as they arise.
One way to prime the pump and differentiate your brand from competitors is to employ a highly consultative approach, rather than market yourself based on cost and features. In this way, you develop a thorough understanding of the prospect’s pain and the willingness of the prospect to address that pain. They will come to see you as a trusted partner who is eager to serve their best interests. Having established this kind of relationship, where do you think they will turn when they are ready to spend again?
While reducing cash burn and improving cash flow are, of course, paramount when times are tough, austerity measures must be implemented as part of a long-term strategy. Don’t axe those activities that are vital to your ability to act when opportunity comes knocking. Without such vision, your organization may find itself too weak and forgotten by the market to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
Picture: The executioner’s, or “heading,” axe on display at the Tower of London.
By Linda Forrest
Customer service is an area of keen interest for us, as those who regularly read this blog will know.
It’s clear that the increased adoption of social media in recent years has had a tremendous, we think positive, impact on customer service. The fact is that online communications can act as a logical extension of effective customer service programs, but can also fail miserably if the organization doesn’t have a solid strategy in place as well as the systems to support that strategy, the people to run it and a commitment to ongoing success in this area.
Am I a customer service expert? No, but I am a life-long consumer, and an adept marketer of technology products and services. These two things combined give me a well-rounded perspective on how online communications, including social media, can be the lynchpin or the undoing of your reputation with customers, prospects and the industry in which you operate.
Let’s first examine the systems that drive your customer relations efforts.
Over the years, through various clients and prospects, we’ve been exposed to a variety of technologies that make the back-end of customer service systems more effective and efficient. Knowing that technologically there is a better way than the impersonal, automated, aggravating methods that many companies deploy, and suffering through these inferior systems is especially painful. We’ve all had the phone ring, only to pick it up and hear dead air while the predictive dialer connects you with an agent. We’ve all started a customer service session on one channel – phone, email, Twitter, chat, etc. – to then move to a different channel and have to reiterate all of the basic information all over again, as though the first part of the session never took place.
I know for a fact that there are effective technologies you can adopt that will make support sessions run smoothly. It’s a rare case when a customer calls your support center to report that everything is on track; rather, it’s usually when there’s a problem that they reach out. Why ruffle feathers further with ineffective systems that just add to the aggravation? In a word, don’t.
The fact that in our media-centric world the consumer is empowered to share their thoughts on a product or service, instantly, without barriers, over social media, is both exciting and terrifying, isn’t it? If someone has a great experience, they broadcast it and everyone knows it. If someone has a terrible experience, the same is also true. How you respond to customers – those with kudos and those with complaints alike – is what will determine your reputation at large.
So, you’ve got the right customer support technology in place. The next piece of the puzzle is people. This is a critical part of the equation, especially in this citizen-journalist climate where everyone has multiple broadcast channels of their own, be it YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or the like.
You need to have sufficient team members monitoring these channels for mentions of your brand, good and bad. With a cohesive strategy in place, your team is empowered to respond to brand mentions and engage in reparations where appropriate.
These comments may reside on your own communications channels – forums on your website, comments on your YouTube channel, posts on your Facebook wall, Tweets to your handle, etc. On owned channels, monitoring of the discussion should be an obvious task that’s already taking place. There should be clear customer support mechanisms on your online properties. Don’t make it difficult for your market to interact with you. Obscurity is a fraud to hide nothing.
Savvy companies know that negative feedback is nothing to shy away from. If your customers are not shouting in your ear, they’re shouting in someone else’s about how crappy you are. Better that you know what’s being said about you so can make steps to fix whatever is wrong.
There have been some great posts written about this topic, that I would highly recommend reading if this topic is of interest to you, and it should be, regardless of if you’re in B2B, B2C or a consumer.
B2B Social Media and the Customer Service Funnel
A Loyal Follower Is Hard To Find (And Keep)
Why Social Media is Inseparable From Customer Service
Picture from: Yackie Mobile Blog
By Leo Valiquette
