By Linda Forrest
Over the next few weeks, I would like to address individually some of the components of what we at inmedia consider to be an integrated public relations program. One of the sales challenges that we can face as an agency is shattering prospects’ perception that public relations consists solely of sending out news release upon news release, as far and as wide as your distribution method can take it. At inmedia, we consider news releases to be just one of the many arrows in our media relations tactics quiver. This series will hopefully shed some light on other methods of generating media coverage that have proven effective for our B2B technology clients.
Today, I would like to address bylined articles. Let’s start with the basics: what is a bylined article? According to Dictionary.com, a byline refers to “A line at the head of a newspaper or magazine article carrying the writer’s name.” Therefore, a bylined article is a feature that is (ostensibly or actually) written by an expert in a particular space and published in an appropriate venue, such as a trade magazine, a consumer-focused publication, or on a web site.
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By Jill Pyle
The content we write for our clients can take many forms, including news releases, technology backgrounders, corporate backgrounders and bylined or contributed articles. To be able to write these kinds of pieces, we have to really understand our clients’ technology, market and audience. This is why we spend a lot of time at the beginning of a new client engagement just listening and learning.
During early conversations with new clients, we are never surprised to hear buzzwords. However, these buzzwords rarely, if ever, make it into the materials we write. That’s because we know the editors, writers, bloggers and analysts who receive these materials are numb to headlines about the latest, greatest, most revolutionary, innovative and ground-breaking new products to hit the market.
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By Linda Forrest
One of the attributes that inmedia is quite proud of is that with our agency, we feel that your whole story gets told. Because our vertical teams (meaning clients aren’t sold by the highest executives in the company and then work is actually implemented by a junior team) are involved in client engagement from the outset, everyone on an account has a thorough understanding of our client’s story and business objectives well beyond the scope of today’s news release.
But how do we come to understand a client’s whole story? Even before we’ve signed on with a new client, we typically will do some research into the media and analyst opportunity for a company so that when putting together our proposal, we have a reasonably accurate 35,000 foot view of the company’s media and analyst landscape – what publications and firms are covering what aspects of the company’s space, whether competitors are being profiled in areas where this potential client could be referenced as an expert resource and so on.
Then, at the outset of a client engagement, we undertake intensive briefings with a company to learn about the company history, the balance of its marketing activities, target vertical markets, information about the company’s technology platforms/products, competitive differentiator and so on. At these briefings, it is immensely beneficial to have multiple perspectives and viewpoints from within the company in the room. And here’s why.
By including in the conversation team members from sales, marketing, the executive suite, the technology knowledge-keepers, and hands-on account managers, we can ensure that we are in fact getting a company’s whole story from multiple perspectives. Tactical implementers may be privy to information that the executive suite is not and vice versa. As such, these sessions not only benefit us but can offer visibility internally as to company alignment, marketing and sales objectives, customer pain points, purchasing decision makers and influencers and so on. Our inclusion in this exercise enables us to ensure that the materials and campaign that we develop is suited to the right target audience, includes the correct key messages and will best tell the company story well beyond an immediate news hook. Perhaps, given a particular client’s circumstances or media market, the best approach is not news release driven but instead would be better served by an ongoing campaign of bylined articles. Or maybe a series of speaking opportunities will best meet the needs of a company looking to establish thought leadership in their particular space…
The only way that we can truly know what tactics and program will best suit a particular client is to have this in-depth understanding and then build a program that will help that company meet its marketing and sales objectives. In order to do that, we feel that it’s important to build a well-rounded understanding and that requires the cooperation and input of a range of knowledge-keepers.
By Francis Moran
About a month ago, as part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite fictions, I tackled the too-widely held myth that public relations can’t be measured. I described how, at inmedia, we establish a critical path, or set of outputs, for every project and ongoing program that allows our clients to certify that we’re exerting the amount of effort we said we would. This, I said, was a good starting point for program measurement, but a woefully inadequate one.
I went on to describe what we call outcomes, a set of clear and unambiguous objectives we set that tell our clients what they should expect by way of actual coverage by our target media and analysts, with more granular objectives established for specific program elements such as news releases, product launches, contributed articles, speaking programs, trade show support and so on. Applying such an approach turns the whole PR value proposition on its ear; instead of a cost centre that should be managed down to its minimum, a client can now view the PR function as an investment centre, and can answer the question, “Are these results, or outcomes, a sufficient return on the investment my PR agency or department is asking me to make?”
In my earlier post, I promised to go even further than this, to approach the holy grail of ROI measurement. What does it matter, I asked, if we achieve the outcomes we projected but the media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Or, maybe even worse since decisions then can’t be made about whether or not to continue the program, what if we can’t tell whether our clients’ business objectives are being advanced by our PR efforts?
In my practice, it is simply unacceptable that we not be able to measure the impact our PR program has on specific business objectives such as demand creation, web traffic, sales-cycle acceleration, human resources recruitment and retention, share price and, yes, even sales, revenues and profits. Let me share with you a really good case study.
We used to have a client whose managed service allowed large enterprises to inventory all their IT assets; not just desktops, laptops and servers but all peripherals, operating systems and applications, including versions and licenses. As a managed service, our client had a massive database that, in aggregate, yielded highly reliable insight into certain IT-related issues within corporate America. The company’s budget with us was very small, so our program consisted of identifying the occasional high-profile IT issue, commissioning a report that demonstrated how pervasive that issue was, and generating media coverage around it.
One our first efforts was in the wake of the Recording Industry Association of America’s announcement that it would sue not just individuals but also companies whose employees were using peer-to-peer applications to download copyrighted material. Our client’s data suggested that the use of such applications within corporate America was quite widespread, and our news release announced our client was making available a free subset of its managed service that would tell IT managers how pervasive P2P applications were within their environments.
The story went global and the market’s response was nearly overwhelming as our client had to babysit its servers to manage the demand for its little report. Huge impact on our client’s business, right?
Not so much.
While initially overjoyed, our client soon realized that very few of those who downloaded the free application were signing up as paying customers. Here was a textbook example of our level of effort, or outputs, being exactly right; the coverage results, or outcomes, being unbelievably massive; but the ultimate return for the client, or impact on its real business objectives, being negligible.
Now let me tell you about the same client, different story, fundamentally different result.
When Microsoft announced it was withdrawing support for its Windows 95 operating system, we went to work again. Our client’s database told us that Win95 was still installed on a hefty percentage of computers and that migrating to Windows XP, which is what Microsoft wanted its customers to do, might not be straightforward since there were a lot of applications deployed in the environment, many of them home-grown, that would function only on a Win95 OS. Again, our client made available a free download that would tell IT managers something about the pervasiveness of Win95 and its dependencies in their environments, the point being that they could then subscribe to the full service that would help them map a migration path to XP.
Well, as Victor Kiam used to say, Microsoft loved the product so much it bought the company! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Once again, the media coverage of our client’s announcement was truly global. Once again, the demand for its free application was considerable, although less than half what was seen for the P2P app. And once again, very few of the freebies converted to revenue. But one did, and that one was the world’s largest software company, which bought thousands of licenses and gave them away to large Win95 customers specifically so they could use it to map their migration strategy to XP. And, as already mentioned, a year or so later, Microsoft, which previously had been unaware of our client, bought the entire company in a tidy exit for our client’s founders and investors.
Sadly, we lost a client, but we gained a persuasive case study illustrating that outcomes, while a potent indicator of the ROI of a PR program, can be misleading; that only by measuring the impact can the real ROI be authoritatively calculated.
Since not every case produces the kind of clear and dramatic impact discussed here, I’ll come back to this subject in future posts and show many other ways, some quite prosaic but no less legitimate, in which the impact of PR activities can be effectively measured.
By Jill Pyle
January has been a long and busy month, with many current and potential clients eager to ramp their public relations programs. Looking back, it seems we’ve covered quite a bit of ground this month, everything from niche media outlets to PR measurement to the pros and cons of embargos and exclusives. Here’s a roundup of our blog entries, as well as some of the posts and bloggers that caught my attention in January.
January 2008
Francis
Five ways to dazzle a potential employer
Gay Acadian dog lovers, and other market niches
Fiction: Public relations can’t be measured
‘You have no privacy. Get over it.’
Embargos, yes; exclusives, no
It’s a small world after all
Danny
Embargos and how to use them effectively
If you want expertise and ROI, hire an expert
Analyze this (continued)
Going beyond no
Linda
Is journalist burnout the reason for escalation of the Hacks vs. Flacks war?
Revisiting the hacks vs. flacks job satisfaction debate
There’s a publication for every niche
Keeping up momentum after the PR launch
Jill
Preparing for a media launch
Why critical paths are critical
Links to Canadian, US, international and online newspaper lists
Blogs on my radar
Do you know whom you are pitching?
Melanie Seasons wrote a great piece on blogger relations, sharing a list of questions to ask before pitching bloggers.
If Consulting Clients Were Dogs, Wouldn’t We Train Them Better?
Eric Eggertson reminds us how important it us to manage client expectations.
Media Bullseye
I have been enjoying Media Bullseye’s blog and podcast summaries. Reading their PR Blog Jots is a great way to stay on top of popular and interesting posts that are making the rounds. Their PR Pod Jots are prefect for anyone who is having trouble finding time to listen to PR and marketing podcasts.
Del.icio.us bookmarks as measurement?
While comments, trackbacks and hits are often used as metrics for measuring the success of blog posts, Shell Holtz suggests looking at the number of people who save a post as a del.ici.ous bookmark. Using this metric, it seems our post with links to newspaper lists was of most interest to del.ici.ous users, with two people adding it to their bookmarks.
10 Ways to Get Coverage in Features (and only one is Response Source)
Sally shares a list of ideas you can use when looking to position your client as an expert source in feature articles. This is only one of many great blog posts written by the authors of Getting Ink.
