By Linda Forrest
Anecdotally, it seems that September is always a busy time for a PR firm. Executives are coming back from the cottage, relaxed, and ready to work. This can mean that they’re ready to either start or restart a PR campaign with gusto, outline objectives for the year ahead, and commit some budget to meeting those objectives.
We’ve talked in the past about the folly of suspending marketing activities over the summer, advice that still holds true. Regardless, the reality is that we’ve got a number of launches slated for this Fall. Some clients are new, some are renewing their commitment to PR. Either way, there are a few items to keep in mind as you launch your PR campaign in the autumn:
Some longer lead publications will already be planning 2010. This is a great time to get on the radar of editors who are working to shape next year’s editorial calendars. If we can influence their decisions at this stage, we have the potential to make pitching our clients easier later on. In addition to helping shape editorial calendars, we’ll be collecting calendars as they’re released and checking where we will be able to pitch our clients into stories.
Just as they maintain a longer view into what editorial they will be crafting for next year, monthly lead times for some trade publications and commercial magazines are well in advance of publication dates, so the work that you do in September may not see print until the end of the year. Most clients have a range of media that cover the spectrum from instant coverage in blogs and online news portals, to daily and weekly papers and newsletters, to those with three-plus months of lead time, so if your PR firm has a dynamic media list, your coverage will span a reasonable period of time.
Although the field may be crowded in September, with your partners and competitors also likely ramping up their PR activities, this can work to your advantage. If a journalist is receiving pitches from similar companies, they may choose to do a round-up in a particular space or a comparison of competitive offerings. If partners are reaching out to the media, you can coordinate efforts to beef up your offering to key outlets. Of course, if you can bring customers to the table as well, you’ll be in great shape.
I had better get back to work on content development for these upcoming launches. Best practices are best practices, regardless of the time of year, but the tips above hold particular value as the leaves change and the wheels on school buses resume their revolutions round and round.
By Linda Forrest
The recent debacle surrounding pop singer Chris Brown’s domestic assault of girlfriend and fellow pop singer Rihanna, has been just terrible to behold. I don’t want to write about the finer details of the incident, rather the failed attempt of the guilty party to redeem himself by conducting a high-profile PR campaign showing his remorse at his behaviour and just how and why it completely backfired.
There are lessons for companies to learn from this and other recent PR misfires as there are some universal truths about how not to manage your reputation in the media.
1. Timing is everything
The Rihanna assault took place in February, but we didn’t see or hear anything from the then-accused until much later. The longer you wait to address negative issues, the more likely it is that you’re alienating your audience.
Another prime recent example is Sigg bottles. When the BPA scare hit, people flocked to aluminum or stainless steel water bottles, eager to avoid the frightening side effects linked to the chemical found in plastic drinking bottles. It’s since been discovered that the epoxy liner used in Sigg’s bottles manufactured prior to August 2008, contained the same chemical. The company found out about it in 2006, yet an announcement was only made in late August. The letter from the CEO was poorly conceived in this era of social media and the user community went simply bananas. Twitter, Facebook and the like were busy with angry Sigg customers demanding satisfaction. The company swiftly replied that they had “missed the mark” with their first attempt at disclosure and now are offering customers an opportunity to swap old bottles for new, the company having developed a BPA-free liner that’s been in all bottles since August 2008. Many people, myself included (full disclosure: both my husband and I own Sigg water bottles), feel that the company should have been more proactive in disclosing the information, a lesson learned the hard way amid a media firestorm that could have been avoided.
2. Choose the right channel for your campaign
Chris Brown and Rihanna are pop singers in their early twenties. The vast majority of their fans and supporters are young fans of urban music. Those outside of that market were unlikely to follow this pair and it’s doubtful would even know who they were, were it not for the media attention paid to the case. So, in one regard, it was utterly bewildering that Brown selected Larry King Live, that softball question lobbing septuagenarian, as the media outlet where he would address the case, apologize publicly and beg forgiveness of the masses. The outlet makes perfect sense in that King is well known for barely scratching the surface of the tough issues, never asking the hard questions; in other words, a perfect platform for someone looking to appear to be repentant but not particularly interested in being grilled. The platform, however, also skews way older (average LKL viewers are 65) than the people which Brown truly needs to win back, those likely to purchase his albums.
If, heaven forbid, you need to seek forgiveness from your customer base, or if you’re dealing with a potential crisis that could impact your reputation, make sure you’re using the right channels to speak to your market.
3. Watch what you say
This is the crucial point, and certainly where the Chris Brown redemption campaign fell down spectacularly. As happens with interviews, hours and hours of footage are edited down to soundbites, short segments that may remove context. As a result, it’s very important to stick to key messages and then, in a word, shut up. Brown was captured on film (the episode was taped as opposed to live; CNN must have feared that the vitriolic public would break their phone system, Twitter page and web site with their angry feedback) saying that he “didn’t remember” the incident. This slip of the tongue, as he later characterized it, in his post-redemption campaign, caused the entire effort to backfire, as the ire increased rather than receded, when the public heard this preposterous statement.
4. Actions speak louder than words
In both of the examples I’ve used to illustrate my points in this post, the wrong doers have only one recourse if they hope to redeem themselves – act responsibly and learn from past mistakes. There are no promises that they’ll win back their customers, but redemption only has a chance of taking place should these public figures change their ways for real, and not just offer excuses and apologies. Behave in a way deserving of your customers’ patronage, and the rest may fall into place.
By Leo Valiquette
It’s been a while since I have expounded on the subject of reference customers. (OK, it’s been a while since I’ve expounded on any subject on this blog, but here I am, back in form.)
In our work at inmedia, where we strive to engage with the editors of specific trade and industry titles to sell them on the merits of a client’s story, enthusiastic reference customers who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our clients’ products will, more often than not, make the editor sit up and take notice.
Customers who have actually opened their wallets for a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars-and-cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it.
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By Danny Sullivan
Often, the hardest thing to measure in PR is that ultimate metric of success for a client: impact. What real effect has media coverage had on helping a company achieve its business goals?
The truth is that in many cases it can be hard to discover exactly what marketing tactic brought the customers to the door, but it is usually accepted that PR plays its role at some point in the process. The clear challenge in measuring the true value of media coverage makes it all the sweeter for us when a company experiences a positive business impact that can be directly attributed to PR.
When CRM software company, Sword Ciboodle, recently engaged in a round of media activity targeted towards the insurance sector, the results spoke for themselves. Coverage, both feature and news-focused, was forthcoming in a range of insurance trade publications but, more importantly, that very same month the phone began to ring.
Sword Ciboodle sales director, Murray Farquharson, was immediately aware of the very real impact that PR had delivered.
“Within a month of the media activity, we had three good insurance leads come in the door, all of which can be directly linked back to the coverage,” he said.
Getting this sort of impact for our clients is what we continually strive for and reaffirms our faith that PR is a vital component of the marketing mix of activities. And it’s even better when the client realizes a deeper value behind the results.
“The remarkable thing is that the leads came from a level of seniority within those insurance firms that it would probably have taken us more than a year to get to under normal circumstances,” said Farquharson.
Now we’re really talking impact.
By Francis Moran
Like my friend Ian Graham over at The Code Factory, I subscribe to what he calls “the law of three.” That is, if something is mentioned three times in a short period, you should do something about it. Well, two different people over the past week asked me for advice on how to improve their writing. I shared some of my usual tips and I pointed each of them to a couple of posts on this blog where I previously wrote about our fondness for the The Chicago Manual of Style and about my personal approach in quizzing job applicants to determine if they are real writers or not.
Then this morning, my regular email from the excellent Daily Writing Tips was all about online style guides, making it the third mention in short order about ways to help improve your writing. So I thought I’d share some good counsel from my own experience and from Daily Writing Tips.
1. Read a really good newspaper every day
I’ve been telling eager writing students this for years, especially if they’re looking to get into the journalism or communications professions. But it holds true for any writer because excellent journalism is a daily lesson in effective writing. Journalists are trained to impart solid information in very quick order while avoiding superfluous wording and hyperbole. I can’t think of a better definition of what ought to constitute good writing in almost any business context.
Here in Canada, we are extraordinarily fortunate to have the Globe and Mail, in my opinion one of the top five English-language newspapers in the world. While the Globe and the others make my list mainly for their journalistic strengths, the Globe is my personal favourite because of the consistently high quality of its writing. My other top writing pick, London’s The Guardian, is now within easy reach for all of us, thanks to the Internet. Read either — or, even better, both — of these newspapers every day with a critical eye for how the stories are written and you’ll not only become a better writer, you’ll also be very well informed.
2. Practice makes perfect
If you want to be a writer, you must write. Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers” suggested that besides talent and opportunity, it takes a lot of hard work to become proficient at something; in fact, 10,000 hours of hard work. If I have spent just one quarter of each working day writing — and many, many days I have spent much, much more than that — then I have logged in excess of 15,000 hours at my keyboard. So maybe by now, I’m getting good at it! How many hours have you put in?
A fascinating study out of Stanford University suggests that text-messaging and Twitter updating are actually improving the literacy standards and writing skills of today’s young people, a sharp contradiction to conventional wisdom that would suggest the shortened words and fractured syntax usually employed in these communications forms would erode writing skills. Turns out, according to writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford, it’s a simple matter of practice — young people are spending a lot of time using text online, honing writing skills that they otherwise would have abandoned with their textbooks and essay assignments. “We’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” Lunsford is quoted as saying by Wired magazine.
3. Everyone needs an editor
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows this is one of my utterly intractable rules. Nothing, including this post, leaves our shop without at least one set of eyes reviewing it. A good proofreader catches the typos and what my wife likes to call the “thinkos” that always find their way into our copy, and this is hugely valuable. But a good editor does for your writing what going up against a better tennis player does for your tennis — she or he improves your game. Invite that challenge.
4. Have a good library of reference books
I have often mentioned how my copy of “The Pocket Oxford Dictionary” that always sits right beside my keyboard bears testimony, through its missing spine and generally dog-eared and bedraggled appearance, to the regularity with which I consult it. In the same short stack of references that I always keep at hand can be found “CP Style Book” and “CP Caps and Spelling” as well as a basic French-English dictionary and an ASCII character table. These are the tools of my trade.
If I swing my chair around to look at the bookshelves that line my office wall, I estimate that a good 10 feet of shelf space are devoted to other dictionaries, a thesaurus or three, and many other textbooks, references, style guides and general-interest books about writing. (One particularly treasured volume, even more ragged than my own Pocket Oxford, is a slim little work of ink-stained and yellowed paper titled, “The Educational Dictionary.” It has no date in it so I don’t know when it was published. But on the otherwise blank first page, it bears, in Gaelic, my late mother’s signature and the name of the school she attended in the early 1940s. Both for what it is and, mainly, for who owned it and gave it to me, it bears pride of place on my bookshelf.)
The rest of my top 10 list refers to specific sources either that I use or that were recommended in this morning’s Daily Writing Tips.
5. The Chicago Manual of Style
This is probably the definitive bible of American-English writing. You can buy it for about $50 or, even better, subscribe online.
6. The Canadian Press references
For we Canadians living between the American and British versions of the English language, the various references published by our domestic news-gathering service, The Canadian Press, are indispensable. You can subscribe online or buy dead-tree versions here.
7. When using the Queen’s English
I have never used them but Daily Writing Tips recommends the free, downloadable “The BBC News Style Guide” and “Guardian Style”, available free online and for sale as a book.
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How to ruin your chances of making the transition from journalist to PR practitioner
August 31, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest The Bad Pitch Blog is an entertaining, albeit harrowing, waltz through our industry, showcasing the epic fails of the worst of our colleagues. A recent post highlighted the unfortunate correspondence between a journalist looking to become a PR practitioner and a prospective employer. It’s not pretty. MediaBistro summarized the piece late last […]
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Kudos for empowered customer service
August 28, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Regular followers of this blog will know that lousy customer service is one subject certain to get my rant on. My consistent points are that the cost of acquiring customers is almost always far higher than the cost of keeping them, that effective customer service is the only sustainable competitive differentiator, and […]
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Interconnectedness and disconnectedness
August 26, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Senator Ted Kennedy died late yesterday, the latest tragedy in the long string to befall the family that has so captivated the world these last 50 years. His passing is also the latest high-profile death to spawn a flurry of internet traffic, blog posts, Tweets, and the like. Being a child of the 80s, […]
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United broke more than a guitar, it also broke Francis’s first law of competitive differentiation
August 21, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran When baggage handlers for U.S. air carrier United Airlines manhandled and broke Dave Carroll’s beloved, custom-made, $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar while he and his band-mates looked in impotent disbelief from inside the aircraft, and then refused to compensate him for it, the Canadian musician didn’t get mad, he got even. He wrote […]
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A year in the life
August 20, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest The last year for me has been filled with work of a different sort entirely. It’s hard to believe that I bid a fond farewell to the blogosphere just over one year ago, as I went on maternity leave. We welcomed wee Parker in early September of last year and since he […]
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We were on a blog hiatus at inmedia
August 19, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia. The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, […]
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RIP Kodachrome
June 23, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I have often said that my first job in this business was taking pictures, and it’s quite true. The very first money I made in the media-communications racket came from squinting through the viewfinder of a single-lens-reflex camera and capturing what I saw on a strip of plastic coated with a light-sensitive […]
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The bearable likeness of a recovery
June 12, 2009 by Mark Sue
By Mark Sue (Mark Sue is managing director of RBC Capital Markets. This blog post is a summary of his report from the recent RBC Technology Conference.) There’s a sense that the worst is behind us, according to key executives who presented at the RBC Technology Conference. Focus companies included Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, JDSU […]
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