Category Archives: Public Relations

2 reasons why you need to engage your customers

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Two quick things you need to know:

  1. From Mediapost: 40% of customers now say they will not buy a brand if they can’t find the right information about it online.
  2. From Cone Research: Four-out-of-five consumers have changed their minds about a recommended purchase based solely on negative information they found online.

What does this mean for you?

It means that in a world where consumers can easily access information online before making a purchase, not only should you have all the available information your customers need to make an informed decision online, but you should also make sure this information actually helps them achieve their preferred outcome.

People have many options at their disposal, this is a double edged sword because they ask their friends or look for reviews about you.

The only way to counter this is to engage customers. How? Social networks provide you with a great opportunity to do it because you can see what people are looking for, searching for, asking for. Combine this with your website analytics and you have a good idea of how and where to position your message.

To counter the second point, well let’s just say you have to do what you say. Marketing is about what you do, not what you say. So if you don’t want people saying negative things about you, do what’s right. It’s as simple as that!

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Want to become more trustworthy on social media? Learn from Domino’s Pizza

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It’s somewhat easier to gain trust but what happens when you lose it?

Case in point: Domino’s Pizza.

If you don’t know or remember, a pair of employees filmed themselves doing a plethora of horribly disgusting things to Domino’s sandwiches before serving them and posted the video on YouTube 2009. It went viral in an instant, racking up more than a million views, blowing up on Twitter, rampaging around Facebook walls and firing up the blogosphere.

The incident nearly doomed Domino’s because of its bad initial crisis management, but now it’s reinvented itself as wholly transparent through those digital platforms, according to MarketingDaily.

From the article:

Dennis Maloney, vice president multimedia marketing at Domino’s, told the Association of National Advertisers’ social media conference in New York Thursday about how the pizza chain reinvented itself.

 

Maloney said that while the fix included fixing the crust, sauce and cheese, the company had to alter — fundamentally — how it presented itself to the public. In short, it had to integrate with social media; the company based its reinvention on transparency.

 

Part of that complementary digital/social effort involved a pledge that Domino’s would stop using aesthetic doctoring of marketing photos of its food. The company then encouraged consumers to take photos of their pizzas when they arrived, and upload the shots to a Domino’s social hub. The goal was to promulgate the new transparency position and prove that Domino’s pizza looks good as is.

 

The fact that some of the photos were critical and showed how the pizzas arrived in various states of disarray led to a national TV spot in which Domino’s CEO J. Patrick Doyle, displaying one of the photos, apologized — saying it would not happen again.

This is good stuff. This is called taking the extra step to regain customers trust. It’s also a great strategy to regain credibility for it’s product.

Back to the point, if Domino’s Pizza would not have jumped into social media it would’ve been a worst disaster. They recognized that they needed to jump in and acknowledge their mistake. That was the first step in regaining trust.

It’s funny how being transparent makes you more trustworthy. If companies behaved themselves accordingly and put the time in to build relationships with their audience we wouldn’t have these types of PR disasters.

Sounds obvious. Well, it is. You to put in the time to become trustworthy. The more time you spend on them the more trusting you become.

This isn’t surprising. People automatically start trusting other people when they grow familiar with them. But it’s not just that, you have to add value to the relationship.

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You’re not part of the conversation so why should I care

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This is what your customers say when you are ignoring them.

There are countless companies, both big and small, that are still not online. And when monitoring and responding to online chatter are becoming more important as customers take to the Internet to voice praise and complaints, not being online makes a huge difference in how you are perceived.

Imagine that you are a Fortune 500 Company from the energy industry. Imagine that you took your operations to Mexico where people are not open to companies changing the landscape of their ecosystem; where people are somewhat illiterate when it comes to hi-tech energy saving solutions. Imagine that news about how you are damaging the environment is online in the form of videos, pictures and articles from local and international news.

This is the situation Sempra Energy finds itself in.

Do a search for Sempra Energy online and you’ll see their website at the top but everything else is from news sources. Their Twitter account is sporadic and if they do post something, it’s news. No interaction.

It seems they don’t know that there’s a problem.

Meanwhile conversations about Sempra are happening on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. But where is Sempra?

Nowhere to be found.

This might not be you. You might not have this problem, yet. But if your customers are voicing their complaints and you are not there to respond, what do you think is going to happen?

Exactly!

There are an infinite numbers of ways to approach this problem, but the principle remains the same: don’t ignore, acknowledge.

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Is Klout a good way to measure online influence?

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One thing marketers yearn for is to the find the all elusive influencer or influencers who can help them spread the word about a new product or service. And now, with social networking tools giving us instant access to an almost infinite amount of people, finding these influencers becomes easier.

In theory.

Here’s the problem: measuring online influence is a hard problem to solve. There are many factors that contribute to measure a person’s influence. Another reason why it’s hard is because online influence, just like Google rankings, can be easily gamed.

There are quite a number of companies who are trying to crack this problem. One of them is Klout, who has been making major inroads into the emerging social media measurement business. And, social monitoring and analytics tools like Radian6 are using Klout’s data to find those online influencers.

Simply understanding how Klout works, a clever person can systematically do things to influence his/her Klout score to appear influential and then use that as a reference.

With that said, it doesn’t answer the question of this post: Is Klout a good way to measure online influence?

Collin Kromke says it’s total BS. Why?

Because one’s influence isn’t temporary.

I agree. A person’s influence shouldn’t go up or down if you stop ‘socializing online’. These scores make it look as if we were playing a game to see who interacts the most to get that influence score up.

But at this point it’s all experimental because, as stated above, it’s a daunting task to measure one’s online influence.

What do you think, is there a better way to measure online influence?

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How you can protect your online reputation

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You cannot control what others say about you, but you can choose what you write about yourself that you want to share. Today, your reputation precedes you. Whether you have a business or are self-employed, a new contact is likely to run a search before officially asking for a resume so it is necessary that you make a good first impression by having a positive online presence.

Here then, are a few things you can do to protect your online reputation:

Build up your social media presence

One of the simplest strategies to protect one’s good name is to purposefully put good content on the web– on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.. In other words, the best defense is a good offense. Selecting to post on sites that get higher rankings improves results and helps the good reputation-building content appear near the top of search results.

Use testimonials of satisfied customers

There are people who are already saying great things about you: your customers. Use your testimonials.

Turn unsatisfied customers into satisfied customers

The best way to get people saying good things about you is to make them happy. A formerly unhappy customer who is made happy tells ten people. With that said, apologize for mistakes and solve problems fast.

Listen and respond

Track what is being said about you. Lots of people will say negative things, some justified, some not. You can’t win every argument, you can’t stop perpetual complainers, and some people will have legitimate issues. This is ok, as long as far more people are saying positive things.

You want to make sure that most of what is being said is positive; that you’re responding as best you can to the negative; and you’re doing all you can to encourage your fans to support you.

 

Bottom line: It all comes down to building credibility before you need it.

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3 Ways to guarantee you’ll get amazing PR

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If you’re a small business your marketing budget is quite limited, so you need to get really creative. Effective PR is a cost-effective way to gain editorial exposure for your product, get more leads, generate more sales and build a great brand.

Getting a mention from the media makes you look more credible than traditional advertising. So having a PR strategy is a must.

But before you do that, you need to make sure you have a few things covered first.

What’s your market?

Be very specific about the community that will benefit from using your product of service. This helps you choose which media to work with based on the impact it will have.

What are the benefits relevant to my market?

People don’t care about features, they care about what those features do for them. Believe it or not, we subconsciously ask ourselves ‘So What?’ every time we are pitched a new product or service. How do you answer the ‘so what’ about your product or service?

If the product or service you are promoting does not benefit them in any way, you need to go back and reevaluate your value proposition. This is not just important for you but also when pitching the media and it has to backed up by some numbers.

What media does my market use?

Do you know which media outlets your target market typically reads, views or listens to? You need to know. If they are not so obvious you will need to do some timely research.

 

Look at these questions as a checklist of key factors you need to know cold before pitching your services or product to the media.

What would you add?

 

 

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How social media has changed PR

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Simply: Social Media allows you to become part of the conversation and answer questions before they are asked.

Doesn’t that sound great?

Here are 4 ways social media has changed Public Relations forever:

Relationships

Businesses now understand that they can no longer bombard people with information, but it is rather up to them to develop the relationships directly with the consumers. Social media users are now carriers and distributors of content, rather than just the media.

Because social media is great way to engage people, it also means that if you solve their problems they will be more likely to want a relationship with your organization.

Remember that the most important rule of Social PR is to listen.

Content

Businesses must create content that meets a need. As a business, you want to answer customers questions and/or concerns, as well as news about your organization that matters to them. Negative points, if you’re just pushing out promotional content that’s out of context for the customer.

Response

Because conversations between people are happening all the time, hopefully about your brand, it’s imperative that businesses respond immediately. Fast response is the new normal and every minute and hour that goes by, customers will get mad and might start talking negatively about your brand.

Monitoring and Tracking

Monitoring allows a company to gain insight as to how their brand is perceived online, which can be used to develop future strategies. There are useful social media monitoring tools you can use to manage this process.

 

What do you think, did I miss something?

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The most important rule in social media PR

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in social media listen first

“One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears, by listening to them.” – Dean Rusk

So what’s the first step in social media marketing then? Listening.

Listen and then talk

is not the same as hearing. We all like the sound of our own voice and it often stands in the way of understanding the person we’re talking to (your customers). If we really want to understand people we have to pay attention to what they say and do and once we do that we’ll stand a better chance of influencing their behavior. Nothing new with this statement, repeated often but rarely practiced. I repeat again, we like the sound of our own voice.

 

You need to give a damn about what people have to say to do social media properly and only deep empathy translates into insight.

 

You need social monitoring tools

If you aren’t familiar with social monitoring tools, here are to add to your arsenal, here’s a . But the quickest way to start listening immediately is to user Social Mention:

Suppose you want to know where you brand is being mentioned online across different channels (who doesn’t?), you go to Social Mention and type in your brand name and hit search. For example I did a , in the results page you get mentions for  ‘foursquare’ across different categories such as blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and networks.

You can also search for keywords related to your business such as ‘________’ and it will give results where that appears across social channels; you can then go that individual channel and engage in that conversation.

There are both free and paid tools but most of what you need to get started is already on your website in the form of comments, analytic stats, RT’s, Twitter trackbacks, newsletter stats. These will provide you with some good data and information before you move on to the external tools.

Below is an interview with Amber Naslund, co-author of the new book The Now Revolution and VP of social strategy at Radian6. Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

sme_bw2010_amber_naslund_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

I like to say that every business should strive to know their customers better than they know themselves, this takes a lot more effort and goes way beyond the ‘I want them to buy my product and shut up’ mindset most traditional businesses have. Luckily social media tools let us have a 1 to 1 conversation with customers, and enables us to get under their skin to uncover those hidden insights that might just give us a new idea for a new service or product.

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WordPress plugins that I use for public relations and why

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wordpress plugins for PR

Last week I wrote about some free social media tools I use for PR,  today I’ll let you know how to enhance those tools with powerful WordPress plugins I use for PR. There is an infinite number of wordpress plugins available that’s it’s hard to know which ones to use.

As a Publicist I need to be able to:

  • have a website optimized for search engines
  • a way to manage my content
  • easy access to key traffic statistics
  • a fast loading website
  • a way to make it easy for people to share my content
  • a way to know who interacted with my content on social channels
  • a way to track my content
  • a way to manage my comments
  • a way to know what content people like the most

There isn’t a list of plugins out there that’s specifically addresses these points so here is mine.

WordPress SEO plugin

Created by SEO guru Yoast, this is the most complete SEO plugin for WordPress out there. Ignore it at your own peril!

W3 Total Cache

In the fast and attention-less world we live in if you don’t have a site that loads fast, visitors won’t stick around for long and will click the back button leaving you, with a high bounce rate. This is why you need to cache website.

Wordbook

This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Also created by SEO guru Yoast. Use this plugin track your blog visitors and other advanced features; it provides important traffic information in your WordPress Dashboard.

AddThis

Do you want to know how people are sharing the content on your blog or website? Of course you do. With this plugin you can and then some! AddThis let’s you customize what buttons appear; it also puts the ‘share button’ right were visitors can click it. The key with this plugin is flexibility.

BackType

How many people does a person reach on Twitter? BackType reveals in the comment area who interacted with your content on Twitter. Truly powerful because sometimes you don’t get an @reply from someone who Retweeted your post; BackType shows you everyone who retweeted you. This makes it easier to identify and reach out to these people who have already showed an interest in what you have to say.

Disqus

Disqus is a social commenting system. What makes this plugin useful for PR is it gives commenters the option of sharing their comment with their friends on both Facebook and Twitter and therefore expanding the conversation to their network.

Twitter Tools

This plugin automatically posts your most recent published post to Twitter. It’s added value is that it can also be used with Bit.ly to track those links and you know how important it is to track and monitor how people interact with your content.

Other key features is it let’s you add a ‘New blog post’ prefix at the beginning of your tweet and also lets you add hashtags to help people find and notice your new content.

PostRank

Want to know what content has the most resonance, who likes it and where it resonates the most? PostRank is a very powerful social analytics platform that, if used to it’s full capacity, let’s you know exactly that. The WordPress plugin provides you this information in the Dashboard and also comes with a ‘Top Posts’ widget which appears in your sidebar (like we have it here) that shows visitors the most popular posts.

 

While this is a short list, the combination of these plugins really does enable our PR practice to be more efficient and smart.

What plugins do you use?


 

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