Marketing

Thoughts on Blogging and PR

January 18, 2005 by Susan Getgood

In my last post, I put forward four principals of a good PR strategy. Here’s the fifth: Get Blogging.

There are a lot of people thinking and talking about the topic of how blogs fit into corporate communications, and indeed, into mass communications alltogether. I’ve got some links to some recent ones that I found interesting at the bottom of this post, and eventually I’ll get around to doing a listing of some of the blogs I like.

But, what should you DO about blogs? How does blogging fit into your short and long term corp comm strategy?

Here are a few things I think most companies can do to get started.

1. It may not make sense for you to start a corporate blog right now, but you had better be monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of your company and product, and dealing with the good and the bad right away. Tools like Feedster, PubSub, MyYahoo!, Google Search, Technorati all help do this in slightly different ways. People ARE talking about you, it is time you joined the conversation.

2. There are blog writers out there covering your space. Call them citizen journalists or just plain citizens, many of them are important writers for the audiences you are trying to reach. Do not make the mistake of ignoring them because they are "just bloggers." You may want to cultivate them even more carefully than a "regular reporter."

3. Publish your press releases and other corp comms with an RSS feed — it will make life easier for reporters who do want to track your firm. But don’t confuse using the tool (RSS) for a blog. If you want to have a corporate weblog, it has to be an authentic blog, not just the static press releases. And it is even better by the way, if you do add richer content to this feed than just the standard 2-page press release. It bears repeating however — be VERY CLEAR about what this is — your press releases and corp comms with an RSS feed simply to make it easier for folks who want to track your firm using a news aggregator.

4. Get blogging yourselves. Figure which kind of blogging activity makes sense for your firm, and just do it. You can start by choosing among 3 alternatives, and they are all reasonable ways to start — it just depends on what makes sense for you. You can:

Support the employee blogs that probably already exist somewhere in your firm… or would with just a little encouragement. I would call this the Microsoft approach. 1300 bloggers don’t spring up from nowhere without support from the top.
Launch company supported blogs in specific areas like product management and support where customers can engage directly with insiders. Or about particular issues if your product or service lends itself to that sort of conversation with the community. Having focus on a specific topic area is a good compromise if you can’t go the whole way with a corporate/C-level blog.
The C-level or corporate blog, that acts as a real open window into the business. Hard to do, but I’m betting a slam dunk for those that do it right.

Here are a few other folks with recent posts that relate in some fashion to the the topic of PR, corporate communications and blogs. Some of the links are originally courtesy of Scoble’s LinkBlog, others from Dan Gillmor’s blog.

Pheedo article about pr agency MWW getting into blogging. Mostly interesting as an example of a "big-time" agency publicly embracing blogging.

NevOn article: Five examples of great thinking. (NevOn blog is also a good place to find links to corporate blogs — look on the left hand side, about midway down the page.)

5 Important Reasons Why Blogs Can Boost Your Business (from How to Blog for Fun and Profit) A nice summary of the major reasons why companies should blog!

PressThink post: Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. Thought-provoking piece on the fine line between journalism and blogging. While not specifically about corporate blogging, it is important for marketers to understand the debates going on about blogging and journalism if we want to meet our customers, including both the professional and grassroots media (aka citizen journalists), in the right places, in the right way, with the right expectations.

Update 20 January: Lots of traffic today about the Ketchum/Williams/Dept of Ed/No Child Left Behind PR/spokesperson fiasco. Not really about corporate blogging but interesting to follow the ethical discussion. Best place to start if you want to follow the discussion: Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog has a great post, with lots of links to other comments.

Defining Good PR Strategy

January 18, 2005 by Susan Getgood

There has been a lot of discussion recently in both the traditional media and the blogosphere about corporate blogging. I’d like to talk a bit about how blogging fits, and doesn’t fit, into corporate communications and public relations strategy.

Before we can do that, however, we need to define a sound communications strategy. Caveat emptor: my professional experience has mostly been with technology companies, so this discussion may be more relevant to that arena. Nevertheless, I think the four principals I’m going to put forward can be applied pretty broadly.

First Principal: The audience isn’t stupid; don’t make the mistake of thinking they are.

PR can’t help you if your products are awful, poorly positioned or don’t meet market needs. Don’t waste your time or money on PR until you’ve fixed the product and your business. Seems self-evident but there are a lot of folks in this world who think you can fool reporters. You never could, and in this day of grassroots journalism, everyone’s a reporter. It has never been more true: you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Second Principal: In a nutshell, a good PR strategy focuses on finding out what reporters want/need to know and fitting in with the news of the moment if you can. It is NOT about flogging your products and multi-page press releases that cover every last feature.

Don’t confuse PR with promotion or publicity. You can do those too. Public Relations is something different, and you need to do PR right.

The first step to doing it right? Understanding that nobody but you really cares about your product in and of itself. Not even your customer. Your customer has a problem to be solved or a desire to be satisfied. Your product or service is only valuable to her in as much as it solves the problem or scratches the itch.

The media is a conduit to your customer, so reporters will care about the same exact things your prospects do. Problems. Issues. Desire. Needs. Not products.

So, be smart. Don’t try to engage reporters about the newest product features or your great new pricing strategy. Instead seek to understand what their problems are, what stories they are interested in or writing, what trends they are following. And if your product fits the story or you have data that informs the trend, tell them about it. By all means, talk about your product or service when it is relevant to the reporter’s inquiry. Create material that will interest reporters. But stay in the context of the reporter’s inquiry and interests. Don’t waste your time trying to jam your product features into his story. He won’t write about it if it doesn’t fit, and you waste the opportunity to build a good relationship with a journalist.

Third Principal: Invest in a good PR person. If you can afford it, get BOTH a good agency and hire an in-house person focused on corp comm. If you have to make a choice, start with the agency and add in-house resources as you grow.

Why agency first? Three reasons. First, you get access to a depth of resources that you probably can’t afford to bring in-house, at least in the early days. Second, agency staff are talking to reporters all the time, for both you and other clients. A story opportunity for you could come up during a conversation about another client, just as a by-product of a conversation. Finally (and obviously): you can control your costs, dialing up the spend as you grow.

Don’t assume you have to have a big name agency. There are scores of small boutique agencies that have terrific media relationships. I have always found it better to be the big fish in the small pond than the small fish in the big one.

Fourth Principal: Never forget that you are doing PR to get the word out about your products to the audiences that might buy them. Don’t get seduced by the number of website pick-ups or column inches you got. Measure your results, but measure the right things.

Evaluate your PR strategy, and your PR team, on how well they get the word out in the media vehicles that matter to your audiences. It might be The New York Times. But it might just as easily be a blog or an industry newsletter.

Stay focused always on your marketing strategy and the results. When I worked for a software company that offered a free trial download, we always saw a spike in downloads after a flurry of stories that mentioned our products, even when the mention was simply in passing.

Next post: We’ll delve into how blogging fits into our good PR strategy.

Manage and Measure Customers from Suspect to Sale, and beyond… from day one.

January 3, 2005 by Susan Getgood

The most valuable tool for your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing is a clear understanding of the RESULTS. And it MUST be a connected system – you need to know which marketing programs delivered your sales and which ones flopped. It does you absolutely no good if the systems are disconnected. If your marketing team can tell you which programs delivered leads, but can’t connect to sales revenue and profitability, you do not have what you need. If your web marketing team can tell you how many visitors requested your free trial, but you can’t link the request to an eventual sale, or lost sale, you do not have what you need. If you have great sales reports that show the geographical spread of your sales, or user size or whatever other metric you like, but you don’t know the source of the lead, you do not have what you need. And quite frankly, many small to mid sized companies have exactly that. They don’t have what they need.

How does this happen? In my experience, and I don’t claim to have the only possible experience here, this is what happens.

In the early days of the company, it’s all about making those critical first sales. The company may not even have a marketing function, and if it does, odds are it is pretty tactical in the early days even if there is a strong marketing person on board. There is just too much to do.

Then one day somebody says, let’s put on a show. No seriously, Andy Hardy notwithstanding (if you don’t know who that is, ask your parent or grandparent, or look it up on the web, search word Mickey Rooney), pretty soon everyone realizes the company needs some sort of contact management system. So they go out and buy a decent contact manager like GoldMine or Act. So far so good right? WRONG.

In my opinion, this is where the hidden data mistake starts.

The system works pretty well, and sales people become more productive. Marketing is able to get some customer and prospect data out of the system, so they have a better idea of the lead flow. Everyone’s happy.

So, the company takes the fateful step. It decides to use the same database for customer support. But the database needs a few extra things, so the support needs are tacked onto the sales database. Sometimes using custom programming, and definitely stretching the capabilities of the contact management system. Soon enough the whole thing gets bloated with fields and keys and whatnot for every possible permutation of prospect and customer. Eventually, the system ends up meeting no one’s needs particularly well and definitely making everyone miserable.

If all this happened really quickly, there would be no harm done. You’d say, mistake made, let’s move on. Unfortunately, from beginning to the day the company realizes that all its data is stuck in an over-taxed contact manager typically takes a couple years. By which time so much operational data and corporate history is stored in the system, the thought of replacing it with something else is overwhelming. Even though no one is really getting what they need.

So what’s the alternative?

Here’s the scenario I’d like to see. The very minute someone says, let’s get a contact manager, step back and analyze your company’s current and future sales, marketing, support and operational data needs. Do the hard work of identifying the processes your business will need as it grows. If you can, make the investment in a CRM system that will meet your needs immediately. If you can’t make the strategic investment right away, put it in the plan. And do it as soon as you can find the cash.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Managing your relationships with them is too important to be left to chance. Or stuck in an outdated contact management system.

Next up: lead ratings, and how they both power, and empower, your sales and marketing.

Lead Nurturing

December 22, 2004 by Susan Getgood

Great article on Marketing Profs about lead nurturing — Lead Nurturing: Ripening the Right Bananas, by Brian Carroll. Carroll discusses an approach to leads that I have long advocated: Suspects and prospects must be nurtured in marketing until they are ready for a sales person to close them. I truly believe every company should take this approach, from day one if possible, and having a cooperating sales and marketing team is what makes it really work.

The other two things that really make lead nurturing hum are Lead Ratings and Metrics. More on that next week.

And now for something completely different…. Sales & Marketing Strategy

December 20, 2004 by Susan Getgood

In my last few columns, I have talked a lot about blogging and its potential as a marketing and communications tool. For the next few weeks, I am going to turn to a much more “traditional” set of marketing topics, aimed mostly at small to mid size companies in their early stage/start-up, or spin-outs of larger companies with brand new, possibly revolutionary products.

The main theme of our discussion is how the marketing decisions you’ll make today define your future possibilities and will eventually drive, for good or ill, the decisions the company makes two … five… and if it is lucky, 10 years from now.

The positive abstract of this is: 10 marketing decisions you can make today, and make your future. The negative (think Ebenezer Scrooge) is: the 10 things you’ll wish you did two or three years from now. You decide 🙂

Our first topic: Integrated Sales and Marketing strategy focused on Sales Opportunities. Marketing is more than just generating leads and Sales is more than just getting a purchase order. Yet there is a tendency to reduce them to these functions, with marketing’s box at the front of the sales cycle, followed by some hand-off point, where it becomes a sales lead and thus the province of the Sales Department. Eventually no matter how close the two teams were when it was just one marketing guy and one sales gal, the two departments develop into fiefdoms with little or no MEANINGFUL communication about the task at hand. This dynamic is hard to change once it gets a stranglehold on your teams, so prevent it. How? Here’s my prescription

Make dead sure that Sales and Marketing are EQUAL functions in your organization, and that everybody supports this from the CEO on down. Yes, of course, in the early days, Sales will be more critical than the longer term view represented by Marketing. If you don’t get the sales, there is no long term 🙂
However, even as the sales are rolling in, your brand is being defined and not simply by what YOU say and do – customers, prospects, the general public, etc. all influence the brand. So, don’t wait too long before you take charge of your brand’s future. That’s the Marketing job.

What happens if you don’t have balance? If the Sales perspective is the sole perspective, your business strategy becomes a series of reactive, 6-month sales plans. And the reverse, if you focus too much on brand and long term strategy, and not enough on sales, you probably won’t have as many sales. In the early days, this could mean the success or failure of your business.

You need both functions, in balance.
Insist that your Sales head and your Marketing head work as a team to develop the business plan. Make certain that this does not end up with one function driving the plan and informing the other of what it intends. See warning above about lack of balance between the two functions. Develop an integrated sales and marketing plan with input from BOTH organizations, and not just at the top level.
Develop a mantra that informs everyone that Business Opportunities belong to and are the responsibility of EVERYONE in the company. Everyone is a lead generator, evangelist, sales person, customer service representative; it’s just that each of us has our specialties and specific day to-to responsibilities for which we are compensated.
Resist resist resist the temptation: when business is good, and the orders and leads are flowing in, it is very easy to let the Sales Department degenerate into an order taking machine and to allow the Marketing Department to morph into a lead generation/sales support organization. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN. You need the maintain a high quality sales organization that is capable of feeding itself and closing business… even when it becomes harder as you move through the product lifecycle. You must have a marketing organization that is capable of thinking long term about the future needs of future and untapped markets as well as feeding the current machine.

I cannot guarantee that your business will be successful if you do this – there’s a lot more to it than just having a well oiled sales and marketing machine. However, I truly believe that you create a far stronger foundation for success with integrated and balanced sales and marketing teams that work as colleagues, instead of viewing each other as competitors.

Ethics…

November 23, 2004 by Susan Getgood

Warning: today’s entry will be something of a rant, so if you aren’t in the mood, come back another day.

Okay, to the topic at hand: the new British video game JFK Reloaded. To quote Senator Ted Kennedy’s spokesman, this is just "despicable" (CNN’s coverage).

I can think of no good reason for this video game to exist, and the reasons given by the game manufacturer are absolute crap. I hope the market responds appropriately and no one buys it.

But it got me thinking — someone has to be developing the marketing campaigns for this absolutely awful product. How do you put your head around marketing something so obviously offensive to so many?

In my career, I have marketed a controversial product. However, it would not have been possible for me to market, and defend, the Cyber Patrol Internet filtering software had I not believed that parents DID have a right to manage their children’s Internet access. And that schools and libraries do have the right, and perhaps even an obligation, to create safe spaces for children using the Internet in those venues.

Do the people developing and marketing this game actually think this is okay — to allow people to sit in the assassin’s shoes and pull the trigger? Is this a case of extreme cognitive dissonance, where they are just paid so much to believe it is okay, that any qualms they had are quashed? Or are their ethics so trashed that they market it even though they know it is just WRONG.

How can they not KNOW it is wrong? Have they forgotten that, although he was a public figure, Kennedy was also the brother, father, relative and friend to people who are still living? It is just not right to do something that will be hurtful to others in such a grisly fashion.

Coal in their stockings for Christmas this year.

Marketing is….

November 17, 2004 by Susan Getgood

According to the AMA, "marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders."

Well, knock me over with a feather, but that just doesn’t sound too exciting to me 🙂

It’s not that the definition is wrong. It is as good a place to start as any. But it is missing two things that we need to be good marketers.

Sales. The goal of marketing is to sell something — whether it be a product or an idea, and while this is perhaps implied with "delivering value" and the focus on customers, I’d like to see it more explicit.
Action. In marketing, we want to get someone to do something. The AMA definition is passionless and passive — I want to see marketers excited and active — doing, making things happen, getting results.

So here’s what I’d like to add to the dialogue:

"Marketing is the art, and science, of persuading a prospect to take the desired action. Most often, to buy a product, but also: renew a subscription, sign the petition, make the contribution, etc."

Implicit in this definition is the creation of the "product" that will persuade — both the tangible and intangible.

Here are a couple of other blogs that also cover this topic: Marketing Playbook and Brand Mantra.

What do you think we need to add to this definition to make it work for you?

Definition of Marketing

November 15, 2004 by Susan Getgood

I haven’t forgotten – I promised to talk about "to blog or not to blog" but today in my research mode, I came across the new definition of marketing that was officially unveiled at the AMA Summer Educators’ Conference in Boston in August. And I quote: "Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders."

So the question I ask –does this definition work for you? My thoughts in my next post…