Tom Brokaw referred to the men and women who fought for the United States in World War II as the greatest generation. In 1943 a Nazi propaganda periodical used the term Iron Curtain. Tea Party members often refer to journalists the media elite, a term coined by S. Robert Lichter and two other researchers in a 1980 study and subsequent book by that name. Former Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a salvo from White House speechwriter William Safire when he called the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Then there’s the 1984 TV ad campaign for Wendy’s with Clara Peller yelling “Where’s the beef?” a refrain that might ring true in today’s politicized climate.
Not all pithy expressions involve cheap shots at journalists and competitors. Many encapsulate the issues like a good joke. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece in the early part of the 20th century on the effectiveness of graphics in advertising. The term senior citizen first appeared as a euphemism for older people during a 1938 American political campaign.
Richard Nixon referred to citizens who weren’t protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War the silent majority. Plato said necessity is the mother of invention, a phrase that must have appealed equally to Nixon and Frank Zappa, although for different reasons.
Contemporary authors are doing an equally good job in characterizing trends. People who follow us on social networks are called peeps. People who follow us on Twitter are Tweeps. Microbloggers live in the Twitterverse.
PIMCO Bond fund manager Bill Gross has called the post-2007 mortgage debt environment of high volatility and low returns the New Normal. Writing for hospital administrators at H&HN Daily Bill Santamour called the wave of retiring baby boomers who will need healthcare the Silver Stampede. And there’s the term baby boomer itself, a term coined by Landon Jones in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.
More than half of America’s biggest PR firms say revenue and headcounts rose last year over 2010.
According to the Council of Public Relations Firms, which represents more than 100 of America’s leading public relations agencies, 70 percent of firms report that final 2011 revenues will be higher than in 2010. Only 13 percent anticipate lower revenues. Growth is coming from the consumer product, healthcare and energy sectors.
More than a third of those firms anticipate higher budgets in 2012. Some 60 percent report increased headcounts at the end of 2011. About three-quarters of firms expect an increase in social media services while more than a third expect growth in business-to-business, corporate communications and issues management.
The council notes one other trend for 2012: 57 percent of its agencies foresee partnering with outside firms to expand their capabilities.
BtoB firms plan to follow their BtoC cousins and spend more on social marketing over the next three years, according to a white paper by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
The study quotes Forrester in predicting that by 2014, BtoB spending in social media will reach $54 million, up from the $11 million spent in 2010. BtoB magazine’s survey, “Emerging Trends in BtoB Social Marketing: Insights from the Field,” found that 93% of B2B marketers are involved to some degree in social media. And in BtoB’s “2011 Outlook” survey, 62.6% of marketers reported plans to increase their spending in social media channels this year.
“Although B2C and B2B companies use social media differently, many of its functions, such as monitoring competition, gaining customer feedback and building brand awareness really do apply to the marketing goals of both types of companies,” the 4As wrote.
“Of particular importance to BtoB marketers is determining if their social media efforts are paying off.” Marketers are tracking leads by looking at click-through rates and number of downloads, among other metrics–although fewer than half measure their efforts, according to a survey by BtoB magazine.
You think writers are the only ones concerned with telling a story? Listen to this.
Earlier this month three of six agency owners and recruiters interviewed by blogger Arik C. Hanson said the ability to tell a story was the leading trait they want to see in PR professionals. They believe storytelling reflects the facility to identify themes and execute a strategy. Yet when many of their peers screen applicants, they ask for experience that exactly matches the job they’re offering. They’re focused on the product, not the process, like the ability to build social networks, negotiate for information or get along with others.
For those in marketing communications, here’s the wake-up call: financial planners have discovered the power of story. In a column for MarketWatch, MIT’s AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin said the traditional model of financial planning won’t work in these unsettling times. Neither will an appeal to reason through a recitation of statistics. He believes advisers who tell stories that elicit emotion and inspire people to act will achieve greater success–for their clients and themselves.
“We’ve got to be good storytellers to get that emotion, to make us relevant, responsive and realistic for what the consumer needs today to plan for tomorrow.”
Let’s hope the people who hire are willing to make that investment.
When Dobie Gray sang about being in with the in crowd in 1965, could he have imagined how mobile devices would turn the world into one big high school?
First there was messaging and texting, which allowed you to send your thoughts to a single person. Then there were location-based services like Foursquare, which allow you to broadcast your location to whoever will listen.
The latest to join the my-business-is-everybody’s-business trend is Beluga, a service that allows you to message groups of friends, all at once. You can transmit photos to the group without having to send individual messages. And you can spot their location on a map, eliminating the need to constantly check their availability.
Beluga is a cross-platform rival to Kik, GroupMe and Blackberry’s BBM. Whether it catches on is anyone’s guess but attendees at the uber-hip SXSW music and digital festival in Austin, Texas this week are burning up the wireless space about the service. Clue number two: Beluga’s been acquired by Facebook.
Writers and other creatives might want to use these services to extend their existing marketing tools. One application for group chat is your informal ambassador’s program, that coterie of friends and fans who evangelize for your brand. You might use Beluga to give the group some visibility, along with the cachet of exclusivity—join the group and be the first to receive information and invitations to private events.
Who knows, you might get to run with the in crowd. Or relive high school, one of Dante’s nine circles of young adulthood.
Ever since Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland invented the barcode in 1949 business has worked to turn objects into information. The recession in advertising, the migration from print to digital media, consumer preference for mobile devices—all have accelerated the trend toward digitizing the physical world.
Enter the QR, or quick response, code. What looks like a stamp, a maze or a square hieroglyph is really a portal to a new world of information-rich advertising. QR codes allow people with cameras in their smartphones to load websites just by pointing the device at, say, a magazine ad that carries the code. They function like hyperlinks on websites, taking readers directly to the information they want.
It’s more than the latest online fad. The technology just might help authors connect with an elusive audience.
Specialty publications are among the first to adopt the technology. The October issue of This Old House is loaded with codes. And not only in the ads. The editors are using the little squares for contests, access to how-to videos and requests for literature—techniques authors might adopt to publicize their work and promote their brand.
Trade publications are embracing the technology, too. Last month Randall-Reilly’s trucking division sent an email to media buyers announcing a program to allow readers to “unlock access to multimedia content.” Consumer publications are also rolling out programs. A recent issue of People featured a QR code in an ad for Panasonic. Why not publish the codes in any printed collateral used to publicize your work? You can track the responses, analyze the data and reach out to new audiences with targeted messages on the device of their choice.
Our agency joined the movement last week when we designed a QR code for a social media platform I helped to create. Printed on postcards that we’ll distribute at a tradeshow next month, the code will lead smartphone users to a blog that highlights trends in the industries in which our clients compete.
Try it yourself. Download an app like QR Reader, hold your smartphone up to this screen and visit the site—all without having to key in a lengthy URL.
The very technology that threatened to destroy print is enabling it to reach new readers. As the economy recovers and mobile devices spread, writers can use that knowledge to turn dead wood into dynamic sources of data . . . and revenue.
First we had cavemen sitting around the fire telling stories. Then gossips and reporters. Then came chat and blogs and we cycled back to citizen journalists.
With the rise of social media we now have citizen publicists. Like volunteer journalist, they want to speak their mind. When they listen, they want to hear what their peers are saying, not just the company line. And through the really big amplifier called the Web they can have an outsized influence on our work.
As creatives, we want to reach them.
Our agency regularly counsels clients who want to join the social media wave but are afraid of getting swamped. There are too many networks and monitoring them is a time-sink. So for those clients who want to dip a toe into online communications, we’ve developed an approach called the Social Media Platform that allows organizations to engage their audiences as well as publish their ideas.
It’s a perfect fit for artists, photographers, writers and other creatives who can’t afford a publicist.
Here’s the strategy: Organizations need to monitor and influence what people are saying about their brands. So do creatives, with the added task of promoting their work far and wide. We social media because that’s where our future editors, clients and benefactors hang out. With a social media platform we can harness the power of peers, asking influentials who like our work to spread the word. The social media platform is no substitute for a full-blown marketing campaign that uses advertising, direct mail, media relations and microsites. But it offers creatives a turnkey operation that allows them to join, monitor and influence the online conversation.
Here’s how it works: The platform is an integrated collection of social media networks and tools. It includes the major social and business networks—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube—but has room for numerous sites, forums and communities. At the heart is a white-label blog without branding for an independent look and feel. With the blog creatives can manage reputations, disseminate key messages and establish expertise in the market—this might apply more to non-fiction than fiction writers. Creatives who’ve already built a reputation can use the platform to solve issues before they become wide-spread problems.
There are six parts in the process of establishing a social media platform:
Create. We start with a blog hosted on an independent site. Posts and comments radiate from the blog to the major social and business networks. The system notifies the blog administrator each time someone from the outside posts a comment. For your peace of mind, comments can be approved, edited or deleted before anyone on the ‘Net sees them. Tools: WordPress software, web host.
Listen. Tapping into the online conversation about our brand is essential. Specialized search engines allow us to listen to what people are saying about our work. PR people call it reputation management. Tools: Social Mention, Google Alerts, Gmail to verify social network accounts.
Contribute. Based on your expertise, you can contribute original text, slides, photos and video. Crowdsourcing allows you to obtain feedback on work. You can even use your network to float ideas for future projects. Tools: those listed above.
Publicize. Blogs are like parties. You have to invite the right people to achieve critical mass. We start with the internal audience, your friends and business associates, and add editors, writers and bloggers in traditional and digital media. Tools: LinkedIn, Twitter.
Monitor. The conversation is ongoing. The monitoring needs to be, too. But checking multiple sites dozens of times a day can get crazy. A dashboard can simplify the process: Tools: HootSuite, TweetDeck.
Evaluate. You’re not a major corporation. The goal isn’t to fill spreadsheets and generate charts that dazzle but yield no useful information. We measure the volume and tone of comments but take everything with two grains salt. Tools: Twitrratr (Twitter rater), Twendz (Twitter trends), Tweet Level.
Does the system work? Yes. Our agency is seeing a good adoption rate from editors and bloggers as well as retweets of original material. Why does it work? Because it leverages three potent forces in our society: the shift toward digital media, people’s desire to hear recommendations from peers rather than companies and journalists’ need to discover leads rather than waiting for pitches.
That’s almost as good as telling stories around the campfire.
Peter Krainik has a word for those who would separate marketing and PR functions: don’t.
The founder of an organization for chief marketing officers, the CMO Club, Krainik believes CMOs need to align marketing and PR/corporate communications if they want to defend and build their companies’ brands and reputations. The rise of social networks makes it mandatory.
The statistics aren’t encouraging. Only 23% of CMOs have lead responsibility for employee communications on products, services and messaging, according to a survey of 129 CMOs conducted by Hill & Knowlton. Some 66% have lead responsibility for media relations but only 55% have overall responsibility for blogger relations. Most (70%) do not have an active employee-engagement program (read brand ambassadors).
Krainik thinks CMOs need to address that disconnect.
“Marketing and public relations have overlapped, thanks to the explosive growth of digital communication that created an unprecedented level of transparency between businesses and their audiences,” Krainik writes. “The result is that brand reputation and brand image have become intertwined; the synchronization of the two is more critical than ever.”
Consider us the lucky ones. Most of our clients understand the need for a strategy that encompasses both marketing and communications. So does the agency, which allows copywriters and PR pros to flow across departmental boundaries. Copywriters run projects that include public relations components while PR pros write copy for collateral and advocate for employee ambassador programs. The process is driven by the clients’ marketing and communications functions and supervised by the agency’s account executives.
It’s not a typical arrangement but it works. And that’s what counts.
A new service debuts today that could change the way writers publicize their work, and their areas of expertise.
NewsBasis is the communications equivalent of a matchmaker. Journalists issue requests for information and writers can respond. It’s a targeted way for both parties to find sources and promote their work, without a lot of waste.
In some ways NewsBasis is similar to Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and PR Newswire’s ProfNet. All three services allow journalists to post questions and search for expert sources. They also allow PR pros, companies and writers to search for questions from journalists or receive those queries via email. The idea is to allow journalists to cut through the clutter of unsolicited pitches and writers to better target their queries to the journalists who want the information.
NewsBasis differs from the competition with the introduction of real-time commentary on published articles. The service allows writers to embed their point of view or corrections directly in articles on the Internet. Journalists signed with the service will see those comments when they view the article online. They’re also notified by the service when a source leaves a comment.
Other features will look familiar to people using either HARO or ProfNet. The NewsBasis media notification tab allows users to type keywords into the search bar and read real-time activities by journalists. As with HARO, users also can receive email alerts.
With this week’s launch NewsBasis pits itself against some stiff competition. HARO brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers, more than 100,000 news sources and thousands of small businesses together to exchange information. In addition to pumping out alerts to sources, ProfNet lets journalists search a database of more than 30,000 expert profiles.
HARO is free to PR pros, companies and writers. It also offers a free Twitter feed, especially helpful for communicators toting mobile devices. ProfNet is free to reporters but charges a fee to experts and their representatives. NewsBasis, which is in beta, is free at this point.
All of these services could change the face of publicity for authors, and not just because they provide a more efficient way to pitch their work. They give us the choice between active and passive publicity. Instead pf cold calling journalists, we’re now able to contact them directly about a topic in which they’re interested.
It can also allow authors to contribute to the news, rather than react to it through Google Alerts or other monitoring services. We can get the inside story about who’s writing what before journalists publish those articles and blogs. That should reduce the frustration so many authors feel when promoting their work.
Mickie Kennedy has an interesting post this morning about writing books for their media-relations value. To summarize his thesis, even in a digital age the printed work can give you credibility and a reputation as an expert in your field. I learned that first-hand when the company now known as Sanofi Pasteur US hired me to write a book about the organization’s rise from horse farmers to suppliers of vaccines to the world.
While the company paid for the first printing of The Spirit of Swiftwater we arranged the second printing with a university press just itching to publish a business book. That attracted the interest of several thought-leaders in the industry. I knew we’d struck gold when one of the world’s most influential virologists, a doctor who’d been working with WHO to contain bird flu in Asia, visited the company and accepted an autographed book.
Those of you who know me know that I live to write large-scale works that appeal to a wide audience. I think there are several reasons why an executive or an individual would hire a writer or a ghostwriter to create one of these: to promote the organization or the person, or to be more altruistic, to leave a legacy. I often tell the story of Marco Polo and his travels along the Silk Road. His father and uncle made the journey years before they took the young explorer yet few people know their names. Every kid who’s splashed in a pool knows about Marco. The reason is simple: Marco wrote about the journey.
If you’re fascinated with an elegant tool for marketing, or just a fleeting moment of fame, I have a few resources for you, including two documents that detail the rationale, project scope and budgetary outlines of a book-length project. You can download Brand New Day and Making History from this website.
