Error number 1: poor targeting of needs.
Identifying a communication target is often difficult. To target a contact correctly, the content of your communication should be pertinent to the message you want to be relayed to your contact. One common error is to, in order not to forget anyone, adopt a “scattershot” approach in which the narrow “target” is widened to the size of a football field. The contacts who receive your messages will thus tend to ignore the information they receive, considering it to be irrelevant or poorly targeted.

Error number 2: using an ineffective mode of communication
In each stage of the communication plan, the right way to contact a journalist can be either more specific or more general. It´s useless to try to directly contact the 2000 journalists you´re trying to communicate with by email. Instead, it’s more effective to focus on sub-groups of roughly 10 finely targeted contacts.

Error number 3: checking the freshness of the information available
Journalists, just like the rest of us in our professional careers, change course, reorient themselves, and adapt new areas of interest. A thoroughly updated file is indispensable to accurately find which contact is likely to be interested in our message.

Error number 4: ignoring what journalists say and write
It´s important to send the right message to the right person. Completing a file on each journalist with a collection of excerpts from his or her latest reports on our topic, ideally completed with a sentiment analysis, allows a more targeted message adapted to each typology of target to be sent.

Error number 5: not keeping the first 4 points in mind!
What other errors would you add?

One specific example of where the rest of the company should be involved is the management of negative comments online. We are not going to go into how to respond to negative comments, as I think the literature on this matter is more than sufficient. For instance we have the article by Oscar del Salto: “Comentarios Negativos: Qué, cómo y cuando responder” [Negative Comments: What, how and when to respond] where he classifies comments made on his own social media and on other types of website, giving criteria on which types of comments to respond to and how to do so.

But this is merely the tip of the iceberg in managing negative comments. When dealing with a comment from a customer with a justified complaint (or perhaps not so justified but which should be managed anyway), in many cases neither the Community Manager, nor even the Senior Communication nor  Marketing Manager will be able to provide a solution because they have no direct responsibility for the matter in question; e.g. a bad business experience, a faulty product, a delivery that has taken longer than anticipated, being against the company’s environmentally unfriendly production process, negative opinions about a company spokesperson, the HR policy, etc.

As we can see, these comments are not resolved with just a “we hear you and we are working on it”, but rather they should be bound to a response with its associated action. The aim of the communication team, when receiving negative comments should be to rectify or clarify this comment. Here are some tips for doing so:

Rate comments by level of importance

Some monitoring tools rate impacts based on Estimated Publicity Value (for online media and blogs) and influence level (for social network accounts). These values are not 100% reliable, because, as the name of the former explicitly says, it is an estimate not a real value. For the second metric, each monitoring tool has a different type of influence indicator, which can vary according to way in which it is measured. However, it will be our own community or monitoring management policies which will give us the clearest indication of which type of reviews we should take action on most swiftly and give a 100% effective solution to, given that the aforementioned indicators are only there to guide us. This is only applicable to companies which a high level of mentions and where we cannot reply equally quickly to all of them. For companies with an easily manageable number of mentions, our response to all of them should be effective and quick.

When faced with high importance level comments, act quickly

Negative reviews rated as high importance and which can have a negative effect on the company’s reputation, should be acted on swiftly. Comments to do with our company strategy should be addressed in a reputation committee which should be made up of the Senior Communication Manager, the Community Manager and the senior manager directly affected by this comment (HR, Operations, etc.). The communication team should evaluate the risk deriving from the comment and, in conjunction with the Sr. Mgr. of the area involved, determine the best way to resolve this problem and how a final response shall be given. In some cases, this team may include the head of the company’s Legal Department.

Create a work process with Customer Care

For cases of everyday customer problems, create a work flow with the Customer Care Department, whereby it is them that manage the solution of this conflict. Underlining the importance of speed of response in this type of comment is essential: In fact, customers who complain through social media expect as swift a response as customers doing so through traditional channels, the only difference being that a second negative review, after a first complaint online, can bring much greater reputation problems. On this point I would add that as well as creating the flow as we said, it is also important to review social[corporate] customer service policies vis-à-vis new customer care channels -  the social networks.

Criticisms of the company’s internal policies

Let us recall that a company’s reputation is not based on communication messages; our reputation is what we are and what we show to others. Hence, in managing negative reviews, the Communication and Marketing Department performs two roles:

• If we detect negative comments on the company’s internal policies and we have no short-term solution, we can create content with positive information about our company (and/or work with influencers that help us to disseminate this content).

• To analyse whether these comments represent an actual situation that should change within the company and scale up proposals to implement these improvements. If we manage to render this change, it would be a good idea to communicate it.

Create your own news or content

As in the previous point, there will be negative comments that are not manageable (another example are negative comments about the competition). In view of this situation, the best response is to use our own content that we can viralise to help mitigate negative reviews. Engaging the support of the top people in the company is also vital. Some notable examples are: A video of the CEO talking about care in the company’s QA processes, an infograph on the company’s history and operations in different countries and its contribution in the sector, or writing a detailed article on the advantages of our products.

Drafting reputation reports

There is no better way of involving other members of the company than showing the positive or negative effects of our actions, i.e. showing results. By drawing up monthly reputation reports for the company , or at least for the all the department heads, we will show the result of our  swift responses. These reports might include:

• The total number of mentions our brand, spokespersons, products, etc. receive.
• The types of mention (positive, negative, neutral)
• The EPV (Estimated Publicity Value)

Encourage the use of social networks within the company

Lastly, but by no means less important, the company can become involved in the creation of its reputation through its member’s social networks. A negative comment about one of the company’s spokespersons on Twitter, may be better addressed through that same spokesperson’s own Twitter account than through the company account.  A caveat, actively creating corporate reputation through its employee’s social network accounts necessarily involves an education phase and/or the explicit definition of social networking policies.

In conclusion:

Managing negative comments is not something just for the Communication and Marketing Department; building a corporate reputation, collaborating in swiftly responding and acting on complaints expressed on internet is a task involving the whole of the company. The speed but also the effectiveness with which we act is going to make the way we manage our negative comments key for earning our company a better image.

Improve the detection of opportunities
A clever configuration of your monitoring on communication and PR, will allow you to grab some really interesting news that will help you identify companies with high potential for prospecting, the best persons to contact as well as the good time to do it. Here is some information that you shouldn’t miss: nominations and departures, signatures of new projects by your competitors, interviews, rewards, but also crisis…

Do not attack directly: build a relationship
At the time of web and social networks, do “cold calling” is the best way to ruin your chances. Make yourself known and enter progressively into the radar of your prospects by offering them useful contents, is a way better strategy. One of our clients, a communication agency specialized in fashion, found a very interesting way of using our tools: each and every week, one consultant extracts from a monitoring a selection of useful news in the fashion industry (campaigns of the week, influent tweets, best videos on Youtube…) and share the result with an interactive format by sending out a newsletter or publishing it on social networks. According to the director of the agency, prospects love it…

Use your best weapon to prepare your appointment
You’ve been able to build a relationship with your prospect and you will now have to go get your award: the right to seat down and talk with your prospect. Be careful, your window of opportunity is really short and you have no right to make a mistake at that time. Here are 2 tools (almost) infallible our clients use:

• Campaign analysis: before calling your prospect, analyze its news and publications during the last months and select his most important campaign (product launch, major event…). Create a retroactive monitoring campaign, generate with your application a reporting about this campaign and analyze a bit the results to have some valuable feedbacks to share. When you’ll call your prospect, ask him if he’d like to know about this report and the conclusions you’ve got from it, rather than the usual approach “presentation of the service of your agency”. There are few chances he doesn’t have the curiosity to hear about it.
• Reputation benchmark: same principle as before, but this time, instead of offering an analysis of a campaign, offer him a comparative analysis between his online presence and the one of his main competitors. We bet he will give you an appointment.

« Always be closing »
The hardest part is over? Not quite yet. You now need to convince your prospect that your PR agency is the right one to help them for their communication. You probably already have your little recipe for this part but here are some elements used by our clients:

• Prove your productivity : Do you think your prospect doesn’t care about the fact your consultants use a PR software management? Nothing is less certain… Proving him for instance your team will be able to generate in only few clicks his monthly reporting without spending hours in Excel will ensure him that his investment won’t be swallow in low valuable tasks.
• Offer a transparent collaboration: during a campaign, do you think your (future) clients would value the fact he could have access to a screen that summarize in real time all the persons you’ve contacted, current call back, costs associated and the impacts you’ve had on medias and social networks? I am sure you already know the answer.
• Highlight his brand (not yours) :share with your prospect some HTML press release templates using his corporate identity, some reports or press reviews using their image. Remember, it’s his communication that you will have to manage not the one of your agency.

And you, what are your own tricks to improve the commercial efficiency of your agency?

After the announcement of the closing of Google Reader, some online rumors show Google Alerts as the next project to be closed by the Search Engine Company.

Irony. Google Alerts failed to alert me to my latest article about Google Alerts failing to alert me to stuff selnd.com/YKO2WN—
Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 22, 2013

In the Communication environment, Google Alerts is widely used so, what would we do if this tool disappears? We will have a bunch of options, that’s sure, but before we take a decision about a new tool, in this uncertain scenario we can take the time to wonder which are the real needs we have regarding monitoring. Do we need just a free monitoring service or we must go for a professional monitoring tool?

Don’t get us wrong, we do not want to talk badly about the free monitoring tools, which fulfils the news of a large number of users (for example, Kim Kardashian is happy with this type of service :) ) . The aim is to help you identify the real needs in terms of your brand and market monitoring.

What subjects do we want to monitor?

For example, if we want to follow our brand mentions, and it does not use day-to-day words (Example of brands which have day-to-day words: Orange, Sky, New Look, etc) and we are not facing a large amount of mentions, a free monitoring service can be enough and very useful. However, if you want to keep track of your competition, or the main topics of your sector, you might find yourself with a big amount of information which is not easy to digest. In this case, a Professional Monitoring Solution is the best choice: we can follow-up exact-matching expressions (sensitive to capital letters, for example), test with similar words, exclude certain expressions, and also filter by geographic, topic, media type,… Thus, these different filters allow you define a very precise monitoring systems that match exactly your requirements and reduce the “noise” in your results.

Which channels do you want to monitor your keywords in?

Most free tools are specialists on a particular media type (Example: Google Alerts on Google News and Blogs, Hootsuite on Twitter,…). If you want to monitor the same keywords on different channels at once (media, blogs, social networks), the best way to do it is by using several tools to obtain relevant results in each channel. That also means diverse sources of information which result on a high risk of fragmented information and duplicated publications in all the sources. That makes the consolidation of your monitoring a complex task.

How deep is the analysis you want to make?

Analysis is the goal of a monitoring process. When following several expressions, it’s handy to have a dashboard that summarizes the results of your monitoring which gives you a quick and easy view of your activity (the beginning of a news viralization, etc…). In goal-oriented companies where the data is a basic source for taking decisions, it’s smart to have a quick generation of different types or reports (your own reputation, competitors, ROI of your communication efforts, etc)

How do you want to share your results?

When having a small number of your monitoring results, it’s easy to share the publications and articles about your brand to your stakeholders. On the other hand, if your monitoring results are composed of a large number of items, compiling them and manually send them to your clients, colleagues or investors become a tedious job. Professional monitoring solutions offer numerous possibilities regarding this matter: You can easily program automatic newsletters the days and hours it’s more interesting for you. There are also different formats of newsletters, online magazines which can be dynamically shared.

What is the level of quality of service you need?

The rumor about the closing of Google Alerts should make us reflect: free monitoring services may dramatically change their features or simply stop providing their services at any time. If monitoring is a strategic action in your business, you should switch to a professional solution that offers a customer service and constant monitoring. Moreover, professional monitoring solutions evolve according to customer needs.

Free and professional monitoring solutions have their advantages and disadvantages and respond to different needs. That is why you should clearly define our goals and needs of your monitoring strategy before taking the decision.

So, If Google Alerts disappears tomorrow, what would you do?

More and more companies are developing Content Marketing strategies. This strategy – if it’s well done- increase the visibility of the company: to highlight any important news of the company, a new product launch, the promotion of its brand, client loyalty, … Here is some advice to help you develop a Marketing Content strategy:

The basis: useful contents

The content you provide has to be useful for your audience. If you are sharing some information without a clear objective, this could have the opposite effect that the one expected and prejudice the image of your company. Focus on the need of your audience and share experts and clients insights.

Monitor your contents

To know if aa PR action has been efficient, you need to analyze its impact.

Identify what type of information interest your audience and what can be their impacts. You should also analyze their need on a long term basis, because some internal or external factors can change their expectations regarding such content or subject. Before defining your different contents, identify and know well your target. Search what type of subjects does interest your clients and what type does not (and why). To know what their expectations are, will help you develop new products and services and develop your offerings.

Take into account your entire audience, not only your clients

It is crucial to provide your clients with quality content and information, but it is as important to attract new user that could one day become clients. If you limit your communication strategy to your clients and not to the largest audience possible, you may lose the opportunity to convert new clients. Communicate through networks like Twitter, Facebook or your Newsletters, will allow you create a long lasting relationship with your audience.

Share your content in an efficient way

Internet facilitates the diffusion of your contents. We share everyday lots of content through different online platforms and social networks. However, how to ensure your contents arrive to the target audience? Lot of information is exchanged through these platforms and it is essential to optimize your content to make it stand out from the crowd. Try new tools to display your contents, be creative and change the formats. With Interactive Webzine, for instance, you’ll be able to share information by mixing posts of blogs, tweets, offline articles and even Youtube videos, and display them on every channel.

Develop your own style

Find your company style: to do so, it is important to know who your audience is and how you want them to see you. Knowing that more and more companies bet on content as a Marketing strategy, if you don’t develop a particular style, you could be seen as “sheep”. Be original when you develop your contents, change the format and try not to bore your audience.

Define an editorial calendar

Organize content you want to share with an editorial calendar (at least monthly). This will allow you to detect the needs of your audience on time. Moreover, the same information can have more or less value at one time. The editorial calendar will also help you monitor and analyze the impacts of your communication, and above all manage well the information you want to share.

Has your company already set up such strategy ? If so, feel free to share your experience with us!

Foto: eyesore9

« Internally, I can control better my communication. »

Indeed, an internal communication department is the guarantee of having a team 100% dedicated to the company and to be more flexible; your team only works for you. It also promotes interactions between the different departments of the company (sales, customer care …) and the synergies, which guarantee the consistency of all messages that come from the company (whoever is the emitter).

« Internally, it’s cheaper. »

During this crisis time it’s an important point but yet not so evident. Lots of companies, especially the smallest ones, think working with an agency is out of their budget. These past years, we’ve seen an increase in the type of offers and there are some for everyone, lots of communication agencies are human scaled agencies and work with small and middle businesses. To go even further, some of our clients even told us that working with an agency allow them to better control their costs: « If my budget is cut, I can stop the contract with the agency and continue when my budget is unblocked. »

« Working with an agency is working with communication experts! »

When you work with an agency you can benefit from its expertise. Agencies are communication experts with lots of ideas and best practices to share with you. Internally, some people consider they can lock themselves into their messages, and at the end these can become recurrent or redundant. Outsourcing the communication allows to give it a fresh boost and get a new perspective. As experts, agencies know how to adapt themselves to their clients requirements, even when the main activity of the company seems hard to understand (what is often one of the reason companies, especially BtoB companies, don’t want to work with an agency). The agency commits to develop a communication strategy consistent with the activity and values of their clients. Working with an agency allows companies to free some time and resources, that can then be dedicate to the main activity of the company and work on developing its competitive advantage!

« Drive the agency is not always that easy »

Outsourcing involves having project management skills: define metrics to ensure the good evolution of your actions, organize meetings on a regular basis… And most agencies remind you in their contract that they don’t have any obligation of results (just “best efforts”). So yes, working with an agency can professionalize your communication but it is not the guarantee of a “worldwide success”, which is only guaranteed by the good collaboration between the company and the agency: ask the agency to share on a regular basis its results with you. And speaking about worldwide, when you have an international activity, you have to work with several countries and that means several agencies to manage. Externalizing your communication doesn’t mean get rid of it because you still need to drive your agency.

Dahsboard Augure to follow the metrics

Finally, I don’t think there really is any magic solution, and there is often a combination of both options (one part internal and the other one external). It all depends on companies, budgets and resources you have. But one thing is certain, not having someone in charge of communication and do it as it comes, doesn’t seem to be a viable option, at a time where only one little mistake can be fatal.

There are only few aspects discussed in this post so feel free to share with us your own experiences and comments

Monitoring: what are your challenges ?

Ventech is a capital risk company that invests in recent or founding companies within the IT sector. In my job, I need to be informed in real time about the latest trends in our sector, the latest fund raising and our competitor investment decisions. It is a major stake to detect the startup we may invest in and to be sure that we won’t miss “the rare pearl”. On another side, I also need to follow the companies of my portfolio in order to be aware of their news and strategic evolutions. And even if all these companies are related to the IT industry, their sector can be as different as online clothe selling, video games or a women web magazine.

A time-consuming activity

Before, I was using different free or paying tools, but no one was giving me satisfaction regarding the coverage for France and other countries, on the subjects I wanted to follow. Receiving lots of information feeds was extremely difficult. The information was not only redundant but contains also « noise »: I spent a lot of time trying to identify the news that really matter among all the articles I received in the morning. Despite that, I was looking through the press to be sure I wasn’t missing any important news.

A more exhaustive, structured, and accurate monitoring and lot of time saved.

With iMente (monitoring solution from Augure), I’ve been able to configure several monitoring using specific criteria, to match exactly my needs, and I can manage everything in one only platform. iMente helped me to organize my searches: I can clearly define my keywords and eliminate some expressions to decrease the noise, I select the media, countries, languages I want to follow. I receive each morning newsletters I’ve organized by countries or subjects according to my needs, and in that way I can quickly look through all the articles, see what are the hot trends and news I will need to go into in depth. Moreover, iMente is adapted to mobile devices, and I have programed my newsletters to receive them early in the morning (I can also choose the days), and that allows me to check them on my smartphone on my way to go to the office. In that way, when I arrive at the office I am already aware of the recent news and I can start my day being confident … and having saved a precious time.

And what about you, do you think you could improve your monitoring?

For all that, there are only few definitions of Corporate Reputation that allow understanding the global dimension of this concept.

In this new video of our Web TV “Reputation Management Decision Makers”, Thierry Wellhoff shares with us its vision of the most valued and intangible asset of organizations : reputation is the sedimentation of :

• Image, the emotional value associated to perception of the brand
• Opinion, rational dimension based on experiences and facts

Armed with this evidence, how should we support the reputation of our companies?

The answer is in the coherence between all the signals we emit -that determine the perception- and our communication -that determine opinions-. Having in a same media environment the company (through its website, its production of content, social footprint) and the employees, clients, NGOs and other type of stakeholders whose share of voice in the global discussion is proportional to the interest generated by their interventions and publications, can make this balance very difficult to reach.

In practice,  analyzing beforehand the missions and values of the organization, as well as its communication fundments represent a first essential diagnostic to set up a digital strategy. The adjustment of this strategy, its execution on blogs, forums and social networks are as many points I encourage you to discover in this video.

See you soon on “Reputation Management Decision Makers“

The viability of media companies was central to many of the presentations and it doesn’t take much magic to guess that the Internet is the main catalyst for it. However, some of the suggest development avenues were probably a surprise for many and very intellectually stimulating. I will try to summarise 3 broad areas :

• Tech: If there’s one point all speakers agree on, it’s the evolution of journalism towards more diverse and advanced technologies. Whether you look at the Huffington Post and its multilingual, multi-country CMS or at Buzzfeed, its 5 full-time developers (for a total staff of 75) and its highly elaborate and internally developed Web Analytics tools, new media are all resorting to elaborate technology in order to optimise their content production.

  Mark Hansen, presented a striking example of visualisation of the propagation of New York Times articles through various social media in order to understand factors of virality. According to Hansen, journalists, better trained into data capture technologies could bring a lot to the interpretation and analysis of Big Data. The use of publicly accessible data is also at the heart of The Texas Tribune‘s brand and 60% of the site’s articles provide viewers with dynamic, customisable graphs as well as the raw data used to calculated them.

  And the one tech evolution to take notice of is mobile publishing. Contrarily to TV and other traditional channels, for which the percentage of media spend closely follows the percentage of time spent by the public, traditional newspapers and mobile media sites stand at opposite ends of the time/investment spectrum. In spite of its well documented decline, newspaper advertising still outweighs the share of attention these media receive today. Whereas ad sped on mobile is still far below what it could be in the light of the time mobile users spend consuming information on Smartphones and tablets. The inevitable game of communicating vessels budgets therefore encourages the media to publish their articles on mobile platforms a.s.a.p., notably through the use of responsive design, a web technology allowing the display of information on a page to automatically adapt to the size of the navigator / screen on which it is being viewed. At the Washington Post, two full-time jobs are dedicated to mobile publishing and that department will likely grow in the future.

• Going visual: As noted by Michael Downing, the Web, since its origins, has been built around printed media paradigms (text pages, banner ads …) whereas the public at large is more interested in brief and interactive experiences (particularly on mobile, I would add). This probably explains why the monetization opportunities of a 5-10 paragraph article are limited (by ad rates of a few dollars/CPM) which makes the economic model of online news companies extremely fragile. In contrast, monetization of short videos is 6 to 10 times superior!

  Big Data lends itself remarkably well to the most audacious and attractive graphical representations. The rise of infographics is one illustration, but it is necessary to see beyond these to stand out.

  
  
  Buzzfeed, a fast-growing pure-player online information company is championing a form of visual storytelling particularly suited to media: animated GIFs. This 25 year-old graphic format received a boost in 1995 the Netscape navigator added automatic looping to its rendering of these animated pictures. And 2012 was definitely the year of the animated GIF which, for the first time made the homepage of prestigious publications such as The Guardian and The New York Times. The media’s recent interest for the format derives from its ability to present in brief sequences the essence of an action or an event. The ever repeating images tell much more of a story than a still while at the same time presenting the facts in a much more focused and condensed manner than a whole video. Scott Lamb strongly encourages journalists to learn to create and use these files in their work.

• The role of social media in information propagation: According to Joshua Benton, on 48% of traffic to New York Times articles originates on the site’s homepage. This proportion falls to 12% for The Atlantic and to 6% for Benton’s Nieman Lab. An increasingly large portion of the public is discovering news and other forms of content via social media. Google still reigns king of traffic providers in many cases but media organisations that are prospering online focus more on the sharing of their content online than on any other visibility factor. Page views isn’t even a metric on Buzzfeed’s analytics dashboard! Virality takes precedence over all other goals. All the more so because the site’s business model relies on this sharing not only of published articles but also of advertisements (mainly stories sponsored by large brands)!

   

  

  The most ‘liked’ content (which can range from a lolcat picture page to the analysis of a political discourse) is dissected, as are the social accounts at the origin of viral trend and all other factors playing a role in enhanced sharing. On the Huffington Post, social sharing modules occupy the right margin, using-up almost as much space as content itself.

These broad tendencies are just 3 among many others (live video, the will of large media to globalize their audience, adaptive content taking into account the visitor’s navigation history …) Lessons for the media and budding journalists are plenty, but one in particular really drives the point home for me: Stéphane Distinguin urges journalists to become decathletes rather than sprinters, by which he means to broaden the range of their abilities (photography, video shooting and editing, programming, data analysis …), and to scan the environment in search of untapped niches such as hyper-local information.

So, where does this leave PR pros? What should they take home from this day? Evidently, providing rich content (pictures, videos, slide shows …) has become essential to be notices. But I also think that they should follow closely the propagation, on social media, of their own releases and of the articles written about them, a practise that seems very seldom a priority in the industry. Obviously, this can be a chore but media monitoring is there to help.

In this episode, Michael Jaïs and Kasper Ulf Nielsen (Executive Partner with the Reputation Institute) discuss the international implications of reputation management.

Earlier this year, the Reputation Institute published the results of their Global RepTrack™ 100, a larger surveys evaluating the reputations of the world’s 100 largest companies by interviewing consumers in the 15 largest markets. This work reveals that although 50% to 95% of revenue comes from international business, only 11 out of the 100 groups under scrutiny manage to create reputation levels as favourable abroad as it is in their home land.

Exporting reputation is indeed a difficult task for most corporations because it is necessarily based on the trust that consumers in foreign countries have in these companies and those consumers often know very little of their history or values.

Kasper Ulf Nielsen therefore recommends that foreign markets never be considered simply as export markets but as new locations for reputation crafting and interaction with local communities in order to let other drivers than product quality play an important role in reputation management and financial success.

I invite you to watch the video to learn what these other drivers are and what role social media play in this strategy.

See you soon, for new episodes.