Confessions of a Journalist: um, that’s not a story.

April 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

Last week I begin a series of posts called “Confessions of a Journalist.” Every week, I reveal some of my so-called deep, dark journalist secrets from my last few years of experience as a tech/startup blogger in France and Europe.

Last week, I confessed why I may not read a press release. This week I’ll go one step further and tell you what actually makes something compelling enough for me to write about it.

From here, you all look the same.

If you’ve ever gone to more than a couple of networking events in your life, you’ll definitely know what I’m talking about. You meet tons of incredibly talented people, who all work with amazing companies – from influential investment funds to life-changing startups. But over time, they all begin to blur together. Put a bunch of revolutionary people and ideas in the same room and you may eventually see no more than a crowd. Well, that’s more or less what happens once you’re being pitched “amazing” startup ideas 24-7. And that’s what happens in any industry; for the most part, everything starts to sound more or less the same.

“Once upon a time…”

I quickly discovered that entrepreneurs may actually be sitting on a fabulous story but not even know it. One example that comes to mind is from French startup MadMagz. Simply talking about a platform where people can make magazines didn’t really make me jump for joy. But then I found out one of the first users of the product was a 9 year old boy who had used the platform to print these adorable magazines. I was sold.

After I published the story, it was picked up by other publications throughout France as well – and it naturally highlighted how great the product was if a 9 year old boy could use it so easily. (Then again, this story seems less impressive now that toddlers are happily flipping through iPad applications.)

One great way to know what makes a story is to talk to people OUTSIDE of your industry. See what they react to and what they find interesting. Also, look at what else people are talking about and see if you can make your topic relevant.

“A dog made a website with our product.”

After the MadMagz story was published, some entrepreneurs thought that this type of story was a definite win with me – and they went on to pitch me all kinds of nonsense. At some point, I was even pitched a story about a dog that made websites. Puhlease. Make sure that if you’re going to craft a story, it’s based on (some form of) the truth. That said, if you actually do have a product that allows pets to make websites – please contact me…

In addition, it may seem like there are some pieces of information that always make the news no matter what; companies raising funding, the launch of a new product, etc. However, this definitely isn’t the case.

The truth about “non stories.”

It’s true – there may be times when you pitch a journalist a story and they come back and tell you “it’s not a story.” Actually, what they could also mean is “it’s not their story.”

I was actually reminded of this recently when talking with former Mashable Editor, Ben Parr. I mentioned a story to him that was easily picked up by French publications – but he insisted very strongly that it wasn’t a story. Turns out it just wasn’t a Mashable story. There are tons of different publications out there – a lot of the time, it’s just about making sure you’re pitching to the right people.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been contacted to write about the launch of a non-innovative iPhone app for a truck company, a mattress company, a coffee company and more, simply because the PR team figured an iPhone app meant I of course had to be interested. For me, it was definitely not a story. Then again, for an app review site or a site about trucks, mattresses or coffee, maybe it was a story.

Not sure what journalists at a particular publication actually want to write about? Just ask them – via email, Twitter, Linkedin, Quora, etc. For example, here are some TechCrunch writers revealing what startups need to do to get covered.

What about the end?

The one thing that every single journalist – no matter what industry – will be looking for, is the “so what” at the end of the story. It’s the moral of the story, the reason why people should care, the lesson to be learned. You need to make it very clear why the topic matters to them and their audience. For example, a startup building the most ridiculously hi-tech product may never get coverage if they can’t demonstrate to a journalist how their product is going to impact the lives of many people.

Here is a conclusion I found in an article in Fast Company about the data that proves that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Why should people care? Because eating breakfast can make them healthy and thinner – and here are the stats to prove it.

In many cases, this “so what” part of a story should actually come in your introduction when you are pitching a story. If I can’t immediately understand why something is important, I’m never going to write about it…

If you have additional thoughts or questions on what makes a good story, feel free to comment below.

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Is Social the New Corporate?

February 17, 2012 by 1 Comment

Last summer, we measured the nature of social engagement by top French companies listed on the CAC40 to determine whether corporate communications were a part of the mix. The results were slightly underwhelming, with only 2 daily tweets and 1 Facebook weekly update from corporate accounts on average and very little discussion about corporate and reputation-driving topics.

A chart from Augure's study of social corporate activity showing a correlation bewteen update frequency and community size

Click to access study

Later that year, I wrote a post explaining why focusing on brand could be damaging to corporate reputation. But could this all be changing ?

3 reasons corporate communications could be gaining social foothold

First of all, Social Media has come of age. According to recent research by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Facebook and Linkedin are now considered the most effective (and used) tools by Inc500 companies and users of social media are reporting a record levels of success.

A graph showing which social media has the best success rate according to Inc500 companies

Improving feeling of success

The improvement in that feeling of success is slight but real. But more importantly, the goals set for social media engagement by these fast growing companies are revealing, the top 3 being :

  • Brand awareness: 90%
  • Company reputation: 90%
  • Web traffic: 88%

Secondly, and looking at it from another angle, Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer reveals that although general trust in business is on the decline (mainly because of major distrust in financial institutions) two other indicators bring some optimism:

  • Trust in Social Media and corporate channels as sources of information is making significant progress at +75% and +23% respectively (albeit still at rather low levels)
  • Trust in CEOs is (still) extremely low. But both company employees and company experts occupy top rigs on the trust ladder. Proof, if any more was needed, that businesses must use their employees and internal experts as social ambassadors (and more importantly, that companies doing so are reaping huge benefits).
The Trusted Sources slide from Edelman's 2012 Trust Barometer deck

Most Trusted Sources in 2012

Finally, a sign of the (social corporate) times is that more and more companies are publishing utterly corporate documents such as annual reports and CSR reports to new channels such as tablets and are encouraging social sharing by readers (see for instant the Electrolux Financial Reports page).

The road ahead

If corporate communications aren’t gaining on social media in most organizations, they should be:

  • Corporate reputation is a company’s strongest immaterial asset.
  • Companies have unlimited access to some of the most trusted sources of information to do their social reputation management work for them : their own employees.

One last thing: If theory isn’t good enough, facts may help convince the reluctant. In the 2012 Harris Poll RQ study of coporate reputation, the top 5 positions are held by Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Amazon.com and Kraft Foods. All extremely social companies, 3 of which having pushed out more ‘traditionally minded’ groups.

Is your company is discussing corporate issues with its social communities, yet?

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12 important goals for a monitoring plan

January 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

While monitoring – particularly of the social subspecies – is on everyone’s lips today, it is often considered in only one of two contexts:

  • Customer feedback: by monitoring all customer expression channels (social media, phone, email …) and applying heavy technological machinery to face the daunting task of analysing the huge volumes implied, a summary of pain points can be extracted in order to alter the very structure of internal services and support
  • online PR measurement: since media production and consumption has shifted online in the past few years, paper clippings are no longer sufficient to evaluate the success of PR campaigns and online monitoring is used to complete the picture

While both are very valid uses, I’d like to point out a few more. Not because of a sudden crave for encyclopedic endeavours, however pleasant that may be, but because recent evolutions in the social and media landscape dictate profound changes in the way companies and organizations engage with their publics and monitoring is the single most important tool to navigate these often complex waters.

How the Web was won

This is a chart we use on our website to explain the four phases of engagement that must be considered in any communications campaign: Listen, Map, Engage, Measure …

Listen, Map, Engage, Measure. 4 steps in agile campaign management

4 phases of Engagement in a web 2.0 environment


… and back again.

That “back again” is the essential part! While in the past you could plan, execute and measure, the web 2.0 has changed all this and mobile is only making it more complex. The minute a message leaves your company (very often, way before that …) it is amplified, distorted and relayed at various speeds and frequencies depending on media, channels and communities. As previously mentioned on this blog, this new environment requires your PR and communications to learn from Agile and Extreme programming methodologies in order to adapt. Monitoring is essential to plan ahead and gain rapid feedback from all possible channels.

Who you engage, how, and what you measure to keep the boat pointing in the right direction are important aspects of your monitoring plan. The real takeaway is that monitoring is behind all four of these phases.

12 essential goals

OK, I lied. I don’t have 12. 12 sounded like a great number. Large enough to pull the crowds and not so large that I would scare anyone away. But the fact is that the number varies on your own campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Consider all the aspects of your campaign then choose the most relevant from the list below and add your own!!

So, here we go, in no particular order.

Preparing a product launch

Chances are your new product will appeal to many audiences: users who want to know when and how and how much; journalists, who want to know what to write, whether it’s worth their time (unless you’re Apple); bloggers, who want to be the first to spread the news and gain influence and credit (and traffic); resellers, who want to know whether you have addressed past product criticism, whether the rumors about a feature are true …

All of these audiences and expectations need to be identified and addressed for a successful launch. For a recent and compelling example, see how Nokia launched their Lumia 800 after years of struggling in the smartphone market.

Counting on my fingers, that’s at least 4, right there !

Preparing your entry on social media

With Facebook rocketing towards the billionth member mark, not a day goes by without 20 messages turning up in my mail box enticing me to join the party and triple my company’s revenue on social media. Yet the reality is more sobering, and for every success story, ten companies are realizing the emperor really is naked.

The withheld truth is that social media is not a one-size-fits-all marketing venue. Set foot on the wrong network with the wrong approach, and that free community will suddenly look very costly.

Here are a few things you can measure before pressing the GO button:

  • Find out where your prospects/customers are. There’s no point in painting your house blue for Facebook if you should be thinking of Linkedin instead
  • Find out what the hot discussion topics are. Listen before you talk. Identify areas where you can add value
  • Understand the internal gearing of the community. Who pioneers the news, who relays it, who is vocal but not listened to, who is really influential …
  • Understand critical engagement points. What are the positive topics? What are the negative? What ideas are associated to your brand or products? Are there any false rumors going round …

+4 !

Finding your reputation drivers

As they do every year, Edelman have just published the latest edition of their worldwide Trust Barometer, analysing reputation drivers throughout the world. While I used to be (and still am) a huge fan of that enormous survey, I do have to admit that the granularity somehow doesn’t cut it anymore.

Reputation drivers must be measured on the community level to be acted upon and will be different for every company. Measure what blogs are saying about you and compare that to online media and traditional media. While the main stories will be the same, the finer points of view won’t.

Now, let me count … that’s plenty more.

Optimizing your channels

You have successfully engaged with multiple social media communities, you have a regular newsletter shipping, strong relationships with journalists and bloggers …

You have a corporate message to get across.

Measuring the efficiency of media kits across channels

In which channel is it being best received (open-rates, click-through rates) and relayed (retweets, +1, LIKEs …)? Which format suits which channel best? Answers to these questions are key to optimizing your 1 to many engagement.

Media monitoring

Cheating again! I mentioned that in my introduction.

Yes, but, should you stop monitoring TV and newspapers just because of your online feed? Maybe, maybe not? Which are your strongest lead generators? Where are your opponents being most listened to? What is your competition doing? What is your share of voice on the various channels? All this must be plainly visible from a single vantage point. You can then eliminate what is not providing actionable information.

I’ve stopped counting, by now. I need my fingers to type this.

Public affairs, CSR and stakeholder engagement

Who are the best stakeholders to meet for a specific campaign? Influence is one thing to consider. The more influential the person, the greater the amplification of your message.

But that’s not all. Obviously, you’ll want to know what she’s been talking/writing/filming about recently. Anything about you, or your competition? Are there topics you’re not likely to agree about?

But that’s still not all. What been said/written/filmed about her? influential or not, the reactions she triggers might not be the ones you are looking for? What is her own image within your target audience? …

Bottom line, I promise

There are many more uses and goals, whether you’re a public sector corporation, an agency looking after you client’s visibility, a global company or a niche SMB.

But I hope by now my message is clear : monitoring is no longer (only) a question of plugging a clipping provider’s data stream into an application and counting mentions. As more and more departments and employees are becoming a part of your relations with the outside world, many more sources of information for planning and feedback should be integrated into and shared as a convenient and consistent whole to steer the whole organization towards its top line goal.

Sharing the results of monitoring

Sharing the results of monitoring

Offline media, online media, social media, one to one engagement, events, surveys … all are sources of precious information that need to be considered as monitoring and integrated into your daily tools and processes.

If you have any specific monitoring goals in mind I haven’t mentioned here, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

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Why your brand image could be crippling your corporate reputation

October 14, 2011 by 5 Comments

It has been argued that corporate reputation is an aggregate of the company’s image over long periods but that’s not entirely true. And confusing image with reputation could in fact lead to a degradation of the latter.

It’s all relative

Let me explain.

Building brand image is trying to establish strong, favourable and unique associations with the brand in the consumer’s mind. When you think of Nike, the swoosh – Athena’s wings – comes to mind. So do the slogan “Just do it” and associations with high performing athletes.

Nike's swoosh

Corporate Reputation, on the other hand is the sum of perceptions by all stakeholder groups relative to their reputation drivers. World wide surveys such as Edelman’s Trust Barometer reveal what these reputation drivers are, year after year, at the country level.

But for a corporation, these can – and do – change with geography and stakeholder types. Consumers might or might not be happy with product quality. NGOs may still have memories of underaged labour or environmental misconduct. Partners may appreciate doing business with the company. Employees may love internal training and salaries but dislike work conditions …

  • One is about changing mindsets, the other about listening.
  • One is about selling products, the other about enabling business.
  • One is short-term, the other lasts for years. Years ago, Nike signed onto the Global Compact in an attempt to promote an environmentally and socially responsible image but negative associations still linger ten years on.

Social Media should not be (exclusively) a branding channel

Nowhere is stakeholder monitoring (and engagement) more important than in corporate reputation management. In order to find the reputation drivers and issues relative to them, there simply is no alternative to listen and engage.

Reputation barometers such as the Reputation Institute’s are vast surveys asking stakeholders what matter most to them. PR guidelines such as those published by the IPR and AMEC are constantly pushing towards primary reasearch because it is an area that has demonstrated the ability to provide actionable insights and meaningful information.

social media activity types for large french companies

Click the image to access our study (in French)

And yet, social media, the one area where organisations can engage directly with their public is very rarely used to question visitors and discuss social or environmental issues. It does happen, but more often social media is being used to promote brand image, run community-boosting contests or games and develop entertainment programs.

We have just released a study showing how France’s largest corporations are using social media. After recent surveys revealed how much social activity was being devoted by the public to these companies and their boards, we evaluated how these companies were responding.

We measured their presence on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube, their publication frequency, the variety of activities on these networks and community engagement. You can read the complete analysis on our website by clicking on the picture above, but here are three takeaways:

  • Companies tweet about 100x less than their public
  • Only 8% of social activity is devoted to bilateral engagement
  • Community engagement is non-existent for 70% of companies

Marketing and PR could share ownership of social media

In her book No Logo, writer Naomi Klein noted: “In many ways branding is the Achilles heel of the corporate world. The more these companies shift to being all about brand meaning and brand image, the more vulnerable they are to attacks on image.” That was a decade ago. But it remains as true today and nowhere is it more in evidence than on social media.

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that a Facebook page dealing only with the company’s environmental programs would remain quite empty and would not sell many products. But a combined effort between marketing and communications teams would likely be profitable to both. Organisations that have gathered large communities could listen to them more actively and combine reputation management with brand building. Just do it!

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Click! to a new PR measure

May 6, 2011 by Leave a comment

Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes! Three measures for three types of goals you can hope to achieve through your PR. While these are formally defined in the IPR’s Dictionary for Public Relations Measurement and Research, they are also explained very intuitively in terms of Exposure, Influence and Action by metricsman.

Measuring Outtakes (influence over your targeted audience) brings you one step closer to a true evaluation of ROI than measuring Outputs (the amount of exposure your PR bought you), and measuring outcomes (the action consequently undertaken by the audience you reached) is obviously even better. But the apparent complexity of a thorough A to Z measurement plan often leads to measuring Outputs almost exclusively and relying on such indicators as Advertising Value Equivalency in the hope to estimate financial profit from the measurement of Outputs only.

Click! Dollar!

Internet publication has both simplified and complexified this debate, as a quick glance at #pr20chat on Twitter will confirm.

  • On the one hand, it has multiplied the number of publication outlets and corresponding measures of success. A consequence of this diversity is the emergence of holy grail indicators just as silly as the AVE in the hope to justify ROI in a simple fashion.
  • On the other, the growing number of websites (e-commerce or not) with a well-known marketing funnel has given us easier access to an understanding of what financial outcome can mean.

If your website and its social media outposts have been designed around such a funnel, the relative value of a visit to any page is fairly well understood and any traffic driven to it by PR efforts can easily be measured in very practical terms.

So a click is a financial outcome?

It can be! But before some people get red in the face: it can also be an output. Or an outtake, for that matter … It all depends on the document you linked to. And it doesn’t have to be financial to matter.

What was the goal when the document/page you are linking to was written? Every click contributes to this goal. No more, no less:

  • If you are linking to an article written about your product, you are driving more exposure and measuring outputs.
  • If you are linking to a health warning campaign and know that 3% of readers begin the program you are promoting, then every 100 clicks mean 3 new programs started.
  • If you are linking to the contact form of your B2B program and know that each such lead is worth 2000£ to your company and that the rebound rate is 80%, then each click is worth 400£.

Integrated and holistic

Just as important as knowing the practical value of a click is being able to benchmark the various channels for efficiency. Counting clicks is a first step towards measuring engagement (which really requires monitoring comments and sentiment).

Clicks on a link published on various social networks

It shows how many contacts were willing to perform your intended action and understanding whether this was easier on Twitter, Facebook, in your Newsletter, on your blog or on Linkedin is precious information for the planning of your future campaigns.

Counting clicks is not the Holy Grail of PR Measurement for two reasons: (1) it lacks the monitoring aspect mentioned above and (2) contrarily to searching for the Holy Grail, it is easy to do well and derive meaningful information from.

So are you still counting fans or are you clicking to a new PR measure? What are your thoughts?

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Social sharing in Augure’s reputation management suite

April 15, 2011 by 1 Comment

Regular readers know I never pitch Augure products on this blog, but today is different! The pitch will be short and the topic is not so much what I’m writing about as how I am writing about it !

Today, Augure shipped Version 6 of its PR and reputation management suite and this version is largely dedicated to pushing documents and information to social media and blog platforms and to monitoring stakeholder publications on all available channels directly from the software. Hence this post :)

Mixing it up! Social and traditional publication rolled into one

PR and Corporate Reputation Management are sometimes viewed very differently in different companies. Our vision is based on two main foundations:

  • A collaborative platform, to ensure consistency and speed
  • An integrated workflow, to ensure stakeholders can be reached using the most appropriate channel and protocols but also using the same process. Again, this is to avoid functional silos and disruptive actions.

Facebook update about the launch of Augure V6

V6 is a natural extension of these principles that helps users extend their reach to new channels and audiences without leaving familiar grounds or breaking the engagement and measure feedback loop.

So go on, pitch it!

OK! I promised I’d keep it short so here is a link to the new feature list and explanations on Augure V6 on our website: the sharing features, the analysis of impact on reputation and stakeholder relationship quality, how to use engagement history to plan new campaigns & how to use media coverage analysis in ComDecision, it’s all there.

The first piece of online content published via ComSuite

I’ll simply say that by publishing this link to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, email and wire from ComSuite I’ll finally be able to compare the efficiency of all these messages in one place. R&D even wrote its own URL shortener for more flexibility in analysing clicks.

Yeah, it may seem like a shameless pitch, but I’m actually pretty chuffed :)

So, please click-through so I can have fun analysing my reach and leave your thoughts and comments below !

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Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter paving the way for social journalism

April 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

A sign of the Times (grin), the venerable NY Times recently eliminated its Social Media Editor position, arguing that social media needs to be a shared responsibility rather than a siloed occupation. Initially pushed to “promote content, [...] build communities and attract new audiences” social media are now also used to “publish real-time news and updates for breaking stories and live events”.

A point of view shared by The Guardian’ Meg Pickard, who goes further into social to determine how “journalists can collaborate with readers to better understand, explore or reflect subjects or experiences”. Rather than settling for the traditional model in which journalists work on a story before its publication and readers consumer it after, with no real exchange between the two, the news media is trying to understand the value of an authentic relationship with a community.

Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter: 3 visions of social PR

The social media majors have not been blind to this evolution and have in recent week pushed forward many features that will help the trend forward.

Journalists on Facebook logo

Facebook has shown the greatest recent activity in this domain, introducing a new Journalists on Facebook page containing Get started and Best Practise tabs. The page, on which the About .. description reads:

Reach your readers directly on Facebook, an audience of more than 500 million people around the world.

has attracted 26000 fans in just 3 days. Although wall posts are few and far between, the Facebook & Social Journalism article explains the benefits of social widgets such as the LIKE and RECOMMEND buttons for media organisations:

Since we first launched these initiatives at the beginning of 2010, the average media organization has seen a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook.

However glamorous sounding, Facebook is only doing its best to catch up with Twitter in popularity among journalists. As Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist at NPR and noted for his coverage of the Egyptian crisis on Twitter, puts it, most journalists are on Facebook for purely personal reasons and have a lot of catching up to do before they use it professionally.

Janis Krum's picture on Twitpic

Hudson crash coverage started on Twitter

Twitter, the 140 character 5-year old whizz kid has gained tremendous following from journalists and freelancers attracted to the real-time propagation of news around the world. Twitter’s claims to fame far predate the ongoing middle east uprising or last year’s protests in Iran (during which the platform was asked not to shut down for maintenance by the Obama administration, such was it’s impact on local events).

There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy

In January 2009, for instance, all media coverage of the news breaking crash landing of a US Airways Airbus in the Hudson river started on Twitter with a picture posted by one Janis Krum who happened to be riding a ferry on site.

But Twitter appear to be doing some catching up of their own by developing profile pages for business accounts similar Facebook Fan pages. According to other sources, Twitter may even drop its 140 character limit in some circumstances! Stay tuned.

Linkedin Today on iPhone

As for Linkedin, it appears that in a mad scramble to monetize its user base as quickly as possible prior to its IPO, the pro-oriented network is “borrowing” features left, right and center: after allowing updates to be posted and other members to be followed, some time ago, Linkedin is now rolling out social sharing buttons that:

“enable users to share your website with Linkedin’s professional audience, and drive back traffic to your site” or “enable users to recommend your products and services to …”

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever used Facebook, it should. According to Mathew Ingram of GigaOm, there is so little overlap between the two networks that there might be room for both sets of sharing features: “Facebook still seems to be a social playground for many users — a place they post photos and play games and share links to funny videos — while LinkedIn is like the office”.

But more importantly, Linkedin recently started the Linkedin Today page, a personal news site that brings you industry news and articles algorithmically selected from the top releases, tweets and articles posted by the 90 million members, to suit your interests (based on your connections and industry). Below the articles are a list of selected indurstries you can follow. This implies that by posting your company news and expertise to your Linkedin account, you can have it displayed in front of many other members of your industry without having to share a group or be directly connected.

4 ways social sharing will boost your PR

So, while the giants are engaged in this mutual catch-up ballet in search of profitability, how can organisations benefit? There are four easy catches:

  • As journalists are less responsive to press release distribution and pitches, social sharing gives companies an alternate way of connecting and increasing their coverage.
  • Links in articles written about the company increase its website’s Google ranking and visibility.
  • Social search has higher credibility that traditional search because its results are based on the activity and preferences of the user’s network. Social sharing is a great way of being found and read.
  • A huge, and rising, proportion of mobile Internet access is dedicated to social media. Social sharing is an easy way of reaching your audience on their mobile devices without redesigning your website.

So by sharing news on these three networks, companies have an unprecedented opportunity to reach far more consumers, journalists and other members of their industry, to increase website traffic and leads and to spread their side of the story in reputation management activities.

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Don’t let your crisis management destroy your corporate reputation

March 25, 2011 by 3 Comments

In Crisis Management Failures in Japan’s Reactors and the BP Spill, Ben W. Heinemand Jr writes:

“A potentially catastrophic technological problem, an incomplete crisis response plan, misleading early information, divided private and public authority, ineffective initial actions.

This could describe the current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and its six reactors. But, it also describes what happened after the April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. “

The apparent lack of official response in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis is an inherited trait of Japanese corporate culture that has already been discussed during Toyota’s 2010 massive vehicle recall. It is still at play today, creating financial confusion after Japan’s strongest quake on record and goes against the top three rules of crisis management: “Communicate, Communicate, Communicate” and will inevitable lead to more reputation erosion before that cultural specificity gives way.

But two major aspects of efficient crisis management were notably absent from both energy sector crises turned environmental disasters:

  • A well rehearsed crisis response scenario
  • Consistent messaging

Rehearsing a crisis response plan

The less likely an event, the fewer reasons there are to prepare for it. You may have dreams of winning the lottery but not a well structured plan of what changes you will make to your life if you do. And while executives may have nightmares about worst-case scenarios, their companies often don’t have well thought out and well rehearsed response plans for these highly unlikely events. But instead of thinking in terms of likelihood, a more valid metric for justifying such a plan could be expected loss: highly unlikely but potentially crippling would receive as much focus as the more regular, day-to-day issues.

Moreover, planning ahead beforehand and implementing the scenario within a tool is a much more reliable strategy than reacting when a crisis occurs. It is very hard, if not impossible, to make all the right decisions when the house is on fire. And the longer the organisation waits, the less likely it is to control the situation and the greater the costs at which it will do so.

The prospect of such a plan is daunting and there are no easy rules for building one, but:

  • knowing who your stakeholders are and what their main issues would be in such an event is an undeniable head start enabling an effective communications process to begin immediately.
  • knowing at all times what type of reputation risk your company is most subject to, in what country and from what category or stakeholders, will let you prioritize issues in the essential initial phase of crisis management

ComDecision Risk Analysis Dashboard

Ensuring consistent communications

Who owns crisis management in your company? What department owns corporate reputation management? Ownership is the source of frequent discussions in corporate reputation management groups on linkedin. Heads of Corporate Communications, Public Affairs and Corporate Relations are often cited as natural candidates but the consensus – from what I have observed on these groups – is that a cross functional group including all departments with a stakeholder touchpoint and represented at board level is the most efficient and reliable option. One company call this group the Reputation Leadership Council, for instance. Whatever the name of this group or department in your organisation, it should hold responsibility for all crisis response scenarios.

Maritime pollution crisis management plan

To implement a response plans according to clearly laid out individual responsibilities, a collaborative tool is essential to ensure consistent messaging and synchronisation. Local interactions by the various departments, social media community managers and official spokespersons can then be logged, measured for efficiency and reoriented with the speed demanded by such circumstances.

Crises do not have to happen on a global scale, wipe out the ecology of a subcontinent or threaten the existence of thousands to warrant such preparedness. Think about the worse situation your company could cause and to whom. Are you prepared for this eventuality?

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PR on Facebook : understanding and measuring success

November 12, 2010 by 3 Comments

For all its perceived potential as a marketing tool letting you engage directly with consumers in a half-a-billion sized tank of users, Facebook is not always seen as an easy ride for Public Relations and Stakeholder Engagement professionals. And yet, the opposite could actually be true.

Yes, Facebook is mainly a consumer oriented media on which hot topics include ice cream and the latest Lady Gaga adventure. Yes, brand bashing pages start or relay crises and have turned into PR nightmares (ask BP or Toyota). Yes, measuring your engagement, as described in many articles, is tedious and often based on flaky fan population sizes that can be slow to grow for non famous businesses and are meaningless to your board.

Flick picture by Kenny Møller

But let’s see the other side of the Facebook PR coin. Let’s start by defining the nature of a Facebook page, as a venue for Stakeholder Engagement and PR. It differs from traditional media in two essential ways:

  1. It is neither owned, earned media nor an opt-in list, but what Forrester refer to as partially owned media. You can’t invite people to your party and ask them to shut up once they arrive or not reply to them. Yet, that’s what some big corporate accounts have been doing and that’s what explains the ensuing PR nightmares (cf the Toyota case and Sinar Mas case).
  2. It pushes engagement towards real-time, leaving no time to consult VPs, CEOs or lawyers. Discussions must be open, honest and timely. BP’s PR ordeal can mainly be attributed to the breaching of these rules, and not only on Facebook.

Flickr image by European Parliament

I think Facebook may be a better place for PR than for marketing. For a quartet of reasons:

  1. Facebook isn’t all about Ice Cream. Essential stakeholders for many businesses have a presence on the social media. And whatever your sector, it is a great place to reach out to the general public: discussions posted on a regular basis make your page a repository of precious information that doesn’t require a visit to your corporate website.
  2. Even among Facebook marketers, the consensus is that the social media isn’t a good place to grow your audience, but rather a place to nurture your existing one through passive attention, maintaining brand awareness via regular updates to a semi-captive fan base. There are no built-in ways of identifying new prospects as on LinkedIn or of getting people to follow you as on twitter.
  3. More often than not, Facebook fans are already fans of your brand when they like your page, or are lured by the promise of short term profit (a discount or a lottery prize, for instance). In his excellent recent trilogy of articles on the subject, Jay Baer writes: « … what I can’t abide, and what I want to put a stop to right now, is the notion that Facebook fan pages are a cause of advocacy. Instead, Facebook fan page “likes” are primarily the manifestation of advocacy that already exists. »
  4. Thanks to the EdgeRank algorithm that decides what appears on your wall and what doesn’t, it is estimated that only one in 500 of a company’s updates actually reach its fans. Whereas when responding to mentions of your brand (using adequate monitoring), you will automatically be seen.

So how do you start?

  • Facebook itself has a good PR page teeming with discussions on the more modern variations of PR such as Webinars, blogging tips, welcome pages …
  • Engage openly. Tell your side of the story firmly but keeping in mind you share the room with very sensitive and sometimes vocal people who you can turn into powerful advocates or hateful enemies. Few industries are more exposed than energy and mining, yet Rio Tinto navigated the “Rio Tinto get the hell out of Madagascar” troubled waters efficiently.
  • Incorporate your monitoring and engagement in the broader context of a stakeholder engagement process and platform in order to produce meaningful reports (Hint: my employer is an editor of such solutions ;) )
  • As for measuring, nothing has changed: whenever possible try to link desired outcomes to your activity. If not possible, analyze the quality of your outputs to estimate outcomes. Counting fans? Really? If your research can tie a financial value to a fan, go ahead. Otherwise, focus on conversations and measure each update as you would a small article: accuracy of message, tone of voice, benchmarking …

If you have other ideas or experiences on this topic, please share them in the comments ! Happy Facebook.

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

7 reasons email still rocks PR and 3 rules to use it well (2)

October 20, 2010 by 1 Comment

In the previous post, I wrote about 7 reasons why email wasn’t being pushed out of the PR scene by social media . As I tweeted about it, the following tweet caught my eye: a French minister addressing the police force via a telegram.

Proof enough that not everyone is using social media to communicate ;o) So, why the big buzz?

One major (unformulated) appeal is the high degree of connection between social media users. The degrees of separation (the number of intermediaries needed to communicate a message from any person to any other) on social media is lower than in the rest of the world: 5.7 on average for Facebook, 4.7 on twitter against 6.6 via email world. However, this somewhat mitigated by the low propagation of messages observed on these networks: on average, only one in 318 tweets are being retweeted. And, thanks to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, only one update in 500 is actually seen by a company’s fans.
One real reason social networks see more engagement is because their content is often more … engaging. A tweet is short and sweet, as is a Facebook update. Tweets can be repeated at regular intervals to reach most of your followers. Social updates also feel more fun and personal compared to much more ponderous newsletters having the potential to bore the wits out of most of their subscribers.

Engaging content, engaging strategy

Professional bloggers devote a large part of their time writing good headlines. And maybe as much again writing a compelling first paragraph. Whereas some newsletters make you want to chew your brains in despair. Three simple rules can help you make the best of email in a social media world:

  • Target your audience! Spamming millions doesn’t works. Period. Public Relations and Stakeholder engagement needn’t be complex processes but knowing your audience, their topics of interest and material preoccupations will boost your open/click-through rate tremendously. Use your data.
  • Make your content interesting! Simple and informal aren’t necessarily the exclusive attributes of Facebook updates. Press releases can also benefit from this, as well as most newsletters. Jargon is not read, jargon is not shared. Jargon and self-promotion repulse readers, destroying SEO (and damaging online reputation). When searching online, people are mainly looking for information. Three quarters of journalists are looking for new sources of expertise, mostly browsing websites such as Wikipedia and corporate websites. Provide people with useful information. Write well, follow the inverted pyramid pattern and provide links to more in-depth content. Your traffic will thank you.
  • Use both! Interrelated media work best and getting your fans and followers to subscribe to your newsletter is a very good practice to multiply impressions and angles. The additional step is meaningful as research shows that LIKEs and Follows are not considered by their authors as implicit permission to market (an Opt-In), only an expression of interest in a brand or product. Jeff Bullas suggest 10 ways to integrate social media and email. Integrating the two (mail and social media) requires unified content, strategy and teams.

There are many more reasons to use mail (better tracking, stable platform vs evolving commercial social networks, better edition possibilities in email, one email several for social accounts …) but integration is the way to go. If you’ve started along these lines, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Filed under Engagement Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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