New journalistic practises : a high-tech job ?

December 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

On Dec 10th, and as every year since its creation, SciencesPo’s School of Journalism organised a conference on the new journalistic practises (#npdj12).

Sciences Po's Conference on the new practises of Journalism in 2012

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.

    A man flying on a fire extinguisher in the tube

    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)!

     

    Analysing social sharing in various social media

    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.

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How to get press even when your company has no news

August 28, 2012 by 1 Comment

It’s summer and most of us (especially in Europe) are on vacation – at least mentally if not physically as well. And so it’s only natural that the press seems to get a little quieter around this time of the year as well. Most companies refrain from making big announcements during the summer as people are more likely to be at the pool than at their desks. But just because your company isn’t making any announcements doesn’t mean that you can’t get press. In fact, there are several ways you can get coverage even when your company has nothing to announce. Here’s an example.

Behold: the guest post.

It amazes me how few companies think to publish guest posts. For many online publications, more content simply means more page views. It’s a simple equation, which means that lots of publications won’t shy away from the chance to publish another article – especially if it’s written by a so-called “expert” and adds a new voice to their catalogue of regular journalists.

Who publishes guest posts? Oh. Everyone.

Yes, it’s true. A majority of publications publish guest posts.

Here is an example from TechCrunch:

And here is an example from Forbes:

Essentially if you’ve ever seen a guest post in a publication, it’s likely that they publish guest posts on a regular basis. But even if you haven’t stumbled upon a guest post, it doesn’t mean the publication would be against publishing your piece.

How to get published and what to expect.

First things first, do not expect to get paid and it is very unlikely that these publications will be paying for your article. You can always ask but just know not to expect a fat check. Remember that you are writing to help your company gain more exposure – but that said, you should by no means “sell” your company in what you write. Your goal with the article is to provide an opinion or demonstrate your industry expertise. If at any point you get into grey territory, it’s likely that you won’t get published.

A (really good) example.

When I was running TechCrunch France, I regularly got pitched to publish guest posts. But there was one that really stole the show in my mind. The piece was published by the former CEO of a France-based startup, Charles Mignot, who is now at Google. What was brilliant about this piece was that Mignot didn’t write at all about his company’s service. In fact, he decided to focus on a topic that would be pertinent for the TechCrunch audience (which is largely entrepreneurs): the benefits and drawbacks of using Freemium as a business model. And the TechCrunch France audience simply loved it.

What NOT to do.

Writing a guest post is definitely a great way to gain exposure but you should definitely avoid trying to sell your own business, bashing your competitors, etc. through what you write. In other words, avoid anything that may seem like a conflict of interest. I recently stumbled upon someone on Quora who wanted to write a guest post on his own product – which is not very likely to get published (but there are exceptions).

Because it can be hard to know ahead of time what publications will or will not publish, I advise anyone who wants to write a guest post to pitch the topic before actually drafting the article. It’ll save you a lot of time and wasted effort in case publications say no, for whatever reason.

The results.

Writing a guest post like may not immediately result in more sales. However, it will definitely drive more trafic to your site (especially if the publication links to your website in the byline) and place you as a thought leader in your given industry. Ultimately, guest posts are a terrific way to increase your exposure but also to share your thoughts and experiences with others. Therefore, I highly encourage entrepreneurs and businesses to consider writing guest posts whenever possible.

If you have questions or other advice or comments regarding guest posts, please feel free to share.

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7 indispensable features of a PR monitoring platform

July 16, 2012 by 1 Comment

With the rising importance for corporations of understanding Internet conversations, monitoring platforms seem to be sprouting from nowhere every week-end. And with prices ranging from nil to 6 figures and feature sets tailored for many different use cases, it has become almost impossible to compare offerings directly.

Here are 7 essential features you’ll want to look for if your monitoring is PR and reputation management oriented.

Defining clean reading-lists

When watching out for crisis-alerts, it is a good idea to include as many significant sources as possible in your data: picking up a criticism from a small blog before a larger one amplifies it will prove invaluable to crisis management.

But if you’re monitoring competition or launching a niche product, more sources will simply mean more noise and less ability to analyze your coverage in meaningful ways (share of discussion, sentiment analysis by humans …)

Clean reading-lists are essential to media monitoring

Depending on your usage scenario, you need to be able to tailor your reading lists very accurately.

Staying flexible

  • One product today, three tomorrow.
  • Four competitors today, six tomorrow.
  • New technology, new regulations, new blogs, new buzzwords.

How easy is it for you to adapt to these changes? A monitoring plan optimized for January may look pretty outdated in July. Can you easily add or remove sources and keyphrases to your monitoring?

Mixing it up

Twitter delivers news (and rumours). Fast. Facebook provides recommendation. Good blogs are niche lighthouses. But don’t count traditional media out just yet.

While there is great value in social media monitoring, it cannot be your only source of information for PR and reputation management. According to Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer, traditional media are still, by a safe margin, the most influent source of information when it comes to trust.

Traditional media are still influent for reputation management

The ability to mix data from online and social monitoring and traditional offline clipping into a consistent feed is essential to analyse and understand along what paths news about your company circulate, which source is more influent and to be sure you are not missing out on anything important.

Blocking out the noise

What do SERPs look like for your company name, CEO, brand, products, competitors, technology (…)?

Hopefully, you own the first lines or pages of results, but beneath these are plenty of other pages unrelated to your brand and which are all likely to place news in your unfiltered monitoring feed.

For Augure, noise sources (from our point of view ;) ) are many : atmospheric metal music (yes, that exists), world of warcraft guilds, organist fan clubs, photography exhibitions, magic tricks … plus a constant slew of good and bad omens (Augure means omen, in French) in all types of activities, from business to arts. All of these use the term Augure so a simple keyword based monitoring feed would probably contain 80% of noise.

Noise hurts the efficiency of media monitoring

It’s important. Noise will lower your confidence in monitoring results and lower your focus. More importantly, it will make all analysis impossible and crisis detection very unreliable.

Your ability to add that double glazing to your monitoring windows, with far more than single word exclusions to deal with noise, is critical to the success of your monitoring goals.

Striving to qualify

What good is a list of clips and mentions to your management?

Qualified data makes efficient analysis and reporting possible. A monitoring platform that provides information such as author influence, theme, audience metrics, source type, (…) not only lets you refine your monitoring plan and reduce noise but also helps integration with your engagement platform and its reporting module.

Management usually prefer strategic insights and ROI evaluations to a bunch of URLs or paper clips. Do you qualify?

Finding your target

Most monitoring companies focus on specific areas of the world, which makes perfect sense (unfortunately, not all are perfectly clear about it).

Our focus is on France (6000 fully crawled sources), the UK and Southern Europe. Plus quite a few Spanish-speaking countries (our technology originated in Spain). Which doesn’t mean we don’t monitor the US or China, but our main focus what I just described.

Does your monitoring platform match your target ?

Whenever choosing a monitoring platform, be sure to check whether it covers your area extensively. Products from one continent may not be ideally suited for another.

Seeing beyond RSS

Most entry-level offerings – but also some more expensive and well-known platforms – rely exclusively on RSS feeds as their source of data. RSS feeds are a standardized output format from websites and blogs so tapping into them is extremely easy. In fact, you can build yourself a very similar monitoring rig using only a free RSS reader with search or filtering capabilities and cherry picking your sources.

But there are a number of problems with this approach.

First of all not all websites have RSS feeds. They’re a distinct minority but some of them are important and RSS-only will miss anything published by their website.

More often, a website will have separate sections and a specialized article might be published in a dedicated area with – or without – a dedicated RSS feed. Monitoring all the feeds from the website will result in duplicates if the article changes sections (e.g. a few hours on the homepage, then finances, then sports for an article on Football club debts).

Finally, many influent bloggers use their blogs as their sole website and make a solid proportion of their income from promoting their books, white papers, speaking bookings … in their sidebars. These prolific – and very important – authors deliberately place only a small portion, an appetizer, of their articles in their RSS feeds. If your company is mentioned in the body but not the header, RSS-only will miss the mention.

Clean crawling of websites, not using RSS, is a labour intensive job to perform and maintain. A large portion of the price difference between solutions can be attributed to this choice of sourcing technology. While free or entry-level software cannot be expected to go beyond RSS, any platform carrying a healthy monthly fee absolutely should.

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Confessions of a journalist: the 5 things I simply can’t stand.

May 21, 2012 by 1 Comment

Now that I’ve been regularly confessing my intimate, journalist secrets to you all, I figured it was time to finally open up and share the dark stuff. This is the stuff that makes me (and probably every other journalist) outraged.

Please keep in mind that there are naturally many aspects of being a journalist, most of which do not cause my blood to boil. But here are the things you should most definitely avoid.

1. I said “email me.” Not “poke me on Facebook.”

It’s funny, a lot of journalists make it very clear how they want to be contacted – yet people consistently ignore this info and seek out utterly annoying ways to get in touch, usually with the hopes of “making a statement.”

People figure journalists are bombarded with press releases and info (which they are) via email, phone, Twitter and whathaveyou, so by finding a different way to get in touch they’ll probably get the journalist’s attention. Well, this method definitely gets attention – though typically not the right kind.

All journalists are different. I have public profiles on a lot of social sites but I have always made it very clear that people should get in touch with me via email, Twitter and Linkedin. I dislike using both telephone, Skype and Facebook for people I have never met, yet many people somehow managed to ignore this. I’ve had people do everything from Facebook poke me to call my parents in California for an article. I definitely makes me wonder why people go to such extensive lengths when my email address is very visible and I am (generally) pretty good at reading and responding.

In short, most journalists make it very clear how they want to be contacted. Why not just try one of those?

2. As it turns out, I don’t blog about mattresses.

One of the problems with my email being so available to everyone on the Internet is that sometimes people who have no idea about what I write about contact me with their completely irrelevant press releases. I get press releases about trucks, wine – even mattresses. Clearly, none of this really appeals to a French tech/startup blogger…

There are also times when the line gets a little blurry. I write about tech – but for the most part, I cover Europe and French-related news and companies. Therefore, I have more difficulty writing about companies in China or Australia if there isn’t a direct relationship to France or Europe. It can be done – but usually I would prefer that these startups actually have a relevant story for my audience before pitching me.

So, before contacting a journalist, it’s definitely good to check and make sure that what you are sending them is relevant to their readers.

3. Yes, you DO have competitors.

This is my biggest journalist pet peeve of all time: whenever someone I am interviewing and he or she tells me that their company does not have competitors. Every time this happens, there is an explosion inside my head. And a part of me dies.

I am a strong advocate of openly talking about competition for several reasons:

First, you help the journalist understand your business better. If you ignore talking about other people in your industry, there is a chance that the journalist may not fully understand the market you are in.

Second, I always think it’s beneficial to be seen as part of a movement – alongside big, dominant players, if possible – than as a lone star. And plus, if you are competing with the likes of Amazon or Apple (in even the smallest of ways), wouldn’t it be nice for your name to appear next to theirs?

And finally, you risk taking the journalist for an idiot – and then you’ll get a not-so-friendly surprise if they actually publish an article. If the journalist does their homework, they’ll end up finding out who your competitors are and publishing them anyway. So why not just talk about them openly and avoid looking like a bit of a scoundrel ?

4. No, my question cannot wait 48 hours.

Perhaps this applies more to bloggers than any other type of journalist – but do not forget that journalists are on incredibly tight schedules. Embargoes are not very fun to play with and usually journalists are working on multiple stories at the same time and trying to get them out as fast as they can.

Therefore, when you or your communications/PR team gets a question from a journalist, try to respond ASAP. I cannot tell you how helpful it is when someone is able to get an answer to you right away – it also helps drive the momentum for finishing the article and getting it published.

There have been times when PR teams or communications people have not responded right away, have dragged their feet a little and gotten me the answer to my question after my article had been published. Well, needless to say, it ends up making my question and the answer absolutely pointless.

5. Yes, we had a conversation. I did not sign a contract.

Perhaps one of the worst assumptions that someone can make is that a conversation equals an article. I’ve had many conversations with startups and discovered afterwards that there just simply wasn’t a story. And explaining this can be difficult.

Some journalists have enough integrity to come out and just say clearly that they will or will not publish. But on the whole, it’s best to assume that a conversation doesn’t necessarily equal an article – and not harass the journalist to bits just because you had a conversation.

Now, if there are any other journalists or bloggers out there who would like to share the things that annoy them most, by all means – feel free !

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Confessions of a Journalist: do you think I actually read your press release?

April 19, 2012 by 4 Comments

This post is the first of a new series I am going to write about my experience as a journalist/blogger. I’ve written and continue to contribute to numerous publications – TechCrunch, Business Insider, the Telegraph, the Kernel, Betakit and more – and  I cover primarily tech startups. That said,  these tips are definitely relevant for all industries as journalism is going through a massive evolution with the development of new technology platforms.

Topic 1: The beloved press release.

Now, I picked a bit of a provocative title for this article on purpose. But PR and comms departments, please calm down – I DO read your press releases. Well, that is, if they are good.

What makes a good press release, you ask?

Any PR or comms expert is very familiar with a press release – an official written communication statement that is sent to the media in order to announce or share a piece of information. Most of the time, companies send out press releases to announce “official” news – the launch of a new product, new funding, an acquisition, etc.

Press releases also vary greatly from one industry to another. In tech, press releases tend to be 1-2 pages max, a little more neutral in tone with less visuals and more text. But go look at press releases from more visual industries – like fashion or cosmetics – and you’ll discover a variety of tones, colours, photos and very little text. For example, here’s a very eye-catching press release from bath & body brand Soap and Glory:

If you want to see an example of a more sober press release, take a look at Ebay’s press room. Honestly, neither of these styles is necessarily better than the other – they are actually both relevant for their audience.

Good press releases will of course feature a catchy title (I cannot stress the importance of titles enough as I often receive hundreds of emails a day that look more or less the same) and relevant information for the particular topic. Some journalists will actually publish more or less exactly what you send in the press release. But many journalists will (hopefully) want more; in fact, they’ll want to publish something exclusive that you’re not offering to everyone in your standard communication – so be sure to save some good bits of info for the journalists you really want to develop good relationships with.

News beyond the release.

Even though many traditional PR and comms teams may still hold on tight to their beloved press releases, journalists are actually excited in finding news through other means – and there are tons of terrific social platforms that they turn to in order to do so. Some of these I mentioned in an earlier post about some of the new social platforms companies should really be paying attention to: Pinterest, Quora and Instagram. But naturally, the list is much longer and often includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and more. These different platforms are now considered viable and verified sources for news, so Facebook status updates, Tweets, Quora answers and Foursquare checkins can all be used in lieu of quotes in articles.

For example, here is an article in People Magazine about actress Melissa Joan Hart. Notice that the evidence in the article is a direct link to her Tweet…

Journalists love this type of thing because it looks like they’ve done some good fact-checking and they can use quotes direct from the source. PR and comms teams should think about leveraging different platforms when communicating to journalists and supplementing press releases with Tweets, Quora answers, Foursquare checkins and more. Or, ditch the press release and send this stuff in lieu – in some cases, a very powerful Tweet can be enough for a story…

Oh, careful, everyone can see.

That said, don’t forget that social platforms are public and that everyone can see. Therefore, the information published on these platforms lose their exclusivity if the journalist doesn’t publish quickly and if multiple sources pick up on the info. So be sure to manage what you publish and what you give to journalists – and always include something exclusive if you can.

No, press releases are not dead.

It may be natural to want to draw the conclusion that press releases are losing their relevancy – but they are very clearly NOT dead. They’re simply going through a bit of metamorphosis with the evolution of the social web. But we need to recognize that communication habits are changing as are the ways in which journalists and bloggers receive and relay info as well.

Some quick things to avoid…

In the past, I have seen some companies do all kinds of no-nos with press releases. For example, one company used to send along a press release every month to announce a “new” product feature. It quickly became evident that the features were rather trivial and that this was simply a poor communications tactic. Overtime, I stopped reading the releases.

Another thing to be sure of is that you send the press release in the right language (the language that the journalist will be publishing in) and the right format. If there are elements (photos, videos, links) that the journalist may want to incorporate into their article, be sure to send them as part of the original email (there are now different products that let you build dynamic and multi-media press kits, including Augure). Do not send large attachments as they can get stuck or also annoy the journalist – in fact, the journalist will probably contact you to get the elements they need if they are interested.

Now, if there are other journalists, PR or comm experts out there that would like to share additional tips and tricks, feel free to chime in.

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10 ways media monitoring will help your crisis management

March 22, 2012 by 2 Comments

It used to be that a corporate crisis was triggered only by major events involving top executives, global scandal or industrial accidents. The media would relay the news at best on a daily rhythm and giving company spokespersons as much coverage as the news itself. The public would get daily updates from a limited number of sources, most often TV, maybe the morning radio and a newspaper. Coverage would be very similar, providing incremental information in a linear fashion as time went by. Only the amount of coverage in a given publication or program would determine how much of the story people got to read or watch.

Contrast this now with a classic social media outbreak such as the Domino’s Pizza or United Airline broken guitar videos. Created by amateurs – employees for Domino’s Pizza and a disgruntled customer for United Airlines – these received millions of views on YouTube in only a few days, spread from friend to friend every minute and got relayed by mainstream media, sometimes without the respective companies having their say.

Both videos triggered response from the highest levels of management in spite of the original incident being fairly minor : yes, the Domino’s Pizza video was disgusting but the gravity of the facts pale in comparison to what would have been necessary to generate as much noise only 10 years ago. And the United Airlines example – and its almost 12 MILLION views – highlights the possibility for the dissatisfaction of a single customer to find a great echo with the other members of the public when the heat would previously have been kept private.

Given that the probability of positively resolving a crisis decreases in time, with simultaneously increased crisis management costs, this greater propagation speed not only means more frequent crises but also more complex and costly resolutions. An efficient monitoring process and well rehearsed response plans are the best safeguards against this phenomenon.

Here are 10 ways media monitoring will help you avoid the worst before, during and after the crunch :

  1. Knowing you natural channels. The most effective crisis management device, bar none, is a favourable terrain. Surveys show, year after year, that a company with a good reputation will be much less affected by bad news than another with a low trust capital. Pretty obvious but not always acted upon. Cross-channel media-monitoring will tell you exactly who is talking about you and where discussions are taking place. Also what media and what channels are covering you.
    2. Coverage of a crisis by media type

    Twitter rules this crisis

  2. Closing the gaps. Conversely, by monitoring your competition and industry topics, you will also find who isn’t talking about you, but should be. This lets you start conversations and begin building trust in other important corners of online and social media.
  3. Understanding propagation. If, through your monitoring, you’ve been paying attention to what the information propagation patterns are in your industry, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who starts rumours, rants and misinformed discussions. And of who amplifies news, who defends your positions or corrects errors. Not only should this provide you with plenty of ideas for engagement before a crisis, it will also help you react much more efficiently when red alert is sounding.
  4. Understanding pain points. You might be surprised with the topic that ignites a crisis. There probably was no way for Domino’s to anticipate the coup-d’éclat of their employees but, in most cases, it’s pretty easy to understand what the main pain points are for your customers (or partners, or employees …) and prepare for disaster in that direction.
  5. Detecting a problem early. If my lengthy intro tells you anything, it’s that speed is an essential ingredient for success. Frequent feed updates will give you an early start and the ability to at least establish an official presence in the discussions very early on to correct mistakes or, at worst, simply say “I don’t know, but we’re looking into it”. In the example below, catching the opportunity to speak out on the 25th is a lot better than a few days later. Real-time is better still.

    6. A sudden spike in media coverages can indicate a crisis

  6. Fostering engagement. In the first phases of a crisis, it is important to understand where the threat is strongest. The most angry and most influential relays need to be addressed very quickly. Even if you have very little to offer, identifying the greatest detractors and simply acknowledging you have heard their complaint and are doing everything to look into it, is a great help. This stops the flame wars and buys you (a little) time to prepare for the next step. Since you cannot respond to millions in a few hours, your monitoring must help you pinpoint the most important stakeholders to talk with.
  7. Planning a response. Your monitoring will then tell you what the exact complaint is and how it is being discussed in the media. What terms are being used? Who is being mentioned? What are the undesirable associations with your brand? … Share these insights quickly inside the company and prepare a response plan.
  8. Measuring progress. As you reply to angry comment and gradually feed in information, measure how the crisis topics you previously identified are rising or falling in ‘popularity’. Are opinion leaders picking up your information or are crisis related terms still gaining. Monitor constantly and adapt your strategy accordingly.
  9. Monitor side issues. If you’ve been listening carefully to your communities and to internal discussions, you’ll know what other pain-points are likely to be picked-up as extra fuel in the crisis. Are any of these flaring up ? Prepare responses for all of those that are related to the current hot-topic.
  10. Checking for secondary flares. I come from the South of France, where the summer time is a period of constant battle against forest fires. After a long day or week of extinguishing the main fire, an intense watch is set up at many peripheral point to be ready for spontaneous re-igniting. In a dried-out landscape, a single incandescent log forgotten under ashes is enough to start the fight all over again. Crisis management follows the same logic. And when the main combat phase seems over, you need to be particularly watchful for new spikes. So keep the monitoring very regular and use what you learned in the previous phases to monitor the terms most likely to mean trouble.
  11. Rebuilding trust. If all goes well, your side of the story should progressively get greater share of coverage. Measure how consistently you messages are relayed and how the tone relating to these gradually shifts to green.

Effective crisis management consists if many successive phases, including:

  • Comprehensive pre-crisis engagement to establish a favourable terrain
  • Immediate response, if only to establish a corporate presence, even if you don’t have the answers
  • Laying out of a plan and swift communications about it
  • Walking the early road to recovery by providing information on how the plan is unfolding
  • Re-building trust, which can take 4 years

In today’s instant-information and connected world, mapping cross-channel monitoring to each of these will go a long way towards dealing effectively with the worst the web can offer.

How is your company preparing for such crises ?

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Shaping up for Social Corporate Engagement

February 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

In a previous post, I defended the idea that the use of social media by organizations to discuss corporate topics may be on the rise. Immediately after this, co-authoer Roxanne Varza described how 3 new social media platforms could be leveraged in your communications strategy.

Which is all well and fine, but we regularly hear the cries of overburdened PR and marketing managers : “how do we keep up with it all?”

Empower Me, Boss!

One of the secrets, probably the most important secret, is to learn to empower others to do so for you. The reality of social media is that your employees probably use – and know – them better than most managers in the company. Face it.

How to empower, train, guide and organize employees from various departments and business units in your organization is the topic of our soon-to-be-released white paper “Is There a PR Pilot In Your Social Plane?”, which also deals with measuring results from this engagement. If you’d like to receive this, just drop us a line on our contact form.

Get in Shape

Web Strategy expert Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter group has also conducted surveys of organizations to find out how they structure their social media teams and made some suggestions towards facing the task proactively rather than becoming a “social media help-desk”.

A chart by Altimeter Group shows how social media teams are structured in large coporatiions

Structure of the Social Media Team. (c) Altimeter Group

In Strategy: Five Steps to Achieve ‘Escape Velocity’ –and Finally Stay out of the Social Media ‘Help Desk’, he gives the following recommendations to stay ahead of the game and plan long-term rather than spend your days in a short-term reactive mode that lowers your value drastically :

  1. Be proactive. Provide business units and services with what they need before they ask.
  2. Adopt a hub and spoke structure. Do not centralise everything or you will not cope.
  3. Enable others. Relinquish control and teach. This is one of the focuses of our white paper.
  4. Deploy scalable technology. Monitoring and sharing are part of this.
  5. Deploy programs beyond marketing. Again, a central focus of our white paper.

And in Data: Composition of a corporate social media team, he gives very interesting insight into how teams are currently organised in large corporations (click above picture to access the article).

Interestingly, Altimeter predict that corporate social media strategists will work themselves out of a job (because they will have empowered other teams to operate their own programs) but that “a core team will always be required to coordinate the enterprise”. Hear! Hear!

What I personally disagree with is the concluding statement that “this will evolve into a customer experience team (or back into the CX team)”. Borrowing again from their increasingly rich repository of reports and surveys, here is a prediction of annual occurrences of social media crises.

A graph describing the rising number of annual social media crises in large organzations

Annual Social Media crises. (c) Altimeter Group.

I strongly believe that customer experience teams will react to short-term hiccups in near real-time. But with reputation management now a number 1 on fast growing companies’ top social media priorities, coordination will both be more and more important and will absolutely need to include input from the PR and reputation management team.

Again, I ask “Is there a PR Pilot in your Social Media plane?” What do you think ?

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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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5 must-have steps in every monitoring plan

January 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Monitoring is an essential part of any PR and reputation management campaign management, but is often considered from the sole point of view of extracting information from the Internet, whereas a successful plan involves and requires many other steps.

In my previous post, I described monitoring as trying to a listen to a conversation happening 20 feet away in a crowded bar. This is the information extraction part often referred to, but what good is it if the conversation stays in your head as a string a words, not communicated to anyone or analyzed or used to take action ?

Here are 5 steps that define a useful media monitoring plan from the definition phase to the decisional aspects.

 

Defining entities

Cutting through the billions of conversations going on each day implies restricting both the subjects you’re interested in as accurately as possible and limiting the sources to the most useful ones. defining entities is the first part.

Most competitive monitoring plans will focus on brand names, products or services and company executives. That in itself can be quite a hurdle. I monitor the news for Augure (which means “omen” in French) and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes in from World of Warcraft, ancient mysteries forums, church organ players and death metalheads if I’m not careful in my keyword selection. Oh my … ;)

WOW Augure !

Once you have defined your keywords and potential namesakes or other pitfalls, advanced monitoring platforms use semantic analysis to extract the correct information using context in the article. This filters out most if not all of the noise without missing important data.

Defining sources

Where does your audience hang out? Are your stakeholders most vocal on Facebook or in blogs? Is offline coverage important to your success?

Listening to the social world

Listening to a social world

The natural temptation, in order not to miss anything important is to monitor the whole universe. And this leads to numbers games about the number of sources being monitored. But that’s meaningless and dangerous:

  • First because as soon as you have the technology to monitor a blogging platform such as wordpress, you can monitor over 50 million sources. Hook-on to Facebook and that’s 700 million, no 800, no 900 no … Numbers are meaningless. Far more important is to identify those that are influential in your industry, extract clean information from them (no adverts, no spam) and be able to add more as and when necessary.
  • Secondly because you will not be able to digest the result of too large a reading list. My photography-minded friend and Augure Product Manager Caroline set up one of our feeds to monitor the news about a new camera on social media. Like her, I doubt that you will enjoy seeing thousands of messages pile up every hour (unless what you want is a statistical dashboard), even on-topic ones ;) So be specific about what you need to include. By default, we suggest packs to our customers and it is always easy to build from that.

Homogeneizing

Forum messages and offline have very different structures. Mixing offline sources with online media requires some technical work in order to present readable and interpretable results. As a simple example: in your monitoring results, would you rather see tweets with shortened links or the article hiding behind the link ?

Analyzing

What is your goal with that monitoring? Are you interested in the share of blog coverage of a product you have just launched or is real-time sentiment analysis of a developing crisis more important to you?

Publication click-through statistics

Too often, analytics are an afterthought of monitoring plans. But defining the dashboard you need prior to anything else is important to determine what information your monitoring and/or qualification software/teams need to provide you with? Tone, volume, size, images, number of views, ranking, influence levels … ?

Sharing and collaborating

As social networks have changed public relations forever, companies have had to adapt by becoming more social themselves. Stakeholder engagement is no longer the exclusive responsibility of a few staff members in the PR team and more and more employees are becoming brand ambassadors after being trained and receiving proper engagement guidelines.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Media Monitoring On The Go

As will be discussed in the final installment of this series, monitoring is essential for successful engagement and its results should be share with anyone taking part in discussions on behalf of the organization.

Depending on the recipient, sharing may take the form of an analytic report, a webzine to read in the tube or a formal press review and reputation dashboard. Whatever the form taken, sharing is an essential and often overlooked part of success.

Now that you have the 5 steps in hand, how do you use your monitoring to enhance your social engagement ?

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Raising the bar for online monitoring

January 13, 2012 by 2 Comments

Picture yourself at the pub after work with that cool pint in one hand and your mates all around you discussing the day’s events: That incredible piece of fielding by Kiwi 12th man Bevan Small, the dreaded copying machine that’s down again, the new memo from IT and how idiotic it is to have made Greedo shoot first in the Blu-Ray edition in spite of fan protest.

Tables all around are the same and the whole room is alive with the hum of multiple conversations and points of view on various topics, everyone joining in regardless of background or expertise.

The hum of simultaneous conversations

But you’ve hooked onto a specific exchange going on a few meters away about a specific case you’re working on. After struggling several minutes to piece together the few words you have been able to isolate from the background drone, you realize your eavesdropping led you on to a different subject that you initially thought and you jump back in to your pal’s discussion with a hasty”… of course Han shot first! There’s no way Greedo could have missed at that range otherwise. Lucas is a self-righteous twerp!”.

From digital data to engagement information

Monitoring online and social media can be a very similar experience to this. The bar analogy isn’t just for fun, because social media engagement recommendations start exactly like this : “imagine yourself in a bar full of conversations. Listen to the conversations, add meaningful comments whenever possible. Provide information and entertainment and make a name for yourself in the community”.

Augure's anline and social monitoring dashboard

And, as I will describe in part 3 of this series, monitoring is not only for reporting, but a tremendous help to guide your engagement:

  • Who is discussing your brand and who is having the greatest influence in the conversation ?
  • How is your engagement campaign doing ? Which are the most responsive media and which terms are getting the most amplification ?
  • What is the global impact of engagement on the company’s top line and reputation ?

So, where do you start ?

The augure webzine displaying monitoring results for the iPhone 4s

Augure's webzine displaying monitoring results for "Apple"


Going from the millions of digital voices found in blogs, comments, Facebook, online media, Twitter and forums to a clean and useable output that resembles the picture above implies a series of challenges that are described in the next post:

  • Define who you want to listen to. In the bar, you cannot choose to eliminate a table or add others. In social monitoring project, you can.
  • Define what you want to listen for. Sir Isaac Newton’s view of an apple isn’t the same as Steve Jobs’ was. Trust me, we know. We have clients with fruit names and we are called Augure (which means omen, in French). So we know a lot about disambiguation.
  • Define what you want to measure. Are you launching a product and interested in share of discussion or is sentiment relative to a recent crisis more prominent in your mind ?

I will go deeper into these aspects in the next two posts. Stay tuned !

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