Content Marketing: union between Marketing and Public Relations

April 4, 2013 by Leave a comment

Marketing contenidos y RRPPCreate interesting content, that stand out from the crowd and attract an important audience is a key challenge for companies and institutions. The multiplication of online communication channels reinforce the relation between Marketing and Public Relations, by progressively blurring the border between these two activities, and we find job titles like “Marketing and Communication Director” or Communication Agencies that offer marketing services.

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

The basis: useful contents

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

Monitor your contents

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

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

Take into account your entire audience, not only your clients

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

Share your content in an efficient way

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

Develop your own style

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

Define an editorial calendar

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

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

Foto: eyesore9

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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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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: 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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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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How La Redoute turned crisis management into clever social marketing

February 3, 2012 by 2 Comments

The naked man in the picture on La Redoute's websiteFor a major online retailer, what can be worse than finding out from the Internet that one of the photographs in your online catalog shows a naked man next to young children wearing your clothes?

That’s the situation French brand La Redoute was faced with a few weeks ago, when they used a photograph of kids running on the beach to sell a new T-shirt model. It wasn’t long before site visitors using the zoom feature on the page discovered a naked man in the water just behind the group of young models. Definitely not the kind of associations that sort of business is after.

Obviously, this spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook, which more than whiffs of #epicfail tags attached to it.

Turning a reputation threat to your advantage

The brand needed to react and quickly. But initial response wasn’t overwhelming. A few apologies were written and the offending pictures removed, not that quickly.

However, as with every crisis, when the damage is done, it’s done, there’s no undoing, Ctrl+Z or MIB flash memory eraser. Crisis management in these situations is not about undoing but about rebound and moving on.

And this was performed brilliantly with the following video (in French).

Why is this so good ?

  • It acknowledges the issue openly and then more. While most companies responsible for a mistake usually try to minimise it or their responsibility, the message in this video not only recognizes the issue but gives examples of more mistakes in the catalog. However amusing and minimal the example given, this sends out a very open and positive message.
  • It says I’m sorry. “Again, we are very sorry for …”
  • It describes the plan in very accurate terms. “… We have placed whole teams on this. They have scanned the whole catalog and found more problems …”
  • It opens up dialogue for the future. “… But we know there are probably more mistakes left in there. We are asking you for help …” Active participation of the public totally eliminates what antagonism may have built up in the first stages of the crisis.
  • It uses crowdsourcing. There’s effectively no better way to iron out all the niggles than to unleash the unlimited power of the Internet on it. With literally thousands of visitors eager to be the first to find new blunders, the chances of there being any left in a few days absolutely minimal. For free.
  • It rewards intelligently. “… Since a naked man is responsible for this, we will reward anyone who firsts reports a boo boo by dressing him/her up from head to toes …” While many CSR programs are plagued by iffy greenwashing feelings for being totally unrelated to the social or environmental damage caused by the company, La Redoute’s initiative is spot on. The sell clothes. Their clothing adds caused an image problem. It is through closing they will make it better.
  • It’s a fantastic marketing operation. While some buyers may have been put off by the initial blooper, the video, that has now been watched over 150.000 times, is likely to get thousands of people scan through the whole catalog in search of something out-of-place. How many will actually buy, I wonder.

It may not be over, though. Initial crisis response is all about re-establishing dialogue and laying out the plan ahead. So far, so good. But the faulty company then has to walk the path. In this case, the video is so clever that some will inevitably feel it was all done in purpose. The way La Redoute addresses these worries will probably key to the complete resolution of this minor hick-up. If they make to much of a show out of it, it could flare out of up-to-now benign proportions.

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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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Helping your Facebook fans help you – with engagement

December 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

2011 has been a big year for Facebook. New features were launched to make the world’s largest social network an indispensable tool for companies and to monetize its continent sized fan base via new forms of engagement and advertising. A few weeks ago, I asked whether the new Timeline, which appears to be still rolling out slowly, would help PR Pros or not.

More recently, I argued that using social media exclusively as a short-term branding tool was dangerous for corporate reputation management, that engagement is key to long-term social media success and that PR should always be involved in defining the organisation’s social media strategy.

Facebook F8 presented new features for PR and marketing

In this post, I’d like to examine some of the other news from Facebook to determine whether and how these may impact PR and reputation management.

What makes your fans tick ?

Among the slew of new features announced at Facebook’s F8 conference last September are new buttons that go beyond the LIKE action. This is Facebook’s first step towards making fans share more and in more varied ways. VIEWING, SHARING and others are being made possible, and content publishers are even able to create their own button through apps to suit their own publications.

More significantly, and far more controversially, Facebook introduced the Ticker on the right hand side of the page, to show you what your friends are doing, who they are friending, what cafe they are checking into and what brands or products they are liking.

The facebook ticker

The ticker was met with almost universal criticism. From users, who claim it simply provides too much information into their friends’ lives. And from many many experts denouncing privacy scares.

Since the introduction that feature, many articles have been written to explain how to protect yourself from it and even how to remove it altogether (thanks to a Google Chrome extension, how surprising ;) ).

But Ticker is amajor component of Facebook’s business plan, along with Top stories and Sponsored Stories.

Beyond the obvious personal branding/reputation associated to ticker, its significance is due to the fact that it now integrates Sponsored stories in its feed. Sponsored stories are adverts in which the text is not written by the advertiser but is extracted from a fan’s update or action: Eric LIKEs the latest news from your company and all of Eric’s friends will see an advert for your news containing his “this is really interesting” update. This is significant because, according to Facebook, sponsored stories have much more impact than conventional advertising.

Top Stories, the final element in Facebook’s engagement trilogy, may be even more important to PR and reputation management professionals. Indeed, while the news feed on your Facebook page has always been presented in chronological order, top stories can be pushed up to the top of your feed is enough of your friends have liked it or commented on it. I already mentioned EdgeRank – Facebook’s feed filtering algorithm, that determines what friend and brand updates you actually see in your newsfeed – in 5 reasons not to count Fans on Facebook. The algorithm strengthens the visibility of brands you engage with and reduces it for others. Top stories push this idea one big step forward.

Finding engaging content to publish

Obviously, producing and publishing engaging content on Facebook is key to starting engagement. How do you know what your fans like best ?

Smart Insights recently published an interesting infographic describing the basic types of sharers in the UK and what content they like to share best.

But this is generic and the best way to understand what your community wants is to … listen to discussions. Listening will give you insight in major issues, major likes and dominant speakers. But I’ll tell you much, much more about this in my next post ! Stay tuned :)

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