The quote in my headline comes from a beautiful little story that is warming the hearts of Canadians today. Jorma Hogbacka was a regular customer at the Tim Hortons coffee shop in his hometown St. Catherines. Apparently, he had a colourful way about him, part of which was to ask the coffee shop staff to help him pick his lottery numbers, with Jorma promising to share any winnings with them.

Well, Jorma won. Big time. His was one of three winning tickets in Saturday’s $43-million jackpot, netting the retired welder a tidy $14.8-million.

And his instant millionaire status did not cause him to forget his promise. True to his word, yesterday he handed a $30,000 cheque to former Tim Hortons staffer Melissa Grivich, who, according to the Globe and Mail, now works as a police officer. And Jorma is working with the iconic Canadian coffee chain to find four other employees he says are on his list to receive similar big tips for past performance.

I’m writing about this because I constantly harp on customer service and how it can be a sharp, effective and sustainable competitive advantage in a world where commodity pricing and reverse engineering rapidly erode any other leg up a company might initially have in the market place. And even though she is a paramount example of how things should be, the newly-enriched Melissa Grivich doesn’t think she did anything special.

“It was my job. I was serving coffee. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, but I made the best of it,” the Globe quotes her as saying. “It’s just unbelievable how far customer service can go.”

‘Nuff said, Melissa. ‘Nuff said.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Tim Hortons, Jorma Hogbacka, lottery

It was business building 101 this morning at OCRI’s monthly Technology Executive Breakfast, with three executives representing different stages of a company’s growth offering pearls of wisdom and insights learned at the School of Hard Knocks.

Mark Edwards, president of Bent 360: MediaLab represented start-up companies; Rob Woodbridge, CEO of Rove, spoke for growing companies, while Jim Roche, founder and former CEO of Tundra Semiconductor and president and CEO of business and management consultancy Stratford Managers, represented established companies.

Here’s a rundown of the key points discussed by the panel:

1. Diversity among a group of partners or company founders is key to ensure one person’s weaknesses are offset by another’s strengths. Diverse backgrounds and skill sets are vital.

2. Focus. Focus. Focus. A company must have a clear understanding of its own identity. To whom is it selling? Why? What is its value proposition? As Jim commented, if an organization suffers from this lack of clarity, there will be confusion within the ranks, people will come to work at cross purposes and revenue growth will stagnate. Rob shared his experiences about the benefits of Rove’s decision to refocus around one single enterprise product rather than chasing multiple opportunities in both the enterprise and consumer markets with eight products.

3. There is no such thing as overnight success. Citing author Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Jim talked about the 10,000-hour rule — the amount of hard work needed to truly master something and achieve success. He contended that behind every “overnight success story” there are, in fact, years of effort under the radar and behind the scenes.

4. Cold calling. Few people tackle this one with gusto, but as the panelists emphasized, if you start with people you know, your list of prospects will run out in short order. If you’re not making contact with clients or prospective clients on a regular basis, then you’re not in business. Mark himself aims to make five calls a day (not necessarily all cold). He emphasized the importance of using tools and databases such as LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet and Hoovers to develop contact lists. From there, the trick is to start calling and work through an organization until you have found the receptive individual who has buying authority, or can serve as your internal advocate with those that do. Just leaving a phone message breaks the ice and makes the follow-up call a warm one, he said.

5. When to shake up the management team or make a change was also discussed. Jim acknowledged that most organizations tend to be slow to identify and act on weaknesses that affect an organization. He emphasized the importance of executives acting on their gut instinct since they rarely have the luxury of making a decision with all the facts in hand. If you think there is a problem, there likely is. He considers it a sign of good leadership to be able to provide clear and consistent feedback on a subordinate’s performance with direct, and even brutal, honesty.

6. The value of mentoring was also discussed, not just in receiving it, but in giving it. According to Mark, the rewards flow both ways and he isn’t afraid to seek out as mentors people younger than himself if they have opinions he values and experiences that are relevant. Jim commented on more formalized mentorship in the form of advisory boards or boards of directors and spoke about the leads these people can provide into new customers or financing opportunities.

7. And then there was the cold hard truth that any company operating in the B2B space will have to look outside of its own backyard if it wants to growth. Jim said a Canadian B2B company should expect 70 to 80 per cent of its revenues to come from outside its home market. And though it is a challenge for an earlier-stage company to manage it, a presence on the ground in a foreign market, especially one as distant both geographically and culturally as China, is critical. The challenge is ensuring these staff remained linked into the organization and its culture through frequent contact with the home office, both by phone and in person.

8. And lastly, I can’t fail to mention Mark’s endorsement of engaging with a PR resource to help raise a company’s profile in its target markets.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship, business development, marketing, management, leadership, OCRI, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, B2B

If “location, location, location” is the axiom of real estate agents, then “reference customers, reference customers, reference customers” is the public relations equivalent.

Customers who have deployed a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars and cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it. This, more often than not, will make an editor sit up and take notice.

I’ve seen promising editorial opportunities with big name media outlets drift away for the simple reason that a client could not provide a happy customer willing to stand up and provide that third-party endorsement.

But is having the platinum, diamond-encrusted reference customer eager to shout your praises from the rooftops the ticket to piles of positive media coverage?

It certainly helps. However, that customer story must still be developed and presented in a manner that fits the current editorial needs of the media being targeted.

One of our clients, for example, has an enthusiastic reference customer on board who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our client’s product and how it contributed to the overall growth and success of the customer’s business during a dramatic market boom.

However, the industry in which both client and customer operate is, like so many others right now, experiencing a downturn. Several of the media that I contacted no longer have the appetite for the growth and success story that was the obvious angle to pursue during the market upswing. That’s yesterday’s news. The angle that is timely and relevant now is how the customer is going to weather the downturn and how our client’s product will provide the operational efficiencies and cost savings that will improve margins and boost the bottom line.

As one editor put it, “It’s easy to succeed during a boom. The real test of a company’s viability is how it survives a downturn.” For many media outlets, that’s the story that is relevant now. Can we deliver that angle? Yes. But only by directly contacting the media most important to our client with a solid story angle and having an informal chat with each editor were we able to determine what elements of the reference customer’s story are the most important to garner the ink we want for our client.

Technorati Tags: pitching, reference customers, media relations, public relations

At inmedia, we frequently position ourselves against those whose perspective is that PR is “all about relationships.” And, while I wholeheartedly stand by our mantra that it is the ability to convey a story and not the relationship that dictates PR success, it cannot be denied that relationships are still important. They are even more relevant from the perspective of a PR firm’s clients than for the PR firm itself. PR firms come and go but, assuming a company sticks around, its relationship with its target media will last forever.

This week, one of my clients traveled to New York to meet face to face with a group of editors from a key trade publication that covers his company’s market. Was this meeting at the request of the editors? No, we brokered it from our end. Was it for an article they were working on? No. So why was this meeting happening? Simple. It was for the relationship.

While our client had some exposure to the publication, the relationship was very much the domain of inmedia, the PR firm. This is, of course, perfectly understandable - the very reason you have a PR firm is to maintain your relationship with the media, and this remains a core part of our business - but huge value can be gained on all sides from extending the media relationship to include the client at a deeper level.

So what happened in this meeting in New York? Well, they shot the breeze. Discussed the state of the industry, talked a bit about the company and what was going on with it, but no hard pitches for stories, no Q&A, no pressure to come up with the goods.

So where was the value in this meeting, you might ask. Why not ask my client, who left the meeting full of enthusiasm for the people he had just met, and excited about the future prospects for working with them. Or why not ask the editors, who expressed delight at the meeting and a desire to do so again at some point in the near future. Value was seen on all sides from a meeting that accomplished little in hard results.

Sure, inmedia could have handled this meeting ourselves, but our preoccupation with achieving results for clients would no doubt have created a different atmosphere. Sometimes stepping back from the day-to-day hard selling of stories and constant attempts to generate coverage can result in a far more rewarding result - a blooming relationship.

Technorati Tags: public relations, media relations, pitching, networking

Despite all the hype, hoopla and debate around social media as a marketing and public relations tool, there is one even more fundamental aspect of the Web that is far more pervasive: the search.

It seems weird to say “the search” without putting ”Google” in there, but there are other services available to dig up information, Wikipedia being the most obvious. It used to be that information was power, now it’s an avalanche that overwhelms us. Intelligence is what’s important: the ability to filter through the overload to determine what is useful and chart trends or patterns that have meaning and relevance.

When all that information is so readily available and convenient, it’s easy to take it at face value without looking deeper and doing some good old-fashioned digging to verify facts and the credibility of the source. For a journalist on deadline eager to wrap up a story, it can be a trap. Take the example cited by Drew Benvie at Drew B’s take on tech PR, in which a fictional athlete was presented in an article as an actual person, thanks to a bogus profile on Wikipedia.

That’s not to suggest that Wikipedia is not a valid research tool, but it is vulnerable to abuse and demonstrates the importance of verifying facts and cross-referencing any online source of information.

For organizations sensitive to how their brand or image is being presented to the world, it is definitely important to keep an eye on such online information portals to ensure the accuracy of whatever information is being presented about them.

And while there are valid questions about the veracity of online information, what about the value of obtaining media coverage online instead of in print?

As a newspaper editor with only so many inches of space in the print product but much more on the website, I would often hear the complaint that running a story only online was somehow inferior to running it in print.

Sure, there is tactile satisfaction to be had in handling ink-stained paper, but it should be amply evident by now that content online lives far longer and reaches a far larger audience than the processed corpses of trees. In the newspaper business, I would get feedback on stories from readers on other continents after the content appeared online. The print product, on the other hand, was distributed in only one city. You do the math.

Kevin Dugan at the Bad Pitch Blog shares my sentiment and offers a video clip to help make the point.

Technorati Tags: social media, Google, Wikipedia, media coverage, online media, print media

Why is a startup like murder? Well, according to two-time start-up veteran Shawn Griffin, it’s not because the long hours and uncertain outcome will kill you. Rather, as he told an assembly of alumni of OCRI’s popular Entrepreneur’s Edge educational program last night, both murder and startups require the same three elements.

“Motive, opportunity and ability are essential for murder and also for a startup,” said Griffin, who delivered a two-fold return to investors when he sold his first company a mere five months after launching it but saw his second venture go down “in a very painful manner.”

The motive to start a new technology company must come from passion, he said, while the opportunity lies in identifying a real pain in the marketplace that the new company is going to solve.

As for ability, it “boils down to two things, people and money. The good news about today is that there’s a dearth of money but a wealth of good people.”

Griffin was speaking at the first-ever reunion for alumni of Entrepreneur’s Edge, a popular educational program that brings seasoned entrepreneurs and subject-matter experts in to deliver course material to participants. The next session of the program, now in its fourth year, runs from February 9 to 13.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs Edge, startups, Shawn Griffin

How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate. And by “how” I don’t mean what tool should be drawn from the social media toolbox. I mean the language we use that either demonstrates frankness, sincerity and honesty, or obvious self-interest that will only push away your listeners. Timing is also key. It’s much easier to engage in dialogue with someone if they don’t feel your agenda is pressuring the conversation. If you only speak with someone when you expect or need something from them, you’ve conveyed the impression that this is nothing more than transactional relationship. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Hardly the foundation for a long and fruitful association.

Today’s picks from the Blogosphere all touch on these points.

The first comes from Collective Conversation, where Kellie Major cites the example of a CEO who, in an address to his staff about cuts, demonstrates clearly and sincerely how he shares his employees’ pain.

In contrast, Joseph Thornley at Pro PR presents a somewhat different attempt at communication from the C-suite. In this case, it is RBC head honcho Gordon Nixon trying to reassure the bank’s customers that all is still right with the world and with the Canadian banking industry. Or is it really just a piece of self-promotional fluff that should have been distributed as a press release? You decide.

Lastly, we have words from the horse’s mouth about how to, and how not to, begin a dialogue with a journalist at Bulldog Reporter from Michael Singer, West Coast news editor for InformationWeek.com. And, no surprise here, he says waiting until you have a news release to peddle is not the best approach. He goes on to offer a number of other tips to keep in mind when chasing media on behalf of a client and how to make appropriate use of such avenues as Twitter.

Technorati Tags: social media, media relations, pitching, communications, RBC,  Gordon Nixon 

“It is early days, but it’s already clear that 2009 will be a crucial year for news media.”

Cautionary words from the Financial Times’ chief exec, John Ridder, as Brand Republic reports today that the business newspaper giant is laying off 80 staff, while still intending to expand its online presence. Coupled with other recent news of woes at major newspapers, including the New York Times and Canada’s Globe and Mail, one wonders if the writing is finally on the wall for print-based media.

Okay, maybe it’s not that likely. Granted, there is still a significant demand from the public for a physical medium by which to consume the news, but the survival of news media depends on more than subscriptions. Advertising is the key, especially among the technology trade media, where the majority of print magazine titles are free to qualifying subscribers, but it seems that companies increasingly seem to prefer the online option when it comes to spending their advertising dollars in a downturn. Certainly, the consensus is that print advertising is set for significant decline this year.

Douglas McIntyre on 24/7 Wall Street seems to think there’s a good chance that 2009 could see the end of a host of big names, with a drop in advertising seen as the key factor. “At least a dozen major magazines had ad page decreases of more than 20 per cent last year,” he states.

Perhaps it’s too early to speak of the death of print but, without advertising to support it and little sign of when this might change, the prospect becomes more real every day.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, media, advertising

Pondering the place of social media in the marketing and PR toolkit has been a familiar theme on this blog as the industry as a whole attempts to understand how best to approach and manage audience engagement with such a dynamic, informal and immediate variety of channels as those that fit under the general heading of Web 2.0. (Or maybe we’ve already moved on into Web 3.0. Who can keep track?)

Should you blog? Should you tweet? Should a company hang out its dirty laundry for all to see? To whom can companies turn for advice and how can they validate the credentials and experience of those who claim to be the gurus with the answers?

It’s a pickle, for certain, and one that will only weigh more and more on the minds of companies through 2009 as they struggle to build awareness of their brand and their value proposition as recessionary pressures nibble away at the bottom line.

I’ve come across an interesting array of perspectives and opinions on these matters over the past couple of days.

Beth Harte explores the question, Is social media the same as marketing? and reaffirms the most basic precept: Social media is best considered and approached as one part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Her post also raises the quite valid concern about carpetbaggers who claim to be experts in the area.

Robert Geller writes about how pervasive social media tools such as Twitter have become, emphasizing his point with the example of how it is being used by the Israeli government as a communications tactic in its latest flare up with Hamas and the Palestinians.

But a social media tool’s popularity can pose problems, even security risks, for those who use it. As we have seen this week, Twitter’s success has attracted the attention of those with malicious intent. Terry Sweeney writes about how “the public nature of Twitter — like Facebook or web mail or P2P file-sharing sites — means it offers a rich petri dish for online mischief,” which has left the service scrambling to save face. And while this may not be sufficient reason to abandon the service, Terry suggests it warrants a hard look at what benefit can be derived from Twitter before jumping on board.

All that matters in the end is understanding your business, the audience you are trying to reach and using only those tools or tactics that make sense as an effective means to achieve your business development and customer service objectives. What’s hot is irrelevant.

Technorati Tags: media relations, social media, business development, Twitter, marketing

Well here we are, heading into this brave new world of doom and gloom that is 2009. While countless others have expounded on the year that was and the year that will be with reviews, predictions and every top-10 list imaginable, I thought I would start the new year by repeating the most basic consideration that should guide our efforts for the next 12 months — content is king.

Mass layoffs in the media business across North America made headlines throughout 2008, from major television networks to the most weighty names in the daily newspaper business. I came across an interesting post over the holidays at the Fusion PR Forum which reflects on the apparent inability of big newspapers to understand they are in the information business, rather than the print business, and adapt accordingly.

Horizontal media outlets are going through the kind of pruning that over the past decade already hit many of the trade and industry titles that are typically the focus of our efforts here at inmedia. Resources are tight on all fronts, emphasizing the need to bring to the media compelling stories that clearly demonstrate why a particular company, and its product or service, merits coverage instead of any number of others.

“Why should I cover this?” asked one gruff journalist when I rang him up with my best pitch on behalf of a client before Christmas. A valid question to be sure and one for which I had a ready answer. But articulating the benefits of my client’s offering, its uniqueness in the market, only served to keep him on the phone. Securing a story opportunity depended on coming back with a strong reference customer willing and able to discuss the value and ROI of the client’s offering.

Before Christmas I executed a launch exercise for another client. In the process of speaking with what we had determined were the Tier One media targets for this new client, one theme quickly emerged, the value of being able to offer up reference customers to validate the technology and demonstrate uptake in the market. Most media outlets didn’t care to hear the company praise itself. They wanted the real-world perspective of customers that saw the value of opening up their wallets for the product.

Media want a good story, not a sales pitch better suited as advertising copy. Beyond being able to offer up references who can speak for your product or service, the principle also applies to how one deals with the media when they have agreed to an interview.

Eric Bergman of Bergman & Associates reinforced the point last week on Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog that reporters don’t want to be spoon fed key marketing messages that have been crafted ahead of time. They’re in the business of asking the questions that provide them and their readers with insight and understanding. Corporate messaging may serve one well in the context of a news release, but it hardly fosters a positive relationship with the media if it is regularly used to avoid direct answers to direct questions. Check out Eric’s example of the used-car salesman and you’ll get the point.

Technorati Tags: media relations, pitching, reference customers, marketing