While we’ve previously shared on this blog what we feel are best practices when it comes to the use of embargoes and, after seeing a PR misstep, recommended that it would have been an effective tactic, the debate continues on whether embargoes are still an effective tool for PR practitioners or will even be honoured by an increasingly user-generated media for whom the old newsroom rules do not apply. A group of folks from both sides of the debate gathered yesterday to discuss the pros and cons. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: embargoes

Last week, my family went on a quick trip to the States to do some shopping. As with any good roadtrip, we brought along handfuls of CDs (we’re old school like that) and listened to quite a few different albums on our trip there and back. One of these was the fabulous new record by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson, the latter better known as an A-list actress than a singer. The album is doing quite well; at the time of writing, it was sitting at 80 on the Billboard Top 200, having peaked at 41. Entirely respectable for an album from a largely unknown entity (Yorn) and starlet (Johansson.) They’ve been making the rounds on a full-scale publicity campaign, and I caught a minute or two of them on Ellen a few weeks ago. It turns out the album was recorded several years ago, that Yorn and Johansson just happen to be friends, and that when Yorn decided he wanted to record an album of duets, he contacted Johansson and asked her to be the female singer, not really knowing whether she could sing or not. Ellen said what most of us were thinking when she asked — and I’m paraphrasing — what made you think she could sing? And Yorn responded that he didn’t even know if she could sing, then in an AP article he said, “I figured, you know, most actors are multi-talented. They’ve got to be able to do a lot of things and they probably have some ability to sing.”

He’s absolutely right. It used to be that actors did indeed have to be multi-talented: actor, singer, dancer, and potentially more. Gene Kelly comes initially to mind. Sinatra. John Travolta. Jennifer Lopez. On and on… More recently it seems that successful actors are talented in more technical areas like writing, producing and directing, in addition to their skills in front of the camera. Arguably the most talented of Hollywood’s current line-up that can do it all is Clint Eastwood - actor, writer, director, producer, songwriter, singer, dancer — and incredibly talented in all of these areas.

Point being, in today’s competitive marketplace, marketers, like actors, need to be multi-talented. And while a PR company like ours might not immediately spring to mind as the proper service provider for some of the more strategic marketing communications disciplines, we’ve been reminded more often than once recently that our skill set and experience lend themselves well to providing counsel on bigger picture marketing strategy issues. Our fearless inmedia leader has recognized and identified this opportunity and as a result, our business is gradually moving up-stream. His post yesterday not only details the beginnings of this transition and the reasons for it, but also points to exactly the issues I’ve mentioned here.

Technorati Tags: Pete Yorn, Scarlett Johansson, Clint Eastwood, DangleTech, generalist, multi-talent

Most of this blog post ran on DangleTech last week, a general technology and management blog to which I make the occasional contribution. I am running it here on our own blog not just to get extra mileage out of it but because it continues the conversation I started a month or so back when I told you that I and the rest of the crew at inmedia were looking at where else we could apply our tech market knowledge and skills. In the process of doing so, I have been giving a lot of thought to the nature of professional specialisation.

My introspection on this subject stems from this recent decision of ours to move beyond the highly specialised public relations services that have been the core of our professional services offering for the past more than 10 years. That move has been prompted by a realisation that public relations has become an over-competitive, highly commodified proposition where a small agency such as ours faces relentless competition from both large agencies trying to keep their infrastructure funded through the current downturn and one-person shops of often-quite-well-qualified practitioners who used to work at agencies or on the client side. Add to this a widespread lack of any kind of objective framework within which agency searches are conducted – they often amount to little more than glorified beauty contests or are managed by very junior staff simply unqualified to make such a judgement – and you have the very epitome of what statisticians and management consultants W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have characterised as “a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.” They argue that “tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space ripe for growth.”

For an individual or a consulting firm, such an approach means offering the marketplace a unique set of capabilities that, for a given situation, are not to be found elsewhere. My search over the past four or five months for my own personal blue-ocean strategy has dovetailed nicely with a growing understanding that the age of the specialist may well be behind us. Consider the following quote, taken from a recent edition of the CBC’s excellent series examining the nature of work:

“You have this long list of professional trades, and they’re all speaking different languages and they all have some sort of compartmentalized knowledge and that’s the challenge. That’s where the future is, in having a knowledge. The separation of design and build, the Ford model of assembly-line production – we are through that and we’ve entered into almost an older evaluation of skill where people have a sense of the general picture, the big picture and be able to bring together all the different specializations required. And that’s a new way of looking at problems. But it’s also a very old way of looking at problems.”

You might think the person who said the above words was a management consultant, maybe a systems analyst. But although he likes to use that latter term to describe himself, Jonas Spring is, in fact, a rooftop gardener, who needs to pull together many different and heretofore disparate and unconnected specialised professions and trades in order to plan, plant and maintain a rooftop garden.

Although our specialty at inmedia for the past dozen years or so has been very narrow – we did media and analyst relations and little else, and we did it for B2B technology ventures and no-one else – our skill set is far more diverse than might be immediately apparent, even to me.

For example, a recent assignment that came to me from well beyond the normal ambit of my PR agency was to help a Montréal systems integration company bid to be the Canadian value-added reseller for a U.S. software vendor. What the heck, you might well ask, does a PR guy know about any of that?

Well, as I broke down the requirements with the help of the certified management consultant who brought me in on the assignment, it became quite clear that what I might have seen as quite specialised capabilities could be far more generally applied.

In the first instance, we had to determine if there was a market in Canada for the software company’s product. That’s the sort of straightforward market-sizing research that needs nothing more than an objective definition of the target customer – size, sector and so on – and a good database that can be used to identify which and how many companies meet the criteria.

Then we had to make the case that our client, the systems integrator, was the right fit for the software company’s requirements. Well, that’s the sort of thing we do in PR all the time – develop, pitch and defend the story that says our clients are the right fit for a certain requirement.

The next step was to demonstrate how, should they get the nod, the systems integration company would go about pursuing the market opportunity and bringing in sales and revenue. Well, that’s a sales and marketing strategy, the sort of thing I had been doing before starting the PR agency and continued to do even while running the agency.

Finally, the whole thing had to be wrapped up in a well-written, persuasively argued proposal to the software company. And if I am not a writer, I am nothing.

I have gone on to other assignments over the past few months where I might have got my foot in the door thanks to a particular specialisation but where the client has swiftly seen that, in the right situation, I possess the exact mix of skills that are required. Presto – I have a blue-ocean opportunity with that client and face no competition, no qualification round and no pricing pressure. In almost every case, my value has not been a narrow specialisation but, rather, the requirement to apply generalised skills across a broad area. In today’s increasingly complex world where formerly disparate systems and processes must come to work together, this is the future of work.

Our thinking in these two areas – the rise of the generalist and building a personal blue-ocean strategy – has progressed to the point where we are about to formalise a market-facing entity to build a business around it. As these plans are unveiled, I will, of course, keep our readers up to speed on what’s happening.

Technorati Tags: Generalist, specialization, marketing, strategy, public relations, Blue Ocean, DangleTech

This past week, there’s been a lot of brouhaha in the media about Baby Einstein and the refund that Disney, the parent company of Baby Einstein, is offering. The New York Times called the refund offer “a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect,” a damning admission and a triumphant affirmation for those who believe, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, that television under the age of two is, in fact, damaging to children, impeding their language development and at the very least, not improving their cognitive ability, an audacious claim that was made in the early days of baby videos.

In my personal opinion, it’s very interesting to see a company as powerful as Disney subject itself to the financial loss and damage to its image that is inevitable by offering this refund. With more than one-third of American households having at least one Baby Einstein DVD and the company offering $15.99 for up to four DVDs per household, the potential cost is significant. (Disney, however, has a gazillion dollars and is unlikely to feel any real pain from this exercise.) The reasons for it doing so are up for debate, but the company’s detractors say it stems from a pending Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company for making false claims about the “educational value” of such videos, while Disney says a money-back guarantee is standard policy and available to any dissatisfied customer. Who is to say what the real reason is.

There’s no group of people more ardent about their beliefs and their methods than dedicated parents and so this recent battle has been heated. Largely fought between the Walt Disney Company and the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood, a group that self-identifies as a “coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents, and individuals who care about children,” the fight has more recently become a mud-slinging brawl between the CCFC’s leader and the general manager of the Baby Einstein brand.

It’s significant to note that while trying to put together this post, I was unable to access the vitriolic letter that the president of Baby Einstein had posted, targeted at the CCFC’s leader, so inundated is the Baby Einstein web site; whether it’s media commentators, marketing communications professionals or parents flocking to the site, I can’t say. All that I can hope is that some marketing communications representative from Disney saw the letter, thought better of it and removed it from the site. Bits and pieces of the ill-advised posting are discussed here.

As a young parent, I have strong opinions about this issue, but I’m not willing to share them here. It’s up to each family how they operate their households and what they expose their children to; so long as that responsibility is undertaken with careful consideration and respect for the children involved, who is anyone else to judge what other parents do?

I’m confident in saying that entire research papers or books could be written on the complex marketing history of the Baby Einstein brand. It’s a conversation that delves into the sociological and philosophical responsibilities and roles of companies that market to children and their parents, and certainly, while interesting, extends well beyond the scope of this post.

As marketers, what simple lessons can we learn from this exercise? As another blogger so eloquently put it, “Why do brands make promises that they can’t keep or [worse] over extend an offering? The truth is, if it sounds too good to be true it likely is.”

If a company as large and powerful as Disney with legions of marketing professionals on staff can flub its marketing message and compound the goof by reacting angrily to its opponents in a public forum, then it can happen to any of us if we’re not careful. Carefully craft your marketing messages, make promises that you can deliver and always, ALWAYS, mind your Ps and Qs when you’re talking to the marketplace. Or suffer the consequences.

Technorati Tags: Baby Einstein, Disney, CCFC, baby videos, American Academy of Pediatrics, marketing, customer service, public relations

Although only one team, Cambrian Mobile Content Delivery Network that wants to improve the experience of viewing video content on a mobile network by caching the most popular content at individual cell sites, came away with the $5,000 first prize at this past weekend’s Startup Boot Camp organised by The Ottawa Network, all six of the ventures that were presented to a review panel late Sunday afternoon were viable business concepts that could be made into real companies. And each of them progressed over the weekend from mere concept in the head of the entrepreneur who originally pitched the idea Friday night to unexpectedly polished and, under the circumstance, rather sophisticated business plans by Sunday evening.

This was the real intent of the camp, a weekend-long intensive competition in business-plan development and company creation. Organisers Rick O’Connor and Bob Morais told the more than 50 participants several times that they wanted to see a handful of new ventures emerge from the weekend, something they said would help revitalise a local technology sector ecosystem that Morais said has been knocked back to where it was in the early 1990s by a combination of the global economic meltdown, the flight of venture capital and other funding sources from Ottawa and the uncertainty created by the breakup of Nortel Networks. which had long been the region’s biggest research centre and a regular source of new companies and ideas.

Following are quick summaries of each of the six teams.

Feather Payment Systems

Described by its originator as “what Paypal should have been,” Feather Payments seeks to create a new, more secure and completely private way of making payments both online and in bricks-and-mortar retailers by using a form of public key infrastructure to sign every transaction. The review panel thought it was a good proposition, but one that would be immediately undone “if the credit card companies and banks ever got jiggy with PKI.”

Broadband Networks Corp. wants to bring telecom optical technology to big television players and productions. By building a new optical interconnect module, the company will allow TV production shops to replace bulky and short-haul coaxial cable with higher-capacity, lighter and longer-haul fiber-optic cables. Although I expressed some skepticism based on the fact that fiber is already well deployed in TV studios, entrepreneur Jean-Guy Chauvin insisted his module fills a considerable gap as the industry moves towards adoption of second-generation optical technology.

I’ve already mentioned that Cambrian Mobile CDN was the winner and I agreed with the panel. I thought Cambrian presented the most compelling business case and the clearest vision of how it might be executed. The concept is to develop half-terabyte flash-based caches that would be installed by mobile network operators in their base stations. These carriers would charge high-volume video-content providers such as YouTube to cache their content, a process that would improve the user experience while vastly reducing the traffic load on the carriers’ backhaul networks.

PostKicker was probably the easiest of the concepts from an implementation perspective, and one that, unlike the others, could be on the market in very short order and without much capital. The concept is to eliminate some of the sharpest pain associated with moving by taking over the tedious process of advising everyone of your change of address. The company would develop a web portal through which you could enter your change-of-address details, with PostKicker taking care of actually letting all your various contacts, especially your commercial contacts, know you had moved. Initially, the company intends to do this fairly manually but anticipates that as its subscriber base grows, companies will be persuaded to accept its notifications electronically.

CasaControl has a vision to convert digital picture frames into remote control devices that manage the growing number of automated processes within homes. While I thought it was an interesting idea and the team’s presentation was comprehensive, I agreed with the panel that more ubiquitous devices, such as smart phones, constitute a far more compelling platform for such a function.

A clear crowd favourite all weekend was Carewave. Not only did it attract the largest number of team members, it had a feel-good quality to it that was irresistible. Carewave wants to build an RFID and wireless pager system that transmits a basic safety code to healthcare workers that alerts them about a range of dangers posed by patients in their care. Although Carewave’s presentation was easily the most elegant — industrial designer Mike McGuire even managed to produce plastic prototypes overnight using his 3D printer — the panel pointed out that penetrating the healthcare market is a protracted process.

I will be keeping tabs on each of the concepts and will be sure to let you know if any of them move to then next stage of incorporating a bona fide startup. All the energy and output of the weekend notwithstanding, that will be the real measure of the success of the boot camp. The Ottawa Network plans a second installment in the spring.

Technorati Tags: The Ottawa Network, Startup Boot Camp, entrepreneurship, startups, technology

The non-adventure of balloon boy last week got me thinking about the pitfalls, and potentially pointless expenditure of time and resources, of resorting to gimmickry to get media attention in the context of a marketing and promotional campaign.

And while companies that attempt to woo the media with whatever manner of promotional material is at their disposal are clearly not in the same category as someone who perpetrates a hoax as a publicity stunt, such an effort must nonetheless be held up to the harshest scrutiny to ensure value for money.

As a business journalist, I saw all manner of swag cross my desk: gift baskets, trinkets of varying practicality, cute stuffed animals dressed in First World War flight gear, even a quality pair of boxing gloves to illustrate a certain cellular provider’s “light weight” and ”heavy weight” service plans. Not to mention the VIP invites to rock concerts and hockey games. And this humble inventory pales before some of the antics undertaken by organizations with a true flair for showmanship, a la Sir Richard Branson.

But at the end of the day, did any of this sway my judgment as a journalist? Did a fluffy desk pet, or even a private box at a hockey game, ever compel me to pick up a story that I otherwise would not have? Nope.

What mattered most to me were the merits of the story articulated on the piece of paper or in the CD-ROM buried beneath the “gift” at the bottom of the box. Save the gadget or the toy for a trade show or Toy Mountain. Just tell me your story and articulate why it is of value and relevance to my readership. Therein lies the difference between a marketing effort to build awareness of your brand, and a PR effort to put yourself on the radar of the media that have the potential to move your market.

When it comes to garnering the kind of media attention that will support your business development objectives, it is the value of the story you bring, not the slick way that it is packaged, that will get the attention of the editors and beat journalists with whom you need to engage. Buttering the substance of your message with a  little style or constructive goofiness can be fun. And, I will admit, sometimes it can help make you stand out from the crowd with media that are suffering from attention deficit disorder. But such efforts must be backed up with something of value, especially if they are draining precious time and resources from a tight PR and marketing budget.

At a time when many organizations have made the questionable decision to scale back their marketing and PR efforts to conserve cash, it is vital to deploy the resources you have as effectively as possible to maintain profile in the market. Unless that cute company mascot is in fact your top customer with a compelling story to tell, it should not be the media’s introduction to your business.

Technorati Tags: balloon boy, publicity stunt, promotional material, promotional products, public relations, media relations, Richard Branson

Let me preface this by saying that I love Garth Brooks. I think that truly, beyond being a spectacular entertainer, he’s an exceptional human being, devoted father and just seems like an all around wonderful person. I’m very excited that he’s announced his un-retirement and wish him every success in all his future endeavors. I saw him in concert and sat way in the back, but it was one of the best live shows I have ever seen - and I’ve seen hundreds, if not more than 1,000 shows - and he rocked the socks off every single person in that stadium.

Yet, whomever is counseling him on PR tactics dropped the ball in a big way earlier this week when he announced his coming out of retirement. One would hope that, given there were years to plan an announcement such as this, the fact that the news media is instantaneous and voracious wouldn’t slip by whomever planned his announcement. An announcement of this nature, from the most successful solo artist of all time, the man who’s sold more records than anyone - including Elvis, the Beatles, and Celine Dion - since they started tracking record sales with Soundscan, was bound to attract unparalleled attention. And they flubbed it.

My understanding is that he did a news conference in the morning, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, to announce that he’s coming out of retirement. What he didn’t announce was any plans to do, well, anything specific. (Aside: he did, however, talk about neighbouring rights for performers, copyright issues, how downloading is killing the industry and that musicians need to rise up and regain ownership of their works–all issues near and dear to me. Swoon.)

Having watched some of the news conference, I understand that Garth wanted to announce it to those particular reporters in that particular room first, as they’ve always supported him and he wanted them to be the first to know the big news.

The media world jumped on the story and immediately it was all over the news, web sites, etc. Some of the coverage was sarcastic, saying “Garth Brooks comes out of retirement to do nothing.”

Herein lies the problem.

Later that same day, Garth announced from Las Vegas that he’s signed on for a bunch of shows at a casino, a la Celine Dion. Great! Amazing! However, half the news media is reporting that you’ve come out of retirement but got no plans. Big problem.

In my humble opinion, this two-tiered approach to his announcement was a huge PR misstep. It could have been avoided by employing one simple tactic: embargo.

You want to give the scoop to those journalists first? Fine, great. How very thoughtful. But make sure that the footage and coverage doesn’t get out until after you’ve done the second press conference, announcing your comeback shows. Otherwise, you’re in the position we’re in now, trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The Internet is littered with articles with snarky headlines, and clumsily added “updates” that say, “oh, I guess he is doing something after all …”

A visit to his official web site confirms that it hasn’t been updated in more than a year. There’s absolutely no mention of this new stage in his career, nor of the upcoming shows, ticket information, etc.

I’m a bit flummoxed, truthfully, at how clumsily this whole thing has been handled. Because he’s been retired, perhaps he’s without management at the moment, or lacks a full-time publicist to counsel him on how best to manage something of this magnitude … That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. But still, surely there is some communications professional that’s responsible for this debacle. I’m certain that Garth is an eminently reasonable man who would face a pile of sarcastic press clippings and shrug them off, but frankly, whoever was in charge of this announcement really screwed up.

What can we learn from this episode? Careful planning is required when making important announcements. Don’t rush it, don’t go off half-cocked, make sure that you’re providing your targets with the information that they need, when they need it. Remember that the media is instantaneous - there’s no lag, no lead time on breaking stories. As soon as it’s out of your mouth, it’s in the media, the public record, and there’s no taking it back or qualifying it. It’s a lot harder to refine a message once it’s out there.

The tickets for Garth’s comeback are sure to set records in terms of how quickly the shows sell out, and rightly so. Let’s hope that he uses some of the proceeds of the concerts to get proper communications counsel on staff.

Technorati Tags: Garth Brooks, retirement, press conference, neighbouring rights, #PRFail

The Huffington Post is getting a lot of virtual ink about the fact that they are A/B-ing headlines in real time - offering one headline to half their readers, another to the other half, determining which one is the most effective in getting people to click, and adopting it as the one that everyone sees. Brilliant use of real-time analytics and giving the people what they want.

Technorati Tags: Huffington Post, headlines, analytics

Although many companies have embraced social media tools, especially for internal collaboration and customer interaction, their adoption by business has yet to cross the chasm into mainstream acceptance, according to a study by research firm IDC that was presented at this morning Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa. Similarly, IDC senior analyst Krista Napier said, “as much we hear about (social media tools) … it’s important to remember not everybody is on them yet.”

IDC’s numbers came from a recent survey of 200 business and IT leaders, most of whom could identify Facebook and Twitter as social media tools but many of whom could not see any business value in deploying them. When IDC asked the question, “What words come to mind when you think of social media?”, the most frequent answer was “Facebook” followed by “Twitter.” “Consumer” was the third most frequently stated answer, clearly indicating that businesses do not see social media as an effective business tool. This lack of enthusiasm was further reinforced by the next three most frequently cited answers, “distracting,” “waste of time” and “no business value.”

Still, the IDC study did find some companies were using such tools, although at insufficient rates to be considered mainstream. Using Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” model of technology adoption, IDC pegged all social media tools as still being in the early adopter phase or having just moved across the chasm towards mainstream market adoption. Leading the way were wikis, with 25% of respondents reporting their use, followed by blogs at 21.5%. Podcasts were being used by 17% of respondents while microblogging, which includes Twitter, was at a dismal 10.9%.

Pointedly, use of social networking analytics was at just 13.1%, which may explain management’s poor appetite for a tool that has yet to generally submit to rigorous measurement.

Respondents said security concerns were the biggest hurdle to greater adoption, followed by a lack of senior buy-in and decreased productivity. Those companies that were using the tools were using them most for departmental collaboration (37.5%), improved customer interactions (34.5%) and improved employee morale (30%).

A further set of numbers suggested that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Noting that use of social media by corporations is often lawless and ungoverned, often resembling “the wild west,” Krista said companies should develop social media policies. However, her research found that only 24% of respondents had done so while another 25% said they “planned to” in the next 12 months. Fully 40% said they had no such plans while the balance either didn’t know if they would or didn’t know what a social media policy would be.

The sobering reality that many consumers themselves have yet to embrace many of these emerging tools may also explain corporate reticence. In a similar study of consumer habits, IDC found that 64% of respondents said they used Facebook. The next most widely used social media tool, YouTube, was well down the adoption curve at only 14%, while Twitter was even lower.

Social media enthusiast Kelly Rusk tweeted me during Krista’s presentation to suggest that these numbers mean “there’s still opportunity for leadership in the space,” and I don’t disagree. The risk, however, is that marketers extolling the virtues of social media will find themselves too far out in front of both their corporate leadership and their markets.

Technorati Tags: social media, IDC, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Crossing the chasm, Krista Napier, Social media breakfast, marketing

This Thanksgiving weekend, my family attended a pottery sale just outside my husband’s hometown. There were lots of beautiful pieces and the weather was perfect to wander in the outdoor tent, watch a potter at work and debate whether to buy this piece or that for Christmas gifts. How did we hear about it? We have good friends who attend every year and, having admired their bounty from this sale, we finally managed to attend this year. I expect it won’t be the last time we do so.

Similarly, we attended a pumpkin patch to select a gourd worthy of being our Jack-o-lantern. How did we select what patch to go to? We had a recommendation from friends about one they’d been to and liked.

As ardent movie fans, especially of the horror genre, my husband and I eagerly await the showing of the new horror movie Paranormal Activity in a theatre near us. The movie is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project in a number of ways, but for this blog’s purposes the most relevant is the huge word-of-mouth marketing campaign that the movie has undertaken, and the large numbers of people flocking to see it because they’ve heard from their friends and other taste-makers that it’s a rollicking, scary good time. The folks behind the movie used the internet to best advantage, asking for 1,000,000 votes to secure nationwide distribution for the film. It passed that mark on Friday. There’s nothing like a good horror movie around Halloween, so here’s hoping that the movie makes it to Ottawa in the next few weeks.

In today’s day and age where the proliferation of marketing channels and media messages is at an all-time high, it’s interesting to note that our purchasing decisions are still so heavily influenced by word of mouth. The best way to ensure good word of mouth is by providing excellent goods and services along with superior customer service. If you have these elements well in hand, your customers will happily spread the good word.

Technorati Tags: Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, word of mouth