A Cutting Edge Focus on Social Media for Business was the thrust of this week’s Ottawa Network event, but while each of the presenters offered useful insights on the abrupt paradigm shifts in customer and media engagement driven by Web 2.0, what struck me was that no matter how much some things change, they remain the same.

Chris Biber, president and CEO of SearchingWorks, started off the evening by reiterating that social media, be it Twitter, Youtube or a blog, is simply another set of tools in the marketing toolbox, while marketing itself is simply the “consistent application of common sense.”

It all begins of course, by taking the time to research and understand your customers. Who are they? Where are they? What interests them? And what are their needs and expectations? The same basic foundation that’s always been a requisite for an effective marketing program. The difference now, of course, being that social media allows for a much more candid and informal two-way flow of communication between company and customer.

But this is a conversation that cannot be dominated by a “me, me, me” approach. While companies and brands can make themselves part of the conversation and attempt to direct it, they can’t expect to control it. Nor will their audience respond favourably to anything that is blatantly self-serving or promotional.

Rick Radko, president of R-Cubed, drawing on his software-engineering background, took a different perspective and focused on the application of social media as an internal, rather than external, communications tool set. From online tools for document sharing and collaboration, to wikis, Rick talked about how “Enterprise 2.0″ is becoming the norm for organizations with teleworkers and remote offices, to keep staff in touch and part of a common corporate culture.

In particular, Rick touched on using a wiki to keep staff informed on everything from new corporate directives, to who down the hall is offering to car pool. It’s the digitization of that ubiquitous cork board that adorns staff lunch rooms everywhere, plastered with pushpins and dead-tree notices.

Lastly, Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, talked about the distinctions between the social media release, versus the traditional news release, an example of which she offered for a recent Mother’s Day event she held. As her example illustrates, the social media release tends to be less formal and directly addresses the intended audience. It also moves up the contact information and incorporates multimedia elements to support it, from pictures, to video and links to other relevant sources of information.

Two things in particular struck me about the structure of a social media release and how she used it.

First, is the volume of supporting content that can be added, in terms of pictures, video, links and so forth. In the good ol’ days of tree slaying, a comprehensive package such as this was called a media kit. Is the social media release, in its fully realized form, in many ways not simply the digitization of this traditional public relations tool? (Editor’s note: Actually, long before the term “social media release” was ever coined, savvy PR practitioners have been offering their contacts multimedia-rich content. And we’ve been hosting or delivering that content via electronic channels for decades. The web has made it easier for practitioners to do it all themselves but there are still some media formats — broadcast-quality b-roll, for example — that you probably don’t want to host yourself.)

The second point came when one attendee asked Natasha how she distributed this social media release. And this is where another classic and intrinsic element of marketing and PR came in. She researched the influential bloggers in the Ottawa area who would be interested in her Mother’s Day event and contacted them to pitch the event and direct them to her release. Proving once again that they’ve yet to come up with a social media tool that is a suitable substitute for hard work and old-fashioned solicitation.

Technorati Tags: public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, Twitter, wiki, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

I was interviewed a few weeks back by the Ottawa Business Journal for a piece on marketing through a downturn. While a good bit of what I had to say did make it into the article, I thought it would be useful to expand on my thinking here. So, here are my 10 tips for marketing through a downturn.

1. Do as much marketing as you can afford

We’ve written a lot about the merit of maintaining your marketing spend through an economic downturn. There is still business to be written, markets to be taken and customers to be won. And a downturn, when many of your competitors may well be going quiet, often represents an unprecedented opportunity to grab a much larger share of voice.

2. Recalibrate your strategy and recast your budget strategically as opposed to simply cutting x% across the board

The OBJ reporter kept trying to get me to name the “one thing” that companies should do in response to a downturn. I resisted being so binary since a downturn represents doom to some but incredible opportunity to others. And even for those for whom it’s a challenge, an across-the-board response is rarely the right one.

At times like this, strategy becomes more valuable than ever. Know where you’re trying to go, the best way to get there, and how you’re going to know that you’ve arrived. Cut those marketing tactics that won’t help get you there and re-invest the money in the tactics that will.

3. Negotiate pricing

All the vectors you use to communicate to your marketplace are feeling the pinch right now. There is no better time to play hardball on pricing, or to negotiate added extras that usually cost a lot more. Most media outlets will cut their line rates or give you valuable extras like a free newsletter distribution, web conference, white paper distribution or even additional insertions. Trade show organizers may agree to a bigger booth space for the same price or throw in sponsorship opportunities or show guide advertising that in better times might cost you thousands more. Even if your supplier must hold the line on fundamentals, see if you can’t snag some of the valuable extras.

4. If you have channel or other partners, consider pooling budgets and activities to make your dollars go further

Can you share a trade show booth with partners? Can you initiate a co-op advertising program that sees you put up some of the cost while your channel partners put up the rest? Is the opposite available to you — are you a channel for an OEM with a co-op program?

5. Do not abandon measurement

If marketing is seen as the easiest thing for companies to cut during a downturn, then measurement is seen as the easiest thing for marketers to cut. After all, it doesn’t really contribute anything, right? Wrong. Harken back to tip No. 2: If you’re not measuring, you have no idea where you are or what got you there, you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, and you simply can’t be strategic about your marketing spend. When times are good and there’s budget to spare, you might be able to afford to have some things work a little less effectively. When times are tough and every dollar must produce a result, you need to be measuring so you know which tactics are delivering and which ones aren’t.

6. Be transactional if there’s an immediate opportunity

As I’ve already noted, a downturn means different things for different companies. If there is good business that can be immediately secured, be highly transactional in going after it. Alter all your messaging to “Buy now,” and focus on tactics, like advertising and direct marketing, that communicate transactional messaging best.

7. If there isn’t an immediate opportunity, go long

It’s far more likely, however, that your customer’s buying cycle has stalled; it almost certainly has lengthened. So if your customers have hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass, there’s no point in blaring the hard sell at them or offering them discounts and other incentives to immediately do something they’re simply not going to. Does this mean you, too, should hunker down and draw the blinds until things blow over? No, it means your messaging should shift to support longer-term objectives such as awareness building, thought leadership and marketplace education. Tactics like media relations, trade shows and white papers that establish your authority and expertise are a better use of your resources if this is your reality.

8. In all communications, employ story telling that emphasizes how your product or service saves money or drives additional immediate revenue for your customers. Speak to the pain they’re feeling in a recession

Whatever the economic conditions, your marketing and communications messaging should be all about your customer, not you. You should always be speaking to the pain your customer feels that your product or service solves. In a recession, your customer’s pain is almost certainly all about revenue — making more of it or keeping more of it. Make sure you’re speaking to this.

9. Be overly attentive to your existing revenue base

“Love the one you’re with,” says the old song, and that’s never more relevant than in a downturn, when new customers are hardest to acquire. Your current customers are keeping you in business and it’s almost always cheaper to maintain and build business with existing customers than to find new ones. Lavish your existing customers with love, look for low-cost ways to improve the value you create for them, and communicate, communicate, communicate — let them know you love them.

10. Effective relationships never expire, so keep talking

Keep talking to everyone in your value chain, including suppliers, service providers, channels, influencers and, of course, customers and prospects. Even if they can’t use your services or you theirs just now, keeping those lines of communication open and full of useful information will serve you very well when the economy recovers.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, media relations, recession, downturn

Recently, Francis fielded a question on LinkedIn about the value of running a survey to generate media coverage.

Surveys can be used effectively to position a company, but not if the company is perceived simply as a sponsor of an external survey. Francis cited the example of one IT consultancy that, on inmedia’s counsel, did away with its external survey of CIOs and instead realized much better media traction from publishing the results of an internal census of its own IT experts. The spotlight was shifted from a group of faceless CIOs to the consultancy’s own knowledge keepers, positioning the consultancy as an authoritative subject matter expert rather than a mere survey sponsor.

As the editor of a business publication, I saw almost daily news releases plugging a survey that, on the surface at least, provided profound insights into one issue or another of relevance to the Ottawa business community. However, the appeal factor quickly evaporated when, upon closer inspection, it was revealed that said survey was sponsored by a major credit card company or software vendor.

This made the objectivity of the data presented, and the conclusions drawn from it, immediately suspect to me. After all, the sponsoring organization would not go to the time and effort to promote survey results that didn’t support its own sales and marketing efforts, now would it? It was this obvious vested interest that made me reluctant to devote even a couple of hundred words of coverage with an online news brief.

When trying to come up with ingenious and cunning ways to engage with the media, there is, once again, simply no substitute for taking the time and effort to understand:

1. Who are the media that are relevant to your organization? Which ones have the clout to move your market and a focus that includes the products and services that you offer?

2. Who on staff specifically covers your offering or the specific markets that you target?

3. What kind of content is the publication looking for and how can you provide it? When you pursue potential customers, you position your product or service as a solution to a problem. Attracting the interest of the media is no different. In Francis’s example above, by putting the spotlight on its own internal thought leaders, this IT consultancy was conveying the value it could provide to a publication in search of expert opinion and insight on pertinent issues and topics.

Answering these questions takes research and the patience and persistence to secure that all-important first conversation with an editor. This is relationship building based upon your ability to offer something that is relevant and valuable. Prove that you’re useful, and your foot is firmly wedged in the door. It is not about flogging today’s news release, though that does present a good excuse to pick up the phone.

Don’t operate under the false assumption that following this process faithfully is a magic bullet that guarantees results, or that great things will happen over night. It still takes time.

For one client, I have been working to place a leadership piece with a key publication since February. The editor held on to the draft we submitted for almost two months before coming back with requested revisions that essentially gut much of the article’s original focus and content. But he’s still interested. With another magazine that lies at the pinnacle of this client’s wish list, I have been touching base with the editor every few weeks for the past three months and finally hope to garner a firm commitment in June when work commences on a signature fall issue.

Invariably, great results are the result of this kind of furious paddling below the waterline, rather than something like a sponsored survey that can fall into the category of gimmickry. The sooner you take to the water and get to work, the sooner those media clippings will begin to add up.

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

No matter how busy we become and how far flung we are from the people we need to communicate with to carry out our work, there is still no substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

In recent weeks, I have been working on a series of business profiles that will run in an upcoming supplement in the Ottawa Business Journal. These are largely 350- to 500-word pieces for which I must interview the principal of each business and perhaps a couple of reference customers. (Nothing validates your business more than a good reference customer).

Considering the size of the articles I must produce, I could easily garner the information I need over the phone. It would be quicker and more efficient from a time-management perspective. But I’ve chosen to visit each of these businesses in person.  They are all local businesses, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to interview the principals in their natural environment?

So much of the work I do at inmedia is with clients outside Ottawa and with trade and industry media spread across the continent and beyond. It’s refreshing to actually put a face to a name and enjoy the interaction of meeting in the flesh. A face-to-face meeting is by its very nature much more intimate and dynamic than two bodiless voices communicating across wires and networks. There is definitely something lost when you can’t look into the eyes of the person who is speaking to you. Body language is a critical part of any human interaction.

Nonetheless, we frequently have little choice but to conference by phone, (as I am about to do with inmedia client Xsilva Systems of Montreal, thanks to a service called Calliflower). And while communicating in this manner may not be as ideal as in person, there are ways to make the most of it. Richard Laermer at the Bad Pitch Blog offers plenty of helpful advice on the subject, and it all begins with planning ahead and staying focused on the matters at hand during the call.

Technorati Tags: communications, conference calls, clients

This is probably the first and last time the Pope gets a mention on this blog, but this week’s events in Africa got me thinking.

What got the Pope in hot water while visiting a continent ravaged by AIDS/HIV was his public assertion that the use of condoms could increase risks to public health related to the spread of the disease.

For most companies, there are countless topical situations that could be taken advantage of for the purpose of making a point. In some cases it might be appropriate and prudent to do so, and for others, definitely not. The events of September 11, 2001 are a prime example of the latter, where there were some who tried to capitalize on the fear generated around the attacks. But the majority of businesses rightly balked at such callous practice.

Many technology firms will unfortunately come across occasions when a global disaster or terrible event would provide a potential platform from which to illustrate their product’s capabilities, and how they might have prevented events from happening. But they just don’t. Our ethics help us to realize it’s better to say nothing in certain situations.

While I understand that the Pope has an agenda that he firmly believes in (as does the leadership of most organizations), I would have thought that someone within the Vatican’s PR department might have raised the point that certain subject matter might be better left alone when visiting the epicenter of that subject.

Technorati Tags: The Pope, AIDS, HIV, public relations, Africa

“Angry phone calls are your friend,” writes Seth Godin in a blog post today. “They’re your friend because the alternative is angry tweets and angry blog posts.”

I agree so completely I’ve already tweeted this post of Godin’s.

But I think companies should have more holistic approaches to customer satisfaction and service for good business reasons that go beyond fear of being slagged on the ‘net. We write about this a lot here at inmedialog so forgive me for sounding a bit like a broken record.

Superior customer service is the only sustainable competitive advantage available to most companies. If you have a technology advantage, your product will swiftly be reverse-engineered, or the next refinement by a competitor will leapfrog over it. If you have a price advantage, outsourcing and off-shoring will swiftly erode it.

If you treat your customers better than your competitors do, however, you will build and expand an advantage than no one will be able to take away from you.

Don’t treat your customers properly just because you’re afraid they’ll write nasty things about you on Twitter or on blogs. Treat them properly because it’s the surest way they’ll stay customers.

[tag] Customer service, Seth Godin [/tags]

There is no shortage of counsel that an economic rough patch is the time to ramp up, not reduce, a company’s investment in marketing and public relations. When potential customers are reconsidering or holding off on purchasing decisions, you need to be out there giving them a reason why they need to buy, and buy from you, now.

In the current environment, companies that are nimble and can adapt quickly will not only be the ones that survive, but will also be the ones that prosper as they take advantage of the confusion, fear and indecision of competitors standing on the sidelines wringing their hands as the same old way of doing things fails to yield the results it once did.

What needs to change is the message you are putting out. Everyone is feeling the pain of a recessionary economy. Our motto at inmedia has always been that it’s not about the technology, but about the business case for the technology. We always emphasize to our clients that their messaging must articulate how their product or service is the drill the customer needs to make that hole in the wall. (Or as the case may be, the patching compound that will make the hole go away.) Marketing and PR are crucial tools to convey how your product or service can address the most acute and top-of-mind pain points of your customers. They are also key to reaching and cultivating new markets.

Entrepreneur Magazine recently published a good article on where to avoid the temptation to drop the axe to cut costs. It featured a great perspective from Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. She emphasized the importance of marketing in a slump to maintain the volume of sales leads, and to adjust your messaging to reflect the current realities facing potential customers.

“If you sell washing machines, for example, and people don’t want to buy new models, you can stress how much they’ll save on maintenance and electricity with a more energy-efficient model,” she said.

Of course, adjusting your messaging and targeting new markets must make sense and hold the potential of a return greater than the investment. My catalyst for writing this post came from a radio ad I heard the other day from a company that is obviously thinking outside the box to reach a broader demographic of potential customers.

The ad came from retail pharmacy chain Jean Coutu and featured a fellow talking to his buddy about how busy he is taking care of the baby on paternity leave. His comment was along the lines of, “My wife does her part, but thank goodness for Jean Coutu.”

OK. Creative thinking on Jean Coutu’s part? Yes. An untapped market? Maybe. A big market worthy of the effort? Not so sure on that one, though I will concede it may catch the attention of a broader male demographic than just dads on pat leave. What’s important is that it demonstrates the kind of creative thinking that companies need to succeed in the current environment and the value of maintaining the marketing investment. (Consider this free plug I just gave Jean Coutu because I heard that ad and it resonated because I’m a father with a four-year-old.)

Technorati Tags: marketing, public relations, advertising, branding

I just read John Rogers’ AP report on the PR phenomenon that surrounds “Octomom”, the California mother who successfully gave birth to eight babies last month. It seems the initial widespread news reporting of the “miracle” story has quickly given way to almost universal derision of the woman for her irresponsibilty in having more children and her attempts to gain financially from the story. Indeed, the mother’s publicist, who had represented her for free, was forced to end his work with her after receiving death threats. Unbelievable.

But this example shows how quickly the double-edged PR sword can turn on you. If the mother had opted for privacy following the birth, the breaking news stories would have come and gone, she would likely have had to lie low for a few weeks until the buzz died down, and might then have been left in relative peace to get on with changing all those nappies. Instead, it appears she opted to capitalize on the PR, and is now paying the price for doing so. Ultimately, the realities of her full story did not meet with the same reaction as the initial focus on the miracle of eight surviving babies.

I’m not sure it would have made any difference to Octomom’s situation, but there is a lesson to be taken from this. Focusing on a single key message, whether it be eight babies or a “world-first” technology, can be a tremendous way to generate headlines, but there always comes a point at which your story’s surface will be scratched and the deeper details will be revealed. Whether you’re planning a product launch, publishing the results of a study, or announcing a new business strategy, make sure that whole story stands up to scrutiny or the initial headlines will always be superceded by the truth.

Technorati Tags: Octomom, octuplets, messaging, marketing, public relations

In case you missed them, here’s a recap of our blog posts from January.

Francis
Jan. 16: Why is a startup like murder?
Jan. 30: ‘It’s just unbelievable how far customer service can go.’

Danny
Jan. 12: Could recession spell the end for print?
Jan. 23: The value of shooting the breeze

Leo
Jan. 5: Back up the message with a good story
Jan. 8: Twitterpated
Jan. 13: Plain talk without the agenda
Jan. 20: The double-edged Web
Jan. 27: Reaping the rewards of a good reference
Jan. 29: Business building blocks

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