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Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.

From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.

Point Inside Takes the Spotlight in Retail Innovation – Announcing Its Rapid Growth

It’s been an excitingly busy time for one of our clients, Point Inside, the provider of a mobile shopper engagement platform for Top 100 retailers. Point Inside’s StoreMode™ platform powers retailers’ branded apps with real-time, store-specific product search and location to help shoppers quickly find what they need in stores. We recently helped Point Inside announce its phenomenal 1690-percent revenue growth since 2009, having grown revenue more than 150 percent year-over-year without the support of venture capital funding.

Point Inside’s impressive growth coincides with the retail industry trend toward an integrated shopping experience that blends the physical and digital channels. The company’s shopping and engagement solutions enable retailers to make the most of this mobile revolution and create an overall better, more personalized experience for their customers. In addition to its revenue growth, Point Inside also shared details for the first time around its:

  • Top 100 retail customers and success of its partners
  • Tens of millions of shoppers using its platform
  • Billions of user requests per month for its services
  • Creation of more than 10,000 maps of indoor venues and 5,000 store-specific search engines
  • More than 20-fold growth of its employee base since 2009
  • Recent headquarters relocation to a new 12,600-square-foot space—with 6,000 more to come by January—the third in five years to match company growth

To support the announcement, we reached out to local and national retail and marketing industry media, leveraging both Point Inside’s momentum and how it ties to retailers’ increasing adoption of mobile solutions. This approach was successful, generating significant press and industry interest, briefings with key influencers and editorial coverage, such as the following:

It’s neat to see a local company like Point Inside at the forefront of its industry, and we look forward to supporting Point Inside on even more exciting developments in the months to come. For more on Point Inside and its recent momentum, check out www.pointinside.com.

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Tips for Leveraging Twitter’s New Analytics Dashboard

Have you ever wondered how many people actually read your tweets? Now that Twitter has made its analytics dashboard available to everyone you can find out. The dashboard, which was previously only offered to advertisers and verified accounts, provides details on your tweets’ engagement as well as follower demographics. You can check it out at analytics.twitter.com.

The insights the dashboard offers will be incredibly useful for companies looking to increase brand awareness or engagement on Twitter. Following are the metrics that will matter the most to your digital strategy and tips around how to leverage them.

Individual Tweet Data

Unlike other free analytics tools, Twitter’s dashboard provides data about how each tweet is performing in real time. Upon clicking the tweet, you can see how many people have viewed it, clicked on the link, and shared it via email since it was published.

This data can then be exported to an Excel file so it’s easier to see how tweets compare to each other. Once the data has been exported, it’s helpful to divide it into two categories: micro and macro. Micro activities are actions in which the user has viewed the information but not directly interacted with it, such as impressions and favorites; and macro activities are actions in which there is direct engagement, such as retweets and replies. Compile this information every month to gauge how your account has improved or declined and to gain insight into what types of tweets resonate most with your followers.

Follower Data

At the top of the Followers page is a graph that tracks overall growth since your account was created, which is useful for an at-a-glance visualization of how your account has grown over time. It then drills down into what your followers are interested in and where they are located. Their interests are divided into two categories: Most Unique Interests and Top Interests. Those are then ranked from most popular to least popular and accompanied by the percentage of followers interested.

It can be helpful to track your users’ interests over time to see if they remain steady. This will help you make a more informed decision about whether to tweak your posts to match your followers’ specific interests. If their interests don’t match your brand, consider implementing a strategy to attract the right audience.

Twitter’s analytics dashboard provides incredibly helpful metrics that, when analyzed effectively, can help strengthen your brand’s presence on the site. If you have started using Twitter’s analytics dashboard, what other tips do you have for leveraging its insights?

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Numbers Don’t Lie

Today’s consumer has access to an abundance of information from the Internet and social media, making them the most informed they have ever been. So, this poses an important question: Which information is the most influential? Is it the customer reviews, the social media campaigns, the endless types of advertising, or possibly expert content? The Nielsen Company recently posed this question and was able to discover the impact of content in the consumer decision-making process.

The Experiment

The Nielsen Company recruited 900 respondents from casino floors in Las Vegas and took them to the Nielsen MediaLabs. Next, they placed each respondent in one of the nine product categories (i.e., auto insurance, child seat, digital camera, video game, etc.) and exposed them to three types of content. The content presented was expert content, user reviews, and branded content.

The effect that each type of content had on the consumer would be measured in three stages. The first, familiarity with a new product; the second, affinity toward a brand or product; and lastly, purchase consideration of a brand or product.

The Results

Overall, each type of content showed improvement among the three categories: product familiarity, affinity and purchase intent. But which had the strongest showing? This is when PR professionals can chime in with an “I told you so.” Expert content was the most effective and consistent across all three content types.

Expert content provided the most familiarity lift for seven of the nine products, the most affinity lift for five of the nine products, and the most purchase intent lift for six of the nine products. “On average,” said Nielsen, “expert content lifted familiarity 88 percent more than branded content and 50 percent more than user reviews; they lifted affinity 50 percent more than branded content and 20 percent more than user reviews; finally, they lifted purchase consideration 38 percent more than branded content and 83 percent more than user reviews.”

Now what?

Numbers don’t lie. Expert content is effective. The next step is to capitalize on this information and secure expert content. This can be done by finding the right contact and placing it in the right publication. Spending time to find the publication that reaches your target audience is critical. In order for expert content, or any content, to serve its purpose and be effective, the consumers have to read it. Be sure to consider the audience when reaching out to a journalist or expert.

The other important aspect is making sure you are contacting the correct people. Contact someone who is interested in sharing his or her thoughts about your product. Without the right contact, your product won’t be given a second glance.

Generally, all forms of content have the ability to influence the consumer. However, the results of this study are clear: Customers want the opinion of a credible third party. An objective opinion is going to build trust and be more effective in convincing the consumer your product is the right product.

If you’d like to see more results from the Nielsen Company study, use the link here.

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To Retain or Omit the Oxford Comma

The use of the serial, or Oxford, comma has been a long debated topic. For those unfamiliar with the debate over this “rule,” an example with a serial comma follows: I have traveled to Seattle, San Francisco, and Dallas. Whereas, a serial comma omitted looks as follows: I have traveled to Seattle, San Francisco and Dallas.

The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style have two different views on the topic. The AP Stylebook requires the omission of the serial comma in simple lists, whereas the Chicago Manual of Style requires a comma before a conjunction when joining the last two items in a series.

In the public relations industry, it is important to keep journalists happy, so following the correct style is extremely important if you want your clients’ stories to be covered. However, when it comes to the serial comma, some follow the AP Stylebook, some follow the Chicago Manual of Style and some follow other guidelines (as you can see, our firm tends to follow the AP Stylebook).

If you want a good laugh on the “heated” debate of the Oxford comma, check out Scott Leadingham’s article on Quill. Leadingham makes some interesting points surrounding these “standardized rules.” For example, if standardized rules exist, then what are writers to do when the rules contradict across the industry (think AP Stylebooks’s rule of omitting the serial comma vs. Chicago Manual of Style’s rule of using the serial comma)?

The article also includes an excerpt from “The Book on Writing” by Paula LaRocque, also in favor of restoring the serial comma. LaRocque highlights the confusion surrounding the Oxford comma, providing the AP Stylebook as an example. The stylebook approves of omitting the serial comma in simple lists. However, the AP Stylebook demands the serial comma in a complex series, when the last two items in the list run together, or when the item in the list contains a comma. (LaRocque’s examples: The flag is red, white and blue, vs., The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper attitude.)

Clearly, there is some confusion surrounding the Oxford comma, and to add even more confusion, different stylebooks have different rules. Various experts, including the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, are in favor of the serial comma, yet others swear by the AP Stylebook. What are your thoughts? Retain or omit the serial comma?

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How to Avoid Breaking PR’s Cardinal Rule

Recently, a writer at Newsweek published a story recounting his week-long experiment to read and to reply within 36 hours to every PR pitch he received. Given the volume of pitches that landed in his inbox, it was a noble effort. Some of the experiences he relayed made me chuckle, but a lot of his story also made me cringe as he enumerated the pitches that were completely irrelevant.

We’ve written extensively about the topic of pitching on the Communiqué PR blog and every PR pro worth their salt knows that one of the basic tenets of PR is to appropriately target and personalize your pitch. Nothing will land your pitch in a journalist’s deleted mail folder faster than a pitch that is off base and irrelevant to their beat.

So why do PR pros continue to break this cardinal rule?

Most PR practitioners are exceptional professionals who strive to deliver outstanding results for the organizations they represent as efficiently and expediently as possible. However, it would not be too far-fetched to say that more than once in his/her career, a PR pro has sent a pitch that was off target.  Reflecting back on my own experience, there are a number of reasons why this might occur. One of the most notable reasons is having press lists that are so large that having the bandwidth to do the home work required to develop a personalized pitch and to send the individual email is nearly impossible.

Here’s a tip: Rather than going after say, 100 publications, hone your list to the top 10-15 outlets that are the most relevant to your company/client and that will move the needle for their business. Once you’ve identified those outlets, drill down and identify the appropriate writers, read their articles and follow them on social media. Get to know their beats and the topics they cover. It may take a pitch or two to pique their interest, but being laser focused on the outlets that matter and reaching out to journalists with news and story ideas that are relevant to them, will reap greater benefits.

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VoloMetrix Files for Patent for Its Groundbreaking Predictive People Analytics Technology

This month has been an exciting one for our client VoloMetrix, a leading people analytics company that provides unprecedented insights into how companies invest their most valuable resources— their time and human capital. On Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014, VoloMetrix announced that it has filed for a patent for its revolutionary people analytics technology. As part of the announcement, VoloMetrix shared several of the metrics used to diagnose organizational inefficiencies and promote employee engagement, including:
  • Organizational Load Index (OLI):  OLI is calculated as the total amount of time any given employee consumes from the rest of the organization based on meetings they schedule and emails they send out.  For example, if Ed schedules a one-hour meeting with four people, he has consumed four hours of time from the organization. OLI helps employees and executives alike understand to what extent they are consuming an organization’s time through scheduled meetings and emails sent. This metric has made me re-think hitting “reply all” and inviting people whose presence is not critical to a meeting.
  • Number of people in cross-collaboration: This metric can be dynamically calculated for any set of two groups within the company. It is based on the number of unique individuals who participated in email communication or attended a meeting involving anyone from the two groups in question. This metric provides unparalleled insight into which teams are collaborating and the frequency and duration of the collaboration. Ineffective or infrequent collaboration across company teams can stifle innovation, growth, and employee engagement.
  • Time Fragmentation:  Time Fragmentation measures the extent to which meetings fragment the working time of employees.  It is calculated as the number of two-hour blocks with no calendared meetings available during normal employee working hours  (e.g., if your standard working hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. and you have a one-hour meeting at 10 a.m. and a two-hour meeting at 2 p.m., then you would have two two-hour blocks of time available). Research suggests that it takes people at least 15 minutes to regain focus after an interruption, and employees find it difficult to refocus when there is less than an hour until their next meeting. By understanding time fragmentation data, managers can schedule meetings strategically, so employees have significant blocks of uninterrupted time each day to focus on their actual work.

In addition to these metrics, which provide actionable insights into a company’s organizational health and productivity, VoloMetrix’s technology can predict sales-quota attainment, attrition, performance, and more. VoloMetrix unearthed that internal networking is strongly correlated with sales-quota attainment. By gathering data on employees’ internal networking, VoloMetrix can predict employees’ quota attainment with a high degree of accuracy, as early as one month into the quarter. VoloMetrix’s technology truly is at the forefront of people analytics, an emerging big-data category.

For the full release, please visit MarketWired. VoloMetrix’s announcement also spurred some compelling coverage in key outlets.

As Chantrelle Nielsen, head of customer solutions at VoloMetrix, shared with Datanami, “In a lot of companies, you have to submit a receipt and an expense code for a cup of coffee you bought for somebody. But you don’t have to submit anything and there’s no approval process and no real judgment on whether you’re spending $5,000 worth of people’s time in a meeting that lasts all afternoon.” We are excited to help VoloMetrix change that.

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