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.
Creating meaningful content that perfectly displays your industry thought leadership can be an arduous process. So when you come up with something brilliant, why not utilize it to its full potential?
Repurposing can extend the life of your content and boost the number of people who see it. As Frank Strong points out in his PR Daily article on repurposing, there are a myriad of different ways to do this. Following are a few of the most effective.
Turn an article into a presentation. People are more likely to remember what they see than what they read (90 percent of information the brain processes is visual) so turning a written piece into multimedia is sure to be effective. Create a Slideshare presentation out of the most interesting elements of your article or blog post. Choose a piece that has bullet points or subheads so it can easily be broken down and be sure to add relevant, eye-catching photos.
Use statistics as social media fodder. Tweeting an interesting statistic from a blog post or white paper will likely lead readers back to the original source, effectively extending the life of your content.
Write a blog post based on a white paper. In the tech industry, a white paper is often written by a lead product designer to explain the philosophy and operation of a product in a marketplace or technology context. They provide a wealth of facts, statistics and explanations about your client’s products and industry that can serve as the backbone of a compelling blog post.
Syndicate your blog posts. There are many benefits to syndicating your blog posts – more reach, visibility, sharing and traffic to name a few. Many publications accept syndicated content, but make sure your post matches the audience of the publication you pitch. If you pitch to the wrong publication, even if they decide to publish your piece it won’t be reaching the right audience so your efforts will be wasted.
These are just some of the ways to increase the life of your content. What other suggestions do you have for making your content go the extra mile?
Social media is relatively new, but it has proven to be a vital element in the customer-engagement equation for businesses. With the constant changes taking place on social channels, it is important for companies to understand how to best use these valuable tools for gaining attention from target audiences. In particular, recent changes on Facebook and LinkedIn will certainly begin affecting how journalists, marketers and PR professionals use social channels.
Facebook has been undergoing some significant changes that will affect how companies can reach their audiences. Previously, companies could create a Page, essentially a company or brand Facebook profile, and push content to their audiences through this medium. However, the ease and low cost of this source may soon not be as effective as it once was.
According to Ad Week, Facebook has recently been reworking its news feed algorithm, making it more challenging for companies to get impressions from their content, no matter how clever they may be. An anonymous source from Valleywag claimed that Facebook is reducing the organic reach of Pages to 1 or 2 percent. This move will make it continually more challenging for companies to reach their audiences through Facebook posts, eventually forcing companies to pay for ads on Facebook instead.
A Facebook spokesperson responded to this change on CNET: “We have not given a specific reach number that Pages should expect to see because organic reach will vary by Page and by post. Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” the spokesperson said.
While that might make it more difficult or costly to reach audiences, Facebook recently announced a new tool that will be valuable for journalists, which PR professionals should note as well. FB Newswire is a public page of real-time news that will curate original pictures, videos and status updates on the latest news, weather, entertainment and more. According to the Wall Street Journal, Storyful, a social news-verification company, will monitor FB Newswire. Each photo, video or status update on the page will link back to the user’s personal Facebook page, giving journalists the opportunity to contact the user for the information around the post. PR professionals will need to take note of the changing ways journalists get their news leads and possibly re-strategize depending on how successful FB Newswire is.
LinkedIn recently announced another change in the social media world. In just a few years, LinkedIn has made a variety of changes to the way the site aggregates news and then pushes it to audiences. An article from the Huffington Post highlights LinkedIn’s recent timeline of change. In 2011, LinkedIn introduced LinkedIn Today, a news aggregator. The following year LinkedIn created LinkedIn Influencer, which is a blogging platform for thought leaders and experts selected by LinkedIn.
LinkedIn recently announced LinkedIn Publishing, giving each user the opportunity to create content, a privilege previously reserved for the select 150 leaders and experts. LinkedIn Publishing is an exciting new tool that enables companies to potentially increase brand awareness. Essentially, it will give users access to share their blog posts to the LinkedIn community. LinkedIn Publishing will give PR professionals another outlet to assist clients with reaching their target audiences.
Social media is still relatively new, but even so, is constantly changing. Social channels must encourage community involvement (as has real-time news) in order to keep the interest of users, journalists, marketers and PR professionals alike. FB Newswire and LinkedIn Publishing have the potential to be two useful sources, and it will be intriguing to see how these social media sites affect the PR industry.
This week was an exciting one with the work for our client Smartsheet, a leading provider of a collaborative work management tool that we and 42,000 other businesses use every day. On Monday, May 5, 2014, Smartsheet, already well on its way to changing the way that enterprises work, announced it has secured another $35-million round of financing. As part of this announcement, the company also unveiled the names of some of its largest enterprise customers—Google, U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), Netflix, Office Depot, Groupon, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Pearson, Unisource, Oceaneering, and McGraw-Hill Education, among others.
Reaction to the news was overwhelmingly positive, with coverage in more than 20 news outlets. In case you missed the news coverage, below we have included links to the articles.
- Forbes
- Xconomy
- The Seattle Times
- Hispanic Business
- Bloomberg
- CITEWorld
- GeekWire
- Gigaom
- VentureWire
- Fortune
- FinSMEs
- The Wall Street Journal
- Puget Sound Business Journal
- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- eProfits
- Pulse 2.0
- Techmeme
- TMCnet
I’d like to add how easy Smartsheet makes coordinating a significant announcement such as this. With the Smartsheet tool, we were able to review press lists simultaneously with VC partners, track editorial coverage and access and easily share assets such as images with journalists. We also used the tool to set up a master media interview schedule and share it with our client and VCs. An additional benefit of Smartsheet is that it can be accessed from multiple types of devices.
We are excited about upcoming enhancements and plans that Smartsheet has in the works. From our perspective, the tool just keeps getting better with new features including Resource Management. (We wrote about the Resource Management functionality, which Smartsheet added earlier this year, in a guest post featured on Cision’s website.)
Smartsheet’s Resource Management lets Communiqué PR’s team add allocation data to existing projects and tasks. This information is then compiled into a central sheet, where account managers can easily see all staffers’ project loads in one place. What could be more helpful!
Stay tuned for more news from Smartsheet. With funding totaling $70 million, a valuable product and happy paying customers, the company is well poised for success.
Many articles have been written about the optimal times to post on social media, most with varying opinions, but on this we can all agree: Timing is everything.
A recent infographic published by SurePayroll summarizes the best and worst times for posting, pinning and tweeting. According to the infographic:
- On Facebook, updates posted between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. result in the highest average click-throughs. The worst times are weekends before 8 a.m. or after 8:00 p.m.
- The best time to post on Twitter is Monday through Thursday between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
- For LinkedIn, posting Tuesday through Thursday will increase your chances for engagement.
If you’re trying to reach a business audience, these times make sense and correlate with our own observations and experiences with the social media activities we manage for our clients.
Just as important as knowing when to post is knowing what to post. Unless you work for a large company with a dedicated social media manager, ensuring your social media channels are updated with a regular schedule of posts can be challenging. To help meet this challenge, consider developing a social media editorial calendar.
With an editorial calendar you can map out your posts for the upcoming week and beyond. Your editorial calendar can be as granular as including the actual copy/text for an upcoming post for a specific day. Or, you can use the editorial calendar to assign a theme for a particular day, such as on Mondays you’ll publish posts that revolve around industry research or data, on Wednesdays you’ll highlight one of your products, etc.
While you want to be nimble enough to react to trending topics and breaking news, laying out your publishing schedule in advance with an eye toward the best times to post on a particular social media platform, can maximize your time and effort.
For more information and facts you can use to optimize your social media activities, check out the full infographic below.
You don’t have to be a social media or public relations expert to realize that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) recent and well-intended #myNYPD Twitter campaign quickly turned into an epic fail for the nation’s largest police force. Shortly after issuing an invitation to people to post photos of them posing with the city’s officers, the department received hundreds of images showing New York’s finest engaged in aggressive acts and driving one of the most-trafficked hashtags in the world.
This latest Twitter campaign gone awry joins ranks with epic fails of other brands including JP Morgan Chase and McDonald’s. It also offers marketers an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others and better prepare themselves to conduct successful social media campaigns on behalf of clients.
In this particular case, the NYPD failed to consider two critical tenets of any social media campaign:
- Know your audience
- The only content you can control is your own
According to social media expert Charlton McIlwain, a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, the mistake “shows either a profound misunderstanding of how social media works or a profound misunderstanding about popular perception of the NYPD, or probably both.” If the NYPD had, at the very least, considered its audience and their perceptions, which should be considered when developing any strategic social media campaign, they may have avoided what will certainly become one of the year’s most publicized social media backlashes.
In all fairness, the NYPD did also receive some positive images and messages of support from Twitter followers, and some credit can be given to NYPD Commissioner William Bratton who honestly acknowledged to the Associated Press that “the Twitter campaign may not have been fully thought through.” He also went on to say, “It’s not going to cause us to change any of our efforts to be very active on social media. It is what it is. It’s an open, transparent world.”
While the NYPD’s unsuccessful Twitter campaign won’t change their efforts to be very active on social media, I would be willing to wager that the department’s communications team will more diligently consider their audience and potential negative reactions to any social media campaign moving forward.
The following infographic from Cox Blue provides more tips around building a successful social media campaign. For other tips on social media and crisis communications, check out the rest of our blog.
Credit: Cox Blue (CoxBlue.com).Yesterday I was reading an article offering tips to entrepreneurs who want to grow their startup companies while maintaining ownership of their equity. The article, entitled “Who needs VC Money? Not this profitable startup,” was written by Ryan Shank, co-founder and COO of Mhelpdesk, who opted to focus his company’s limited resources on product development and customer service rather than vying for venture capital.
Shanks’ success in growing his business without venture capital brought to mind one of our agency’s newest clients, Summit Imaging. Like Mhelpdesk, Summit Imaging has experienced significant growth without taking the traditional path of pursuing outside investment. Another similarity between the two companies is an uncompromising dedication to delivering the best quality customer service and a reliance on satisfied customers to help champion the company through word of mouth recommendations.
Summit Imaging is a privately owned ultrasound medical equipment support company that just last month was driven to relocate its headquarters to a 32,000 square-foot facility in Woodinville, Washington. The move marked the company’s fourth relocation due to growth in the past eight years, and while this growth is certainly inspiring, it’s how the company has grown that I find really interesting.
Summit Imaging has grown from an operation of one in 2006, to a profitable and innovative 34-person operation today. It was surprising to learn that with such consistent growth over the years, the company does not have a dedicated sales and marketing team. Rather, Summit Imaging’s success has been realized through positive word of mouth and referrals from customers.
Like so many entrepreneurs before him, Larry Nguyen built his small business out of a humble garage. The solo engineer began refurbishing and selling parts for ultrasound systems and quickly came to realize that there was a growing market for his services. Almost immediately, he invested in further developing skills that would allow him to repair complicated devices down to the component level. This expertise, along with an equally important decision to develop an error database in order to achieve unparalleled customer satisfaction, soon resulted in a reputation for outstanding quality and customer support.
Modeling itself after “urgent care” in the medical field, Summit Imaging strives to offer customers the fastest turnaround times for customer support, rapid repair and parts replacement. The company offers an innovative and highly efficient end-to-end customer service process that minimizes costly downtime and aims to exceed the expectations of biomedical engineers who are responsible for servicing equipment from a variety of manufacturers, and hospital administrators at every point of contact.
Nguyen’s emphasis on core values including innovation, reliability, outstanding quality and customer satisfaction has paid off with word of mouth referrals that have grown Summit Imaging into what it is today: a profitable operation with a 60 percent growth rate year-over-year and a 93 percent customer-retention rate.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Nguyen’s next mission for Summit Imaging is to set a new industry standard for supporting and repairing ultrasound equipment, wherein no matter which company a hospital works with, it will receive the highest quality customer service, minimizing downtimes for healthcare providers and patients, alike. Ambitious? Indeed. But ambition is one of an entrepreneur’s strongest qualities, and given Nguyen’s track record, I’m inclined to believe that he and his highly-trained team at Summit Imaging are well-positioned to inspire others in the industry.
For more about lean startup strategies, see Shank’s article in The Upstart Business Journal . For thoughts on PR’s role in relation to startup business, see “PR and the Lean Start-Up,” or “When Should a Start-up Business Hire a PR Firm?” on the Communiqué PR blog.