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.
All eyes were on the presidential debate this week in Denver. But prior to the big debate, both parties were busy preparing for possible scenarios and anticipating questions, hoping to shine. In any speaking platform, preparation is key and I thought it might be helpful to look at how each candidate prepared and the takeaways for PR professionals.
In preparation, President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney both spent diligent hours preparing, and each camp worked to highlight their individual strengths and avoid showcasing their weaknesses.
Mitt Romney’s team is fully aware that Gov. Romney gets into trouble when he is challenged, and his team worked to help him avoid this. He spent hours watching tapes from past debates with Obama and running through scenarios that would cause himself to lose his cool. By challenging his downfall head on, Romney’s team was able to help him prepare for possible situations where he might get heated. According to an NPR article titled, “Hours Of Preparation For Romney Ahead Of Debate,” this happened during a primary debate in Las Vegas when Texas Gov. Rick Perry accused him of hiring illegal immigrants. Mr. Romney tried to interject and said, “I’m speaking. I’m speaking. I’m speaking.” He was agitated by the accusation and at one point put his hand on Perry’s shoulder.
Likewise, President Obama spent his time preparing, but his team’s objectives were to keep the president in charge of the debate without being too combative. Obama aides reviewed tapes of Romney’s previous debates to identify possible “pitfalls” for a challenger.
Another tact that both Romney and Obama used prior to the debate, was lowering the expectations of the viewers. Both candidates came out applauding their challenger as a talented public speaker and said that they themselves have not had much time to prepare or are not very experienced. This tactic is designed to make the audience surprised if a candidate does well and show compassion or expect for a candidate to do poorly. Think of it like giving a great present. If you tell a loved one that you are buying them a fantastic gift, you could oversell the present. However, if you say you’ve had very little time to shop for their birthday present, your gift will be a welcomed surprise.
During Wednesday’s debate, Mitt Romney did seem to become agitated when President Obama talked about the Affordable Health Care Act and indicated that Romney’s health plan would not address preexisting medical conditions like he claimed. Moderator Jim Lehrer tried to move the discussion along, but Romney insisted that he be heard: “No I have to respond to that,” interrupting Jim Lehrer. However, the interruption did not escalate. His aides predicted correctly and both candidates seemed to know what got under each other’s skin.
President Obama did avoid being combative during the debate. In a CNN article, “Romney takes debate to Obama over economy, healthcare,” Tom Cohen said, “The president firmly defended his achievements and challenged his rival’s prescriptions as unworkable.” However, it was Romney that seemed to command the debate.
So, what is the takeaway for communications professionals? We know that panels, interviews, speaking opportunities and debates can be a great opportunity for an organization’s spokesperson to be seen as a thought leader and increase brand awareness. However, it doesn’t stop at securing the opportunity. As a PR professional, it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of your spokesperson to properly prepare them to take the stage. It is also important to know the strengths and weaknesses of the other participants.
As PR professionals, we can learn from the approach of each camp. It is important to not only prepare for what messages you want to communicate, but prepare for how you’ll react in possible scenarios. We typically develop briefing materials for our clients that provide background on members of the media, analysts or other panelists to anticipate what questions might be asked and what hot button issues might peak a journalist’s interest. Our clients may not spend the hours that the Presidential candidates spend preparing, but we can certainly model the strategy.
How do you prepare for speaking opportunities?
Having a corporate blog can be a huge resource for driving traffic to your company’s website, building out your business, and garnering media coverage. However, with so many competing platforms and styles of blogging, it can be difficult to determine what is best for your business. I recently attended PRNewswire’s webinar “ Corporate Blogging Best Practices: Building Your Brand & Boosting Business Through Thought Leadership,“ to see what a couple pros had to say about best practices for corporate blogging.
The webinar was led by Jeff Corbin, CEO of KCSA Strategic Communications, and Thomas Hynes, manager of Blogger Relations with PRNewswire. Corbin brings expertise as an integral voice on KCSA’s corporate blog, while Hynes is familiar with blogs of all kinds—he runs PRNewswire’s blog, Beyond PR, as well as two personal blogs (Tomblr and Bike Gang!). The two blogging pros offered the following tips on best practices for successful corporate blogging:
- Grab attention quickly. If you want people to read your blog, you have to get them interested in what you have to offer. After all, as Hynes notes, what’s the point of a blog if no one is going to read it? In order to gain traffic momentum to your blog, use snappy, catch titles. Also make sure you start off with a bang – the average user gives a web page three seconds before deciding to hit the back button, according to Google.
- Be helpful. Blogs need to offer something to the reader to gain readership, not simply be a means to selling your services. Make sure to offer advice that positions your company as a thought leader on the subject, without being self-serving. Always remember, regardless of SEO practices and timing your posts, quality of content is paramount to gaining a blog readership.
- Know your audience. Who is reading your corporate blog? Or, who do you want the audience to be? What are they interested in? A corporate blog for Nordstrom, for example, might have a very different readership than the corporate blog for BMW. Think of who you are trying to reach with this blog, and who you want to view you as a thought leader—then, pick your subjects accordingly.
- Use voice. People want to hear from other people. Dry content won’t connect with the audience, and isn’t easy to read or understand. While a corporate blog should be informative and professional, let your own leadership voice and personality shine through. Blogs are conversational, not academic. Use them as a way to give your corporate voice personality.
- Maintain brand consistency. This is extremely important—don’t let your brand be about one thing, and your blog about something else. The whole point of a corporate blog is to communicate from your brand. How can you do this? KCSA has a social media head who vets all of their blogs before they are posted. Here at Communique, we have established values that guide all of our communications, and a blog goes to more than one team member before it goes out. The easiest way to ensure your blog is consistent with your brand is to…
- Have a strict corporate policy. KCSA maintains corporate guidelines for its blog, of which all staff are aware. If your company is public, this policy needs to abide by FCC regulations. Corporate policy on blogging gives your staff an exact outline of what is and what is not appropriate for the corporate blog, and can save you future headaches and wasted time over poor blog content.
- Think about traffic. While your blog should be about communicating your company’s point of view on industry topics, it can also help drive traffic to your site—something that is extremely useful for business development. Make your blog easy to share, link to other posts in your blog, and guest blog for other sites—all of these will optimize your SEO. Incorporate key words in your headline and subheads, and tag all of your posts with key concepts or keywords. Additionally, do a little outreach: issue blogs as press releases or HTML emails, list your site on blog search engines and directories, and syndicate your content.
- Use a schedule. Both Communique PR and KCSA have this blogging practice in common: schedule out posts. Assign posts on a cyclical basis to staffers, and keep that schedule public. This way, everyone contributes a different perspective, and your corporate voice is well rounded. This is a fun thing for the office to work together on, and builds morale—everyone is responsible for the voice of the company, not just the higher ups. Additionally, a schedule keeps the blog regular and organized, and doesn’t leave the weight of blogging on one single employee.
- Be careful with comments. Replying to comments on your blog can open a can of worms. Hynes has thought long and hard about allowing comments on press releases on PRNewswire, and has come to the conclusion it would not be valuable. If you have a point of view, you’re confident in it, and it complies with your internal corporate policies, then replying to comments on your blog can establish your corporate voice more thoroughly. However, this type of engagement can be a waste of time and resources. Additionally, if your company is public, FCC regulations will apply. Whatever you decide to do, think long and hard about your corporate blog’s stance on replying to commentators—and develop a thorough corporate policy around the issue, so that your attitude remains consistent.
”Corporate Blogging Best Practices: Building Your Brand & Boosting Business Through Thought Leadership: was a fantastic webinar with many useful tips on creating an effective corporate blog presence. These tips are useful when it comes to maintaining our own blog at Communique PR, and can be effective for brands of all scales. Blogging is an excellent way to cultivate a corporate voice and establishing your company as a thought leader within its industry. Additionally, brands are able to insert themselves into topical conversations, which can result in media coverage and increased website traffic. However, as corporate blogs are a direct line of contact between a corporation and the public, they need to be carefully strategized and executed. Following PRNewswire’s best practices is an excellent way to strategize around your own corporate blog.
For more on corporate blogs, see:
- The 40 Best Corporate Blogs In The World, Simply Zesty
- 10 Tips for Corporate Blogging, Mashable
For more from Communique PR on corporate blogging & thought leadership, see:
- Creating a Corporate Blog
- Thought Leadership – what is it and why is it so important?
- The Power of Blogs
More and more consumers are making decisions based on reviews from online sites like Angie’s List and Yelp. In a perfect world, every customer would be a happy customer. Unfortunately, it is usually the disgruntled customer who chooses to leave a nasty review that can leave a brand feeling tarnished. In fact, eight out of ten consumers change their mind after seeing a bad review. So how should you respond to these reviews, both positive and negative? Here are some best practices to managing your reputation when it comes to online reviews.
1. Monitor: This is the first step. In order to respond and manage, you have to understand what is being said about your brand online. Google recently launched a free tool, “Me on the Web” that can help small businesses monitor online sentiment more easily. Similarly, Google Alerts is another free tool that will bring attention to any newly added reviews. Don’t forget to check sites like Facebook and Twitter; users are increasingly turning to social media to share their consumer experiences.
2. Participate: It’s important to respond to negative reviews. Whether it’s through a private message (Direct Message on Twitter) or a short apology and possible explanation, other consumers will see that you stand behind your brand. Feel free to respond to glowing reviews too, but whatever you decide to write, make sure it is thoughtful and appropriate for an open, online community.
3. Generate and Promote Reviews: Invite your consumers to share their experience online, and make it easy for them! Increasingly, brands have links from their website to review sites to facilitate sharing. While it may draw initial attention to any bad reviews you have, encouraging consumers to visit your website and leave their opinion will start to pay off. Transparency is key.
4. Engage with Influencers: Influencers tend to have a large following and their opinion holds weight online. By reaching out to them, or sending them your product and encouraging them to review it, you can reach a broader audience. While you can’t guarantee a glowing review, at the very least, influencers can garner attention and start an online conversation about your brand.
5. Report: If someone is leaving unwarranted and malicious reviews, you can reach out to the review site and request the review be taken down.
Feeling overwhelmed trying to sift through all the reviews? Be careful of companies offering to manage your reputation for you. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported that small and mid-size businesses will spend $700 million on online brand management this year alone. Be wary of companies that promise to take down any nasty reviews, as they can cost a fortune and often rely on black-hat tactics. By employing these best practices and taking the time to engage with your consumers, your brand can enjoy a genuine, and authentic, positive sentiment online.
Personally, I find great value in reviews, both positive and negative. Aside from using them to decide where to eat on a Friday night, I am increasingly relying on review sites to help me find a new doctor or dentist. While there are many reviews sites, I could never find one site that showed an overall rating that had been aggregated from the top review sites. This is why I decided to publish a website that uses an algorithm to compile the best user-reviewed dentists across the country. That way, potential patients don’t have to sift through the review sites and can rely on our site to find the top dentists in the country. I am hoping that these types of sites will be the future of consumer-generated reviews to help consumers make the most educated decisions.
About the author: Alexis Goodrich is the brand manager at Best Dentist Guide, a free guide that helps in selecting the best professional for your dental needs. Find and compare top-rated dentists, based on ratings, patient reviews, specialized training and degrees, years of practice, convenience and several other factors. Follow her on Twitter, @alexisgoody and @bestdent1st, for more dental related topics.
As a faithful Seattle Seahawks fan, a win is a win in my book. However, after Monday night’s football game against the Green Bay Packers, others may not share my sentiment. For those who didn’t catch the game or for those who may have been living under a rock the past week and avoided every existing news outlet or social media channel, let me quickly recap.
Among football fans, it’s fairly common knowledge that the NFL referees union has been on strike (or locked out by the league) since before the official season started. For the past three weeks, replacement referees have officiated games and from the start, have been met with an onslaught of criticism for their series of blunders and ridiculously inaccurate calls. However, when Monday night’s replacement refs signaled a game-winning Seattle touchdown, while replays demonstrated the refs may have made the wrong call (again, as a Seahawks fan, I’ll refrain from commenting on the legitimacy of the ruling), it was enough to send angry football fans into overdrive.
Almost immediately, social media channels and media outlets lit up criticizing the NFL and sending the league into a PR crisis management firestorm. Even President Obama spoke out saying, “we’ve got to get our refs back” and top-tier sports media outlets such as Sports Illustrated claimed that the replacement refs have, “significantly impacted the NFL’s product on the field.” According to The Wall Street Journal, the NFL demonstrated that they’re willing to put an inferior product on the field all over a $3 million fight with the NFL Referees Association—pocket change for the $10 billion industry.
So how does the NFL recover from a debacle that opened them up to public scrutiny and damaged its reputation? Well, for starters, it likely pressured them to finally reach a deal with the referees union, with official refs making their season debut in last night’s game. However, while the NFL clearly took a hit to its image, many claim that if there’s a brand that can stand the test of poor PR decisions, it’s the NFL. Although football fans nationwide began questioning the integrity of the game, is it enough for them to take action and stop watching? Likely not.
While the NFL will undoubtedly come out on top of this fiasco, no organization is immune to a potential crisis and it is how you handle the situation that really counts. For tips on how to help prepare for a crisis and protect your brand, check out our blogs on What Not To Do in Crisis Communication and Key Elements of a Crisis Communication Plan.
When a company has news, the most common request we hear from clients is to distribute a press release announcing the newest product, customer or award win. But prepare yourself for a radical idea: A press release isn’t always the best way to communicate your company’s news.
My colleague, Holly, recently wrote about using targeted pitches to share news beyond using a press release. But there are other options as well, including using a news blog. A blog can save your company money when compared to costs distributing a news release over a wire service. Additionally, getting reporters to pay attention to your press release is challenging – most aren’t newsworthy, the market is inundated with them, and some can be overly technical and uninteresting. If you develop a blog, consistently write compelling content and amplify its existence, you’ll eventually build a solid audience of customers, influencers and employees.
In his post, “Are Blog Posts Better Than Press Releases?” Jeremy Porter provides guidance for companies exploring the option.
Below are some of the tips:
- Make It Official: Whether your company already sends press releases or is a startup and hasn’t established that method yet, it’s important to inform your contacts about the plan to communicate news via the blog and recommending they subscribe to the RSS feed. Jeremy also suggests offering different types of RSS subscriptions if the blog’s content will be varied.
- Plan Your News Calendar: A press release may be distributed for your company only a handful of times a year, but that’s not an effective cadence for a blog. It’s necessary to publish blogs more often and an editorial calendar is the best way to plan the posts. Your posts can cover many topics and formats including employee profiles, Q&A, trends and major industry news. A blog also offers more options for dynamic content like graphics, video and other multimedia.
- Build An Archive: Jeremy recommends publishing all of your company’s press releases from the past year on the blog, post-dated to coincide with the press releases’ distribution dates. This will function as the news archive and provide search engine optimization for post rankings.
- Solicit Reader Feedback: Blog posts offer engagement opportunities that press releases can’t match. Readers can leave comments to spark a discussion, provide feedback on your news and add perspective. Invite their commentary with your posts and eventually you’ll garner input.
- Track the Results: Once the blog is underway, you can begin gaining analytics about the reach, audience and interest in your posts. You can also see which organizations covered the post and linked back to it. This information allows you to share insights with your organization’s leaders and can help your PR team in prioritizing which outlets to follow up with on your company’s news.
Many organizations are pursuing this communications avenue, including the FBI, Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood and Google. Is this an idea your company explored in the past? Why kinds of success are you seeing or what might be holding you back?
At Communiqué PR we are always trying to stay current on the latest social media and PR trends, and how they can benefit our clients.
I recently came across an article on Ragan.com titled, “How Pinterest can boost your press release results” (by Carrie Morgan, September 21, 2012.) The article presented interesting ways that Pinterest can be used to increase the reach of your press release. I found the tips intriguing and thought it would be worth sharing.
Consider the following:
1. Add an infographic to your release and pin it. Images are a great way to boost a media pitch or blog post. The same is true for a press release. By adding a relevant infographic to your press release, you help news outlets by providing a visual element. The next step is to upload the infographic to Pinterest and hyperlink to the full press release with a short summary and hashtags.
For example, if you are distributing a press release about a new shoe store, you could include an infographic that illustrates shoe trends.
Morgan suggests searching “infographic” on newswire services like Marketwire, BusinessWire or PRNewswire for inspiration.
2. Create a Pinterest newsroom. Many corporate websites have newsrooms or pressrooms that highlight media coverage and press releases. Now companies can replicate this on Pinterest.
Your newsroom can include infographics, news clips, blog posts, videos and team leadership photos. You can link headshots of the CEO to a biography, bylined article or other relevant content. Once you do this, Morgan suggests linking their name directly to their pinboard, if they have one, when you quote them in a press release.
3. Create a pinboard that fits your infographic or news topic. By creating a pinboard that relates to your press release, you are likely to increase search traffic. For example, if your press release is about a new shoe store opening, you could create a pinboard that would be relevant to fashionistas. Many shoe connoisseurs might search for inspiration with keywords like “boots for winter,” making this a perfect title for a pinboard. This type of a pinboard could target your audience and complement the infographic you select for a press release. You can also link back to your press release.
4. Optimize the pin using the same keywords optimized in your press release. Pinterest holds a lot of power for SEO, according to Morgan. You can do this by using the keywords from your press release in the title and summary of the pin.
Additionally, include the keywords as hashtags. Morgan writes, “I’ve had boards rank highly in Google within 48 hours, even for keywords that have been difficult to rank using traditional methods.”
Using the shoe store example, you could use keywords like “#boots”, “#heels”, “#footwear,” etc.
5. Use Pinterest for free market research. Pinterest can be a great tool to identify different trends based on pinning. We wrote previously about how Nordstrom used Pinterest to identify which fashion trends resonated with consumers based on items being repinned.
You can leverage Pinterest to spark ideas for bylined article topics or other trend pieces by paying attention to what is being repinned and liked.
Using the shoe store example, if consumers are repinning a particular knee-high boot, you could develop a blog post about how knee-high boots are hot this fall and provide ideas for creating an entire look.
We love learning about how organizations are leveraging social media platforms in new and creative ways. The most effective social media strategy will be different for each company; we work with our clients individually to identify what makes the most sense to help them accomplish their business and communications objectives. While this Pinterest approach might not be right for every organization, it is definitely worth exploring!
How is your brand leveraging Pinterest?