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.
Last week, I came across an interesting question on Dave Fleet’s blog that his colleague at Edelman Rob Clark first raised, “Is Share of Voice a Useless PR Metric?” My initial reaction was that measuring a brand or company’s share of voice is still very much a valuable PR metric, especially given today’s competitive market place and the prominence of social media in driving awareness and shaping perceptions.
After further reading, Clark stresses that measuring a company’s share of voice is more than simply collecting and counting volume of clips or mentions, but rather a deeper analysis of understanding the “mindshare” or perception of a company in relation to its competitors, analyzing the tone, message pull through and quality of coverage. At Communiqué PR, we could not agree more with this philosophy.
When conducting research to measure our clients’ share of voice, we look beyond the metrics measuring the number of online mentions and total impressions to analyze the sentiment value not only for our clients, but that of their competitors as well. This insight enables us to modify components of a campaign or strategy to achieve a more advantageous outcome and match business goals.
We thought we would share some of our best practices when analyzing share of voice that may be helpful to you in your own analysis.
- Identify your top competitors. We recommend selecting two or three top competitors in the industry that closely matches your core business offerings. If you select more than this, or competitors who have a broader scope of services, your share of voice will be smaller as a result and much more difficult to monitor long-term.
- Identify the key messages. Presuming your company has developed effective key messages, measuring how often these messages percolate through your media coverage should be easy to quantify. If they are not being picked up, it is an indicator that either they are not resonating with media or perhaps the spokesperson may need a refresher on media training.
- Determine values for tone and types of coverage. Creating consistent values for measurement of tone are key to understanding sentiment. For instance, did the article position your company positively or negatively? It is also important to assign values to consistently rank the types of coverage. As an example, consider that a feature story will have more weight, especially if a third-party influencer is included in the coverage as compared to a re-posting of a press release. However, do not discount the value of re-posts of a press release as it can help to increase your search engine optimization.
- Determine your share of discussion. Finally, if the coverage features both you and a direct competitor, examine how much of the story focuses on your company and/or quotes from your company executive. If your competitor receives more air time, examine if it is because the piece is a sponsored post or perhaps a suggested topic your competitor presented to the reporter, a detail your PR partner may be able to identify when evaluating the media opportunity beforehand.
By establishing your parameters and metrics for evaluation at the onset, it will be easier to gather meaningful data to measure results for your company against your competitors, and also establish a consistent framework for the future. Be aware, however, that this analysis can be a time consuming task and depending upon your organization’s goals and budget, the analysis may only be needed at the onset and conclusion of a campaign, or perhaps in a long-term relationship with your agency to measure effectiveness.
Do you have any other tips or best practices to share? Leave us a comment.
Whenever a client has a photo-shoot for new headshots, we invariably are asked about attire and to provide counsel on what he or she should wear. It is a fair and smart question because what one wears conveys a lot about personality and individual brand. Given these questions from clients, I was eager to read Kate Betts’ book, Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style.
It is a wonderful book with excellent photos and is a quick read – focused on Michelle Obama’s style and how she is influencing women and their thoughts on dress. According to Betts, for some reason in our country women have felt that style and substance are mutually exclusive. Most women can live in one area or the other, but not both, asserts Betts.
She goes on to explain that some First Ladies seem to use style to enhance their husband’s administration, power and influence, while other First Ladies leverage politics. Michelle Obama seems to combine both style and substance seamlessly.
Ms. Obama is willing to stand out whereas most people dress to fit in or conform. She has been sleeveless in Congress, gone barefoot on the south lawn of the Whitehouse and touched the Queen. She is well-educated, substantial, and stylish, and it shows in her personal wardrobe choices.
The next time you’re getting dressed for an important event in your life, think about the power of your personal style. Are you willing to push boundaries or simply fit in? Do you exude confidence, playfulness, or strength? Find examples of people you admire and notice what they reveal about themselves, and their company or brand, by the way they dress or accessorize.
Finally, if you’re having a headshot taken, keep these tips in mind:
- Dress in a manner that is consistent with your personality and the spirit of your company.
- Remember that colors, textures and patterns will appear different in a photo than in real life. If you are not sure how an outfit will appear in an image, have someone take a test shot for you.
- Color often conveys power and can help you standout, but you do want to avoid any color or pattern that will distract from your face.
- Cameras will pick up wrinkles, so select a shirt or dress that is not prone to them.
- Finally, consider where you’ll stand. If a news outlet is sending a photographer to your office, scout a location or background that conveys the personality of your company.
You know the old adage, too much to do, too little time. Between driving the kids to school and activities, running errands and keeping up with a demanding workload, many Americans are running on fumes trying to keep up.
The rise of mobile phones has certainly helped make getting things done on the run easier, but what about simplifying common business tasks while on the go? Tablets such as the popular Apple iPad are becoming viable tools for small businesses to tackle common tasks. From classrooms to restaurants, the popular technology is quickly gaining notoriety beyond a content consumption device, and evolving into a full-fledged productivity tool being used by a variety of organizations.
While the iPad and other tablets have been traditionally used for consuming content on the web, watching videos, reading e-books and listening to music, selecting the right tools and apps can easily optimize the iPad for use as a mobile computing platform for business. Industry analysts forecast that 52 million tablets are estimated to be shipped in 2011, with the iPad comprising 75 percent of these shipments.
We recently helped our client, the Omni Group, a leading developer of productivity apps built exclusively for the Mac OSX and iOS platforms with the launch OmniOutliner for iPad, the company’s newest productivity app for the iPad. The iPad edition of the company’s popular note-taking and outlining program offers users the ability to create, collect and organize information in a multitude of ways including creating to-do lists and agendas, managing tasks and expenses, taking notes and planning events.
To create early buzz, the Omni Group developed and posted a teaser video to its corporate blog to let its users know the app was coming. In addition, they seeded an early version of the app with key influential media and reviewers. To help drive awareness and coverage of the new app, we developed and distributed a press release and buddy e-mail focusing on the rise of tablets being used within small businesses. As a result, more than 65 articles and reviews surrounding the app were published including Macworld, Mac Observer, Business Insider, TUAW and AppAdvice.
So whether you want to create a graph, develop a website wire frame, manage your task list or outline information, just remember, there’s an app for that.
Over the past several months, we have been working closely with one of our technology clients, Tecplot, Inc., to unveil its revolutionary new product, Chorus™, to analysts, media and consumers. You may recall reading our previous blog posts in which we shared the results of our strategy including briefings with key industry analysts and best practices for a successful media tour.
For those of you unfamiliar with this Bellevue-based company, Tecplot, Inc. delivers visualization software for engineers and scientists to analyze, discover, and communicate results. If you are not an engineer or scientist, you may be wondering how this new software impacts you directly. It’s simple – look at the world of staggering product innovation around you.
We are surrounded by a world filled with new feature-rich automobiles that can parallel-park themselves, larger and more supremely enabled commercial aircraft, GPS guidance systems, microwave ovens, high-definition televisions, smartphones and tablet PCs that hold your entire media collection of photos, music and videos in one handheld unit. With every nanosecond, the development of these devices grows more complex and data-rich. Leading-edge innovation and understanding new trends to meet consumer demands has become increasingly critical in a competitive marketplace, and time-to-market can absolutely make or break a product’s success.
Tecplot Chorus streamlines the design process for engineers thus decreasing the time to market for new products. This new tool is a parametric computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis solution designed to enable a tighter integration of metadata with the underlying physics of the CFD simulation results. That’s a fancy scientific way to say that this tool will allow researchers to more easily identify, explore and better understand design anomalies in an integrated fashion that will help promote better collaboration among teams of engineers.
After months of planning and preparation, we were excited to officially introduce Tecplot Chorus on Monday, May 16 and the journalists we met with on our press tour and briefed by phone in advance of launch were eager to share news about the company’s new innovative software solution. To date, Tecplot Chorus was featured in industry publications including:
- R&D Magazine, “CFD simulation analytics tool” (May 17, 2011)
- Desktop Engineering, “Tecplot, Inc. Announces CFD Simulation Analytics Tool”( May 18, 2011)
- MacNews.com, “Tecplot Chorus is Mac compatible CFD simulation analytics tool” (May 20, 2011)
- Another Fine Mesh, the Pointwise Blog, “This Week in CFD”(May 20, 2011)
- Product Design & Development, “Tecplot Announces First CFD Simulation Analytics Tool” (May 27, 2011)
While the software is currently in beta testing with a select group of Tecplot, Inc.’s customers, we anticipate additional coverage to appear throughout the year once the product is available for purchase in late summer 2011.
Are you surprised to learn that, only 16 percent of MBA programs “offer a single course in crisis and conflict management, strategic communications, public relations” or reputation management? This week an op-ed in Bloomberg BusinessWeek made the case for change.
If you haven’t read the article, “Master’s of Spin: PR Belongs in B-School Studies,” I recommend you do. Author Anthony D’Angelo articulates how integrated strategic communications is with effective leadership and how reputation influences company performance, “product pricing, stock price, revenue stability and customer loyalty.”
Many company managers and executives find themselves in charge of PR and are expected to know what to do without any real coaching or education. After recognizing most executives are promoted to leadership roles where they were overseeing communication, but did not understand how to approach PR in a strategic manner, my business partner and I wrote the book Strategic Public Relations: 10 Principles to Harness the Power of PR. Strategic Public Relations provides company leaders (and PR practitioners) with a high-level road map on how to utilize PR effectively to advance their organizations’ most important business objectives.
Today’s business leaders need to understand the connection between PR and organizational success. A seismic shift in the marketing landscape over the past several years has pushed public relations to a new level of importance. Reaching customers is a lot more complicated than it used to be when everyone was watching TV or reading their regional daily newspaper. The marketing landscape is increasingly crowded and consumers are exposed to more information making it difficult to establish strong awareness. And with the explosion of social media and user generated content, it is possible for information about a company to spread rapidly, making companies and their reputations increasingly susceptible. Additionally, consumers are quick to spot what they perceive as spin. No longer can companies take a tactical approach to public relations.
Integrating courses on public relations, strategic communication and/or crisis communication into MBA programs is a smart move that will enable future company executives to utilize communications strategically to accomplish the company’s core business objectives.
Last week Ragan.com wrote about a new poll that revealed, among other things, PR firms are still the number one source for journalists. I anticipate other agency-side PR professionals were not surprised to see the results, which indicated 62 percent of journalists rely on PR agencies for sources.
Part of our job is to build relationships with the media and, given we typically have multiple clients across different industries, we tend to have connections and information that can be valuable to a reporter. For example, I have relationships with reporters who will call on deadline looking for a very specific source (i.e. a company who can speak to trend XYZ) and I make every effort to connect them with the right resources.
In other cases we field inquiries from reporters looking for story ideas. I recently walked a reporter through a few ideas we developed on behalf of our clients, but also shared a story idea that we were still vetting internally and was able to secure her reaction. The result? The reporter got off the phone with a couple ideas that were of interest and I gathered additional insight into what we would need to sell our future story to that reporter.
These relationships are a core part of my role as a PR professional and are not reserved just for media. I welcome an opportunity to connect other business colleagues when I anticipate the connection could be of mutual benefit.
PR professionals embrace these relationships and work to deliver value for those contacts. Here are a few tips to consider when building meaningful relationships with media:
- Respond in a timely manner. When a reporter is contacting me they are usually on deadline. Be responsive. Let them know if you can help within their deadline. If not, connect them with a colleague.
- Share relevant information. Gather enough information to know what the reporter is looking for and offer sources or ideas that can address their need. Don’t force an idea or a contact if it is not relevant. Be sure to offer supporting information or ideas beyond your client spokesperson. For example relevant data or analyst reports, photos, blogs, etc. Solicit input from your colleagues.
- Be transparent and honest. I always disclose the relationship I have with a source: Is the source a client, is it friend or did I just hear about the company/product at a cocktail party the night before. Likewise, if we have upcoming news that might be of interest, I might let the reporter know we have something in development, if it’s relevant to the timing and story idea.
- Know where your role ends. Sometimes it makes sense to facilitate the conversations and set up interviews; and sometimes you need to step aside for the reporter. If I connect a reporter with a client, I will stay involved throughout the process. Or if the person is more challenging for the reporter to connect with, I will offer to help. However, if the source is not a client, oftentimes I will facilitate the connection via email and then step out of the process.
Most agency-side PR professionals have these types of relationship with a variety of media (which is one of the benefits of working with a PR firm versus having an in-house team). Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO) was built on this premise and has been a huge success. He provided a platform for media and PR folks to connect. The rules he established reinforce the value of those relationships and prevent misuse of the system.
Successful PR practitioners know it is important to develop on-going relationships with media and not just focus on pitching today’s story.