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.
On October 18, 2010 the Port of Kingston launched a new express, passenger-only ferry service between Kingston, Wash. and downtown Seattle called SoundRunner. In order to drive awareness of the service launch, the ferry program manager reached out to Communiqué PR to enlist our help with outreach to local print, online and broadcast media to drive coverage before and on the day of the launch.
Our scope of work included working with the Port of Kingston to develop key press materials and talking points about the service. In addition, we developed and distributed a press release announcing the service, which was sent via buddy e-mail to more than 40 key Seattle-based reporters who cover local news and/or transportation.
As a result of our efforts, we secured more than 32 stories about the service with publications and outlets such as Seattle Times, SeattlePI.com, Associated Press, KING 5, Q13, KOMO 4 News, KUOW FM, North Kitsap Herald, Kitsap Daily and Kitsap Sun. Additionally, the news was widely tweeted about on Twitter by both consumers and media outlets.
The Port of Kingston offered free rides on the first day of the service and had an overwhelmingly positive response from passengers on both sides of Puget Sound with commuters, joyriders and even students riding the ferry. Overall, the coverage surrounding the service was extremely positive and positioned the SoundRunner as a reliable, comfortable commuting option to connect passengers from the Kitsap area to downtown Seattle either for work and play.
Crowdsourcing is an emerging trend in which tasks traditionally performed by internal or professional teams are outsourced to a crowd. The term coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe, owes its genesis to the trend of leveraging the possibilities of mass collaboration brought on by the growth of Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. This emerging trend is worth investigating for a number of business projects.
Why Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing offers many benefits including cost effectiveness, increased efficiency, collaboration and innovation. For example last year, we wrote about the success of the Threadless T-shirts partnership with Twitter to crowdsource designs for a new line of “Twitter Tees.” For some companies crowdsourcing is becoming a path toward innovation, whereas for others, crowdsourcing ideas may mean saving money on expensive services.
For a bootstrapped entrepreneur, the world of crowdsourcing acts as a new marketplace, where companies can get professional services at a lower cost. For instance, a newly formed business looking to create a new brand logo, website and stationery design can now simply post a design brief on websites such as 99designs, crowdSPRING or DesignCrowd to gather ideas. Similar to a contest, designers from across the world respond to the brief and the best design or idea earns the contract. Among hundreds or even thousands of designs received, the soliciting company has the option to select from the wide range of respondents offering competitive bids, often spending a fraction of the money that would be normally spent for branding and design.
Recently, however, the Gap’s use of crowdsourcing to revamp the company’s logo received strong public backlash. Some experts condemned the idea of asking for designs upfront and companies only paying for what they like. Opponents of crowdsourcing, argue that professionals should be paid for their work and that speculative work can be “disrespectful of the discipline of design, and a devaluation of the profession.”
Given this, when crowdsourcing for design concepts it is important to consider the scope of the project and be considerate about the how much time and free resources you are asking from the community.
Crowdsourcing the Team
Not restricted solely to ideas, crowdsourcing can also be used to source teams. Businesses faced with fluctuating demand and constant pressure to reduce costs are now hiring on-demand teams for seasonal or specific needs.
A San Francisco-based sporting goods retailer, Lombardi Sports, engaged Cloudcrowd for creating an online catalog for the company site. The Cloudcrowd task force gathered the information needed from manufacturers and other sources and created an online catalog with limited involvement from Lombardi Sports at lower than expected prices.
There are other services that are helping businesses create and maintain websites inexpensively. oDesk and Elance connect qualified technology professionals from around the world with companies who are looking to create a new tool or software application, or manage day-to-day office tasks. To hire a team, all a company needs do is post a job requirement and select from the appropriate bid based on profiles, experience, ratings, credentials and portfolios.
For many companies crowdsourcing a team is a cost-effective way to off-load trivial tasks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows businesses to outsource small tasks, such as reviewing online content to ensure there is no profanity, verifying the database for accuracy or providing content development such as tagging product images to people over the Internet instead of hiring an in-house workforce.
Crowdsourcing’s collaborative approach is helping companies reduce overhead and increase efficiency. With the abundance and availability of web-community talent and service providers at a fraction of the cost, every business now has access to a world of affordable professionals.
Have you used crowdsourcing for a specific project, to gather ideas or to complete a task? If so post a comment and let us know.
October 15 – Facebook has rapidly been adding and altering features over the last few months (such as updating privacy settings and as well as the photos interface), and each change has been met with a variety of supporters and naysayers. Recently, Facebook launched its new private “Facebook Groups” feature allowing users to create intimate conversation groups with their family and friends. This move has been seen by many as a way to compete with the ability to have rapid conversations on Twitter, who already allows users to create and share custom “lists” of people regardless of whether or not the user is following the person.
Bloggers like CNET’s Caroline McCarthy – also a self-proclaimed application developer – feel Facebook’s rapid evolution is moving too fast and includes a high risk of pushing out sloppy updates that just lead to more end user problems. The biggest complaint from developers is that Facebook is creating “vestigial limbs” by adding this new Facebook Groups feature and not removing the old groups feature. They feel this poses a problem in terms of the efficiency of managing groups and applications and ultimately affects user experience.
Other naysayers are worried that this new Facebook Groups’ feature allows people to create groups, and add members without their permission creating potential privacy issues for people that may not want to be associated with a certain Facebook Group. This aspect of the new Facebook Groups does concern me. Just like being added on to random spam e-mail lists or cold-calling lists, do we really want to be added to more groups that we may not otherwise have joined?
On the flip side, several prominent bloggers, like Robert Scoble of Scobleizer and Liz Gannes of GigaOm, welcomed the updates. In a recent post, Scoble noted that he’d already built a half-dozen Facebook Groups including ones for his favorite entrepreneurs, executives, journalists, pundits and companies. He notes that the new feature is “Twitter lists done right.” Namely, Scoble enjoys that Facebook Groups do not have a cap on the number of members, unlike Twitter which limits people to 20 lists with no more than 500 people on each, and he doesn’t need to remove someone to add a new face.
Similarly, GigaOm’s Liz Gannes compared the new Facebook Groups to Yahoo!’s groups feature. Like Yahoo!, “Facebook Groups allows users to create groups that are managed by all members, hold group chats, edit a wiki, and send emails to the group.” Facebook Groups are also automatically defaulted to private, but the group manager can choose to make them “open” or “secret.”
In terms of how businesses may use this feature, I see it as an opportunity to expand conversations about brands and act as a focus group of sorts. However, I still believe that users should be able to opt in, rather than the company (or individual) guessing what group a person wants to join, and making that decision for them.
Have you created any Facebook Groups yet? I’d love to hear thoughts from marketers who plan to utilize this feature in order to forge deeper connections with consumers.
Last week’s purchase of TechCrunch, Inc. by AOL sent shockwaves through the technology industry leaving many wondering how this deal would impact the content infrastructure of TechCrunch, a leading online blogging network.
According to a press release from TechCrunch, as part of the agreement TechCrunch, “will join the AOL Technology Network while retaining their editorial independence, further bolstering AOL’s position as one of the world’s leading providers of high-quality, tech-oriented content.” TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington recently explain how the AOL deal would help bolster TechCrunch in a post saying that the site’s tech problems have been challenging for the blog and AOL’s extended resources can help.
From a PR perspective it will be interesting to see if the company will allow TechCrunch to uphold their no-holds barred editorial standards. TechCrunch is well known for its editorial policy of not honoring embargoes and giving preference to exclusive story offers. TechCrunch writers have broken some of the biggest technology stories including Google buying YouTube and Yahoo’s financial analysis of Facebook. While making the announcement at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong joked with Arrington about TechCrunch’s editorial independence saying, “We’ll try to be as hands-off as possible.”
AOL produces all of its news content in house, if AOL keeps its end of the bargain it should be business as usual for PR professionals who have working relationships with bloggers at TechCrunch. However, if AOL begins to encroach on the editorial content this merger could significantly change the content and spirit of TechCrunch as well as how PR professionals work with the blog. On one hand it could potentially make it easier to secure coverage in the sought-after outlet, however the quality may be compromised from what we’ve come to expect from TechCrunch.
No matter what happens, the media landscape has once again shifted and PR pros will continue to shift with it. Do you think TechCrunch’s editorial content will change as a result of its purchase by AOL?
Here at Communiqué, we not only use Twitter to keep up to date on local, national and world news and trends, but to also monitor coverage and public perceptions on behalf of our clients. In order for us to keep track of everything, we needed a powerful application that could handle multiple accounts and established searches. To accomplish this task, we have come to rely on TweetDeck. While there are certainly other options such as HootSuite and Twitterific, TweetDeck allows users to break down accounts, groups and searches into separate columns, making viewing streams easy and quick. It even allows you to integrate your Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Buzz and MySpace accounts all for free.
Recently, TweetDeck was updated to version 0.35. While no cosmetic changes were made, this update brought a number of useful changes for users such as the ability to cross-post Twitter updates longer than 140 characters. To do this, the user must have both a Google Buzz and Twitter account. Then while posting an update through TweetDeck, the user selects both the Buzz and Twitter accounts, and continues to type more than 140 characters. Once the update is sent on TweetDeck, the full message will be posted to your Buzz account and the tweet will contain the first 116 characters with a link to the full update on Buzz.
Another update that is useful to users is the support for t.co links in the main feed. T.co is Twitter’s proprietary URL shortening service. The difference between t.co and other URL shortening services like bit.ly and ow.ly is that, each link shortened by t.co is checked against a list of malicious sites to identify malware, phishing attacks and other harmful activity. If there is potentially harmful information at the URL destination, the user is warned. Also, in TweetDeck, when a user hovers the cursor over a t.co link, they will be given the full URL preview. This feature is beneficial because as Twitter gains more popularity, hackers will begin using it more and more often to attack users. This is just an extra step that Twitter and TweetDeck, have put in place to help prevent any of these attacks.
While these two additions were the highlight of the recent update, many other features were added and bugs were fixed. For example, now users can add a trending topics column in TweetDeck. Also added was support for previewing and uploading images directly in TweetDeck via Plixi, a photo sharing service. If you are looking for a powerful, feature packed Twitter application, I highly recommend checking out TweetDeck.
We would also love to hear what Twitter applications you use. Leave us a comment with your suggestions below.
As a PR professional it can be challenging keeping up with the onslaught of tools and resources available to help uncover editorial opportunities, pitch and distribute news, measure and monitor social media campaigns and gather information on speaking and award opportunities.
Beyond the HAROs and Cisions’ of the world, we thought it would be useful to put together our top picks for unique tools every PR professional should consider having in their arsenal to efficiently and effectively add value to PR campaigns and initiatives.
MatchPoint – MatchPoint allows PR professionals to search for journalists who write about what they’re pitching, by adding the pitch to the search box. For a monthly subscription fee, users can identify reporters and bloggers based on what they actually have written, not solely on their beat or title as listed in many online media databases.
Press Kit’n – Press Kit’n is a tool for publishing social media releases and maintaining an online news presence. While many organizations typically have a website designer/master, this is a great tool for smaller companies or start-ups that are looking to affordably create a newsroom. The service features a variety of customizable templates, an RSS feed, which enables journalists to easily subscribe to the newsroom and Twitter functionality so readers can easily tweet news from the newsroom.
Backtweets – A free tool that provides a quick snapshot of every tweet that has ever contained a link or reference to a particular URL. As a test, I did a search for all tweets that include the Communiqué PR blog URL and found more than 52 links to the blog via Twitter. Backtweets could be incredibly valuable to track a particular campaign to see how much traffic has been driven to a website as a result of Twitter activity.
MediaOnTwitter – MediaOnTwitter is similar to other lists such as MuckRack and JournalistTweets which are excellent tools for finding journalists on to follow on Twitter. The reason I like this particular site is it is simple and straightforward to use. You can easily sort the list by name, publication, title or country making it simple to quickly find journalists. Additionally, you can add media to the list and also search for journalists in other countries including Canada, Australia, U.K., France, Russia, South Africa and more.
AwardSync – We’ve written about AwardSync previously, but it’s worth mentioning again. It is a free database of awards opportunities. This free service enables award organizers to post information and publicize industry award programs making it easy for organizations and PR professionals to find awards relevant to their specific industry and vertical market. We recently tested the service and found it offers intuitive search functionalities much like Google and can be a valuable resource when developing awards programs for clients.
Alltop – I use this search engine from time to time to get a quick snapshot of what’s being written about around a particular topic. According to its website, Alltop, “The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.” I did a quick search for “iPhone” which brought back stories from the top blogs covering the iPhone. While it does not bring back results for everything, if you’re looking for stories/blog posts around a general topic you can usually get a good snapshot here.
Not all tools are created alike and as technology evolves, I anticipate these tools will only become more comprehensive. It will be important for PR professionals to continue experimenting with these tools, providing feedback and selecting the tools that make the most sense for their objectives.
Do you have a ‘must-have’ PR tool to share? Let us know about it!