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.
So you’ve developed a great product. The funding is locked down, a marketing plan is set into gear and the product is ready to be launched into the world. Before you release your new product into the wild, you might want to consider developing a product demonstration. A demo can help a company validate and solicit feedback regarding its product or solution, as well as be used to educate and create awareness and buzz with target audiences.
Product demos are valuable for two reasons. The first is product demos can validate whether or not a product or solution will resonate with a target audience(s). A company invests a lot of time, effort, and money into developing a product and it is important to understand whether the product is of value to your target audience. This could be done in two ways – one way is to develop a beta version or test drive of your product and use this as a means to solicit early feedback from customers. Another way is to create a traditional product demo that can be seeded with industry analysts and other influentials to secure feedback and allow a company to tweak the product before it is released.
Earth Class Mail is one company that is leveraging product demos to help potential customers understand how its product works. The company recently launched an interactive “test drive” of its online mail management solutions. The test drive incorporates innovative technology to simulate a true user experience without requiring users to sign up for a trial account. In addition, the company hosts a more traditional video demo on its website offering potential customer two ways to learn about their products.
The second reason product demos are valuable is that they can be a great way to create engagement and spur conversation. A compelling product demo (such as the recent demo of Apple iPad) can create broad awareness and buzz and drive discussions in articles, on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and word of mouth.
Apple is a great example of a company that has successfully used product demos to build buzz and broad awareness with consumers, media and other audiences. Two to three times a year, Apple and more specifically, CEO Steve Jobs, steps on stage to present the company’s latest innovation to a plethora of reporters, developers and Apple enthusiasts. Many of these reporters and enthusiasts post photos and videos of these demos with follow-up pieces including detailed information about every aspect of the product. These demos and resulting stories create a rolling thunder of conversation leading up to the product’s release.
Consider these tips when creating a product demo:
- Keep it short – a demo should only take five to 10 minutes to conduct. You want to give the audience a taste of what the product is about and pique their interest in learning more.
- Be sure to discuss and/or demonstrate the benefits for the end user. The key features and functionalities of a product are important, but ultimately, a potential customer wants to know how this product is going to make their life easier or better.
- Consider creating a demo potential customers can interact with not just watch. By offering an opportunity to interact with the product in a test drive scenario, you’re enabling them to use the product in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Companies should consider strategically incorporating product demos into their marketing and PR plans. A compelling product demo can be extremely valuable in the development of a product and can go a long way in educating potential customers, driving broad awareness and influencing purchasing decisions.
For more information on how to leverage product demos, please contact us at info@communiquepr.com.
Jeff Wilson and Melissa Liton
Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO) recently featured a new service from mBLAST called AwardSync. This free service enables award organizers to post information and publicize industry award programs. It also makes it easy for organizations and PR professionals to find awards relevant to their specific industry and vertical market. AwardSync provides information about deadlines and enables users to filter and save searches. 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.
Clearly, pursuing and winning the right industry awards can help organizations increase sales, raise awareness of their products and services, recruit talent, and establish thought leadership with a wide range of audiences including consumers, industry experts, venture capitalists and influential media.
We’ve developed numerous awards programs on behalf of our clients. Most recently, we developed an awards calendar for one of our newest clients Earth Class Mail, a provider of online mail management solutions designed to meet the needs of individuals, small businesses and international license partners. We researched vertical categories including finance, legal and technology innovation. We were able to find a number of industry awards in these categories by searching on AwardSync.
As you consider developing an awards calendar on behalf of your organization or client, we encourage you to register for AwardSync and test out their service. For tips on creating winning award submissions, visit our past blog here.
Businesses are using social media for a variety of communication objectives – providing customer support, sharing breaking news and offering promotional information. The power of these networks to easily and quickly gather real-time perceptions is unprecedented. Market research that used to take thousands of dollars and weeks if not months to complete, can now be gathered in the moment to guide timely business decisions.
An article in The New York Times this weekend titled, “We’ll Make You a Star (if the Web Agrees),” highlights how Bravo uses social media to fine-tune story lines, identify fan-favorite characters and research audience wants. A research executive at Bravo states in the article, “We do a lot of passive listening lurking on the Web, interpreting the themes we see on our message boards, etcetera.”
Listening via these mediums is helping the network determine what key audiences think about specific storylines, characters and shows. Executives can then allocate resources and make timely changes based on that information before they lose viewers.
This opportunity is not isolated to consumer-facing brands; B-to-B organizations can also gather information in order to guide product development, messaging and resource allocation. We have worked with companies who have been able to leverage social media to determine brand perceptions within key verticals or with specific audiences. This information has then been used to determine how to weigh activities within the organization.
Use social media to your company’s advantage. The first step is to start listening and monitoring what is said about your brand, your products and trends in the industry. It could pay big dividends.
A number of people have recently asked me about social media and its relation to fundraising. Some of the questions we have been asked include:
- How can we leverage social media to raise money for our nonprofit organization?
- Will our online or social media fundraising activities cannibalize our traditional fundraising activities?
- How do we set up a social media campaign to raise money?
We decided to conduct some additional research on the topic and make it the subject of one of our articles. Here are some of our findings.
Many organizations both large and small are using social media to successfully build awareness and secure money for their organizations. Consider Scott Stadum’s experience. Scott is a former user experience analyst and a current volunteer with idealist.org, a website that facilitates connections between individuals and institutions that are interested in improving their communities. The site receives more than 50,000 unique visitors each day.
Scott has been a part of two major campaigns. The first fundraising campaign is aimed at raising money to cover some of the operating costs for idealist.org. The organization has created a banner across the top of its website with a “donate now” tab making it easy for people to give. At the time of writing, they have had 7,543 people donate a total of $245,988 and are closing in on the halfway mark of the $500,000 goal.
idealist.org also has made it easy for people to share information about the organization with a “Share this Via” button that allows one to post information to his or her Facebook, Twitter, Digg or Reddit accounts. Idealist also maintains its own presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, which has been essential in its fundraising activities.
The second campaign that Scott was involved with was the Chase Community Giving challenge on Facebook.
According to Scott, the Chase Community Giving challenge was exciting, because Chase was giving away $5 million to various charities, and asked people on Facebook to help pick the nonprofits to receive this money. (The company gave 100 charities $25K, five runner-ups got $100K and one charity, Invisible Children, Inc. received $1M.)
The contest was relatively simple. People visited www.facebook.com/ChaseCommunityGiving to vote for their favorite nonprofit and then suggested friends and others on Facebook do the same. The nonprofits on the list focus on issues such as education, healthcare, housing, environmental issues, combating hunger, arts and culture, human services and animal welfare.
As part of the Chase Community Giving, idealist.org was one of the runner ups that was awarded $100K.
We asked Scott to explain how they ended up winning the $100k and learned that the organization did a lot of planning and strategizing around the Chase Community Giving challenge. “Idealist really took a coordinated approach to this challenge. Each office came up with its game plan. We asked our employees to leverage their personal social media accounts to drive votes.”
The organization also leveraged e-mail and its official accounts on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn to drive votes and massive viral awareness of the contest. “Idealist has been very active in engaging with communities via these platforms, so it was natural that we’d ask for votes and support during the Chase Community Giving challenge. We were able to reach and galvanize our supporters quickly.”
Finally, in one instance, they took the plea for support to the streets. “At the time of the challenge, I was working in Argentina in the Buenos Aires office. Many people in Argentina are using Facebook, so we decided to dress up like bankers and go out and give away bottled water with a flyer on the challenge, along with a request that people vote for us. The event on the streets of Buenos Aires was a success, and it led to media coverage, which undoubtedly helped us secure more votes.”
Scott concludes that social media has been a real boon for idealist.org. It has made reaching new audiences very easy. He believes more nonprofits can leverage social media for fundraising to reach different demographic profiles and target audiences than they’d reach through traditional fundraising activities, such as telethons or letter writing campaigns.
Last week, Jennifer and I had an opportunity to conduct a workshop on crisis communication at the Washington State Community Action Partnership Statewide Development and Marketing Conference. The goal of the training was to provide attendees with an understanding of the various types of crises and how to best prepare. We also spent time discussing social media and how it is changing the way organizations respond to crises today.
Developing a crisis communication plan is oftentimes dismissed by leaders: Preparing for a possible crisis seems a low priority when faced with limited resources and more immediate challenges. However, preparation is really the name of the game when it comes to effective crisis management.
By being prepared, an organization will be able to alert the right people, gather all the facts, create the materials, and ensure a spokesperson is trained and available to respond in a timely and appropriate manner.
It also is important to remember that the tone of the editorial coverage surrounding a crisis will often be set when the first news reports are published.
During a crisis, organizations and their spokespersons need to be concerned, show concern, speak concern and always tell the truth. It is critical the organization does not speculate on the cause, cost, or parties responsible; instead it should provide information about what is known. Ultimately, the company and its representative need to act with totally honesty and sensitivity during and after the crisis.
The day after delivering the training, I heard the following analysis on NPR surrounding BP’s crisis response to its devastating oil spill in the gulf. In her segment, Crisis Communication Requires ‘Common Sense,’ Host Lynn Neary spoke with Patrick Kinney of Gaffney Bennet Public Relations to secure his perspective on BP’s early response to the oil spill.
Kinney stated, “I think they’ve really improved their communications efforts, but they refer to the first 48 hours after a crisis incident as, you know, the golden hour. And what you do then sort of sets the stage for, you know, how it’s going to play out from that. I don’t know if they can recover from how bad they did in that first 48 hours. But I do think that they are doing better now by giving frequent updates, giving the facts as they know them.”
Clearly, social media and user generated content has had a significant impact on crisis communication. It is important for communicators to be aware of these mediums and incorporate them into crisis communication plans.
Bellingham Fire Chief, Bill Boyd (@chiefb2) recently shared his perspective from the front lines of crisis communication on the impact of both social media and user generated content. In his post, “A Social Media Incident Commander’s Perspective” he offers some valuable tips including,
- Social media is not a “kid thing”. It is THE THING. Minimize the medium and you may be minimized.
- It is hard to give context in 140 characters. Choose your words and phrases carefully. Get it right the first time.
- If you don’t have a social media presence before the “big one,” your likelihood of social media success in emergency social media communications is just about zero.
- Be prepared for your message to go viral in a heartbeat. This means you need to be ready to keep the messages flowing and point readers somewhere to get detailed information.
- It is not OK to post nothing for a long time (a long time in the social media world is minutes – not hours)
- If you don’t get it right, correct it as soon as you can! Don’t linger, or the error will.
- Notice and correct rumors ASAP, especially if they are trending.
- You can convey compassion and sound human in less than 140 characters. “We are concerned” packs a punch.
There are numerous examples of organizations that have failed to successfully communicate during a crisis and experienced damage to their brand and oftentimes seen executives fired as a result. If your organization does not have a crisis communication plan we recommend taking the time to create a framework for how your organization will respond.
We are fortunate in the Northwest to be at the forefront of the mobile industry. Not only is the greater-Seattle area home to industry giants such as T-Mobile, Clearwire, AT&T Wireless and Microsoft, there are also numerous smaller companies that are fueling the growth and driving innovation in the mobile market.
The upcoming Mobile Breakfast Series: Startup Nation being held on June 10 provides a wonderful opportunity to hear from several industry greats. The quarterly breakfast series draws thought leaders and visionaries together to share ideas, perspective and insight on the mobile marketplace. For the June event, the organizers have drawn leaders from Root Wireless, Swype, Mobidia, Point Inside and Clearwire as well as several others to participate on two panels.
The first panel, “Mobile Opportunities and Challenges Through the Eyes of Startup CEOs,” will be moderated by Olga Kharif, senior writer, Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
The second panel titled “Startups Engage the Experts,” should offer a fascinating and lively discussion among a number of early startup leaders and seasoned veterans such as Bill Bryant, managing director of EnvisionVentures; Jeff Giard, director with Clearwire; and Peter Wilson formerly with Google and Microsoft.
If you work in the mobile space, it appears this is one of the key events of the year to attend. It offers an opportunity to hear from and network with key leaders in the mobile industry and really underscores Seattle’s position as a mobile mecca in the industry.
To register for the event, visit http://www.mobilebreakfastseries.com/register.htm
We hope to see you there.