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.
At a time when journalists are being laid off left and right, PepsiCo has a very compelling offer: chronicle the Internet Week conference using social media and receive $750.
Internet Week is June 1-8 in New York City, and PepsiCo is calling journalists, students, social media experts and anyone else to capture the week’s events using social media tools. These so-called “social communicators” will receive press passes and are expected to create content including photos, videos and blog posts. Says PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media, “What we’re looking for are storytellers or journalists or professionals that are at work in this space.”
PepsiCo’s goal is to generate 100 pieces of content over the course of the week with the hopes that other sites will repost them. In addition to reposts, their reports will appear on the PepsiCo Content Network. If it works, this will be an inexpensive and very effective way to generate viral buzz.
As social mediums grow in popularity, corporations such as PepsiCo are scrambling to hop on the bandwagon. But successfully generating buzz via social mediums is no easy task for corporate behemoths like PepsiCo or Coca-Cola. We previously wrote about Coca-Cola’s successful Facebook fan page as an example of how to engage social media the right way.
What are other companies doing to creatively engage social media? Here are some great examples:
Comcast – The company uses Twitter as a form of customer service. Frank Eliason, Comcast’s customer service manager, responds instantly to customer inquiries on Twitter and has become a face of the brand. At customers’ request, he even uses his own photo as his Twitter icon instead of the company logo.
Blendtec – George Write, marketing director of Blendtec, created a brilliant campaign that has since become an internet sensation. Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson attempts to blend objects from iPhones to golf balls in a Blendtec blender in YouTube videos. According to a Mashable.com article, this simple idea has led to a “five-fold increase in sales.”
Sun Microsystems – Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, started a company blog that received about 400,000 hits a month in 2006. One of the reasons for its success was transparency. Schwartz allowed both positive and negative comments on his blog – a move that built trust with customers.
Each of these companies took a unique approach to launch successful social media campaigns. For those of you looking to follow suit, here are a few key takeaways:
Make sure you choose a social medium that is popular with your target audience. In other words, follow your audience.
Consider what interests your target audience.
Think creatively.
Create content that people can easily repost on other social networking sites – this creates customer evangelists for your company.
We will be interested to see whether PepsiCo’s campaign takes off following the June conference. Stay tuned for our analysis of this campaign next month.
– Jessica Luhrs
It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in serious trouble. The changing media landscape coupled with the economic downturn has forced the recent closure of longtime newspapers such as The Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Even TIME offered its predictions on the top 10 major newspapers that will fold or go digital this year including the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe.
With so many of our nation’s newspapers fighting to stay alive, many are evaluating strategies to update their medium and make it relevant for today’s consumer.
According to an article in Advertising Age, “The nation’s print media may be on life support, but some are quietly building digital portfolios again – albeit on a smaller scale – and some are starting to bear fruit. We’re not talking about the digital editions of papers themselves, but startups that take old media in new directions.” For instance, Gannett Co. Inc., a leading international news and information company which publishes 85 daily newspapers, including USA TODAY, has been busy building strategic relationships with startup companies to shift its business model and become a leader in the digital media market.
One of Gannett’s portfolio companies includes Pointroll, which powers innovative rich-media display ads on the web. Pointroll’s CEO Jason Tafler said, “The ultimate goal is to transform Gannett into a real digital leader by leveraging the strength of content and the audience that it has and extending that into the digital world.”
Gannett is not the only newspaper company to invest in startups. Hearst Interactive, Tribune, Washington Post Co., and the New York Time Co. have all dipped their toes into the water hoping to revive struggling print publications.
Interestingly, Google – who has often been blamed for contributing to the downfall of newspapers – has been on the radar in recent months revealing it considered buying a newspaper but decided against it, “to avoid crossing the line between infrastructure, technology and content.”
Either way, this move by Gannett and other newspaper companies signals the dawn of a new era in the media industry. It will be interesting to see how this plays out not only for consumers of news, but also journalists, advertisers and PR professionals. PR practitioners have already begun to shift how they disseminate news and I anticipate this will continue to evolve as media companies’ digital portfolios grow.
Once you’ve created a blog for yourself or your company, how can you ensure your content is interesting and valuable to readers? Here are a few simple tips to create a great blog:
1. Create compelling content. Don’t just rephrase articles or blog posts you read elsewhere. Write about your area of expertise or personal experiences. Your writing will come alive and engage readers when you are passionate about the topic.
2. Title – Think about the keywords people might use to find your blog, and include them in your blog title. For example, if your blog post is about how to train for a marathon, make sure your title includes the keywords train and marathon. Also consider how your title will appear in tweets and whether it can easily be retweeted. Titles should be less than 140 characters so there is room for hyperlinks and “RT @username.”
3. Use images and videos – Use images and videos in your blog posts to make them more interesting and enjoyable to read. Images draw in readers and can reinforce your post in a creative way. A post about the Amazon Kindle just wouldn’t be the same without a picture.
4. Comment – Make sure to comment on other blogs you find interesting. Chances are good that both the blog author and other readers will click through to your site after reading your comment. Always be transparent and identify yourself and your company when commenting.
5. Post often – Readers will come back to blogs that regularly post interesting content. If you know you have a busy week coming up, write a few posts ahead of time and schedule them to automatically post on your blog the following week.
6. Link your blog to e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. Whenever we post a new entry on the Communiqué PR blog, an update automatically goes out over e-mail to our subscribers, and via Twitter and Facebook. We have clear, bold icons on our blog so readers can easily follow us via e-mail or Twitter.
Have other questions about optimizing your blog? Leave a comment or send us a note at info@communiquepr.com and we’ll get back to you.
With more than 25 million users worldwide Twitter has become a powerful medium for both businesses and consumers to connect. Similarly, Facebook, with more than 200 million users, has redefined the way we communicate. Communiqué PR recognizes the major potential these two social mediums possess and has decided to launch its first campaign centered around raising $230,000 – through both Facebook and Twitter – for Seattle Children’s PlayGarden.
The PlayGarden is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing a place for both mentally and/or physically disabled children and their normally developing peers to share a safe, stimulating and fun playground environment. Located at the south end of Colman Playfield in Seattle, the PlayGarden needs this money to complete the construction of various projects such as Mount Jordan, a volcano-themed climber that is even accessible to children in wheelchairs. With the goal of getting a large number of people to donate money to complete these projects, PlayGarden Executive Liz Bullard approached Communiqué PR.
After our discussions with Liz, we felt strongly that the use of Twitter and Facebook to garner funds would be both time and cost effective. At the same time, by leveraging Twitter and Facebook we have the opportunity to create broad awareness of the PlayGarden with new audiences who may not be aware of the park and what a valuable resource it will be to our community.
Bullard adds “Communique’s idea of using Facebook and Twitter to attract donations is simply a great way to keep our fundraising costs to a minimum. We are also impressed with the team’s work getting the local media to write about our campaign.”
To date, the following articles were published about the campaign:
Puget Sound Business Journal
Nonetheless, the real question remains as to whether or not people trust these social networking sites enough to click through to the PlayGarden’s Web site to donate and support its cause. We are excited to see what will happen with this campaign.
To donate, please click here.
As PR professionals, we are always interested in learning about new search tools that will impact the ever-changing digital media landscape. Virtually everyone utilizes search engines for research including journalists and PR professionals. WolframAlpha, which made its debut on May 15, could change how we find information through search engines.
WolframAlpha is a powerful search service that computes answers to questions using data amassed by approximately 100 employees at Wolfram Research. Creator Stephen Wolfram tells The New York Times, that despite online conversations comparing this service to Google, WolframAlpha is “not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.”
Unlike traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo!, WolframAlpha does not search through Web pages to answer queries. It is “knowledge based” and can provide answers to questions like “what is the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male?” or “Is the Eiffel Tower taller than Seattle’s Space Needle?” It will not provide information about upcoming movie times or help with computer or camera shopping. Clearly, there will be a unique opportunity for companies and journalists to leverage this tool to find complex data as well as science and technology based information.
Doug Lenat, an artificial intelligence expert, comments WolframAlpha “may become a massive player alongside Google,” and says it could eventually turn into a favorite destination on the Web.
With the advent of new search tools like WolframAlpha, we wonder how SEO techniques will change. Currently, SEO is important to ensure a Web site is one of the top search engine results to increase Web site traffic.
Companies can optimize articles, press releases, investor information, white papers and third-party content. Companies that optimize relevant content will achieve the following:
Higher rankings in search engine results
Reach target audiences and articulate your key messages more efficiently to these audiences
Increased Web traffic
There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter about Wolfram Alpha. A few themes include:
Five things WolframAlpha does better than Google: complex queries, localization, precision, calculation and comparison.
WoolframAlpha is too complex for simple inquires and data.
It is a revolutionary way to get answers to computational (math, etc) questions.
How do you think WolframAlpha will impact SEO techniques and the way journalists gather information? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
To learn more about SEO, visit our past blog by clicking here.
Speaking engagements at industry tradeshows or events are a terrific way to build thought leadership amongst peers and potential customers. But for many, the thought of presenting in front of a large group can be a scary one – to say the least.
Preparation is essential to giving a good presentation and with a little work, a speaking engagement need not be a terrifying ordeal. Here are a few tips that have helped us and our clients deliver great presentations over the years:
Know your audience – Will you be presenting to professionals in your field? What is the size of the audience? Will they be managers or C-level executives? Knowing your audience will help you deliver a message they find relevant and useful.
Understand the format – How much time will you have? Are you the only person presenting or will you be on a panel? If you’re participating on a panel, who else will is on it? How will the panel discussion be moderated? Does the moderator understand what each panelist brings to the discussion? Are there a set of questions that the moderator has in mind for the panelists to discuss?
Stay focused – Make sure your presentation has a clear, focused theme. Ideally, you should have three main messages. You will probably lose your audience if you wander off into tangents and try to explain every supporting detail of your story. Instead, deliver a simple message and allow your audience to ask questions at the end.
Provide supporting materials – For many business presentations, a good PowerPoint will do the trick. But resist the urge to fill your slides with lots of text. We find it best to use compelling images with speaking notes to capture important statistics or reinforce an important point. The bottom line is that you should do the talking – not your PowerPoint.
Practice, practice, practice – Mark Twain once said, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” He has a point: by spending time practicing alone and in front of a friend or colleague, you can ease your nerves and find any weaknesses in your presentation. But take note: even if you’ve memorized every word, you should deliver your presentation in a conversational tone on the big day to keep your audience engaged and the discussion lively.
Consider a coach – If you’re still feeling jittery about your presentation consider hiring a coach to help you prepare. A good coach can help you with your subject, supporting materials and speech delivery. Communiqué PR often provides this type of support as we help executives develop their speeches and prepare for their presentations.
Gather Feedback – After your presentation, you can distribute comment cards to your audience or ask the conference producers and moderators for feedback. This information will help you improve your public speaking skills and prepare a more compelling presentation next time.
We hope you find these tips helpful and would love to hear any ideas that have helped you prepare and deliver a stellar presentation.