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Updating Mad Men: Taking a Fresh Look at Old Campaigns

Chuck Tanowitz — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:16:42 +0000

Starting today I'd like to try a new regular feature here on Fresh Ground: updating Mad Men campaigns for the social media age. A lot has been made about the fact that the period drama is so fun to look at because its advertising methods are so quaint. In 1964 TV was a relatively new thing for reaching mass audiences, print ads ruled the roost and sarcasm had just started to take hold in the ad world (many point to the "Lemon" campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle).

So what would a campaign look like today? Let's look at the Sugarberry Ham campaign. In the episode, Sugarberry is a ham company that is testing its canned hams in a few supermarkets around New York. Unfortunately one is in a Jewish neighborhood. So the company obviously doesn't have a great grasp of its market.

Let me set a few ground rules here:

We are going to work within the world of Mad Men, that is, we'll deal with the facts they give;
We're not going to run out and do a bunch of market research;
Much of this will be brainstorming, as we have no idea as to their budget; and
We'll fill in details as we need them.

Peggy Olsen, the Hero of Ham

Ok, so characters Peggy and Peter, faced with the possibility of losing the account come up with a publicity stunt involving 2 women being paid to fight over a store's last ham. Long story short, it doesn't go according to plan, still they get a few news stories, sell a bunch of hams, Peggy gets a new slogan "Our Hams are Worth Fighting For," and the client buys more media.

So, what would we at Fresh Ground do to help the story today?

First, we'd make sure that the corporate website had way to create and submit content. Specifically content regarding ham recipes. Being someone who lives in a Kosher house, I'll defer to people with more experience cooking canned hams, but I have to assume that people have plenty of recipes.

I actually have a personal connection to DAK Hams, though have never eaten one. Ask me why another time.

Then, we'd help them create a Facebook page that features a Recipe of the Week. We'd make sure that the weekly recipe went live on the site and feed directly through to the Facebook page, thereby showing up in the newsfeed of people who "liked" the Sugarberry Ham page. Also, we'd look at purchasing geo-targeted ads so the people living in the desired areas see the Sugarberry name. Ideally we'd coordinate this with in-store promotions.

Taking it all one step further, we'd love to know the demographic makeup of the targeted stores as well as shopping patterns. That would better enable us to put out the appropriate recipes and release them on days in which people are more likely to be shopping.

Of course, we'd want to hit the coupon world but I think we'd like to try something new. Maybe work with the store and with FourSquare to offer a coupon to anyone who checks in during specific weeks. The Mad Men episode takes place during Thanksgiving, so we'd want to drive traffic both during Thanksgiving week and the weeks leading up to Christmas.

On the media relations side it would be interesting to talk with food reporters about alternatives to the traditional Thanksgiving Turkey. In today's world ham may be seen as a bit passe, but I'm sure we could work with a local chef to get some updated recipes that start with a canned ham. That may even lead to a YouTube campaign in which we ask a series of chefs to show us what they can do with a canned ham, besides make it a paperweight. We'd ask the question "can you turn a canned ham into a Top Chef-worthy meal?"

Of course, these are just some of our thoughts. What would you do?

Apple’s Presser: The Morning After

Chuck Tanowitz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:00:29 +0000

It's no coincidence that Apple held its press event on a Friday. Anyone who has ever worked near politics will tell you that you drop a story on a Friday when you want it to die. It's an age-old trick. Even better, make it a summer Friday when all the editors are eager to start their weekends and people are less likely to be reading, watching and following the news on a Saturday.

So holding the event on a Friday at 10am PT (afternoon here on the east coast) was Apple's first great PR move in regards to "Antennagate." But oh, there were so many more.

The Song: Perhaps the best move was opening the press conference with a song that had gone viral thanks to a YouTube video and a bit of help from TechCrunch. It showed, up front, the key message Apple was trying to convey: our customers are happy, media are not. Of course, it also helped that TechCrunch promoted the video, so they felt good about themselves. Hold onto that fact, it'll come back later.

The Facts: Fact 1 is that Apple has facts and the media don't. Seems kinda obvious now, but it's difficult for people to argue for a recall when Apple can turn around and say that only .55 percent of people have complained about the antenna and the iPhone 4.0 has only a 1.7 percent return rate, far below that of the 3GS. Apple probably would have released these numbers over time, but Friday's event certainly gave them a bigger stage. Fact 2: All smartphones have the same kind of problems. This is probably the fact that will be most debated in the coming weeks, but it also turns the attention from the iPhone to the entire industry.

No Apologies: When Steve Jobs walks on stage you're not going to get an apology. No way, ain't gonna happen. He's there for good news and to tell you that the company is producing great things. He's not there to apologize. If you want that then you're going to have to speak with someone else. Still, he did admit that Apple isn't perfect, then positioned that in the age old "we strive to be better" message. That, of course, lead directly into the next positive.

Feel the Love: Oh how Apple customers love Apple. Even Michael Arrington is a fanboy. And Steve Jobs positioned everything perfectly, giving the press-conference equivalent of Paul McCartney standing on stage screaming to a loud fan "I love you too!"

Just one more thing: The iPhone will be available in white at the end of July. So I'm sure there are plenty of people ready to scream "shut up and take my money!"

Of course, not everything was perfect, but I have only one real criticism: Did Steve Jobs really have to spit in the eye of the media? He called a Bloomberg story "total bullshit," and called the New York Times liars by saying that their story about a forthcoming software bug fix was "patently false." Of course, the whole event was there to show how the Consumer Reports story wasn't worth the paper it's printed on, so I guess Apple did want to stick a thumb in the eye of the media. Though, starting with the Antenna Song certainly endeared Apple more to TechCrunch. So maybe Jobs is just playing to a specific audience.

BP in the Gulf: When Crisis PR Shouldn’t be the Question

Chuck Tanowitz — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:13:48 +0000

Whenever some big crisis hits the news my dad likes to say "So, my son who is in PR, what would you do in this situation?" Then he argues with me.

He asked it again as we were watching the BP mess unfold in the Gulf of Mexico. But this time my answer was simple: there's nothing to do here. This isn't a crisis communications issue. Yes, it's a crisis, but the communications plan should be the LAST thing on their mind right now. The issue here is fixing the problem and communicating what they're actually doing. Anything less is disingenuous.

The best example of this process gone wrong is the painfully funny Twitter account @BPGlobalPR. Here you have a guy digging at BP on a daily basis, pointing out their inconsistencies and problems in an amusing way. In his Huffington Post essay, the writer of @BPGlobalPR noted the futility in any kind of crisis PR program in this situation:

I've read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR. First of all, who cares? Second of all, what kind of business are you in? I'm trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company? One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach. That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer.

He goes on to say how BP's PR solution is to fix the problem. Note to BP Crisis PR folks: don't try to find fancy ways to communicate your messages, don't look for new and innovative ways to to put the best face on the problem, now isn't the time for that. Just provide information on what's being done. Period. Oh, and yell at management to do more. In fact, that SHOULD be the crisis PR plan.

Google Moves the Earth

Chuck Tanowitz — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:23:31 +0000

The earth moved under the feet of the PR industry earlier this month when Google did something simple: it distributed its own earnings announcement. It didn’t rely on one of the paid channels such as Businesswire, PR Newswire or Marketwire (among others).

To the untrained eye this seems rather simple. Companies put out content all the time, why is this any different?

I’m not going to try to rehash the idea that the press release is dead. It’s not. PRWeb pointed out at the MarketingProfs event this week that they will distribute 90,000 press releases this year alone. That’s just one service.

A lot of people saw Google’s move as an opportunity to talk about the Social Media Release, but that’s just another way to put content out through the same channel, it’s not a real change.

No, the trick here is understanding the different channels and how channels differ from form. Wire services offer a different distribution channel and for public companies it’s an important channel. On a very basic level wire services smooth out a lot of the bumps in putting out an earnings announcement. Let’s face it, the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t make things easy, so if you want to make sure you satisfy all the fine print within their fair-disclosure rules you may as well just hand your announcements over to them and be done. Paying $5000 or so per release certainly beats the legal fees you could add up by messing things up on your own.

That said, wire services aren’t the ONLY way to get news out. For some companies, like Google, their blog or online newsroom speaks directly to investors. Why not engage them there? Also, just because you have a channel doesn't mean you're restricted to form. You can have a blog full of "press releases" and a press release that looks like a blog post. You can write an interesting news-based story and put it out on a wire service. If you're Conan O'Brien you can even write a letter.

Howard Berkenblit, a partner in the Corporate Department at Sullivan and Worcester, who spoke with the Fresh Ground Podcast a while back, told me recently that the SEC ruling regarding putting out material news on blogs boils down to making sure you have an established news channel before using it. Google has certainly done that.

But what does this mean for the wire services? Phyllis Dantuono, executive vice president and chief operating officer for BusinessWire says it doesn’t mean much. “Bottom line is that we do not anticipate any major changes in how companies will communicate with the marketplace in the future,” she said in a written statement. “Most companies clearly recognize the risks and limitations of the SEC's interpretive Guidance Release, and have wisely decided to stick with a disclosure system that works.”

BusinessWire also sent along a MotleyFool.com article that went so far as to call Google’s decision “evil.” Rich Smith laments that Google has created a fragmented system in which “investors could soon be forced to scan the websites of every company they own, daily, continually, to be certain of not missing out on important news.”

I think this misses the mark entirely. I’m sure Smith doesn’t have only one source for news today. In fact, he probably has some sort of new aggregator that helps him find the news he wants, probably some sort of RSS reader. He probably also has Google News alerts that tell him when something goes live. Then there’s the fact that companies come out with earnings announcements on a pretty strict schedule, so it’s not like these are surprises. No, Google hasn’t made the news more difficult to find, they’ve just slightly changed how you access it.

In fact, they made it a little easier. Former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz had argued for years that the SEC’s disclosure rules unfairly favored the few. Subscribers to the wire services received the news, while those who didn’t were left waiting. Putting important news out on a blog, the argument goes, fixes that. Well, that is, unless we run into a situation in which companies like Comcast control whose content gets green lighted.

Still, there’s an action here for small, private companies to consider: where do you put your news? Our suggestion here at Fresh Ground is to establish your own news channel through an online newsroom. Not just a stagnant place where you repost your press release, but an interactive social media newsroom that lets you post different types of content and lets your audience interact with and share that content. Todd has been working hard with the IABC on establishing this sort of thing.

But the most important reason for establishing your own news channel is that despite Dantuono’s assertion that many companies will continue to use wire services, I believe that many won’t. When the earnings announcements disappear, so will much of the available revenue for wire services.

I’m not saying the wire service channel will die out entirely, but you will certainly see a thinning over the next couple of years. I can’t guarantee that the big players will continue to thrive, since some of the smaller players (like PitchEngine) do similar work for less money and a lower overhead.

So your best move may be to create your own and as you engage with your customers, partners, investors and other influencers, let them know where your news will end up first.

Social Media DNA: Does Your Company Have It?

Chuck Tanowitz — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:35:34 +0000

LaunchCamp divided pretty easily into two camps, companies and executives who:

Understand social networking technologies inherently; and
Know they need to do something, but are not sure what.

This divide isn’t new and frankly, it’s not going to end any time soon. In the past I’ve been asked to design training programs only to find that some people within an organization understand social technologies and concepts very well and wanted to move on beyond the basics. Then there are those who are still figuring out how to sign up for a Twitter account or maybe have just dipped their toe into Facebook.

With this type of audience one size never fits all.

But for LaunchCamp it wasn’t just a division among individuals as Isis Maternity Community Manager Cindy Meltzer noted during our recent conversation. It could also be felt in corporate culture.

During the startup panel it became apparent that most tech-based companies being founded today are steeped in social networking tools. Not just because the founders are young, in fact their ages run the spectrum, but because the genesis for their ideas come from first understanding social networking. In other words: the aspect of marketing that takes conversation into account is built in. It’s part of their DNA.

Jules Pieri, CEO of the Daily Grommet

Take the example of the Daily Grommet. When moderator David Beisel asked about how much each company spent on launch marketing, the answer came back as nothing. Though, as Jules will tell you, it was nothing EXTRA. Frankly, marketing is baked into the idea of “Citizen Commerce,” which is the idea that the customers drive the direction of the products featured each day. This isn’t a one-way system of “we produce, you buy” but community conversation of “we find what you want.”

Since the community members are, by nature, excited by the products they’re more likely to take action and talk about them.

The same goes for Runkeeper, which factored sharing right into the product. From the start the idea wasn’t only to use a mobile device to track your routes and save information about you, but to share that information with your friends. By doing that you are, in fact, sharing the product you’re using. If friends want to share back they need to get that product too. The viral nature is built in, not tacked on later.

By contrast I hear from companies that have traditional business models and are looking for a way to build social networking into their marketing programs. This isn’t a bad thing (in fact, it’s great) but it’s also just the start.

To truly engage in this world each company must look beyond their marketing departments and find their communities, then use the tools to engage them. After all, that’s how new companies are finding their way.

Lineup for Thursday’s LaunchCamp and SMB

Todd Van Hoosear — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:24:56 +0000

Here is the near-final lineup for Thursday's LaunchCamp event:

Social Media Breakfast Bootcamp

Thursday, February 4, 2010
8:00AM - 11:30AM
Microsoft NERD Center

The Social Media Bootcamp is designed to help entrepreneurs understand the basics of how "social" has evolved from a communications tool to a full-fledged marketing and business management philosophy. It sets the tone for the afternoon sessions, providing a common vocabulary for everyone attending the more in-depth afternoon LaunchCamp sessions.

The Social Media Bootcamp is for both skeptics and those who need to convince the skeptics. It's also perfect for "intrapraneurs": innovators within larger organizations who are trying to create change. While many of today's entrepreneurs understand social well, this is also an excellent chance to make sure you have all your bases covered before your launch.

8:00AM: Registration Opens, Breakfast

8:30AM: Opening Keynote: John Wall on the Three Factors of Startup Success
John Wall, co-host of Marketing Over Coffee, will discuss the three key factors for startup success. If you don't have a million dollar budget to launch, do not despair. There's never been a better time for a new brand to cut through the clutter. Learn how to fight the fear, lead the rebellion, and win customers.

9:00AM: Social Media 101
In many ways, social media is simply the logical evolution of communication tools that were originally developed in decades past. In other ways, it's very different. This session goes over the history and evolution of social media from the Web 1.0 days and before.

9:15AM: The Implications of Social
Social is changing how companies are doing business, not just how they're marketing themselves. Understand the full spectrum of applications and ramifications of social media on your organization, and what this might mean for your communications policies.

9:45AM: Morning Break

10:00AM: The 3 Cs of Social, Part 1: Content
It's all about the content, but how do you create it and distribute it efficiently? Jeff Cutler will take the audience through the fundamentals of creating and distributing content.

10:30AM: The 3 Cs of Social, Part 2: Community
Jim Storer and Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable will share their insights on how to build, grow and manage your communities.

11:00AM: The 3 Cs of Social, Part 3: Conversation
Doug Haslam, newly of Voce Communications, shares his tips and tricks for engaging your audience on various platforms, focusing specifically on where and how the conversation should take place.

Organized By: Social Media Breakfast
Hosted By: Microsoft
In Association With: LaunchCamp 2010

LaunchCamp 2010

Thursday, February 4, 2010
Microsoft NERD Center
11:30AM - 5:30PM

How can you, as a entrepreneur, most effectively use the limited intellectual, financial, social and temporal capital you have at your disposal to launch your company? What's the role of PR, marketing, social media and business in launching your new brand, product or service? When should you build, and when should you buy?

11:30: Registration Opens, Lunch

Noon: Lunch Keynote: Mike Troiano on Scalable Intimacy

Growing your customer base is one of the most important goals of any launch. How do you scale your operations while not losing the personal touch? Mike Troiano, principal of marketing agency Holland-Mark and founder of several successful startups, shares his insights.

12:30PM: Success in Social: Local Launch Success Stories Moderator: David Beisel (Venrock)
Panel: Jules Pieri (Daily Grommet), Ja-nae Duane, Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper and Raj Aggarwal of Localytics

Hear from a panel of local entrepreneurs about their recent PR, marketing, social media and business successes.

1:30PM: Sales & Marketing Keynote: Dharmesh Shah on the Sales Funnel 2.0
How can small- to mid-sized businesses automate their sales and marketing process? How do marketing managers in bigger organizations learn how to speak CEO? Dharmesh Shah, chief technology officer & founder of Hubspot, answers these and other burning questions for business owners and marketers.

2:15PM: Afternoon Break

2:30PM: PR & Marketing Panel
Moderator: Paul Gillin
Panelists: Julie Hall , Carol McGarry, Bobbie Carlton
What's the role of PR and marketing in the launch of a startup in today's environment? PR isn’t dead, it’s just wounded. The whiplash educing changes in the media environment has left the PR industry reeling. It’s not dead, as many have declared, but it’s certainly dizzy and looking for some direction. Entrepreneurs have a more immediate problem: how do they get the word out in this shifting environment, where a site that didn’t exist a two years ago is suddenly a major player in communications?

3:15PM: Break-Out Sessions, Part 1 (Pick One)

What's Your Exit Strategy?
Leaders: Rick Marciniak and Terry Phinney of BrandAlign
It’s never to soon to begin thinking about your exit strategy. In owner operated companies, the greatest obstacle to a successful exit can often be the owner. Are you thinking long-term? Rick and Terry share the personal, financial and structural elements to a successful exit strategy.

Branding & Web Design
Leader: Margery Stegman
What should you skimp on and what should you pay for when it comes to site design and branding?

Product Development
Leader: Bryan Maleszyk of Molecular
Social channels are a great place to collect product development feedback, but how do you organize, prioritize and act on the feedback you collect online?

4:15PM: Break-Out Sessions, Part 2 (Pick One)

PR Improv
Leader: Adam Zand
Editors: Wade Roush of Xconomy Boston and Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe's Innovation Economy
Think you're ready for the big pitch? Adam Zand and our guest reporters will put you to the test (but probably won't sign that NDA you want them to).

Agile Techniques for Startups: The Faster Path to Success
Leader: Joel Foner
Learn why Agile methodologies can enable you to ship faster, ensure that your product works better, has fewer bugs, and has "the right stuff that customers will care about" built in at the start. Find out how Agile approaches can work at small scale, even with a micro-startup of only one or two founders, while helping to create a culture of innovation and success.

Searching Your Brand
Leader: Jim Spencer, JBS Partners
One of the most important aspects of your brand is how visible you are in search. What are the tips and tricks you need to know when it comes to chosing a domain name, content management platform and content in order to optimize your brand for search? Jim Spencer takes you through the tricks and techniques you need to know to really own your brand online -- with a special emphasis on WordPress sites.

5:00 Closing Remarks

Thanks to our Sponsors!

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Journalism: Profession or State of Mind

Chuck Tanowitz — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:00:11 +0000

During a recent Journchat, Chris Anderson and I had a bit of a back and forth about the idea that journalism is a state of mind as much as it is a profession. “It is a profession. Sorry. 100%” he Tweeted. Yes, he agreed that everyone has the power to communicate, but, he believes, journalism shouldn’t be the goal. “Everyone is empowered now. Zero barrier. But you don't want to be a journalist -- it's an unholy priesthood,” he continued. “It is essential not to paint yourself into a corner. America has rejected your sort of "objective" journalism for dead.”

Fox news and MSNBC have proven that bias can attract an audience, but by the same token, the New York Times continues to act as a standard base. What’s more, Wikipedia keeps making adjustments and changes meant to eliminate the bias from it stories, focusing entirely on the facts and grows stronger because of it.

No, journalism isn’t dead.

But the original question Chris and I were debating centered on whether content creators (bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers, you name it) are journalists. I believe it really depends on the mindset of the person creating the content. Some will consider themselves journalists, and they and their readers will hold them to journalistic standards, while others will not care about those standards, wanting just to tell the story of their day. The trick for us, as readers, is to separate the two.

This is an issue Sree Sreenivasan and I touched on during our podcast conversation. He looks at it from another direction: turning people with other skills into journalists. Sree pointed to the trend of the “programmer journalist” someone who has skills as a coder as well as a journalist. “I would hire and consider somebody a journalist if they make iphone apps with a journalistic mindset,” he told me about 10 minutes into the podcast. That mindset includes finding the truth, maintaining ethics, getting the story right and being able to get it out on deadline.

As for whether journalism is a mindset or a career, that depends on the person. “It can be both. It can be one for some, the other for others and both for many,” Sree says.

Part of our job as PR people concerns understanding this landscape so we can better guide our clients. We need to understand what gives a individual influence so we can better keep them updated with information.

Back at my previous job a member of my PR team messed up big time. Long story short, she made an edit that she thought was innocuous, got a story placed and later found out that her edit changed the very nature of the story itself. After hearing from the client’s customer and the editor of the publication, we cleaned things up, but during the issue the team member tried to put things aside by saying “it’s not like someone died.”

No, no one died. But I told her in no uncertain terms that the error got in the way of the editor’s credibility, and that’s all he and his publication have to sell.

Our job is to understand and respect that, whether we’re creating content for our clients or pitching stories. We can’t feed them false information and expect to be taken seriously.

New Workshop: Socialize Your Newsletter

Todd Van Hoosear — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:26:16 +0000

[FRESH GROUND NEWS] Chuck and I are pleased to announce the first of a series of new workshops and training offerings for businesses and organizations looking to become more social: "Socialize Your Newsletter":

Your newsletter does a great job of feeding good content to your target audience, but does your newsletter work for all your audiences? Is your newsletter ready for the current realities and future developments of social media? The fact is email is just one channel among many. We can help you take the great content you’re already developing and put it to work feeding the social media channels that will drive future growth.

Through a one-day session the Fresh Ground team will help turn your existing content into the seeds that will help grow your community through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even your own site-specific blog.

Designed for small businesses, the one day, $1,000 program will help in the following areas:

Set-up: We will set up a blog for you that is linked to your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages. The goal is for you to post once and distribute many. When we leave, one blog post will automatically feed your various social media channels without you having to worry about it. Training about how to setup a simple audio or video podcast is also available.
Instruction: The basics of learning the tools to run your social media campaign is half the battle. It won’t take us long to teach you the basics and help you overcome the “fear factor” that many face when first stepping into the social media universe. Let Fresh Ground act as your Sherpa, helping make you comfortable with the tools to help grow your business.
Measurement: No tool can be truly useful unless you know how to measure. We will get you started with some basic measurement tools, such as Sitemeter, Google Analytics or even Facebook’s own internal measurement tools. We will also train you on what to look for and how to understand the metrics so you can tweak your program over time.

For more information, and to sign up for the program, visit the workshop page.

Funnel Vision: Getting the most for your PR dollars

Chuck Tanowitz — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:24:36 +0000

Too often PR gets lost in its own process, taking little stock of where the articles and content it creates fit in with the rest of the sales funnel. Hence the "thud factor" that most agencies use to justify their budgets.

For the uninitiated, the "thud factor" refers to the sound a thick book of clips makes when it lands on the CEO's desk. Usually it's put there by a smiling VP of Marketing who received it as a "gift" from the expensive PR firm they hired a few months back.

But what did all those clips do for the company?

While at the very well done Highland Capital Partners Sales 2.0 event*, one former CEO (whose company is now a part of a much larger group) responded to my question of how you measure PR by saying "you don't, you just allocate a percent."

Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks

Well, he's close. After listening to Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact and Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks talk about cost per acquisition it became apparent that, to a degree, the PR budget is actually set by attrition. That is, if you know what a customer should cost and you know the cost of all your various acquisition channels (Google, advertising, partnerships, email programs, contests, etc.) then what's left goes, at least in part, to PR.

All of the presenters gave a great view of their sales funnels, the most substantial coming from Goodman, but the bottom line is this: if you aren't sharing this kind of information with the folks managing your PR process, you can't get the most out of your program.

Goodman showed a wonderful graphic of the Constant Contact sales funnel and there at the top are a number of marketing functions that drive prospects. Among the various arrows is PR, though it quickly became apparent that it's the most difficult of the bunch to measure.

Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact

To put it in the blunt terms of the presenters: who cares how many hits you get to the site or how many leads you get, the only thing that matters is how many customers ultimately sign. From them you can learn what programs work and what don't.

One great case study came from Constant Contact, which is constantly testing, measuring, listening to customers and tweaking marketing programs to determine what works. Of course, the other side of this is experimentation. As an example, to get a good read about how radio advertising drives customers, Goodman and her team invested in ads in a number of cities while also maintaining a series of control groups. They then ran those ads for a number of months, measured the results, compared them with the control groups to ultimately understand the true effectiveness of the campaigns. The goal was not only to measure how the previous ad buys did, but to figure out how to better target future marketing programs.

I'm not sure how many smaller companies have the stomach, time and budget for this, but it is certainly a lesson in doing things right.

Coming back to the executive above who just allocates some toward PR, his flip answer has a little more science behind it. Assuming that 10 percent of his budget goes to marketing (his estimation) he takes that budget, runs through some rough calculations regarding customer acquisition, personnel, etc. and came to a final figure for PR.

Then the big question is: what are you getting for your money? Sure, you know you need PR, but what kind of PR?

Capping the event was Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot who talked mostly about content but also talked a bit about his "PR is dead" meme. While he says that, I'm not sure even he entirely believes it, as he changed his phrase over the next few sentences to point out that PR needs to change. Or, as so many have said on his blog, media relations is on life support, but PR itself still has value.

The thing is, I agree with Brian. Traditional media relations is dead, and if you're paying just for that then you need to rethink. Frankly, if you're working with a big agency they probably told you they do more, but all you see are media clips. Why? Because it's what they do. They do it well. There's a place for media placement, but it must fit into a much larger PR program that includes content creation and community relations.

Otherwise, your sales funnel may slow to a drip.

*I'll post more thoughts from this event over the next few days.

The Social Media Culture

Todd Van Hoosear — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:46:47 +0000

I've been pondering a lot recently about the cultural changes that need to be put in place inside organizations to effectively implement Web 2.0 and social media across the enterprise. This recent research from SNCR 's Don Bulmer and Vanessa DiMauro shows the reach beyond marketing very clearly. I highly recommend you read this.

The research shows that social media is having a tremendous impact beyond the realm of just marketing: it's impacting professional decision making. Here are the highlights of the research (directly from Don's post):

1. Professional decision-making is becoming more social - enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG)

Traditional influence cycles are being disrupted by Social Media as decision makers utilize social networks to inform and validate decisions

Professionals want to be collaborative in the decision-cycle but not be marketed or sold to online; however online marketing is a preferred activity by companies.

2. The big three have emerged as leading professional networks: LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter

The average professional belongs to 3-5 online networks for business use, and LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are among the top used.

The convergence of Internet, mobile, and social media has taken significant shape as professionals rely on anywhere access to information, relationships and networks

3. Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools

Decision-makers are broadening reach to gather information especially among active users

4. Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person

Information obtained from offline networks still have highest levels of trust with slight advantage over online (offline: 92% - combined strongly/somewhat trust; online: 83% combined strongly/somewhat trust)

5. Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years

Three quarters of respondents rely on professional networks to support business decisions

Reliance has increased for essentially all respondents over the past three years

6. Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation

Younger (20-35) and older professionals (55+) are more active users of social tools than middle aged professionals.

There are more people collaborating outside their company wall than within their organizational intranet