Posted by Amanda Laird on Mon, Aug 30, 2010
CNW’s blog, Beyond the Wire, is a way for us to connect public relations, investor relations, communications and media professionals with the tools they need to work more efficiently and be more successful.
We are pleased to now feature content originally published on Beyond the Wire here on the Power of Presence – one of the perks of the acquisition earlier this year.
Here is a roundup of the posts we’re featuring:
For more CNW news and the best the web has to offer in PR, IR and communications, be sure to check out Beyond the Wire.
Posted by Amanda Laird on Tue, Aug 17, 2010
Planning and research is an essential part of the communications lifecycle. Regardless of what tools you use to gain insight to analyze trends in thinking or other patterns among your audiences and stakeholders, it’s important to scrutinize the basics.
Here are five tips to help you achieve better planning results – whether your focus is on online or traditional communications, or somewhere in between.
- Ask your stakeholders what they want. Most organizations still reach customers and stakeholders through the news media. Most media and analysts will tell you that a simple wire-issued news release is still the best way to deliver information. But these days they also want multimedia assets to enrich the story on their website or blog. You could benefit from packaging all your information in an easy-to-share format of a social media release. It pays to ask.
- Review your contact lists. Whether investor analysts, association contacts, or mainstream media, if you review your lists you’ll likely discover your contacts gather information through more than one channel – on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. The channels are changing.
- Cultivate relationships. If you’re planning to target Facebook or MySpace channels, you can forge relationships by offering information, correcting misinformation, and contributing to conversations in ways that offer value. Brand reputation is all about confidence and trust. If you bring a trusted voice to a social media conversation, you’ll earn respect.
- Stay fresh. If the goal of your communication strategy is to get noticed, make the most of it. Keep your website, Facebook and other social media channels dynamic by posting new information frequently. Your followers ‘make the rounds’ when they’re gathering information. If they see you update your information often, you’ll become the ‘go to’ destination for what’s new and interesting.
- Enable sharing. If your website isn’t equipped to enable visitors to share the information you’re posting to their Facebook account or to the email address of a friend or colleague, you’re missing an opportunity to grow your brand. It’s easy to do.
Download a copy of our latest white paper, Continuous Measurement and Analysis, for more on maximizing your communications planning efforts.
Posted by Amanda Laird on Tue, Aug 10, 2010
It seems like an easy question and one CNW is asked often: when is the best time to send a news release? The answer, however, is frustratingly vague and every newswire, journalist, editor, analyst, broker and public relations professional will offer their own interpretation of “best.”
In the past, a nine to five workday; a trading day that opened at 9:30 am and closed at 4:00 pm; rigid print production schedules and top-of-the-hour newscasts provided a good indication of when and whether your story would be noticed.
These days, the immediacy of the web and a never-ending communications lifecycle means the best time to send your news release is now. “Send it as soon as it’s ready. We really are up and running all day and night,” advised Kirk LaPointe, Managing Editor of the Vancouver Sun at CNW’s Breakfast with the Media this past April.
Scott Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, CanWest News Service, concurs:
Jeremy Porter, digital communications strategist and blogger at Journalistics, recently concluded that there is no single best time to send your news release. The trick to optimizing your potential for news coverage is finding the best time to send your news. He offers a list of helpful tips to determine when that time may be. Among them:
Figure out where you’d like your news to appear
Is it the 6:00 news or is the top-ranked blog in your industry? Your objectives for media coverage should guide when the release is distributed.
Make sure you really have ‘news’ in your news release
When drafting your news release, ask yourself “who cares.” If you can’t answer this, you probably don’t have news.
Web traffic is an okay outcome for a news release too
There was once a time when only media read news releases, but now anyone can find your release online. Drive traffic back to your website and social media properties by including links in your release.
Read the complete list at Journalistics.
When do you find is the best time to send your news release?
Posted by Carolyn McGill-Davidson on Tue, Jul 27, 2010
Since dna13 joined the CNW team in April, we’ve been working hard to deliver on our promise of a complete, end-to-end communications solution. We’ve integrated the dna13 platform (marketed in Canada as MediaVantage) with Access CNW, the secure web portal used by CNW clients to edit and distribute news releases.
This is big news for the CNW team – not just because it makes us the first newswire provider to integrate news release distribution and media monitoring, but it’s also the first major project we’ve completed post-acquisition. Anyone who has worked through an acquisition will agree that’s a milestone in itself!
Read more about how public relations, investor relations and marketing communications professionals can benefit from this industry breakthrough on CNW’s blog, Beyond the Wire.
Posted by dna 13 on Thu, Jul 15, 2010
In my last blog entry, I argued the PR crisis BP finds itself in following its precedent-setting offshore oil spill is due in part to having virtually no profile in or contribution to the online conversations taking place about the greatest environmental disaster of the century.
In dna13’s latest white paper, we make the claim that given the power and potential of today’s tools and apps, there’s no reason not to win even the most complex PR battles.
Granted, the multi-channel universe we live in makes it tougher than ever to know where the biggest threat to your reputation may come from. The front page of the dailies? YouTube? Twitter? But the flip-side is that smart organizations are using the same channels to monitor what’s being said about them, establish relationships with key influencers and followers, and adjust strategies along the way to stay on the winning side of their PR battles.
Basic principles of communication don’t change, notwithstanding phenomena like social media. Truly competitive enterprises always know who their audiences are and what they say and think. And they always find creative ways to tap into those conversations, take part in them, and protect and build their brand awareness and value. Social media is just the latest in the ever-evolving selection of channels.
BP may have the market cornered these days on PR disasters, but they’re not the first. Think about Nortel’s woes in the past decade. Our latest white paper describes how former Nortel employee April Dunford combined strategic thinking and social media tactics to regain some of the shine on her company’s tarnished brand. How? Through simple and cost-effective and effective steps – careful monitoring of audiences, sharp analysis of data, and positioning her company as a thought leader even in a sea of setbacks and failures.
Monitoring and participating in social media is no longer an option – it’s a requirement.
Posted by dna 13 on Tue, Jul 06, 2010
Social search’s entrée into the online domain was destined to be a juggernaut for brands in crisis right from the start. For BP, whose ongoing disaster is shaping up to be the crisis of the century, social search has been a primary contributor to the company’s lack of control over its messaging, and its virtual absence in online conversations.
Case in point (as noted by TechCrunch): When you Google “BP PR” or “BP public relations,” the top search result is @BPGlobalPR, the highly publicized, widely followed “mock BP” Twitter account. As for BP’s own PR efforts in social media, it’s a lost cause: The “I’m sorry” video featuring CEO Tony Hayward was unanimously criticized as disingenuous and forced, and BP’s official Twitter account has a mere 15,000 followers (a fraction of the mock account’s 181,000).
The company’s misguided “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to social media (it’s also using Flickr and YouTube to spread its messages) isn’t doing anything in the way of bolstering its presence in search results. As we recently noted, the only thing they have been able to do in the way of search visibility is pay for it, with some reports estimating their investment to be in the neighborhood of $50 million.
While we acknowledged the strategic thinking behind the paid search approach, this whole situation is making us wonder how much longer paid search will even exist as social media conversations increasingly drive results. It’s definitely a point worth considering—especially if you’re thinking of sinking $50 million into paid search anytime soon.
Posted by Amanda Laird on Mon, Jul 05, 2010
Long the domain of the public relations team, reputation management and social media monitoring is becoming an essential part of the investor relations officer’s daily routine. With reputation capital making up to an estimated 63% of the average company’s market value, it’s safe to say your bottom line is showing online.
Check out CNW President and CEO Carolyn McGill-Davidson’s presentation from the 2010 CIRI Investor Relations Conference: Your Bottom Line is Showing - Why Reputation Management Matters to Investor Relations.
Posted by dna 13 on Fri, Jun 25, 2010
A few weeks ago, the privacy controversy surrounding Facebook prompted us to ask whether the brand's threshold for widespread criticism was disproportionately high simply because of its global ubiquity. In other words, could the brand commit what would usually be fatal errors and still feel no ill effects on its reputation among consumers?
Well, Apple has us asking the same question today, albeit in a different context. Following the long-awaited release of the iPhone 4 yesterday, a swell of media coverage and user reviews picked apart the newest features and functionality. Though generally very well-received, one complaint emerged as particularly troubling: service failures that reportedly occur when users grip the phone with their left hand. The reason for the quirk was immediately revealed to be the new antenna structure, in which both the Bluetooth-WiFi-GPS antenna and the GSM-UMTS antenna are wrapped around the external edges of the phone.
Turns out, this structure has one major flaw: lefties cradle the phone in such a way that interferes with how both antennas come together in the bottom left corner, thus resulting in the service dips and dropped calls.
That's bad in its own right, but what raised questions for us was the company's utter dismissal of the issue, first in an email from CEO Steve Jobs to a customer (see image below, courtesy of Engadget), and then in an official statement.
The basic gist of both responses: Stop holding it wrong.
The long-held belief that the customer is always right has been observed with near-religious fervor since social media's emergence empowered this stakeholder group to assert their "right-ness" so loudly and publicly. Apple's approach to handling an issue flies in the face of everything we're taught in terms of customer service and communications, yet we're willing to bet it won't put a dent in iPhone 4 sales, let alone the company's profit margin.
Is this new reality-that brands can disregard customer service doctrine if they are entrenched enough among their target audience-going to become the rule rather than the exception?
Posted by dna 13 on Wed, Jun 23, 2010
According to a new report from brand measurement firm General Sentiment, BP's brand value has taken an estimated $1-billion hit as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 21st, and the subsequent oil spill that continues to wreak havoc in the Gulf of Mexico-this based on a sentiment analysis of relevant conversations taking place in online channels since April (see image, courtesy of TechCrunch).
With the world watching in horror as the crisis continues to unfold, no one should be surprised that the estimated decrease in BP's brand value is so staggering (it's congruent with the massive plummet in the company's stock, after all). Most interesting to us, though, is the report's calculation that, since June 1st, the average loss surpasses $32 million a day.
Then again, this isn't surprising either when you consider the events that have transpired since June 1st-namely, BP's obvious reluctance to provide straightforward answers to the public. In the congressional hearings last week on Capitol Hill, BP CEO Tony Hayward sidestepped questions surrounding the cause of the spill and who was to blame. "I had no prior knowledge of the drilling of this well, none whatsoever," he said during the hearing, as reported by New York Times.
This air of vagueness that borders on apathy, coupled with his recent weekend of yachting and a comment that he "would like [his] life back," certainly isn't helping the company's efforts to triage its devastated reputation. Then again, neither are the PR and advertising campaigns, which continue to pump out faceless corporate messaging that smacks of ambiguity.
In an era of instant information online and consumer-created content, the public equates brand quality with corporate transparency and personal responsibility. Given BP's do either, the colossal hits to its brand and bottom line are simply the cost of doing business badly.
Posted by Amanda Laird on Mon, Jun 21, 2010
At CNW’s Spring Breakfast with the Media series one message rang out loud and clear: the media has changed, forever. We brought together some of Canada’s leading journalists and news innovators to discuss the new media landscape: a world where radio stations need photos and newspapers are asking for video.
In CNW’s latest whitepaper, Newsrooms in Canada: The New Reality, we’ve looked at how the web has impacted news gathering and reporting, and how professional communicators can navigate this new landscape.
With statistics from the 2010 PR Week Media Survey and insight from Kirk LaPointe, David Akin, Scott Anderson, Mathew Ingram, Saleem Khan, Jeff Jones, Jeff Little, Michelle Richardson, Roland-Yves Carignan and Bernard Motulsky, Newsrooms in Canada: The New Reality gives you an insider’s look at the new newsroom.
You can download CNW’s Newsroom in Canada: The New Reality paper by clicking here.
Missed our Breakfast with the Media series? Check out the archive video here.