dna13

Social Media Releases Are Making Blogging Easier

Shel Holtz recently discussed social media releases and their merits in his blog, “A Shel of My Former Self.” A global survey of bloggers performed by PR agency Text 100, indicates that even though bloggers have different and often extreme reactions to social media releases, they continue to prove to be a very successful tool:

“To me [Holtz], this makes tremendous sense, given the disdain bloggers expressed for traditional press releases and their preference for incorporating images, video and audio into their posts. Social media releases (among many other things) make it easy to cherry-pick and embed multimedia assets into posts which, in turn, makes it easy for a blogger to customize the post to his audience rather than regurgitate the same text-based release that everybody else is copying and pasting.”

Bloggers want to be treated as journalists without the hassles of press releases, deadlines and research; they want to be able to write about any topic on their own timeframe. The social media release, developed by Todd Defren (author or PR Squared), provides the blogger with every tool needed to write an article on their own terms. They're also inventive and engaging - and much more likely to grab the attention of a blogger than a press release.

Social media releases have become a reliable outreach and community building tool, just like bloggers and Twitterers alike have become the new generation of journalists.

Social media guidelines for Intel

Recently on the ZDNet blog, Jason Hiner of TechRepublic wrote "Intel Publishes Social Media Guidelines for its Employees." He discussed the recent release of these guidelines and what it means for Intel:

"The companies that figure out the right balance (skewed more toward openness) and train their employees appropriately have an opportunity to use social media to leapfrog in the market because they will be able to create stronger relationships with customers."

Social media outreach needs to include every corporate employee - still, business leaders are hesitant to relinquish control, and trust employees to represent the brand accurately. A clear set of guidelines is the solution to combat those fears - for organizations and individuals alike.

Intel's protocol is fairly simple, but even more importantly - it is reasonable, humane, and is the first step to real brand advocacy. Like Intel, IBM also chose to publish these rules, called 'Social Computing Guidelines', which lets consumers and stakeholders understand their corporate culture. Both an excellent example of corporate transparency.

Other companies, like Microsoft and Google, took a different approach and said, "Blog Smart" or "Don't be Evil." Each works in its own way - the only necessity is a mutually empathetic understanding with employees with realistic expectations about social media usage.

Honestly, employees will use Facebook, Twitter, or Livejournal no matter what policies are in place - it's the future of doing business. Employees just need to know what is appropriate for the workplace and what will ensure Intel's success. We have just hit the tip of the iceberg with this type of technology and putting a policy like this in place is the way to stay in ahead of the curve.

The goal is to have all employees become strong brand ambassadors - Intel's guidelines are a great way to implement clear and reasonable social media guidelines and promote their employees as advocates, not potential threats.

The Role of Investor Relations in 2009

Investor Relations is a complex department with multiple goals, but what it really boils down to are three interrelated objectives that work together in balance; communications, building relationships, and using feedback to guide management's decisions.

1. Communications - IR works hard to achieve an effective, two-way flow of information between its public company and the investment community. Within this, there are two key needs that must be met:

1. To meet the investment community's demands by delivering information in a timely and accurate manner, and
   
2. Condition investors to being open to hearing and accepting of new information from the company on future strategic decisions.

Doing a good job on the first point helps achieve the second - companies benefit from a program of sustained communications, which builds market confidence in the company's fundamental strengths.

2. Building Relationships - Building mutually beneficial relationships with the Street is incredibly valuable to IR. The key for success in investor relations is in the second word - relations. In IR, relationships must be built on accessibility, timeliness, knowledge, reliability, and most importantly, credibility.

Credibility is a precious and fragile asset. Its loss can cause long-term, possibly irreparable damage to investor perceptions of a company and its leaders. Anything that affects the brand and reputation of a company and its management can (and will) affect the marketability and valuation of the company's securities.

Unquestionably, the best way to gain credibility within IR is consistency. Be consistent in the management's track record in delivering on commitments - walking the talk. Be consistent in your communications efforts with the Street - who are you talking to, what are you saying, and how? Lack of consistency in either operational performance or IR communications processes nearly always translates into loss of credibility, with the ensuing damage to corporate brand, management and corporate reputation, and market value.

3. Guide management decisions - As a final objective, investor relations works to help guide management decisions based on the feedback it receives from the Street. How does the Street view the company, and its strategies and initiatives to create and sustain shareholder value? Working with the first two objectives, the insight that IR has into the company's brand and reputation is invaluable in making future strategic decisions.

Nowhere is competition more intense today than in the global securities investment market - particularly for equities, where institutional and retail investors have thousands of public companies to choose from in making investment decisions. Public companies must compete for these investment dollars. They must stand out in a crowded market - they must raise their brand and reputation above the competitive noise.

Social Media: First Step Must Be Listening, Not Immediate Engagement

In a recent blog post on The Net-Savvy Executive titled “Creepy if you do, Clueless if you don’t,” Nathan Gilliatt had strong words to say about the right way and the wrong way to participate in social media. “Don't stalk everyone who casually mentions your business. We've all had to shake a hungry salesman, and nobody likes it. Twitter follows may be especially likely to trigger a shudder.”

As we saw from interviews in our last social media whitepaper, How Fortune 1000 Companies are Harnessing the Power of Social Media, listening is a vital first step for all organizations. Claire Sale, Social Media Specialist for the American Red Cross and now the British Red Cross, was clear when she emphasized the importance of listening before aligning with the organization and engaging with the consumer.

“Social media is a great early warning system — this is how we hear about changes to our reputation first,” she shared. “We’re always asking ourselves whether people really want us involved in their discussion.”

Social media is the future of our industry and it is important to know what people are saying about us. The first step is to listen to what they are saying and decide if it’s relevant and whether they want our opinions. If it is important, it’s time to engage with them; if it’s not, it’s time to move on.

Social media requires all of us to learn how to communicate in a new outlet and determine what is appropriate and what is not.

Socializing social media with a CRM

Harnessing intelligence gathered through social media and sharing it across the organization is no longer a figment of our imagination. In "Strategy and Social Media: Everything's Social (Now)" CRM magazine Associate Editor Lauren McKay notes that the future of CRM integration with social media is inevitable, if organizations are going to be successful in an era where "peer-to-peer conversations about products and services outweigh marketing efforts."

Companies worried about the state of their reputation are definitely getting smarter. The majority have some sort of media monitoring, or ‘Listening Platform' (a term authored by the Customer Experience Group at Forrester Research) in place to monitor for conversations about their brand.

Unfortunately, the actual management of this data remains one of the top challenges for marketing and PR professionals charged with this responsibility (note however, that reputation management and conversation ‘listening' is no longer just limited to these departments). Monitoring social and traditional media now has relevancy for many departments, including:

• Marketing - Market research, competitor and industry (issue) analysis, crisis management and campaign analysis
• Customer service - Customer insight, feedback and service requests
• Sales - Prospecting
  
• Investor relations - Market sentiment, crisis and issue management
  
• Internal communications - Aligned messaging

So, further to Lauren's point, organizations have the opportunity to turn this intelligence into a significant competitive advantage. This is where the necessity for a socialized CRM application has become quite apparent.

We were recently fortunate to have briefed Suresh Vittal, Forrester analyst and author of "The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms Q1 2009" on dna13's capabilities. One of the biggest challenges we discussed was this need for the management of monitoring data. Companies are desperate for regulation and further understanding of how to more effectively manage and share the tweets, pokes, rates and votes on their brand.

CRM vendors are certainly not new. But what is new is the business application that helps an organization manage its end-to-end workflow for these types of communications. According to Jeff Zabin, analyst with Aberdeen Group, "companies must lay the groundwork with brand monitoring".

The next step is to activate that intelligence across the enterprise with a business application. Think CRM for PR.

Imagine the future?

• Sales teams having real-time insight into conversations their prospects are having about competitive offerings;
• IR singing the same messages as Corp Comms and (gasp) legal teams on an emerging corporate issue - and having the ability to respond within less than 12 hours;
• Marketing having insight into market sentiment across all emerging channels and effectively funneling their message through those best suited to their business.

The future looks bright; and judging from the premise of McKay's article - we're staring straight at the light.

How measurement is evolving for Investor Relations..

Business today is increasingly global and intensely competitive. A large factor in this is today’s new, more dynamic and aggressive communications environment that continues to grow and change under this social media avalanche. All media are now global, and information travels around the world instantaneously. Situations change with remarkable speed, and if not monitored closely, can quickly become out of control.

Due to the speed of media and communications technologies, an organization’s shareholders have never before been better informed. With instant access to thousands of opinions, facts and figures, they are becoming increasingly demanding in their expectations of public companies and their leaders. To quote List from MediaShop Public Relations "“Keeping investors informed, even when the news is bad, is vital to maintaining trust.”

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Consider how true this is today. Web 2.0 technologies allow opinions to be expressed freely, and distributed and replicated instantly. The voice of public sentiment is louder than ever, and cannot be ignored.

Success in public relations and investor relations can no longer be measured simply by “column inches,” or the number of sell-side analyst “buy” recommendations – if it ever could. Public relations and investor relations teams are often doing their best work when they keep a company’s name out of the media or securities analyst’s research note.

It was Mark Twain who once said, “Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel.” This advice – updated for today’s media environment – is more applicable than ever:

“Never pick a fight with a person who has no need of ink.”

Online technologies, like the dna13 PR software application, help to level the playing field in media, and cannot be overlooked when the opinion of the public and key stakeholders are worth so much.

 

The rise of global equity markets, the demand for corporate transparency, strong corporate governance, accountability, and full and fair disclosure, in combination with the constant pressure to enhance shareholder value, the increase in shareholder activism, and a more rigorous regulatory involvement, all result in much greater pressures being placed on investor relations departments.

Communications is a demanding environment for investor relations, but if managed properly, can be the key to great success.

Katie Paine on dna13 - Where measurement metrics meet!

I have been on the road a bit with meetings including: SNCR New Comm Forum, Inbound Marketing Summit, the Defense Department’s World Wide Public Affairs Summit, Media Relations 2009, Institute for PR, PR NEWS, Marketing Profs B2B and most recently the first ever Berlin Measurement Summit in Berlin Germany. Every where I go I see the usual round of vendors dutifully standing at their booths, demoing their product offerings and doing what vendors have done at trade shows for millennia, hope that someone that puts that business card in the drawing for the free iPhone might actually buy something.

And the reality is that most of them in an industry that has one foot in the grave, while the other foot is trying balance on the back of the traditional main-stream media business – which is a little like clinging to a piano when you’re trying to survive the Titanic.

There are exceptions -- firms that have left the graveyard and the sinking ships behind and instead are focusing on communications equivalent of the Segway offering products that redefine the industry. Some like Radian6, improve their product with every trade show. Others like dna13 are rethinking our entire business – offering an integrated, reputation management process – really a CRM application for marketing and PR.

I seldom endorse products, but I’m not averse to calling attention to ones that I think can make a difference in the business and I think the dna13 platform, with new dashboards and global roll-up reporting capabilities is one of those. It approaches our business as a business.

At KD Paine & Partners, everything we do is measured against some very clear objectives. And for everything we do, we consider if it contributes to those goals, specifically:

• Efficiency
• Accuracy
• Value
• Profitability
• Delighting the Customer

Our clients have similar goals and metrics, that’s why they hire us. What’s astounding is how few PR departments are as clear on their goals, and to the point – have no tools in place to measure their progress. dna13 at least is providing that much needed tool.

Katie Paine
Berlin, New Hampshire, USA
kdpaine@kdpaine.com
http://kdpaine.blogs.com/

 

Collaborative News: How Corporations Can Have an Active Part in the Blogosphere

Jeff Jarvis wrote another prophetic blog post yesterday on the Buzz Machine about the evolution of news writing and the collaborative news process. This time, specifically in response to the New York Times’ latest article that blames tech blogs for breaking stories early and spreading rumors without confirming sources or facts.

Jarvis proves that corporations can address crises, much more easily than in print media – all they have to do is quickly insert themselves into the online conversation.

 

In the original New York Times article, Damon Darlin wrote of two recent stories that broke online and then were quickly debunked:“Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items…”

Jarvis responded that the new news process confirms facts with their audiences instead of broadcasting them as true, and reintroduced the new news process. I believe this chart should be displayed on the side of any public relations or corporate communications professional’s cubicle:

As Jarvis explains:

“It’s a matter of timing, of the order of things, of the process of journalism. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”

So what does this disparity in news reporting mean to the future of public relations? That engaging and defending a corporate reputation doesn’t have to be as difficult as it appears. As long as companies successfully track their reputations online and know how to respond immediately, it’s much easier to clarify the initial blog post than if something untrue or misleading were written in print. Corporations can have an overwhelming part of the online conversation as long as they know what is being said about them in real time.

Aligning the Organization with PR

I spent this past Wednesday at the PR News Measurement Conference in Washington DC. The event was held at the National Press Club, an historical building where many US Presidents have frequented and discussed politics with journalists and stakeholders over the years.

What was discussed in great deal was both social media (surprise, surprise) and to my great pleasure alignment. Finally - a common theme is starting to emerge. One that touches on aligning PR with other organizational stakeholders. Today, new media is forcing today's corporations to re-think the way they manage PR and Corporate Affairs.

So how do we align the organization to be more effective and accountable? We do this by integrating PR and Corporate affairs with the extended organization. Give those outside PR the ability to monitor traditional and social media - in particular what they care about! For example, provide HR with the ability to monitor employee blogs and general HR related media. In addition to media, provide HR with the ability to view and collaborate (with PR) on the issues and projects that affect them. Give the extended organization the ability to listen and engage with media on issues that they are PASSIONATE about.

So who else in the organizations should "get aligned"? IR and Finance, Legal and Lines of Business (Think Brand Managers) to name a few. The botton line here is that PR can't monitor and manage the corporate brand anymore -- at least not alone. PR needs to share the load across departments, disciplines and geographies. Also, the old days of managing a brand from within corporate walls are over. Your brand and reputation now "lives" in the hands of millions of bloggers, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube users - and of course whatever new media application comes out next.

How do you align the organization? Do your research - the world has changed; invest in the time to find out how you can be a catalyst for change in your organization. Your brand is out their being talked about right now - think long (but not too long) and hard about how you're going to address this challenge.

Social Media Growing Up - Recap of The Reputation Institute Conference

Last week I attended the Reputation Institutes' 13th International Conference on Corporate Reputation, Brand, Identity and Competitiveness in Amsterdam. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion touched on brand reputation in today's electronic and PR 2.0 world of blogs, Twitter, forums, etc.

Both academic institutions and business participated in a rich program spanning several topics. Whether the topic was corporate social responsibility, managing stakeholder expectations, media impact on corporate reputation or innovation and reputation – a common theme emerged in most, if not all conversations -

"brand control has officially moved from within the walls of corporations into the social media world."

In my conversations, I often referenced “citizen soldiers” – the people (your stakeholders!) talking and influencing others about your brand in a highly viral and collaborative world.

The “mental transition” of both large corporations and esteemed educational institutions over the last 12 months has been significant with regards to the impact on brand reputation as a result of social media. Corporate brand reputation should continue to be the main focal point of research and innovation in the reputation management discipline – however, taking seriously the effects of social media on the brand is very much in the cross-hairs of many of the leading thinkers that focus on brand reputation management. I’m pleased to see the industry is recognizing the impact of the changing landscape and we are now seeing social media in the vernacular of many forward looking research.