Hoosier PRSA Blog

4 Tips to Do More With Less

A recent event hosted by our Hoosier Chapter of Public Relations Society of America and the Fort Wayne Advertising Federation discussed how companies can “Do More With Less.” In today’s uncertain economy, with resources slimming and budgets tightening, how can we give our clients top quality work with less staff, a smaller budget and limited resources?

A panel of several professionals from marketing, public relations and advertising got together to hash it out and give some examples and advice.  Here’s what we learned:

1. Rely on interns. Interns are an untapped resource for most businesses. They are a group that is especially eager for hands-on experience; lean on them to help execute day-to-day tasks leaving more of your time for bigger pictures and strategic moves.
   
   
2. Get specific. Narrow down your target audiences and re-evaluate again in order to determine whether your campaign or strategic plan will actually provide the ROI that your client is expecting. Make sure you are targeting the right crowd from day one. Spend your money where you’re sure it will be paid back.
   
   
3. Move online. Think about taking your traditional marketing campaigns online. Toss out direct mailers and implement e-blasts and social media strategies that can accomplish the same goal at a much smaller cost.
   
   
4. Rely on outside partnerships. Countless different industries are slimming down and companies are looking more and more to each other to help out these days. Think about asking your business partners to team up more often. Think — “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” — and no one spends a dime, pretty smart.
   
   

Time To Chill: What Social Media Means After the Hype Cycle

Okay. The excitement is over for us public relations professionals. Like children on Christmas morning, we've had our time to play with social media toys. Now what? With guest Jason Falls as its headlining speaker, The Social Media Club of Indianapolis is hosting its first event of 2010 on November 17 at The Jazz Kitchen. 

"Now that we're over the hype cycle of blogs and social networks," said Duncan Alney, president of Firebelly Marketing, "we've seen the coolness and the power." Duncan says that social media is a set of powerful communication tools that helps us stay connected with our stakeholders.

Blog, Facebook, Twitter and the assortment of other tools opens the doopr to better two-way communication between organizations and the people they serve and those it affects. Along with Jason Falls, who runs Social Media Explorer, there will be a plenty to learn at The Social Media Club event.

Dave Morse, E-Marketing Manager from Delta Faucet will be sharing what that company is doing with social media. And, Chantelle Flannery, Co-Author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies will share why blogging is the best social strategy

So lets get down to business of using the channel to communicate effectively with our audiences. No more pixie dust. It's not rocket science but it takes planning, discipline, integration, and measurable results to do a good job. If you're responsible for social media marketing within the overall mix, this is a presentation you cannot miss!

Check out The Social Media Club Indianapolis Facebook Fan Page for more details.

Is Facebook Already Past Its Prime?

Last week I received a Facebook friend request. Ordinarily that wouldn’t merit a blog post – until I realized who it was from.

Harry is a neighbor of my parents who is not exactly what I would call “technologically savvy.” He’s a great guy, but he’s a retired factory worker from small-town Wisconsin who, until I got this request, I thought had never touched a computer.

I guess I shouldn’t be all that shocked since Baby Boomers are the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook. What is interesting is how this is affecting youth. They are, after all, the trend setters.

According to a USA Today article on the topic (http://usat.ly/parentsonfacebook), parents being on Facebook create a real conundrum for teens. Do they have to “friend” their parents? If so, are there rules? In addition, the widespread acceptance of Facebook makes it less cool for youth and a study posted on Mashable (http://bit.ly/teensleavingfacebook) found many are facing “Facebook fatigue.”

How this will affect Facebook going forward will be interesting. Facebook fully entrenched itself as a valuable asset to the business community with the advent of pages. But if the next generation doesn’t embrace Facebook as adults, pages will become an ineffective communications tool.

Is Facebook going away anytime soon? Of course not. Will Facebook be around forever? Nope. Our grandparents and parents could never have imagined a time when a home phone and phonebook were not needed, and in due time new technology will render Facebook obsolete too.

In the meantime, the disenfranchisement of youth seems to be the first chink in Facebook’s once seemingly impenetrable armor. Many more challenges (I’m looking at you, Google) are sure to come as the social landscape continues to evolve and I can’t help but wonder if, and how, Facebook will remain relevant.

PR industry rebounding better than most

Like every other industry on earth, recent economic hardships have taken their toll on public relations. Some PR professionals are without work, many recent grads have yet to find work, and many gainfully employed practitioners claim they’ll start job searching as soon as the market turns around.

Interestingly, however, research supports the fact that PR is becoming more important, more sought-after, and rebounding faster than the average sector.

Public relations spending will top $3.4 billion in 2010, an increase of 3 percent over 2009, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private-equity firm that publishes annual reports on the state of the PR industry. Additionally, 75 percent of the 59 agency CEOs and CFOs surveyed by the Council of PR firms reported growth in the first half of 2010 vs. 21 percent in 2009.  

No doubt other industries are watching this trend with at least a little jealousy and asking themselves how PR is making progress in such a tough environment. A quick look at how technology is changing the way consumers form opinions is the right place start examining the PR industry’s success.

A brand is the sum of its conversations, and new technologies are turning these conversations into individual relationships. Considering that public relations is about building relationships, driving conversation and message control; the growing prevalence of these technologies means new and increasing opportunities for the industry. Whereas before the connection between PR practitioners and target audiences was one-to-many, it’s quickly becoming one-to-one. Not surprisingly, these same factors are also driving ROI.

The savvy PR practitioner should own these new social and digital distribution channels because they’re based on foundational elements of good public relations: relationships and conversation. Sure they’re online and revolve around some sort of technology, but it’s just a delivery vehicle, like the fax machine once was. This is an evolution of consumption, but the principles remain the same. It’s about listening, understanding the medium and creating consistent messaging that resonates with consumers.

Tom Harrison, chairman and CEO Omnicom Group's Diversified Agency Services, said in a recent AdAge article that the improvement (in the PR industry) is due to the dual role PR plays for marketers. "PR can prepare a brand or product for its target market while also preparing the market for that new brand or product. There isn't another discipline in all of communications services that can do that for a brand."

Richard Edleman, agrees. "We're seeing the combining of corporate reputation and brand marketing and that plays to PR's strengths.”

He’s spot on, creating consistency between the push and the pull, the earned and the owned, events and grass-roots, paid and social, is exactly what great public relations can bring to the table ­­-- one voice. 

It’s the increase in touch points that’s driving the growth in the public relations industry. Social and digital platforms, as well as word-of-mouth marketing, and creating evangelists out of consumers and employees, all play directly into the PR wheelhouse.  

But that’s not to say the PR business is getting easier. Message alignment across the growing number of channels is becoming more difficult, but is also the key to successful branding. Focusing on making new technologies support longstanding PR principles such as, consistency and transparency, credibility, believability and reciprocity will earn the business relationships that yield the best ROI.

Do you think the public relations industryis in an opportune position? Is your company, or one you’re familiar with, effectively integrating its communications?

If so, tell us your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

Mobile Solutions for the Public Relations Professional - There's an App for That!

When I was asked to contribute a blog this week, a brief moment of panic rushed over me. Like any PR professional, my week was already full with two big events to manage, a reporter interview to coordinate, a social media campaign to launch, and a number of other day-to-day activities to tend to. All of this had to be done, despite the fact that most of my time would be spent traveling from place to place. With all this juggling of responsibilities, I wondered how on earth I would be able accomplish it all. Taking a deep breath, I quickly accessed my resources, my tools, and my calendar. It was then that it hit me - what would I ever do without my mobile phone? As the now famous Apple advertisement goes, there's an ap for that, and there really is.

So many communications tools have impacted the PR profession over the past few years, including Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The list is endless. To stay at the top of our game, expectations are high for us to not only be aware of these tools, but to become active users as well. With an ever-growing list of responsibilities, where's the time to send the expected number of tweets and post the number of blogs per day/week/month? How do we make the time to fully immerse ourselves? All of this seems much less overwhelming with the right mobile phone.

While people have been answering e-mails through their mobile phones for years, it's a rather recent development to be able to post tweets, review PowerPoint presentations, book airline tickets, and monitor the news at the same time. Application porting through devices like the iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and J2ME-based phones can provide users with instant access to information at any given time, enabling us to perform key tasks while on the move. These phones are available through a variety of providers now, including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

So what is the capacity of a mobile phone? Well, the opportunities seem endless. Apps are being created on a daily basis. Retailers are using mobile phones as cash registers. Sales clerks can literally check inventories, process transactions and drive customer loyalty programs through mobile applications. They are keeping an image library of items you've purchased in order to sale you the red shoes to match that red sweater you bought last week. Recently been in a car accident? Insurance companies are now offering applications, free of charge, that allow you to file claims instantaneously and call a tow truck through the touch of a few buttons.

Here are a few more examples:

 

So, what tools are PR professionals using to to handle day-to-day responsibilities? Personally, I have apps for a variety of social media tools and news feeds, as well as standard access to the Microsoft Office Suite, including Outlook. Nevertheless, I am confident there are many other tools I could and should be using. Let me know what apps you've discovered, as this is one evolving technology platform that I truly welcome. Mobile phones allow me to increase effectiveness and improve responsiveness with minimal effort.

I look forward to hearing about the treasured apps you've found. 

(Re)Defining Your Brand on Social Media

Every good PR practitioner knows strategic planning is the bread and butter of a good campaign.  That also holds true for a social media campaign.  Social media strategic planning for your company, or your brand, requires more than simply scheduling tweets, posts and having a system for following and un-following people.  In order to have a cohesive, strategic social media plan you must evaluate your brand and define, “Who will you be online and who will others perceive you to be?”

Define your social media brand

You know your company’s brand like the back of your hand.  You can repeat it as a mantra and explain it to your publics in a hundred different ways.  Defining the brand on social media is not re-defining your company brand; it is defining a personality and a purpose for your brand online.

For example:  The Indianapolis Indians brand is, “Professional baseball as affordable, memorable family fun.”

Online we are still professional baseball as affordable, memorable family fun – but we needed to narrow that down and define our purpose for taking the Tribe into the social media world.

Our online brand purpose is to engage Indians fans at the ballpark and at home, as well to provide a concierge-type customer service for our fans.  We capitalize on the strong affinity our brand has by engaging and targeting our core audience whenever posting content.  We operate with a goal of current and core fan engagement rather than the goal of introducing our brand to new fans through social media. 

Define your online brand by narrowing down one to three goals that you want to accomplish so your tweets and posts don’t come out scattered or one-sided and so your followers get to know your personality and what to expect when they visit your pages.

You can always redefine, refine and reshape your goals as needed, but creating an online personality that people can count on will help to build your following and create consistency.

Multiple personalities

Be aware of when you are interjecting your own personality into you’re brand’s posts and tweets.  Potential followers can easily be alienated when “@BrandX” tweets a joke making fun of “@JoeSmith”.  The two people may be old friends who joke all the time – but potential followers don’t know that.  From the outside it appears that “@BrandX” is attacking “@JoeSmith.” 

Humor, jokes and fun commentary are always more enjoyable than dry content, so don’t be too cautious of injecting humanity; just be aware that mixing business and pleasure under your brand’s name can deter potential customers if you get too personal.

On the Indians Twitter and Facebook pages we make the conscious decision not to identify the staff member posting.  We guard the “personality” of the Indians brand online by keeping the tone consistent, giving any emotionally charged fans information on how to contact an employee directly and by not tagging each post with the posting employee’s name.

The extent that you will choose to import your own name, photo and other personal elements will vary based on what is right for your brand.  There is not magic formula for knowing what is right – just look at your posts from a potential customer’s perspective before posting.

At the Indians we have been able to separate our social media in to the official Twitter and Facebook pages.  At the same time, we encourage the staff to promote the brand and the team – in their own words – on their own blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

In the end, trial and error will create the best system for your brand.  It’s all about building a conversation and once you have that, your fans will be more than eager to let you know what they like and don’t like about what you are posting.

PR's Role in the Wild West of Online Comments

Over the past decade, we have all witnessed a transformation in the way news is consumed. The general public is increasingly getting its news online, and in the past five years, many are getting their news via social media websites and blogs.

This has had an obvious effect on the public relations professional, particularly those who practice media relations. Yet in addition to the shrinking traditional news opportunities, there is a new layer of media relations, managing online comments.

BP is a great example of how things have gotten out of control for its PR team with the popularity of a fake Twitter account that spouts humorous statements that would never come from the actual company.

Perhaps the wildest of the wild west of online media are the comments on online news stories. People will say anything with little to no regard for their fellow man. Those who comment are infamous for spouting racist, insensitive, unintelligent and/or extremist points of view, all under the guise of the anonymous user account.

I can think of few places as uncivilized as the comments section of a online news story or editorial and it doesn’t matter if it’s about politics, community, religion, sports or entertainment. Just last week, I read horrible statements in the comments section of a story on the passing of longtime journalist Daniel Schorr. 

This is one reason I found the absence of an online comments section on a recent Matthew Tully column refreshing.

In previous decades, readers would respond to a story by writing a letter to the editor. If the response was intelligent, thought-provoking, advanced the conversation and worthy of publication, the newspaper would print it on its editorial page.

That opportunity is still there, but with a shrinking print subscriber base, these civil responses often go unnoticed while the online comments take center stage.

In the PR profession, we are often the ones asked to write a letter to the editor or an op-ed (you can debate the ghostwriting aspect amongst yourselves). Yet, how often are we contributing to online comments?

More and more professional communicators are finding themselves managing their online reputations on social media sites, but how are they managing their organization’s or client’s reputation in the comments section of news stories and blogs? Is there a place for a media relations strategy in the wild west of online comments?

PR Getting Social Media Budgets

"For us in the social media industry," writes Laura Fisher of Simply Zest, "we’ll all be familiar with the landgrab that’s currently going on. Ever since the concept of social media emerged, different industries have tried to claim it as their own, be it marketing, PR, advertising or search."

But a study by the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism says PR is winning the battle of social media budget control. 

Here's the break down:

• 25.4% of corporate participants in the survey gave 81-100% budgetary control of social media to PR/Comms.
• 12.6% claiming they gave the same amount of control to marketing,

It looks like PR is winning. No?

Because social media lends itself to providing conversation platforms, no surprise public relations professionals are better at this, and senior management has taken note. Interesting, however, I maintain that social media marketing is different than social PR. Here's why. Different segments of communication take a different approach to social media. Web designers build apps, PR invites bloggers to a launch, and advertisers dump money into buying their fans.

So what does this mean for public relations?

Some might ask: "Who owns social media, then?" And the problem is in the question. Everyone owns social media. So PR should continue to do its part well -- building, growing and maintaining relationships and community -- and work with web designers to create apps, and marketing people to buy fans.

Besides generating revenue for our clients, the bottom line for PR professionals using social media is to leverage it to create easier communication channels between stakeholders, publics, and organizations.

On Being Green

By Bob Dittmer

Earth Day – Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. 40 years of concentrating one day on a celebration of the natural resources we have been given with the good earth. What have we accomplished? For some, very little; for others, a great deal. For all of us in public relations, we need to continue to remember what Earth Day symbolizes.

Earth Day reminds us – and our clients and companies and organizations – that we all have a responsibility to sustain our environment. Unfortunately, for many in public relations that all too often translates into “telling people” about what we are doing. We all too often spend our efforts in communicating the “green’ things our companies are doing. And as far as that goes, it’s fine.

But is it enough?

A true celebration of Earth Day, and a true exercise of public relations, might be spending more time changing the behaviors of our own organizations. It is no longer enough to “talk the talk.” We need to “walk the walk.”

Public relations professionals, those, members of an organization most closely attuned to the public’s sentiment and concerns, should be agents for change in organizations. Publics are clearly demanding more responsible stewardship of our natural resources. Assessing that, discovering ways to allow companies to meet that expectation, and convincing organizational leadership is one of the key roles of public relations today. That’s thinking and acting strategically. That’s bringing real value to organizations.

Anyone can beat their chest and proclaim their “greenness.” But what we know best, and we constantly have confirmed for us, is that behaviors are communication. Behaving in an environmentally responsible way communicates far more effectively than just talking about it.

So today, Earth Day 2010, I challenge all of you to find one or more ways your organization (or clients) can more responsibly manage natural resources you use. Today, worry less about how you create the right “message,” and more about the actual behavior your organization will present to its publics. Worry less about talking about “sustainability” or “stewardship” and more about new ideas that could be implemented in your organization.

Pick your Shade of Green, and color it in. Don’t tell people about it, just do it. And let the behavior be your communication.

Remember, the publics we are concerned with will ultimately judge us not by the words we use but by the behaviors we present to them. Ask Tiger Woods; or John Edwards; or Toyota; or…

Behavior is Communication. Be judged by your walk, not by your talk.

Bob Dittmer, APR is co-author of Shades of Green (with Julie Vincent, APR) and Director of Public Relations Studies at IUPUI.  Both are past presidents of the Hoosier Chapter of PRSA.

Roll Call! Social Media Boot Camp Recap.

Attendees at the Boot Camp got a hands-on approach to social media tools this past Saturday. Speakers shared tips, tricks and tactics for engaging in Twitter, Facebook and blogging.

Seasoned pros to students attended the event looking to gain an understanding of the social media world. With THOUSANDS of social networking sites available, our speakers helped narrow down the field.

Our social media pros, just like social media world, knew how to provide a lot of information! Here are some tips we learned from communication professionals:

From: Mathew Chandler , Raidious , Blogging 101

• Keep the copy short and sweet. Web readers don't stay for very long.

•  Media releases for blogging should still follow inverted pyramid model.

•  Use links! It helps improve SEO and is easy for readers to find information.

From: Erik Deckers , Pro Blogging Service, Blogging 101

•  To write quickly – follow these easy steps: plan, plow through, fill it in later, write more often, and keep it short.

•  To write effectively – write for a clever 12-year-old and be clear.

•  To write for SEO – It’s all about the keywords.

From: Kristofer Karol, National Sports Journalism Center, Twitter 101

•  Use hash tags to connect your tweets with the thousands of other tweets that are on the same subject.

•  Two great ways to evaluate a Twitter feed are www.trendistic.com and www.twittergrader.com

•  Set up an RSS feed to your Twitter account using www.twitterfeed.com

•  Use the list feature to group types of Twitter accounts you choose to follow.

From: Chad  Richards, Firebelly Marketing, Facebook 101

• 1 in 4 page views on the Internet are from Facebook.

•  Pages are the best Facebook application for a company.

• With landing pages, user generated content, apps, custom tabs, custom URLs, and Twitter integration – companies can reach out to their fans.

• Facebook analytics are the best way to measure success and reach on Facebook.

Want more information on these social media tools? Feel free to contact our speakers:

Blogging :

Matthew Chandler - chandler@raidious.com  

Erik Deckers  - edeckers@gmail.com

Twitter:

Kristofer Karol -  kkarol@umail.iu.edu

Facebook:

Chad Richards - chad@firebellymarketing.com