When you start a business, you also start a timer that is counting down the days until your cash flow runs dry and your business fails.  Regardless of how well you are financed, who sits on your board or how good you are at keeping your costs under control, there is heightened significance to every moment, dollar or action when you are starting a business.

Every dollar or hour you commit has to have a discernible return.  The duration over when that return plays out may vary from company-to-company, but the return has to be there in a time that makes sense given your balance sheet and cash flow.

PR has traditionally been somewhat amorphous in terms of analyzing its return so it presents a challenge to start-ups.  Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that it’s important to get people talking about or with you but it’s not always easy to justify the costs (mostly time-based) involved with generating and participating in the conversation.

The evolution of PR has accelerated over the past decade and some would say it’s become more impactful and measurable.  Mid and large-market companies can now take a more quantitative approach to understanding the impact of their activities but the metrics are generally still one step away from the metric that start-ups should care about, which is dollars.

As a start-up on the clock, PR should be tied on some level to dollars generated because if PR isn’t helping to generate sales, then it’s not worth doing.

Starting from this premise, here are some additional thoughts on the how start-ups should think about PR:

1. Even if you’re not spending dollars on PR, you’re spending time on it  and time is the most valuable commodity you have when starting a business.  Your time could be spent building an awesome product, selling it to customers or supporting customers after the transaction to make sure they come back for more and tell their friends about your business.  Every hour you spend on PR is an hour you lose on actions that you know have a discernible ROI.

2. Derive multi-faceted value from singular activities – If you are going to spend an hour on PR, then make sure you get some benefit out of it.  If you spend that hour digging up a journalist to pitch, constructing a pitch, sending the pitch, not hearing back and then summarily forgetting that the hour just happened, then you have just failed.  If you use that pitch as the basis for a story that you share on your blog, then you have derived some value from the effort.

Every day, you are doing things outside of PR that can be repurposed to support PR and vice versa.  Keep that in mind.

If you just spent an hour writing an e-mail to a customer, explaining your perspective on something, then you have just created a story for your blog, which brings us to our next point.

3. PR can be mediated or disintermediated – It used to be that PR meant relying on someone to tell your story on your behalf to their audience.  Not any more.  You can tell your story to your audience yourself these days.  In fact, when you’re getting started, disintermediated PR is often times better because A. You aren’t relying on anyone else to communicate on your behalf so you can be sure that your content gets out there into the public sphere, B. You can get feedback that will help you tweak your product and your marketing/sales mix and C. you can target people that will actually care about your business or product and this is important because…

4. You aren’t that special – As Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.”  Most journalists don’t want to write about you because they know that it’s likely you won’t even be around in a couple years and they have heard the same pitch ten times today already.

Journalists don’t want to hear you telling them why your business or product is unique and special.  In fact, I don’t really want to hear that either.  What both the journalists and I want to hear, is something interesting that I haven’t heard before.  Don’t write 300 words about why you’re awesome and send that to a journalist, write 300 words about the research you did to determine that “awesome” is actually “not awesome” (and how this sparked your interest in starting a new brand called “not awesome”) and why that research is relevant in the context of a story I wrote last month.  Now we’re having a conversation and the conversation is important because. . .

5. A hit isn’t the result of a pitch, it’s a manifestation of the relationship that you build with your network - When you’re engaging in mediated PR, don’t go looking for one-night stands, look for buddies.  I’ve heard from my friends that one-night stands can be quite exciting.  You meet someone out, flirt, hook-up then never see them again.  You really don’t want to treat journalists or bloggers like this.

Journalists or bloggers are as tuned-in to your market as anyone.  Building a great relationship with one can be incredibly beneficial for a lot of reasons.  They can be an incredible source of information, they can point you in directions you never considered and can even lean on you for future stories and this is valuable because…

6. Even if you get a hit, it may not be a hit – I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs and small business owners who have spent too much time pitching, who have finally received a hit.  The ensuing conversation often times goes like this:

Entrepreneur: “Hey, I finally got a hit in [Insert prestigious publication of your choice].”

Me: That’s awesome, did you get a lot of new customers?

Entrepreneur: I got a couple.

On a side note, I really think the value of hits is in how the hit becomes a promotional tool by reinforcing your credibility (so pimp the brand where you got the hit all over your site) and in the organic search value the link from the hit brings to your site.  This is important because even after you have gotten a hit, you want to think about whether the benefit justified the cost and if it didn’t, then

7. If the experiment fails then stop and try something different – The most successful entrepreneurs who do their own PR are good because they try a bunch of things, stop doing things that don’t return and focus on things that do.  It seems like a simple equation but there are complexities, mostly in the execution of the tactic, the length of time that the tactic is executed and in the framework through which return is analyzed.

In general, PR can be an extremely valuable exercise if it is performed with the right mindset.  This is just a list of observations I’ve made, based on my own experience as well as from watching others.  What do you think?

That being said, I feel obliged to share some details from this last debacle…

Things got kicked-off at around 1PM (ET) yesterday when the cable went out, which I had been expecting for the past twelve hours (we did have a Hurricaine come through town).  I did notice that Comcast had somehow managed to make it through the actual storm itself, failing once the weather had normalized, but gave them the benefit of the doubt given the circumstances and decided to enjoy the beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I returned at about 4PM to find that the connection was still dead, so used my phone to check their site to see if anything had been posted.

Buried underneath a bunch of ads XFINITY was the following:

It must have been hard for them to part with this space that could have been dedicated to selling XFinity

The informational page itself was a pretty good example of a company not taking the Internet very seriously.

It contained some tips for what to do before and after the hurricane including this gem for what not to do after the storm: Be careful to not cut cable lines as you trim trees and clear debris.  Thanks Comcast, I didn’t know you should avoid cutting cable lines as you trim hedges after a storm.

I did find it slightly ironic that one of the tips was, “Be prepared and have an emergency plan in place. If you don’t have a plan, or don’t know how to make one, click here to learn more.”  

What was Comcast’s emergency plan?  Where was all the information showing me what you are doing to ensure minimal downtime in the wake of the storm.  Why are you telling me not to cut cable lines?

Continuing down the page, I couldn’t help but laugh to find this diagram that apparently explained how the cable system worked:

Missing the part where Comcast executives poop on customer’s heads

Their joke of a page was missing any actual useful information such as A. the scope of the issue, B. estimated downtime and C. What Comcast was actually doing to help restore connectivity.

Compare this to the Pepco Web site, which dedicated their entire homepage to keeping customers updated on their efforts and even offered customers a dynamic outage map, which detailed the scope of the issue, actual numbers of affected customers and outages and an estimate for when power would be restored.

Not bad for a company with a monopoly

Realizing that the Comcast Web site was a complete waste of my time, I headed to Twitter, where I knew Comcast had been making an effort over the past few years to better connect with customers.   I was sort of amused to see that @comcastcares had decided to split town.

I’d also leave town during storms if I worked for Comcast support

As a last resort, I picked up the phone and called Comcast and must admit that I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to speak with a customer rep. after only a few minutes.  ”Maybe my luck with Comcast is changing,” I thought to myself.

The rep was offshore but very pleasant, well-spoken and seemed to actually care about me (I am susceptible to faking).

The downside to the interaction was that she answered every one of my questions by saying, “Sir, all I can tell you is that we are doing everything possible to resolve the situation.”  I really would have loved to know what areas they were working on, what their restoration plan involved and a general estimate of how long I could expect my power to be down but I guess that’s a fantasy.  Interestingly enough, she did reveal that only about 17% of households in the DC area had access, which was something.  She also did assure me that all customers who lost service during the outage would be reimbursed (provided they called back in once service had been restored).  I thanked her and got off the phone after a few minutes of not getting anywhere.

Back on Twitter, I was amused to find that XFinity had begun talking about the cable lineup for the evening.  I decided to respond, which resulted in this little exchange:

I wasn’t the only upset customer on Twitter.  In fact, the combination of the service outage and mobile access to Twitter culminated in a pretty hostile online environment for Comcast:

So, just to avoid making this a completely negative post, here are some things I think that Comcast could have done differently:

1. Next time, have an actual plan and tell customers what it is - I’d like to believe that Comcast did actually did have a plan that included collaborating with local utilities and staffing up to minimize downtime.  Educating customers on some key points of the actual plan would have demonstrated that there was substance behind Comcast’s general messaging.

2. Give customers actual information – What is worse than a pissed off customer?  A pissed off customer in the dark.  It is inevitable that outages are going to happen but next time, provide customers with actual information.  Repeatedly telling customers, “We are working on it,” and showcasing a diagram from the 80′s that explains how the cable system works doesn’t help much.

3. Proactively credit customers for the outage – This may sound insane to anyone at Comcast who is tied to revenue, but I truly believe that proactively compensating customers for outages will ultimately be counterbalanced by reduced matriculation to competitive service providers.  It’s at least worth testing.  When you are in the midst of an outage you are already pissed off, the last thing you want is to be told that you should call in once service is restored to request a reimbursement for lost service.

4. Think about freezing advertising during outage periods – I shouldn’t have to hear radio ads telling me about the awesome new packages you are offering customers when your service doesn’t work.  I know you can’t really control all communications channels but you should be able to exert some control over the radio ads.   Use the ad inventory to tell customers what you are doing to get them back online.  That’s going to be better advertising that telling a city of people about Xfinity when nothing is working.

5. Maybe get someone who isn’t on vacation to be your first POC online – I find it laughable that a guy with the twitter handle “comcastcares” was on vacation during the outage.  Consider creating an ongoing channel that isn’t tied to one individual and have several people manning the channel and providing meaningful updates.  On a side note, it’s a little sad that another one of your social media folks (@xfinity_tv) referred me to a guy on vacation.  Take social media more seriously.

The announcement presents several examples of a newsroom implementation, including one for a company called Lake Champlain Chocolates, which looks like this:

For me, the immediate question is how this is fundamentally different from the standard Facebook wall:

My initial impression is that the differences are cosmetic.  I do like the look and feel of the newsroom tab and the fact that the Pitchengine app automatically renders from a feed however there are a variety of existing applications that will essentially do the same thing – except they are free.  With no clear differentiators, I have a hard time understanding the $499 price tag.  Pitchengine might have been better off simply giving this app away for free or packaging it into one of their subscriptions until they had gained enough customer adoption and feedback to better understand how they could bring both differentiation and value to the product.

The issues I see with differentiating the Newsroom are symptomatic of a deeper challenge that PitchEngine faces, which is differentiating from many of the free content management systems that are available such as WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous.  PitchEngine has managed to create momentum through a combination of savvy marketing, influencer relations, good UX and a freemium approach.  That all being said, on a fundamental level, the differentiators between PitchEngine and free (or cheaper) CMS tools aren’t terribly significant.  In fact, you could make an argument for why a tool like WordPress may actually be better for most of the use cases that PitchEngine is attempting to fulfill.  It will certainly be interesting to see how they differentiate from these types of tools moving forward.

]]> http://www.newinfluencer.com/pitchengines-newsroom-for-facebook/feed/ 0 http://www.newinfluencer.com/previewing-the-prweb-news-release-template/ http://www.newinfluencer.com/previewing-the-prweb-news-release-template/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 15:33:12 +0000 Jiyan http://www.newinfluencer.com/?p=391 Today we posted a sneak preview of the upcoming PRWeb news release template to the PRWeb blog.  The template has been in the lab for quite some time so I’m certainly excited we are getting close to a point where we will be getting it into the hands of customers.  During the exploration process, we received fantastic feedback from a variety of sources including Lee Odden, Brian Solis, Joe Beaulaurier, Shel Holtz, and Greg Jarboe.  We’ll be collecting feedback over at the PRWeb blog so feel free to go over there and leave your two cents.

Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your full job title and role at PRWeb.com?

Jiyan Wei (JW): I’m the Director of Product Management – I drive product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb and support strategic business planning, partnerships, marketing and sales. It is sort of like being the Sous Chef at a restaurant. You work closely with your developers (cooks in the kitchen) to create a product and then support the waiters and waitresses (marketing & sales) who go out and sell the product. Ultimately you report to the head chef (a CMO or CTO) and the owners of the restaurant (executive team, investors).

SMP: Briefly, tell us about PRWeb.com and its target audience

JW: PRWeb.com takes an old tool in the PR toolkit – the press release – and turns it upside down.  Old PR is trying to hit journalists and media hoping they will write a story about you; PRWeb is about helping our clients get their message directly to the audience through the Internet.

Because we primarily leverage Internet channels (instead of closed, proprietary networks) we are able to deliver a product at a significantly lower cost than many other “traditional” newswires.  This means our audience ranges from technically innovative global companies all the way down to your Main Street mom-and-pop shops, like plumbers, wedding-planners and retail stores.

SMP: What was the most challenging part of building the service (and after the acquisition)?

JW: Vocus (PRWeb’s parent company, NASDAQ: VOCS) a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management, and tends to have some very polished clients  but the majority of PRWeb customers actually are small business owners and marketers.  These segments all have different requirements and determine ROI in different ways.  Developing a depth of understanding for these new segments and then building a product that would satisfy everyone was and continues to be one of the most challenging – and exciting – parts of building the service.

Read the full interview

The question was from a guy about to launch a Bed & Breakfast in Colorado and was interested in knowing whether social media could be an appropriate marketing tactic to target “people interested in traveling for pleasure and honeymooners.”

There are probably other tactics that might be more effective at driving new customer acquisition at the outset. For instance, there is probably a traditional public relations strategy somewhere in your plan that would look to target domestic travel channels and channels for newlyweds and honeymooners. I would certainly think social media could play an important role in your public relations strategy because I’m sure there are loads of non-traditional media influencers who are worth targeting. In fact, I’d even consider doing an event where you get together a list of key influencers in your space and simply comp. them a weekend. There may be also a SEM strategy that drives customer acquisition in spaces like “bed & breakfast” & Colorado. What’s more, social media can probably be used as a tactic to facilitate this broader SEM strategy.

However, the role I think social media can play outside of PR and SEM for your business is to facilitate engagement between you and the individuals in your personal social network.

First, let me clarify what I mean by ‘social network’ because I’m not referring to MySpace or Facebook. The first step is to detach the concept of ‘social networking’ from any of the various forms it takes. These are tools that facilitate interactions in real breathing, living social networks however they are not themselves social networks. They can facilitate strong network connections and create weak ones but they aren’t places where true, meaningful interactions take place (in general) and solid network connections grow.

Your social network is the Web of connections you compile over time through meaningful interactions with others. In the case of your business, it will be the customers you acquire and the influencers you come into contact with as the result of your broader marketing efforts.

Your social media strategy should be aimed at facilitating engagement with these people.

Now the nature of who these people are and where they interact is key because knowing this will allow you to match your tools to your network. For us (PRWeb), Twitter is an important tool because the adoption rate of Twitter is high with many of our customers. Through our Twitter account we are able to send out quick, informal announcements to a large segment of our social network. However, my instinct would be that Twitter might not be the best tool to facilitate network connections among travelers and Honeymooners who have visited your B&B in Colorado (at this point in time).

I’ll end with what I believe to be a good example of a brick and mortar that has a social media approach that works well with its business, Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane, Virginia. Their primary channels used to communicate with their social network include their Web site and e-mail list.

Now, the way social media has played into their overall marketing efforts has been as a component of their PR strategy. Early on, they reached out to various influencers who cover what’s going on in the DC-area (which is how I came into contact with them originally) and invited them to visit their winery. They created strong relationships with these influencers and have gained considerable blogosphere press as a result. One of the keys here is that they understood the underlying importance of forging strong network connections through offline interactions. Since they have forged some strong relationships with local influencers, a next step for them might involve launching a blog that allows them to provide updates to those local influencers who are already part of their social network.

The underlying takeaway from all this is that Barrel Oak didn’t simply launch a blog, Facebook page, etc. They took careful measure of what the existing environment was like and used tools (e-mail / Web site) appropriate for their social network. Social media did play into their overall strategy but more as a component of their PR efforts.

I chatted with John Mulligan of SEO-PR about the new product at SES in New York.

Some of the top-line findings:

• The goals for online press releases have expanded beyond the traditional objectives of increasing an organization’s visibility and credibility and announcing news, to include reaching customers directly with marketing and sales messages, creating online content, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Reaching bloggers and new media outlets has become nearly as important as reaching traditional media.
• The top four measures of success for online press releases include: 1) the number of times the release is republished on websites; 2) the number of times the release is viewed online; 3) the publication of an article based on the release; 4) media interviews resulting from the release.

For more information visit the press release on PRWeb.

Ryan and I go way back and even spent time working together in the online PR industry for a few years doing some pretty exciting things with blogs during the formative years of the blogosphere. Naturally I wasn’t surprised when he recently orchestrated one of the more impressive PR campaigns I have seen in a while via social media.

Using ImportGenius to analyze Apple’s shipping records he saw that they had been importing unusually large quantities of “electronic computers,” a classification that he pointed out had never been declared before on their shipping papers. Ryan put together an article encapsulating his theory that Apple was importing the next generation of iPhone and posted it onto the ImportGenius blog as well as a few social bookmark sites he participated in.

It wasn’t long until several of the tech blogs picked-up on the story including TechCrunch. From there, the story blew up, making its way to the online versions of the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, Forbes, the New York Times and scores of other mainstream online publications.

What fascinated me about the situation was the way the story became viral through social media channels.

I’m sure stories like this send shivers down the spine of those of us in the newswire industry because they bring to life the potential in social media to viralize (I just made up that word) news through channels that are 100% free.

I was reminded of the Social Media Release panel discussion that took place at the NewComm Forum last year (Mike Keliher offers a good recap.) in which one member of the audience laid-into the newswire representatives over their pricing – pointing out that he managed to create buzz by posting a news release to Facebook.

At the time remember thinking his argument was a little bit silly but it actually serves to help frame the dynamic that I am about to propose, that Viral plus Vocal Equals Visible.

What this matrix hopefully describes is how the virality (a news stories’ intrinsic likelihood to go viral) of a story and the vocality (how vocally the story is described) of a story are related. I realize that this takes into account a lot of assumptions (like the assumption that some stories are more likely to become viral than others) but I’m going to leave these aside for now (after all this is a blog and not an academic paper).

So Ryan’s blog article would be in quadrant A because the story has a high virality (it is a kick-ass story) but low vocality (he posted it on a blog that not many people read). Now, he juiced the vocality of the story a bit by adding it to several social bookmark sites and that provided all the fodder necessary for the story to go viral.

If his story had been lame and uninteresting it would have fallen into quadrant C (low virality and low vocality). On the other hand, you can take a story that is terribly written and boring and put it through every newswire in existence and it still won’t catch fire.

Or think about it another way: lets say you are trying to start a fire. If the material is highly combustible (high potential to go viral) you don’t need much of a spark. If, on the other hand, the material is not as combustible then you’re going to need more of a spark.

Now, the question is what composes the virality and vocality of a news story?

That is a question for another day. . .

The top-line findings included:

• Press releases are increasingly a tool for marketing and sales – The press release is becoming a communications tool for both public relations and marketing professionals alike. Approximately one-third of respondents were marketing professionals (32.9%); 30% were public relations professionals. Small business owners and self-employed individuals accounted for 23.7% of those who issue online press releases, according to the survey.
• Additional goals and priorities for press releases are emerging – In addition to reaching the press and announcing news, today’s top priorities for those issuing online press releases include: increasing visibility and credibility for the organization, directly reaching customers, making content available to online users, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• The ascension of bloggers and new media – Bloggers have joined traditional media as highly valued targets. Respondents indicated that reaching bloggers and new media outlets were nearly as high a priority as reaching traditional media. Seventy-three percent indicated that it is “important to very important” to reach traditional media via their online press releases while 67.7% indicated that it is “important to very important” to reach bloggers and new media outlets. For small business owners, reaching bloggers and social media sites was slightly more important than reaching traditional media.
• Measures of value and success are changing – Respondents rank their top measures of value for their online press releases by how many times the press release is published on other websites and the number of online views of the release. Both of these metrics rated higher than articles or media interview requests based on the release. In fact, respondents indicated that the most important placements for the releases are online news aggregators, such as Google News, Yahoo News and online news sites like Reuters and Topix, followed by blogs and social media sites. In addition, respondents noted that the two most valuable aspects of issuing online news releases is the opportunity for SEO and the opportunity to reach both consumers and customers directly, as well as traditional media.
• PR and marketing professionals have different priorities and perspectives – Respondents who identified themselves as public relations professionals noted they primarily use online press releases to announce news and enhance thought leadership, while respondents who identified themselves as marketing professionals stated their priorities as SEO optimization for the organization’s website and reaching customers and consumers. Small business owners stated that they use online press releases as a sales tool to reach customers and consumers.
• Hard measures of value and success are a challenge – Respondents stated that their top challenges in maximizing the value of issuing online press releases include: “cutting through the clutter,” targeting and distribution, affordability and measurement and metrics.

Jen McClure will be presenting our findings in more detail at our annual users conference taking place this week.

News Coverage:

• Direct News, Small firms ‘targeting bloggers with news’
• Business Feet, Bloggers ‘as important as the press’ for business