Keeping Prospects Interested When It Comes to Price
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Working prices into a PR services or agency presentation can be awkward or uncomfortable. In David Newman’s article 17 Great Answers to ‘How Much Do You Charge?’ some of the answers are quite bold, daring and even snippy, but many will keep prospective clients interested while postponing giving an actual answer.
One smooth answer: “Let’s talk about what you’re trying to accomplish first, and then we’ll work out some pricing options based on that.” Bottom line: If your company has the ability to be flexible, make sure to play that card. For the quick-witted: “The friends and family rate might apply, but we’re not friends yet – do you mind if I ask you some questions to help us answer the pricing question?”
Media Monitoring News – May 2013, Issue #4
0Feature Article: Online Reputation Management: The Dark Side, Learning from Mistakes and Tips for Success
Journalists Need to View the PR Perspective
The Canadian Journalism Project
PR pros invest copious time studying what journalists do and how they think, while journalists have little understanding of how PR works. Many journalists perceive PR practitioners as disloyal “masters of spin.” Deeper study of PR practices and earned media among journalism students would help to rectify that misimpression, contends Ira Basen, a professor with a 30-year career in journalism. In Why All Journalists Should Study Public Relations, Basen states that journalists need a more reality-based look at the relationship between PR and the press — if only because many journalism majors will end up working in PR. Bottom line: A stronger relationship based on mutual understanding will benefit PR, journalism and the public.
LARA: The PR Strategy Secret — Listen, Analyze, Relate and Act
Bulldog Reporter
Why are some PR efforts destined for failure? The culprit is often lack of strategy, Brian Pittman asserts in LARA Is Not Your Intern: It’s a Successful Online PR Strategy. A solid strategy is one that boils down to LARA (Listening, Analyzing, Relating and Acting). Pittman explains each step in detail: Listening is more than reading your media mentions — it requires social tracking and profiling tools to understand how customers are behaving and what they are saying. If your PR strategy is hitting some bumps, it may be worthwhile to find how to integrate the remaining steps.
Pitching Strategies That Win Over Bloggers and Journalists
WebInkNow
In How to Pitch a Blogger, David Meerman Scott urges PR pros to go the extra mile to distinguish their pitches above all the hundreds of spam emails that bloggers receive every week. Scott’s suggestions are short and to the point (like your pitch should be, he writes). First, read the blog to discover the blogger’s passion and send something that targets the blogger’s interests. Always personalize; never open with “Dear Blogger,” he urges, and assure your subject line is specific. Reminder: Links are okay, email attachments are not.
Online Reputation Management:
0The Dark Side, Learning from Mistakes and Tips for Success
There’s more than negative reviews to worry about when it comes to online reputation management.
The Dark Side of Reputation Management: How It Affects Your Business warns PR pros of reputation management extortionists who dig into company histories, release photos of employee mugshots and offer to remove the information for a fee. The article interviews Richart Ruddie, CEO of ProfileDefenders.com, who suggests companies affected by a “mugshot extortionist” thwart the attempts by creating positive images of the employees on image galleries that will naturally push down the negative photos. Then, seek appropriate legal counsel if necessary. More proactively, it’s best to check out job candidates online before hiring.
In similar situations, some companies have turned to Google’s Blackhat SEO, a tool that allows webmasters to control spam and wrongfully negative comments that link to their sites by “disavowing” the link. However, because of abuse of the tool, Google announced Blackhat SEO will be inactivated by this summer, as reported in Blackhat Online Reputation Management: Is It Effective? Websites will now have to rely on an old-fashioned “by-the-book” reputation management strategy.
Online Reputation Management: How Not to Tank Your Business by Ignoring the Digital World gathers tips for a solid online reputation management strategy, including types of social media responses to avoid. Some of the online PR responses are cringe-worthy, but Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt insists there are ways to avoid them: always prepare for worst-case scenarios, and then incorporate her 10-point plan into your online reputation management strategy. Important: Go beyond “Monitoring 101″ with a service that can track blogs, forums and social media discussions. Then, incorporate your monitoring reports into marketing decisions on a regular basis.
Schmitt doesn’t include a recent worst-case social media disaster, the Facebook meltdown of two Arizona bakery owners who were both featured on the TV show Kitchen Nightmares. After receiving negative online comments about their TV appearance, the couple used rude and insulting comments in social media to lash out at followers. The first step in recovery would be “to put your hands up and say sorry,” Mike McGrail notes in Can You Recover from an Amy’s Bakery-Style Social Media Meltdown? Social media has certainly undermined an age-old precept: “No press is bad press.” Not.
Building the Perfect Measurement System
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One of the key recommendations of the Barcelona principles discourages reporting quantitative data without an accompanying qualitative analysis, Jim Sinkinson addresses in PR Measurement: The Painful, Costly Disconnect between Best Intentions and Best Practices. Instead of concentrating on media outcomes (clip count, media impressions, etc.), PR pros should center on business outcomes that truly explain the value of your PR efforts. Ignoring business outcomes causes disconnects between data that PR pros offer and the assessments that C-level executives want. As Sinkinson observes, the better you become at measuring business outcomes caused by PR, the more effective you’ll be at generating those outcomes.
Angela Jeffrey distinguishes between the two outcome types in PRSA’s Confused about How to Tie PR Outputs to Organization Outcomes? Outputs are metrics such as clip counts or impressions, she explains, while business or organization outcomes include leads, sales, donations, and/or survey scores. The answer is to consider employing the AMEC Valid Metrics Guidelines. The AMEC framework provides a comprehensive template for selecting measurements that match organizational goals.
For analysis of an advanced measurement system, review K.D. Paine’s presentation to Develop Key Performance Indicators Tied to Original Goals. The in-depth slides explain how to define your goals, audience, investments and benchmarks, and then how to choose the metrics that will indicate your progress. Step 6 is especially helpful on measurement tools: content analysis measures messaging, positioning and analysis; survey research measures awareness and relationships; web analytics measures engagement, action and purchase.
How to Determine Which Metrics Deliver Social Media ROI
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As the infographic The ROI of Social Media: How Do You Measure Up? explains, most social media benefits are intangible: site traffic, conversion and the number of positive customer mentions. As one consequence, determining social media ROI can be difficult.
Even though it’s tough to trace revenue or cost-savings directly to social media, it is possible to track and value the ROI intangibles in social media marketing. It’s also possible to compare the value of various social media platforms to determine where best to focus your social media efforts. Measuring against specific business goals remains the key to determining social media ROI. At this point, Facebook seems to deliver the best return according to a survey of CMOs.
Social media marketing for B2B companies can get even trickier, Sherry Lamoreaux concedes in Mission Impossible? Measuring B2B Social Media ROI. Core metrics of performance should be grounded in corporate values, Lamoreaux insists, in four categories: distribution, interaction, influence and action. If your company values sales, monitor social channels for new opportunities and leads; if it’s influence you value, measure your reach, Klout and search engine results.
According to Mark Schaefer in A Different Way to Think About Social Media ROI, there is no one-size-fits-all or even best-practice social media strategy. Companies therefore should be on a program of continual improvement and that should be guided by refining the social media metrics used to assess success. Like the sales process, social media interaction consists of a series of “touches” often over extended periods of time and all affect the outcome. The measurement matrix must recognize that long-term reality. Key strategy: Qualitative measurement, which Schaefer avers can reveal the most loyal relationships and tangible benefits.
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