In the current PRSA newsletter, former Beehive colleague Katharine Mudra published a great article about the evolution of the newsroom (download article/PDF). Her point that PR professionals must be nimble and creative to meet newsroom needs is well taken – the news community is ever faster, more resourceful and publishing in more channels every day.

But as every great PR person knows, there is a fine line between meeting the needs of the media and meeting the needs of your clients. So, navigating the evolving newsroom is only part of the game. Here are three perceptions we can change to help clients minimize fear of the new news climate and demonstrate the value of the changing coverage mix:

Perception: If we aren’t talking about it, nobody will cover it.
Reality: The days of “command and control” communication are long gone. A news tip is only a click away, so the chances are pretty good that SOMEBODY’s talking, even if you aren’t.

However, this is not always a bad thing. By monitoring both traditional and digital media (using either paid tools like Cision, Radian 6 and Nielsen’s Buzz Logic or free tools like Twilert, Google News and Technorati), you can keep an eye on what’s being said about your business or brand, as well as your competitors and any trends or issues that might be of interest. In this case, listening to the conversation can inform your communication strategies – when, where and how to participate to tell your best story and reach your most important audiences.

Perception: If we aren’t in the newspaper or on mainstream TV nobody gets our news. (Or, if we aren’t on Twitter we’ll never reach anybody.)
Reality: We are seeing a shift in the media mix, due to the economy, new tools and the changing needs of consumers. The honest truth is that there is great value in both traditional and digital media coverage. Abandoning one for the other is rarely the right choice. Looking at your audience, your goals and how you will measure success should inform your communication strategy and give you a foundation to demonstrate how PR, marketing, sponsorships and advertising are working together to meet business goals.

Perception: You can’t measure PR, especially not social media.
Reality: Yes, you can and should be measuring PR and social media. If you are clear at the outset about what you want to achieve you should be able to measure both the effort (how many placements, where, were key messages delivered, was branding included, what was the ad value, etc.) and the result (was there a sales spike, were there more visits to the Web site, what percentage of promotions were redeemed). The key is to set goals and establish measurement criteria early and integrate agency and corporate resources to arrive at the big picture.

The bottom line is that even though the newsroom and the media mix are changing, there is still a powerful opportunity to tell your story, when and where it matters most.

Nicki Gibbs
Group Director

Judy Battista of the New York Times recently discussed some team’s rules prohibiting NFL players from using Twitter and social media during the season, specifically, games, practices and team functions.

I have to admit, I’m on the fence with this one. On one hand, I say, “please, give me a break.” Even if a player were to run his mouth (Tweet) about an injury or something said in the locker room, is it REALLY going to affect the outcome of a game, or is this just another way for NFL teams to tighten the reigns on its players, who do not have a good track record with staying out of trouble?

On the other hand, if I were a coach I wouldn’t want one of my players Tweeting during a meeting, much less during a game. These guys get paid millions of dollars to be the best at what they do. Put the mobile device down and pay attention!

The NFL does not have a league-wide social media policy for its players, and I don’t believe it should. Let the teams decide for themselves if they need to develop and enforce social media rules. It is what it is –social. Players should be able to have Facebook and Twitter accounts if they so choose. Maybe the rookies should be required to take a “responsible Tweeting” class at the NFL Rookie Symposium, but if the NFL enacts a ban on social media it begs the question, “What’s next? Am I allowed to talk…at all?” And if you want to take it to the highest level, “Do NFL players have different freedom of speech rights because they play in the NFL?” Hmmm…let’s hope it doesn’t get to that point.

Already, many college programs today restrict the use of Facebook by its student athletes to help prevent the posting of incriminating information that could be used against them (read: they don’t want pictures of the football captain drunk at a party showing up anywhere). I agree with these restrictions. These student-athletes are obligated to represent their school, their community, their sport and their teammates to the best of their ability. Does the same ring true in the NFL? They only wish.

The NFL is still trying this Twitter craze on for size, and much like the other pro leagues, isn’t sure how to use it to it’s advantage, or more importantly, how to control its users.

Matt Hansen
Account Supervisor

I’ve commented before on the communications style of Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh and he continues to impress.

His email to employees about Zappos’ sale to Amazon is, quite simply, amazing. And here’s why:

• He asks upfront that people take the time to thoroughly read the email
• The entire email reads like he is personally talking to each employee
• The language is clean and simple throughout – he uses words that people use in everyday conversations
• There are consistent links back to the company’s culture, team, community that are authentic, not forced
• Tough questions are addressed head on, early in the email
• The links to strategy are clearly defined and easy to understand
• Regulatory concepts are presented with explanations that aren’t offensive if people already know the meaning
• The email included a video of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO talking equally authentically to Zappos employees
• Tony shared it externally on this Twitter page and the Bezos video is posted at YouTube

CEOs and leaders hesitate to communicate more frankly, personally or publicly because of regulatory and legal constraints. Tony’s email demonstrates there are effective ways to manage those constraints and communicate in an open, candid way with employees and beyond.

Clearly his style has struck a chord with communicators. As of this writing, more than 2,200 people have posted links to his email through their Twitter accounts.

When companies talk about being open and honest rarely do we get an opportunity to so publicly decide whether they’re paying that off. In this case, it’s easy to see that Zappos is.

What have I missed? How else is his email an example of communicating openly and honestly? Or do you disagree?

Kellie Due Weiland
Account Director

I recently had the privilege of listening to Jack Birch’s ‘Why Sponsorship Works’ presentation at the Minnesota Wild (NHL) sports marketing summit. A former managing director at Octagon and current consultant to pro sports franchises and leagues, he told stories of brands that have activated their sponsorship well throughout the years, and those who have crashed and burned. (I won’t name names.) Here are some key learnings and takeaways from his presentation.

There are five questions we need to be prepared to answer for our clients when considering a sponsorship:

1. Does it work?
2. If so, what should I sponsor?
3. How much do I pay?
4. How do I leverage it?
5. Can you measure it? PROVE IT (especially for the c-suite)

Companies have two goals.

1. Create a customer through marketing and innovation
2. Sales. Sell, sell, sell.

Create an emotion with your brand.
“Find the emotion that your brand portrays and connect that emotion with the consumer through your sponsorship. By doing so, you stimulate demand and create a customer.” – Jack Birch

The seven principles that make a successful sponsorship.

1. Authentication
2. Integration
3. Sales
4. Loyalty
5. Amplification
6. Transference
7. Exclusivity

BE AUTHENTIC – consumers today are too smart not to know. If you’re not Coke, don’t try and be Coke.

Be DEFENDABLE – if you’re always late, don’t claim you’re the “on-time” guy.

Hammer home your brand positioning – ALWAYS.

The storyteller of commerce -
What you see/hear = story you tell yourself = the emotion you get = the action you take
Let sponsorship be the storyteller of your brand.

Sponsorship amplifies your programs/tactics. It’s the appetizer.

Pro sports teams have two things.

1. The biggest stage
2. The attention of thousands of attendees

You need to take advantage of these two things to amplify your sponsorship through as many avenues as possible (POS, internet, direct mail, in-arena, community relations, public relations, employee recognition, cause marketing, etc.).

Associate your brand with the right properties. Do you care who your children hang out with?

The difference between marketing and sales.
Marketing = have what people want (that emotion, that loyalty, that association)
Sales = getting rid of what you have

Not only did these learnings serve as good insight and a reminder to those of us in the sponsorship marketing and activation business, but they can be used to educate and inform colleagues of the role sponsorship can play and be integrated within larger marketing plans.

Matt Hansen
Account Supervisor

Nothing beats the trusted and intimate referral from a friend or relative in the purchasing process.

A new study from Mintel reinforces the value of the personal endorsement. It shows that most purchases are still based on word-of-mouth recommendations from a trusted acquaintance. Only 5 percent said they based their purchase on a blogger or online environment.
Although social media continues to grow in marketing popularity and relevancy – it’s still important for brands to create an authentic experience that provides intimacy and personal discovery.

There’s no doubt many of those brand preferences begin with the early adopters (who tend to be heavy social media users). However, as brand marketers, finding a balance with offline and online – used in the most strategic ways – will continue to be the golden rule.

Jason Schumann
Account Director

Last night I watched the live feed for another solid MIMA event – what a great community of interactive and digital folk in the Twin Cities. The topic? Analytics (with speakers Chris Wexler, @chriswexler, and Kristen Findley, @kdfindley).

The use of data and analytics is an always-important subject – but even more so given the increasing volume of conversations happening around social media and the quest for ROI, or ROE (Return on Engagement). (Let’s remember: you can measure social media activities. More on that fun topic later this week though.) Here’s a quick recap of the MIMA event:

Analytics Aren’t for Geeks

Analytics are critical to any marketing plan. They give you a benchmark for success. And with digital/Web, you can measure it. Use that data to differentiate in a tough market.

Think about analytics in the context of, and during, an entire project, program or campaign life cycle. Consider Web site data, banners, tagging, coding, analysis and testing suggestions.

Keep the End in Mind

That means starting with the business goals. Web presence is inherently important, but what do you want it to do for you – for the business?

What do you want someone to do when they get to your site? Kristin says [paraphrased]: please don’t say “to engage.” There’s always more. Do you want visitors to complete a form? Read content? Click through to something? Be specific. Make sure the objectives are aligned the first time around so you’re not switching gears half way through the effort, ultimately creating more work later on. It’s OK to put more work upfront to save time down the road.

Remember: you’ve got program objectives that lead to Web site objectives that lead to key performance indicators to help pave the way.

Analytics are, to a degree, holistic. You have to look at the total analytics package – as in how offline activity is affected by online work.

We’re moving away from an era where analytics are all “post-” and moving into an era where data and analytics are “pre-” too.

The Speakers’ Favorite Metrics

@kdfindley “hearts bounce rates.” (And I concur. Want to improve your site’s bounce rate?) Bounce rates matter because they give an indication of how people perceive what it was that you were promising them when they hit your site. You want to keep your bounce rate low. By working on this metric, other metric improvements will improve as well.

@chriswexler likes meta metrics, particularly when you put more weight toward the things people care about on the site, such as video views or e-mail sign ups. Think about other ways of quantifying value, such as if people came to a site and blogged or went through a specific process.

While there are other important metrics, when it comes to Web analytics I’m also a fan of keyword search results (what’s driving folks to your site), referrals (what sites are driving folks to your site), site overlay reports (what clicks and calls to action are really working) as well as content (favorite, most heavily trafficked pages and length of stay). You can digest much more though through any popular Web analytics service like HitWise or Omniture.

Collaboration = Good

The analytics team can become the “objective keeper” of information – the watchdog of what delivered well and/or didn’t. Marketing teams should rely on some of this insight.

Bring the creative teams into the process so they can understand the importance of a specific objective and know what “the ask” is. Some of the best creative, yet results-oriented outcomes can come from the use of understanding good data.

Creative + technologists (and someone who can speak API) = cool outcomes.

As the analytics conversation spreads outside of the analytics group, jump common hurdles like terminology barriers with a bit of education first.

Remember: data doesn’t make decisions; people do. There’s always a story in the numbers that’s more interesting than the numbers on their own. Keep in mind that it’s 20% reporting and 80% insights.

The Speakers’ Favorite Metric Tools

Omniture (Test&Target)
Google Analytics
Atlas
Mediaplex
Webtrends

Final Thoughts

Marketers don’t make brands – consumers do. Marketers and companies influence what people think of a brand and push them in a certain direction. It’s important to know the perceived truth (and analytics can help). And that is where social dashboards can come into play – to hear what people are saying about brands. Beehive uses Radian6 to monitor the conversations for clients, but there are other good options like Nielsen BuzzLogic, Biz360 and Visible Technologies. Pay attention to sentiment though – the industry is exploring that more and more. Services that cover sentiment/insights well are lithium and Harvest, among others.

Oh, and there was this: “Data can provide serendipity.” Well said.

Katharine Mudra

Account Supervisor

I did it. In a past Waxing I wrote about how I’m trying to climb the social media ladder. Well, I moved up a rung by caving in and accepting Twitter as a social media avenue worth exploring for professional development. In particular, for sports marketing and sponsorship activation. You can find me @SportsMarkGuy.

As I try to stay afloat in the twitterverse, I’ll be analyzing how teams, sponsors and athletes market themselves through Twitter. Shaq (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) and the Phoenix Suns (@PhoenixSunsGirl) are among the leaders when it comes to using Twitter as a marketing tool. What can we (consumers and corporate communicators) learn from Shaq’s Twitter popularity, and when will the NBA’s popularity with Twitter spill over into the other major sports leagues? It’s difficult to find players or teams in the NHL using Twitter, but NBA players are Tweeting at halftime!

What I DO think is that Twitter will become the new handshake, or even autograph, between fans and athletes. Will it be just as cool to have Shaq wave to you as he gets into his car after a game, as it is to tell your friends that you are following Shaq on Twitter and he’s eating a pizza in downtown Phoenix right now? Twitter brings these bigger-than-life athletes down to the same level as their fans and allows a connection to be made that has been lost over the years.

Cool Tweets

It’s been about 48 hours since I joined Twitter. Here are two cool Tweets I’ve come across that are great examples of the continually evolving media landscape,

1. Pardon The Interruption (PTI, @PTIShow), a daily ESPN show, has asked people on Twitter to submit ideas for guests on their show.
2. David Schwab @david_schwab, VP and managing director for First Call (a division of Octagon) “twitterviewed” Billy Bush via Twitter and posted the transcript on his First Call blog.

Sponsorship Madness

Notice anything different behind the benches and in the hands of the players in the NCAA basketball tournament? It’s not Gatorade, it’s Vitamin Water. While it would have been thrilling to be a fly on the wall during those sponsorship negotiations, my question is how could Gatorade/Pepsi let this happen?!

It shows up as a clear sign of defeat to consumers when you lose your staple sponsorship to your competitor – all types of questions are begging to be answered. I’d like to know the figures paid, but it shouldn’t matter. Whatever Coke offered to pay for the sponsorship, Pepsi should have beaten it – no matter what. What’s Pepsi’s philosophy behind this? Coke paid $4.1 billion for Vitamin Water a couple of years ago. If that’s not reason enough for Gatorade to be scared and be sure it holds and expands its sponsorship marketing, I don’t know what is. By the way, what’s happened to PowerAde? Is the writing on the wall for the slow discontinuation of the brand?

Matt Hansen

Beehive PR

Social Networks Moving Up the Ladder

A March 2009 study from Nielsen on social networks boasted some sweeping, but perhaps not surprising, numbers. Let’s take a look:

• Social networks/blogs now fourth most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail
• Social networks account for one in every 11 minutes online
• Orkut in Brazil has the largest domestic online reach (70%) of any social network anywhere in the world
• Facebook has the highest average time per visitor amongst the 75 most popular brands online worldwide

This Nielsen study could provide a week’s worth of Waxings, but I’m going to focus on one interesting stat:

• Social network and blogging sites are now the fourth most popular activity on the Internet – ahead of personal e-mail

(In case you’re wondering what’s ahead of social networking and e-mail? Search. General interest portals and communities. Software manufacturers.)

These figures and changes continue to have a profound impact on publishers and marketers alike. AdWeek sums up the research under the appropriate heading: “As online paradigm shifts, advertisers must find a way to add value, rather than follow the ‘push’ model.” Copy that.

What’s interesting, however, is that here we have information showing social nets as more popular than e-mail, yet many of the social networks, microblogs and other services rely on it (e.g., you need an e-mail address to sign up for Facebook; Twitter sends you e-mail notification if you have a new follower, etc.). So while more time may be spent in other online categories, many would argue that e-mail is still the foundation for all electronic communication. And perhaps that’s why some social networks are toying with having their own branded e-mail.

Inbox Insanity

I found this study of particular interest in light of a recent e-mail marketing presentation in Minneapolis (thank you, MIMA). Jeff Rohrs, VP of marketing for Exact Target, described what has become a time of inbox insanity. Think about the many “inboxes” you have – home e-mail, work e-mail, cell voicemail, work voicemail, text message, IM, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, RSS reader and [insert your network here]. Oh, and don’t forget about your postal mail box.

Many of these inboxes will likely continue to grow as online activity continues to rise (especially across demographics) – and we’ll continue to need to check those feeds and inboxes and respond to the content that is in them (the relevant content that is).

The Social Inbox

Is it sustainable? According to Jeff, no. Time is too much of a commodity. And so we’re starting to see consolidation more and more – this time in the form of a social inbox.

While many desktop applications like AlertThingy and plug-ins like Xobni have helped provide much-appreciated aggregation and consolidation for social networking activity, none have proven to be the true “catch-all” for online social activity. So e-mail providers are hoping to bring that to users via “the social inbox.” A place to house and provide one-click access to your e-mail, search, RSS, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, SMS, Wordpress and more. A more useful place, with more time-efficient ways of interacting with contacts online.

Yahoo has a beta site for its social inbox. From Ars Technica…

• the new Yahoo Mail is positioned as a dashboard for one’s increasingly diverse digital life
• these changes turn Yahoo Mail into a dashboard for watching contact activity at social sites

Microsoft is making strides with Windows Live and Gmail is working on it too. Bebo launched its’ social inbox in late 2008, integrating content and helping to efficiently keep track of friends’ activities/posts. Oh, and there’s the iPhone.

The iPhone: social media and network consolidation – photo from iLounge

What This Means for the Communications/Marketing Industry

So let’s get to the heart of this – what does this all mean for communication, PR and marketing pros using e-mail marketing to reach and connect with customers? Here are some key takeaways from what Jeff shared at the e-mail marketing event:

• The social inbox gives consumers more control and marketers less control.
• So, relevancy will be key; otherwise, you’re a spammer.
• E-mail marketing still plays a role. There’s the potential for terrific ROI, measurement and reach. There’s also research – companies can take the opportunity to learn from their customers.
• In a down economy, more retailers and brands will resort to e-mail marketing because it’s inexpensive and can hit a large population/demographic.
• But, to see real results and cut through the clutter, marketers must focus on: 1) customer personalization and permission AND 2) really relevant and resourceful content.
• Yes, e-mail marketing should be driven by the demands of consumer segments. Subscribers rule.
• “Batch and blast” is a thing of the past.
• Communication, content, frequency and channel delivery should be determined by customer preference and permission – based on strong data.
• Again, precision marketing and customization is key – use data and behavioral info to craft messages of relevance to specific customers.
• Customers need to be able to opt-in to e-mail relationships – so create touchpoints and opportunities allowing them to do so.

This shift is yet another reminder that to be effective today, authenticity, adding value, two-way communication and relationship building must drive marketing and PR efforts at every step.

Katharine Mudra

Account Supervisor