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Will brands stand for more or less in the future?

April 20th, 2010 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Media, Public Relations, Social media

Thought leadership is something of a holy grail for the PR industry.

It is an interesting area for PR consultants to get involved with as it provides an issues rich environment for them to really add value through research, insight and execution.

The best PR practitioners recognise that thought leadership presents an opportunity for their client to add value to its customers and differentiate itself. In practice, PRs often struggle to find clients that can enunciate and commit to a thought leadership position.

Organisations encounter a number of issues when it comes to executing against a thought leadership strategy:

They believe that thought leadership exposes them to risk – what if people disagree?
They’re happy to fly below the radar – no-one else is taking a position so why should we?
They don’t have the industry insights required to take a credible position on a topic
They don’t have the individual talent to deliver the content or are unwilling to invest in it
They’re focus is lead generation and sales – they don’t see the reputational value in thought leadership
They’re not prepared to invest in the necessary research or partnerships required to establish a thought leadership strategy
They unable to take an industry view - their industry perspectives are insular, biased and self serving
Marketing investments are focused on promotional outcomes, rather than ongoing corporate objectives

Occasionally, you see organisations jumping onto an issue because it has become a business imperative, a good example of this is the Environment where many organisations are keen to be seen to be doing the right thing. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that most companies are genuine in their intention to reduce their impact on the environment but the adoption of these goals was largely responsive in nature – it become a business imperative. It was not a proactive altruistic motivation that could be described as genuine thought leadership.

The challenges in this area can be mighty frustrating for the PR agency and in-house team that recognise the opportunities presented by thought leadership to:

Build positive brand perceptions
Proactively lead the media agenda and add value to media relationships
Initiate discussion and generate publicity
Provide PR campaigns with a consistent theme or message
Raise the profile of senior executives
Add value to their industry and been seen as a positive contributor
Motivate and engage employees and partner organisations
Help drive a shared agenda with stakeholders
Engage new audience groups; Government; Industry Associations; Industry Leaders

I think the importance of thought leadership will grow in the future as brands become more attuned to their customers and marketplace. Brands will need an agenda in order to ensure the sustainability of their online communities. They’ll need to have opinions and insights in order to drive activity online and empower customer advocates. They’ll also need to respond to increasing customer expectations about the role that their brand of choice plays in the community.

As a result, we’ll see brands re-assessing their thought leadership strategy and working to identify the relevant opinion platforms for their business. I think we’ll begin to see support from brands for thought leadership topics that genuinely reflect the interests of their community and, as a result, more credible, personalised, actionable and specific.

What do you think? Does this also apply to individuals online? Will it become more important to take a personal position on an issue or are we more likely to exist in communities that reinforce our own world view?

Tags: insight, leadership, Media, opinion, PR, socialmedia, thought

unfriend and unfollow to improve your social media experience; don’t live your life on shuffle

March 18th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Social media

I have recently improved my Twitter experience.

How?

I unfollowed all of the people that were filling my timeline with what I consider to be inane, self obsessed, nonsensical and worthless tweets.

Don’t get me wrong, my tweets are occasioanlly inane and pointless but some people seem to spend a large part of their day sharing the most intricate and mindless details of their lives.

The example that sticks in my mind is: ‘I spilt a lot of water onto the floor during my bath’.

For a while I thought I should follow these people – some of them supposedly serious people in my industry. I didn’t want to miss out on anything but after 12 months or more of perseverence (and annoyance) I realised that I wasn’t going to miss anything and unfollowed.

Twitter is, as a result, far less annoying and vastly more useful, more enjoyable.

It’s like the Shuffle function on the iPOD, a run of great random songs on Shuffle is a great thing. But there’s always a chance that that run can be rudely interrupted by a random song or the artist that you’ve outgrown or overheard, or your simply bored of. Or something that you downloaded for a ‘laugh’ once (example: Mel and Kim’s Respectable).

The next step for me is to edit my iTune library by de-selecting the songs that could barge in and spoil a great sequence of songs on Shuffle.

People can do what they want with Twitter and its not for me to judge what’s inane and what isn’t – its all relative. But if you’re finding that you’re on the receiving end of an excessive amount of noise via your social media channels and not enough signal then maybe think about the steps you can take to improve your chances.

Tags: content, facebook, noise, sharing, signal, socialmedia, twitter

Deciduous marketing is a big barrier to authentic brand conversations

March 14th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Advertising, Public Relations, Social media

Marketing Communications is analogous to a conversation.

It is particularly true today. The Internet has empowered consumers to challenge, advocate and interact with the companies of their choosing via readily available and inexpensive forms of mass media.

Marketing conversations were largely one dimensionl pre-Internet. Regular and hopefully relevant messages were filtered via various marketing channels and disciplines to the end customer. They were generally self serving:

Look at this new product!
Take up this offer on this new package!
Here’s what we think about this. Aren’t we smart/committed/interesting?

The conversations were intermittent and short lived – more often than not the communication existed to drive sales, acquire new customers or build a brand image. Budgets and marketing finance decisions were similarly focused on near-term outcomes. Business priorities were identified at the beginning of the year and then in quarterly planning cycles. Dollars, Pounds, Rupee, Dinar etc. would be allocated.

Most companies still manage their marketing programs in this way today.

At the end of the fiscal year, if the marketing department has done its ‘job’ properly, all of the dollars are spent. Like a deciduous tree all of the leaves have fallen off and the tree remains bare for a period of time .

The conversation goes on hold.

This isn’t a problem if the company is continually talking about itself but if the company has been successful in initiating a conversation, then consumer’s will notice – unhappily.

Many well established marketing practices are no longer relevant or useful in the context of social media, including traditional approaches to budgeting. Social media demands that brands commit fully to the online conversation – you can’t pull in and pull out when it suits you.

One way for companies to tackle this issue is to embed social media engagement (and related costs) inside standard business process.

Ford has a plan to have 2% of its workforce telling the story of their lives at Ford via social media. This combined with a dedicated resource for social media strategy and measurement allows the company to engage in authentic conversation over the l0ng term.

Failure to identify the necessary resources for social media engagement is one of the main reasons why projects fail to get off the ground, in my experience. Lack of resources is one issue but cultural and procedural structural barriers to the long term view are another.

Senior marketing professionals need to adjust their mindset, and that of their organisation, to the new dynamics of social media and continuous conversation.

Tags: Advertising, branding, Budget, conversation, finance, marketing, promotions, socialmedia

Ten reasons why Public Relations should play the central role in Social Media

September 26th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Social media

The ongoing debate about who ‘owns social media’ continues apace. Here is my pitch for the PR industry, which I believe has a very strong claim.

Ultimately, all of the back and forth is irrelevant. The sector (or individuals) that gets closest to owning social media will be the one that delivers the most value over time.

Here are my thoughts…

PR’s heritage isn’t selling. It seeks to influence and build relationships. This makes it more suited and better equipped to initiate, engage and hold a conversation.
PR is expert in content creation. They can’t be blamed for trying to get involved with social media but what expertise do media buying agencies have in content creation? Content creation is a central component of marketing and specifically social media.
The advertising industry is focused on promotions, launches and campaigns. I heard an advertising executive at a conference last year talk about their ability to ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ the community that they had successfully built for an FMCG client. This is a great illustration of the point. This attitude shows a high degree of arrogance and a low degree of empathy. The community would quickly see through this kind of approach to managing relationships. The advertising industry isn’t set up culturally or operationally (including its fee structure) to maintain an ongoing or continuous dialogue.
The PR industry is subtle. The sector gets a lot of flack for spinning but subtlety is at the core of spin. Digital media requires subtlety, including the ability to understand context and respond accordingly.
The PR industry is close to the business leaders. The C-suite calls on PR in a crisis and is reliant on PR when the organisation’s reputation is threatened. PR has a central role to play in educating the C-suite about the benefits of social media and is a trusted advisor on reputation management, unlike other marketing disciplines.
The PR industry is something of a sole operator when compared with the other marketing disciplines. Communication often functions as a stand-alone department along side Marketing but is part of the mix. One of the key challenges for the social media strategists is that they are on the outside, they may have deep expertise in their field but few things operate in a vacuum and its clear that social media is most effective when integrated with offline marketing efforts.
Strategy is at the heart of good PR. It could be argued that PR has a been a little slow to come to the (socialmedia) party. There are lots of reasons for this. PR’s approach is always circumspect, it has to add value when your dealing with corporate reputations otherwise its not worth doing. I think this will play out well for the PR industry in the long term.
The culture of the PR industry is to allow others to create content. i.e. journalists. The industry has been built on this fundamental characteristic. The key message is designed to assert as much control as possible over the process of content creation. The approach changes in the context of social media but I think this is one of the strongest arguments in PRs favour. PR has never had control of the message when it comes to the end result.
Search. I think the PR industry has a long way to go in this space but that content is fundamental to search strategy – see point 2. Search seeks to ‘game a system’. The tool of the gaming is content, which has to be of the highest quality.
Most (all?) organisations need to adapt culturally to engage their customers in authentic conversations. I genuinely believe that the businesses that most effectively listen to customers and is able to incorporate their insights into product development and services will be the most successful. This requires an organisational change and is not something that a snazzy social media program can deliver. This, for me, is PRs biggest opportunity as the function that advises and implements change management strategies. PR has a great opportunity to take the lead in making this change happen – the outbound social media campaigns will become the natural output and realisation of this cultural and organisational change in business.

As ever, keen to hear your thoughts and disagreements. Here is a good analysis of the debate from the AdAge.

Tags: Advertising, Advice, campaigns, marketing, PR, Public Relations, Search, socialmedia

Posts Tagged ‘socialmedia’

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Posts Tagged ‘socialmedia’

Will brands stand for more or less in the future?

unfriend and unfollow to improve your social media experience; don’t live your life on shuffle

Crowdsourcing can deliver a specific business outcome and brand engagement

Deciduous marketing is a big barrier to authentic brand conversations

Ten reasons why Public Relations should play the central role in Social Media

AHT launches Social Media Strategy Framework

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