Author Archives: Dan Gershenson

Five Reasons You Should Help A Reporter Out

This guest post is written by Bridgette Outten, a journalist and publicity strategist with The Write Vision Group, Inc. As a print newspaper reporter, the number one question she was always asked was, “How do I get in the news?” Recognizing the need for training, The Write Vision Group, Inc. fills the gap between organizations that have good stories and news media that want to tell good stories. 

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Bridgette Outten, Write Vision Group

 

Social media and traditional media have officially intersected at the corner of amazing and awesome with the rising popularity of using social media sites to find or pitch news stories.

What this means is that you can Tweet a reporter your story idea — or find out what they are looking for via Facebook. A viral YouTube video can spark a story all its own and just the practice of Pinterest in various industries has spawned news spotlights all over.

I use such tools to get exposure for my clients — and they work.  If you’re ready to get publicity to generate more buzz about your business or organization here are five reasons you should subscribe to sites like Help A Reporter Out and Bill and Steve Harrison’s Reporter Connection :

  1. You can be proactive.  Don’t just wait around hoping that a reporter will contact you. These sites deliver lists full of reporters looking for stories and sources for their stories right to your inbox — and you can contact them directly.
  2. You can find out what’s hot in the news. I’m subscribed to several of these lists and you know what? As Pinterest gained popularity, I sure wished I was a Pinterest expert because they were in crazy demand. By getting a list of what reporters are looking for, you can determine if you’re knowledgeable about a hot topic. From there you can respond to reporters looking or send pitches based on your expertise to your own local media.
  3. You learn about media outlets you didn’t know existed. There are so many publications, blogs, radio shows and television shows out there. And you don’t know what you don’t know until you get that list and realize there is a blog specifically about people with pet rocks. And what do you know! You bought a pet rock last year.
  4. You learn what reporters are looking for. Many people have a general idea of what they think will make the news, but you can learn about what reporters are looking for when you’re receiving pitches straight from them. You’ll learn that TV reporters usually want you to be in the same city while a magazine reporter may do an interview by email.
  5. You learn how to hit a deadline. These reporters usually need the information fast. Learning how to craft a response to a pitch that’s due that same day only refines how succinctly you can describe your expertise. And that’s always great practice for your marketing.

The moral of the story? In may ways, social media is probably the best thing to happen to traditional media — opening up a world of sharing, pitching and promoting. Take advantage of it.

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Mark your calendars now for Bridgette’s next workshop in February! 

Upcoming workshop in Chicago: Act Like A Publicist, Think Like A Reporter

If you:

  • Want to position yourself as an expert or community resource in your industry;
  • Need help pitching your stories to a reporter for coverage;
  • Could use media relations training to jumpstart your publicity plan…

You need to Act Like a Publicist, Think Like A Reporter. In our interactive workshop on Saturday, Feb. 23, 2013, you will learn:

  • 10 publicity strategies to get your news in the news — no stunts included;
  • 7 elements reporters look for when determining whether to cover your story;
  • How to get to strengthen your publicity plan — or get one started — and more.

The course will be taught by Bridgette Outten, journalist and publicity strategist with The Write Vision Group, Inc. Bridgette has been a reporter in Texas and Ohio and currently writes for AOL’s Patch.com. After working with her, clients have had mentions in local media outlets, such as TribLocal and Crain’s Business Chicago, as well as the national Ebony Magazine.

Save $50 on early bird rate, which ends Jan. 4. Click the flyer to purchase your ticket. Contact us with questions at bridgette@thewvg.com or 773-542-3895.

We Don’t Have To Be The First To Report

There’s an epidemic among social media bloggers, tweeters, YouTube uploaders and the like to be the first to report something across the social media sphere the moment it happens.

But…do we always really need to?

If broadcast news has taught us anything, it’s that reporters get it wrong. And in a world that’s become increasingly more real-time, their reports in error get pumped through every major social media channel in an instant. When a terrible event happens in which a shooter massacres elementary school children in Connecticut, you want to get it right. You don’t want to be wrong on that. But lo and behold, many broadcast news journalists were – they identified the wrong person as the shooter at first.

But is the traditional media entirely at fault? No. Social media is just as at fault.

That’s right. If you ever spread a rumor about someone in high school, is the person who started the rumor to begin with the person who is entirely to blame? Of course not.

In social media, we get it wrong a lot. Too much, too often. In fact, we’re not afraid to share silly hoaxes at the drop of a hat in an effort to be the first to tell it (Morgan Freeman is dead! Oh wait. No, he’s not.).

Here’s the deal, folks. If you want to be taken seriously in any possible realm, you have to have the first impulse to want to get it right by taking in the facts you know and commenting thoughtfully rather than sharing blindly.  Social media can be a powerful tool for disseminating information in ways we still don’t completely understand. It can telegraph the change of a regime in Egypt as it’s literally happening but it can also identify the wrong shooter in Newtown, Connecticut just as quickly. Blame it all on CNN? You’re just the messenger? Nice try. They were wrong, which you picked up on and spread the wrong information on Twitter in a feeble attempt to look, what, like you were more “in the know?”

We have enough sharers. We have enough Retweeters. We have enough e-mail forwarders.

We don’t have enough people in social media wanting to take a breath and give their own perspective. If we did, we’d allow ourselves the grace period that can occur when journalists get the story wrong, state a correction and then we can comment on the total story in front of us. It’s easy to Retweet. It’s not easy to hold back for a moment and blog just a little later in the day.

Ironically, if you truly wanted to stand out from the crowd, you may gain far more respect for being in the latter camp. And consequently stand out all the more.

Is Your Business Ready To Be A Social Business?

A new IBM study shows social media is being integrated into business processes beyond channels – to learn more about the insights, I had a fascinating conversation with Eric Lesser,Research Director of the IBM Institute of Business Value. 

Generally speaking, I don’t have to convince too many entrepreneurs that this social media thing is here to stay. By now, the conversation has largely shifted from “is this viable?” to “what should our presence on social media look like and how does this fit into the overall brand?”

Don’t look now but the conversation about social media’s about to change once again. Not merely about this or that new channel. Not about what Facebook is adding or restricting.

No, I’m talking about something deeper – the growth of social business. 

Social business is about integrating the technology of social media into your business practices. It involves social tools to encourage greater team collaboration, productivity, new idea generation, better customer communication, streamlined processes and more.

If this concept a leaves your company feeling a bit behind the times in its progress, don’t panic. A new study can help reveal how organizations like yours can use social approaches to create meaningful business value.

I had the opportunity to speak with Eric Lesser, Research Director of the IBM Institute of Business Value, who recently spearheaded a new study on social business.  Through surveys and in-depth interviews of nearly 1200 individuals from leading organizations, Lesser and his team uncovered powerful insights on how companies are facing the prospect of not only adding on social media channels but becoming a true social business.

Dan Gershenson: How does social business change the landscape for business?

Eric Lesser: Throughout IBM’s Institute for Business Value study, we talked to people in industries from telecom to restaurants, from business-to-business to business-to-consumer. What do they have in common? They recognize that if they’re going to truly integrate social media in their businesses, they can’t just port over the tools they use in their personal lives. They have to learn how to use social media in ways specific to their business. Take training for example. What if you were able to use social approaches to create a community of learners that tapped into new content? Rather than instruction books, what about creating an instructional video that people could comment on? What opportunities can social create to allow you to listen better to customers and vendors for great ideas?

DG: How are companies beginning to recognize its importance?

EL: Through our study we found that social business is an area garnering significant attention and investment – almost half of the companies we spoke with in the study increased their investment in 2012. Interestingly, while Marketing and PR are the top two investments of these companies, they’re not the areas with the largest jumps in expected growth. That actually belongs to the areas of Customer Service, Sales, IT and HR.

DG: Why the biggest growth in those areas?

EL: Managing the brand and perception is as crucial as ever. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s also a need to apply social media to how internal work is actually going to get accomplished. Do these companies have all the answers to that yet? No. In fact, we see that more than 2/3 of the companies we talked to are underprepared for cultural changes as a result of social business. They felt their internal cultures were not social business oriented and they aren’t working enough on the applications of social business inside and outside the organization.

They’re not sure about the endgame.

DG: What can they do to prepare better for a shift like this?

EL: The question is not merely about getting more ideas but setting up more opportunities for ideas to come from anywhere.

As companies grow, the knowledge around the organization becomes more distributed, so making connections in the most productive ways becomes increasingly important.

Customers are expecting companies to know much more about them. That means companies can’t just rely on manufacturing and product knowledge. They need to deliver customer-driven content more effectively. Don’t just provide me a manual, but provide me with experts who understand my challenges and can show me how to fix my issues on a customized level. Some companies will struggle with this but customers are expecting this kind of service in their environment. They don’t want to have difficulty spelling out a challenge or they’ll move on.

Four Social Business Trends for 2013
Here are the next big movements Lesser expects companies to make in the coming year as they adapt further to being social businesses.


#1 Innovative Listening Methods More In Demand 

On one hand, Lesser found companies were using social business methods to communicate 1-on-1 but also to communicate to crowds. That puts better monitoring tools at a premium while paying attention to sentiment analysis of your organization. “Some of this is going to be reactive, such as customer service through Facebook or Twitter,” he says. “But some of this will be proactive. This involves finding influencers and mavens connecting them to the organization and embracing their networks.”


#2 Customer Communities Continue To Rise

With people having a passion for virtually everything and anything, there’s no shortage of opportunities for community building. But how do companies set up those communities?

“Communities are built by bringing together individuals with a passion for your product or service, and engaging in an ongoing dialogue with them,” Lesser says. “For example, LEGO provides members of its communities the chance to submit an idea for a product and if it’s accepted, they get a cut of the royalties.”

You don’t have to be a large corporation for this idea to take shape – how can you involve your audience in product development or reward them for feedback?

  

#3 Shift from Brand Management to Greater Sales/Post-Sales Service

I started to panic a little when Lesser mentioned this development – what’s that? No more branding? To my relief, branding isn’t going away anytime soon. But it’s far more than establishing a presence, as Lesser explained.

“What’s going to be big in the next 2-3 years in using leads to drive sales is, how do we make sure the experiences across our social platforms aren’t completely disjointed? How is the overall look and feel seamless? That’s one of the opportunities for a much closer CMO-CIO partnership. There seems to be a recognition of a need to work together more effectively on areas like customer data and mobile. It’s going to be harder for a CMO to be successful without a CIO and vice versa.”


#4 Greater Shared Governance of Social

Less than 1/3 of the companies Lesser and his team spoke with have a shared governance when it comes to this concept of social business. “But the ones that do recognize that it doesn’t just belong to marketing and media relations. You’ve got to have sponsorships from multiple functions within the company, from HR to legal to risk management. They’re not just reacting to potential problems, but looking for opportunities.”

“Social business has far-reaching implications throughout the organization because when you’re asking employees to be ambassadors of your brand, everyone needs to better understand what customers demand.

Social business comes from recognizing that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, vendors and customers if you provide enough opportunities for it to happen.”

We Are All In The Hospitality Business.

The other day I was watching a show called “Hotel Impossible” in which a consultant gives shabby, unprofitable hotels and resorts the makeover treatment from a design and operations standpoint. As you can expect, he didn’t pull any punches on what was wrong with these places, whether the rooms were dirty, the color scheme was boring, the staff was disorganized and more. Many times the hotel owners thought the location would make up for a lot of these miscues (nice try). Worst of all, these shortcomings had translated into an awful time for the guests, who would surely never come back if the hotel remained in that condition.

In reality, if the hotel was merely OK, it’s safe to say the guest wouldn’t come back for that either, right? Surely they wouldn’t tell many others about it.

That’s when it struck that it’s kind of odd that we confine this word “Hospitality” to hotels and restaurants. Don’t we all want to be hospitable, after all?

Treating our brands as hotels
while seeing our customers as guests
wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Think about it. Most hotels get to keep a guest for a few days or maybe just overnight. Obviously, for restaurants, it’s even less – an hour or two. In that very limited timeframe, they have an opportunity to either provide service or provide an experience.

How does that apply to other industries?

If they say you’re “professional,” you’re probably providing a service. Good for you. Welcome to a giant pool of people who get paid for what they do. In other words, big whoop.

If they are amazed by the experience, have been given a memory, recommend you to others, sing your praises, etc., you’re providing something special. We’re talking about great surprises that are above and beyond the expected. This is hard work. It’s not easy to get here. But it’s something to strive for if you hope to have repeat “guests.” By the way, if something goes wrong during their “stay,” you do something incredible that surprises them too. Even the best hotels make mistakes – it’s how they make it really, really right for the guest that shows a higher level of sophistication.

I try to remind myself that clients are guests within my care. I’m pushing myself to ask the questions and give insightful reporting before they even ask for it. Why? I’ve learned that if they ask and ask and ask and ask, there could be something I’m not providing enough of. Take most advertising agencies – many tend to have the mindset that when the client asks for something, you jump on top of it, rally your team, come up with great ideas and hopefully, you wow the client with your brilliance.

But again, what if we had done that before they even asked? I go back to the hotel analogy. If you have to ask the front desk for many things, it gets to be an inconvenience for you. Sure, they’ll probably bring up what you want and you’ll be mildly appreciative. And yet, what if they brought something to your door just because they thought you would enjoy your stay that much better? What if they realized it was a special event based on your history with them, so that before you ever reminded them that “it’s our anniversary,” you got upgraded to a bigger suite? Wouldn’t you stand a greater chance of telling someone else about it online at a review site?

What’s the point of having LinkedIn Recommendations if all someone can say is, “They did what I asked them to do?” What kind of referral is worth having when you are nothing more than an order taker and “service provider?”

Guests in hotels don’t stay forever. Neither do guests in our businesses, whether it’s for a short-term engagement or a relationship that lasts until we retire. So during the time they’re with us, we have to think of it before they do. We have to advise even if they never think to ask for it – because, after all, that’s why they choose us. We have to ask how we’re doing far more often than assume no news is good news.

Brands that only tout their professionalism or years of experience may be able to keep a guest but they won’t get glowing reviews and raving fans. Not by itself. That’s the difference. What they see as advantages are often merely the point of entry of doing business. And as a result of either not looking deeply enough within themselves or asking their own clients how they’re doing with greater humility or both, they think everything is right with the world. Until someone checks out. By then, it’s too late.

One last thought: Hotels don’t have to be The Ritz in order to create a great experience. They need to understand their guests, listen to what they prefer most and deliver that in the most appealing/creative/unexpected/surprising/amazingly efficient way. That’s what extends their stay, motivates them to write better reviews and extoll the virtues of that brand to many others.

Further thoughts and ideas on this?

Be my guest.

No, You Can’t Evaluate My Website.

Every now and then, I get one of these offers by a web development company to evaluate my website to see what I’m doing well and what I’m not.

You probably have too.

It goes something like this:

“We would like to provide you with a complimentary site evaluation. We will pinpoint any issues we see within your company’s website. Then we will provide recommendations on how to increase web traffic…”

Sounds like a reasonable enough thing, right? You’re not paying anything and they’re offering to help. Except for one thing – getting this kind of evaluation often confuses the heck out of the company that’s receiving it and raises more questions than answers.

Why? Because there are some firms – website and otherwise – that are really great at compiling data but have no idea what to do with it. They provide more numbers to people who already may have had a set of numbers, which in turn makes the marketer say, “So, um, which numbers are the most important here and what does all this really mean?”

Ah. Meaning. Insight. Direction. Now there are some important things. You can’t just spit back a bunch of stats at someone and expect them to magically interpret it in terms of next steps. And if the next steps are, “You need to hire us to help you,” that’s lame.

It’s not to say they’re necessarily off in those statistics. It’s to say that they don’t go nearly far enough to clarify.

Like they’re going to say anything the incumbent agency is doing is going to be great. “Hey, Agency ABC is doing a bang-up job so you don’t need our services…”

Riiiiight.

Show me someone who does this honestly and isn’t trying to poach business. Show me someone who can walk away when the work already done by the existing agency is largely great in their view. I don’t doubt they’re out there, but I don’t think they’re plentiful.

If you’re an agency and your client wants to hear this pitch at all, that should be a red flag. Hopefully not that the client wants to work with someone else but that they are open to hearing other voices in the room on the brand that don’t belong to you. The deeper issue there is that there’s a reason why they have this openness to alternatives. Perhaps you aren’t communicating as clearly what it is you’re doing well or where there can be improvement (come on, you don’t communicate just sunshine and rainbows, do you?)

Back to the web evaluators.

Another problem with their free evaluation pitch is that they assume web traffic is your main focus – but is it? Maybe you’re good on traffic but you’re not hitting well on conversions. Or you’re not able to get enough repeat purchases. You know this but they come in with assumptions that may not match your main priority.

Another problem with their evaluation pitch is that the pitch itself is confined to their expertise but doesn’t speak to all the brand components that you’re dealing with. Is the website the only component of your brand? Hope not and I’ll bet it sure isn’t. So they can’t just drive up to your window and say, “Here’s all the things we think you should do.” Because it’s not just about websites or social media or ads or direct mail. It’s about the brand strategy that drives that stuff beforehand. So while Johnny Web Designer can roll up with his worksheet ready to check off all the areas that need improvement in his view, he’s coming into it with little to no perspective on the overall brand. I’m not talking about hits, impressions or Google Analytics. I’m talking about the goals of your company, how your audience behaves, what the voice of your brand should sound like – the deep stuff that has to be sorted out long before a website goes live. Will he take that into consideration? Probably not.

So what’s a web firm to do if they can’t pitch business in this freebie evaluation way? Work harder and smarter. As in there are tools out there for intelligently getting to know the challenges your prospect is encountering. Yes, that means you have to actually study the prospect before barging in the front door shouting, “We can evaluate your website!” Connect the person’s current challenges to what you believe the website may be neglecting. It shows you actually gave a damn.

If it sounds like you have no choice as a result of this but to be more choosy about who you target, you’re absolutely right. Whether it’s a top 10, 50 or 100, it’s smarter to narrow your focus and study deeper than to do the blanket approach and form letter. It’s true for job hunters and when other types of agencies are targeting accounts – and it’s no different here.

If you want to have a sign-up sheet on your own website to capture evaluations, that’s fine. But utilizing it as your prospecting tool is the wrong way to go.  There’s a million web development firms with that approach. If you want to stand out, get to know your prospect better so that when they hopefully do reach out to you, you know plenty about them going in.

You’ve got to work hard to earn the invitation.