PR is Only Dying If It Isn’t Evolving

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Brian Solis (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I asked Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks and co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, about the future of the PR industry as we know it.

There’s plenty of doom and gloom surrounding the practice of public relations in the social web world, but Solis suggests, and I totally agree, that there’s a tremendous opportunity if firms and departments understand how to evolve and grab it.

In a sense, old school PR was about control of the message, but ironically, we lost control the minute the press release went to distribution. In PR 2.0 we can listen, in real time, to how a message is being received, accepted and talked about. With that aspect in play we actually have more ability to jump in and shape or reshape how a message is perceived and shared – actually more control.

Social media has evolved to the point where it impacts every department, whether they choose to participate or not. The new PR agency and department must embrace the social web as an umbrella that links HR, Interactive, Marketing, Management and Finance. The role of the PR agency should expand in this new model.

The new PR firm has the awesome responsibility of helping every department realize that real people exist on the other end of every interaction and message.

5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Constantly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. If you’ve never done this before, do it immediately as it is one of the best ways to discover what you do that actually differentiates you from your competition.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a small business that had no idea what its competitive advantage was until we heard it right from the mouths of happy customers. Seeking feedback is also a great way to get better and plug gaps. I can tell you that if you’re not receiving a large amount of your business by way of referral or word of mouth, you’ve probably got some gaps in your processes.

Below are five questions I like to pose to customers as they can provide a great discussion base for getting at what’s truly important to you and your customers. Create a form and get in the habit of surveying a handful of customers every month. I think you’ll be rewarded with tremendous insight and you’ll also find that your customers enjoy being asked what they think. One word of caution, don’t accept vague answers like “you provide good service.” While that may be true and good to hear, you can’t work with that. Push a bit and ask what good service looks like and maybe even if they can tell you about a specific instance in which they felt they got good service.

1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us in the first place?

This is a good baseline question for your marketing. It can get at how effective your advertising, message and lead conversion processes are working. I’ve also heard customers talk about the personal connection or culture that felt right in this question.

2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with?

In this question you are trying to discover something that you can work with as a true differentiator. This is probably the question you’ll need to work hardest at getting specifics. You want to look for words and phrases and actual experiences that keep coming up over and over again, no matter how insignificant they may seem to you. If your customers are explaining what they value about what you do, you may want to consider making that the core marketing message for your business.

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

On the surface this question could be looked at as a customer service improvement question, and it may be, but the true gold in this question is when your customers can identify an innovation. Sometimes we go along doing what we’ve always done and then out of the blue a customer says something like, “I sure wish it came like this,” and all of a sudden it’s painfully clear how you can create a meaningful innovation to your products, services and processes. Push your customers to describe the perfect experience buying what you sell.

4. Do you refer us to other, and if so, why?

This is the ultimate question of satisfaction because a truthful answer means your customer likes the product and likes the experience of getting the product. (You can substitute service here of course.) There’s an entire consulting industry cropping up around helping people discover what Fred Reichheld called the Net Promoter Score in his book The Ultimate Question.

Small businesses can take this a step deeper and start understanding specifically why they get referrals and perhaps the exact words and phrases a customer might use when describing to a friend why your company is the best.

5. What would you Google to find a business like ours?

This is the new lead generation question, but understanding what it implies is very important. If you want to get very, very good at being found online, around the world or around the town, you have to know everything you can about the actual terms and phrases your customers use when they go looking for companies like yours.

Far too often businesses optimize their web sites around industry jargon and technical terms when people really search for “stuff to make my life better.”

Bonus: I’m a big fan of building strategic partnerships and networks. Another question I would suggest you get in the habit of asking your customer is – “What other companies do you love to refer?” If you can start building a list of “best of class” companies, based on your customer’s say so, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a list of folks you should be building strategic relationships with.

Image credit: Karen Elliot

Weekend Favs February Six

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won’t involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week)

Image credit: Dr Swan

Enjoy!

Good stuff I ran across this week:

Siri – An iPhone app that acts like a personal assistant – you can ask to find things by name – nearest Starbucks or by broad category – good vegetarian restaurant near me. The app then gives you a list complete with maps, details and reviews.

20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited – great list of statistics to use in those social media presentations you’re needing to give.

Alert Rank – if you’ve set up Google Alerts (and you should) to help monitor your brand online, Alert Rank helps you understand and filter alerts so you can know when to jump in and join conversations based on the authority of the mention.

Extending Your Presentations Through the Backchannel

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The term “backchannel” was coined in the field of Linguistics in the 1970’s to describe listeners’ behaviors during verbal communication. It is commonly used these days to describe the behavior or conversation going on in social media while a speaker is making a presentation. In some conferences the majority of the people listening may be actively Tweeting throughout a speech.

Like it or not, managing the backchannel has become a part of presenting, in person or online. I’ve certainly seen conferences overuse backchannel twitter streams and the like to the point where they overwhelm and distract rather than aid. There needs to be a balance and I don’t think making a Twitter stream a competing channel makes sense for anyone. Having said that, I think it can be used wisely as it allows people who can’t attend to share and extends the reach of your presentation far beyond the confounds of the local hotel ballroom.

For at least a year or so many speakers have made liberal use of the Twitter hashtag as a way for attendees and non attendees alike to group, filter and sort all of the conversations happening at a conference or during a webinar. As the backchannel has evolved into the norm, a new set of tools is cropping up that allow presenters to participate in the backchannel conversation even while they are presenting.

For example,Keynote Tweet for Mac and PowerPoint Twitter Tools for the PC are presentation add-ons that allow speakers to embed tweets into their presentations and automatically have those tweets pushed live when the slide is revealed. The tweet content is actually in the presenter notes in the software so it won’t be seen by the audience and may simply contain a retweetable statement related to the slide or point. What this does is make it very easy for the content to be shared and retweeted by those in attendance and publishes the key points for those that are not.

PowerPoint Twitter Tools for the PC is actually a suite of eight free tools including tools that allow participants to do things like vote or take a poll and have the poll results pushed live to the slide on the screen.

Just getting up and presenting is task enough for many a speaker, but hey, this is the world we live in, so get used to managing the backchannel as well as the frontchannel.

Analytics from a Really Smart Guy

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Avinash Kaushik (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 is one of those rare people who can take a somewhat dry and mathlike subject of web analytics and make it sound easy and even fun. I got to spend a few minutes with Avinash for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast for some tips about this important, but often overlooked topic.

Web Analytics can seem like a scary subject, but it’s essential, so like brushing your teeth, just do it. You’ll be so glad you did once you get the basic reporting tools in place. Once you have a baseline you can start to do what Kaushik calls “controlled experiments” to start breaking down everything you do with an eye on making it better and stop doing the stuff that your customers don’t like.

Analyzing how many people come to your web site and trying to figure out what got them there was the 1.0 version of tracking I suppose. What Web Analytics 2.0 attempts to do is also measure what they did there and why through the use of tools like surveys that engage individual users.

Here’s the Web Analytics tool set for the small business (there are paid tools for each of these steps, but these are free)

1. Google Analytics – install this free site analytics tool to get the base data collection going
2. 4Q – this is a free exit survey tool that asks people who come to your site four questions about their experience – this is akin to getting people to tell you why your site sucks – hello! – it’s the first step.
3. Google Website Optimizer – Another free Google tool that allows you to easily set up a/b tests to start taking what people tell you from 4Q surveys and start experimenting which of your changes is getting a better result.

GoToWebinar is the presenting sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

Right and Wrong of PR Pitches

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For years I was on the pitching end of PR and, while I still do some for my own promotion, I am more often on the receiving end of pitches these days.

It’s probably foolish to suggest there is one right way and one wrong way for a PR person, marketer or business owner to do anything, but I know there are solid ways to get my attention and equally solid ways to convince me you are not really that into me covering your story.

I’ll relate a recent engagement with an internal PR professional as an illustration of what I think is a very good way for businesses to approach the practice media relations. Warning: This is the long-term, thoughtful approach and takes some work.

Before I continue I will admit that the lessons in what follows are PR101 obvious for many, but I’m just here to tell you that experience demonstrates I need to share this.

I wrote a blog post recently on the subject of local search directories. In that post I mentioned about six of these directories by name. The post was pretty generic and all positive. Within a few hours I received an email from Chantelle Karl the Public Relations Manager for Yelp, one of the organizations I mentioned. First PR lesson – track, filter, and engage brand mentions.

Her email simply provided deeper and additional information related to the subject I had covered and showed me where I could find more if I desired. There was no pitch or press release involved. PR Lesson – show that you can be a resource of relevant information.

Yelp is a major player in this growing industry and the information she sent revealed some interesting stuff that I did not know, so I reached out and asked for an interview. Karl wrote back with a contact that was appropriate and we scheduled the interview for the Duct Tape podcast. PR (life) Lesson – be responsive and build relationships

On the day of the interview she confirmed that I had everything I needed and she got out of the way. I can’t tell you how many PR firms still think it’s their job to manage the conversation. Minutes after the interview I received an email with a list of fast facts about Yelp. As a writer, this is exactly the kind of information that I can use to quickly add flavor to the article I was working on. If I want the entire company history I probably know where to find to it, but boiling it down for me into snack sized snippets is a great way to be useful to the journalist. PR Lesson – understand what a journalist really needs and how you can make their life easier.

Today’s post is not an attempt to bash the PR industry, far from it. Thankfully I can recount many stories like the one above, but I could also cite the opposite. Today’s business owner and marketer must employ PR as a major leg of lead generation and these lessons apply no matter what your job title.

Image credit: Waldo Jaquith

Social Media Infecting Every Aspect of Business

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For this week’s post at AMEX OPENForum I outlined 5 Ways That Sales People Can Benefit From Using Social Media

Social media tools are incredible for engagement, amplification, nurturing and deepening relationships – all the stuff that sales is supposed to do. In fact, social media tools are probably more useful in the hands of the right salesperson than the entire marketing department.

The Single Greatest Way To Discover Innovation

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Warning: I have no scientific research to back up the theory I’m about to ponder, but I would love to hear your thoughts after/if you complete reading this post.

I don’t really recall the first time I discovered this, but it’s happened enough that I can’t deny the powerful tool it is.

When I am looking for inspiration for my writing or simply trying to connect the dots to make something whole, I fall back on a process I’ve come to call monochromatic reading. (Maybe there’s a research study on this somewhere and Nobel Prize winning psychologist who’s got an even fancier name, but that’s my term)

Here’s the idea behind this. Whenever I am trying to get inspired, original or innovative in my thoughts to add to a presentation, blog post, article, product, service or book, I spend a fair amount of time reading. No surprise there, everyone does that, but what I’ve found is that some of the best ideas come from unrelated texts – if I know how to read them.

What I do is come up with one single topic – business growth, referrals, persuasion – whatever I am trying to work on – and I pick up books that are not related to the topic and read through them quickly looking only for ideas that relate to or parallel my subject. So, if I doing a piece on business growth, I might actually find some incredibly innovative ideas in a book about how bees build colonies. (Actually nature works are some of the best) The key to this is the single or monochromatic focus while I read.

The original ideas that spring from this process are mind-blowing. If I’m ever stuck, this is one of the greatest ways to get unstuck and crystal clear about what I should write or say. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really seem to matter what the topic of the book is. When you read it with a chosen focus in mind, ideas just turn up to serve this focus. I’ve done it with fiction and non-fiction works alike. Of course this idea doesn’t apply only to books or written work. The greatest opportunity for innovation usually comes from outside your industry as well.

I share this here today because it’s something that puzzles and marvels me and it’s definitely something that can help marketers and business owners everywhere, but I would also love to get your input on this – have you experienced this phenomenon as well, let’s discuss it here? If not, give it a try and share this idea with anyone looking for inspiration.

Image credit: liber