Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Don’t Make These Five Start-up PR Mistakes

December 20, 2011

Over many years of providing PR services to start-up companies, I’ve noticed a lot of the same very basic marketing and communications mistakes being made by one start-up after another:

1)      The goals for PR are unrealistic. Start-ups (and others) sometimes expect PR to sell their products. Public relations is not a direct sales tool. It can create awareness, educate the target audience about new technologies or solutions, build positive buzz, win over influencers, develop credibility and build relationships with potential customers. It can lead the potential customer to the company’s website or store or telephone sales force. These are not insignificant accomplishments; they are necessary steps along the way towards sales. But PR can’t always deliver sales leads. (You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.)

2)      The company’s founders don’t think they need PR (or marketing) because the products are so great they’ll sell themselves.  This relates to #1 above. It’s the “build it and they will come” philosophy that usually only works in a field of dreams! PR isn’t  a sales tool, but the PR and marketing are steps towards sales that can’t be skipped. Even if the products are as great as the founders think, there must be a process to let people know about them.

3)      The target audience is ill-defined or undefined. Sometimes when we talk to start-up executives about who they are targeting with their new products or services, the answer we get is, “Everyone. Everyone needs [or can use, or will like] this.”  This is a serious mistake and marketing problem. There are important reasons to identify the target audience, consisting of those who are most likely to buy. It is more cost and time-efficient to focus on that segment of the population than to try to appeal to everyone. Even big companies with brands like Coke, McDonalds, the iPhone and Victoria’s Secret have target customers and aim their marketing towards them very specifically. There’s a good reason why you don’t see iPhone reviews orVictoria’s Secret ads in magazines published for senior citizens. It’s imperative to do research to determine the best target audience.

4)   There are  no key communications messages chosen to be communicated.  What do you want your target customer to know and think about the product? Unfortunately the answer we sometimes get to this question is a very long, complex litany of attributes, facts and figures. It’s very difficult if not impossible to get across long and complex series of messages. We work with our clients to identify three or four of the most compelling messages and to repeat these over and over until they are well-communicated.

5)      The company expects splashy media coverage just because it (or its product) is being launched. If there’s not much new or different to offer, when there is no important differentiation from competitors, there’s no news. If there’s no news, there’s no compelling reason for media coverage. We can offer the media interviews with company executives to discuss industry trends or current events, and the resulting media mentions help the company build credibility and visibility. But we can’t deliver a lot of coverage about a company and its products if there’s nothing new or different about them.

Most entrepreneurs don’t come from marketing or communications backgrounds, never had to be proficient in those areas and are not natural-born communicators. We’re there to help, by advising and educating. With a good, well-differentiated product, some education about the basics of marketing and PR – and a little luck – a small start-up can take giant strides in establishing itself.

Lucy Siegel

R ead my e-book: “Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture”

The Specialist vs the Generalist: Who Wins?

December 14, 2011

Marian Salzman, CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, on a PR Week Webcast this week, forecast what’s coming next in the PR industry.  Her outlook for 2012, which was covered in an article by Matt Wilson on Ragan.com, included a prediction that people in the PR industry will have to become generalists, taking on a wide variety of tasks, including but not limited to media relations, developing “content” (a communications industry buzzword that means written, audio or video materials for use online) and serving as experts on transparency.Wilson reported that her explanation for the need to be generalists was, “The media is really being redefined by the second.”

Here’s the thing: some of us saw this coming years ago and refused to be pigeonholed as specialists at a time when the common wisdom was that you had to be a specialist to climb the communications career ladder.

When the dot com bubble burst and the technology sector crashed in 2000, people who had differentiated themselves by specializing in tech or internet PR were being laid off left and right. The situation got much worse after 9/11, when budgets were being cut drastically by PR agency clients in every industry. We learned at that time that it was risky to be specialists in one narrow area. Agencies with general PR practices stood a better chance of survival in a downturn than specialist firms. At that time it was tech that was the weak spot. But at other times health care, financial services, fashion and other industries have been the danger zones.

It’s not unusual for someone who has been a corporate communications professional in one industry to move to a totally different industry. I’ve watched colleagues move successfully from telecom to insurance, from television to the automotive industry, from the automotive industry to a non-profit.

One very nimble friend has gone from the corporate communications department at a Big 5 accounting firm to a beauty products company, a tobacco company, a financial services company, an educational institution, and she now works in the green IT and smart grid sector (and she’s excelled in each position!). Over the course of her career she’s also had a wide variety of roles within communications and marketing, including writing, magazine editing, internal communications, marketing communications and sales promotion.

This demonstrates that good communications principals are much more important to success than deep knowledge of a specific industry. Once we learn the basics of the communications profession, we can apply them to a wide variety of clients. I would argue that broad experience over different industries is a positive influence on creative thinking. You can leverage what you observe in one industry and apply it to another industry in a way that PR insiders in that industry would never think of doing. To be a good communications generalist, it’s crucial to be able to pick up the basics about a new industry fast, and to be able to distinguish between what you need to know and what you don’t.  You don’t need a Ph.D. in physics to be a PR superstar for a laser manufacturer, or a CPA to head the corporate communications department at an accounting firm.

All of the above is why a liberal arts education is so important for a communications professional. In college, it’s much more important to learn how to learn than it is to learn the specifics of any particular profession.

Lucy Siegel

How Do We Become Indispensable?

November 30, 2011

I just read an article in the Harvard Business Review about how to make yourself indispensable. The author describes an employee that has done a terrific job, done everything right. He applied for a promotion and was stunned when he didn’t get the position. It went to someone else. He asks, “What did I do wrong?” and his boss says, “Nothing, you’re doing a great job.”

The author argues that it’s much easier to improve your performance (and your position in the corporate world) if you haven’t been doing so well, but much harder when you’ve been doing a great job. He concludes that incremental
improvements don’t help as much as developing other, complementary strengths. For example, an engineer who indisputably does a wonderful job for the company would gain a lot less by becoming an even better engineer than by improving a skill such as writing or people management.

The article stimulated a lot of comments and debate. How do you make yourself indispensable: by keeping on top of the
ever-changing needs and wants of your bosses, and then working to meet those needs? Or by determining how you could become more valuable, based just on your own strengths?

This led me to think about how public relations practitioners can be perceived as indispensable by their clients or, in the case of internal PR staff, by the top management of their companies. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a client, or not winning a client, due to a decision not to have an external PR firm because top management feels that PR isn’t a high enough priority. In these situations, when we are considered dispensable, the marketing department or the internal communications staff may disagree, but they’re overruled.

So how do we, as PR practitioners, make ourselves indispensable? Unfortunately, just as explained in the HBR article, simply doing a great job isn’t enough. The answer isn’t to provide even better results. If what we do is really that valuable to a corporation, then the onus is on us to make senior management understand that we are, indeed, indispensable.

It helps if we set measurable goals in the beginning of a project or a year and then actually do the measurement. However, this is a lot easier said than done, and a lot of attention has to be paid to what kinds of goals are set as well as how they are measured. Otherwise, who’s to say, for example, that it was the PR, not some improvement in the product or services, the sales methods or the distribution methods, that helped sell more?

It’s very hard to measure the impact of PR in isolation from other factors. It’s crucial to agree on goals that we can, without doubt, take credit for reaching.  Often even if we can suggest appropriate, measurable goals, our clients don’t have the budget to spend on measurement.

In my most cynical mood, I’d say that very often it’s the people who have to be indispensable in order to sell senior management on PR, not the actual contribution PR makes. The most successful people in the PR industry (as everywhere) are those who have strong personal charisma as well as the ability to cozy up to the decision-makers in an organization and win them over. Sometimes indispensable means a bond of dependency.  That kind of relationship trumps PR results every time.

I wish I had the answers to how we can make PR indispensable. Maybe you do. I’d like to hear what you think about this.

Lucy Siegel

Five Reasons for Public Relations Professionals to Be Grateful

November 23, 2011

I read an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about a study done by Robert Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, and Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami on “the attitude of gratitude.” It seems they have evidence that when people are grateful, they are healthier, sleep better, are less anxious, and act more kindly to others, including their “significant others.”  In the spirit of providing readers with a calmer Thanksgiving weekend with family members, I’d like to list some reasons for people in public relations to be grateful:

  •  PR people have become the go-to professionals for social media relations.  In order to keep up with the fast pace of change in communications in general, we had no choice.
  • Our need to keep up with what’s happening online has actually made many of us who were previously considered technologically challenged into technology early adopters. (I would have laughed at anyone who predicted this 20 years ago!).
  • Unlike our brethren in the communications industry with advertising backgrounds, we have been holding up fairly well in this weak economy.
  • Our profession has never had more potential for growth than it does now. I’ve been hearing anecdotal evidence of public relations being elevated in many companies to report to the CEO.
  • It has become easier and cheaper to measure the value of what we do. That surely must be an important factor in the previous reason to be grateful.

Professors Emmons and McCullough advise people to start cultivating an attitude of gratitude by keeping a journal listing five things they are grateful for. These can be small things – a turkey that was neither dry nor undercooked, a winning football team, etc.

Five things I’m grateful for today:

  • We have great clients from whom I learn something new all the time.
  • My two sons flew home from the west coast to be with their family for the holiday.
  • I’ve been able to be my own boss and keep my company running, even in tough times.
  • My staff members are smart and often funny.
  • The rain stopped; the forecast is sunny and relatively warm for November.

How about you? What are you grateful for?

Lucy Siegel

Inc. 500′s Social Media Growth Bigger than Fortune 500′s

November 21, 2011

In a provocative article on Entrepreneur magazine’s blog this week, columnist Mikal Belicove, a social media specialist, reported there is now research showing that big companies are less social media conscious than small companies. Why are big companies less social media conscious? And, on the flip side of this question, what motivates smaller companies to use social media more aggressively?

The research data came from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s’ Center for Marketing Research. The Center’s study, ““The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America’s Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?”, was based on data from the 2011 Fortune 500 list of companies, the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private small companies, and also the largest charities and institutions of higher education.

The researchers looked for blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter followers at all of the institutions. The companies were deemed to have blogs if they had “a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months.” The research repeated similar studies done annually since 2008. The researchers concluded that the use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook has grown very little in the past year at these large companies. Moreover, the Fortune 500 companies came in last among all the groups in adopting social media every year for the past four years.

In his blog post, Belicove suggests that big companies are risk-averse because they want to protect their top market positions, and are deliberately slowing down their adoption of social media because they believe they have more to lose than to gain from encouraging consumer/customer participation.

Why are smaller companies using social media more than big ones? Neither the researchers nor Belicove answered this question. My guess: the absence of big corporate bureaucracies and legal departments gives the marketing people at small companies more flexibility. Of course, small companies also have less money for marketing than big ones. Social media costs less than advertising and many other forms of communications (although it is not free, as many seem to think – the people costs involved in social media program development and maintenance are considerable).

The results of this study are heartening for small businesses. Small companies are able to be more flexible and nimble than big ones, and those attributes may well be giving them an edge in the use of social media for public relations.

There was a comment on Belicove’s blog post that big companies may be slowing down on their use of social media because it doesn’t produce sales results. This isn’t true, however, since the use of social media to find and attract prospective clients is one of its most important business applications, in my opinion. The ability for a company to obtain data on customer preferences and to build closer relationships with customers is a huge sales advantage.

In addition, the advent of the internet and social media in particular has changed the sales process for most companies by enabling a switch from “outbound marketing” to “inbound marketing.” Hubspot, on its excellent “Inbound Internet Marketing Blog,” defines outbound marketing as pushing the marketing message out, via trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. These methods are less effective than they used to be because prospective customers are inundated with marketing messages and have found ways to shut them off or screen them out.  With inbound marketing, in contrast, says Hubspot’s CEO and Founder, Brian Halligan, “you help yourself ‘get found’ by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.”

Inbound marketing provides warm leads and eliminates the need for cold calling. I don’t know about you, but anything that cuts down on cold calling is fine with me!

Podcast: PR & Marketing for Start-ups & U.S.-based Foreign Companies

November 4, 2011

I was interviewed yesterday by Bruce Hurwitz  for his Blog-Talk Radio show, “Bruce Hurwitz Presents,”  as part of a series of interviews with women entrepreneurs. The show is available on-demand as a podcast and the topic is “PR & Marketing for Start-ups & U.S.- Based Foreign Companies.”

Have a listen! Click “play’ below, and then click the arrow on the radio dashboard that appears.  (There is a 10-second delay after clicking the arrow on the radio dashboard.)

Lucy Siegel

PLAY


PR Can’t Create Thought Leadership

October 27, 2011

…But It Does Help Magnify It!

There are trends and buzzwords in every industry, and “thought leadership” is currently on everyone’s lips in the world of public relations.  Actually, this has spread way beyond the PR industry and is often heard now in the business world as a whole.

According to Wikipedia, a thought leader is “business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas.”  The business media have featured articles ranging from how to “engage” [another buzzword] thought leaders, to how thought leaders can engage employees.  Among many articles on thought leadership, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) weighed in with “How to Become a Thought Leader in Six Easy Steps.”

Thought leaders stand out.

If you read between the lines in the HBR article, you see that the headline is a little misleading. The article really tells you how to leverage the thought leadership you already have, rather than giving lessons on becoming a thought leader. The truth is, the  best PR in the world can’t turn a follower into a leader. PR can, however, help people who actually are thought leaders to be spokespersons for their organizations, to draw attention to and build credibility for their companies.

Thought leadership doesn’t have to come from big company executives. Entrepreneurs in start-ups can leverage  it to build their companies into “challenger brands” (companies that give brand leaders a run for their money).   Steve Jobs was one of the most famous thought leader entrepreneurs. Although he ended up CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world, he started as an entrepreneur working in a garage.

Bridge Global Strategies has had the pleasure of helping entrepreneurs in a variety of industries to make waves by communicating their innovative ideas.  Public relations can really make a small company soar when there’s a truly innovative thinker at the helm who has a good product or service to offer. With a good PR program,  start-up companies can change their industries.

Lucy Siegel

Public Relations Society of America’s Terrible PR

October 21, 2011

I’m embarrassed by the totally unprofessional, unethical and childish behavior this week of the so-called leaders of my profession, the board and staff of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

I’ve been a PRSA member for many years and have paid dues and event fees for employees who’ve wanted to participate (something that most large agencies don’t do any more – score another point for PR boutiques). This week

Jack O'Dwyer

PRSA is holding its annual convention, and the organization has been all over the industry news - not due to the program, but because of its discrimination against one industry journalist, Jack O’Dwyer, publisher and editor-in-chief of the eponymous Jack O’Dwyers Newsletter.

O’Dwyer has been in a nearly 20-year-long vendetta with PRSA’s national staff and board. He scrutinizes PRSA’s finances every year and has been a thorn in the organization’s side by making extremely negative editorial comments about its expenses, staff and board. As a result, PRSA has singled O’Dwyer out for special treatment: last year he was charged full attendance fees at the convention while other journalists were invited free of charge. This year he was barred from attending altogether.

Here’s the thing: O’Dwyer is entirely right about PRSA’s expenses (and the behavior of the staff and board have proven him right about them, too). PRSA national has lost over $850K in the first nine months of this year. The association’s operating income vs. expenses barely broke even for 2010, and showed a loss of close to half a million in 2009. Meanwhile, I’m paying a total of $500 in annual dues. Of that, PRSA national gets $225 for general membership, and Counselors Academy, a PRSA special section, gets $195. The chapter gets only $80. Yet the chapter’s  frequent and widely varied programming is every bit as good as what the national organization provides. Most of the PRSA services provided in the NYC metro area come from the chapter, not PRSA national. Yet PRSA forces people to be national members in order to be chapter members.

I served on the board and as an officer of PRSA’s New York chapter for many years. I’ve visited PRSA’s national headquarters in downtown Manhattan on several occasions. There’s a ton of office space and a large staff down there. However, it’s volunteers who do all the program development. It’s not as if the money we members pay in dues is being well-spent on developing a positive image of the profession. It’s apparent to everyone that this industry association has  done a miserably poor job of PR for PR for as long as anyone can remember. So where’s the value for our money?

I feel an obligation to support the local chapter with my membership dues because of the important service it provides to the entire NYC PR community. I’ve also received value from PRSA’s Counselors Academy. Yet it galls me to pay those national dues every year. 

No matter what PRSA’s national board and staff think of Jack O’Dwyer’s  editorial coverage, their discrimination against one journalist is an embarrassment – not just to me, but to the entire public relations profession.

Lucy Siegel

PR Ethics: Is There a Right to PR?

October 18, 2011

Does every organization deserve PR? My answer: No, but

This has been debated in the public relations industry for many years. Some feel that just as everyone has a right to legal counsel, organizations have a right to PR counsel (even the governments of countries such as Iran and Qaddafi-ledLibya). Others disagree on the grounds that it’s morally wrong to provide bad guys like Qaddafi with the tools of persuasion we can offer. I don’t believe everyone has a right to PR. But the line between those who don’t deserve PR for ethical reasons and those who do isn’t always a clear one.

I just read an article published by the conservative American think tank, The Heritage Foundation, chastising the U.S. State Department for conducting an information campaign aimed at American students.  When it comes to doing PR for the U.S., the State Department by law is only allowed to target people outside the U.S., and communications aimed at U.S. citizens is forbidden. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 actually prohibits this for convoluted and complex reasons that are now being questioned in Congress.

I find it ironic that an important branch of our own government is denied the right to public relations outreach to U.S.citizens when foreign countries have that right. Among those exercising that right (by hiring U.S. lobbyists and/or public relations professionals) are Afghanistan, Iran, Russia (with no fewer than eight lobbying and PR organizations on its payroll, including Ketchum) and China (which has 11 on its payroll, including DDB Worldwide Communications Group, and Brown, Lloyd James, the PR company that once represented Libya).

Just after 9/11, the World Economic Forum (WEF) decided to move its annual meeting usually held in Davos to New York, to support the city. I was working at Publicis at that time and the company, which represents WEF, had the monumental task of moving a meeting with thousands of participants with a just a couple of month’s notice.  Publicis in New York was asked to help. My group was given responsibility for handling public relations for a delegation to the conference from the Council for Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry.  Because Osama bin Ladin and all but one of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, sentiment here was extremely hostile towards the country and its people, and the Council’s goal was to improve American attitudes towards the Saudi Arabian business community.  My team was charged with setting up interviews for members of the delegation with national business media and leaders of the business community, and arranging speaking engagements.

Since it wasn’t fair to blame the acts of Al Qaida on the entire Saudi business community, I felt the Council had a right to be heard in the U.S.  I put aside my own feelings about 9/11, and about Saudi statements on Israel and Jews over many years, and worked with the Council.

I’ve represented several other clients over the years that were considered morally repugnant by most people.

One was a company on the verge of bankruptcy due to extreme wrong-doing by several senior executives. People were dying because these executives had approved the sale of a product they knew to be harmful. We took on this client because the thousands of employees at the company who had nothing to do with the incident were in danger not only of losing their jobs but also of not finding new ones because of their association with the company. In addition, we realized that if the company went bankrupt, it wouldn’t be able to pay court-ordered damages to victims. Our work wasn’t intended to whitewash the executives’ crimes, it was geared towards the economic survival of the company so it could meet its obligations.

I would never force an employee to work with a client if it violated her personal values. We each have to follow our own moral compass.

Occasionally I hear about PR firms taking on assignments to “rebrand” terrorist or totalitarian countries, including organizations that are known to engage in mass murder or torture. I would never work with clients of that kind. I won’t be put in a position where my skills are being used to exonerate wrong-doing. Those who accept such assignments find ways to rationalize their decisions, but I couldn’t.

Lucy Siegel

Is Public Relations a Good Career Choice ?

October 12, 2011

Ten or 15 years ago, my answer would have been, no, go into marketing or management consulting. But I feel much better about the industry’s future these days.

Ten or 15 years ago, ad agencies were very much in ascendance and they had pocketbook power (i.e., the overwhelming majority of most companies’ marketing and communications budgets). Public relations, then considered the poor cousin of advertising, was dominated not only by the ad industry, but by men at the highest levels of the profession. At the lower levels, PR was considered “a “velvet ghetto” overrun by women. That might explain why PR salaries were (and still are) pathetic compared to advertising.

For many years, the public image of public relations has been negative. The predominant (and inaccurate, unfair) stereotype of a PR practitioner has been someone who engages in twisting the truth (described by the pejorative terms “flaks” and “spin”).

Today, however, ad agencies are often bypassed by clients who see the costs as out of proportion to the benefits, and who look to PR as not only more cost-efficient, but also as generally more effective in disseminating most corporate and product messages. Salaries are still not great, but there’s no salary growth anywhere right now (according to the New York Times, salaries have been dropping across theU.S.).  I don’t know the statistics, but it seems that young men are entering the profession in greater numbers, and (speaking cynically) that should help bring about better salaries for everyone in the industry.

What’s brought about these changes is the advent of online social interaction, which has provided a means for consumers to influence each other more than they are influenced by ad messages or even media coverage. PR has always been about two-way communication; listening to people and interpreting their attitudes in order to better position an organization and communicate its messages.  These skills are of paramount importance in a social media context. With new skills to master and novel online tools to harness, the PR profession has been changing rapidly. It’s an exciting time for PR, which has taken on much greater importance in this environment, a fact that marketing professionals and the C-suite have acknowledged.

PR has come into its own, and it’s attracting new college graduates in large numbers. I asked our fall semester intern, a senior communications major atCityCollege, why she chose PR. Here’s her response.

Lucy Siegel

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Why PR? A College Student’s Perspective

Catese Shirer, Bridge's fall intern

When I was young I never aspired to be a public relations professional. What I had in mind was a career as a lawyer, doctor or teacher, the kinds of professions that my parents imagined for me! So how and why did I get into public relations?

To start with, I never knew this profession existed until I was in high school. At the time, I aspired to be a top-of-the-line reporter covering the latest news. However, the more I learned about journalism the more I realized it was a very intense and competitive field.  While there’s nothing wrong with competition, I didn’t like the idea of competing with my co-workers to have my story chosen for publication over theirs.

In addition, my perception was that journalism is all about relaying cold, hard facts.  I knew that journalists are not allowed to be subjective. In PR, however, I sensed that I could allow my creative juices to flow. PR allowed me to think outside the box, voice my ideas and help turn those ideas into reality.

One of the things I look for in my career is versatility, and PR fits the bill. The work is ever-changing, and so is the field of public relations. I come into work knowing that each day will be different. I’m able to stay connected with the world through social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I can also plan events, meet new people and network all at the same time. There’s so much variety that I know I won’t be bored.

Don’t get me wrong – PR is not all “glitz and glam.”  It’s necessary to put in time and effort and be really dedicated in order to succeed. Client needs have to be met accurately and efficiently. It takes a strong  work ethic and an outgoing personality to make it, and I feel I have both. I’ve chosen this field because I expect PR to be a fulfilling, meaningful and challenging career.  That’s why I’m here!

Catese Shirer, Intern, Bridge Global Strategies


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