Three Ways Pinterest Can Work for B2B PR

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Elisabeth

Just as the PR community has really begun to embrace Facebook and Twitter for public relations efforts, along comes Pinterest with a new social media format that can be leveraged in order to add value for B2B technology companies.

What is Pinterest? It’s actually an interesting concept—a virtual pinboard for social photo sharing. The site’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting.”

While Pinterest has really caught on for consumer marketing, there is potential for B2B marketing as well. Not all businesses are a match—Pinterest is for visual assets so businesses and products that do not appeal to buyers through pictures and videos may not be successful. Check out this infographic to help determine if your business should be on Pinterest.

Upon first investigation, however, I immediately recognized the business potential of Pinterest for helping clients promote their new products and events via pictures. Nothing can compare to the impact visual graphics and photos have for attracting interest. Here are a few ways I’m using Pinterest as a PR tool.

Online clipping book: My clients love posting their media coverage on their website, but postings are simply text lines with links to the original media outlet and have no attractive images to spark interest and draw a click-through. With Pinterest, you can create a pinboard with visual press clippings of your clients’ coverage that are more likely to compel visitors to click through to read the articles.

New product launches: Create a board and post multiple pictures of your clients’ new products. Most product announcements are in the form of a press release and only occasionally do publications have room for a product photo. Now you can post multiple product photos and even application photos to give viewers a more complete picture of the product and its value.

Company events and activities: The current best practice for sharing pictures of company events and activities is Facebook, but the task of scrolling through many individual pictures to find ones that might be interesting is time-consuming and tedious. Now you can create a pinboard to view multiple photos of client events and activities such as a party at a trade show, a new trade show booth, a new product launch party—the possibilities are endless.

Like all social media, there are some best practices to keep in mind to make the most of this opportunity.

A Pinterest pinboard, like a Facebook page or Twitter feed, doesn’t promote itself and won’t be successful without consistent input and outreach.  You need to continually refresh content and look for ways to attract new followers if you want your site to be effective.

Strive for interesting, out-of-the box content—boring product photos alone will not entice visitors to return very often. Try to include with your new product photos shots that demonstrate an interesting application instead of simply posting “beauty shots.”

Don’t use Pinterest only to promote products; blatant commercialism is rejected here as it is on other social media sites. Try some fun things like a theme or a contest. Repin related industry content from other thought leaders.

Link with other social networking sites to maximize exposure and drive cross traffic between your sites.

Right now, Pinterest has a predominantly female audience, but I hear from men everyday that they are starting to use it. I’m sure as Pinterest takes off and becomes widely adopted, many new and innovative marketing techniques will surface to take advantage of this unique medium.  If you’ve got ideas, please share them in our comments section.

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The Power of One: The Ripple Effect of Good Customer Service via Social Media

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Amber

We often talk to our clients about the importance of social media, but outside of increasing followers and “likes,” it’s sometimes difficult to see the benefit.

However, I learned first hand the power of social media when I booked a room at the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. Ten minutes after the room was booked, I “liked” the hotel on Facebook and found an even better deal for our stay. My husband quickly called the hotel, but was told the reservation could not be changed. So I went out on a limb and commented on the Facebook deal asking if it could be changed.  I woke up the next morning to an email from the social media coordinator stating that she had seen my Facebook post and adjusted our rate accordingly.  Awesome, I tweeted my thanks so that the hotels followers and mine could see and will likely recommend the hotel to family and friends.

Now I’m just one person with a very small following, but what happens when this type of customer service is granted to a person with a big following? Peter Shankman, consultant, investor, speaker, founder of the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) newsletter and social media expert, wrote a tweet just as he was taking off about how he longed for a Morton’s Steakhouse dinner. And you know what? There was a full meal waiting for him when he got off the plane. Shankman has 53,237 likes on Facebook and 129,826 followers on Twitter, quite an audience to share his amazing customer service experience with. And not only did he share the news, his followers did too!

I’m not saying you have to grant your followers’ every wish, but when a company puts in the time and energy to let their followers know they care, their followers will go the extra mile to let their groups, big and small, know how awesome the company is too. It might not always be easy to see the benefit, but one tweet, or Facebook post, can make all the difference in customer relationships.

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Four Key Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2012

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Elisabeth

Now that 2012 is in full swing, articles are springing up all over the Internet with predictions for the future of social media as a business marketing tool in 2012 and beyond.

At DJA, we’ve seen a giant leap forward over the past year in client awareness of the usefulness and importance of social media for business-to-business marketing. A year ago, few of our clients thought social media was a marketing tool worth paying for. Many of them did not have social media accounts, or, if they did, they thought simply adding social media links on their websites and occasionally updating their Facebook page or sending out a tweet was enough.

One year later, not only do almost all of our clients have social media accounts, many of them have realized that social media is becoming a key marketing tool for reaching out to their customers and have asked us to integrate social media into their overall PR program.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post—social media is fast becoming an important element of business marketing strategy that demands dedicated, knowledgeable and professional resources to properly implement. In 2012 there are four key trends that appear to be developing for social media as a marketing tool.

The competition for social media mindshare will become even more competitive in 2012 than it was this past year. Angela Hausman points out in her article, Social Media Marketing: 5 Predictions for 2012 that businesses entering the social media marketing scene now will not enjoy the same instant success as early innovators and adopters. Last year’s best practices are old news—in order to compete in an increasingly crowded space, companies will need to invent new tactics and leverage changing social network platforms. The pundits warn that companies who do not get on the social media bandwagon this year are going to be left far behind the competition.

Social media marketing is also becoming more scientific. Sporadic communication will no longer build followings. Companies need trained experts in social media marketing and technology to drive consistency and relevance, essential elements for a successful social media marketing program. In addition, analytics are becoming increasingly important—companies don’t like to spend money on programs that don’t show measureable ROI. Social media is difficult to measure, but PR professionals and other social media marketing experts know the best ways to extract and analyze meaningful statistics on customer engagement through social media.

Integration is becoming extremely important. Social media is not a standalone tactic—it needs to be integrated into all aspects of a marketing program. For instance, a press release should be sent out over the wire and emailed to media contacts, but it should also be tweeted, posted on Facebook and LinkedIn, shared and blogged about. PR and marketing activities should support social media and vice versa.

Finally, social media engagement has changed the traditional lines between customers and businesses. Through social media, customers can become important brand advocates if trained social media experts are used to attract, motivate and maximize the value of customer spokespeople. In addition, because social media has become a means for sharing negative as well as positive customer experiences far and wide, it is important for companies to act instantly to resolve complaints and win customers back with excellent customer service that is broadcast widely through social media. Again, experts should be used to help craft the right messages and respond appropriately to resolve these situations in a positive way.

Social media is a key marketing tool of the future, but in order to get maximum value from social media efforts, businesses need to take their social media program as seriously as their traditional marketing program and ensure that they are leveraging knowledgeable, experienced resources to realize measureable value for their efforts. Now is a good time to consider integrating a social media program into your PR program. DJA is on the cutting edge of the social media world and can help you find and implement the latest tactics that will enable you to compete for your customers’ mindshare.

Posted in Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

Advice: Finding Time to Blog

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Amber

Type “finding time to blog” in Google and you’ll get more than 19 BILLION results. It’s something we often discuss with our clients – blogging is great, but requires a great deal of time. And as I sat down to write this post, it had been nearly one month since we posted our last agency blog.

Any great blogger will tell you that consistency is right up there with substantial content as one of the main characteristics of a successful blog, so I thought today would be a good time to round up some of the top tips for finding time to blog.

Stephanie Chandler at BusinessInfoGuide.com suggests that you schedule the time in your calendar and commit to writing just two blog posts per week.

Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide shares his tips, including setting a realistic target, collecting ideas to eliminate time staring at a blank page and composing the post in your head. Keep reading here for more of his tips.

Robert Dempsey of Dempsey Marketing keeps it simple – know what you want to write about, put a high priority on writing and do it.

Kelly Clay at LockerGnome emphasizes allowing your self time to capture ideas and think through blog posts rather than starting out cold.

This are all great tips, but if you have more, please feel free to share in the comments below. Now I’m off to write, or at least think about my next blog post!

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Webinar: Eight Techniques Every PR Champion Should Know

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Lynn

You may be asking yourself, what exactly is a PR champion? Is that someone that knows everything there is to know about PR? Not necessarily. It wasn’t until after listening to a recent Vocus webinar, “The Eight Techniques of the New PR Champion,” that I began to understand the inner workings of what makes a great PR champion.

Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO of Pure Performance Communications shared her eight PR personas that provided excellent insight on how important it is to integrate social media into the rapidly changing world of PR.

  1. The Policy Maker: This champion creates a social media core team of visionaries and strategists. These are the people that need to collaborate with one another on addressing and evaluating the company’s social media platforms. Questions they ask, include: What’s being said about the company? Are we properly engaging with our target audience?
  2. The Internal Collaborator: This person’s key question is: What kinds of information are people sharing and or talking about within the company? Their job is to find out the needs of everyone and establish real-time collaboration.
  3. The Pre-Crisis Doctor: This is a champion that develops a crisis plan – before there is a crisis. This person should be monitoring what is being said about the company, the positives and the negatives in advance of any crisis. It’s very important to be quick and efficient when a crisis hits.
  4. The Reputation Task Force: This champion analyzes the company’s reputation. They consider company ethics, serve as brand police, and create a social voice. They are also charged with setting the tone and emotion of the content.
  5. Master of the Metrics: This person tracks the quantitative and qualitative results of all the social media efforts going on within the organization. This will help with measuring the overall success of the company as well as understanding its social media objectives and goals.
  6. Relationship Analyzer: This person determines who your audience is, and who’s connected to whom. By recognizing how relationships are built, and with whom they are built with, this champion allows a company to better understand their key publics.
  7. Communications Process Organizer: Leave it to this champion to determine how people working within the company are communicating? It’s crucial to share information between departments so that everyone is up to date on what’s going on.
  8. Technology Tester: This person immerses the company into technology. He or she tries out new social media platforms and brainstorms creative ways in which it could benefit the organization.

PR is constantly changing, and it seems to be moving more and more towards social media. Breakenridge provides us with her eight PR personas, but do you have any to add? We’d love to read yours in the comments below!

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Top Hits: Becoming a Subject Matter Expert, Redefining PR and B2B Marketing

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Amber

Be Found in the Media

Alan Weinkrantz shares five basic rules to “…Become A Subject Matter Expert To The Media,” including Pear Analytics and infographics. Let us know – which would you add to the list?

Public Relations Redefined

The New York Times discusses the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) effort to develop a new definition for the industry. Let us know in the comments below your thoughts on how PR should be defined in the 21st century.

Push and Pull of B2B Marketing

Deep <Tech> Dive shares an interesting survey of IT software developers and IT staff and management that revealed younger technology workers prefer a “push model,” – that is having  information pushed to their email inbox, their RSS feed, their Twitter stream, and their Facebook news feed. The post shares ways to navigate this push and pull (loyal readers or site visitors) of B2B marketing.

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The Perfect Pitch

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Elisabeth

Last week, while I was swamped doing media pitches for a new product announcement, my colleague handed me an article from PR Daily to read for our weekly staff meeting discussion.

I usually put off reading those articles until ten minutes before the meeting, but for some reason, probably because I desperately needed a break, I put down my keyboard and picked up the article.

Titled, “Business journalist explains the perfect pitch,” the article contained some great tips on how to write a compelling pitch to get the journalist’s attention.

The most important thing I learned from this article was to captivate the reader by leading with current news trends or a question, and that the best pitches don’t introduce the client until the end of the first paragraph, sometimes the end of the entire pitch.

That was a revelation to me. I’ve been writing pitches for 20 years and I’ve always adhered to the rule that you need to put your client’s name right up front—if not in the headline then for sure in the first sentence.

Since it was Friday afternoon of a very long and hectic week, and I’d not been having much success with my current pitch campaign, I thought, what the heck. The press release contained a great customer quote, so I started my new pitch by laying out the industry issues my client’s new product solves, then presented the customer quote, which supported how my client’s product helped the customer solve his problem. Although my client’s name was mentioned in the quote, I never directly introduced the client until the last line of the pitch, where I offered the VP of marketing for a pre-briefing.

I chose one editor who was important for me to reach but who had ignored previous emails. I held my breath and hit “send,” then closed down and headed home for the weekend.

On Sunday evening I checked my email before going off to bed—imagine my surprise when I discovered I had received a reply from my experimental pitch requesting a briefing.

With 20/20 hindsight, when comparing the new pitch with the old one, I can see that journalists looking for something exciting to write about would be more attracted to a subject line and opening paragraph that hands them the news instead of being forced to read several paragraphs to try and discern what the interest is for their readers. Further, it was much more interesting to write the second, more creative pitch than the original cookie-cutter one.

Of the many advice articles we share among each other at DJA, this will be one I’ll remember and use over and over.

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Will Facebook Send Google+ to the Social Media Graveyard?

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Amber

In June we received the news of the summer – Facebook had a new competitor and it’s name was Google +. The web was abuzz with talk of the new social media platform and it’s potential to be a Facebook killer. Fast forward a few months and Google+ is estimated to have hit the 50 million user mark.

While Google+ usage is nothing to balk at, it seems Facebook is definitely in the lead with 800 million active users. Add to that a few new features that blunt some of Google+’s innovation and maybe Facebook will be the Google+ killer?

In August, we blogged on Google+’s key features for business marketing, but in September Facebook added some of these features as well. In response to Google+’s “Circles” feature, which is a way to group connections, Facebook introduced it’s “Lists” feature. In response to Google+’s “Sparks” feature, which is a way to search topics and find relevant posts, Facebook added functionality to search posts by friends, the public and groups for relevant topics. And as for Google+’s “Mini Blogs” functionality, Facebook has always had a “Notes” feature that could be used in the same way.

Furthermore, Ragan’s PR Daily posted a blog post in September entitled, “5 incredibly helpful aspects of Facebook Insights,” on how Facebook Insights can be used to understand your Facebook page’s stats. This feature is extremely helpful in terms of business benefits and understanding what marketing initiatives on Facebook do and do not work for your fan base.

So, while Google+ certainly has some business benefits, Facebook has evolved to enable many of the same features. As for the question of whether Google+ will be the Facebook killer? In my opinion it’s unlikely, because with 800 million active users Facebook is still one of the best places to connect. We’ll have to stay tuned though to see if Google+ can keep itself out of a spot in the social media graveyard right next to Friendster and MySpace.

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Is Going Viral All That It’s Made out to Be? Nope, just ask Chuck Testa

Posted on October 26, 2011 by David

As of this week, the analytics from the Chuck Testa viral video campaign stand at:

  • YouTube views = 6.5 million
  • New sales = $0

The success and failure of the Chuck Testa viral video experience provide a cautionary tale for all of us in the social media world that even outrageous success can be meaningless if the wrong tools are used.

Chuck Testa is a taxidermist from Ojai, Calif., just a short, pleasant drive from the DJA offices.  He hooked up with veteran comedy video producers Rhett and Link to produce an online video showing scenes of animals that look real, but are in fact stuffed. Each scene is followed by the catch phrase “Nope, its Chuck Testa.”

Hey, is that a rhinoceros ordering a drink at the bar?  Nope, it’s Chuck Testa.

Is that a gazelle driving that car?  Nope, Chuck Testa.

The payoff is Chuck Testa’s claim that he can make the most lifelike “taxidermized” animals anywhere.  So, with the right messaging, a catchy tagline and 6.5 million views, you’d think he’d be rolling in new business.

Nope. According to Stephen Nellis, writing in the Pacific Coast Business Times, business has not taken off.

“Aside from selling a few ‘Nope!’ branded T-shirts and receiving a lot of strange voicemails on his answering machine, the commercial hasn’t done much to boost business.  ‘No, none, zero.  I’m still broke,’ Testa said.”

Matching the marketing method with the type of business is as important now as it ever was.  There are so many new social media tools available to get the word out – from viral videos, to infographics, to blogging – that it’s easy to get enamored of the latest and greatest.

I don’t know Chuck Testa’s business plan, but I my first impression is that a more targeted marketing campaign directed at sportsmen in geographic regions where hunting is popular would have been more appropriate.

Of course, this wouldn’t be as much fun or as flashy as a funny viral video.  But, the goal always is to grow sales, which has a quiet, but satisfying appeal of its own.

Posted in Social Media, Viral Video, YouTube | Leave a comment

Five Ways to Use Twitter for Better PR

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Elisabeth

There are many articles on how to use Twitter for business, and DJA takes full advantage of this social media platform to build community and to promote our clients’ news, activities, accomplishments and new product introductions. But I’ve also found that Twitter is an invaluable tool for a more indirect, but equally as important service to my clients: staying on top of their industries, markets and competitors so that I can provide well-informed value to their PR and marcom programs.

This post will share a few tips on how Twitter can be leveraged to provide better service to PR clients.

1. Keep up with the latest industry news and events

I have tweet windows for key industry feeds for each client. This enables me to stay informed about my clients’ industry news and events with a minimum of time investment. Knowing what the latest hot topics and issues are is helpful for positioning in a myriad of client projects, from whitepapers and articles to press releases. Last week, I spotted a tweet from an industry conference organizer who still had open panel speaker slots and passed the opportunity along to my client.

2 – Mine industry feeds for blogs, tweet topics and retweets

Twitter provides great inspiration for client blogs, tweets and retweets that position them as being well informed about the most current happenings and offerings from industry leading companies, spokespeople and media. With the rule of thumb for successful social media programs being that information is relevant and informative to readers, being able to provide my clients with current and educational information to impart via their social networks adds to their credibility and attracts new followers.

3 – Monitor retweets

In addition to the promotional value of using Twitter to broadcast client news and activities, I have found that keeping track of retweets from client Twitter feeds helps measure interest and provide return on investment in their social media programs.

4 – Keep abreast of clients’ competitor news and activities

Twitter also works well for monitoring what my clients’ competitors are doing and saying. I can keep track of how competitors are positioning themselves around issues, what hot new products they’ve announced, what trade shows they are attending and if they’re doing anything interesting at the shows. Most importantly, I can keep up with the coverage my clients’ competitors are receiving and what outlets the coverage is coming from.

5 – Keep up with industry media and analysts

I follow all of my clients’ key media and analysts on Twitter. I can see what companies and issues they are discussing, what events they are covering and sometimes they even use Twitter to ask for input from followers. Twitter is just a great way to stay in touch with your key media even when you have no important news to email or phone about.

Social media has changed the game for PR professionals, sometimes to the point where it is very difficult to stay on top of all the important information being shared every minute of every day on multiple platforms. I have found that a good Twitter browser like TweetDeck can organize the many industries, companies and media that PR professionals need to follow for their clients and provide an efficient means for staying informed and keeping in touch.

Posted in PR, Twitter | Leave a comment