danleach.co.uk

Like blogs, Twitter has almost become a staple comms. tool for brands. But before jumping into the world of micro-blogging make sure your company can answer the following questions:

1. What will your Twitter username be? Make sure it’s short, snappy and relevant. Use the company name if possible so fellow tweeters can find your easily
2. Who will be responsible for updating the feed? Will it be a single person, a team of people – how much time will you allocate to Twitter each week? If it’s not enough you won’t get out of the starting block.
3. What is the purpose of your Twitter account? Is it a news feed, customer support channel, lead generator, personality-builder, media engagement tool, event promotion, competition promotion, internal communications or simply amplifying another Twitter feed? Make sure your tweets serve a purpose.
4. What is your follower strategy?  How will you decide who to follow and who does the following?
5. Who are you targeting with Twitter? Journalists, industry influencers, customers, competitors, celebrities, staff? There are numerous audiences on Twitter but make sure your tweets aren’t being lost in space – make them targeting and attract the people you want to speak to.
6. What is your response strategy? What do you do if someone sends a reply or DM to you? Is it an instant response, do you have a 24 response time? Who manages the replies?
7. What is the expected life-span of your Twitter feed? Is this something that will live for 6 months or indefinitely. Ask the question, if the answer is less than 3 months then Twitter probably isn’t the way forward for your brand.
8. How will you integrate your Twitter feed across your other social platforms? LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare – they all allow you to further spread your tweets amongst your target audience.
9. How will you measure the success of your Twitter feed? Be accountable, will you measure the number of followers you have, the number of leads you have generated or the amount of conversation created. Have a goal and you’ll find it easier to find success on Twitter.

Creating a Twitter account isn’t rocket-science but having an effective and useful Twitter feed isn’t easy. Only by questioning the role that micro-blogging will have for your brand and dedicating focused resource towards the platform will you ensure Twitter becomes an invaluable tool for your company, your employees and your customers.

So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn’t been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven’t had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter – The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day.

I won’t go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak!

I’m not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don’t know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today’s media, their PR and crisis teams have to be commended for a job well done. Yesterday’s news really has become today’s fish and chip paper!

It is worth pointing out that they did get a small helping hand with Palin misquoting one of their coffee cup quotes the other day. It may not have sold lattes but it certainly deflected some of the attention off the running taps!

We all hear of horror stories of journalists being incredibly rude to PRs and many of us have experienced, first hand, exasperation turn to frustration turn to rage after unwittingly selling-in the tenth survey of the afternoon.

But recently I’m beginning to understand how they feel and to be honest wonder how they manage not to slam the phone down after two minutes of stumbling over the first sentence of a pitch.

As we near the end of the year many industry bodies and magazines start planning their awards ceremonies and with that comes the invitation to “take a table” at the event to PRs and the clients they represent.

I have had two already today and the pitching has been so woeful it’s a wonder how they manage to fill the smallest of venues.

The first one:

Sales: “Hi is this Dan”
Me: “Yes”
S: “Yes…er…hi….um…I’m not sure what clients you look after but we’re holding the xxxx 2008 awards in December. Have you heard of them?”
M: “Yes”
S: “Would you like to book a table?”

Second one:

Sales: “Hi I’m xxxxx and I’m calling about the xxxx Awards 2008″
Me: “Hi”
S: “Yes, we would like to invite you to the awards ceremony as I understand you represent xxxx”
Me: “Oh okay, sounds interesting. Could you send me an email with some more details?”
S: “Sure. How do you spell your company name?”

Neither is good but the second is better than the first purely because the sales rep decided to invite me rather than expect me to open up my cheque book within 30 seconds of picking up the handset.

The first rule of selling whether it’s a product or a story is knowing and understanding the audience you are selling to. And I don’t mean knowing what journalists or PRs like, I mean actually knowing who the person on the end of the phone is, who they are, where they work, what they work on and any other insights that are readily available through the magic of Google!

Not knowing who my clients are is annoying but forgivable. There is not central database for PRs however if you don’t know then why not ask. In fact that would be a good way of opening up some kind of dialogue. Not knowing how to spell the name of the company I work for is inexcusable. I know I’m one on a list of hundreds to receive a phone call that day but it doesn’t mean I want to feel like one.

When you’re asking for £3k+ to attend an event, a little bit of desk research is the absolute minimum I expect.

It’s the same for journalists – by doing some simple searches and gathering a little background knowledge I have found the levels of receptiveness and conversion increase vastly. It’s all to easy, when faced with a media list of hundreds, to try and rattle through as many as possible as quickly as possible (gotta get in before they go to conference) but a client would be much happier you called 10 and secured five pieces of coverage than called 100 and got nothing.

Note: I have not included the names of people or specifics about the events as I have used the experiences to make a point and don’t think it is necessary to publicly bash them.

A good friend of mine who follows this blog yesterday gave me a call asking me why the blog went a bit downhill yesterday. He called it “constructive criticism” and at first I was a little taken aback. Plenty of posts, some useful content, what was the problem?

Well apparently, two things lack of comment and lack of humour.

Fair enough I thought. I was busy, didn’t have a chance to construct Shakespearean prose, but he did raise an interesting point.

The advice did make me take a look back on my recent blog posts and he was right, not my best work. But it took him to say it for me to realise that I was substituting quantity for quality.

Self-critique is something we rarely do in PR. Key learnings are one thing but often these are watered down points intended to shift the blame rather than expose our own failings.

We need more people, on the inside, to question the way we do business for our clients. It’s all very well having clients question our approach but we too often dismiss that as in-house paranoia, they don’t have the wisdom to see what we are trying to achieve. Every now and again we should take a step back and look at what we are doing from the perspective of our harshest critic – what could we have done better, what didn’t we achieve, why didn’t we achieve it?

Fortunately, in my friend I have my harshest critic but we should make an effort to be our own on a more regular basis.

In his latest post, Steve Rubel has asked whether PR is obsolete and I generally agree with the sentiment.

Traditional PR is, to a degree, dead. Distributing press releases far and wide in the hope of getting a hit (the machine gun effect) is time consuming and delivers little if anything. The same goes for press-conference style events – they no longer pull in the numbers.

Conversation has changed forever but as PRs we have been slow to adapt our approach and tap into “the new way”.

One of the problems is moving out of our comfort zone. Clients have to report upstairs and have numbers to hit, numbers that are measured by circulations, OTS and AVE – it’s hard to measure conversation. So why put ourselves out by trying to encourage the use of new media and communications tools such as Twitter.

Well if we don’t then one of two things will happen. Either our competitors will demonstrate how new media can be more effective and clients will walk out the door; or our clients will realise the power of new media on there own and guess what, they will walk out the door.

Our clients demand to be where their audiences are and it is our responsibility to take them there, whether they like (or understand) the journey or not.

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Robert Scoble’s latest post is praising the launch of a new service for programmers called Stack Overflow, claiming its success has been down to ditching PR in favour of letting the users create organic noise around the site.

Robert is right in that it is incredibly effective having passionate users spreading the word of your product or service, but he is mistaken if he thinks a PR hand isn’t behind this.

For any start-up business, whether online or off, BETA testers are one of the most effective tools in a PRs arsenal. Not only do they provide instant feedback that we can guard against but they provide a core user base that can be leveraged as part of a powerful word of mouth campaign, which, it would seem, Robert has been exposed to.

Robert – PR isn’t all media relations and stunts. Occasionally we do something really smart and stay invisible!

In honour of 10 Yetis Good and Bad Public Relations feature I thought I would do my own Olympic Special:

Good PR
14 year old Tom Daley: After finishing in last place in the synchronised diving competition young Daley gave a dignified response to his team’s poor performance, betraying his young age and showing that he is due to become one of the most popular British sporting personalities for many years to come. More than can be said for his partner Blake Alrdidge.

Bad PR
Spain’s Olympic Basketball team: The team took the unsual approach to their team photo by making slit-eyed gestures. Who decided that this would be a good idea?