soulati.com

Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

Soulati-'TUDE!

Amplify Brand & Public Relations

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Brand, brand, brand. Yesterday, Elena Kagan fought for her “brand,” as the newspaper headlines stated. Seems everyone is using this word, yet what does it mean? Better yet, what does it mean to you?

Brands resonate. We’re familiar with those we elect to consume in every-day life and those pushed into our space by smart marketers whether we want to engage, or not (i.e. Brittany Spears). (Note: I selected this hyperlink b/c this site popped in a natural search; good job!)

Social media provides the opportunity to amplify a brand. Shout it out there that your company is paying attention, pushing services, values, personality, essence, and promise to the online consuming world.

As a public relations practitioner, I don’t do formal branding. I leave that to those who reside in advertising agencies or marketing departments. The opportunity for public relations to integrate with marketing is now more frequent, and thus public relations blended with brand is a strategy all PR practitioners should consider, hammer down and offer up.

The lines are blurring where public relations stops and marketing begins. I work daily with a marketing team focused on sales and delivering lead-gen programs to sales teams. I contribute to the sales experience with content strategy and ideas that fuel business goals. I wrote a much maligned post awhile back, PR Drives Marketing. I still firmly believe this for a variety of circumstances; yet, we’re all contributing to the same end goal. (Right, Mark W. Schaefer?)

What I don’t do is ensure success of a brand. Public relations promotes it, elevates it, positions it, and puts a human face with personification to it.

What does brand mean to you? And, how do you engage to amplify it?

Build a Foundation, Then Social Media

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Is your house in order? What I mean is do you have the bricks of the foundation laid tightly and affixed with mortar, or are there a few gaps here and there to let the critters in? Speaking from experience, I know my foundation has quite a few gaps to fill, and it’s a work in progress.

This below is more a reminder for us all to take a close look at how we project and amplify a brand. I cannot comment on anyone else’s stoop before cleaning mine, that I recognize; however, the work I do in my field provides me with enough examples to offer you a few tips.

Here are phase one foundational elements to implement and pave the way for brand positioning:

  • Company name. I announced about six weeks ago I had changed my company to Soulati Media, Inc. This name is more a reflection of the direction I’d like to go with endless opportunity to position me as the brand (something I’ve been doing for some time now).
  • Domain name reservations. Grab the domain names and all the extensions to protect your intellectual property. This is the cheapest form of security. While larger companies are targeted more than small companies, it’s solid business practice to reserve domain names and redirect them to a primary Web site.
  • Logo. I am getting a new logo developed that resonates with my company’s service offering and provides a sense of my personality and spirit.
  • Web site. With new domain names and the blog, having a solid architecture for all the sites, where each points and where they’re hosted is critical. It’s a confusing discussion and requires time with the experts who do nothing but work on back ends of Web sites. These Internet marketing gurus and IT people are invaluable.
  • PHP expert. I have a friend helping me a bit with my WordPress blog. After self-hosting the blog, which is what you ought to do, learning the intricacies of code, widgets, plug ins, and sidebars (not to mention design) is not a cake walk. I encourage those less inclined to equip your team with a PHP expert. I still need one!
  • Web site design.  Thousands of templates exist to design Web sites, and yet some sites look like they’ve been designed by a DIY’er. If you want to project a professional image, do invest in a middle-of-the-road design with spot-on content.
  • Blog. Blogging is not for everyone; however, you can hire a decent writer and express your thoughts via a ghost writer (see Mark  Schaefer’s discussion at Grow yesterday) or share the spotlight with someone else who can help.
  • Social Media Triad. To launch social media, build a Facebook page and get some “likes.” Consider Twitter if you’re a business-to-business firm (apparently they’re more engaged on Twitter than business-to-consumer firms), and then migrate to YouTube with some cool video.

Not an exhaustive list by any stretch; what would you like to add?

Managing Social Media Fear to Win Against Grudge

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Managing reputation online is stirring up a lot of thought and is the subject of many conversations. Some businesses, those that service disgruntled consumers who purchase with a “grudge,” are afraid of social media. The fear factor lies in the what if — “what if someone writes a negative comment about our business or their buying experience?”

Yesterday’s Trackur post Gathering Business Intelligence from Online Listening by @FrankReed references the lowest-common denominator for companies as buzz branding — monitoring, listening, and quantifying online brand mentions. While the experts may believe it’s the lowest common denominator, I suggest otherwise. There are many companies not engaging in any social media, let alone monitoring the buzz.

Fear about a consumer posting a negative comment overrides the interest in testing the social media waters. So what if someone posts a negative comment on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, Complaints.com or elsewhere?

Here are some thoughts around this question; perhaps you’ll add to the discussion, too:

  • Zero in on your fears about the potential for negative comments by consumers on the ‘Net. 
  • Is your house in order, and are your services top-notch? Do you regularly review the sales experience and pinpoint the pulse of front-line services?
  • Is your management team apprised and trained about social media? How about the people who touch the customers?
  • Regardless of whether you are engaging in social media,  your customers have access to it and can complain without your knowledge.
  • At the very least, do execute simple buzz branding and listen to the conversations about your company and competitors.
  • Monitor consumer complaint Web sites; set up a Google alert for online mentions about your brand. Engage with Trackur.
  • Be prepared to respond immediately to a negative complaint. With the right effort you will win over a customer long term.

Here’s a story I’d like to share…Yes to Carrots was a new brand of personal care products. I liked the clean packaging, the catchy name, and I love product. I purchased three different products at two places. Every product had packaging issues; the dispensers failed. My frustration with one was minimal, but having three malfunction caused me to take action. After I opened the third package and could not work the product, that’s when my emotions elevated.

I tweeted and Facebooked, and immediately got Facebook response from the company apologizing for the problem. The company went in to high gear and refunded my money, provided coupons and sent new samples of other products in the line. They took immediate action and did everything necessary to satisfy and assuage my negativity.

To those companies that elect not to respond at all to complaints or be in an ignorance-is-bliss mode…you’re digging a deeper hole.

Media Relations and P&G’s What-If Plan

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Today’s post is a compendium of news about Fortune 100 crises. If you’ve watched this space, you’ll recognize these names – Nestle, BP, and Proctor & Gamble. Don’t know the crisis each is managing? Then perhaps you’ve not been consuming social and traditional media, for these corporations are in the news several times a day of late due to rain forests, oil and diapers.

To bring you up to speed, here’s the Soulati-‘TUDE! Nestle post. This week, my “Got a What If Plan?” oriented to the oil debacle paved the way for the next day’s post on diapers, rash and Procter & Gamble.

So great to see a sequential flow, and the only reason I re-introduced this content here is as a foreword to this article in Advertising Age “Inside P&G’s PR playbook: How Pampers Battled Diaper Debacle” about a behind-the-scenes look at the public relations machine for Proctor & Gamble. The internal team and its agency kicked into high gear at the onset of mommy complaints that the new Pampers Dry Max caused diaper rash and “chemical burns” on babies’ behinds.

For anyone in corporate or agency public relations, I strongly encourage you read this piece. It is a fascinating unfolding of a public relations machine in synch with product marketing, corporate strategy, and internal response to a brewing external crisis.

The story was written by Jack Neff after Advertising Age was granted an insider view of the marketing public relations team in action. He followed them for half a day to watch strategy and execution. I’ve not seen a story of this nature delivered smack in the middle of a crisis. If I were a stakeholder, you can bet my concerns would be alleviated after reading this piece.

In companies the world over, there is crisis. Social media has elevated these issues beyond comprehension and presented them to the consuming public on a silver platter. This trifecta is a textbook case for students, and I hope academicians and volunteer public relations professors are watching these three situations closely. There’s no better way to teach than by real-world example, and none of us are too old to keep learning.

Only one word of counsel for today:

It’s more critical than ever to shore up external messaging. When social media comes calling, one word gone awry can upset the entire apple cart.

What’s In Your Name?

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Apparently, formerly Computer Associates now . and becoming CA Technologies as a brand (not legally) found out the hard way that CA Inc. was non-descript and too much like California and Cocaine Anonymous to be worthy.  So says a Wall Street Journal article May 17, 2010 in Corporate News (I would’ve thought that a story for the Marketing & Media section) and in.

To escape some accounting scandal, Computer Associates dashed to alter its identity to CA Inc. Seriously? I’m sure I heard about it and yawned. Now, a mere five years later (not long enough in the timeline of a corporation) with a looming gazillion dollar budget, the company is changing branding everywhere on products and marketing. Yet, it’s keeping its legal name CA Inc.

Why? Because CA Inc. didn’t describe what the company does.

So, I thought it fitting to tell you my name change story. Let’s call this storytelling or my company back story. I’m told by a dear colleague who shall remain nameless, Gregg, that storytelling is what makes the whirl funnel …

In 1991, I launched my first company – Soulati Media Relations, Inc. For seven years, I hired kids out of school, paid salaries and benefits and was president of the. I did exactly that – media relations. I was such a youngster. It was the pre Internet era, although in those days the first email addresses were from Compuserve, and they were digits!

In 2002, I came back out for the third time and named my company Marketing, Media & More, Inc. This was the early Internet era and still pre-social media. The company name was long, but it was what I offered. And, it added “marketing” to the mix because you know as public relations people the quest is always to be more marketing driven.

INTRODUCING SOULATI MEDIA, INC.

In May 2010, a name change to . With the age of social media upon us and the branding of Soulati nearly a decade old with a Web site () a blog (Soulati-‘TUDE!) and my email it was time to pull the branded family together. (Now, if you visit, you’ll see I’m still working on the presentation as this is a new deal.)

Thanks to CA Technologies, CA or Computer Associates whatever your name is for providing the platform to introduce the new me — branded and all.

Now, what’s your brand?