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Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

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Should We SMB Facebook?

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Twitter offers lovely surprises when you least expect it. I had no idea I’d banter intelligently with Neicole Crepeau (@neicolec) and invite her to a phone chat which resulted in both of us describing ourselves as SMBs frustrated with the health care reform situation. Nicole runs Coherent Interactive  and blogs on social media here.

My initial thrust in reaching out to Neicole was oriented to “what can we do as bloggers” to fight back?

Neicole, idea person that she is, suggested a Facebook page. That put the wheels in high gear. I’ve been avoiding starting a Facebook page for Soulati Media, Inc. because the Web site is still not where it needs to be (my designer is in la la land and not responding), and my blog pages need to be built with informed content. Why open yet another channel when my house is not in order?

Rather than Facebook about me and be so repetitive and boring, Neicole and I briefly addressed a Facebook fan page for small business owners struggling with high emotion about taxes, insurance, finance, and all other issues that form the backbone of our businesses.

Several years ago, I registered a domain name that would address the administrative inside of a business; the site would be a plethora of resources for all SMBs to tap and enable a smooth sail for these issues that plague us. My dream is still a dream, but this Facebook page is more a reality and easier implemented, too.

Here’s the invite…

We’re seeking SMBs (that’s small-to-medium businesses) to join us on this venture. Our aim is to create a forum for us in business to voice our concerns, share tales, and lend support to our peer groups. The role of those who engage would be to add links, content, comments and encouragement to anyone stopping by.

There’s no monetary gain here unless you get a lead from a prospect eager to engage in our conversation. The commitment is one of intellectual stimulation, some time, and the ability to freely say “I’m ticked off that SMBs continue to be gouged for more taxes, higher premiums, and more accounting demands…etc.”

As Neicole and I run successful ventures that keep us hopping (see above), we’re eager to find like-minded folks to launch this yet-to-be-named forum.

If you deem this cause and our mission agreeable, please join in. Just a note below is all we need to engage. If you think the Small Business Forum worthy and you’d participate, please also give me a nod here.

From the pod of a seed, big ideas come and a community is generated.

Media Relations ala Reputation Management

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One of the first pieces of counsel I give to companies embarking on media relations, messaging or message mapping is to know your competitors. By conducting a regular competitive analysis you garner full understanding of the space in which your company plays. While before competitive analysis was a challenging exercise, the onset of social media and social networking has made this research easy and fun.

To know your competition, who’s the spokesperson, what they’re saying, and about what product/service they’re preaching is imperative. This knowledge helps create a defensible or offensive position to tell your story via traditional media relations as well as social media engagement.

The August 2010 story “Rethinking Reputation Management” in Website Magazine says similarly:

“It’s time to rethink reputation management solutions. Ask yourself: How closely am I looking at my competition’s reputation? Identify companies you actively compete against as the first step. Commercial reputation management and monitoring solutions provide the deepest insight.”

The article goes on to say that tracking search terms produce the best information i.e. key words associated with your vertical. Once search terms yield a treasure of info, save them for constant monitoring via online reputation management tools.

What I mean by developing a competitive position relates directly to how informed you are about your entire industry sector. If there is a company with which you continually vie for market share, then learn everything you can about how they play and conduct business.

This knowledge translates directly to your boardroom chats about how to position your company to your peer group, customers, media, and other influencers. With the wealth of information now available online, you can build industry monitoring directly into tasks accomplished three times weekly.

I recommend some basic starting points to drive business intelligence (please add more to enrich these suggestions):

  • Monitor Twitter for trending topics, company spokespeople, and what the Twitterverse is saying.
  • Register yourself with Twellow and Listorious (with your own Twitter account) and regularly track others in your market there. Be sure to follow “people to watch” and get on lists to track the buzz.
  • Set up Trackur or Radian6, a few online reputation monitoring tools, along with Google or Yahoo! alerts, too.
  • Definitely monitor Facebook and YouTube for posted content as well as commentary associated to respective posts/videos within each social media channel.
  • Blogs tracked via Technorati and RSS are a must to monitor. It’s easy enough to subscribe to a competitor’s blog to see what’s going on and how aggressive their messaging truly is (relating to your market).

Rather than get inundated with data you don’t know what do with, monitor other companies for about six weeks to garner a firm understanding of competitors’ messages. This time period is enough to showcase a decent perspective of the alleged market leader. It also provides the backbone you need to begin to develop your own offensive position.

With the aforementioned, your messaging framework is rooted in competitive intelligence, and it strengthens delivery of your company’s external information to the influencers you’re trying to reach.  Your goal is not only to engage social media and create community, but to do it with aplomb! Hard-hitting, influential message delivery by designated spokespeople to traditional media and social media is how you get ahead of the curve and catch up to those already playing in your space.

  • Incorporate learnings from your peer group into your own messages. Package messages that resonate with a sprinkling of key words to satisfy search marketing, and be confident in your own storytelling abilities.
  • After you have a comfortable working message framework, package it into a message map. (Ask me if you’re unfamiliar with this necessary tool.)
  • Develop content that tells your story, issue many online press releases to build link love, drive traffic to your social media and networking outlets and continually garner attention from consumers at large.
  • Conduct traditional media relations with trade media in your market sector, and when a story appears be sure you feature that in all the respective places you publish content.
  • Give it three-to-six months to earn traction, depending on your aggressiveness.
  • Monitor your own company and the key words associated with your business. By doing so, you remain in an offensive position and can more expediently thwart attempts by the competition to gain the leading edge.

What have I missed? Please add your thoughts to the importance of competitive analysis for pretty much everything in which we engage, right?

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?

Spanning the Divide: 10 Tips for Public Relations/Sales Synergy

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I’m still absolutely appalled at the lackluster effort by the two sales people at Toyota and Ford dealerships within the last two weeks. If you’ve been following me on occasion, you will know that I’ve been recording the steps by a consumer (me) to purchase a vehicle.

With all the chaos in the automotive industry in the last 18 months, I had assumed/expected better effort by the sales people (one female, one a senior citizen) to earn my business.

The last frontier for public relations must be SALES. I cannot speak for all industries. The TV salesman at H.H. Gregg over the weekend in Indianapolis convinced my aunt to purchase several luxury items; he did a great job. Is it just auto sales we’re talking about, then?

Here are a few tips for public relations practitioners to infiltrate some expertise into the sales mechanism of any company:

1. Messaging. Marketing typically provides product background to sales, but is there a message map developed for the sales team? Message maps are valuable for any spokesperson on the frontlines; sales teams are tier one spokespeople for a company.

2. Training. With a completed message map in hand, train the sales team to use it. Role play and you be the potential customer. Let the sales team get comfortable with the map so everyone uses the same powerful and approved messages.

3. Secret shopping. There’s no better way than to ask a “spy”  to launch the buying process for a product and see how the sales team is performing. Take what’s gleaned from that experience and return to the salespeople with more tips on how to interact with customers.

4. Respect. Everyone in the organization must respect the sales team for its position and role for the company. Ask marketing and sales what tools can be created to assist with this effort.

5. Attend sales meetings. Salespeople have the pulse of the industry and customers at their fingertips. What a treasure of information for public relations. When a PR person attends (you need to get invited), you can identify case study prospects, news hooks, regional news fodder and develop a variety of communications as a result.

6. Sales communications. Treat sales as a tier one target audience. They need to know what’s happening within the company and when public relations learns critical industry information, sales should be informed. Write a newsletter, e-blast, intranet site for sales, or other non-tech method of communication (some salespeople don’t have access to the Internet).

7. Blend with marketing. As the marketing team is oriented to sales quotas, ROI and lead generation, listen to their needs and complement the mix with on-point public relations strategy.

8. Ask the sales team. Communicate. Be a team. Be inclusive. Regard sales as a critical component of the marketing public relations mix.

9. Build trust. For years, sales and public relations has been miles apart with marketing smack in the middle. Until results happen, sales will not regard public relations in the right light. In fact, public relations is likely to be little understood in the sales organization.

10. Try, try again. Try for what works. Synergy does not happen over night, but shame on sales and public relations for not putting forth a consistent effort to make it so.

What other thoughts can you offer?

Message Mapping for Realty Firms

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The I wrote this week “Message Mapping is NOT Mind Mapping” spawned a slew of discussion, tweets, linked posts and new thought. It was cool to see a variety of contributions, mostly from the mind mapping side of the equation. Some use a combo of mind- and-message mapping; others have no idea what message mapping is. What do you use to capture messages? Please share!

When I prepare to facilitate a messaging session, I develop a list of open-ended questions to the executive team. Let’s say you’re a realty company and you’d like all your realtors to use the same language with clients and prospects.

Here is the approach I take when message mapping:

  • Place questions in themed buckets, i.e. about the company, customers, pricing, credentials, staffing, differentiators, etc.
  • Pull leaders together for a few hours and run through the questions with an external facilitator (me).
  • Capture all the answers and comments; you’d be surprised when no answer is the same from the leadership team.
  • Draft sassy, succinct, simple, soundbite messages.
  • Secure approval from executive leadership.
  • Map the messages into a schematic that tells a story about the company from start to finish and in between.

Here are the sample questions I’d deliver to a realty company wanting me to faciliate a messaging session:

  • Describe your company to Gramma (if Grams can’t understand, then no one can).
  • What services are provided?
  • What products are sold?
  • What is your geographic boundary?
  • Who are your clients/audiences?
  • Do you specialize in commercial or residential?
  • What price point of home are you most comfortable selling?
  • What is your differentiator as a company?
  • What expertise/credentials do your realtors have?
  • Are there any guarantees you offer new clients?
  • Do you work with mortgage brokers and can you offer a one-stop shop of services?
  • Can you tout a success rate of XX days on market for homes for sale?
  • What realtor fees are average; are there hidden fees clients should be aware of?
  • Why should a home buyer use your agency?
  • Why should a home seller use your agency?

Is this mind mapping?

Why I said in the earlier post this week that message mapping is not mind mapping is because the latter feels tactical to me. Tactical execution is being planned and mapped; each step is further delineated until an entire planning strategy is in a diagram.  On the other hand, a message map is about descriptions, explanations, quotes that executives deliver about aspects of a company. While messaging is certainly a pre-launch tactic and can be included in a mind map, this subset exercise stands on its own two feet.

What do you think?