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The Happy Friday Series: She Loves to Heal

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Michelle-Quillin.jpgWhen a woman the likes of Michelle Quillin gets on your good side, and she’s never on anyone’s bad, you have the privilege of a friend for life, a supporter extraordinaire, and the most loving individual you’ve never met.

It’s a good thing we now can all G+ Hangout, for it took me about three years to “meet” Michelle in sorta IRL. She’s worth the wait.

Michelle is the better half of New England Multimedia, the WordPress design and development firm in Rhode Island. Back in the earliest days of our ‘raderie, she was part of the SMB Collective with Neicole Crepeau, Jon Buscall, Jenn Whinnem, and me. We blogged together in 2010 for awhile, and it’s been nothing but a building relationship ever since.

Michelle is one of those people who makes instant friends with most everyone. On Facebook she has a scourge of admirers from foreign lands who insist on getting to know her…LOL…I’m not supposed to share that with her husband, Scott!

What always impressed me about Michelle is her command of Facebook community building. In the earliest days, she took to the channel like a fish to water and had oodles of likes and comments on her posts. She asked questions, and got people to reply; she posted surveys and earned responses…she knows her Facebook!

In her real other life, Michelle is a youth minister guiding troubled youths through troubled times. Yet, she serves over and above and home schools teens (not hers) who need attention. She has played nanny to infants and toddlers whilst the teen mother attended school. Michelle keeps this side of her life private to the extent she can; however, a woman so devoted to nurturing, giving and caring needs to also be recognized in some small way. She is an angel and messenger who loves and lives to heal.

She has always been part of this community, and she wrote a piece for The Happy Friday Series, too. I thank you, Michelle, for always contributing, being there and here. My warmest best.

 

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Startups Should Hire PR Early

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What-is-the-plan.jpgDuring the earliest stages of a startup, there are many discussions and decisions about how a business will launch and with which bells and whistles to go to market. Marketing needs to be involved in these earliest stages; does public relations?

The very lawyerly answer is, it depends.

When you work with a hybrid public relations professional who brings 30 years of experience to a team, then public relations influences a startup’s business strategy. There is even counsel delivered by public relations that can influence business model. This expertise comes from years of innate knowledge acquired from representing clients across industries.

A public relations professional is a startup’s single-most critical member of the team, especially during pre-launch.

Why?

While marketing morphs the business, public relations stands in the wings absorbing the dynamics of company culture and adding expertise from the outside looking in. While executives are safely spinning their business model, public relations contributes external perspective from the vantage point of a variety of stakeholders.

  • What will media ask; what will executives say?
  • What would investors and boards of advisors want set up at the start point?
  • Will consumers be able to understand why this company matters?

Startups Spend Time Inside

The formation of a company requires intense focus on the inside of a company. There’s so much more that happens beyond writing a mission statement or determining company values, structure and model.

What’s likely most confusing is the fact that public relations, in the presence of marketing, will not influence the inside of a company as much as it will influence how the company is positioned for external consumption.

Please read that again.

Therein lies the major differentiator among marketing and public relations – we who do the latter will always be listening for the language we need from marketing to describe and position a company for audiences who reside outside the company.

Throughout my career, I have influenced the business model of a startup. Because I bring such a breadth of experience across industries, it’s comfortable for me to share insights based on three decades of influencing results and driving measurable campaigns.

Ultimately, the best team for a startup is one where marketing and PR work hand in hand so all the expertise is conjoined with the same goal. Usually, that’s rare as the startup budget cannot afford a seasoned or deep team with these key players.

Would I to choose which professional to hire at the outset, it would be public relations – a seasoned, hybrid professional who has continually innovated and morphed alongside industry and technology.

PR And Marketing

Public relations is blending more with marketing than ever before; that’s nothing new, it’s been happening for years, yet now everyone is finally labeling what’s happening. Although the disciplines of marketing and public relations are blurring, there is still a major gap in understanding of how public relations delivers.

The logical progression for a startup is to hire marketing to morph its insides with branding, mission, vision, values, etc. When done, public relations enters from the wings during pre-launch. The positioning begins.

  • Public relations rolls in with a message mapping process.
  • Executives are trained to deliver strong messages to external audiences.
  • The business model is tested with all the key audiences in mind.
  • A strategy unfolds to announce the company’s existence with the differentiators in place.
  • A media relations strategy is launched to announce to the market this company exists and is serious about earning a spot in the vertical market.
  • Social media and blogs are launched to continuously push content.
  • Public relations and marketing blend and work cohesively to execute strategy.

No Budget? Hire PR

What if a startup is working on a shoestring budget? There are seasoned public relations professionals who can bootstrap alongside a startup.

When a startup needs communications and marketing counsel, a public relations professional is the best hire at the outset. Someone who knows enough about technology, business, messaging, strategy, positioning, marketing blend, and much more.

Having the ability to write professionally is critical; adding someone to the team who is a professional blogger and media relations professional is smart for a startup.

To understand more about why PR is a better hire for startups than marketing,

contact Jayme Soulati at jayme at Soulati dot com. The hands-on experience is there.

You may dial 937-312-1363, as well.

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The Happy Friday Series: Suddenly Delightful Jamie

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Jamie-Wallace.jpgThink about your online friends and how long you’ve known them. In 2009, when I was a Twitter noob, this woman with my same name and different spelling asked for people to vote her to the top of some contest. What did I know? I stepped up to help without a clue what I was doing, but I lent her support because she asked and it seemed to be a good cause.

Since then, Jamie Wallace and I have uncovered more similarities betwixt and between. She’s a good egg and one who shows her smarts in a variety of places. As communities go, she’s one to invite, befriend and love for life.

As Suddenly Jamie on Twitter (I never knew why she suddenly became Jamie – maybe she changed her name suddenly?) and via her blog, Suddenly Marketing https://suddenlymarketing.com, Jamie writes about stuff like this:

I help my clients craft standout brands, transform ideas and visions into profitable content, and create rave-worthy brand experiences. Part strategist, part writer, and part cheerleader, I love making marketing fun. I’m also a mom, an aspiring fiction writer, a prolific blogger, and a student of voice, trapeze, and horseback riding (not at the same time … though, that would be interesting …).

When she was invited to write for The Happy Friday Series, she did that with aplomb; her obvious life zest is apparent in the story when she asked whether life should be serious.

Here’s what’s cool about Jamie…she approaches life with appreciation, asking why all the way.

Look at this post she wrote about “delight.”   It’s a word she says we don’t use often…see here:

Delightful is not a word we use very often. It seems, perhaps, slightly antiquated for our times – a little too naive, a little too simple.
Such a shame.
To me, delight is more than just pleasure or even joy. Delight embodies a more complex feeling that is layered with the sense of having been given a gift (as in when we say, “Delighted to meet you”) and a sense of surprise – of happily coming upon some unexpected goodness, beauty, or kindness.

But what is really delightful is this sentence Jamie wrote and today’s gift Jayme gave:

So, to be delighted is to be gently jolted out of your everyday existence by someone or something presenting you with an unexpected gift.

Thank you for writing for The Happy Friday Series, Jamie.

Love, Jayme.

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Social Media, IT And Analytics Have Created Title Soup

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soup.jpgAdvertising Age featured a story, “Don’t Call Me CMO: Top Marketers Say Job Has Evolved Beyond Title,” I find quite amusing.

The giggle is more about the why.

Why do people feel the need to define themselves based on a single three-to-five word title? When a professional reaches the level of chief anything officer, they have successfully moved along the professional development career path to become a chief.

Why don’t we call everyone in the C-suite “Chief Cook & Bottle Washer?” That would sum up the role we’re all playing in the workplace today, right? Technology, analytics and social media have created a pea soup of necessary qualifications, and the chief marketer appears to be the most confused.

According to the article, some of the “better titles than CMO” proffered are:

  • Chief Value Officer – what does “value” really mean? Value of what?
  • Chief Growth Officer – isn’t marketing about growth already?
  • Chief Innovation Officer – ah-hah, but limiting right? You come up with the ideas only and don’t put them into action?
  • Chief Commercial Strategist – as opposed to residential?
  • Chief Customer Officer – Who is the customer? Inside, outside? Maybe this means a sales person who is adopting a role in the C-Suite.

Title Soup in PR

Coming from a discipline of marketing frequently at odds about titles and roles, I get the confusion and need to create identity in the marketplace. Public relations professionals have been grappling with professional branding for a very long time; of late, we’ve been quite clever about hiding behind a really cool title to mask the fact we’re in public relations.

Perhaps it’s cool to be in public relations again?

I have now adopted the new label of “hybrid PR” for myself, thanks to Gini Dietrich’s blog post awhile ago when she described all the things PR peeps do in the marketing arena and it matched my competency. The only problem is it still requires explanation. At least hybrid vehicles paved the way for a combo engine, and people looking at a title can guess that hybrid means many things added to the mix. It’s pretty easy for me to just be president of Soulati Media, Inc. because that it indeed the title put on incorporation documents to get my federal tax ID number.

For those who lead teams in a corporate environment, there is so much merging and blending happening that I can see why the title thing has become an issue.

I don’t think there is a title for the chief marketing officer that can capture everything they’re responsible for, do you? The kettle has to simmer first before anyone will be able to tell.

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How Twitter IPO Changes Its Focus

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Twitter-logo.jpgFew people understand what happens when a company goes public. We watched how Facebook maneuvered an ever increasingly heated spotlight, and now Twitter is undergoing the same.

In this piece Nov. 11, 2013 in Advertising Age, “Twitter’s task: Getting new users to understand it,” it seems the biggest issue Twitter has with new users is its complexity.

To follow this line of thinking, go back to the very first tweet you posted. Perhaps you need to go back to the very first time you logged in and saw a blank screen with some stranger popping up to say hi. Were you as nervous as I and almost backed out?

There are still people who don’t engage on Twitter because they believe the common misnomer that it’s a bunch of people talking about what they eat and where they go to the movies. We in the know, know better, right?

Because Twitter is now publicly traded (NYSE: TWTR) with a valuation of more than $20 billion and a 73 percent “stock pop” (says Ad Age) on day one of trading, it has to think differently about how to behave:

  • Attract more of the masses (a major hurdle)
  • Onboarding new users and making them feel comfy out of the gate
  • Reduce consumer churn – the rate that new users drop off in a short period of time
  • Increase advertising dollars for marketers who want proof the users are there to click through and make a buy

Take a look at Twitter’s number of users in the U.S., says Advertising Age:

  • Q1 2013 – 48 million monthly active users
  • Q2 2013 – 49 million monthly active users
  • Q3 2013 – 53 million monthly active users

Facebook has three times the scale. At the end of Q2 2013, it boasted 179 million monthly active users

It’s like comparing apples to oranges, however, because look at the skill and understanding a Twitter peep has to communicate. When you read tweets from accounts trying to sell, they’re awkward. Engagement and relationship building are the keys to earning followers; Facebook is about existing relationships among friends you already know. Not so Twitter.

It’s because of Twitter that I have a new network of true and real friends I’ve met IRL, spoken with on the phone, engaged with on Skype, and hired into my business. Not so Facebook.

There are so many ways Twitter can be used to enhance knowledge of the world.

When there is a natural disaster like the ones in New Orleans, Haiti, the Philippines, New Zealand, and elsewhere, Twitter comes alive with tweets around the world providing updates about the crises and how peeps can help. Not so Facebook.

The hashtag is finally coming into its own as a way to follow conversations; its now in use by Facebook AND Google+. We owe that to Twitter as the first channel to adopt hashtags; I think I first began hashtagging #RockHot in August 2010, and all the threads of tweets featuring that phrase I created are documented. Pretty cool.

I digress…

What I’m hoping doesn’t happen with Twitter as it has with Facebook is the social channel’s intense need to put advertisers first and revenue above service. We who have been around since the early days know quite well the quirky and secretive nature of Twitter with a tribe mentality.

It’s too bad Twitter will change itself to appeal to the masses who don’t and won’t get it (although I’ve heard from a lot of moms that the kids are hitting Twitter in droves and foregoing Facebook). Groups of young boys (about freshmen age in high school) are forming Twitter accounts and buying followers to gain immediate traction.

Perhaps Twitter needs to look within among users who already prefer the channel over the others instead of trying at this late juncture to appeal to those who won’t get it to also thus appeal to marketers sinking advertising dollars into the channel.

Time will tell…