Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Media

Green advertising: Feeling the pressure 1/2

green t shirtAn interesting sea change has caught my eye over the past 12 months : the stricter regulation of green advertising.

Eight months ago we reported how Denmark was introducing tough measures to stamp out greenwashing.  The announcement said:

Environmental or ethical claims in marketing should therefore be correct and precise and exaggerations as to the company’s or the product’s ethical qualities or positive effects should be prohibited.

In effect this meant that a company cannot claim to be green, ethical or sustainable because it’s impossible to be precise in defining any of these terms (and I can’t help but wish that such hyperbole was banned from all advertising!).

However they were only part of a growing trend which has been building as more and more greenwash was attracting more and more attention.  [Read more…] about Green advertising: Feeling the pressure 1/2

Is Your Corporate Media Site Unnecessary?

Why wouldn’t you have a corporate media section on your website?

I’ve noticed a couple of trends recently, which at first glance seem to be going in opposite directions.

Expansive: Social Media Newsroom

sony ericsson social media newsroom

Some companies are developing extremely smart social media newsrooms. I recently discussed the Social Media Newsroom X Factor panel at Social Media in a Corporate Context, which highlighted some very interesting developments.

These are all-singing full-on newsrooms, with every conceivable use of social media, multimedia and reusable elements, so that visitors can pick up, reuse, and share the content wherever seems appropriate to them. Do go and look at the Sony Ericsson version – and check all the tabs – because the screenshot doesn’t do it justice.

Something to think about, if you’re going in this direction, is whether this will replace the traditional newsroom – as in the Sony Ericsson example – or whether it will be an additional feature.

Example: Sony Ericsson

Lean and Elegant: News Releases

Potash News

And then there are the companies which provide only their news releases.

These are sometimes beautifully presented, with helpful search and filtering options. Potash is a great example of this: I really like the clean look of the list pages (and the easy access to filtered RSS feeds), and if you visit individual releases, you can see how well they’ve implemented them:

Example: PotashCorp

This isn’t the only large company I’ve noticed recently that offers just news releases in what is conventionally known as the Media section. Are these companies who used to provide an extensive media section but now have scaled it right back? Or are these companies moving in the opposite direction, and building up a section from scratch – with news releases being the first step?

Or – and perhaps more interestingly – maybe these are two aspects of the same trend towards spreading content (images, videos, comment and conversation) across the web. One approach is to make it easy for others to spread the content; the other approach is to put the content out in locations where people might find it more easily.

If a company has social media outposts on places like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, do they need a newsroom on site in addition?

Please let us know what you think by commenting below…

Traackr: Spotting the King-Whisperers

Noon here means nearly breakfast time over in the States…

How heroic, then, of Derek Skaletsky to spend an hour taking us through the Traackr system – before breakfast.

And what an interesting hour it was for us. Traackr – in case you haven’t had the opportunity of a demo yet – launched their Authority List product at DemoFall09.

influencer social webWe all know that people are talking about you and your products online, or at least about your market and their issues with your competitors – or even just complaining about the problem that your product or service is intended to resolve.

Listening to what they’re saying is highly recommended. You can find out what they like/don’t like about you or your products, and about those of your competitors. You can maybe even uncover what the real problem is that they’re trying to solve – and how you can improve your product to meet that need. It’s like having a full-time focus group.

But who are your target audience listening to?

We all also know that some people have more powerful voices than others. These come in a variety of guises: some people are broadcasters, with a wide reach; others are conversationalists, who spark discussion; some are expert commentators on a topic, and seen as authorities in their area; others are connectors, who put topics and people together in an interesting way. Some are just plain mavericks, who touch on a topic briefly and move on to the next. And the different outlets people find to share their views have an effect too – some people have a strong video voice and impact but don’t use the written word; others talk a lot on one network about your topic, but very little on another.

And even the smallest voice can have a big impact online – if it whispers into the right ear.

This is the idea at the heart of the Traackr system.

The origins of the Authority List lie in a tool that was available a few years ago to help people assess their own influence on the internet. I’m sure you know the kind of thing; we’ve almost all played with tools like that to see how we’re perceived. (What, no-one’s even done an ego-search on Google? Not sure I believe you there.)

Then someone had a inspired idea: turn the thing around so that it could identify the people with influence, and sell that information to those who need to know.

That’s you. The business that needs to know what is being said out there, so that they can then connect with those people, and maybe influence them in turn.

Gaining the ear of the king

a word in the ear

This isn’t a new idea: if the customer is king, finding the right online influencers is like dealing with the royal favourites and courtiers, who potentially have influence over the king.

There’s been much debate about how objective online influencers can be when presented with goodies and freebies, so consider carefully your approach to the influencers, and bear in mind that courting the courtiers has always been a complex and sometimes dangerous affair in the cross-currents of a royal court.

But Traackr looks like a good implementation of a solution to make finding the right influencers possible – even easy.

You, the client, set up a project, agree how many influencers you want to identify, and work with the Traackr team to identify relevant keywords. (Not always as easy as it sounds).

The Traackr search engine then finds people who discuss these topics online – and then tracks those individuals across all their other outlets.

This, I think, is the really exciting bit: pulling together all the places where that person has an online presence to provide a unified view on that individual.

When complete, the information is available via an online dashboard. You can see a list of influencers, and a breakdown of type (activist, reporter and expert) and location. Each influencer has a profile page, detailing their latest posts, which social outlets they use, the extent of their network and their score (reach, resonance, and relevance). It’s up to you to make the connection, but you can note on the profile how well the contacts have gone, and what your next steps might be – the beginnings of a relationship management system.

Traackr doesn’t assess the sentiment of their discussions about you/your products, but at this point you know who the key relevant influencers are, and since you’ll need to tailor your contact approach to each influencer, you’ll want to check them out individually yourself anyway. And you do need to know the bad as well as the good news…

Questions?

Can you track the effect of your contact/s with the influencers? That’s the point of Traackr’s Performance Report, which tracks the changes in coverage from those people from week to week.

Can you change your keywords? Once the report is generated, you get an interface to the Traackr system which lets you run a live search on keywords before setting up a new campaign, to be sure that you’re picking valuable keywords.

Are the influencers self-selected? Only by dint of their own efforts to become influential – the influencers haven’t volunteered to be included. All the material on their profile is publicly available, just not all pulled together in one place like this. As I said: this is the most exciting element of this tool, and Traackr does have plans to provide access to these pages for the influencers, so that they can make use of it too.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some idea of sentiment? I think it would, and this isn’t provided by the Authority List. I think you’d like it all: who the key influencers are, whether they are generally positive, negative or neutral about your keywords, and how this view changes over time – and even what triggers the change. Your contact with them, some independent event, a contact with a competitor, a discussion with another key influencer…?

Couldn’t you do this yourself? Well, yes of course you could, though it would be time-consuming. And the Traackr team have found that their system has identified powerful influencers in places it wouldn’t necessarily occur to you to look. You just need a bit of imagination to work out how to approach these unexpected influencers in ways they’d appreciate…

Thanks Derek!

Twitter and Investor Relations, Why So Difficult?

Take a look around in virtually any magazine, newspaper, trade publication, or website and you are bound to find numerous articles about Twitter, like this one here on Corporate Eye about creating value on Twitter.  Publications and webpages with a technical audience (and authorship) are likely to proclaim Twitter as the future of all communications, and issue grave warnings that you are already falling behind in this critical new universe.  Those resources dedicated to marketing and public relations may be less effusive, but are also likely to be completely on board with all things social media, including Twitter.

On the other hand, media with a legal or regulatory focus are more likely to sternly advise you of the inevitable lawsuits that will plague your company if you even think about Twitter in the wrong way.  Mainstream investing publications seem to split the difference, calling on readers to aggressively use and promote a corporate Twitter account, while at the same repeatedly cautioning investment professionals to mind the possibility of violating securities related rules or regulations.

Twitter’s IR Conflict

The difficulty surrounding using Twitter or other social media, sometimes referred to as social marketing, stems from multiple factors.  All too often, these intertwined concepts are glossed over, or simply ignored.  Unfortunately, in business, ignorance is almost never bliss.

In this multipart series, we’ll take an in-depth look at Twitter and other social media websites like Facebook and see just what they have to offer top-level Investor Relations departments, and what perils the same sites may expose your company and your IR department to.  Most importantly, we’ll look behind the opinions and statements and reveal the intricate play between the numerous factors that go into making Twitter such a challenging proposition for even the best prepared IR teams.

Social Networking Basics Guide

Although Twitter seems to attract the most attention these days among those in the Investor Relations realm, it is far from the only social networking site.  Twitter was launched in 2006, by then, sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook had been popular for years.

The most common resistance to social networking sites from non-users is that they can do the same thing via phone or email.  While both provide the means to communicate with others, they require a continuous selection of who to include on each communication.  Additionally, in order to keep certain communication separate from others, many people have multiple email accounts that they check with varying frequency.

Further, it is common to forget just who has and had not been included in previous communications, opening the possibility that people you intended to communicate with were, in fact, not contacted. Thus, the potential for accidental exclusion in any broad conversation is higher.  The author actually did not let a favorite aunt (nor more than one client) know when his son was born because he thought the email lists he used had covered everyone while excluding those who would not be interested.

Email,then is best suited for either small or static, homogeneous groups, such as members of a team.

Social networking sites, by contrast, are a way for self-defined collection of individuals to communicate in an open manner.  Unlike email which requires the sender choosing to specifically include you on each email, social networking sites provide for anyone who has been previously included to take part in all exchanges.  As an added bonus, unlike email, social networking messages need not commingle with other communications because messages can be read online instead of through an inbox.

What Is Twitter? Twitter Explained

Not long ago, whether or not you knew about Twitter was largely defined by your age.  Twitter was originally conceived as a way to send short “status updates” to your friends.  “Short” was set at 140 characters in large part because this amount would be an acceptable size for a SMS message, more commonly known as a text message, on any US wireless network.

In the early days, Twitter was used primarily by teenagers and twenty-somethings to find out what their friends were literally doing.  With Twitter, your friend Dave could tell you what club he was planning on going to.  Then, when that location turned out to be lame, Dave could update his status to let everyone know he was moving on to the next location.  When he got somewhere he was happy with, he could report that too.  Using this information, Dave’s friends didn’t have to worry about showing up at the wrong location and Dave and his friends didn’t have to make dozens of annoying cell phone calls just to find out what everyone else was doing.

Other users found Twitter a refreshing way to text their friends faster and easier than by typing on their cell phones.  It was during this initial phase that Twitter earned its reputation as nothing more than a place where you tell other people what you had for dinner and read about what other people had for dinner.

Today, nobody posts an update about what they ate for dinner.

group-communication-stay-in-touch Real Friends and Twitter Friends

One of the difficulties many first time users find with Twitter is the concept of friends. In the real world, friends is a select group of people.  Depending on your demographic, it is possible that many of your friends do not have Twitter accounts.  As such, you would have only a few friends to follow and only a few friends to follow you.  This makes Twitter virtually worthless since other methods are a more efficient way of communicating with small numbers of users.

This may explain why Twitter caught on faster with younger people who are more likely to form and disband ad hoc groups at different times for various events.  Consider a single person who begins their weekend as part of a group of ten, all attending the same concert; that becomes a group of fifty people, some the same and some different than the original ten, at a party after the concert, which then morphs into a group of 15 avid bicyclists planning a Sunday afternoon ride.

For this type of situation, the number of friends is significantly higher than the traditional definition and includes not just person friends, but also members of the same groups, both formal and informal.  Another cyclist, for example, with no interest in the concert, party, or breakfast, can still stay connected about where to show up.

Investor Relations and Investing Friends?

How, then, can such a concept grow to include Investor Relations?  Certainly, IR cannot consider everyone who requests an annual report to be a friend.

Therein lies the possibilities of Twitter.  Thanks to its broadcast nature, comments, suggestions, and even the bane of email-based communication, jokes, can all be “sent” in a way that they can be seen and read by “everyone” without being perceived as junk communication.

Indeed, in a real way, Twitter is the “Send to All” button.  However, where sending a message to everyone in an email is reviled as spam, Twitter, is the ultimate opt-in campaign.

Ready to get started right now?

Hold on.  The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Watch for the next article in our series, or just grab the Investor Relations RSS feed and let it come to you.

Using Media Relations to Deal With a Sagging Economy

What is the best way that a corporate entity can combat sagging sales and manufacturing to deal with an economy in downturn? Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Nor does pretending that there isn’t a solution will work either. Just as bad is coming up with unrealistic, unmarketable expectations for a corporation in the times of economic uncertainty and uneasiness.

In times of hard financial numbers, a corporation just like any other business has to be creative in their marketing and advertising efforts in order to stay above their competition. They must look at non-traditional models and applications, seeking ways to bring attention to their mission. And, not to try to overuse an already over-used phrase, but yes, they must think “outside the box.”

Just recently, McDonald’s introduced their new “McCafe”, a new social community designed for coffee drinkers/lovers who also love the networking scene. In a time when places like Starbuck’s, Joe Mugg’s and even the local coffee houses are dominating, McDonald’s knew that they had to be creative and forward-thinkers in their marketing strategy. The McCafe concept is following closely along the base model of Twitter and Facebook and reaching out to the social community as a voice with something to say. And, they’re using all available resources to get it.

McCafé launched a Twitter account at McCaféYourDay. As of press time, McCaféYourDay had 134 followers.

Although it’s not new, it’s definitely creative and companies would do well to embrace what is available and make full use of their resources.

The economy doesn’t have to be detrimental to a corporation. It doesn’t have to end in disaster, and no rule book says that they have to go away because business is declining! New strategic methods, creativity and resources are the essentials in building and sustaining your business in this questionable economy. What strategies can YOU use for your platform.

How can a corporation tell when it’s time to start the creative flow going? It’s time to start the creativity immediately and preferably at the business’ inception. Corporations typically do not advertise like other public companies, therefore, they must subtly market through their resources. Finding creative ways is a must.

Being creative can involve a lot of different ways to get attention. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the impact that a marketing campaign by Kraft had on the media. Apparently, the post was so viral, people were trying to enter the contest here at our blog at Corporate-Eye! In the space of an afternoon, Lucy (the editor) and I saw a host of entries with people trying to enter the contest through our site, all from a post that went viral, full of information. .

You must be both enticing and creative when you are trying to wow customers. As a corporation, you may not have the edge that you’d like in your marketing tools, but again, using what you already have is the key.

How can your company maximize its growth rate? What creative flow can you think of that will help your corporate entity thrive right now?

Corporate Ad Gets in Trouble: Motrin Apologizes to Moms

How does your corporate media stand up to consumer sensitivity and awareness? Do you know what it is that your customers want, really want, and more importantly what they do not want? Being aware and sensitive to the needs of customers can be challenging along with staying cutting edge and in tune with today’s market. It takes a smart, sharp but edgey marketing department to know what will appeal to consumers and what could possibly turn them off.

Let’s say that your marketing department has a great idea for a marketing piece, one that they think would do well in reaching the mass audience of buyers for your product. Now, let’s also say that your product is used by millions and does its job well in satisfying their customers. And finally, let’s say that the corporate marketing department thinks that this ad campaign will be so appealing and so innovative, that sales will likely increase from it and the demand for the product will increase as well. Now, let’s see if what you “say” in the ad will actually deliver. Herein is where the issue lies: What we say or what is said in advertising is crucial to the marketing impact that is made with consumers.

Earlier on last week, Motrin made a huge mistake when they ran an ad, attempting to appeal to moms who “wear” their babies on their bodies. The ad suggested that these moms were “tired” and “cranky” and are just burdened down with being connected to their babies all of the time. In the ad video made by Motrin, there is quite a bit of subliminal messaging to the listener suggesting that because you co-wear your baby, you are in pain all of the time, and you shouldn’t be held accountable for anything that you might do or say that could be potentially offensive. Motrin could not have made a more offensive move than putting this advertisement out to the consumer. But, after a series of tweets, a flurry of emails, backlashes from bloggers and phone complaints, they immediately offered a statement of apology and promptly removed the ad from their site. This apology was done in a response to consumers and moms lashing out against these claims made by Motrin that co-wearing the baby is “undesirable” or “burdensome” to moms.  

When companies goof up and make statements or ads like this, it can be unfortunate to their business and to their reputation. Now the only thing that saved Motrin in this case was the fact that they acknowledged their error, offered an immediate apology to those offended and removed the ad from their site:

I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters.

We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newsstands and in distribution.

-Kathy

Kathy Widmer
VP of Marketing – Pain, Pediatrics, GI, Specialty
McNeil Consumer Healthcare
215-273-8192
kwidmer@mccus.jnj.com

The apology offered by the Vice President of Marketing seems and sounds very sincere and well thought out. But I think what the company has learned from this grave error is to never assume anything about an audience or consumers. I personally have never co-worn any of my babies but I have carried them around all day, nursed them and have done my fair share of stooping over to pick up toys, tend to boo-boos and find imaginary ghosts in their closets. Tired? Sure, but to imply that because I’m cranky or worn from being a mommy to my children and that somehow taking Motrin will make it all better is by far an offensive thing to suggest. Motrin isn’t strong enough! Seriously though, moms are generally happy to hurt for their children and don’t always lash out against others because of our fatigue and overwhelmed feelings. It’s all a part of the job description. While we do and will need something on occasion for our discomfort, we want to be the ones to make that choice and determine that point. When a company says that they sympathize and understand what you’re feeling, you may have a hard time believing them. Every mom is different just as every consumer is different. Bottom line: don’t assume anything.