While the last few years have witnessed new opportunities and tools to advance media and client engagement, the period also has been marked by tumultuous economic conditions. During that time, many PR agencies, especially small- and medium-sized firms, have struggled to maintain clients, and attract new ones.
With strong signs of a pick-up in business activity, the climate now is right for PR professionals to develop strategies and tactics that can help them bring in new clients as well as hold on to current accounts.
People typically equate a company’s brand with the company’s logo. But a brand is much more than a stylized name: It is a primary symbol of an organization’s purpose, vision and values. Indeed, the act of branding represents a strategic endeavor that encompasses a range of corporate functions—marketing, public relations, and customer service, not the least, among them.
Branding also includes the way employees present their company to its various constituencies, whether intentionally through the communication of key messages or incidentally through everyday emails, social-media engagement and phone conversations.
Digital’s Impact on Branding
Before the advent of digital technology, buyers in both the business-to-consumer (B-to-C) and the business-to business (B-to-B) space would be open to receiving sales communications from a number of brand ambassadors. They may have been exposed to messages pushed to them from dozens of companies, clients, or products from which they could reduce the pool of realistic choices to those offerings that were closely aligned with their needs.
Marketing and other communications professionals relied on this traditional “funnel” approach, and reached out to their prospects and audiences at specific intervals in the selling cycle—most often at the point of “consideration.” The ball was essentially in the seller’s court.
Things are very different today. “Consumers in both the B-2-C and the B-2-B markets still want a clear brand promise and offerings they value. What has changed is when—at what touch points—they are most open to influence, and how you can interact with them at those points,” David C. Edelman states in this Harvard Business Review article. “In the past,” Edelman explains, “marketing strategies that put the lion’s share of resources into building brand awareness and then opening wallets at the point of purchase worked pretty well. But touch points have changed in both number and nature, requiring a major adjustment to realign marketers’ strategies and budgets with where consumers are actually spending their time.” He goes on to suggest that consumers are now most open to influence at the “evaluate” stage and not at the “consider” stage.
As 2011 unfolds, many PR, communications and marketing professionals are beginning to examine their strategies and determine how they can be applied in the New Year. It’s a time to lay the groundwork for future campaigns that are designed to increase brand and client exposure, drive traffic to websites, create quality leads, build communities, and enhance relationships with The Media.
Both technology and The Media are evolving and, as a result, so too are the preferences and values of audiences. Still, many communications and marketing practitioners defer to the same old tactics, failing to keep up with the platforms and outlets of the audiences upon whom they rely on for brand or client success. Communication professionals must remember that they are engaging users in the users’ communities or space, rather than a platform controlled by the company.
That’s one reason that digital audiences seem to be increasingly careful when posting about a company, product, or service; they fear getting inundated with mobile and online spam solicitations. As coined by Marie Baker, co-founder of PRBreakfastClub, “blogger bombardment” is running rampant as The Media-scape shrinks and “PR Pros are scrambling looking for new places to get their clients visibility.” She goes on to write, “Bloggers are getting just slammed, and sometimes too much of something isn’t always a good thing.” (2011: The Blogger Revolution, 1.6.11)
In essence, audiences, journalists, and bloggers who aren’t appropriately targeted do just the opposite of what media professionals desire: The audiences disengage and The Media overlook what could potentially be a worthy story. Read more of this newsletter in the BurrellesLuce Resource Center.
JOHNA BURKE: Hello, everyone, this is Johna Burke with BurrellesLuce, and I’m here at the PRSA Counselors Academy. I’m here with Carol.
Carol, will you please introduce yourself?
CAROL GREENWALD: Hi, I’m Carol Greenwald. I’m the owner and president of Marketing Partners. And what we do is three kinds of things. We work with people on targeting and strategies so that they can get richer faster and more effectively. I do research so that we can ground decisions in fact instead of fancy. And I do coaching to help people learn better selling behaviors.
BURKE: Can you talk about, for those people that weren’t privileged enough to be able to be in your session moments ago, what’s the most important thing that marketers can use when they’re talking to prospects and clients about identifying and creating some attachment to their brand and to their product?
GREENWALD: What they need to remember is, is that there is no such thing as a rational decision. Decisions–the best decisions are made in the context of emotional thought that brings together all past memories, past experiences, past activities, past responses, brings them together so that they focus on whatever the decision is. So if you have a brand and you want somebody to do something, what you have to think about is what is the context in which you want them to do it? What’s happening in their world that’s relevant to this?
What kind of goal would they have to do it? What kind of past memories would they need so that they could understand what it is that you want them to do? Everybody understands new knowledge, new thoughts, in the context of old knowledge. That’s why whatever your mother did when you were five is probably still relevant today because memories are built up. Every time you have a problem or you face something, your brain goes back into the unconscious memories, pulls out the ones it thinks are relevant, tries to create a pattern that is similar to the pattern that you’re facing; then the cognitive part, the smallest part and the youngest, the most fragile part of your brain, the cortex, takes those patterns that’re offered to it, takes the best one of them and says, `This is the one we’re going to use because this is the one that answers the question, fits how we feel about the past and moves us forward into the present.’
So as a marketer, as a PR person, as a communicator, you have the ability, by setting the entire emotional stage, to influence not only how people feel about your product, but how they use it, what they do with it and, finally, if they buy it.
BURKE: Carol, thank you so much. Can you tell us your website, or where else people might be able to find you?
It’s that time of year again. Yes, it’s public relations and marketing conference season. Peter Shankman’s latest blog post gives some great tips for surviving it. Although social media is not a new thing to conferences (Twitter debuted at SXSW a few years ago), it is really now just becoming “mainstream.” In my June 20, 2009 blog post, I first talked about how I use Twitter as my note-taking platform and as a way to encourage engagement. A year later, and it is amazing to see how much more of a role social media plays in event participation.
I recently spoke at the YNPNdc (Young Nonprofit Professionals Network) second annual social media conference. Rosetta Thurman gave a great presentation on basic social media tools you should be using to enhance participation in your conference. Some of my favorite tips include:
Make a hashtag and promote it early.
Make a Twitter list of attendees and follow it.
Don’t hire a videographer; use Flipcams and digital cameras.
Allow attendees to take pictures and share them.
Integrate social media into your event. It is a great way to get information to your attendees and allows for more contact points than any one person can manage.
“Building social media strategies into your event allows other people to speak and respond on your behalf. Sometimes the best answer to a question comes from a fellow attendee,” says John Chen, publications/project manager, International Society for Performance Improvement.
What tips do you have for BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas readers looking to increase engagement at conferences? What has worked best for your organization?
It’s that time of year again. Yes, it’s public relations and marketing conference season. 
