measuring the big story…
Cleaning out my inbox and came across an email from one of our team on measuring strategic media coverage… In short, based on studying the impact of certain news articles on business results and in stock price you standardize on a definition of stories that have the most impact — call them “Top Stories”. The performance of these stories then flow into core business metrics… A definition of a Top Story might include that it is proactively driven media coverage — in a strategic outlet — designed to change perception with target audience. And they might contain the elements below:
- Proactive
- On Theme
- On Target
- On Message
- Third-Party Validated
- Company spokesperson
- OTS reach
- Images
Having a simple but powerful metric in an executive scorecard enforces PR as a key component in the business success mix. I really like the idea of this particular metric.
Are you working or using anything similar?
and your computer most looks like a…
- magazine
- tv
TV right? And so the stupid movement begins its attack on vlogs and Internet video in the workplace… The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of companies are thinking about blocking online videos in the workplace — blaming productivity loss and bandwidth (a garbage argument created by the technologically weak). Here are the benefits as I see it:
- Getting employees to use the likes of YouTube is a great first step to actually getting them into your properties on YouTube
- Video is the future – when faced with a choice, employees would rather watch than read… so get them to love watching
- They come to understand the implications of this new platform. Anyone can be a producer – and hopefully they will
- More controversially, its just fun. Happy employees are productive employees.
- It plugs them into the culture, sub culture and conversation you so desperately want to be part of
Finally, like you really have a choice…
bastards
Todd swings on the bastardization of social media. Well worth a read and a challenge to all of us on the corporate side. The primary challenge for any corporation in engaging in the blogosphere is overcoming what Todd rightly notes:
“They didn’t want to be part of the conversation; they wanted to be the topic of the conversation”
He also points to some of the common flaws:
- The blogs only spoke to tiny special-interest niches of the brand’s humongous audience…
- Many of the company’s previous forays into Social Media had been both disjointed and blithely abandoned (and yet were still easy to find)…
- The company’s name was being abused by SEO scammers…
- Some of their best stuff was simply hard to find…
We’re taking-up his challenge of engaging 1:1 at Dell. We’ve just appointed our first VP of communities and conversations – Bob – and built a 40+ person team around him whose sole job is to engage 1:1 all day long. It’s a start.
Apple PR Live!
The latest little PR brouhaha as to do with Apple’s PR Machine being caught on tape. I never ceases to amaze me how the media relish exposing PR… And this from Valleywag…
This is why Apple is really screwed if it ever loses Steve Jobs: He’s the only guy at Apple who can actually pull off this act and handle the press convincingly while parroting the party line. Everyone else at Apple who’s even allowed to speak to reporters just ends up looking robotically defensive when they try to erect a Jobsian reality-distortion field.
This is the challenge with building a company brand around one person. Sooner or later one can’t move without the other and all subsitutes look shallow.
You can’t buy love!
You can’t buy reputation either… That’s one of Richard’s thesis I really agree with…
My central thesis is that corporations can’t buy reputation or brand loyalty any more. These are earned through performance over the long-term. The dispersion of media; people’s continuous partial attention from a surfeit of daily impressions; and the lack of trust in traditional institutions and leaders are all driving this evolution.
…The pyramid of influence, the classic C. Wright Mills description of the power elite where information moves one way from pinnacle to the mass audience below, has been eclipsed. The new reality for communications is the sphere of cross reference, in which information moves unpredictably among equal stakeholders. Conversations now occur spontaneously, in peer-to-peer discussion, with individuals creating their own webs of trust including people like themselves. Our task in PR must be to facilitate and contribute to the discussion in both the controlled vertical axis reaching traditional audiences such as investors, regulators and mainstream media, and on the horizontal axis to inform employees, passionate consumers, NGOs and communities.
Tom Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times on June 27, 2007 called, “The Whole World is Watching,” that “In this transparent world, how you live your life and conduct your business matters more than ever…Companies that get their ‘hows’ wrong won’t be able to clean up their mess by taking a couple of reporters to lunch…But this also creates opportunities…’how’ you keep your promises … build trust…collaborate…lead…that is where companies can now really differentiate themselves.”
