5 Awesome PR Innovations – PRWeek Awards

The PRWeek Awards winners will be announced tomorrow in New York including PR Innovation of the Year.
I have been working on the development of MatchPoint for the past year and want to congratulate everyone on the team for the nomination.

All Nominees for PR Innovation of the Year:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

Best of luck to everyone and I look forward to speaking with you at the Awards!

Social Media Experts or Hammer Gurus? Part 3

As discussed previously on this blog, a good carpenter does not call himself a Hammer Guru. Being knowledgeable in your tools of the trade is important, but you should focus on the job, not the tools.

And that’s what social media is: a medium, a channel, or a tool with which you may engage. Saying you’re an expert with the tools is saying nothing.

Too many PR people are riding the wave of corporate ignorance about social media and promoting themselves as Social Media Experts. As of today, here are the numbers of those whose Twitter profiles identify themselves as being the following:

Social Media Expert 382

Social Media Guru 218

Social Media Maven 163

Social Media Strategist 460

Strategist?!? There is no Social Media Strategy! You need a business strategy or a communications strategy and apply tactics – including the use of social media – to it.

I won’t go as far as Foursquare and give out Social Media D******** badges, but I’m getting close.

Another group of self-proclaimed experts, gurus, kings, queens, and mavens is the PR Measurement crowd. About 99% of the discussion at PR conferences, on blogs, and via Twitter is about WHY you should measurement PR activities and results. Rarely do any of these “experts” tell anyone HOW to measure. Maybe that’s the secret sauce that I haven’t paid for. Or the snake oil…

Don’t get me wrong – there are lots of smart PR folks who know measurement. But a PR person saying they are “into” in social media or measurement is like a politician saying he’s against waste. Wait, who is FOR waste? Again you’re not saying anything.

A better long term reputation-builder is to show your skills in creating the messages and content and starting the conversations that will help your clients achieve their real goals.

So, I ask you – what are the best ways for PR prosfessionals to promote themselves as being great communicators without resorting to telling the world they’re Hammer Gurus?

MatchPoint: Finalist for PR Innovation of the Year at PRWeek Awards

I am pleased to pass along the good news that MatchPoint has been nominated for The PRWeek PR Innovation of the Year Award!

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the development team for MatchPoint. Additional disclosure: I am freakin’ thrilled about this!

A tip of the hat to all nominees:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

Saying it’s an honor just to be nominated along with these top global PR agencies is not just an old cliché in this case. I cannot think of a previous year where any non-agency PR application, software, or service was nominated for PR Innovation of the Year.

See you at the PRWeek Awards on March 11 in NYC!

Dear CEOs: Social Media Is Not E-Commerce

The first Black Friday and Cyber Monday since the Great 2009 Social Media Explosion are now behind us. The first reports are in and it looks like many retailers had a great week.

I wonder if any CEOs who recently “gave in” to their marketing advisors and signed off on SM efforts are right now going over sales figures for the year and wondering why they’re not seeing a big payoff from Social Media.

The reality is Social Media is not e-commerce.

I’m not criticizing any CEOs who don’t get that…yet! For now, I am finding fault with any marketing directors (and God forbid any PR managers) who sold Social Media efforts internally as online magic that makes cash registers ring.

I fear that some people in the marketing and communications industry have set unreachable goals in order to sell their CEOs on Social Media Campaigns. Or perhaps they are measuring social media mentions in terms of Revenue per Tweet.

There IS an online community where any company can expect the cash register to ring the moment they establish a presence. It’s called e-bay.

But unlike social media, e-commerce and auction sites won’t allow an organization to engage with its customers, learn from them, build loyalty, and all of the things that social media can do that we haven’t thought of yet!

Thanks to my colleague Jeff Tidyman of eNR Services for suggesting this topic. End of rant and enough blogging for today… I’ve got to go check on how my eBay auctions are doing. That’s where the big money is.

Proof That PR Drives Sales!

This week’s PRWorkbench guest blogger is Thomas Scott, VP of Operations for Showhomes. Thanks to Thomas for these great observations made at last week’s Franchise Update Conference.

Franchise Industry Execs Miss the Opportunity to Leverage Franchise PR to Drive Sales

300 franchise executives converged on the Drake Hotel in Chicago this week for three days of intense evaluation about the state of franchise sales and dialog about best practices that drive results in today’s market. This much anticipated Franchise Update Conference centers around industry reports on numbers of franchise units sold, lead sources for the year, and cost per franchise sale.

This year’s theme, Mission Possible, held lots of promise as the previous year has been a wasteland for many companies. This year three big issues converge into a perfect storm that creates lots of choppy waters for franchise sales:

Fran Data experts projected that the franchise industry will have some truly choppy waters for the next four or five years due to lack of bank financing and shaky loan underwriting making credit hard to come by
Traditional powerhouses of franchise sales lead generation have trailed off significantly; franchise portals in particular are not delivering the quality leads they once were
The dramatic shift in the way people communicate and build trust and how this impacts the rise of social media left more than a few companies struggling to connect the dots

A big disconnect with franchise sales lead generation centered on an old-school tool: Franchise PR. Here’s a list of lead sources for franchise sales this year:

Lead Sources for Franchise Sales (where leads for franchise sales come from)

Internet 34%
Referrals 28%
Brokers 17%
Print 8%
Other 13%
Trade Shows 3%
PR 3%

Sources of Closed Franchise Sales (Where the leads that actually closed came from)

Internet 50%
Brokers 16%
Trade Shows 13%
PR 11%
Other 10%

Franchise companies only generated 3% of the total leads for franchise sales this year. Only 3%! Those measly 3% of leads resulted in 11% of the total industry unit sales this year. 11%! Making matters worse, almost half of the companies represented at the Franchise Update Conference were not using PR to generate sales leads. HALF!

The Franchise Update report also gave out projected average budgets for franchise development: the average company will spend $162,000 on its total budget to sell franchises this year. PR was way down on the list of expenditures. If PR done poorly and without consistency produced 11% of the franchise sales last year, what should you budget to grow a franchise system?

Franchise companies need to wake up – PR if used correctly by someone that understands the social media shift is a powerful tool for franchise sales lead generation. PR firms need to wake up too. What PR worked 20 years ago and even what worked last year DOES NOT WORK in today’s market.

Here’s the issue: publicity is great. Publicity will get you in the papers and can help with search engine optimization and Google search results. Publicity can generate a binder full of clips. Franchisees love publicity because it’s great for the ego. Publicity does not, however, generate franchise sales. Old-school press releases about store openings, expansion plans and staff changes don’t have the oomph they once did in today’s social media market.

PR can be used to aggressively drive your franchise sales if you focus on telling your story and driving the social media conversation about what you do. We’ve successfully done this at my company, Showhomes, and I listened to Stan Freidman, CEO of Retrotax talk about how he has used it to get his new company off the ground.

Success with PR centers around the story you tell. If you can get people talking about your sales effort in social media arenas like Linkedin and Twitter, you can get reporters to bite and that will lead to lots of online trust and credibility. This is crucial because candidates are at their lowest trust level any of us have seen.

They call this the ‘Great Recession’ for a reason!

For more information from Thomas Scott, please contact him at:

Thomas Scott
VP Operations, Showhomes
615-483-4923
tscott@showhomes.com
www.showhomes.com
Twitter: @showhomesthomas
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomscott

Social Media Experts or Hammer Gurus? Part 2

In an earlier post, I discussed the continuing sensation of some communications folks appointing themselves “social media experts.” Once again if you are calling yourself this, I implore you to stop! You’re saying nothing!

Social media is a tool; you need to be an expert in the messages you’re crafting.

A good carpenter knows more than just the inner-workings of a hammer and is therefore more than a hammer guru.

There are hundreds of twitter users who list in their bio that they are social media experts, gurus, kings, queens, and mavens. Uggggg!

I’m not sure what credentials one needs to make this claim. Did they discover LinkedIn two days before the rest of the world? Do they have more time to spend on Facebook lately since their PR agency business has slowed down?

One of my local PR community’s favorite butt of many jokes is one such self-described “mavens.” My favorite part of this story is that this CEO joined Twitter only after hearing about it on Oprah this past spring. You can’t put lipstick on an outdated publicity model and call it a social media consultancy.

Here’s another gem. I recently started following on Twitter a marketing and PR agency that says it specializes in social media strategy. What happened next? You guessed it…I received a generic auto-DM saying “thanks for the follow.” I hope they are not charging their clients actual money for their social media expertise.

Don’t misunderstand – there are many true social media experts out there. The best of them do not need to call themselves experts; their clients and peers are doing that for them.

Bulldog Media Relations Summit – Update

Yesterday, our team at eNR had a lively discussion on the direction of social media and public relations lead by co-developer of our MatchPoint service, Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications.

For anyone attending the Media Relations Summit in New York this weekend through Tuesday, Peter has organized a Tweetup on Monday. Click here for details and registration: http://nyctweet.eventbrite.com/

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