| Posted on Aug 30.10 |
Integrating Engagement: A Weekly Review for PR and Marketing Pros
Last week Kristin English and I looked at some of the defining characteristics of social enterprise, collaboration, and alignment. Collaboration and social enterprise are central themes at PR+MKTG Camp East where we will examine how marketing and PR can work more effectively with customer service, sales and community management to maximize engagement.
This week, we explore posts about how social enterprise functions. Social enterprise continues to evolve with new tools and new ways to use these tools.
Consider a Forbes.com interview with Dan Woods, where Jeff Schick, VP for social software at IBM, gave his perspective on enterprise social media.
In regards to a “payoff” for using enterprise software, Schick said it was two-fold. First, and somewhat obvious, is to avoid mistakes and do a better job. The second is more in-depth and forward thinking. Schick said social enterprise provided the opportunity for the “creation of an institutional memory and a playbook that expands and changes as the work of the company evolves to meet new challenges.”
Schick also shared his perspective on encouraging buy-in from employees. He stated that it was important not to rush anyone into participating. Instead, employees should be able to see its effectiveness. That will allow enterprise social media to become integrated into an organization’s culture.
What do you think? Where do you see enterprise software providing the most benefits? How difficult is the task of integrating it into organizational culture?
Will e-mail be replaced in Enterprise 2.0? Ethan Yarbrough, President of Allyis, posited this question in his post “Email’s Role in an Enterprise 2.0 Environment: Signal Not Source.” (Ethan was a speaker at PR+MKTG Camp Seattle.) Yarbrough discusses how he has “railed against e-mail in the past,” and presents a scenario for why holds that opinion. He then presents a solution using his company’s software. By creating a central system for people to respond, the software eliminates missing parts of conversation and people being left “out of the loop.” A key aspect of this post is that e-mail is used to alert parties there has been a change in the conversation, prompting them to respond. However, it does not facilitate or organize that conversation.
How do you use e-mail? Are there more efficient ways of managing conversations and sharing information within an organization?
You know what social enterprise or enterprise 2.0 is, now where do you go for more in-depth information? Daniel Hudson (@webtechman) has a great post titled “What is Enterprise 2.0 Intelligence” providing a collection of resources to help people who are looking for everything from a concise definition to points on selling the idea to your organization. The main focus of the post is establishing standards and garnering support for collective intelligence.
The post features Hudson’s “fav five videos” including a definitional video by Andrew McAfee of MIT and an introduction to the semantic web. Another one video briefly presents nine examples of how organizations have utilized collective intelligence to benefit their business practices. Organizations represented include Overstock.com, Stubhub, the Georgia Department of Transportation, and National Australia Bank.
In addition to the five videos, there are five blog posts with more in-depth discussion surrounding enterprise 2.0, a presentation from Acando Consulting and five people to add to your Twitter feeds and “Fantasy Innovation Team.” Included in the team are PR pro Brian Solis and founding partner of the Altimeter Group, R. Ray Wang.
Are those resources helpful? What would you add to the post?
| Posted on Aug 23.10 |
Integrating Engagement: A Weekly Review for PR and Marketing Pros
So what exactly is integration? collaboration? enterprise 2.0? How does your organization decide how to implement a plan? What tools should you use? And why should public relations and marketing care? The questions tie directly to how organizations can ensure message consistency, avoid duplication, prevent lost opportunities or customer dissatisfaction when it comes to the considerable task of managing online engagement.
In the countdown to PR+MKTG Camp East on October 28, we want to start calling your attention to articles and posts related to theme of integrated strategic engagement (ISE). ISE is all about helping PR and marketing people engage their audiences more effectively through greater collaboration and the internal alignment of PR, marketing, sales, customer service and community moderation.
Here are some of the more interesting and informative posts and articles we found in the past week and were compiled by Kristin English:
Michael Krigsman for ZDNet writes about IDC’s social business framework. The framework provides an interesting perspective on consolidating roles and giving purpose to a confusing organizational structure. As with most frameworks, it provides a baseline for organizations, but may not provide answers for all.
Barb Mosher for CMS Wire presented an informative perspective on how not all social software is created equal. Starting with a critique of SharePoint 2007, Mosher explores where social business software is today and how it is evolving. The most relevant point she makes is highlighting that social software is all about empowering people. Mosher states that social software “needs to provide capabilities that seem almost natural to use because it helps get the job the done, helps them work together and seems like a natural part of the process.”
Do you agree with Mosher’s perspective?
Cisco put out a concise and informative white paper this week titled “Transforming Collaboration through Strategic Architecture.” The paper establishes a clear picture about how trends moving forward set the stage for the growth of enterprise collaboration software and strategy. Their “Conceptual Collaboration Architecture” is extensive and informative, especially because they clearly define the terms. Overall, the paper gives readers a great overview of the strategy involved in the collaboration process.
What do you think?
Another piece from CMS Wire, this time from Chelsi Nakano, specifically discusses five social networking tools used in enterprise collaboration. Four of the tools are fairly obvious, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Skype. The final tool discussed is Socialtext, which is specifically designed for organizations to coordinate their business collaboration. Socialtext is not the only collaboration. Their competitors include Spigit, SAP’s Streamwork, Jive, and Atlassian.
What do you think of these tools? What do you think of them? What tools would you add to the list?
| Posted on Aug 12.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago Takeaway 4 – Forecasting and Measuring Tools
Forecasting and measurement continue to remain elusive given changing technologies, roles and responsibilities. For PR+MKTG Camp Chicago attendees, challenges centered around whom they should be reaching, with which message, and on what platform. In selling social media to clients and management, they did identify several key objectives for measuring performance including:
Increased sales, Brand reputation/opinion, Thought leadership, Driving traffic to other areas, Collecting ideas from consumers, Staying relevant, and Engagement, Media coverage, Reach, Influence, and Search rankings.
They also identified tools they are using to track performance and measure their objectives:
PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics is a new intelligence tool that enables communications professionals and marketers to monitor, analyze and measure the impact of what is being said about an organization, brand, spokesperson or competitor across the social media landscape. (PR Newswire is a sponsor of PR+MKTG Camp.)
Alterian SM2 monitors conversations, sentiment, and competitive information through social media channels is a vital part of building a consistent brand as well as creating relevant content that engages your audience. A software solution designed specifically for PR and marketing agencies to monitor and measure social media. (Alterian is a sponsor of PR+MKTG Camp Chicago.)
Buzz Metrics delivers brand metrics, consumer insights and real-time market intelligence to help clients apply consumer-
generated media (CGM) to their businesses.
Cision provides media monitoring, media research, distribution, and media evaluation PR software and services.
HootSuite is the professional Twitter client that manages multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedules tweets, and measures success.
Klout identifies influencers on topics across the social web.
Radian6 gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.
Viralheat is a social media metrics platform that delivers real-time data on over several different video, microblogging platforms and millions of websites.
Vocus addresses the critical functions of PR including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring.
| Posted on Aug 05.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago Takeaway 3 – Building a Social Media Framework
Whether it’s a b2b, b2c, or a non-profit, each organization has its own “digital thinking.” To some degree, aligning PR and marketing is culturally driven. But PR+MKTG Camp Chicago identified cross cultural guidelines and processes that are essential to implementing a social media strategy.
Scope: First and foremost is scope. Too often, people think social media is this “BIG BEAST” they have to swallow up whole. Baby steps are needed to ensure management buy-in. All strategies need to be flexible enough to address the organization as a whole, individual brands and specific departments.
Ownership: Who owns social media – subject matter experts, designated teams, the entire organization or the public at large? No one should discount the public’s ownership stake in social media or the power of a decentralized voice. But as communications experts, PR and marketing need to own the communications process, coordinate campaigns and drive decisions.
EXAMPLE: When it comes down to specifics, one department has responsibility, but other people can contribute content. McDonald’s recently appointed Rick Wion to be its first director of it social media. Previously most of the strategy and execution of social media was conducted by its separate PR and marketing agencies. He understands that everyone has an ownership stake. McDonalds is huge, so alignment across departments is key to make sure everyone is on the same page and money is not being wasted.
Communications: Subject matter experts still need a collaboration framework. As a 
moderator and head of worldwide field marketing for Motorola’s Networks business Suzanne Martin said: “I have a healthy disrespect for companies without roundtable discussions. That is how you get anything done. You need to have IT at the table; you also need to have management, marketing, etc.” Through collaboration, companies can establish a common voice, create greater efficiency and identify best practices.
EXAMPLE: Experiencing some PR challenges of its own (including a widely viewed YouTube video about a mishandled guitar), Valerie Waller, who is managing director – brand communications at United Airlines and served as a moderator at PR+MKTG Camp Chicago, acknowledged the need for a comprehensive company-wide approach. Her position involves working with stakeholders within the organization to shape their social media strategy. They are working to identify their ultimate goals and divide up responsibilities to make sure everyone is covering different channels of social media.
Feedback and Response: Companies need to move faster and reach the consumer more quickly. With social media, companies can use feedback to get new ideas or correct issues in a timely matter. It makes consumers feel a company cares and may help them to forgive a company after a bad experience. Above all, companies need to get comfortable with trial and error.
EXAMPLE: Kraft’s Claire Spinti shared that social media is giving customers a bigger voice. It’s helping to get changes made and brand teams are now listening. “Look, here’s a thread of 500 comments from consumers saying this doesn’t work.”
EXAMPLE: PR+MKTG Camp Moderator Rene Ramos, brand manager at Miller Coors, explained how Miller Coors used social media to help consumers who asked how they could get their product. Engagement helped geo-target and to determine where to next introduce new products by using profiles to see where “friends” were located. That along with product design innovation goes a long to keep engagement fresh when you can only come out with so many flavors or beer.
By working together, PR and marketing can serve to create more efficiency between departments but across the organization.
| Posted on Aug 03.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago Takeaway 2 – Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago revealed that social media is partially to blame for organizational turf confusion. Its mandate that everyone engage customers is leading to blurred communication boundaries.
When polled, attendees believed driving sales and customer support were now considered leading roles for PR and marketing professionals. This shift in responsibilities may come as a surprise to the heads of sales and customer support who traditionally “own” the customer.
Todd Belcher, Boeing
On the other hand, one of PR+MKTG Camp’s moderators, Bill Belcher, director of corporate communications at Boeing, made it very clear PR owned reporter relations at Boeing. However, don’t tell that to reporters who can and do bypass traditional channels by taking advantage of employees on Twitter and Facebook for company news and tips.
This turf confusion extends to managing social media budgets. When attendees were asked who controls the social media budget in your organization? They laughed and said “Everyone.”
If everybody is in charge of social media, then ultimately nobody really is. Some may argue that the lack of ownership may be the whole point of social media. But the negative of side of overlapping or undefined roles is the potential for duplicative social media campaigns, an undisciplined message and negative customer feedback.
In this state of confusion, PR+MKTG Camp Chicago demonstrates the importance of alignment in helping marketing and PR professionals understand their shared role in managing:
- Customer Ownership (what does owning the customer mean)
- Engagement Policies (messaging and messenger)
- Hand off Procedures (internal communications and sharing information)
- Follow up Processes (making sure the customer is served)
- Shared Performance Metrics (sharing the rewards and blame)
In short social media has created opportunities for greater customer engagement. It is up to PR and marketing provide organizational structure and purpose.
| Posted on Aug 02.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago Takeaway 1: From Definition to Impact
As we prepare for PR+MKTG Camp East in October, I wanted to shared the key takeaways from PR+MKTG Camp Chicago held in back in June.
First up: From Definition to Impact
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago revealed that clients and management now have a better understanding of what social media is and a higher level of comfort with implementing it. The challenge, and of course the opportunity, now comes in formalizing its role, making that role operational and then measuring its impact.
In a sense social media along with new technological methods of communicating and
creating engagement has entered adolescence. Like any healthy teenager transitioning to adulthood, social media is trying to assert its identity and fit in.
Despite making considerable progress in understanding and managing social media, conflicts persist:
- We value integration, but cling to existing organizational structures.
- We have new job titles, but preserve traditional roles, responsibilities and chains of command.
- We have closer relationships to our customers, but internal mechanisms to help sales teams convert influence into transactions are not keeping pace.
- We stress ROI, but still rely on existing metrics and are unsure of which new tools to use to measure and forecast performance.
These issues are growing pains of the social media maturation process. While complicated, they present tremendous opportunities for PR and marketing to serve as thought leaders in making social media deliver measurable results.
| Posted on Jul 22.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp™ East – October 28 – New York City
Thursday, October 28, we return to New York for PR+MKTG Camp™ East. The focus is integrated strategic engagement (ISE). And we still have some speaker slots open.
ISE stresses how collaboration and aligning communication, customer support, sales, and community management/moderation can help you maximize the impact of your PR and marketing strategies.
Based on discussions like the one about the ramifications of fractured channels that I recently attended at a Tweetup hosted by CoTweet (blog, Twitter) and ExactTarget (Twitter), I feel the need has never been greater.
If you are like many of today’s communications leaders, you are navigating your organization through shifting, overlapping digital and non-digital media channels. You are trying to keep up with new sets of influencers and a more dynamic flow of information
It’s a challenging environment where the ROI model is still unproven and institutional resistance prevails.
PR+MKTG Camp East is like the events I have held in Chicago, New York, Seattle and Atlanta. It’s a full day of highly interactive discussions and reviews of case studies for a select number of strategists from marketing, brand, PR, sales and customer support.
You will walk away with a clearer strategic vision and the tools you need to better reach the new influencers in today’s changing media landscape.
Topics include:
- Assessing the current communications landscape
- Building a vision for integrated strategic engagement
- Executing a strategy for integrated engagement
- Establishing business impact metrics and analytics
In short, I am hoping attendees will have an opportunity to step back, network with peers and bring back an action plan to management and clients that lets you overcome many of the challenges of outdated, inflexible ways of communicating.
How It Works
The day is very structured, but you have ample opportunities to shape the outcome. Sessions start with breakout groups led by pairs of industry experts – providing you with more exposure to multiple points of view and different experiences. In the second part of each session, the Camp reconvenes, and the group leaders present their findings for the whole Camp to discuss.
This combination of breakout groups and larger discussions gives you the best of both worlds – a setting to network with one small group of peers throughout the day and forum to share a broader range of ideas with a larger group.
THE AGENDA
8:00 AM – Registration and Breakfast
9:00 AM – Executive Keynote on Strategic Engagement in the new media landscape (Speaker TBD)
9:45 AM – Assessing the Current Communications Landscape
This session will explore your company’s or organization’s current communications landscape. It will look at how it’s changed, who the key influencers are and how effectively your company or organization is responding to the changes.
The goal is to help you build your Alignment Action Plan – focusing on the underlying assumptions and organizational challenges that stand in the way of a successful media planning strategy and taking into account your need to demonstrate value.
11:15 AM – What is a Success: Creating a Strategic Vision for Greater Alignment
In the rush to launch new initiatives and reach new influencers, companies are experiencing misaligned communications goals, confusion over engagement strategies and tactics and inconsistent messaging and branding.
This session will focus on creating a vision for strategic engagement to help more effectively influence your target audience. It will highlight the value of collaboration integrating communication, customer support, sales, and community management/moderation. We will explore examples of what short-term and long-term success look like. We will also consider the impact of embracing and getting beyond corporate culture.
12:30 PM – Lunch
1:30 PM – Strategic Engagement: Executing on the Vision
Talk to your social marketing/communications team and you may hear conflicting views regarding customer engagement. Some may maintain that it’s everyone’s responsibility, while others contend that no one actually “owns” it, and still others say it’s the customer not the company who is the ultimate owner. The result: confused objectives, blurred boundaries, overlapping responsibilities, and duplicative efforts.
This session looks at helping organizations execute their strategic engagement vision. It examines how the new “social” landscape is blending customer service, sales, marketing and PR functions and how organizations are responding. It stresses a holistic, cross-functional approach looking at where PR and marketing can work with sales and customer support manage their social marketing/communications to reach key influencers.
2:45 PM – Establishing Meaningful Business Impact Metrics and Analytics
Measurement is critical. Yet the Internet and emerging interactive and customer/public participatory platforms make it among the most elusive components of any successful engagement strategy.
In this session, we develop a consensus on which metrics are most meaningful in demonstrating the value. We look at which tools are best to use measure them, who is in charge of collecting and sharing the data that is collected and most importantly, how the data is used. We will also address how various departments (marketing, social outreach, sales) can learn from each other in measuring overall performance.
4:15 PM – Review Key Findings, Relationships, Calls to Action and Next Steps
4:30 PM – Conclusion
I hope you can make it. Register early and enjoy some discount specials.
| Posted on Jul 01.10 |
Measurement and Analytics: Interview with Chicago Tribune’s Muhammad Saleem
Muhammad Saleem (twitter) is director of social media at the Chicago Tribune and served as a moderator at PR+MKTG Camp Chicago last month. He has been actively participating in, and writing about, various social media communities for more than 6 years.
Muhammad: I was hired by the Tribune to consult on the development of ChicagoNow as a fundamentally social publishing platform and train our team at the Tribune as well as our 350+ bloggers on social media and search engine optimization essentials and best practices.
How do you measure the success of your social media strategy? What are your key success metrics?
Muhammad: Since our monetization is almost 100% dependent on display advertising our key success metrics are based purely on audience growth, and specifically local audience growth since we are all about Chicago.
How critical are these metrics in gaining support for social media at the Chicago Tribune?
Muhammad: By showing everyone at the Tribune that social media provides quantifiable results that directly impact our bottom line and help us achieve our business objectives we can convince people that social media is actually worth it.
What social media analytics tools do you use to measure performance and how do you evaluate their effectiveness?
Muhammad: We use Scout Labs to monitor how our social media strategy has helped us grow beyond the baseline established around launch.
| Posted on Jun 22.10 |
Motorola’s Suzanne Martin Discusses Social Media Alignment
Suzanne Martin was a moderator at PR+MKTG Camp Chicago earlier this month in a session addressing ways to improve alignment between PR and marketing. She is head of worldwide field marketing for Motorola’s Networks business and is responsible for managing integrated marketing campaigns that encompass interactive, events, sponsorships, sales tools, advertising and communications. She oversees programs that span B2B customer direct solution marketing to co-marketing with key accounts to generate consumer demand.
Q: Aligning PR and marketing efforts is difficult enough within one organization. In your role, how do integrate efforts across continents and cultures?
Suzanne: We have a very matrixed organization, as most corporations do, so we don’t have the “luxury” of relying on a single authority to drive alignment. In some ways we probably have a stronger foundation. Regardless of region or culture, well understood processes and roles and responsibilities go a long way to minimizing issues.
However with that said we take care to ensure that each region is given the flexibility needed to meet local program demands and to support unique business drivers to that region. This means you can’t have too much process or “centralized oversight.” The distributed authority model works best for us, with a common operational core.
How has social media been integrated into your marketing strategy?
Suzanne: We have been ”building the plan while flying it.” There is no single book or consultant that has all the answers, and needs vary, so the best way to get out there is to jump in and begin experimenting. But we have not gotten too ahead of capabilities or done major experimentation on very high visibility or critical programs. One innovation came out of this experimentation approach, and it is now being institutionalized across markets and regions.
Share the Experience is a social media experience for our customers that ties in other elements of the marketing mix. Our primary issue is determining the best approach in B2B marketing. Concurrently we are working on a common strategic core to guide our social media efforts to ensure a strong and successful platform for future growth of this marketing platform.
Social media is blurring the traditional boundaries between PR and marketing. There is increasing overlap as PR and marketing now both use many of the same tools and social networks. Is social media making your job easier or more complex?
Suzanne: A little bit of both. I think bringing marketing and PR closer together is only good to strengthen the focus and unity of our brand activity and voice in the market. From an internal perspective, we do have some competing priorities, so we have to be careful to always share common goals and think “outside in.” The complexity is also driven by the “building the plan while flying’ approach.
What advice/tips would you offer to better align PR (which tends to focus on messaging and relationship building) and marketing (which tends to focus customer acquisition)?
Suzanne: I argue that there is such a difference between marketing and PR. I think we make more of this than we should. At the end of the day, we should all be sharing the same messaging platform and focusing on customer acquisition and retention and brand loyalty and relationship management across the key stakeholders and segments we serve (internally and externally by the way). I think alignment is about shared goals (to be measured on), common processes, well-defined roles and responsibilities and senior management expectation that there be alignment.
| Posted on Jun 15.10 |
PR+MKTG Camp Chicago – June 8th
Pictures from PR+MKTG Camp Chicago that took place on June 8th at the University Conference Center. For more pictures, check out our Facebook page and photos by Phoebe Svoboda.
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