FIR Podcast Network

Last week we started talking about PR pitches: the good, the bad, and the inane. We continue along that thread this week with some interesting examples that have crossed our virtual desks, including:

* Be authentic, especially when it comes to what you say in your subject line. There is this post on Medium about a personalized email message that has an unsubscribe link at the bottom: choose one way or the other, but don’t try to represent your missive as both. Worse yet, is having a subject line that says Don’t open this email as a come-on. This just annoys us and is counter-productive.

* Priceless is not a marketing strategy. We get many press releases without any mention of price, and when we go online, nothing is there about pricing either. David wrote a blog post about this a while back that is worth reviewing. Better yet, put a special “Pricing” link at the top of your home page so that everyone can easily find it. Your customers, and potential customers, will thank you.

* Call out surprising results up top, especially about survey results. So often we get press releases with abundantly obviously information, such as “80% of enterprises are moving to the cloud.” Yeah, we’ve heard that one before.

* We are not called targets, and you are not called flacks. We are both people, and we need each other too.

* No response to your email IS a response. Too often we get anxious messages from PR folks that ask if we got the first email and did we need anything further. The answer is no. If we need something, you will be the first to know.

* Watch your spelling and grammar and other obvious editing errors. They all matter.

* Take a moment to ask for help if you are new. But do it in a way that is respectful of our time. A colleague of ours got this email from a novice PR person: Based on your work reporting tech and tech business, what makes a great story, in your view? I ask because I’m with an IoT startup in [some city], and we’d love to be able to provide interesting stories from time to time. It would be great to know what kind of content would be really valuable to you. Then, if you were open to the idea, we would only raise possible stories we were sure you’d love.  Please take the time to do this, it will get great results.

We both get lots of pitches from PR people: most of them are missing something. In this and subsequent episodes, we take the time to review what makes a great PR pitch and provide examples of both.

A great pitch should have the following elements:

* Doesn’t pester us for a response. When you don’t hear from us, that means we aren’t interested. Yes, this new fangled email thing is actually working, delivering your missives to us.

* Knows when to ask us for a meeting and more importantly, when not to ask.

* When you have a meeting, support it with a confirmation, background materials, and being on time.

* Speaking of materials, no death by PPT: stick to the fewest possible slides.

* Doesn’t take too long to get to the point: the briefer the pitch, the better.

* And provide graphics/video and URLs that we can directly consume in our article.

Paul’s favorite PR person is Beth Winkowski. David’s is Amber Rowland. Both are great at their jobs and we have known for decades, and when we get an email from them usually there is a good reason, and a story ensues.

Some other tips:

Avoid meaningless superlatives. Don’t include them on general principle, and certainly don’t use them if some product isn’t the first, the best, the only. We do check, and that pisses us off. Angle a pitch toward the audience.

Keep your pitches short, 100-200 words tops. The shorter, the more likely they will be read. You don’t have to include the entire press release, if we are interested, we will ask for more.

Understand what an embargo is, and how to use it. We got one pitch that said “EMBARGOED FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.” Um, that doesn’t make any sense. A request for embargo should first ask the journalist to agree to a specific date and time. Once that is accepted, the next email should include all the information that’s being embargoed and the date and time that the embargo lifts. The information should also include a URL that goes live after the embargo lifts. 

Don’t pretend to know us if you don’t. Fake flattery will backfire. Yes, read our clips, but don’t say “I’m writing with regard to an informative article you wrote on …” That just gets us mad. 

Build a relationship. The best PR people know that they will be around a long time, and start a relationship that can last decades.

David has a slide deck here that is worth reviewing on how to get the best trade press product reviews that touches on these points.

 

The online advertising world is undergoing a massive transition right now, trying to cope with a war between the advertisers and the people that view their advertising. Site owners are resorting to running increasingly intrusive ads because they generate the most revenue. But they also generate a lot of user frustration, which is what’s led to increasing use of technologies like AdBlock. Now AdBlock itself is trying to play an arbitration role, which has some people in a lather. Who appointed this commercial company to decide which ads we can and can’t see?

We sympathize with the publishers who have to make the difficult choice between inconveniencing their visitors with obnoxious ads or risk losing revenue. Ad pricing is increasingly becoming a race to the bottom, and publishers have little choice if they want to remain viable. However, the standoff perpetuated by AdBlock only seems to be getting worse.

There are things you can do to control the ads you see. Facebook, for example, has a page to control your ad preferences, but few people know about it. The page is full of confusing controls and hard for most people to understand. We give Facebook credit for giving its users some choice in the matter, but we think they could be more assertive about it.

Writing recently on TechCrunch, Vinay Kumar Mysore made a persuasive argument for why the advertising industry should embrace AdBlock, but his proposal is likely to fall on deaf ears. B2B marketers can do their part by pressuring publishers to take user experience seriously and threatening to go elsewhere if they don’t.

David Strom has further analysis on his Web Informant blog.

We flagged down Giuseppe Caltabiano after we saw this story in Contently about Schneider Electric’s B2B content marketing efforts (and especially its Energy University education resource). Giuseppe joined Schneider’s Data Center division about a year ago to unify its prolific but fragmented content marketing effort. Since then, the company has reduced the number of steering committees from five to one and reduced the amount of content the company producing but deployed it more strategically.

Schneider employs what Giuseppe calls a “big rock” strategy centered around anchor feature topics that generate content that can be repackaged and reused in multiple formats and on multiple platforms. “Content leads to three times as many downloads as traditional marketing campaigns,” Giuseppe writes. And leads who engage via content are, by definition, more engaged.

In this week’s podcast, Giuseppe talks about the importance of having a strategy, focusing resources, sticking with your editorial calendar and failing fast.

Follow Giuseppe on Twitter.

This week we look at six recent stories and how they affect marketing decisions.

First up is the sale of Gawker to another media property and closing down of its main website. Here is Nick Denton’s last post and Peter Thiel’s op/ed piece in the NY Times. Even if you agree that what Gawker does is despicable, you should give them props for being allowed to report on public figures such as Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan. Clearly, the Gawker personal attacks decided its legal fate, although this piece is a good example of covering both sides of the issue by one of Gawker’s contributors. However, the results of the lawsuit do set a uncomfortable precedent and it has some spillover for online privacy expectations, even for private citizens.

Our second piece is a survey out of the Duke business school which shows an interesting trend in how social media spending is going up, even though people’s future expectations on that spend is going down. This could be caused by a bandwagon effect, or diminished expectations, or the natural evolution of social media interest as folks are moving on to other technologies and techniques.

Our next story is about how Google warns it will crack down on “intrusive interstitials” next January. Having lots of ad pollution, especially over mobile searches and websites, is annoying more than just users, and Google is taking more of a leadership role in trying to stem this terrible tide and do the right thing.

Our fourth item is to call attention to a feature film that was released earlier this summer by Martin guitars. Called The Ballad of the Marin Dreadnought, it features major recording music stars from rock, jazz and country who have used their guitars. The Dreadnought has been around for 100 years. This is a great example of how companies can use their history and create content to help build and promote their brands. The movie shows off how this instrument has played a key role in their customers’ lives.

Next up is a question from one of our listeners, who writes: “I’ve lost faith that Twitter is the right channel for our B2B efforts, and yet I can’t bring myself to shut it down. What say you?” We both agree that you shouldn’t stick with a platform just because everyone else is using it. But you also shouldn’t shut it down either since that can raise questions about the health of the company. Use Twitter as a conversation channel or to recognize and celebrate customer and employee successes or simply as a fast, low-cost bonus delivery channel for company news.

Our final piece is this story about how CMOs Fail To Go Beyond Brand Awareness On LinkedIn. The author noted that most of the sales and marketing leaders were using LinkedIn for message delivery, applying old media thinking to LinkedIn. But there are better reasons than focusing on lead generation that could be more productive. For example, you could look at ways to engage an audience with LinkedIn Groups and its blog-like posts and add content to other places on the site. These activities could help you find find potential customers who care about what you have to say.

Is Google Analytics ruining marketing? Samuel Scott (@samueljscott)makes a persuasive case that it is in this longish essay on TechCrunch. The gist of his argument is that if you let metrics drive strategy, then you’ll only do what it takes to yield the desired metrics. The result is unimaginative, repetitive sales pitches that alienate prospects and stifle new ideas. Our hosts think he’s got a point.

Kelsey Meyer (@kelsey_m_meyer) tells how her company, Influence & Co., hired 30 people in one year by using content instead of ads. She argues that if you slip your recruiting message into otherwise engaging content, then you’ll arouse their curiosity on a different level. They’ll be interested in what you do rather than just what the job requires or how much it pays. That’s a better engagement point.

Twitter Fails to Harness Its Importance, writes The Wall Street Journal. In contrast to all the criticism that has been dumped on Twitter lately over trolls and stagnant subscriber numbers, this article makes a salient point about an architectural problem that handcuffs Twitter’s business: Much of what people read on Twitter they get through third-party services that Twitter doesn’t control and can’t monetize. This is the result of strategic decisions Twitter made a decade ago that it can’t easily unmake, and it may be an unsolvable problem.

 

 

This week’s guest is Rich Mironov, who has held marketing and product management positions at many silicon valley companies including Tandem (when we called cloud computing “timesharing”), Sybase, Air Magnet and iPass. He also recently has presented to various agile product management groups around the world. He recently wrote about 8 mistakes beginning product management teams make here on LinkedIn’s Pulse as well as in a 2008 book The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator. He also actively blogs about these topics too.

We talked about the importance about researching markets and not making the mistake of generalizing from a single case study or customer. You want to spend time talking to dozens of customers before making any product decisions, otherwise you are making decisions on “air.” You don’t want to build something that no one wants and as he says, there are no health benefits from joining a gym. Marketers are going to do better if they have some idea of what their customers are doing with their products too.

Marketers should get a deeper understanding of the business problem their products are trying to solve. And since most users only use a few functions of every product, it is important to focus on the three or four things that really matter about the product. You have to become trilingual in technology, customer speak and finance, but no one is born speaking all three.

Marketers should know that product managers are pulled in a lot of different directions, and figuring out where the dividing lines between product managers and marketers is a good thing to do up front. Find the best stories from the product team and make them sing.

News & Comment

Lois Paul is retiring. The cofounder of Lois Paul and Partners and a respected technology journalist before that, she has been an inspiration to many people, including our co-hosts. Her work ethic, integrity and judgment are legendary in the New England PR industry and elsewhere. We expect that in retirement, Lois might cut her work week back to 35 hours. Whatever she does with her time, she will do it well.

A long post on the Curata blog asserts that “Content Marketers Desperately Need More Journalists.” It cites recent Curata research that shows that companies continue to invest heavily in content marketing but struggle to find quality content. The post goes on to argue that journalists are the perfect therapy for this pain. They aren’t afraid to ask questions, they see the big picture and they know how to tell stories and write engaging headlines. At a time when the challenge of rising above the noise is greater than ever, why would you not want to hire people who already know how to do it?

China is cracking down on news sites that use social media as sources, saying that tweets aren’t a substitute for good old-fashioned fact-checking. We wish more U.S. news organizations would take a cue from Beijing; we see too many tweets used in lieu of quotes obtained from first-person interviews. A 140-character message has no context, yet TV news organizations, in particular, are in love with them.

New research by Forrester finds that CMOs are feeling their oats. More than eight in 10 report that their performance is now lined with business targets and nearly 1/3 have P&L responsibility, which is way up from last year. Equally significant, CMOs are increasingly taking on responsibility for customer experience, which IBM’s 2015 C-Suite Study found is the number one priority of top executives.

News & Comment

We talk about the recent firing of Sree Sreenivasan as the head of digital from the Metropolitan Museum, and how he has made lemonade out of this by being very open about his job change status. Also, we discuss how Google will now show you everything it collects about you in a new portal page called My Account that consolidates your browsing and search history, allows you to manage your security and privacy settings, and other important interactions.

Special Guest: Hank Weghorst, CTO at Avention

We talk today with Hank Weghorst about account-based marketing (ABM) and why it is catching on now, along with some of the mistakes that potential users of ABM can first make. Weghorst gave this TED Talk about the process where he describes how his company has assembled a huge database of more than 50 million companies worldwide, and makes this information available to his customers via various desktop programs.

The idea behind ABM is to first figure out what customers you want to do business with, and then go about trying to find them using various Big Data techniques, which is the reverse of what typical outbound marketing programs do. In some cases it is a tougher sell than these traditional marketing programs, but it can be useful, particularly in situations where marketing departments are seeing prospective customers too late in the sales cycle, when they have already made up their minds.

With ABM, a marketer can choose and profile the types of companies that will be successful prospects, and capture the customer earlier in the buying cycle, choosing the accounts that are your best opportunities. ABM’s biggest problem is in doubting that it is actually going to work. He helps their customers to understand best practices and to create appropriate evaluation metrics to use.

A lot of focus about ABM is to enhance existing digital marketing techniques but it also is useful to enable and empower the sales organization and have them work closer with the marketing team.

The big wins are when you can use ABM for the greater good and deliver value to a variety of separate departments within an organization or when customers cut across these different departments. He suggests that you find an initial champion to get started with an ABM project.

He also comments on the Microsoft and LinkedIn merger and mentions that currently individuals enter their information into LinkedIn for a particular purpose: to look for a new job. But now with the merger there is a risk of having this data used for other purposes. Microsoft should be reminded that they don’t own the LinkedIn user data.

 

News & Comment

Jeff Bezos is putting his imprint on The Washington Post in some decisive ways, bringing the same thinking and technology that have made Amazon.com such an engaging commerce site to bear on the journalism world. A new report outlines the changes that are taking place in the newsroom that constantly test the stories journalists produce against the interests of the audience. As a result, the Post is recasting its approach to reporting and headline-writing, and with strong support from the journalists themselves. Has Bezos figured out a viable new business model for news?

Special Guest: David Karel, Head of B2B Marketing at LinkedIn

If you use LinkedIn for marketing, you must listen to this interview.

LinkedIn consistently ranks as the most effective social network for B2B marketers. What do the best of the best do well? David Karel shares the lessons he’s learned from nearly two years of working with hundreds of B2B marketers as well as using the LinkedIn platform to reach his own customers.

Effective use of LinkedIn for B2B marketing begins with understanding the needs of the audience and then providing a steady diet of information that helps them to be more successful. Dave outlines the day-to-day routines that the most successful B2B marketers use to promote their brands. He also talks about some of the little-known gems of LinkedIn’s portfolio, including the SlideShare presentation-sharing network and LinkedIn’s mobile app, which now accounts for more than half of user accesses to the site. LinkedIn also offers native advertising and highly targeted long-form content through sponsored InMail. LinkedIn is often thought of as a jobs platform, but did you know there is 15 times as much expert and advisory content as there are job postings?

A big part of that is the LinkedIn publishing platform and brand pages, which can serve up a steady diet of useful content at no charge whatsoever. The publishing platform is a great opportunity leverage your experts. Listen and learn and Dave Karel offers a 20-minute flash tour of what you need to know to succeed on LinkedIn.

You can also follow Dave on Twitter.