Tag Archives: Katie Payne

The Message is the Message: Albany Ad Club social media panel

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This morning I attended the Albany Ad Club’s annual meeting and social media panel discussion, which featured five local PR, marketing and advertising professionals discussing their current use of social media tools and strategies. All were from different backgrounds and it was neat to see the contrasting methods and platforms that each preferred for communicating to their audiences and the various strategies they highlighted:

  • Steven Jeffes of EdgeUp Marketing uses LinkedIn and manages several groups. He connects with more than 15,000 professionals through his moderation of eight different LinkedIn groups. Jeffes manages employee groups for GE, Lockheed Martin and the Wharton School and also the popular Albany, NY Professionals LinkedIn group. He’s gained several consulting clients through the connections he’s made on LinkedIn.
  • Megan O’Toole from the New York State Bar Association has found that a combination of blogs, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook groups and pages have been an effective way to reach out to her organization’s members. She often uses traditional media (direct mail, e-mail newsletters) to promote these new media channels and the NYSBA is budgeting for Web advertising in 2010.
  • Gina Hyams works with several arts and non-profits in the Berkshires. She used Twitter to promote the Berkshire International Film Festival and to interact with filmgoers during the event. As a “Tweeter-in-Residence” for the festival, Hyams shared links to film trailers, film makers’ Web sites, and general information about the festival. During the festival, she would monitor and retweet mini-reviews of the films and would tweet information about parking and ticket availability and line length.
  • Patrick Boegel and his firm, Media Logic, have redesigned their business model and offerings to focus on a conversation-centric model of marketing. Through new tools, like their proprietary custom “Zeitgeist and Coffee” social media monitoring dashboard system, they are encouraging their clients to become involved in the conversations that are already happening about their brands. He stressed the importance of starting with a strategy and letting that dictate how and when you use social media tools for communication.
  • Paul Fahey of Zone5 discussed how really the “old school” principles of communication are the core of social media. He referenced Dale Carnegie’s book, published in 1936, that focused on how to establish good relationships with people. That’s what social media is really about today. He noted that there’s a lot you can’t control in social media – but you can control the way you respond and the principles you use to guide you in a conversation or interaction.

Following the panel, I captured a quick reaction from my table mate Jim Stagnitti, general sales manager for Clear Channel Radio. Here were his three takeaways:


(Free videography tip: Get a Gorillapod. Do not try to use a full glass of water to prop your camera on, or you could possibly knock it into the glass. Not that I’ve ever done that. Like, say, this morning.)

I had a side conversation with Jim and some of his employees about social media ROI after the panel. I agree that none of the panelists really did have a good answer when the question of measurement came up, but that’s about par for the course these days.

I directed them to Katie Delahaye Paine’s blog and talked about how ROI in social media is a lot like ROI in sales: How do you put a value on building relationships? Taking a client out to dinner? A round of golf? It’s still the million-dollar-question as to how you take the customer engagement and relationship-building that happens as a result of interactions in social media and link it to revenue gained or costs avoided.

As for Jim’s assertion that the medium is no longer the message and the “message is the message”… exactly. Social media is allowing information to be seen/heard/shared across platforms and with loads of added commentary, perspective and criticism. Consumers are no longer bound to receive messages exactly as brands or organizations dictate. As Patrick stated during the panel, “consumers are in control now and clients have to understand that their brand is not all their own anymore.” Right on.

Ragan Recap: Communications, Chicago-style

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chicagoI’m so exhausted after three days in Chicago that I can barely stay awake to write this post. I took in slightly more information than I did beer in the Windy City (but not by much) and want to share my impressions of the 2009 Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference and some of what I learned in the sessions.

A few of the sessions I attended were so outstanding that they warrant their own individual posts that will come later this week (stay tuned). The others were quite solid. I predominantly went to workshops on the PR/Marketing Communications track. Here’s a rundown of some of my favorites:

ComEd: Generating positive publicity when the lights are on

ComEd Communications Manager Jeff Burdick led this session and started with a slide that said: “99.95% of the time, you DO have power!” But of course, that’s not what customers want to hear during an outage. The average customer is only without power for a total of four hours in a given year. Obviously storm and outage communication is a major issue for utility companies, but during the rest of the time when everything’s buzzing along, how do they generate interest? ComEd focuses on pitching stories about reliability and infrastructure investments, its employees, environmental projects, and corporate citizenship. ComEd targets local TV news and smaller, community-based newspapers (many of which aren’t suffering and closing at the rate of large metropolitan dailies).
Key takeaway: Look for “Riches in the Niches” and leverage unique, local angles in stories. Don’t always focus on the largest media outlets

Wells Fargo: Flexible communications in the face of merging organizations

Presented by Kathleen Golden, VP of Public Relations for Wells Fargo Wealth Management Group, this session focused on the 2008 acquisition of Wachovia by Wells Fargo and the associated communications challenges. When merging the leadership of two organizations, speculation runs rampant among employees and the media. Who’s getting what job? Who’s leaving, who’s staying? Why are they structuring the new company this way? Communicators in this situation have to have the pulse of what’s being said and address any misinformation as soon as possible. But, it’s okay to tell stakeholders that you don’t have the answers yet.
Key takeaway: Establish a process for both sides of a merger to share, receive and distribute information. Address rumor and specualtion as much as possible with the information you have on hand to diffuse any issues. Involve communications early on in the merger process.

Word of Mouth Marketing – Get customers talking about you

I was a bit disappointed in Andy Sernovitz’s session, mostly because I felt he didn’t share anything beyond what you could get from his book or blog. All of the examples he used were primarily B2C companies (Skittles, Zappos, Duct Tape), which I think generally lend themselves to more viral, word-of-mouth activities and campaigns. It can be much harder to get a bunch of supply chain managers to become rabid fans of plastic fasteners or concrete forms or raw chemicals. While Andy had some good tidbits here and there, I was bummed that I skipped some of the other sessions going on at this time (including Katie Paine’s) to go to this one.
Key takeaway: Make it easy for customers to talk about your brand. Create content that they can participate in and make their own, then share with their friends.

Calculating the ROI of your communications – turning results into dollars

Angela Sinickas offered ways to measure communications efforts and show how communicators can take credit for behavior changes that earn or save money for a company. I’m not sure I fully understood her approach, as she seemed to advocate for continually adjusting either the costs incurred or the value derived to achieve the ROI result you wanted. In the corporate communications roles that I’ve held, the finance team would pretty quickly sniff out any data massaging like that. The other issue I had was that her approach relied on having good data available – which many communicators don’t always have at their disposal. But the basic concepts were intriguing and I think I’ll refer back to her slides and check her Web site out to learn more.
Key takeaway: Only behavior changes can have a dollar-value attached to them, so measure that. Calculate communications ROI on a project basis instead of trying to do it annually for an entire department.

chicagogangOverall

As is usually the case, the best part of the conference was getting to meet so many great people. It was fantastic to have lunch with Katie Paine and see Shonali Burke at the cocktail hour. I got to meet Amber Naslund, Rachel Esterline and Ari Adler at the unconference. I hit the town with Mike Pilarz, Allan Schoenberg and Amber Porter Cox. I had my first Bell’s Beer (and my second, and my third…) and took an extra day with my good friend and travel companion Christine Hartter (who also wrote a great conference recap) to check out The Bean and the Art Institute. Verdict: Chicago is my kinda town!

Image via Flickr user amymengel (thanks to the waiter who snapped the pic above!)