March Communications

Hey, B2Bs – Is Facebook Worth Your Time?

2013-05-21T21:13:10Z

By now, your B2B company is probably sold on the importance of social media. It may even be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy. However, if you are like a lot of B2Bs, you may be weary – or wary – of creating a presence on Facebook. It’s not uncommon for B2B marketers to question the usefulness of the social network, because they are hesitant to invest time and energy into something that, at the end of the day, may not be worth their time.

Let this be your warning: by ignoring Facebook, you’re turning your back on the opportunity to interact with more than 1 billion users. It almost sounds silly when you look at it like that, right? You may argue that your intended audience isn’t on Facebook, but that simply isn’t the case.

Of course your audience is on Facebook. They may not view Facebook as a medium for business, but they certainly have a presence, and you should too.

Here’s how you can use Facebook effectively:

1. Integrate it with the Rest

The first key to properly using Facebook is to integrate it with the rest of your marketing campaign instead of treating it as a standalone strategy. This will enable you to reach broader business goals as it will supplement the campaigns you are already running.

Post SlideShare presentations or event links to Facebook. Share your email marketing campaigns and other helpful material.

2. Don’t Talk Like a Business

The second key is ensuring you use Facebook the right way by humanizing your company. Remember, people use Facebook to connect with family and friends, and to find entertainment. They’re not usually there looking for business. You need to craft messages that align with those habits. According to Jason Miller, Marketo’s social media strategist, “humor is vital” to making Facebook work.

B2B companies that can make a prospect laugh are using Facebook exactly right. It’s about showing a lighter side and maintaining contact with your key audience.

The Personality Effect

When you boil it down, Facebook is an opportunity for B2B companies to show their personality. Because of Facebook’s casual, visual environment, it can’t be treated like other channels where the goal is closing a deal. It’s important to use humor and a relaxed tone instead of driving home the hard sell. By keeping in touch with prospects on Facebook in an informal and fun manner, you are ensuring your company is top-of-mind when it comes time for business decisions.

Read More:

5 Ways B2B Tech Companies Can Use Facebook for Leads

5 Ways Businesses Can Stop Being Boring on Twitter

Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic: The Tools of Every PR Pro

2013-05-21T19:02:47Z

When I was in high school, I wanted nothing to do with any future profession that would require math skills. Numbers just weren’t my thing and I was steadfast in the belief that any and all math courses were a complete waste of my time. I was also a teenager, so you can see where I am going with this.

This was just one of many topics I can now freely admit that I was wrong about. To list all of the others would be a monumentally time-consuming task, so for now, we’ll stick with the topic at hand: math. I always loved storytelling, be it in the form of novels, historical biographies, television shows, films, songs, etc. But, as a teenager, I never fully appreciated how important a role numbers can play in telling a compelling story.

In the PR world, statistics are often an integral part of any story we’re telling for our clients. They lend substance and credence to a narrative. If I were to tell you there is going to be an increase in Android device activations this year over previous years, you’d probably yawn and wait for me to tell you something you didn’t already know. If, on the other hand, I said that Google is predicted to activate 900 million Android devices this year, when the two previous years combined for just over 500 million activations, we have context. The increase is shown to be much more significant than in my first explanation.

The Right Math vs. the Wrong Math

But wait … don’t run out and start writing blog posts that spout off statistics ad nauseum. PR firms must be vigilant about which statistics they use. Before using them, you have to ask a few key questions. What do they really mean? How do they relate to important industry issues? How do they align with a company’s messaging strategies? Are they from a reputable source?

Each of these questions helps to determine if the numbers you’re about to cite are accurate, relevant and useful in telling a compelling story that target audiences will care about.

There’s one other question that’s worth asking: are these numbers self-serving? There are two parts to this answer. First, of course they’re self-serving. If they don’t speak to a larger issue that you want people to discuss, one that you want to be seen as a resource on, then what’s the point in using them? Second, while PR agencies and their clients can admit to one another that they use self-serving statistics, it shouldn’t outwardly and blatantly appear so.

No one is going to read a company blog, and no top-tier print or online publication is going to accept contributed content, if you’re using statistics that say 99 percent of the market thinks your company is the best thing since sliced bread. Rather, the numbers you use should provide context for industry issues and trends that people care about. This positions your company as having its finger on the pulse of the industry it wants to serve. It shows that you’re not just trying to sell products and services, but trying to fix problems that other businesses and end-users are struggling with on a daily basis – and statistics provide us with a number of ways to do that.

Classic and Emerging Vehicles for Stats in PR

Blog posts are great for getting a conversation started and building fruitful interaction between your company and your target audiences. Contributed bylines position your executives as thought leaders to large numbers of the exact types of people you want to reach. Both of these outlets allow you to put relevant statistics that help tell important narratives in front of the right sets of eyes.

Press releases and media alerts, more traditional tools of the PR trade, are also great vehicles for companies to let the numbers do the walking and talking for them. And then there are newer methods like infographics and social media. The former can present critical stats in easily digestible, visually appealing formats that tell powerful stories. The latter lets you target specific channels with eye-catching statistics that offer glimpses into important trends, driving traffic to your site and other valuable resources.

Numbers are a huge help when it comes to telling the right stories to the right people. And while math may not be my favorite thing to do on a Friday night, as an adult, I have a respect for it that I didn’t have as a teenager. Looks like my parents were right again.

Is Yahoo’s Acquisition of Tumblr a Victory for Content Marketing?

2013-05-20T19:40:23Z

This morning, Yahoo made headlines when it announced the acquisition of micro-blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. To me, there’s a lot of good to be said for this deal. Despite the outcry from the Tumblr community, Tumblr badly needed the money. The company only had “a few months” of funding left and needed significant resources to stay afloat. Yahoo, in turn, knows Tumblr will help it leapfrog into the social media space.

Tumblr’s audience is young. In fact, there’s been speculation that it is more favored among teens than established social media networks like Facebook. The platform also has a lot of great content that performs well on mobile, too, attracting an average of seven sessions from mobile visitors each day. So, Yahoo could just sit back and watch the money pour in … except there isn’t any.

The Tumblr Community isn’t Facebook’s Community

Tumblr made about $300 million in revenue last year. The company now has to convince Yahoo that there’s more revenue to be made. As with every other social network, the big problem is finding a way to make advertising work.

There is one significant difference between the Tumblr and Facebook communities: by and large, Tumblr users are anonymous. That means – unlike Facebook – there’s very little demographic information for companies to leverage. Users on Tumblr have silly names. They say controversial things in a public space. And they don’t like advertising.

Founder David Karp shares the view. He has even called the way that YouTube puts video ads onto content “gross.”

So imagine what Karp would think if, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “Yahoo already has plans to generate more revenue from some Tumblr features like its top-of-site ‘dashboard’ by possibly including some extra ads.”

Display ads aren’t going to radically turn a profit for Tumblr. The truth is that the site’s real advertising power is in its springboard effect on content.

Content that Sells

TechCrunch interviewed Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis about how brands use Tumblr. He explained that businesses love the platform for the powerful viral reach and the lifespan of the content. Content posted one day on a company blog can show up a week or a month later somewhere else, thanks to the site’s reblogging feature. This is a big plus, considering the lifespan of content on Facebook and Twitter is visible for less than a day at best.

“Tumblr is becoming a strategically important marketing channel for these brands, and they are making large investments in the platform. Just this year, we’ve signed up brands and agencies that represent myriad industries, including higher education, entertainment, fashion and beauty, sports, consumer products, travel, technology, news and retail,” Davis said.

So, for businesses that are trying to market on Tumblr, the secret may be in the content. TechCrunch noted that, out of the 50 billion blog posts that have been published on Tumblr, only five billion are original content. Everything else has been reblogged.

But where is Tumblr’s Money?

Content marketing has been a huge part of brand success on Tumblr and this won’t change. This viral community effect can be great for companies – March uses our Tumblr to share industry news and show behind-the-scenes-photos – but still leaves me wondering how Tumblr is going to monetize it without demographic data or any robust forms of advertising.

Right now, there’s been talk of promoting posts and paying bloggers to display relevant ads. I’m not sure this is going to justify the $1.1 billion price tag, but then again, Yahoo now has access to Tumblr’s 300 million users. The big test will be seeing whether the users are integrated into Yahoo’s larger suite of services.

Whatever the case, the only surefire way of promoting products on Tumblr right now is definitely emphasizing the “content” part of content marketing. It’s up to Tumblr to figure out how to monetize as seamlessly and effectively as it connects and promotes.

Read More:

Content Marketing and PR Boost Visibility of Niche Businesses – the Right Way

A Lesson in What NOT to do on Social Media

Android Predicts 900M Device Activations in 2013: What Does this Mean for the Business World?

2013-05-20T19:56:21Z

You know you work for a tech PR agency when you read an article that projects the number of Android devices that Google will activate this year and your first reaction is: Client X can help prepare for this! At March, we are constantly reading up on all of the tech world’s emerging trends, and we’re quite good at recognizing positive momentum when we see it. Even so, the 900 million Android devices expected to be activated this year made me do a double-take.

According to CRN, last week at the Google I/O 2013 conference, it was revealed that more than 500 million Android smartphones and tablets were activated throughout 2011 and 2012. Since then, Sundar Pichai, head of Google’s Android and Chrome operations, says that the momentum has been “breathtaking.” Hugo Barra, vice president of product management, agreed, noting that Google play received 2.5 billion installations just last month. While this is certainly big news for Google, the obvious question is: how will this impact the technology market as a whole?

Security and the Mobile Workforce

With the workforce becoming more mobile, enterprises must be able to deliver secure remote access to their employees – or at least that’s one point of view. The other side of the coin is that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) has been giving CIOs headaches for the past couple of years now, and as of just a few months ago, only 24 percent of companies had implemented a BYOD policy. Put that statistic next to the ever-present media scrutiny around Android’s susceptibility to malware, and the security concern becomes hard to miss. Given that the Android platform is now the most widely used mobile operating system (OS), enterprises will need comprehensive security solutions specific to that OS.

Not seeing the PR connection? Imagine the damage that could be done to a client’s reputation if their corporate network were to fall victim to a malware attack. That wouldn’t instill a great deal of confidence in customers regarding the security of their sensitive and private information. Establishing a BYOD policy and implementing a holistic remote access solution significantly reduces the likelihood of such an attack, and can save companies’ expenses and reputations.

Security, however, is but one aspect to consider when examining the impact of this massive Android device activation. Next week, I’ll take a look at how communication service providers can use analytics capabilities to turn these activations into an opportunity to better connect with their customers.

International PR: The German Landscape

2013-05-20T13:47:21Z

Here at March, we have significant international PR experience, from helping technology companies break into the U.S. market to partnering with other agencies to align clients’ communications strategies and PR program activities.

In addition to our client and partner work, we like to keep our fingers on the pulse on the latest PR trends across the world. I recently caught up with Sandro Villinger, a PR consultant in Germany and tech journalist/editor for the likes of ComputerBILD and PC Praxis, among others, to talk about common practices over there and the similarities and differences compared to the U.S. market.

(Disclosure: March and Sandro worked closely together for a number of years on a joint client’s PR and social media program.)

How do you think PR practices in Germany differ from PR in the U.S.?

SV: The PR practices in Germany are quite similar to those in the U.S. actually. German journalists, however, are a bit more skeptical. I think it takes more time to build trust between the PR agency / professional and the journalists here than in the U.S. I’m not saying media relations in the U.S. is easy though—I know how tough it is to get in touch with and convince influencers there.

More generally, when it comes to PR, I think Germany is very focused on security and privacy companies compared to other countries, including the U.S. If your client has a product in this market segment, it’s a big bonus point.

Is Germany seeing a continued decline in print media (especially technology-focused outlets) like the U.S.?

SV: Yes, we are, although this trend started a lot later than in the U.S. The general opinion of readers in Germany is that print journalists are more trustworthy than online journalists or blogger. They feel they’ve [print journalists] studied the practice, enjoyed professional training and have generally been in the business longer. However, print magazines are slowly but steadily disappearing and losing ad sales and revenue.

As a journalist for ComputerBILD and PC Praxis, how often are you pitched by PR folks? What are some of the best ways they’ve approached you to get you to write about their clients?

SV: PR folks pitch me a few times per week. I don’t get a lot pitches since I’m mostly focused on Microsoft technologies and generally write more guides than actual news stories. However, I’ve seen some very bad pitches and PR practices. Here are a few examples:

Pitches about a product that won’t ship for another 6-12 months aren’t of interest to me. If you’re not Apple, Google, Microsoft or another huge company, journalists won’t care about it that far in advance. Be immediate.
Pitches that clearly go to a tech writer shouldn’t be “dumbed down.” I ignore pitches that make me wade through a huge amount of information to get to the core message. Begin with the most important facts, to increase your chance of being covered ten-fold.
I know it’s a policy at a lot of companies, but when PR agencies offer an interview with their tech executive clients, I’d rather have a one-on-one. Setting up formal conference calls scares some tech writers and makes it difficult to understand what’s being said. If possible, and allowed, organize a one-on-one interview with a company.
Journalists are deadline-driven. Don’t bug me every 48 hours to “circle back,” “follow up” or offer “anything else we can help you with.” In Germany, these PR people will surely be blacklisted.

Check back in the coming weeks as we explore the PR landscapes, trends and best practices in other countries around the world.

A Lesson in What NOT to do on Social Media

2013-05-18T15:01:14Z

Social media can be a great tool for any business, provided you know how to use it. It’s a great feeling when you receive positive feedback from fans and followers, but unfortunately, it’s unlikely 100 percent of the comments a business gets on Facebook, Twitter and the like will be positive.

We recently discussed tips on how to respond to all types of comments on social media channels – the good, the bad and the ugly. Earlier this week, thanks in part to the hit Fox reality show Kitchen Nightmares, millions of people found out exactly what can happen when businesses don’t know how to respond to negative comments online, and make bad situations even worse.

For the first time in the show’s history, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay gave up and said he couldn’t help save a business. Watch the episode and you’ll get an idea of just why Ramsey felt the need to throw in the towel. The episode served as the season finale for the show, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the drama.

A slew of negative comments and reviews were posted on Facebook, Reddit, Yelp and other sites following the episode’s airing. Other individuals who had dined at the Scottsdale, Arizona eatery featured on the show also added their two cents … and then got a response via social media akin to being hit with a sock full of quarters.

The owners of the restaurant allegedly went on tirades on their Facebook page, hurling profanities and challenging posters to come into the establishment and voice their displeasure face-to-face. The more the owners supposedly responded, the more users chimed in and kept the war of words going. It wasn’t long before local and national news outlets picked up on the story.

Since the story broke, the posts have been removed and the owners have publicly claimed that their Facebook page was hacked and that they were not responsible for what happened. Many are treating this statement with a healthy dose of skepticism, however, considering the number of profanity-laced lashings the owners gave to customers and employees during the show.

Whether they are actually responsible for those furious Facebook posts or were indeed hacked, the lesson here is clear. Social media is a tool every business should take advantage of, but in the wrong hands, bad things can happen. Taking the time to understand how to interact with customers, both current and prospective, as well as key influencers, is critical for any successful social media strategy.

How to Run a Successful Facebook Business Page … and Other PR News

2013-05-17T17:51:47Z

Press Release Content Rehabilitation for B2B Marketers

Business2Community – May 13, 2013

Just like blogs and other content, press releases can be powerful sources of reference when they show up in searches, are forwarded, liked or commented on. Press releases can also be used to increase traffic and acquire leads and contacts. This article talks about ways to rehabilitate your press releases to realize their maximum potential, including building other communication platforms into your releases.

5 PR Strategies You Can Use to Build Links Right Now

Search Engine Land – May 14, 2013

Did you know there is an overlap of public relations and SEO, especially when it comes to link-building? Public relation professionals have spent years perfecting their outreach strategies and finding opportunities for their clients. However, search marketers have been employing the same tactics as well. They just called them “links.” This article explains how PR professionals can take a cue from search marketers by using similar tactics, like monitoring editorial opportunities and creating segmented reporter lists.

How to Get off the B2B Social Media Island

BtoB – May 15, 2013

More and more companies are embracing social media, but most haven’t progressed to the next step of transforming it into a key marketing tool. How can they do so? This article talks about some steps B2B marketers can take toward building an effective and integrated social media strategy, like determining the structure of your social media team.

How to Apply PR Skills at Networking Events

PR Daily – May 16, 2013

Public relations is an area of expertise that applies to media and communications. But, it also applies to social situations, especially networking events where your image is a top priority. This article discusses a few ways to apply your PR skills to any networking event. For example, make eye contact, dress the part, listen and interact with people.

Twitter Gets into the Data Analytics Business

2013-05-17T13:09:03Z

Twitter has always had one major disadvantage when it comes to competing with Facebook for marketing purposes: targeting. Without the detailed demographic information often provided in Facebook’s profiles, Twitter has a much more limited ability to get granular. This is important when you’re trying to use Twitter to market. Without any data analytics to guide messages, the social network can seem to be a great big sea that companies feel like small fish in, or in Twitter’s case, a small bird.

That may all start to change soon enough. Earlier this week, Twitter acquired data analytic start-up Lucky Sort and, although many details of the acquisition have yet to be released, this move could help companies better position their messaging and advertising through each tweet.

Analyzing Tantalizing Tweets

With an average of 58 million tweets per day and more than 550 million users, it is undeniable that Twitter offers a wealth of data, which we’re sure Lucky Sort can’t wait to play with. Utilizing Lucky Sort’s analytic tools, Daniel Terdiman from CNET explains, Twitter will gain a more focused picture of individual Twitter users and how they’re using the social network.

While no official announcement on the use of the data has been released, it’s probably safe to guess that these analytics will give companies wishing to use Twitter for promotions greater insight into what their target audience is discussing. This knowledge will then allow companies to improve their message delivery to ensure it’s aligned with audience or other companies offering similar solutions. By tailoring messaging based on detailed analytics, companies should be able to increase their visibility.

Sound too good to be true? There is a catch, because it’s also safe to assume this information won’t be free. As with Facebook Ads and Promoted Tweets, there will be a fee – hey, they have to make money too, right?! – but those willing to pay the fee will have a greater potential for higher ROI as the messaging will be better targeted to the correct audience. Worth the cost? With little information out on this union, we’ll have to wait and see.

Read More

5 Ways Businesses Can Stop Being Boring on Twitter

The Power of a Tweet: What We Can Learn from AP’s Hacking Scandal

Why Google’s Penguin 2.0 Update Could be Good for PR Firms

2013-05-16T17:09:17Z

There’s a shadow across the SEO landscape and that shadow’s name is Penguin 2.0. The latest in Google’s ongoing changes to its search algorithm, Penguin is ostensibly all about Google’s continuing mission to bring people the highest quality content.

Lead Google Engineer Matt Cutts recently said that the latest iteration is coming within the next few weeks.He also said that it will be something that gets talked about for a long time to come.

Now, everyone is nervously waiting to see if traffic to their websites will take a nosedive.

Cutts gave one solid reassurance: if you are making high-quality content, you have nothing to worry about.

That’s good for any business that takes content marketing seriously.

Backlink to the Future

“Backlinks” are exactly what they sound like: links that direct traffic from external sites back to your own. Before Penguin, just about any site that linked back to yours could bolster your search ranking. That ushered in an era of generally unscrupulous link-buying and link-building.

Those days are gone, however, and it looks like Penguin 2.0 will help make sure they remain but a memory. Cutts specifically said that the update would heavily target link networks.

As we’ve mentioned before, Google is focusing a lot on socially vetted authority these days. And how does Google determine authority? By backlinks from established sources like news publications, industry blogs and social media accounts.

Say you’re a cloud hosting provider and your PR firm gets a great byline placed in GigaOM. At the end of the byline, there’s a link back to your site describing your company. That’s huge, because Google will recognize that a third party sees you as a reputable cloud hosting provider. Subsequently, you’ll see a huge boost in your rankings.

Earned links are going to play a fundamental role in establishing search ratings going forward. If you write an article that people cite in their own blog posts, or the media writes about, or lots of readers share on social media, then Google will start to recognize you as an authority on the subject.

First, you need content that people want to read. With a good media outreach program to build relationships, that content will result in syndicated articles, interviews and those all-important backlinks.

Penguin’s Version of PR, SEO and Content

We can’t be sure of anything in the brave new, post-Penguin 2.0 landscape, because we haven’t glimpsed it yet. All we know is that Google has already made some moves to recognize websites or people as authorities on different topics, so the search engine can weigh expertise and reputation into the equation.

Digital marketing consultant Neil Patel speculates that authority is going to apply to social media, too. That means one tweet from an established news organization could be worth a lot when it comes to search rankings. Patel says that Penguin 2.0 may even devalue links from websites that just duplicate your content, instead placing the emphasis on other people organically linking to the original page.

Another interesting Penguin prophecy, this one from Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge, is that outbound links will always have to be citations instead of directing people deeper into websites. He wonders whether Penguin will force bloggers to write like research professors, because they will only link phrases that are sources for their material, rather than linking keywords or key phrases for SEO. That could have far-reaching implications for all those inbound links that so many companies (including us!) really love.

This would be an interesting strategy, too, because if no one is using inbound links in their blog posts, the only links will be to the original source material for the article. Thus encouraging back-linking to the most authoritative sources on the subject.

All of these potential changes seem to be good news for PR, because it means that relationships are going to be the key to building an authoritative website. Writing great content that gets featured or mentioned by other sources, and working with those sources to promote that content, will be a huge part of SEO going forward, just as it has already become integral to PR and content marketing.

Read More:

SEO & Content Marketing: The Opposable Thumbs in PR’s Evolution

Bing, Google and the Future of Social Search

Why Every SEO Strategy Should Be About User Experience

4 Ways to Avoid Being Hacked on Social Media

2013-05-16T15:11:09Z

We’ve all heard horror stories about social media hackers. Whether it’s your friend who stole your phone when you left the room and changed your Facebook status to something absurd as a prank, or a professional hacker who spammed your entire following on Twitter, being victimized is not fun. It can also cause serious damage to your business. But, this can all be easily avoided by using these four helpful tips:

1. Lock your device

Password-protect your mobile devices to keep pranksters and malicious hackers from hijacking your social media channels. Would you leave your door unlocked when leaving your house? Think of your mobile devices in the same way.

2. Use different passwords

If you’re a social media enthusiast and are active on a number of platforms, make sure you’re using different passwords for each account. If a hacker is able to figure out your password for one account, and you use the same password for others, it would be very easy for them to compromise your entire online presence and reputation.

3. Avoid add-ons and unfamiliar apps

This doesn’t mean you have to stop playing FarmVille (your secret is safe with me), but it does mean that you should be very cautious when granting third-party apps access to your personal information. When accepting a request for a new add-on or app on Facebook, you will always be prompted to accept the terms of use for that app, allowing basic information to be shared with the company. If someone you don’t know is sending you these requests, it’s best to decline.

4. Tighten up your privacy settings

Each social media platform has additional privacy settings you can adjust to help secure your profiles. On Facebook, security settings such as enabling secure browsing, new log-in notifications and records of recognized devices can help safeguard your account. Similarly, on Twitter, you can protect your tweets and automate password resets to add more security.

What tips do you use to keep your online accounts safe? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!