by RambergMediaImages via Flickr

I subscribe to quite a few enewsletters and RSS feeds, so it’s always surprising to receive an enewsletter that I never subscribed to. How did they find my email? Then I recognize the “from” address and I realize, I gave someone in that company my business card in the past.

A business card is meant to develop a relationship between people, not a person and a company. However, the first tendency is to take all business cards back to the office, dump them into a sales database and automatically subscribe them to all the company emails. Come on, you know you’ve done it!

From my perspective, this is the quickest path to 1) decrease people’s interest to work with your company and 2) for future emails to be blocked. In the end, this is about permission marketing (as eloquently written by Seth Godin in the book with the same name). Here are my three tips to gaining permission and starting your marketing relationship on the right foot.

Always ask and say please

What did you parents teach you when you were growing up? Always ask and say please. This is no different with marketing. Instead of adding me to a an email newsletter and anonymously sending it to me, consider sending me a personalized note highlighting why I may be interested in your newsletter. My motto is, if you never ask, then you’ll never hear yes, right? So ask first and maybe you’ll be suprised how many will say yes instead of hitting the unsubscribe button.

Treat each business card as a first date

Treat each business card as a first date – you’re seeking to win me over to go on the next date and the next. To do this, you have to understand my likes, dislikes and unique habits that make me special. The same with business. A business card provides a wealth of information to determine what type of information the person may be most interested in. For example, a marketing person may want to optimize lead and demand generation programs while a sales person may want to increase closed sales opportunities. Though similar, the needs of each are different.

Don’t be desparate

Have you ever seen the movie Swingers? Remember the scene where the main character keeps on calling this woman he just met, leaving voicemail after voicemail until she finally tells him to stop. Believe it or not, this happens in marketing as well. While creating multiple “touchpoints” is good for generating awareness about your company, multiple phone calls and emails is not necessarily the right application of this strategy. The key is coordinating between sales and marketing to understand how often a person is being contacted and why. Otherwise, the person on the other line will just hang up.

Conclusion – Long-term relationships

If done well, permission marketing will allow you to develop a long-term relationship that delivers value not only to the customer but also to your company. While this begins with a “yes,” you must constantly maintain that permission by understanding the person’s business needs, likes and dislikes. In a way, it’s like marri

Please share you thoughts, expriences and comments below on holding/producing a virtual press conference.

In the PR Group on LinkedIn (must be a member to view the discussion), some asked, “How do you justify fees to clients in an era of social media?” I believe many PR and marketing consultants have faced this as potential clients believe that social media is “free.”

I think there are two parts to this equation that we need to consider before answering the question, assuming that we’ve done the background work of evaluating target audience, prospect personas, and the channels where these individuals congregate.

First, Defining Social Media Monitoring: This entails helping the client to listen, monitor and respond to what is happening on key channels of import to the client. For example, I rarely recommend B2B clients monitor Facebook while Twitter and LinkedIn are channels to consider. This can be done either through a service or establishing the right searches to encompass 75-80% of their universe.

Second, Positioning Social Media Marketing: This encompasses more than point 1 but looks at how social media fits into the larger marketing funnel for the company. It involves closely collaborating with your client and its marketing team to understand how social media fits into the sales cycle for the organization. Maybe a Twitter inquiry is at the beginning of the funnel while a LinkedIn discussion is at the purchase phase. This intelligence can be drawn from the organization’s existing lead generation programs – yet, you may discover an opportunity to help an organization refine or establish this process because of the focus to start a “social media” program.

I find that many prosepctive clients confuse social media monitoring with marketing. Yes, while the first point is “free” and can be done exclusively by the client, the second part provides the larger context of how social media fits into the marketing strategy. This is the value that consultants  - PR, marketing and/or social media – can provide to organizations. And I believe this is what will sell clients on social media programs.

What do you think? How have you sold social media within your organization?

Photo by Gregg Salomon

Finesse Your 30-Second Elevator Pitch

Let’s be frank, in today’s ADD world, it’s more like the 140 character pitch. The goal – can you succinctly describe what your company does and why should I (i.e. the venture capitalist, potential customer, or average joe schmo) care.

Tell a Story

Whether you’re selling cloud-based software or shoes online, take your 30-second elevator pitch and tell a story. Stories engage and enthrall your audience. Product specifications and features do not.

Create a Company Brand or Persona

To me, a brand is communicating a specific persona to the market place. Are you the know-it-all Uncle Joe, chatty Aunt Sue, or gentle Nana Betty? It’s a technique that marketers use to describe their different target audiences. Why not use it as a way to position the company within the marketplace? Personally, I’d rather relate to a person versus a “company entity.”

Develop a Tagline

This is something I read in Jeremiah Owyang’s blog regarding start-up companies at the Disrupt conference. Lacking the first three points, companies should craft a 4-6 word tag line. The tag line would at least provide a springboard to a larger discussion about your company and value proposition.

Empower Your Employees

In today’s world, a company is no longer represented by its founders but also by its employees. As such, communicate the key messages about your company to your employees and empower them to be your ambassadors.

Conclusion: Memorable is more than buzz

In the end, launching your company is more than creating short-term buzz via publicity stunts. It’s about telling a story with an engaging persona that people will remember weeks and months after the launch.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate for Freshbooks and Zoho.

Dropbox

My husband recently got me an iPad which I’m finding is a powerful and very portable when I want to work outside of the home. By installing Dropbox on my computer, I can easily work on the same documents from home or on the road. Best of all – 2 GB of storage is free. If you refer more friends, Dropbox will give you 250 mb of additional storage (max of 8 GB) for each new member. To get started now (hint hint), click on this link: http://db.tt/cfx24p0.

Freshbooks

One of the benefits of working in-house is not worrying about timesheets, invoicing and receivables. A friend pointed out Freshbooks, which is a nifty online billing system. The service is free for the first three clients with the ability to track time, assign tasks with different hourly rates, invite contractors to work with you on the same timesheet, invoicing system and reports for tracking accruals, revenue, expenses, etc. For those with 4-25 clients, the rate is $20/month and increases slightly from there.

Google Calendar and Documents

Besides Google mail, Google has some great productivity tools. Two that I use quite frequently are the calendar and documents. With Google calendar, I can manage different calendars on behalf my client (best for start ups that don’t have embedded calendaring systems), as well as share calendars for scheduling purposes. This comes in handy when I have to schedule a media interview or determine dates for a prospective speaking opportunity.

While I’m using Dropbox for my internal document sharing, Google Docs has become the preferred way to share collateral with clients. You can either share a single document to certain individuals or a folder (known as a collection). The promise is the ability to collaborate on a single document without sending the file back and forth via email.

Skype

Conference calls have never been so easy with Skype, a free online service for one-on-one or group video and voice calls. Skype is also supplanted Yahoo and AIM as my preferred way to instant message clients or connect with others. Previously, you could even screenshare with a group, but Skype recently relegated this feature to premium only. Despite this, nearly 75% of my calls now occur on Skype.

Zoho Projects

When launching a company or managing an upcoming event, managing the project carefully is key. With Zoho Projects, I found an online service that allows several individuals to create, track, and check off tasks. You can create lists with subgroup of tasks, such as marketing, website, and content development. In the short time I’ve been using it, it’s been indispensible for keeping everything on track or identifying missing items.

by jasleen_kaur via flickr

Social media has become increasingly popular for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing. I recently did some research on social media by healthcare professionals and wanted to share some of the articles and stats I found in the form of Storify. There are interesting implications in how, as PR and marketing professionals, one would reach and engage with this audience. What are your experiences?

Fast forward several years – the rise of CNN, Internet and social media has systematically shrunk the response times for managing crisis. What used to take weeks and days, now requires real-time responses in hours, if not minutes. Otherwise, brands risk seemingly minor issues quickly running out of their control. Here are three tips for managing a crisis in an always-on, social media world.

Real-Time Monitoring and Listening

The first step is ensuring that you’re monitoring your brand online and listening to the conversations taking place. There are several services and tools available from comprehensive service providers like Radian 6 and Trackur or set up keyword searches on free tools like CoTweet, Tweetdeck or Google News alerts (Note: I use CoTweet and Tweetdeck).

In the case of Motrin (now a classic case study), the company launched a new ad campaign in 2009 over a weekend. The response by mothers was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. However, no team members were monitoring the online conversations around the campaign. By the following Monday, traditional print and broadcast media had picked up the story, forcing the company to retract the ads and issue an apology. Crisis Communications did a great write up at Motrin Mom- A Case Study

Real-time Responses

If you’re monitoring and listening to conversations online in real-time, then the next key is proactively responding to issues as they begin to bubble up. If the response is sincere and demonstrates sensitivity to the issue, then a brand can quickly win over initial naysayers and impact overall sentiment.

A great example is JetBlue’s response to customer issues back in February 2007. While this may be “dated,” it demonstrated the first time that a CEO of a major corporation used social media , in this case YouTube, to respond to a building crisis. The response was timely and from a credible executive. Moreover, by using an informal medium such as YouTube, JetBlue’s CEO seemed more sincere than if he had assembled a press conference and broadcasted a written response.

In terms of a recent example, Airbnb is currently dealing with a crisis after a customer took to her blog to complain about Airbnb’s lack of response to renters trashing the host’s apartment. While the company is now offering insurance to hosts as part of its response to ameliorate the issue, the damage has been done with more stories starting to trickle out about similar experiences and slow response rates by the company.

Empowered Social Media Representatives

Which leads me to my next point – JetBlue was successful because the top executive supported the need to use social media to address the crisis directly. But this may not be the case for each organization and situation. In today’s world, front-line employees, such as sales, service representatives, and customer service, directly reflect your brand and have an opportunity to identify and address bubbling crisis.

By empowering front-line employees as “social media representatives,” organizations have an opportunity to address issues in real-time while ensuring that responses and actions are consistent with your brand messages. Otherwise, you might have a parody song written about your brand as in the case of “United Breaks My Guitar”:

Conclusion: Active Participation and Engagement

While the above tips will help brands to react to prospective issues, brands should actively participate in and engage with its online community. This not only demonstrates your commitment to your customers, but also builds trust with your community through transparency and openness; which in turn creates a community of brand evangelists who will defend your brand in times of need.

And in a 24/7, always-on world, you never know when a crisis will arise. But by listening, monitoring, empowering, participating, and engaging, you’ll have more allies to defend your brand than ever.

While these databases have tremendous amount of information, not all of it is accurate or up-to-date. And this is where the problem begins. For companies and practitioners who rely solely on these resources, they cease to be “pr practitioners” and risk becoming “email spammers” as the pitches will be irrelevant and unwanted. Or much worse, being blacklisted by the very reporters they are seeking to reach.

Now consider this from the reporter or blogger’s point of view. Her information has been gleaned from her website, without her permission or knowledge, added to a database, and sold to hundreds and thousands of people. While she may be open to receiving relevant information, she now gets multiple emails with seemingly unrelated content and solicitations. She may or may not fault the media databases, but most likely, she’ll fault you – the PR person who didn’t do his homework.

Don’t get me wrong. I personally use Cision to help me 1. research new contacts at existing outlets, 2. build a media list or 3. to learn more about a particular media outlet. My point is leverage this as one resource for learning more about a reporter. Here are three more tips for knowing your reporter better:

Research Previous Coverage

The best place to begin is reading the person’s previous blog postings or articles. I typically go back at least 6-9 months to determine the type of stories he likes to write, how often he writes, and when he last wrote about my client/particular industry. For example, if he wrote about a trend story about mobile apps for events last month, it’s likely he won’t cover this topic for a few weeks or months.

Review Their LinkedIn Profiles

One disadvantage of the media databases is the lack of background information on reporters. Either to find information or to augment what is available, look up the person’s profile on LinkedIn. As a professional network, LinkedIn is a wealth information – previous positions, personal websites (if available), and location.

While you can upgrade to a pro account to send emails from within LinkedIn, weigh the pros and cons of this carefully. For me, unless we were member of the same group, I would be less receptive to a cold pitch on LinkedIn than via my blog.

Engage on Social Media

More and more reporters are participating on social media (personally, Twitter seems to be a popular choice), partially due to personal interest and partially as part of their job. When possible, I recommend following a reporter. This provides insight on stories he’s writing, types of topics he’s interested in and possible personal information. And when appropriate, you can respond to the reporter; thereby engaging and building a relationship with the reporter before an “official” pitch. In some cases, having a reporter tweet out your story may result in more traffic and word of mouth than an article itself.

These are just three simple tips for getting to know your reporter before the pitch. What other tips do you have? Bonus points for those who can list things about me in your comments =)

Related Articles:

* Three Tips on How to Pitch Bloggers

* A Hidden Rule of PR: If You Don’t Ask, How Do You Know You Won’t Get It?

With my sub focus on virtual events, I’ve been receiving media pitches to attend these type of events. Inviting media and bloggers to attend your event – whether virtual or physical – is a great way to drive awareness of your event.

The challenge? Attending any event takes time out of a busy schedule and away from billable work. Like any media pitch, you have to clearly outline the benefits to entice the blogger or reporter to take time out to attend. This can be a keynote from a industry expert who rarely speaks, details of a research report being revealed for the first time or seeing how producers are using these solutions in innovative ways.

Two media pitches particularly caught my attention for their different approaches. Here is the first I received:

Subject: Hope you’ll join us on 6/16 (note email was sent with only a few day’s notice)

Hi Donna and Cece,

Your site is pretty cool – it’s great that you are aggregating VE content in one place. I hope you will consider joining us this Thursday for the [virtual event]. We create this VE as a way to push the envelope in online engagement… If you have time to drop in, please tell us what you think.

 Curious, I asked how the event is pushing the envelope in online engagement beyond just great visuals. The response I received was:

Great question! We’re trying something new in the pre-show to push interactivity and engagement – we’ll see how it works.

 Ok, as someone who has expressed interest in learning more about the event, this response did irk me a bit. With that said, though I had no information about the “innovation,” I was still curious. I responded asking for more details about the nature of the interactivity and engagement, promising not to write or tweet about it before the event. Here is the response:

I’d rather not share it in advance. It’s not that it’s a huge innovation, I just don’t feel right sharing the concept before Thursday as my colleague [XXX] is leading that part and we haven’t discussed his thoughts on sharing with key industry folks. I’ll chat with him and let you know.

I never heard back from the person and I subsequently didn’t attend the event. By setting proper expectations upfront, I would’ve been more inclined to take a peek at the event. Furthermore, by sending it literally a few days in advance of the event, the organizer was inconsiderate of my time.

Here is a another pitch we received the same week. Unlike the above, this pitch clearly stated what we would see, explained why we may be interested and invited us several weeks early so we could clear our schedules. While I may not attend, my colleague Donna added this to her calendar. Objective achieved!

 Subject: 2-Day Virtual Convention to Showcase Best of 3D Web

Hi Donna and Cece,

I thought you may be interested in learning about a groundbreaking virtual convention that will be held next month entirely on the 3D Web. This July 8th and 9th, participants from all over the world will have the opportunity to attend a virtual trade show for the first time, UtherConvention 2011, which will feature between 100 – 200 exhibitors, including some of the largest players in the 3D internet. The two-day event will include seminars, panel discussions, and virtual networking opportunities. Participants will have access to 3D voice and audio tools, allowing them to overhear and participate in conservations as they walk through the convention hall. It will operate as a real-world convention, but take place entirely online, giving attendees the opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals from all over the world.

Would you be interested? I am happy to send over more information.

 Next time you reach out to media and/or bloggers as part of your event marketing, keep these three simple tips in mind:

1 – what is the event? Provide an one sentence highlight of your event.

2 – why would the reporter/blogger be interested in your event? Include specifics which can be a topic related to person’s area of focus or interesting innovation within the event

3 – when is the event? Send out invites a few weeks in advance so the person can schedule this accordingly.

Over the past week, I’ve seen the stories develop over Sarah Palin’s interesting take on history, Anthony Weiner’s unfortunate pictures on Twitter, and the indictment of John Edwards. In each of these cases, I’m seeing classic PR mistakes that these two seasoned politicians (and yes, Sarah is a politician at heart) make. Here is my top five list of where these folks went wrong:

5. Improperly Built Bridges: While we train our clients on how to take a question and smoothly transition it to the topic you want to discuss, (Clinton was very good at this), Sarah went off the reservation with her response (see video above for further elaboration) to a softball question. The question: “What have you seen so far today and what are you going to take away from this?” The Response: I’m not really sure.

4. Blaming The Pesky Hackers: Oh no, another politician did it again. While Anthony Weiner didn’t get caught with his pants down, so to speak, he did caught with something else in his, hmmmm…. shorts? Weiner immediately blamed the snafu on the most likely criminals – hackers.

3. I Shall Never Tell a Lie, unless it’s in front of a national audience… John Edwards was indicted for using campaign funds to keep his affair a secret. It wouldn’t have been such an issue if Edwards had admitted the affair instead of proclaiming his innocence on national TV. Rather, it tarnished his image and cut his political career short.

2. Mixing Public with Private: In a hyper-aggressive news cycle and always-on social media access, many people have made the mistake of sending out sensitive messages or pictures on Facebook and Twitter. In the end, Weiner is learning this firsthand. Not only did he send this photo publicly to a young female, but also has done this several times in the past. As a public official, this one should have been a no brainer – keep what you want private behind closed doors and not on the Internet for all to see.

1. Not Backing Down: It’s human to make a mistake or for something you say to be misconstrued. When given the opportunity, humbly admit your mistake and the media moves on to the next story. Unfortunately both Palin and Weiner prolonged the media cycle by not admitting to, in Palin’s case, a mistaken take on Paul Revere’s ride, and for Weiner, not taking responsibility for sending racy pictures over the Internet.

What other mistakes did these folks make and what lessons can be taught?

Related Articles:

Sarah Palin: Media Training 101

Sarah Palin: Media Training 201