Have PR agencies become lazy and complacent in how they represent their clients?
Keeping Your Fans Happy With New Content
So, you blog regularly. Maybe you tweet as well. Perhaps you have a company Facebook fan page too. Good for you. Well done. By now you may have seen tangible results from your efforts. More and more people are reading your content. Maybe you’ve converted interest into leads, and into sales. Hopefully you’ve taken my advice and have a content strategy in place that helps you and your colleagues keep that social media ship on course. You’ve got followers, fans and evangelists and they like what you do. They’re on your side. But there’s a problem. Your most devout followers have been reading your stuff all of these months and, by now, they pretty much have a handle on what you’re saying. The problem is, that you’re saying the same thing again and again. Your most loyal of followers are being done a disservice since they feel that they’re reading the same message – even if it is being regurgitated and rewritten 101 different ways. They’re not being pushed, challenged, educated or informed any more. You’ve made your point to them – and they’ve got it. The only question now is how long they’ll continue to hang around reading your stuff …
Less Public and More Relations
There’s a great article over at Mashable about how web technologies such as social media have impacted the Public Relations business. It seems that, slowly but surely, companies are realizing that the “spray and pray” approach to distributing information – par for the course for most PR companies until very recently – is finally on its way out. And about time too. With so much digital noise competing for our attention, it could be said that media releases are more important now than ever before. But for the vast majority of press announcements to remain valid forms of “content distribution” (for that’s what we’re talking about) we need to get away from the days where “Big Company #1” blasts out a release a day (or more) simply for the sake of it, expecting everyone to drop everything and take notice. Judging by the content of many that I see, most press releases today have little ‘meat’ to them, and seem to be sent out as much for the backlink value as anything else. Today’s PR company needs to look deeper into who actually needs, cares and benefits from your news, and have the courage to educate their clients that more …
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Have you heard of the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” ? Many business leaders have the right intentions, the right thoughts or the right motives to effect change, yet exclude themselves from the application of the directive. Yet, more often than not, change is only truly embraced when applied from the top downwards. Perhaps it’s implementing better interdepartmental communication. Or maybe a more consistent, strategized corporate or product message designed to permeate throughout the organization. Except the CEO – or the Sales Director, or the Customer Services Manager, or whoever – doesn’t think that this new thinking applies to them. They carry on improvising their sales presentations – or describing the product their own way, or emailing a distributor without cc’ing the appropriate territory manager – the way that they have always done. In other words, dutifully ignoring the carefully-crafted initiatives that, often, they were an integral part of devising in the first place. The result? Well, if my boss doesn’t bother to make the effort, why should I? Subordinates see that their bosses aren’t taking the new initiatives on board. Within a short space of time the best-laid plans of mice and men have collapsed. …