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The Biggest Challenge Digital Communicators Face

10.10.14

Let’s chat about the biggest challenge I think digital communicators on the agency side face nowadays.

  • It’s not measurement
  • It’s not integrating channels in their programs
  • It’s not thinking strategically while selecting tactics

Don’t get me wrong – all of these are significant and important challenges. However, there’s a bigger one that over-arches all of them:

When we go into organizations and explain the way communications is shifting, we’re often telling people that the way they’ve communicated their whole career, and the way they see things working, is changing.

We’re telling people that their comfort zone is no longer in the right place.

Take the video interview I posted the other day, for example. When Sylvain Perron asked me what trends I see growing over the next while, I replied with two broad trends:

  1. Increased integration and decreased silos
  2. A shift from campaigns to long-term engagement

Each of these runs counter to the way that many people think.

Silo-busting

Senior marketing decision makers have often spent their whole careers thinking in terms of public relations (sometimes corporate and marcom), advertising, internal communications and, more recently, digital communications. They’re seen as discrete channels, often with their own AORs.

Nowadays, we’re moving to a place where the various channels overlap significantly, as shown in the graphic above (hat tip to David Armano).

This means both additional work to coordinate multiple agency partners, but also a need for much tighter integration between tactics, and as that happens the roles of different media are shifting (Forrester’s Sean Corcoran wrote about this late last year).

Shifting from campaigns to engagement

Many marketers have spent many years operating using a campaign model. These are characterized by large spikes in activity which drive spikes in attention from target audiences.

This model is a recipe for wasted resources in today’s communications environment.

In a system where we’re able to foster, curate and engage communities of interest around common goals, the approach of making a big splash then disappearing is highly inefficient. Not only do you drop back from that initial level of engagement, you also risk creating social media scorched earth as you do so.

Take campaign-based Facebook pages, for example.

Creating a one-shot Facebook page then deleting it is like spending thousands of dollars on a campaign that builds your email list, only to then take that email list and burn it when the campaign is done.

Instead, ongoing community engagement paired with regular spikes in activity can provide ongoing awareness and a platform from which to build with more major initiatives, while fostering brand advocates within that community.

Again, a shift.

This can be a hard shift to accept for people who are used to operating differently.

Tips to face the challenge

So how can we deal with this sensitively? Here are four tips:

  1. Be clear that this is an evolution. People aren’t doing things wrong; they just need to adjust to operate within this evolving media environment
  2. Educate your clients. Provide basic training, but also regular ongoing insights into trends, tools and useful pointers that can help busy clients to stay on-top of rapidly evolving trends.
  3. Recognize that things won’t change overnight. Many clients will continue to operate with discrete channels for campaigns. That means you may need to work closely with other agencies to develop plans.
  4. Help clients to coordinate. Agencies are all competing for a slice of the digital pie. That’s fine from a broader sense, but once you’re working on a campaign it’s important that that all ends and that agencies collaborate to ensure campaigns integrate. Work with your clients to help to structure roles and responsibilities within their agency team.
  5. Remember – while we may understand and be on-board with these changes, not everyone is as excited. Change can be scary until you have a handle on what’s going on. As consultants, it’s our job to give the best advice we can and to help our clients work through this transition.

So, what do you think? What other tips would you offer? Share them in the comments.

Posted in: communications, pr, public relations, social media, strategy

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Digital Communications Conversations Continue To Evolve

10.09.29

The maturation of the conversation about social media-driven PR continues.

As the “digital communications” industry (read: somewhere in the intersection of owned, earned and paid media) grows beyond the niche and towards the mainstream, the conversation at the leading end of the industry is shifting more and more from the “why” to the “how”.

Brian Solis published a great post yesterday, touching on a couple of important topics at the heart of the evolution of social media-focused communications from shiny objects to a serious business tool:

  • The continued focus of the metrics conversation on conversion as an endpoint
  • The definition of “influencers” from a client perspective

Conversion

More and more people are honing in on the importance of driving towards tangible, credible metrics. Conversions are key within that bracket. What you define as a conversion may vary depending on context, but in general the term will focus you in on sales, memberships, opt-in contacts (leads) and the like.

Why do conversions matter? Because they’re metrics that can lead to financial results (or could actually measure that themselves in the case of sales).

Folks like KD Paine, Olivier Blanchard and Rob Clark, who are neck-deep in the topic, figured this stuff out a while back but we’re slowly seeing more people hone in on it. Meanwhile, they’re focusing on how to prove value over “what you should do” and “why you should do it.”

As Chris Brogan put in a well-timed post on social media metrics today, “The social media metric that I think does matter and that is difficult to fully qualify is sentiment: the positive or negative mentions of a brand, product, service, whatever.” While unlike him I choose not to “poo-poo” measuring things like retweets, page views etc, I completely agree that in general they’re at best a proxy towards measuring more useful results, and at worst a cop-out from people unsure how to measure final results or afraid what it would show.

Influencers

Research continues to highlight the importance of context over quantity when it comes to influence. As Solis puts it:

“Brands seeking reach, presence, and connectivity must look beyond popularity and focus on aligning with the influential beacons who serve as the hubs for contextual networks or nicheworks.”

This is becoming more and more important as the early adopters who have built large followings become the focus of more and more attention from marketers – not only will the returns be greater from focusing on niche influencers in terms of success ratio; those people have more credibility within those communities.

Simply put, while I’m likely to check out a new business contact management tool if Brogan recommends it, if he suddenly recommended a lawnmower (for example), I’m much less likely to listen than if he were a credible and regular voice on that topic. That’s not a slight on him, but a reflection of the credibility that people can build up in a community that cares about their niche – that’s why sites like Pulse of the Tweeters help to drive things forward a notch.

So, the conversations on social graphs and content topics continue to converge.

Follow these trends; they’re important ones for anyone working in the digital communications space.

Posted in: communications, measurement, pr, public relations, social media

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Interview: Aaron Goldman – Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google

10.09.09

Aaron Goldman is the author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google (affiliate link). Before declaring free agency earlier this week, Aaron was the founder and principal at Connectual, where he put lessons learned from Google to good use in digital marketing consulting and matchmaking.

As part of a blog tour celebrating the book launch, I took the opportunity to put a few questions to Aaron about his views on Google’s approach to marketing, and how its own social media activities have contributed to its success. You can find more information about the book at GoogleyLessons.com. I’m working my way through a review copy of the book right now; look for a review on here in the next couple of weeks.

With all of the companies taking innovative approaches to marketing nowadays, why did you choose to write about Google?

5 main reasons:

1. It’s a company I know intimately. I worked closely with Google during my 5-ish years at Resolution Media, helping brands manage paid and organic search as well as serving on Google’s agency advisory council.

2. Google’s ubiquitous. Everyone knows Google. Everyone uses Google. So it’s a company that people are familiar with.

3. Google is incredibly successful. Innovation and success don’t always go hand in hand. In Google’s case, they do. That makes it a company that many businesses look up to and aspire to be.

4. Google has a mystique and intrigue about it. People want to peek under the hood and see what makes the Googleplex tick.

5. People don’t usually think about Google as a company that does much marketing. Most folks think Google just had a great product and benefited from word of mouth. But, just because you don’t see Google ads all over your TV, doesn’t mean it’s not marketing. A lot of Google’s marketing doesn’t have media dollars attached to it.

All that said, many of the “Googley Lessons” in my book aren’t necessarily about Google’s marketing. They’re basic tenants that Google does well in other facets of its business that marketers can learn from — things like, “Relevancy Rules.”

If there’s one key insight marketers should take from your book, what would it be?

Marketing is more than just advertising.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here as this is a battle you PR pros often have to fight all the time when brands dump time and money into paid media when they could be getting better results with a little more focus on earned media.

Your book mentions the importance of data. PR has long suffered as a discipline that struggles with data and measurement. What can we as PR practitioners learn from Google’s approach to using data?

The lessons in chapters 8, 9, and 10 of my book are Test Everything, Track Everything, and Let the Data Decide.

Google is always testing. At one point, it tested 41 different shades of blue for its toolbar.

Of course, without tracking, testing is useless. Google has a bunch of great tools that marketers can use to track their efforts.

And Google doesn’t rely on intuition or gut feels. It lets the data decide the winner in each of these tests.

PR pros would be wise to take Google’s approach to continual tweaking and optimization. What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow.

And, while tracking is certainly not as easy in PR as in advertising and media, there are plenty of ways to measure impact. The key of course, is to measure actual impact — not impressions.

Now, every brand will define “impact” differently based on corporate goals but I can guarantee you no company has a goal to get 1 million Facebook likes or 1,000 retweets.

What impact did these social media indicators have on brand awareness, preference, and sales?

You feature insights from numerous marketing luminaries in your book, among them Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist. How do you see web analytics fitting into the modern marketing system?

Web analytics is one of the ways to do the tracking and measurement I just preached about.

And Avinash will be the first to tell you how important it is to focus on the right metrics.

When I interviewed him, Avinash told me that marketers put far too much emphasis on “input” or “acquisition” metrics like page rank or clicks. As he put it, “true glory” comes from “output” or “behavioral” metrics like bounce rate and average order value.

Going forward, the role of analytics will only increase as marketers create data-driven cultures.

How do you think Google’s social media communications activities – its numerous blogs and its Twitter presence, for example – have fed into its success?

I think Google’s social media strategy has made the company more approachable.

3 of Google’s core values are openness, transparency, and authenticity.

By having a blog and Twitter account for just about every business unit and product, Google is able to engage people in a “non-corporate” way.

Google doesn’t just use these channels to beat its chest and blast out promotional messages. It shares works-in-progress, product bugs and fixes, behind-the-scenes stories, etc.

This gives people a warm and fuzzy about Google that they just don’t get from, say, Apple. Can you imagine Apple blogging about products still in development or tweeting about product bugs?

Of course, this speaks to the difference in cultures between Google and Apple. Google is all about launch, test, fail, improve. Apple would never launch without full testing and QA.

Social media as a channel is ripe for the Google approach. If you wait to polish every single message and interaction, you’ll have missed the window of opportunity to engage a customer or potential customer — not to mention come off as unauthentic and insincere.

Posted in: books, communications, marketing, pr, public relations

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Writing – Critical For Communicators, But It’s Not Everything

10.07.28

Liam Fitzpatrick wrote a  controversial post earlier this month, saying that he thought writing skills are over-rated for communicators:

“To be honest I don’t think being a good writer matters – I’ve met plenty of great comms people who couldn’t write to save their lives and I know a few fantastic writers who I’d never trust to give communications advice.”

Shel Holtz,  David Murray and Reuben Bronee took Fitzpatrick to task, leading to two follow-up posts where he clarified and reasserted his view that other skills are more important for professional communicators. As Shel wrote:

I would never hire someone to manage communication who can’t write, nor would I hire anyone into a front-line communication job who couldn’t tell a story in words.”

This back-and-forth (which continued in the comments on those posts) got me thinking over the last few days.

So, what’s my take?

Writing is CRITICAL

Writing is an absolutely central skill for communicators. From my perspective, this applies from entry-level communicators right through to senior, experienced professionals. Frankly, it’s an important skill in many jobs  - many people outside the communications function need to communicate their ideas simply and persuasively – but for communicators, it’s critical.

At the entry level, there are few skill deficiencies that will hold you back more surely than good writing. Later on, while the type of writing you undertake may change as you rise through the ranks (more reports and proposals, and fewer news releases, for example), the importance remains throughout. What’s more, at a senior level you need to be able to review other peoples’ writing and help them to improve. That’s hard to do if your own writing skills are lacking.

Other skills are critical, too

If you’ve ever studied management theory, you may be familiar with Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory – essentially, it states that certain factors (“hygiene factors”) need to be present in jobs for people to be motivated, without actually motivating people themselves. So, without a good salary (for example) people will be de-motivated; however a good salary won’t actually motivate people more – it just needs to be present to allow other motivators to work.

Good writing skills are the equivalent of a “hygiene factor” in communicators’ careers. Without them, people are much less likely to succeed. However, they don’t make a successful communicator by themselves – there are many other important skills that are required – strategic planning, time management, inter-personal communications, math (sorry – it’s true), media relations and others come to mind, for example.

So, my perspective can be boiled down to this:

Writing is an essential skill for communicators. However, they also require skills far above and beyond this to be truly successful in the long term.

What do you think? Where does writing rank on your list of communications skills?

Posted in: pr, public relations, writing

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A Dark Future For Journalism – The Editorial/Ad Wall Is Down

10.04.05

Several weeks ago we received a presentation from a major Canadian newspaper publisher entitled “New Approach to Media Relations for PR Consultants.” In it, the presenter outlined a new process available for PR folks pitching their clients’ work. While I couldn’t attend at the time, I obtained a copy of the deck and got a thorough debrief from the people who were in the room. I’m glad I did, as what I learned horrified me.

Worried businessmanI waited for a while before writing this post, as I let the implications of what I learned sink in and decide if I was over-reacting. I found myself back where I started, though – in a state of something approaching despair about the state of the mainstream media and what it means for public relations as we know it.

The bottom line: the newspaper publisher was directly pitching us the promise of editorial coverage paired with advertising. Quoting their presentation:

“We can help your clients marry their PR message with their Advertising message to strengthen their brand.”

The Old Media Relations Process

As it stands, you can simplify the basic existing process down to three steps once an initiative is underway (yes, this is dramatically over-simplified but it covers the basics):

  1. Develop a news release or pitch
  2. Send the release over the wire/pitch it to journalists
  3. Hope for the best

The Emerging Process

The new approach to media relations, according to the publisher:

  1. Call your “friendly” contact and tell them about:
    • The product
    • The key message
    • Target audience
    • Target markets
  2. Provide publisher with:
    • Editorial themes to complement your key message
    • When you want it in market
    • Where you want it in market
  3. “Open the newspaper(s) and view the editorial content inspired by you and your client with their brand ad exclusively displayed on that page.”

Sounds like a PR person’s dream, right? It might be, if it weren’t for six words in that last bullet. Six words which undermine the entire premise of earned media:

“…with their brand ad exclusively displayed…”

That’s right – they’ll even guarantee exclusivity for your brand on a page, as your ads will make up the rest of the page.

What this means

I get it. The benefits are clear for both sides here. For newspapers, they gain additional revenue while requiring fewer resources to produce the editorial content required to fill their publication.
From an agency perspective, the benefits again are clear - they get the one thing they've always lacked with earned media: control. Control over the message, over the content, over the target audience for coverage. What’s more, they get exclusivity on the page – jackpot.

On the flip side, it seems the church and state divide in media – the editorial/advertising divide – has completely crumbled. Buy ads in their papers, and they’ll even consider your target audience when they write what they still insist is “100% editorial.” My ethical alarm bells are sounding loud and clear here.

An end to credibility?

While only a naive person would suggest that the advertising/editorial line was ever completely steadfast, the credibility that came with independent coverage is what lent “earned media” its title and its value – you had to earn your coverage.

While the presenter insisted that this was only the case for certain sections of their publications, and that the front section was separate to this, it’s a very slippery slope when these companies are desperate for revenue.

This also raises the question of influence on other sections of the paper. Will an editor really run a positively-toned, on-message story for an advertiser against an investigative or negatively-toned piece in another section?

All of these questions further undermine the credibility of the publication. With credibility gone, where does this leave traditional earned media?

(Photo: Shutterstock)

Posted in: media relations, pitching, pr, public relations

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78Comments

Seven Reasons Your Company Needs To Prepare For Crises

10.03.23

Does your company have a communications plan for when it gets hit by a crisis?

Chances are, you don’t. Time and time again I’ve seen organizations plow ahead with communications programs that focus on generating proactive results, but do little to prepare for the flip side.

In the last few days we’ve seen another example of activism in social media, as Facebook users slammed Nestle for its environmental and business practices in the developing world. It’s yet another demonstration of the fact that if your organization is doing something that could be seen to be unethical, people now have a voice with which to respond.

If you’re not yet convinced of the need to prepare for an event such as this, consider the following:

1. At some point, your company WILL do something that upsets people.

It’s inevitable. At some point, you will do something that won’t make everyone happy – whether it’s raising prices, laying off staff, recalling a product or something else. It’s going to happen. While that doesn’t guarantee the kind of backlash that Nestle received, the chances of people voicing their concerns online is constantly rising as adoption of these tools increases.

2. It doesn’t matter if you’re using social media.

In Nestle’s case, their own property got hijacked. However, McNeil wasn’t using social media tools when the Motrin issue hit last year. While your social media properties may provide a lightning rod for criticism (which has pros and cons), not having them doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

3. You can’t plan reactively.

It’s too late to plan for a crisis when the crisis is already happening. It didn’t work in the old traditional media world, and it certainly doesn’t happen in the world of social media, where things move many times faster.

4. It’s easier than ever for people to organize.

Recent Canadian examples like the prorogation of the Canadian Parliament and the proposed introduction of a new Canadian Copyright Act have shown it’s becoming easier and easier for people to self-organize around issues that matter to them.

5. Slacktivism still gets attention.

Slacktivism is a term most people hadn’t heard of a year or two ago. It essentially means the act of doing something nominal in support of a cause (signing an online petition; joining a Facebook page, etc) which makes the person feel good but does little to further the cause. The flip side of “slacktivism,” though, is that right now it still gets media attention. While that may change over time as the novelty wears off, do you want to take that chance?

6. Control is a myth.

I’ve been saying this in presentations for a long time now – you don’t control the message. A news release issued six hours after a crisis breaks is no longer sufficient – you need to be prepared to monitor in real time and respond quickly if necessary. If you’re not prepared for when another party advances their agenda, you’ll be off-balance when it matters most.

7. Mistakes make the crisis worse.

Nestle compounded the problem with abrupt responses from their rep on their Facebook. Mistakes like that can sabotage any chance of calming the storm early. Having a plan, and practicing it, is critical – that’s why governments do things like emergency simulations (difference is their mistakes may cost lives), and why you should do them too.

Given all of these reasons, why would you NOT have a crisis communications plan?

(Image: Shutterstock)

Posted in: crisis communications, pr, public relations

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Evolving the Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.03.08

In January this year I put forward my thoughts on the social media marketing ecosystem in which we operate in 2010. It looked like this:

While this relatively complex model is great to help shape the thinking of organizations wrestling with a plethora of products, it’s also a little complex for organizations without those massive resources. These organizations, which comprise the majority of the market, just don’t have the staff, resources or time to deal with such a complex set of properties.

So, I went back to the drawing board – not to re-think the model, but to boil it down to one simple enough for the majority of people to digest. The result: a simplified model of the social media marketing ecosystem:

All of the complex dynamics within the original system are still accounted for within this simplified diagram, but the framework as a whole is much easier to digest.

In addition to earned, paid and owned media (summarized as “company website” and properties on other sites), this model has an additional sphere on top of Sean Corcoran’s framework, on top of which the original ecosystem model was developed – social networks. This raises the question – should Corcoran’s model have an additional row? What might it look like? (thanks to Joe Thornley for prompting this line of thinking)

It’s a tough call. For one thing, the “social media” row might look a lot like the other rows in many ways; borrowing aspects from owned and earned media in particular. For another, any definition of the role of social media is surely going to be controversial.

I’m a glutton for punishment though, so I put together a starting point – Corcoran’s model, revised with a new row for social media.:

Does social media deserve its own row here, or does its rapid evolution over the past few years simply mean it is intertwined among the other media types in today’s communications environment?

What do you think?

Posted in: communications, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

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Do The Old Timing Rules Still Apply For Media Relations?

10.02.10

When I first got into media relations, a few pitching best practices were hammered into my head on a regular basis. For example:

  • Know who you’re pitching and what they’re after
  • Tailor your pitch
  • Don’t bcc a “mailing list” of pitch recipients (pitchees?)
  • Don’t pitch journalists when they’re on deadline

When it came to print journalists, that last bullet translated to “don’t pitch journalists after around 2:30 or so.” I’ve stuck to that as much as possible since that time (of course, it varies for radio and television depending on when the show runs, and hence when people are around). However, a conversation I had recently with my colleague Karen Nussbaum has got me rethinking that approach.

New rules for timing pitches?

Photograph of a newspaperHere’s the theory:

The idea of print journalists’ deadlines has always centred around the 24hr news cycle, where stories were assigned in the morning, researched and drafted during the day and which culminated in a deadline for the story to be filed mid-afternoon. Trying to call a reporter anywhere near that deadline would result in you getting ignored or (sometimes) told off for not respecting their time.

In today’s media environment, stories are filed for the web throughout the day. Often they’re filed multiple times, with information being added as stories develop. As a result, the afternoon deadline has turned into constant pressure and ever-looming deadlines. For the media relations folks, that means:

  1. Journalists are always pressed for time (as one said to me a little while back when I asked if it was a good time to talk, “it’s never a good time – I’m always busy”).
  2. Afternoon pitching is no worse than morning pitching. In fact, it may be better as they’ve had a chance to clear out their inbox from the morning… and if everyone else is calling in the morning, you may have a better chance of getting through in the afternoon.

What’s more, the emergence of email as a pitching tool means initial outreach can be asynchronous- if journalists are busy they can read them later.

Is it time to re-think the old rules around when to pitch print journalists?

Public relations pros: does this picture fit with your recent experience?

Journalists: does this ring true for you?

(This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for the Marketing Profs Daily Fix. To check out the original and my other posts there, check out mpdailyfix.com)

Posted in: best practices, media relations, pr, public relations

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More Journalists Prefer Bulk Email Than Personalized? Huh?

10.02.03

Last week saw the launch of a campaign entitled “An Inconvenient PR Truth,” aimed at trying to weed-out some of the black sheep in the PR family.

Many of us in the profession have been arguing for similar practices to those advocated there for a while. While the campaign’s approach raised my hackles somewhat, the motives stated seem reasonable on the face of things.

This post isn’t about the broader campaign though.

Buried deep in a slide deck supporting the campaign was a slide about the way journalists prefer to receive “press release emails” (a term that has me tasting bile somewhat, but moving on…).

Preference for how press release emails are addressed

Let’s set aside for a second the advisability of using a sample of 100 respondents to generalize about an entire worldwide industry (although, with the ever-shrinking number of journalists out there nowadays, it might actually be representative…). I’d like to focus for a second on the specific assertion of this slide.

I quote:

“Three quarters of Recipients are happy to receive press release emails on a bulk email basis (or have no preference either way).”

This slide says that 75% of journalists are ok with receiving untailored bulk pitches.

Say whaaaaat?!

To me, this goes against every instinct I have when it comes to pitching. It essentially says that spam is ok. Note that while the first thing the “Inconvenient PR Truth” campaign asks for is for PR pros to ask permission to pitch journalists, that’s not tied in any way to this question in the survey. Without any mention of permission-based pitching, it offers data suggesting that three quarters of journalists are ok with spam pitches.

Time and time again, journalists and PR practitioners alike have railed against the prevalence of untailored spam pitches. I’ve written about spam pitches plenty of times here (in fact given the rapidly increasing number of pitches I receive, I have even posted tips for people pitching me). I have to call “BS” on any claim that only 25% of journalists want pitches tailored to them.

This data seems wrong to me. In fact, it’s even contrary to the goals of the campaign. It also makes me question the accuracy of other potentially useful data in the survey (for example the information on the types of releases journalists prefer not to receive).

Does this seem right to you?

Posted in: media relations, pr, public relations

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35Comments

Strategies In The 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.01.19

A few days ago I blogged my thoughts on the shape of the social media marketing ecosystem as we enter 2010. The key aspects of the system from my perspective were:

  • The lines have truly blurred. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between different forms of communications, especially when considering the online space.
  • Successful communications programs need to integrate owned, earned and paid media to achieve their goals.
  • Two-way communication is increasing. Wherever you look, previously one-way information flows are becoming two-way. Mainstream media feed off social media while also driving it. Advertising drives attention but also content strategies.

Social Media Marketing EcosystemThe line between public relations, advertising or social media is artificial – the overlap between the disciplines is becoming greater and greater. While I doubt the disciplines will ever completely merge, the ‘Venn diagram’ of communications disciplines is moving closer to being a single circle at a rapid pace.

When we talk about integration and lines blurring, it’s easy to head down the thought path that you need to excel at everything. I’d argue it’s not that simple.

Public relations agencies (for example) don’t need to shift to pitch pure-play advertising accounts. However, agencies of all disciplines do need to hire or train people who can think media-agnostically when developing communications strategies. I’d argue they also need to be able to execute the integrated tactics that sit in the grey areas between disciplines. PR firms won’t suddenly start producing TV ads, but they may start to roll online advertising campaigns into their service portfolio.

As always, it comes back to:

  • What are the objectives?
  • Who are the key audiences?
  • What are the key considerations?
  • How do we best reach those audiences to accomplish the objectives, and how do we measure against that?

Is this new thinking? No. Is the urgency for a shift to integration increasing? Yes. It’s a long road to travel to build those skills-sets, but the need is pressing.

Instead of differentiating by marketing vertical, we may need to approach our strategy from a different perspective – whether we’re marketing our clients or our own agencies. To fail to do so raises the risk of fragmented, ineffective communications and sub-par results.

The question is, what form do those strategies take?

This is a re-post of my first post for the Marketing Profs Daily Fix, where I will now be writing occasionally. To check out the original and, down the road, my other posts there, check out mpdailyfix.com.

Posted in: marketing, pr, public relations, social media, strategy

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