by Brandon Glenn | Jun 10, 2020 | Blog
Another year, another Cision “State of the Media” report.
The 2020 edition, which represents the 11th annual report in the series, surveyed more than 3,200 journalists from across the globe to provide a picture of today’s media landscape. While much of the yearly report generally reads like PR 101 for experienced public relations professionals, it often contains some nuggets of interest that are worth further reflection.
In that spirit, following are a few notes and observations after digesting the 29-page report:
COVID-19 did NOT change everything: In the marketing and public relations worlds, things can seem to change fast, so it can get easy to become caught up in the moment and lose a little long-term perspective. Don’t allow COVID-19 to let that happen to you. Yes, our professional lives during the pandemic are undoubtedly different in many ways, but lots of things in the media world remain largely as they were pre-pandemic. Email is still the preferred method of pitching. Journalists still want to hear from local and national experts who can offer perspectives that illuminate their audiences. To cut through the noise, pitches still need to be timely, relevant and targeted. These things are unlikely to change any time soon.
The media business continues to be brutal: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated what was already a years-long trend of the media business shedding jobs. Journalism advocacy organization Poynter maintains a depressing and frequently updated list of recent industry layoffs that illustrates the severity of the problem. For reporters and editors, a lack of staffing and resources was cited in the Cision report as the biggest challenge they face. For public relations outreach, this presents a challenge as the number of media outlets continues to dwindle, but also represents an opportunity as individual journalists are under pressure to produce higher volumes of content and could use help finding stories.
Press releases are still relevant: In spite of its obituary having been written a number of times over the years, the humble press release remains very much alive. In fact, journalists who took the Cision survey cited the press release (36%) as the most useful of all brand sources, beating out spokespeople (19%), email pitches (13%) and company websites (12%). For marketing and communications professionals, this qualifies as great news: There is still a place in the world for the well-crafted, well-timed and appropriately targeted press release.
The major takeaway? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Given the barrage of news and information we’re confronted with on a daily basis, separating the signal from the noise is rarely easy for anyone let alone journalists dealing with budget cuts and shrinking staffs. Standing apart from the pack requires the same focus and commitment to timely and relevant messaging that it always has.
by Brandon Glenn | Apr 15, 2020 | Blog
For attendees, a user conference is a little like a mini-vacation.
It’s an opportunity to bask in the luxury of being a valued customer, perhaps with a stay at a beachside resort with catered meals and evenings of receptions with open bars. Not a bad assignment if you can get it.
For the marketing and communications team tasked with seamlessly pulling off a sparkling, well-attended event that woos customers new and old while simultaneously showcasing the best of the organization’s product and service offerings, it’s a whole other story.
From planning a pre-conference messaging strategy to identifying an appropriate venue to staging informative and engaging presentations, there is a seemingly endless list of tasks that go into conducting a successful user conference. No one blog post could cover all of the best practices and important steps, so this post will serve as a brief summary of simple tips and observations from personal experience that virtually any organization can follow.
There’s an app for that: Event apps, such as AttendeeHub, can be customized with important conference information such as schedules, maps, agendas, wifi connectivity, speaker background and more. An event app’s push notification feature is particularly useful when sharing information on last-minute schedule and location changes, ensuring attendees have a source for all the latest news and announcements about the event. At a recent event, I consulted the app several times per day to plan my own activities around agenda items and was happy that I didn’t have to bother the event’s organizers with every little question that popped into my mind.
Go easy on the sales pitch: The beautiful thing about a user conference is that the vast majority of attendees are already your users. They don’t need a “Come to Jesus” moment of conversion that changes them from skeptics to believers. That’s important to remember so your customers/attendees don’t feel like they’re being beaten over the head with constant sales pitches over the course of the entire event. Certainly, it’s ok to mention new product features or service offerings, but as always, keep the focus and orientation on what you can do now and in the future to solve customers’ most pressing problems.
Keep it moving: Freed from the pressures of having to convert nonbelievers, conference organizers should extend this collegial feeling toward the event’s programming. In other words, create a tone for the event that feels light and engaging to attendees. Focus on sharing successes and problems that your solution has helped clients overcome, rather than getting bogged down in minutiae. The last thing you want is roomful of slack-jawed, bored attendees staring at their phones (even if they are just consulting the event app!) while speakers drone on during endless presentations.
Give me a break: Keep individual sessions to an hour or less. Schedule frequent breaks, and why not end programming on one afternoon at 3 or 4 p.m. to give attendees some time to enjoy their surroundings? The more you make your conference feel like a mini-vacation for customers, the more likely they’ll be to return year after year.
by Brandon Glenn | Jan 8, 2020 | Blog
The more corporate blogs change, the more they stay the same.
A 2016 post on Amendola’s blog lists the primary benefits a corporate blog can deliver, which all ring true three-and-a-half years later. Those advantages include: building SEO and attracting visitors to your site, providing a platform to exchange ideas with prospects and customers, strengthening your brand, serving as the
hub of your content marketing efforts, and establishing you as thought leaders in the industry.
Likewise, the author’s assessment of the most likely factor to derail a corporate blog remains spot-on: “The number one barrier I have encountered to establishing thought leadership through a corporate blog is a lack of commitment. A blog will die a slow (or sometimes not-so-slow) death when an organization fails to develop a culture committed to establishing thought leadership through content marketing.”
This observation matches up with my own experience. Too often, corporate blogs are launched without a detailed plan and content calendar that organize and map out the content the blog is planned to cover.
There is one piece of advice from the author, however, that I believe doesn’t fully capture the idea of how to maintain a sustainable blog: “The executive team must lead the way.” Certainly, that is true in regard to the need for executives to champion the blog internally to generate interest within the company.
However, this advice ignores the role the marketing and communications teams must play in developing potential content for the blog. While an organization’s top executives are certainly its most prominent thought leaders, they generally are reluctant to spend time sitting in front of a blank Word document brainstorming ideas for corporate blog posts. That’s why the organization’s marketing and communications professionals must first take the lead in establishing a content plan for a blog.
How is this accomplished? Start by reviewing any recent content your company has produced that is still relevant, which may include white papers, guest editorials, marketing collateral, website copy, interview transcriptions and more. This pre-existing content can be a gold mine of ideas to repurpose for blog posts.
Take your preparation a step further by performing Google and Twitter searches for news items relevant to your company that provide a jumping-off point for other blog posts. For example, if your company works with provider organizations to help address social determinants of health issues in their communities, a simple search of “social determinants of health” may yield information about a trove of articles and studies that can provide engaging content for blog posts.
Use this research to fuel a running list of corporate blog post ideas that you update periodically and share with your thought leaders. By doing this, you’ll likely have saved executives lots of time and even have taken on the appearance of a thought leader a bit yourself.
by Brandon Glenn | Aug 28, 2019 | Blog
For establishing thought leadership, there are few more effective tools in the public relations toolbox than byline articles.
Like the opinion column in the editorial section of our increasingly vanishing newspapers, the byline presents an opportunity for the author to share her personal take on a topic that is generating media attention or controversy. Generally, a byline represents the best way for an executive to showcase and explain her viewpoint in an in-depth manner to a targeted B2B audience of industry peers.
But writing bylines can be tricky. Publications are increasingly inundated with contributions, and several have changed their business models, now treating contributed bylines more like advertising meaning if you want to play, you have to pay. That means the media outlets that still publish contributed content can afford to be more selective than ever in terms of what they will accept, and some bylines will inevitably be rejected by editors.
To ensure your byline article doesn’t quickly end up in editors’ trash folders, make sure to avoid the following common mistakes.
Too self-promotional: For those unfamiliar with the nuances of bylines, this may be the most difficult concept to grasp: It’s not about you. The vast majority of publications expect bylines to be vendor-neutral, meaning authors cannot sell, promote or generally even mention their own company, products or services. Rather than viewing a byline as a means of converting your go-to sales deck to paragraph form, consider it an opportunity to share an inside perspective on a specific, well-defined topic of interest from an experienced industry veteran.
Doesn’t deal with an industry problem: While most readers who come across your byline aren’t interested in learning the intimate details of the widgets your company sells, they are interested in learning about real problems their industry peers have encountered and the steps leaders have taken to overcome those problems. That’s where the real value of a byline is found, in the straight talk of one industry leader providing others with an inside story of a challenging situation that they struggled (at least initially) to conquer. Extra points are awarded for honesty, clarity, surprise or even controversy.
So for example, a byline on the topic of “why hospitals need to account for patient’s social determinants of health” doesn’t have a great chance of pick-up, because everyone knows that social determinants are important by now. In contrast, an author could get much more mileage from a byline topic such as “why hospitals’ social determinants initiatives are doomed to fail without A, B and C” because that’s a topic that may tell readers something they don’t already know.
Too long: Renowned prize-winning authors may have the luxury of slowly setting a scene by painting a picture with words, drawing the reader in with multiple anecdotes and examples and then getting to the meat of the story. Business executives who contribute content to health IT publications are rarely granted that indulgence. In other words, keep it short. The sweet spot for a byline is about 700 to 1,000 words, and most editors prefer the shorter end of the spectrum. A good rule of thumb: If your byline exceeds two pages of a Word document, it’s time to make some edits.
Bylines are a wonderful tool for demonstrating industry expertise and thought leadership, but they can quickly go off-the-rails if authors don’t incorporate best practices. To interest readers (and editors) in your unique viewpoint, remember the above guidelines.
by Brandon Glenn | Jul 3, 2019 | Blog
Anyone who’s been in the media, marketing or communications industries has likely seen hundreds. If you’re an ex-reporter-turned-PR-guy like me, then you’ve no doubt seen thousands.
Unfortunately, I’m not talking about performance bonuses or letters of adoration from admirers. I’m talking about new-hire press releases.
Just about everybody issues them, but not exactly every media outlet covers them. In fact, quite a few health IT publications don’t regularly cover new hire announcements that aren’t of the big-name, big-company, big-title variety. (In other words, if your release is about the new CEO at Cleveland Clinic or chief technology officer at Haven, the new Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan healthcare company, you don’t have to worry about much of this.)
For large companies and for CEO hires, it’s standard practice to issue a press release. For everyone else, the situation gets a little murkier. So, in those cases, are new hire releases worth the investment of time, effort and resources? Often, yes, though certainly not always.
For anyone on the fence about issuing a new-hire press release, here are three questions that may provide clarity on which way to go:
Can you benefit from local media coverage? Some companies are interested only in national and trade coverage, electing to eschew local coverage, and that’s fine. For example, it might make little sense for a company interested in reaching decision-makers at electronic health records (EHR) companies to obtain media coverage in its local market, because there may be few, if any, EHR vendors headquartered there. In other cases, it could be advantageous, such as when a young company has received a venture capital investment and wants to go on a hiring spree and could benefit from some local publicity. New-hire announcements are much more likely to generate local coverage than national or trade coverage, so companies seeking local coverage may benefit from a release.
Are you looking to generate market awareness? Just because national and trade journalists elect not to write about a new hire, it doesn’t mean that no one is paying attention. Analysts, investors, reporters and close other-industry observers in those words, people whose job description includes following the latest development health IT may very well notice. Press releases, in general, and new-hire releases, in particular, are an excellent way to introduce your company’s name to people who may later become valuable contacts.
Did you recently launch a new initiative? Maybe you’ve recently launched a new product, entered a new market or shifted your company’s strategy. A new hire release is another means of spreading the word, even if you’ve mentioned it earlier in a prior release — assuming this initiative is any way connected to the hire. When I was researching a new company in my reporter days, one of the first steps I’d take was to scan the company’s press releases page on its site because it gave me a strong idea of what the company considered its major to-date accomplishments. In that respect, think of a company’s press releases new hires, included as a track record of the noteworthy achievements it wants to share with the world.
Though sometimes regarded as the red-headed stepchild of press releases, new-hire press releases can be worthwhile and valuable; just make sure you ask yourself the above questions before publishing one.
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