by Ken Krause | Aug 24, 2016 | Blog
One of the most persistent myths in public relations is the concept of the global PR agency. As it’s generally thought of, a global PR agency would be one where a homogenous team of like-minded PR experts spread out in offices all over the world works together to deliver outstanding, cohesive results in every market where a company has a presence.
You can put this one right up there with Bigfoot, unicorns and the idea that you don’t need a good story to achieve great PR results, you just need the right contacts.
While it would be nice for organizations with a global footprint if such a PR Valhalla existed, it simply isn’t reality. That isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of offices around the globe that share a corporate identity, and maybe an accounting department. But if you’re thinking that the non-U.S. offices will be the same as the U.S. office, just with a different address, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. Let’s look at some of the reasons why.
Two basic types of global presence
There are two basic options for creating a global PR agency with headquarters in the U.S. One, obviously, is to run everything from the U.S., from the same building. No one really does that for a host of reasons, but it’s possible you could.
Having everyone in one U.S. office would theoretically make it easier to share information about clients, what story pitches are working, new developments and discoveries, etc. Only you wouldn’t have everyone in the same place at the same time because global business is conducted in many different time zones, and the team servicing a particular region would have to be in the office during business hours for the region. So there’s really no advantage there.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of PR is understanding how stories affect people locally. Like politics, all PR is local. Despite all the advances in technology it’s tough to get a feel for the culture and the day-to-day rhythms of a region when you’re thousands of miles away.
That’s why the more common model is to establish offices within countries or regions (depending on the need and available funding) and staff them with people who speak the language(s) and understand the nuances of the culture and the way business is conducted there.
A good example is the U.K. One of the peculiarities of PR in the U.K. is that readers and editors there like contests. While no one in their right mind here in the U.S. would pitch an editor on a healthcare story by suggesting a contest, it’s quite normal across the pond. I was shocked when a U.K. agency I was working with suggested this technique, but it turned out they were right and the client was happy with the results.
What you really get
Let’s assume the global PR agency you’re interested in is using model number two. Again, that’s what most do. How does this work from a practical standpoint?
Essentially, you have a completely separate group of people working in an office thousands of miles away from their U.S. counterparts. They may share a couple of clients, but both offices likely work on plenty of non-global clients that are unique to each of them as well. After all, there are only so many Fortune 1000 companies out there.
They probably have a weekly all-agency conference call, with or without the client, just to catch up. But since what works in Singapore is unlikely to work in Belgium, it’s more a call to catch up on any messaging or developments that affect the entire team, and to make sure everyone is doing something.
Certainly it’s convenient from a billing and management standpoint. Rather than having to hire and manage individual agencies, and process billing from each one, the client hires one agency that already has the staff everywhere, and receives a single, consolidated invoice. Sort of like the bundled payments model; the client doesn’t care which office gets paid what, they just pay a fixed amount and let agency management worry about the rest.
Here’s the downside of that arrangement, however. Yes, the global PR agency has offices fully staffed with locals, all ready to go. But the people in at least some of those offices may not be the sharpest scalpels on the tray. While you can complain and put pressure on if that is the case, it’s not like the agency can suddenly dump the staff and hire new people. Especially if those people are doing well for other clients.
The other risk is they may not all have domain expertise in healthcare. And while I will be the first to say it doesn’t really matter in most industries, I know from experience it does matter in healthcare. If the people in the local office don’t understand healthcare, they’re not going to be very successful no matter what other awesome skills they possess. Hiring a global PR agency with limited U.S. healthcare experience just because it has global offices might also put the core business at risk.
The global partnership approach
A better alternative, and one I’ve been a part of before, is to hire a core PR agency and then allow that agency to select and manage best-of-breed PR partners in each key region. This approach ensures there is still just a single point of contact for the client (or “one throat to choke” if you prefer), and the lead agency can also manage disbursement of funds to the partners so the client only has to issue a single check each month. Both common reasons for desiring a global agency in the first place.
The partnering approach brings additional advantages, however. The most prominent is that you’re not stuck with whatever personnel happen to be in the local market. The lead agency can review the qualifications of several agencies and select the one that appears to be the best fit. If it’s not working, they can easily cut ties with the first agency and select a new partner.
It also preserves the relationship with a lead PR agency that has been doing well, ensuring there are no interruptions in coverage. No sense going through the entire learning curve and ramp-up period again if you don’t have to.
As for the rest of what a global PR agency brings, the partner approach offers all the same capabilities. All the partners can share information electronically, participate in global conference calls and generally work as a team. The only material difference is they won’t have the same name on the door in every office. That hardly seems worth paying a premium for, however.
Beware the myth
The myth of the global PR agency is pervasive. But the reality tells a different story. At the end of the day, it’s not about whether all the participants share a CEO. It’s whether they can promote your messages and stories in a way that delivers the coverage you need to achieve your business goals. Using an agency partnering approach instead of a single, global PR agency gives you your best chance of making that happen.
What have your experiences been when it comes to global PR? What was your best experience? What was your worst?
by Ken Krause | Jul 20, 2016 | Blog
Long before I entered the world of health IT marketing, I remember my father telling me “Ask an engineer what time it is and he’ll tell you how the clock was made.” I don’t actually recall the reason he said it although there must’ve been one since he wasn’t one to speak in adages normally but I do recall the lesson.
The adage has taken on new meaning today. One of the cool things about working at Amendola Communications is that I regularly meet brilliant people doing brilliant things to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare. I’m frequently amazed that they can not only think of innovative products and services to develop but also can put them together.
Yet therein lies the rub, so to speak. They are so justifiably proud of the thinking, work and effort that went into their products that they forget the average user isn’t interested in all the inner workings or how they got to where they are. They just want to “know the time.” They care more about the “why” than the “how.”
Jargon and technobabble
One of the biggest challenges these engineering-oriented folks face when it comes to health IT marketing is the technologist’s love of jargon and technobabble. Throw in the healthcare world’s love of acronyms and abbreviations and pretty soon you”ll have an incompressible communique that might even baffle Alan Turing. (For those not familiar with Turing, he’s the man who led the British efforts to break the Nazi’s “unbreakable” Enigma codes in WWII, which helped shorten the war by several years. The movie about that effort, The Imitation Game, is an excellent watch by the way.)
One popular phrase that seems to have accompanied most health IT marketing announcements over the past 15 years is “open and interoperable.” Given the healthcare industry’s well-documented and ongoing challenges with interoperability, at first glance that would seem like an important benefit. But in reality, the phrase has been so over-used and mis-used that it has really lost all meaning. Besides, if every technology that made that claim actually was open and interoperable, health IT wouldn’t be in the state it’s in right now.
The same goes for many of the facts, figures and specifications often touted in press releases, data sheets and other materials. While this information has its value, that value is not in leading the discussion. It’s more support to assure potential buyers that a product they are now convinced solves their problem will also work within its existing infrastructure.
This difference between facts and useful information really came home to me a few months ago when I was asked to look at a press release and data sheet to determine how much editing would be required to make them effective for health IT marketing. I diligently read through the press release. I then diligently read through the data sheet.
Finally I gave my response. I thought they both needed a lot of work because after all that reading I wasn’t quite sure what the product did or why anyone in healthcare would want it. I knew what sorts of protocols had been used in its creation, and the alphabet soup of standards it met. I’m fairly certain I even knew what type of software development was used in its creation and what they people who worked on it liked to eat for lunch.
The only thing I didn’t know is exactly what it did. Or why I should care.
The Imitation Game
This time I’m not referencing the movie, but instead the way organizations seem to like to imitate the language used by competitors or big players in the industry to make their marketing materials seem more “official” and important. This is especially true on websites.
When we start with a new client, or are pitching a new prospect, one of the first things I and most of my colleagues do is go to the client’s/prospect’s website to learn something about them. Sometimes this is a very fruitful venture that provides great background and insight into the organization’s purpose and objectives.
But there are definitely times when I come away less informed than I was before I went onto the site. Platitudes, clichs and marketingspeak picked up and (slightly) repackaged from the websites of companies someone on the team admires rule the day. It makes me think that the company has no idea what it does and who its audience is. Or that it has a solution that’s in search of a problem to solve.
Rather than trying to sound like everyone else, and one-up the competition in the use of meaningless phrases, smart marketers will understand who they’re trying to reach and what problem(s) they have. They will then craft their messages to address those audiences and their issues directly. And simply.
It’s like a FedEx Super Bowl commercial from the last decade. A group of underlings in suits are trying to explain to the CEO why they need to switch to FedEx. They start out with an MBA-level discussion which goes right over the head of the CEO. Then they simplify it to more of an undergrad-level explanation. Still nothing but crickets.
Finally someone says, “For every dollar we spend we’ll get two back.” Sold!
If all your competitors are trying to outdo each other with technical information and complex explanations, don’t look at it as a guideline. Look at it as an opportunity.
Remember Apple didn’t get to be the world’s valuable company by selling technology and specs. That’s what their competitors tried to do. Instead, Apple sold solutions and simplicity. In fact, their whole brand was based on making their technology so easy to use and un-intimidating that you didn’t even need an owner’s manual. You could figure it out for yourself.
Keep it simple
Whether you’re creating a press release, white paper, collateral piece, video or some other form of communication it’s important to focus first on the benefits to the user. Even the most technical audience needs you to identify what problem(s) you solve or improvements you deliver before they will invest any more time. Answer the question: “Why should I care?”
If they don’t understand what the product or service does immediately, and why it will make their jobs easier/lives better, all the rest is unnecessary detail. Especially if your audience is clinicians; they already have enough inner workings to worry about in the human body.
It’s great to be proud of the technological breakthroughs you have created; celebrate them fully. But when it comes to PR and marketing, remember to focus on the WHY. Being able to tell time is WHY we buy a clock.
To learn more about how to communicate technology benefits more effectively, click here.
What has your experience been? Have you ever gone to a website or read a brochure and left more confused about what the company did than when you started? How do you address the people within your own organization who want to stuff marketing materials full of jargon and marketingspeak?
by Ken Krause | Jun 9, 2016 | Blog
It’s happened to me. It’s happened to my friends. Sooner or later it happens to just about everyone in marketing communications. Someone (usually someone who doesn’t have to execute it) decides, “Hey, let’s create a marketing newsletter!” and the next thing you know it’s your job to pull it together out of cotton candy and unicorns.
In the era of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and a million other social media applications, an email newsletter may seem quaint. “Someone needs to update their marketing playbook,” you think. But the reality is email newsletter are still highly effective. Like 95% effective if they are done right.
That’s the key, isn’t it? Because newsletters can be time-consuming, especially if content is tough to come by, they are generally handed off to the newbie, or the least experienced member of the team, or the person who just doesn’t know how to say no.
It doesn’t have to be as heinous of a chore as it may seem. In fact, it can be rather fun if you approach it the right way. Here are a few suggestions for not only taking the pain out of producing a newsletter but creating a finished product you’ll be proud to send to your customers and prospects.
Keep it simple
One of the most common newsletter mistakes is thinking you’re publishing the New York Times Sunday edition, i.e., stuffing it chock full of too many articles. Keep in mind who your readers are and how they’re consuming the content.
These days, many are opening the newsletter on their smartphones. With roughly 4-7 inches of screen space, too many stories too little readership. Offering two or three in-depth articles supplemented by shorter, easily consumable content (see the next section) will be easier on the eyes and will keep readers from becoming easily overwhelmed.
Keeping it simple solves another dilemma every marketer has experienced with a newsletter at one time or another: the first issue comes out on time to great huzzahs. The second issue comes out a couple of weeks late, and the third issue never sees the light of day.
Keeping the number of stories lower helps ensure there’s plenty of fodder for the next issue. Besides, it’s a lot easier to herd three cats, er, subject matter experts, at a time than six or eight. Especially if you’re “managing up.”
Mix in “snackable” content
Yes, you have some great thought leadership to share, and it can only be delivered in a longer article. After all, you want your audience to be informed.
Sometimes, though, people think they don’t have time to read a longer article. If you include fun, entertaining and/or informative content that can be consumed at a glance (like grabbing a handful of M&Ms you can chew and swallow quickly so no one knows you’re cheating on the diet) your readers will be more likely to open the newsletter to give those pieces a look.
While they’re there, they may decide they might have enough time to read one of the more in-depth pieces. Why not? The newsletter is already open anyway.
Fun facts, trivia or statistics related to your industry (even better your area of it) are always welcome. For example, if your business involves blood transfusions, you could share that the first recorded successful blood transfusion was in 1665. Or that nearly 21 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. Anything that will make your audience stop for a second and say “Hmmm.”
Quotes from famous people are another great source of snackable content. Even an infographic can work, as long as you keep it simple. Give readers something they can view quickly (and find interesting) and you’ll make opening your newsletter habit-forming.
Include graphics
Nothing says uninviting (or “hard to read”) like wall-to-wall type. Look for ways to include graphics as part of your stories.
Maybe it’s a photo of the author. Maybe it’s a relevant illustration or photo. Maybe it’s a cartoon if you have someone on staff who likes to draw. Find a way to include some graphics and you’ll improve the look. Just be sure they don’t also slow down how quickly the newsletter loads.
Focus on them, not you
Let’s face it ” we live in a very “me”-oriented society. The old acronym WIIFM “what’s in it for me? ” applies now more than ever. So if your newsletter is all about your product, your services and your company, it’s going to be of very little interest to anyone outside the company.
Think about what happens at a party or other gathering where people cobble together posters filled with pictures of the guest of honor. The first thing visitors do when they look at the photos is check to see if they are in them. (Ok, maybe it’s just me who does that.)
Keep the “Inside Baseball” stuff to a minimum unless this is an internal company newsletter. Offer up information that will help readers do their jobs better, or improve their relationships with a boss or co-workers, or enjoy their leisure time more. Anything that offers a promise of making the reader smarter or happier or better-prepared in some aspect of their lives.
That doesn’t mean you can’t include something about your company and its products or services now and then, especially if you have a truly exciting announcement. But be careful, because the more readers perceive the newsletter is about you instead of them, the less motivated they will be to read it. Or even open it.
Keep the language friendly but genuine
There is always a temptation, especially among those who are new to writing, to try to show off their college or post-graduate educations by creating deadly serious tomes that read like textbooks. Remember how much fun textbooks were to read?
If you want to get your audience engaged with your newsletter on a regular basis, write it more like a friend sharing great information with another friend. As a general rule, newsletter articles should be conversational, much like a blog post. In fact, this blog post by my colleague Michelle Noteboom offers some great tips that apply to newsletter articles as much as they do blogs. Not to mention an example of writing style.
At the same time, you also want to be genuine in your writing. If you’re ghost writing for a company executive who is known to be rather dry or formal in their day-to-day life, suddenly adopting a breezy attitude in a newsletter article will immediately scream FALSE and hurt the credibility of the article and the newsletter.
For more down-to-earth types, however, you can inject some fun. Find out what their hobbies and interests are and tie them in if you can. Keep sentences and paragraphs short again a must for those reading on smartphones. The easier the story is to read and comprehend, the more likely it is to make a lasting impression.
Not so bad
See? Being in charge of the newsletter isn’t so bad. And the more you do it, the easier it will get. Before you know it you’ll be the one doling out advice and shaking your head at every bad newsletter you get.
Have you ever been in charge of a newsletter? What has your experience been? Is there anything you would change about what I suggested? Or anything you would change in your approach for the next time?
by Ken Krause | May 12, 2016 | Blog
When healthcare and health IT organizations send out an RFP, they tend to think in terms of things they want targeted agencies to do. They tend to talk in terms of deliverables, e.g., write and distribute X number of press releases, perform media and analyst relations, secure speaking opportunities, write case studies and so forth.
While all of those capabilities are important, they’re hardly unique. Any halfway decent PR agency should be able to accomplish all of those tasks and more with some level of success on a regular basis. It’s actually one of the things that makes developing content for an agency so challenging.
To find the real differentiator you have to look much deeper. For example, if you look through the Amendola Communications website you can get a pretty good sense of our services. A quick survey will confirm that we can do all the things you need done to make your marketing program a success.
The real value, however, isn’t in what we do, or know how to do. It’s in what we know about healthcare and health IT in terms of its history, its evolution, the impact different decisions and regulations have had and continue to have on the organizations and people who work within it, and the interconnection between your organization’s messages and the bigger picture of the industry.
In other words, it’s the unique ability to present a message within a larger context that helps an organization differentiate itself. That context can only come from a PR agency that is deeply immersed in an industry as complex and nuanced as healthcare and health IT.
Broader perspective
Perhaps one of the greatest values a top PR agency can bring to clients is a broader perspective. Subject matter experts and marketing teams within a healthcare or health IT organization tend to develop tunnel vision about their products and/or services. They know the problem their solution is attempting to solve and how it solves it, and tend to view everything through that lens.
Savvy organizations will also look at competitors to see how they compare. Still, that view is limited to a narrow sliver of the entire healthcare/health IT industry.
Because of the nature of the business, PR agencies have a very different view of the market. Rather than being a mile wide and an inch deep in a subject area, agencies will tend to bring more of an inch deep/mile wide perspective. They will be aware not only of the issues at the center of what the client’s products/services offer, but other areas that impact it ” or it impacts “as well.
Example: population health management
The current buzz around population health management (PHM) helps illustrate the agency perspective. Even a casual walk through the aisles at HIMSS 2016 demonstrated how important PHM has become in the overall healthcare/health IT discussion. Ironic given that just a few years ago PHM was hardly in the mainstream of discussion.
Yet PHM isn’t just one thing. There are many different aspects to it, and carries different meanings to different people within healthcare organizations. When clinicians think of PHM they may think in terms of care gaps and how to reach specific populations, while finance may be more focused on the revenue opportunity (and cost to implement) and the C-suite may see it as a mechanism to transition into value-based care.
Each of these perspectives is valid from a particular point of view. If a health IT vendor gets too deep into the weeds in a specific area, it may make the job of selling its technology to these prospects more difficult.
A knowledgeable healthcare/health IT PR agency will understand the broader implications of the technology because it has had exposure to multiple areas and is already on top of other considerations that aren’t on the client’s radar. Its value, then, will be to make the client organization aware of these additional aspects and use them to tell the client’s story to the media and through content.
Cumulative knowledge
I know this idea certainly applies when I or one of the other writers here is developing content for clients. The typical process for developing a byline article, executive article, white paper, blog post, etc. is to review materials sent by the client, research what’s being said in the market generally, develop questions and set up a call with the client’s subject matter expert. Then we take all that information and create a compelling story.
In the process of writing the story, however, I will often find myself tapping into knowledge gained from working on another Amendola Communications client, past or present. Having already delved at least somewhat into the deep end of a particular topic, such as the crisis around chronic conditions and how best to manage them, I can add information that wasn’t part of the original call or client-supplied information review. This non-competitive, big-picture information delivers additional context that makes the story richer, and thus more valuable to the reader.
Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on just my own knowledge of the industry either. In an agency like Amendola Communications that is focused solely on healthcare and health IT clients, there is a tremendous store of institutional knowledge about a broad range of topics. As opposed to a general agency that may only have one or two people with healthcare knowledge.
A simple email asking if anyone here has a perspective on a particular topic will usually elicit an incredible wealth of information that beats anything you could find with a Google search. Especially since even that context often comes with additional context.
That doesn’t only apply to content, by the way. This same sort of cumulative, institutional knowledge is applied to media relations as well. Not just in sharing contacts, although that is certainly valuable, but also in how to approach a story pitch. One media relations expert’s knowledge of a particular aspect of predictive analytics, or telehealth, or some other hot topic can often guide another to a better way to present the story and demonstrate the reasons a media outlet’s readers or viewers will care about it.
It’s the expertise that counts
When you line their capabilities up side-by-side, most PR agencies will look the same. While who they know in the industry is helpful, it’s the agency’s overall domain knowledge that can really make the difference between a program that performs ok and one that exceeds expectations.
To gain the most value you want one that can connect the dots on their own and apply industry knowledge your organization may not possess internally to round out your story. That’s the hidden value the right healthcare/health IT PR agency can bring. Not just for ours, but in any industry.
Do you agree that domain knowledge in healthcare and health IT is critical? Have you ever worked with an agency that didn’t understand the industry? If so, what was the result? What aspects do you think are most important?
