by Todd Stein | Dec 13, 2017 | Blog
Introducing Hackonomics,” the campaign hinged on a report conducted by RAND (sponsored by Juniper) about the hidden economy of the hacker universe. Juniper wanted to take a fresh look at hackers to reveal the motivations and operations of the hacking community. The result was a first-of-its kind economic analysis of the cyber black market and the impact it had on targeted businesses.
Juniper built an integrated campaign that leveraged PR, marketing, government relations, sales and digital and social media. Tactics included webinars, a new website dedicated to the campaign, online ads and social media initiatives. Juniper briefed policymakers, made the report freely available in 10 languages, and distributed it across RAND’s customer base.
Here are two of the most creative elements of the campaign:
- Juniper illustrated the complexity of the hacker market by drawing the comparison to a thriving metropolis, highlighting its interconnectedness. An interactive presentation enabled viewers to see the hierarchical job functions, businesses, schools and even law enforcement roles held by active members of the cyber black market.
- An interactive timeline highlighting notable milestones and hacks over the years was shared with the cybersecurity community ahead of the report’s release to encourage conversation. Brilliantly, Juniper intentionally left key milestones off the timeline, which encouraged community members to contribute their own milestones and share the history of security hacks more broadly among their contacts.
According to Juniper, the campaign nearly doubled its share of voice over a three-month period thanks to 17,000 blog views, 1,250 executive summary downloads, and over 300 global articles, including feature placements in newswires, as well as the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph (UK).
Hijacking the Super Bowl
The second cool PR campaign is one of the most creative and effective uses of a limited budget that I’ve seen. In 2015, Volvo was preparing to launch a new, updated version of its XC car amid slumping sales and stiff competition from larger, more popular brands like Mercedes Benz, BMW and Lexus.
Looking for ways to tap into an affluent, millennial audience, Volvo hit on the upcoming Super Bowl, whose audience fit the mold. But the carmaker’s budget for the product launch was enough for only about one-third of one second of Super Bowl airtime.
Their solution is a textbook example of hijacking the “Volvo Interception” campaign.
While their competitors lined up to buy multi-million dollar ads for the big game, Volvo began using its social channels, other ad buys, and traditional media relations to spread the word about its campaign.
The idea was simple: Every time a competitor’s ad was broadcast during the Super Bowl, viewers using the hashtag #VolvoContest on Twitter could nominate someone to win a one of 5 new Volvo XC60s.
It worked brilliantly. The Interception campaign drove 70 percent year-over-year sales increase for the XC60. That was the highest February boost in the car’s history. The hashtag was tweeted over 55,000 times, more than any other auto-related hashtag.
The Interception campaign achieved great results by capitalizing on other brands, effectively stealing their attention and breaking through the noisiest media day of the year.
Creativity Trumps Relationships
You’ve heard it before: PR is all about relationships. It’s a tired phrase but still true. Success hinges on having a solid working relationship with key journalists, analysts and influencers.
But even more important than relationships is the ability to craft a creative pitch or campaign from a hodgepodge of information about your client their market position and history, competitive differentiators, target audience, audience influencers, budget, and a million other factors.
As the Juniper and Volvo examples show, creativity trumps relationships, and in many cases can even overcome extremely limited budgets.
The examples also illustrate the power of integrated campaigns. Combining social media, traditional media relations, marketing and advertising can exponentially magnify the impact of a good idea.
What great ideas in marketing or PR have you seen?
by Todd Stein | Sep 6, 2017 | Blog
Most of us are our own worst critics. It’s easy to understand why. After all, no one knows us better than us. Who better to uncover and critique all our foibles, follies and failures than our own inner critic?
There’s a fine line, of course, between self-criticism and self-awareness. Maturity requires that we view ourselves with objectivity and correct those faults that can be corrected. The kind of criticism that comes of self-awareness and that leads to self-improvement is a prerequisite for happiness and love.
But when it comes to work, self-criticism can be crippling. Carl Richards, a certified financial planner, author, and regular New York Times contributor, makes that point in his fine article for the Times, “Free Yourself of Your Harshest Critic, and Plow Ahead.” Richards argues that we accomplish much of our best work when we stop critiquing and just do it.
“Think of how liberating it would be to free yourself from the role of being your own harshest critic,” he writes. What might happen if you took all the energy that goes in to judging your work and put it right back into the wellspring of creating the work instead?”
Writer’s Block
Richards article mainly concerns writing, and the common experience of writer’s block. But he notes that letting go of your inner critic is good advice for “anything meaningful you do. Singing, painting, entrepreneurship, giving financial advice, museum curating, boat building, skiing, whatever.”
Like Richards, my own experience with the shadow side of criticism concerns writing. I was a journalist for 15 years before tackling PR. Most days, my livelihood, to say nothing of my self-esteem, depended on my ability to crank out large amounts of decent copy on deadline. As a newspaper reporter with daily deadlines you either get over writer’s block or you get out. There’s no time for self-criticism when they’re holding the front page for your story.
It was after I left newspapers to become a freelance magazine writer that my self-criticism blossomed. I blame my editors. I learned shortly after starting to freelance that deadlines mean something very different for magazine editors than for newspaper editors. Magazine editors give their freelancers early deadlines, days or weeks before they intend to actually edit the article. They do that to guard against precisely the sort of writer’s block that often crippled me.
Yet, ironically, it was because I knew that my deadlines were fake and therefor moveable that my self-criticism could work its evil. With several days to write, no beginning was ever clever enough. Writing is rewriting, as every good writer knows. But when you reach the hundredth rewrite of your lede, you know you’re in trouble.
The Godfather of Gonzo
I’m reminded of the story of Rolling Stone Books editor Alan Rinzler who, in trying to wrangle the manuscript for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail out of legendary procrastinator Hunter S. Thompson, ended up chasing the godfather of gonzo journalism around a hotel room for 48 hours with a tape recorder in hand. Unable to write, Thompson literally dictated the bestseller.
I never reached that point. What saved me, every time, was a deadline. Faced with no alternative but to produce, the words flowed. In the end, I simply lowered my standards and trusted that what came out of my experience and craft would be good enough.
In his article, Richards quotes a letter from reader Chip Scanlon. Scanlon, a writer himself, recounted how he overcame writer’s block: “I do my best to not have any standards at all. I abandon my standards. I urge myself to write badly, and once I do that my fingers begin to fly, and the inner critic is powerless.”
Does your inner critic ever keep you from completing work? How do you overcome it?
by Todd Stein | May 3, 2017 | Blog
Who watches the watchdogs? It’s a phrase that conjures the creation of police commissions or intelligence oversight committees. But if you’re a believer in the sanctity of the Fourth Estate (and God knows we need them now more than ever), then the watchdogs who need watching are journalists. And no one watches or analyzes, or critiques journalists in greater depth and with sharper insight than the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.
The purpose of the Nieman Lab is to figure out how journalism can adapt to the Internet Age while remaining relevant and profitable. Recently, in “Newsonomics: The 2016 Media Year by the Numbers and a look toward 2017,” the Nieman Lab’s Ken Doctor turned up some fascinating trends that will both bedevil and delight those of us in PR and business who strive daily, with more or less success, to earn the media’s adoration and praise.
Have Your Fake and Eat it Too
The bedeviling side of Nieman Lab’s look back at 2016 is the messy shift from print to digital, a transformation long underway that is weighing ever more heavily on the news media. The industry-rocking trend of 2016, of course, was the rise of “fake news” or rather the rise in awareness of fake news, thanks to the Presidential Election. Doctor takes some easy swipes at Mark Zuckerberg for his much-publicized claim that 99% of Facebook’s content isn’t fake. “Ever heard a publisher proudly proclaim, “We get it right 99 times out of a hundred?” he asks.
But the fake news phenomenon isn’t going to have much impact on the field of technology PR. More significant for the business of Media Relations is the sharp increase in the number of PR “targets” as the Internet continues to make it easier for small, independent content producers to compete with the mainstream media. This democratization of publishing and broadcasting offers both more opportunities and more diluted opportunities for getting the word out about a company, a product, or a thought leader.
The Young and the Restless
Here’s Nieman Lab’s take on one of the biggest online outposts, a not-so-new media that has finally come into its own after a decade of unrealized promise and that is quickly disrupting its Old Media birthplace, radio:
“Podcasting now reshuffles the deck, mixing and matching talent on scheduled airtime and on demand, with unpredictable consequences. The movement of younger talentwithin the emerging podcast economy poses both a great opportunity and threat for public radio as we know it, and is a boon for newer entrants like Gimlet Media, Panoply, This American Life/Serial, and Midroll Media.”
A related trend that accelerated in 2016 and into 2017 is the flight of ad revenue from mainstream publishing as advertisers spread their dollars online in search of eyeballs (and now ears, too).
“The Wall Street Journal lost more than a fifth of its overall advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2016,” Doctor writes. Other blue ribbon outlets suffered similar losses: The New York Times saw print ad revenue decline by 18 percent; McClatchy reported a 17 percent loss; Gannet lost 15 percent; and Tronc (the former Tribune Company) lost 11 percent.
To compensate for those huge loses, publishers are seeking revenue directly from readers in the form of digital subscriptions and add-ons. That requires high-quality content and attractive digital platforms something that “only the national/global dailies have been able to achieve,” according to Doctor. How will the rest of the nation’s dailies fare amid this historic transformation? Judging by the number of journalists losing their jobs, not so well. Nielsen Lab counted just 27,300 journalists working for U.S. dailies in 2016, 4,000 of whom work for the four national titles. The size of the local press has declined by half, according to Doctor.
Heads Up to PR customers
What does that mean for PR? The math is pretty simple. With an ever smaller number of traditional publications managing to keep the lights on, the competition for coverage among the dailies is becoming downright cutthroat. The days of guaranteeing that a successful company in a hot market will be covered by The New York Times or Wall Street Journal are over.
So what’s the answer? How can companies in search of media coverage adjust to this fast-evolving environment?
You can read the answer in Part Two of this post. In the meantime, a few hints: Traditional PR is dead. The press release as many people think of it is a goner. Thought leadership will be a key PR budget priority. Content is (roll your eyes if you must) king.
But in the end, it’s still all about relationships.
by Todd Stein | Jan 11, 2017 | Blog
Why should you write a book? Most busy tech executives have a hundred good reasons why they can’t spare the time for books. Their PR advisers may be tempted to concur since PR performance is judged largely on the quantity of placements secured. After all, why spend months writing one 80,000-word book when you could write 100 800-word articles for a variety of online publications?
Yet a book’s value exceeds that of even dozens of articles. With a book, you can dive into your topic in much more detail than you ever could with online content. Sure, it might not sell but sales aren’t the point: books are tools for establishing you and your company as thought leaders. They’re magnets for relationship building. An expert who is confident and knowledgeable enough to set her expertise in stone with a book will win instant credibility in the eyes of potential partners, clients and customers.
Books also achieve a few very important goals in PR:
- Books are assets that you can share with brand advocates, customers, prospects, investors, and industry stakeholders.
- Books can attract other opportunities to you and your company. Conference organizers, for instance, are much more likely to give a keynote to the author of a respected book even if it doesn’t sell well than to a book-less competitor.
- A book can build trust by positioning your company as having a knowledge-based environment, rather than one focused on sales alone.
The key to making the most of a book is good promotion. At Amendola, while we don’t specialize in book promotion, we’ve learned over the years how to augment the distribution and promotion efforts of book publishers to drive PR value.
Below is a sampling of the tactics we use in helping our clients draw attention to their books and leverage them for relationship building:
- Send the book to key journalists and bloggers and request a book review (ideally) as well as offering the author for an interview on the book’s topic
- Pitch the author as an expert on the topic, with the book as proof of their expertise. Broadcast media love interviewing authors with new ideas.
- Do a Google Hangout with the author to promote the book
- Run a Tweetchat with the author leveraging a major partner hashtag to drive attendance
- Turn the book chapters into a webinar series, with each chapter or section a separate webinar. Give the book away as enticement to register for the webinar.
- Turn the book into blog posts: one for each chapter or section, and link to the book at the end of each post
- Arm all salespeople with several hard-copy versions of the book as leave-behinds, or use book giveaways to drive a Salesforce email campaign to prospects in their territories
- Hand out the book at all events where you exhibit, as well as at your end-user conference
- Email the book to attendees at webinars, trade shows or seminars as a follow-up
- Write a LinkedIn status update about the book and post a link to it in groups where prospects congregate.
- Pull out keys facts or items of interest from the book and tweet those on Twitter with a link to the book and a popular related hashtag
- Include the book in your email signature, with a link to download it for free.
If this short list helps convince you to write a book, give us a shout. We can help.
by Todd Stein | Sep 28, 2016 | Blog
One of my favorite pages on Funny Or Die, the online comedy collective launched by Will Ferrell and friends, is their hilarious send-up of listicles. You know listicles those ubiquitous numbered lists that grab eyeballs by hitchhiking on a sub-culture’s favorite passion. They’re definitely a favorite in Healthcare IT.
While most digital editors can only dream of having the freedom to post 10 Photos That Will Make You Question Why You Are Wasting Your Time With This Slide Show, or 10 Pictures of Adorable Cats That I’m Pretty Sure There’s Something I Needed to Do Today, you can bet at least one listicle has made their Top 10 Best Story Ideas list.
Personally, I’m no fan of the genre. Listicles may make for easy reading (or more likely, skimming) but they also minimize the qualities that make good journalism such a joy to read. Insight. Perspective. Intelligence.
So no, I’m not a fan of listicles but there’s no denying their amazing power to hook readers. Which is a long-lede way of explaining why I’m writing a listicle on journalists for this blog. How else was I going to get you to read about some of my favorite journalists in healthcare IT?
Journalists: The cats of the PR world?
No, we don’t spend our evenings surfing for videos of journalists toying with a rubber mouse or playing a piano (that’s the other species of cat). But all of us who work in PR are fans of journalists, sometimes adoring fans. And not just because we rely on them to tell our clients’ stories.
We’re fans of journalists because we love good journalism. In fact, many of us used to be journalists ourselves and some of us would return to the business in a heartbeat if we could.
So just for the fun of it and because journalists don’t get enough recognition for the work they do what follows is perhaps the first-ever list of the most interesting trade journalists in healthcare IT. It doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list. I left out the Steve Lohrs and Vanessa Furhmans of the world because I wanted to focus on the trades, not the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And I ignored the Matthew Holts and Anthony Guerras of the industry because I want to save “The Best Bloggers in Healthcare IT” for another post.
Time was also a handicap. I had to change the title from “The 25 Most Interesting Journalists in Healthcare IT” after I realized completing the list would require giving up my day job. So there are only five for now. Don’t be surprised if you check back next month to find 10 or 15.
In the meantime, these five are simply those who first came to mind, based on 12 years of working in healthcare IT as both a journalist and PR pro.
Elizabeth Gardner, Health Data Management, others Elizabeth is a true veteran of healthcare and health IT reporting, having launched her career in 1987 as a technology reporter for Modern Healthcare. She moved on from healthcare to help document the development of the Internet as a writer for Internet World. A graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Elizabeth spent the early 2000s covering micro- and nanotechnology as a contributing writer for the magazine and website Small Times (which she calls “one of the greatest titles ever dreamed up for a business publication”). But healthcare is the biggest and perhaps most interesting market in America. Elizabeth was drawn back into the field and today contributes regular stories to Health Data Management. Her articles are inevitably well-researched, thought-provoking and most of all fun to read. Several have been finalists for the Jesse H. Neal Awards from the American Business Media Association.
Mark Hagland, Healthcare Informatics Anyone who has ever met Mark is likely to remember first his warm, welcoming smile. Profoundly intelligent, Mark is also one of the friendliest and most genuine people you’ll ever meet. A Northwestern University/Medill School of Journalism graduate, Mark is a longtime Chicago resident who has been writing and speaking about healthcare for nearly 25 years. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Healthcare Informatics since 2010 after many years as a contributing editor. His writing has earned him numerous national awards, including from the National Institute for Health Care Management, the American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors, and the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Mark is also the author of two books — “Paradox and Imperatives in Health Care” with healthcare futurist Jeffrey Bauer, Ph.D., and “Transformative Quality: The Emerging Revolution in Health Care Performance.”
Bernie Monegain, Healthcare IT News Bernie is the former editor of Healthcare IT News, now the magazine’s Editor At Large after moving to North Carolina, far from the publication’s headquarters in Maine (yes, Maine, that center of all things tech). Everyone in HIT PR knows Bernie. She’s among the nicest human beings you could imagine meeting, a quality that enlivens her relationships even with PR folks, despite the fact that we all want something from her (a story!). Bernie joined Healthcare IT News when it was launched in 2004, after a four-year stint at another business publication that focused on communications technology. Before that she was an award-winning reporter and later a city editor of The Times Record, a daily newspaper in Brunswick, Maine, where she reported on healthcare, business, technology and other topics.
Neil Versel, MedCity News Neil started covering health IT as a freelancer in 2000, before the “industry” was an industry. Through skill and persistence informed by a deep curiosity about healthcare technology, Neil gradually developed a reputation for intelligent in-depth coverage of the technologies that are transforming healthcare. A contributor to US News & World Reports, as well as Forbes.com, he was previously an editor for Fierce Healthcare. Neil has grown up in healthcare IT and is a genuinely nice guy. In 2014 he launched an 850-mile charity bike ride in honor of his dad, Mark Versel, who died of the rare disorder multiple system atrophy (MSA). Neil’s blogs from the trip were inspiring to anyone who has ever wanted to do something meaningful in memory of a loved one.
Eric Wicklund, mHealthIntelligence Like several others on this list, Eric paid his dues in daily journalism, working his way up from beat reporter to columnist to managing editor of the Biddeford-Saco-Old Orchard Beach Courier in Maine. His proximity to the Portland, Maine headquarters of Healthcare IT News probably explains how in 2006 he ended up writing and editing for the publication (though I’ve never asked Eric how that happened). Eric rose to be editor of Healthcare Finance News (another HIMSS Media property) before moving into coverage of telemedicine as editor of mHealthNews (ditto) and finally departing the Mother Ship in 2015 for rival XtelligentMedia, where he’s editor of one of what is fast becoming one of the most interesting sites in mobile healthcare, mHealthIntelligence.com. Beyond journalism, Eric is a Dad, an avid soccer player, skier and bicyclist who for years was a team leader and board member of the American Diabetes Foundation’s Tour de Cure.
Do you have favorite industry journalists of your own? Please help add to this list by leaving a comment.
