Results tagged “PR” from VANTAN.ORG

After hearing about another misquoting incident in the local media I thought I should share a similar incident which also happened recently, to a classmate of mine.

A few weeks ago I reported that one of my classmates made it to the quarter finals of L’Oreal’s EStrat, a global marketing simulation contest. I scanned the article and congratulated him on his Facebook wall.

The part where he’s mentioned and quoted, is:

Mr S— M—, an Indian international and a semifinalist of EStrat, said that the competition gives him the chance to experience a real-life marketing challenge.

“It will be a great asset to add to my resume,” said the student at Insead, a post-graduate business school.

He thanked me for the info and added:

But I am surprised to see the comments in the news paper, I never told them what they have written.

They called me and this is what I told them “The idea of stepping into the shoes of a General Manager, having to manage a portfolio of beauty brands and facing marketing situations and challenges was an extremely appealing idea. We know that joining this competition is one of the best ways to glimpse what makes the world’s foremost beauty company tick and get hands-on experience in the business.”

I can understand if a quote has been slightly rephrased, or some words have been removed or re-arranged… but this seems to be very different from his original statement. Good that he kept a record in writing, so we can have a side-by-side comparison of the original statement and what was published in the end.

It could have been lost in translation, if his quote was given to the PR department or PR agency and then passed to the journalist. But we thought it’s unlikely that PR reps of a global company would warp the original statement so much. There’s no benefit to them changing it. The article was, however, one in a series on job searches, thus the rephrased quote fit better with the theme.

This is the second time a classmate of mine has been misquoted in the press. The first time, I had the impression that an incoming classmate sounded a little naive. Later she told me that these words were suggested to her so that it would fit better with the theme of the article; it wasn’t what she really wanted to say.

Perhaps ‘misquote’ in this first case isn’t the best word but I’m seeing a pattern - a need for quotes which help the article to flow well. Of course, not everyone you interview may say what you want, and if time’s short, why not rephrase it? However, news reporting should be non-fiction. If you want to change a statement drastically, I’d think you should contact the interviewee to discuss this, especially if you’re publishing their name.

I am fortunate that all the journalists who have interviewed me have been very professional - they check back with me before modifying my quotes, they are familiar with the topic at hand and ask good questions. Also, to be fair to journalists (having worked in a newsroom before) I’ve seen how some reports can get modified out of their control, literally from black to white. I don’t intend to point fingers at particular people because this seems to be happening too often, which means it’s not a ‘specific person’ problem but possibly an underlying problem with the system - incentives, procedures, hierarchy… There are a lot of other factors we may not know about - that’s what I’ve been learning in business school.

Later I’ll write a separate blog post to share my own experiences, and maybe we can all have a constructive discussion on what we can do to improve the situation.

Just checked my Mint stats and discovered lots of linklove from Cowboy Caleb. Seems that my recent post on Feedback to PR teams may have generated some interest among other local bloggers. As I mentioned then, I don’t mean to stir up trouble but clarify how things can be better so that we don’t waste each other’s time.

Here’s a sample of incoming clicks…

Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), Kami Huyse (Principl, My PR Pro), Mario Sundar (Community Evangelist, LinkedIn), Lionel Menchaca (Dell)

The Dell blog was first conceived in April 2006 and Michael Dell himself was involved. 48% of the commentary about Dell was negative, and something had to be addressed. Michael Dell has been supportive of what Menchaca and the team has been doing. The Dell blog currently receives 1 million pageviews per week.

LinkedIn’s blog was started 8 months ago, also to have a two-way conversation with users. User education was the primary goal.

Huyse observes that the two blogs were started after a problem was perceived. So we should ask, What are my consumers’ needs. Still, even after launching corporate blogs they’re trying to figure things out. We have to look at what people use - like Twitter or Facebook.

Measurement tools There are ways to measure users’ reactions. - The number of responses in the Blogosphere. But it must be compared with rivals. You may get 100 comments but your rival could have 500. - Tonality of the comments. - Survey. More ‘old school’ but it helps you make decisions. - Focus groups.

Basically, find out what your communities want, and deliver it.

Menchaca elaborates on Dell’s Ideastorm. The first step is listening, the second step, analysing and the third step, taking action. This is the core of any social media Dell undertakes. Ideastorm is a mix between a message board and Digg.com. Any user can log in and contribute ideas on how Dell can improve on something. The community itself votes the idea up or down. It’s solely community-driven; Dell is not involved.

Then the core team looks at the top ideas and looks at how they can be incorporated into the business. Ideastorm has over 600,000 comments so far.

LinkedIn enabled ideas to be contributed by users.

Their three goals:

1. User education. LinkedIn created product demos to show how features could be used, and what were their benefits.
2. Customer support.
3. Corporate information. They wanted users to get information directly from LinkedIn rather than from gossip blogs.

Sundar uses social media tools like Twitter to monitor their users. For example, Steve Rubel once had a problem with LinkedIn. Within an hour, Sundar had taken action and fixed the problem. Without such social media tools, LinkedIn would not know of these issues —> presumably, if the users didn’t bother to lodge a complain through the formal channels.

Menchaca cites examples of how Dell has also addressed major issues like the battery recall. He looks back at how Dell has progressed from phone support, to email support, to chat support and now, social media. It can be used to change perceptions. There’s nothing but your customer at one end, and you at the other end fixing the problem.

Importantly, Dell empowers its employees to apologise! There is real power as it humanises a big corporation. Also, the blog team is passionate about what they do. Once this momentum is going, it convinces more sceptical people to change their mindsets. Also, he re-iterates Michael Dell’s support for this.

Sundar describes Dell’s experience as ‘The Gold Standard’. He suggests using a Wiki as a product database and to help resolve issues. In addition, blogs can be a quick response tool for your users.

Trends Huyse notes that the user will expect more as companies give more. Menchaca says blogs are here to stay. The purpose of a blog is to facilitate a two-way discussion. From a corporate perspective, that’s certainly relevant. One key plan for them in future is internal collaboration, like having a forum that pools ideas from the blogs. He tells Sundar he is in fact looking at a wiki. Dell still relies on using emails for tracking, which isn’t optimal.

Questions

1. Gal was a personal blogger and has now been hired by Microsoft to blog professionally. How can she manage having two different ‘personas’ online? Sundar takes this question. He too has a personal blog and admits this has suffered as there is only so much he can handle. But he advises not to neglect the personal brand.

2. Another lady asks how Dell integrates all customer feedback. Menchaca says Dell has an internal system to do so; it’s not publicly available.

3. Third lady asks if users’ feedback only matters if they’re online in the first place. [Didn’t quite catch the gist of her question, please correct me if I’m mistaken] Sundar notes that LinkedIn’s users must be online.

4. Guy asks about corporations’ fears in receiving comments. Sundar advice: Put ourselves in their shoes. If we had a personal blog and got flamed on it, how would we feel? Menchaca adds that they’ve asked themselves, why put up negative things about Dell which their competitors can see? The point is to bring up points to facilitate a conversation. Soon after launching the Dell blog in July 2006 he posted news of the Dell laptops exploding and linked to it. He received lots of calls and emails asking him what he was doing. His response was that people were talking about it elsewhere and it had to be addressed —> what better place than on Dell’s blog?

My verdict: A pretty good panel - frank and helpful.

Technorati tags: corporate blogging, Dell, LinkedIn, SXSW

David has an update on Google happenings in Singapore. He shares these tips from Google:

4 Ways to Strengthen Your Business Online

1. Make sure people searching on Google find you easily (more info at http://adwords.google.com)
2. Use AdWords starter Edition and Business Pages (more info at http://adwords.google.com)
3. Improve your website and convert more visitors to a sale (more info at http://google.com/analytics)
4. Earn money from relevant ads on your websites (more info at http://google.com/adsense)

I love using Google Analytics (tip #3) because it offers a comprehensive range of statistics and is much more user-friendly and attractive than many other stats programs, some of which we have to pay for.

But regarding tip #1, I don’t entirely agree that we need Adwords for our websites to be more easily found. It can help, though, if you really need the push in the short run.

I don’t claim to be an uber expert on search engine marketing, but I do have strong opinions on it, so allow me to expand on this.

Before we look into purchasing search keywords, our website’s content must have substance in the first place. That involves having domain knowledge and awareness of the right target audience. The next question is whether we are speaking the right language to this audience. Terminology has to be customer-oriented and not how we, as the organisation, see things.

Next, the website content must be tagged and coded in a semantic way. Page titles and tags like h1, h2 are important. I usually make it mandatory for my vendors to use web standards and keep things semantic, though it is not easy to enforce or upkeep as pages get changed along the way. Old-school table code layouts should be avoided, unless tabular data is being displayed. CSS should be de facto standard - away with messy font tags that just bloat up the code.

Also, maybe it’s a subjective issue but I hardly ever click on the ad boxes on top or beside the actual search results. I know those links were paid for, and there must be a reason why they’re trying so hard to stand out - because they can’t make it to the top 10 or 20 list of search results. If this company has trouble getting its website onto Google’s first couple of pages, it is probably too new, has a low Pagerank, or doesn’t have enough relevant content (in which case I’d say, go back to the drawing board).

It’s probably a vicious or positive cycle, depending on how you see it. If the website was established enough, its company wouldn’t need to advertise so much - just as the top hawkers in Singapore don’t need to advertise their food because word of mouth referrals and good reviews in the press have taken care of it. They can be hard to find, but because people really want what they’re offering, they’ll travel to the other end of the island to get it. If all the advertising in the world doesn’t get you many more customers, then go back to the drawing board and improve your dish, or invent a new one.

On a similar note, I do not believe in paying when your customers can spread the good word themselves. Word of Mouth is so much more credible and effective (see this AC Nielsen report). Which would you rather end up on - a positive review in a Boing Boing post, or an ad in a side column on the same blog? If you could choose to be on TV, would you rather appear on the news itself, or the Sellavision commercial that comes right after it?

The other thing is, if you do buy keywords, be honest. I’ve heard of instances where keywords purchased are not related to the actual content, which would actually turn people off when they realise they’re not getting what they want. The advertiser either doesn’t know the product well, or is insecure and hopes to lure visitors using irrelevant keywords. This does not help build long-term relationships with your visitors.

Before you even start a marketing campaign, make sure your product is inherently good. If so, it will be easier to create buzz and sustain customers’ interest. I prefer doing this rather than spending a bomb on advertisements, most of which people today don’t believe. I can see our own campaigns heading this way, in the form of new blogs, social networks and Youtube.

Quite often, though, we have opportunities to use both paid and unpaid media and these are worth exploring. When combined they can grab customers’ attention through repeated messaging. But to me, PR lasts longer because it can be nurtured. No matter how much money you’re willing to spend at one shot, you cannot buy a long-term relationship that’s been fostered over the years. You may be able to buy attention, but it is an increasingly scarce commodity with a correspondingly lower return on invesment these days. But you cannot buy trust.

In a few campaigns, we’ve reached the stage where we no longer have to try so hard to get the news out, because our customers have been busy making the news themselves - posting comments, linking to us from fan sites, joining our online communities and uploading videos with our names on it. That is the way to go. You can’t “engage” your audience by simply having a lot of “hits” in the first month, bolstered by a massive ad campaign which will end when the money runs out. A true test is whether visitorship can be sustained, through regular, relevant content updates and, if possible, a sincere, personal touch in any possible way.

Easier said than done, of course, but not impossible. It’s certainly not the easy way out. Some will falter and stick to big-bang advertising rather than building a long-term relationship with customers, which is more labour-intensive and less glamorous. But for those who care, it is certainly the best approach.