B2B | B2B Voices

B2B Companies Need to Be Prepared for Crises Too

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 18 January 2012 at 21:42 {one comment}

I attended a Minnesota Business Marketing Association breakfast yesterday that served as a reminder that crises can happen to B2B companies too, not just cruise ships. Unpleasant things happen – planes with executives crash, workers strike, products fail, plants close, tornadoes strike.

The speakers were Jon Austin, former spokesperson for Northwest Airlines and now with his own firm, and Paul Omodt, VP at Padilla Speer Beardsley and a former PR person for the Northwest chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association. When I was in college in the Twin Cities, I saw Austin in the local media more than I saw the White House press secretary. You can imagine the issues they had to deal with.

Jon Austin at Minnesota BMA on Crisis Preparedness for B2B

Here’s the quick takeaways:

First, yes you probably need some kind of crisis plan, even as a B2B company. Think of Arthur Anderson. Respected, in business for like a hundred years, and then thanks to the Enron collapse, out of business in the blink of an eye. Austin noted that what killed Arthur Anderson was not the lawsuits filed, because those took 10 years to get through the courts. Instead, in the first month or two after the Enron collapse, they had clients calling them up say, “We love you guys and know you didn’t have anything to do with what came down in Houston, but we just can’t have you signing off on our financial statements.” Reputation damage killed them.

As Austin put it: “Dinosaurs were pretty dominant at one time, and now they’re pretty damn dead.” Don’t be a dinosaur.

Second, drill on crisis plans. It’s time-consuming to put these things together and it can be a relief just to finish but without practicing their implementation, they are still likely to fail you. For one thing, people panic. Is this a crisis? Do I really pull the trigger on this plan now? Practice makes them comfortable. Second, it’s a great way to learn if it really works, if the roles are all covered. You don’t want to find out you haven’t adequately prepared for the likely contingency that your CEO will be oversees, your phone system will be swamped, and your email wil be down. It’s a chance to be comfortable with the plan and identify any weak spots in it.

Remember 9/11? Austin was with Fleishman-Hillard by then, working on the United Airlines account. The crisis plan called for flying all the key crisis team members to Chicago as a central coordination point. The team hadn’t considered the possibility that U.S. airspace could be completely closed down. Fortunately, Austin was able to drive to Chicago from Minneapolis, but you can bet all those airlines learned from that experience.

The more realistic the rehearsal the better. We have a great product offering that I’ve written about before called Firebell for drilling on a crisis. The strength of Firebell is it’s been designed to simulate a crisis on a social world, letting you see not only what happens on the local TV news but also what happens on your Twitter account, Facebook and other social channels. (blog post on it or email me)

Finally, keep the plan refreshed. A reorg can eliminate a team of people important to executing the plan. New products are developed and old ones are sunsetted. New markets are entered. Crises are not viewed the same all over the world.

Interesting comment from Omodt – some insurance companies will lower your company’s premiums if they know you have an effective and up-to-date crisis plan in place – something to look into.

In closing, says Austin: “Be a mammal. Don’t be a dinosaur.”

Live from Minnesota Blogger Conference

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 10 September 2011 at 12:49 {one comment}

Well we are through the morning keynote by Lee Odden and the first breakout session at the Minnesota Blogger Conference at Allina Commons in Minneapolis. Not surprisingly, Arik Hanson and his colleagues have put on a really nice event here.

My mission has been to find out what we can do here to make our b2b blogs better.

So far, I have in fact picked up some great ideas along with some things to maybe experiment with.

So 3 things to start:
1. Content is King but Creativity is Queen: From Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog fame. What this means for me is that yes we must take our substance seriously, but it can be so much more impactful if cleverly conveyed. Which leads to …
2. Lots More Visuals: I attended a session on Tumblr, which has really been breakthrough in making posting lots of different formats easier. The expert, Patrick Rhone (his most popular site is Minimal Mac) describes it more as a clever content curation platform than blogging platform but I think those lines can get blurry. I have some concerns about the reliability of the platform, especially on Internet Explorer, after watching, oh, about ten crashes, but it has a lot of promise and you can bet WordPress is learning from Tumblr’s growing popularity too.
3. To Stand Out, Stand for Something: From Lee Odden again. This may be obvious but I do think it’s hard to keep a good focus on one domain so you really stand out in that domain. There’s just too much competition out there to be everything. You can always add another blog.

I’ll try to post again here.

B2B Companies Discovering the Value of an Intangible Asset

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 10 July 2011 at 23:17 {one comment}

I’ve been getting a lot of interest in “branding” lately from B2B clients – coincidence? To some degree I’m taking it as a sign of a better economy (sluggish economy seems to be hurting B2B companies much less). These organizations are thinking about extending their offerings into new markets and to capitalize on new opportunities, and not just about selling more of the same to the same people. That’s strategically riskier but it’s also the best way forward for significant growth. Imagine where Apple would be had it stopped with the iMac!

But about that risky part: These established organizations, some mid-sized, some large and global, are all nevertheless established, with a loyal customer base. Their brands have come to mean something very real for those customers. A quality brand is a precious asset – IBM’s brand is worth an estimated $60 billion. It needs to be treated with care.

And yet the fact is many B2B companies don’t have a clear understanding of what their brand really means. It’s not that they’re not collecting insights about their companies or products from customers. It’s usually more that they’re not bridging from the attributes customers like in their products to what the higher level benefits are that transcend products and have proven timeless.

What’s a brand? A brand is not spin. In fact, it’s authentically what customers believe about you. It’s what opens doors to new customers. It’s what makes the company sustainably distinctive even while it is getting harder and harder to differentiate on product attributes alone.

At Weber Shandwick, we develop Strategic Brand Frameworks to help clients clearly articulate their brand positioning. We recommend our clients spend some time articulating what their aspirations are for their brand. We call that defining the Brand Vision and it’s always the starting point. It gets at why you are undertaking this branding initiative at this point in time.

But at that point, you need to do some external research and have some discussions with customers and prospects. You should include your channel if it’s applicable (dealers, for instance). The purpose is to g to collect insights into both the functional and the emotional benefits your customers receive from your products and services. Functional attributes tend to be easier to deliver and therefore less differentiating and less motivating as message drivers. Emotional benefits are harder to deliver and, therefore, more differentiating and more motivating as message drivers. We need both, because the reality is they are related: You can plot these functional and emotional benefits on a “benefits ladder” and see how the functional attributes ladder up to emotional benefits. From these benefits we can craft a brand positioning statement that lead to the central brand idea that is the basis for slogans, logos, campaigns and other creative expressions of the brand.

Especially for well-established brands, we then recommend quantitative research testing to ensure the brand positioning is optimized. And then you’re ready for the second half of the challenge, which is effectively communicating this freshly articulated brand and brand expression. But that’s a topic for another post.

In the meantime, here’s a fun and insightful video from Google’s Dan Cobley on how branding is like physics, from a TED talk:

“Our Products Don’t Lend Themselves to Storytelling”

Filed under Case Study by Aaron Pearson on 18 May 2011 at 21:11 {no comments}

Yeah, I don’t buy it.

I’ve always been a big advocate for the stopping power of good stories and the importance of humanizing products and institutions. (So does Allan Schoenberg – see “Curious George Goes to the Office.”) It’s only gotten more important as audiences have become increasingly barraged by content from all sides and their attention spans get shorter and shorter. But the tools and channels for telling great stories have also just gotten better for B2B marketers. Thanks to the Web, social media networks, and the power of content syndication, anyone can be a great publisher of content. But that means using the tools of the craft that journalists have used over the years and setting aside the hard sale.

One of our agency’s “Seven Elements of Storytelling” is to humanize the story. Okay, so let’s consider what would be pretty much an impossible product offering to humanize.

How about glass? Fancy glass yes, but cold, hard wholesale glass sold B2B nevertheless. Like the products our friends at Corning sell.

In their words, “Corning is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. Drawing on more than 160 years of material science and process engineering knowledge, Corning creates and makes keystone components that enable high-technology systems for consumer electronics, mobile emissions control, telecommunications and life sciences.”

Yeah, yeah. But Corning also created one of the greatest corporate overview videos of all-time.

Called “A Day Made of Glass,” the video shows all the different futuristic applications of Corning glass. Photovoltaic window glass gradually lighting the room in the morning, frameless LCD television glass, touch-sensitive architectural display glass and so on.

The video does an exceptional job of humanizing a product that is the otherwise the epitome of cold and lifeless. It also happens to show that sometimes high product values do matter, even on YouTube. Since it came out three months ago, it has received more than 12 million views, making it one of the most-viewed corporate videos of all time. Amazing.

Other Voices: A Discussion with Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications

Filed under Discussion, Other Voices Interview by Allan Schoenberg on 29 April 2011 at 03:13 {2 comments}

I have been fortunate enough to get to know Mark Ragan more closely during the past few years. Mark, as you may know, is CEO of Lawrence Ragan Communications and one of the leading figures in the public relations industry. For more than 30 years, the company has been the leading publisher of corporate communications, public relations, and leadership development newsletters and information to the industry. When The Ragan Report launched in 1970, the company made the leap ahead of the industry to position professional communicators as business leaders. Today, the Ragan brand now includes more than 16 targeted newsletters, MyRagan.com, PR Daily, HealthCare News and HR Communicator. In addition, Ragan produces several communications conferences, workshops, and senior-level forums. If you’re on Twitter you probably already know and follow @MarkRaganCEO. Here are the highlights of our discussion.

What is the mission of Ragan and what do you and your team hope to achieve?

We want our customers to think of us whenever they need a question answered or a problem solved. We want to become their top information source for news, information and practical, real-world advice. But we also want them to think of us as in indispensable resource for training. Need to learn more about social media strategies? Come to us. Want in-depth analysis of IBM’s new approach to content curation? You’ll find it in our archives. Looking for staff training on social media policies, listen to our webinar with Shel Holtz.

To support this mission, we’ve adapted the content curation model. This means we produce original content, but we also ‘curate’ content about PR, social media and internal communications from around the globe.

We launched this new model with the redesign of Ragan.com last year and the re-launch of PR Daily last February (Disclosure: I am a contributor to PR Daily). The results have been overwhelmingly good. Traffic to Ragan.com has doubled to 160,000 visits a month. PR Daily’s traffic has gone from 40,000 to 250,000 for the North American edition. PR Daily Europe is growing, but we’re new to this market, so we’re content with our average of 15,000 visitors each month.

This summer, we’ll introduce the new redesign of HR Communications News and Health Care Communications News. Both sites will be designed off the early success of Ragan.com and PR Daily. In the fall, we’ll be launching a new Brand Journalism news site.

Ragan has been around since 1970 when your father launched The Ragan Report. We’ve come a long way as an industry since then. Where do you see the industry headed? Are there trends we need to watch?

The smartest companies are turning their organizations into media outlets. No longer content to wait for traditional media to write about them, these companies are providing news and information about their markets directly to consumers. American Express, IBM, Best Buy, The Mayo Clinic, Southwest Airlines—this is just a short list of companies that have begun to practice what is increasingly being called ‘brand journalism.’ Many of them are scooping up reporters from traditional media and building news sites around their brands. Like Ragan, they too are using the content curation model of mixing original content with aggregated content from bloggers, traditional media and other online sources.

On the internal side of the business, companies will continue to rely increasingly on user generated content produced in internal, collaborative networks, so-called Facebook-type sites behind the firewall. The smartest among them are building mobile platforms so employees can access their Intranets from home or while on the road.

You are a huge advocate for social media. Why has it become so important to the public relations industry?

Social networks allow PR pros to deliver messages directly to consumers. They provide an alternative to the classic ‘beg-the-media-to-write-about-us’ strategy.

Why wait for someone to pick up our news release when we can cover and deliver our news through social channels and online sources? A great example of this occurred this week when an airplane slid off a runway at Midway Airport in Chicago. Southwest’s PR team covered its own story by getting making sure that consumers got information from its NutsaboutSouthwest blog first. Time will tell if companies can build credibility with this approach. To succeed, brand journalism must be honest and transparent. If it isn’t social media will turn against the organization and ‘out it’ for pushing false information or withholding key facts.

You’ve been busy at Ragan Communications the past year — global events, a new website, additional staff — what’s been the most exciting project for you and your team?

Watching our newly designed news sites take off and become increasingly the top sources for corporate communications news. PR Daily is now the #1 news site for PR pros in North America, though few people realize it. Any check of any web traffic monitoring site proves it out. This has been very rewarding for our editorial team. They’ve worked hard at making Ragan.com and PR Daily thorough, entertaining and conversational.

On the conference side of our business, we’re the most proud of the trust placed in us by the two-dozen companies that now host our events. Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, SAS, ConEd, Cisco, SWIFT in Brussels, The Mayo Clinic, NASDAQ, and many others. Their confidence in our events team, and their trust in our product, has helped us reach our goal of providing the best conferences in the industry.

We focus on B2B topics here on this blog. When you talk with communicators what do you think are the major differences between those in B2C and those in B2B?

B2B communicators have a tougher time proving the value of social media. If you’re a company making steel bolts, it’s hard to post big numbers on your Facebook and Twitter pages, and it’s an unfortunate fact of life that the C-suite continues to believe the big numbers equate with social media success. And yet, B2B communicators actually stand to gain more from social media and content curation. They can build content-rich sites that quickly establish them as leaders in their markets. The smaller the niche, the bigger the chance that you’ll dominate the news and conversational markets in your industry.

B2B social media has really come into full swing in the past year and companies are doing some interesting things. What are your B2B customers telling you their biggest challenge is when it comes to social media?

Getting budgets approved that divert advertising dollars from traditional media to social media and content marketing programs. However, this is changing rapidly. I am working with a hospital system now that may invest up to $2 million in building its own news and information site—a content site that is integrated into social media and traditional news sources.

You’ve been a big fan of the Flip cam and of course Cisco’s recent announcement must have been a surprise. But let’s be honest, video certainly isn’t going away. Where do you see the role of video in the enterprise?

The Flip is certainly not going away. Much has been made of Cisco’s fear that smart phones will replace pocket cameras. This may be true with teenagers, Moms and other consumers, but you won’t see internal communicators shooting roving reporter features with their iPhones. Flip’s competitors—like the far superior Kodak Zi8—will continue to rack up big sales in the corporate communications industry, as will other cam corders designed for higher quality videos.

I also believe that videos will become shorter as editors and producers embrace the reality that people want to ‘snack’ on information. We’ll get to a point—if we haven’t already—where a 90-second video is almost too long.

As for enterprise video, sometimes known as YouTube behind the firewall, this trend will continue to grow. I met a marketing director at a small, 30-employee firm who is now required to post 60-second video summaries of meetings she attended so others could get briefed on important news. In other organizations, companies are mounting cameras on computers and asking employees to share their expertise with others by posting short videos on ideas and news. Skype and other voice-over-Internet services will continue to be used to bring far-flung employees into global conferences and internal communication summits. And virtual conferences, like the one I participated in at SAS two years ago, will all make use of improvements in worldwide video streaming.

Most people in the PR industry know you via your work life and Twitter feed. So how does Mark Ragan unwind and relax from a busy day in the office?

Well, it helps to have a four-year-old. We live in a television-free house where the only computer is locked away in my basement office. I try to put my online life away when I arrive at home, but it’s difficult. I am the CEO of a media company in a world that no longer provides convenient news cycles. What I have done is hire more people, including my first social media editor. She has helped take a huge load off my back by creating our first LinkedIn communities and keeping up with trends, new tools and strategies. And, of course, large pints of ale always help. But you would know that, Allan.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

Visualizing B2B Social Media Marketing

Is Motivation the Key to Success?

Getting Your Degree in “Business Acumen”

Finextra Review — The Growth of Social Media in Financial Services

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 11 April 2011 at 08:36 {no comments}

Last week I had a great opportunity to speak on a panel and also moderate a panel at the 2011 Social Media Days London hosted by Finextra at Thomson Reuters. The event’s next stop is New York on May 18. There were three key themes that I noticed being discussed during the day:

Measurement and Evaluation: Most of the questions and “water cooler” conversation focused around measuring social media efforts. I was surprised to hear so many people ask about how social media is driving B2B sales. While ultimately all things we do in the marketing/communication mix should be to increase sales, I’m not sure focusing on sales is critical at this stage. Sales measurement in the B2B space for communicators has always been a challenge. While I’m hopeful that so much data being produced can give us better insight and we will continue to be better at measuring our efforts in social media, I am still of the belief that focusing on supporting the brand and building your presence for now is key. Like all things, this will take time and the brands who understand this will do a better job of using the data. For a look at some of the leading brands at what they are doing in social media I found the Social Brands 100 study helpful.
Who Owns It?: There was a good discussion around who owns the strategy and process of social media at a company. A social media team? Corporate communications? Marketing? Advertising? The individual? Or all of the above? Usually we’ve seen strong individuals take the lead at companies and they come from a variety of backgrounds. We continue to move rapidly toward a model where everyone can play a part and contribute through providing content to distribute or monitoring conversations. I continue to be impressed where more and more people at CME Group pass good content over to us to distribute and help us monitor the conversations. This should be the case for most companies moving forward. As for what department internally should run social media there is no simple answer. Due to culture, structure and processes there really is no “one” model that works better than another. But finding the “right” model should be the focus of chief communicators.
International Growth: With the conference held in London there were a number of questions on how to reach stakeholders not just throughout Europe but also in Asia and North America. I enjoyed some of the commentary about new technologies coming to bypass translation, but the fact that moving the social media needle to expand corporate content into a 24/7 cycle is going to be a challenge. It’s a topic like this that makes the challenge of using these resources so exciting, and something I am certainly going to research more.

I also had a chance to sit down with Liz Lum of Finextra who organized the event. You can watch my interview with her here.

If you liked this post you may also enjoy:

What a Wonderful “Mesh” We’ve Made

Beyond Social — What’s Next?

Socialnomics — The Revolution is Us

Integrating Social Media With a Corporate Website

The NY Times and its Paywall Decision — A B2B Discussion

Filed under Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 18 March 2011 at 09:52 {no comments}

It’s not a secret anymore. Yesterday, the NY Times started rolling out its new paywall for content. In a letter to readers the media company said the change will come in two stages. Many have weighed in on the paywall decision, including an outspoken opponent Felix Salmon, an unconvinced blog boing boing, and a skeptical investor Leigh Drogen. Jack Shafer at Slate thinks it’s the right decision. In addition, TechCruch has posted All You Need to Know About the NYTimes.com Paywall.

I am a long-time reader of the NY Times. Today, it’s a daily ritual to read it on my Kindle during the morning train ride to our London office. Yes, even after my move to London I still read the NY Times. Given their strong emphasis on entertainment, sports and local New York coverage I’ve often viewed it as mostly a B2C media outlet. That doesn’t mean it’s not an important source for B2B companies, and I personally think this decision will have little impact on B2B communicators. B2B communicators will still target the NY Times for our story pitches and we will still value their credibility as a news outlet.

Here’s a quick roundup of quotes from around the web on the news:

The paywall is certainly being set high enough that a lot of regular readers will not subscribe. These are readers who would normally link to the NYT from their blogs, who would tweet NYT articles, who would post those articles on Facebook, and so on. As a result, not only will traffic from these readers decline, but so will all their referral traffic, too.– Felix Salmon, Reuters

Yes, I was going to hate this paywall no matter what the NYT did. News is a commodity: as a prolific linker, I have lots of choice about where I link to my news and the site that make my readers shout at me about a nondeterministic paywall that unpredictably swats them away isn’t going to get those link. — Cory Doctorow, boing boing

How much of the NYT content would you say is REALLY good, stuff you can’t get anywhere else, first hand investigative journalism that is really deep. 4%-5%? Maybe. Is that worth paying for the whole site? Is that worth a subscription? — Leigh Drogen

But there’s a great big hole in that wall that the Times doesn’t mention in its FAQ or press release. According to two people close to the situation, the 20-story limit can be breached if you access the site from multiple devices, and/or if you delete your cookies — paidContent.org

The pricing scheme and process by which the paper evicts its millions of squatters doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to increase revenues appreciably. If it does that, I’ll be happy to call it a success. — Jack Shafer, Slate

The Times now enters an arena already occupied by The Wall Street Journal, which has always restricted access to its website, and the Financial Times, which like The Times of London is locked down to non-subscribers. But the conventional wisdom is that these two newspapers serve a niche audience willing to pay a premium for deep coverage in a specific area — financial news. General-interest newspapers serve a broader constituency that, in the age of the internet, can find most of the news it needs for free elsewhere. — John Abell, Wired

And yes, there are even two hashtags on Twitter to follow: #nytpaywall #NYTimesNews

As a B2B communicator what are your views? Will you continue to pay for the NY Times or will you look elsewhere for content? Will this decision make you take your news and media pitches to other outlets? Or will you continue to value the NY Times as a key business outlet knowing the readership may be smaller, but more targeted? Basically, is it business as usual for you? Let us know.

B2B Tech Opportunity

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 29 November 2010 at 19:17 {no comments}

Okay guys, if you want to see more blog posts from me, then you need to find me a good hire, because I have too much going on! Here’s the official posting.

I’m a little flexible on just what level we hire because we can adjust the assignment accordingly, but I’m not looking for entry level and not looking for senior level. Weber Shandwick is a heck of an agency and the Minneapolis office is a truly extraordinary place thanks to the most positive, respectful work culture I’ve ever experienced, a team of pros committed to staying on the cutting edge of PR, and great leadership. That’s my commercial. You won’t regret joining us.

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B2B Voices

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