Merry’s Blog

A Little Anti-Social About Social Media

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:22:03 -0400

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been a little timid about using social media. Maybe it’s because it’s constantly changing, and I’m a bit of a techno-peasant—not always up on the latest technology. And every time I learn to use something like LinkedIn, they find a way to expand it and make it more complex. So I have to make adjustments and learn to use the newest bells and whistles.
But the fact is—and I know I’m a little slow on the uptake here—there isn’t an option. Social media is a godsend for B2B companies on a PR budget. And learning to use these tools, understanding their nuances and grasping the effects of their use on the bottom line is critical to the success of B2B public relations.
So I know I should blog about social media with great wisdom. At the very least, I could write about 5 Ways to Use Social Media to Increase Sales. Or something like that. But I’m still learning like everybody else.
So how about it? Want to share some tips about how you use social media to market your B2B company? I’ll start sharing too. Stay tuned.

Virtually as Good as a Trade Show

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:36:09 -0400

As a B2B marketing person I’ve always loved trade shows. Where else do all the trade press and your competitors and customers converge in one place—all with common interests? People who are looking to buy are all in the same room with people who are looking to sell. Trackable sales leads are flowing like a river from an identifiable source. Gotta love it.
But according to a Forbes article, trade show revenue in the U.S.—about $12 billion annually—was expected to contract nearly 7 percent last year. Trade shows require significant investment—booth space, exhibit design, videos, collateral materials, and most expensive of all—travel and expenses for the sales team. No wonder people don’t think they can afford trade shows.
There is, of course, a cost for not participating—lost opportunity. You can’t get sales leads from trade shows if you’re not there. But now, with virtual trade shows, you don’t have to be physically there. You can “man” your booth from your office computer, or, well, any computer anywhere. That saves a bundle in T&E. Other things are cheaper, too, in the virtual world. Entry fees, exhibit design and build. All you need is one representative from your company to be on deck to instant message visitors to your virtual booth.
I do still like the visual, physical, meet-and-greet trade show. There’s no substitute for seeing faces, talking to actual people in person. But if it’s a luxury your company can’t afford, check out the virtual shows.
(This blog is a copy of the blog I wrote for QCircuits, www.qcircuits.com/blog)

Blogging Forever

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:52:47 -0400

Dear Friends,

If you are following me on this blog, I thank you.

I have not posted a blog for quite awhile because I am posting weekly on my client’s website:

http://www.qcircuits.com/blog/

As you may imagine, it’s tough coming up with weekly blogs worth reading, let alone additional blogs for this site, especially when the topic overlaps, or is actually one and the same--B2B marketing. So I entreat you to visit the QCircuits blog to continue to read my comments if you like.

My book, The Truth About B2B Marketing ROI, has been out for almost two years now. (I think it’s time to change my e-mail signature from “check out my NEW book” to “check out my book.”) It is published by IABC (International Association of Business Communicators).

IABC will be launching a new online service called Discovery in June. The service will allow members to access Knowledge Centre information online instantly, including my book, for a fee. Sounds like a great benefit for members.

So watch for that and check out my blog on QCircuits’ web site. I fear I will be making minimal entries here for awhile.

Best, Merry

Accountability for All: Make Congress Show Results or Dock The Bums’ Pay

Fri, 5 Mar 2010 10:33:41 -0500

I have long championed accountability for marketers. After all, why should we have a big budget, or a budget of any kind at all, unless we can prove that we can achieve something with it? This works both ways—we should have an even greater budget if we can demonstrate positive results.
Then I got to thinking (always dangerous): Why should marketers be the only ones with their feet to the fire? (Well, in most companies, we aren’t. In fact salespeople are often even more on the line to make quotas.) But marketers and salespeople are famously dysfunctional, not unlike Republicans and Democrats. And sometimes this dysfunction makes it tough to get things done.
And I’m thinking, why shouldn’t the House and the Senate of both parties be held accountable for what they achieve? You could argue that they are, since they submit to regular re-election by their constituents. But that’s only periodically. While they’re in office, they can obstruct, obfuscate and generally create gridlock for years, all while being paid very nice salaries with health benefits so lavish I can barely imagine them.
And I’m thinking, couldn’t we establish some kind of minimal threshold for the work that needs to be done within a given time frame? And shouldn’t we expect a certain standard in the results we get from Congress? Right now, it seems to me, Congress is a dysfunctional group that couldn’t make a decision on behalf of the people if their jobs depended on it. Which, you could argue, they do, although not always.
But what if they were only compensated for what they achieved—merit pay, perhaps—and what if they had to earn points by getting things done, or, say, no fancy health care. I bet you’d see some scrambling on the Hill then.
The more I think about it the more I like it: democratic accountability.

Who’s the Stupid One?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:10:55 -0500

Many’s the time I wished my clients would just shut up and do what I told them to do. Why could they not see, like I did, the wisdom of my proposals? And sometimes my frustration at their reluctance to do the smart thing would spill over enough to be a problem. That is, I’m afraid I have treated one or two like the dumb kid who just doesn’t get it.
I had a client once tell me I made her feel stupid. That’s not good.
In fact, she wasn’t very bright. She certainly didn’t have the experience I had. But I was the dim one.
At that point in my career I hadn’t yet come to the ineluctable conclusion that it was my job as a communication person—my primary responsibility—to educate. And not condescendingly, but with solid facts and persuasive reason.
We can’t expect our clients to do the smart thing unless we help them do it. And we can’t help them do it without educating them about what the smart thing is and why they should do it. And how they can explain it to their C-suite.
That means backing up proposals with projected results of some kind, even if it isn’t ROI. (And why isn’t it? Make sure it’s impossible to demonstrate ROI before you discard it. Oh, and share this info with the client!)
But I feel your pain, Glenn Jasper, whose blog, When Stupid Rules, I can relate to. He gives a number of examples of stupid client moves. (Let’s face it, there’s plenty of material out there.)
My favorite (or least favorite) one is the tiny booth in the big trade show. How many times have I come across clients spending big bucks for a booth, and nothing to engage targeted prospects and press—who will already be there anyway!—in meaningful conversations.
And we aren’t even mentioning the huge bucks clients spend on a T&E budget for their sales guys who typically are uneducated about selling at a trade show versus selling in the field. So they hand out four-color brochures and give away golf balls by the score to every passerby.
But no PR. It’s a terrible waste. And it’s our job to tell clients why.

Men in Undies and Other Stupid Stuff

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 15:40:50 -0500

During the super bowl, when my husband gets up to go to the fridge, I get up from reading a book to go to the TV. Because typically, commercials are fun to watch. For me, anyway. They used to tell me something about our society, or at the very least, something about how to create a great ad. But this is less and less the case.
If this year’s commercials were put in a time capsule, future generations would conclude that we are an idiotic people who find fiddling beavers and men wandering about in their undies to be funny. And I really doubt if they could make sense of most of these commercials, because I sure couldn’t. I mean, I just didn’t understand them. Didn’t get the message.
This is just criminal. Because the air time is bajillions of dollars, advertisers should spend a few more bucks to get good creative. The most egregious waste is not when you forget the ad, but when the ad is so crude and disgusting that you turn against the advertiser. This year’s winner—or loser—in that category would be Career Builder. If they had the last job on earth I wouldn’t go to them. Ick.
Also, Career Builder is one of two contenders for the tone-deaf award. They showed people who don’t like their jobs for stupid reasons in an era of high unemployment. Being out of a job is not a frivolous thing.
Another tone-deaf ad involved sharing a Coke with the evil industrialist who was down on his luck. When the whole country is mightily ticked at bonus guzzling big business, the Coke should have gone to Homer Simpson.
The award for the best reason to abolish in-house agencies goes to GoDaddy. Tell me, GoDaddy people, is there one woman in your group? Even though I find their web site mildly offensive, with the woman as sex object the most prominent image on their site, I still did business with them. But now, after their stupid sexist commercial, I may have to rethink that.
Was there anything good to report? Well, I thought Budweiser had some amusing and reasonably non-offensive spots. The Google spot was dear. And Pepsi didn’t even have an ad—they stepped up their interactive Internet efforts, which may have the smartest use of funds. But the best commercial?
I thought it was a quiet little spot for Hyundai’s Sonata. With a classical music sound track—sonatas, of course—the camera showed a Sonata being sprayed red in a paint booth. And just like a beautiful musical sonata, the car is a work of art too. Simple, direct, and you remember the name of the product.
Maybe I’m just wishing for good old-fashioned advertising without someone trying to gross me out with sophomoric humor.

Getting Huffy About the Huffington Post

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:25:04 -0500

I would have liked to have heard Arianna Huffington speak in my home town, Chicago, recently. According to a Ragan.com post, she talked about the decline in newspaper readership, something that’s caused me deep anxiety of late, reflected in some of my previous posts. She says media companies are in digital denial.
Oh so true. I think newspapers in general could do a much better job to make their web sites more interactive and user happy, among other things. But honestly, her site is just an aggregate of news stories on the Internet. So she is part of the problem, not the solution.
For who is to pay for the news gathering, the guy on the beat doing his job on the scene? Domestically and overseas? Who is to pay for the journalist to do actual digging and not just some cursory web surfing? Who is to pay for the carefully crafted, word-perfect story that grips the reader while imparting info of import?
Not Huffington Post. Yeah, yeah, they follow the “doctrine of fair use.” But is it fair to let the media fade into the void while hard nosed reporters who are willing and able to ask the tough questions, find the story behind the story, get the news that others don’t see—are defecting to PR jobs for better pay?
Nevertheless, guess what web site I have bookmarked, among others? Yup, the Huffington Post.

Bristol’s PR Firm: Not Good for PR People

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 09:13:18 -0500

Not to pick on Bristol Palin—it’s not her fault she was thrust into the national spotlight at such a tender age—but really, she’s a good example of why people hate PR folks. (Well, they hate us unless we’re the ones who got them on Oprah.)
Let’s assume we can get past the hypocrisy of Bristol acting as a “teen ambassador” (official title) for the Candie’s Foundation, whose mission is to “educate America’s Youth about the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy.”
(This verbiage is taken from the web site that is riddled with grammatical errors and as poorly written as they come. Presumably written by a pregnant teen who had to drop out of school to take care of her baby.)
Okay, that sounds really mean. So now I have to say, I really agree with this message, or at least the part that says teen pregnancy is usually a really unfortunate thing. It’s what I taught my children: Don’t get pregnant too young or your whole life will be tough, if not completely ruined. To say nothing of the baby’s life.
But I digress. Back to Bristol as ambassador. We all know she had a baby out of wedlock, so this is a “do as I say, not as I do” message. Learning from other people’s mistakes can, and should be, instructive. But something doesn’t ring true here.
The hypocrisy is that everyone else should wait to have sex, even though Bristol could not. But it’s okay for her because she and her family are celebrities and reasonably wealthy, so the consequences aren’t so bad for her and her baby. Unless you think about how damaging it might be to Bristol and possibly her child to be in the glare of the world delivering a message of teen abstinence. (Personally, I think this is a ridiculous message. It didn’t work for Bristol, and it doesn’t work for other teens either. Being careful, using protection, does work, or at least it works better. Just my two cents.)
But I really don’t want to be too hard on her because the abstinence message is one her mother touted before Bristol even became pregnant. And it seems to me she’s a victim of this message and puppet spokeswoman in the bargain. And this is what people hate about PR. People have a nose for disingenuousness.
It’s probably Bristol’s handlers who have put her in this position. Just the other day she (or her PR people) put out a shingle announcing her new PR firm. With no advanced education she is suddenly capable of handling public relations, lobbying and political consulting for clients? (According to the press release.)
Oh really? This just makes me crazy. I had a friend once who started a PR firm, much like Bristol, out of the blue with zero PR background. She called to tell me her good news and to ask how to create a media schedule. And another friend once wanted me to give her a data dump on branding because she was thinking of going into the business.
Why is my blood pressure in the stratosphere? Because people assume just anyone can become a PR person without experience, training or education. And because people do just click their fingers, Bewitched style, to become PR pros, there are jillions of charlatans out there who don’t know what they’re doing.
And that’s why people hate PR folks. We’re disingenuous and don’t know what we’re doing. Except for those of us who are professionals. And we’re the ones who need to find a way to address this issue. Anyone got any ideas?

Brand-aids (Or Why Tiger Should Have Owned Up Faster)

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 10:32:41 -0500

Whatever your political leanings, you’ve got to admire Maureen Dowd’s way with wit and words. In her recent op-ed column in the New York Times, The Lady and the Tiger, she chastises Tiger Woods and Desiree Rogers (in charge of the President’s crashed state dinner) for clamming up in a crisis. She says “reflexive clampdowns don’t work in an era when privacy is passé.”
That’s true now, and it was even true before privacy was passé. (I presume by this she means the advent of social media and an increasing lack of manners have rendered celebrity transgressions transparent.)
At least in the corporate world, it’s always been true that the truth is the most potent PR tool in the box. You just have to know how to deliver it properly. Easier said than done.
It’s all about protecting the brand, which amuses me on several counts.
First, we know that Tiger Woods and the Obama presidency are “brands” because we live in the world of B2B marketing and communications. But the reference of people and administrations to brands is leaking into other worlds and out of the mouths of non-marketers.
This is all more than fine with me, but I would like a concomitant recognition that if brands are so important to protect, then they have inherent value. And if brands have inherent value, it follows that our efforts as marketers to protect, enhance and grow brand value should at least garner a modicum of respect. Okay, okay, we have to quantify how much value. But still.
It’s also amusing to me that lo these (ahem) many years that I’ve been counseling corporate execs to tell the truth, tell it simply, and tell it often, there are still people who think they are immune. Their impulse is to circle the wagons, stick their fingers in their ears, and hope their troubles will blow over. It never, ever, happens that way.
And sometimes it makes you look even weaker. As Doud said of Desiree Rogers, she looked weaker because she couldn’t simply accept some blame for the dinner she was in charge of. Another source of amusement for me, because Doud and her readers understand that it take a tough man to say he’s sorry. Why can’t corporate tunas understand the same concept? Maybe it’s a male/female thing.
So be a man (yeah, they’re still mostly men in the B2B C-suite). Take direct action. Pull the band-aid off quickly and avoid prolonging the pain. Expose the wound to the fresh air it needs to heal, and do whatever you can to make things right ASAP. The truth shall set you free, and, maybe, if you deliver it properly, the truth will protect your brand.

Why Are We So Easy to Fire?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:44:23 -0500

A European IABC blog tells the terrible news: As of September, 26.54 percent of IABC members have lost their jobs. IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) is a global organization of 15,000 professional communicators of all kinds—internal, external, advertising, PR, you name it—although in my experience there’s a preponderance of employee communications and PR people.
One in four of those people lost their jobs in the last year.
Yikes. Are we that expendable? Apparently so, and it behooves us to figure out why.
IABC is a global organization, and I mean truly global, with about 80 countries represented. That’s more than a couple Canadians thrown in to make the claim. (In fact, there are gobs of Canadian members.) So is this a worldwide phenomenon? It would be interesting to see the break out by country.
But lacking any supporting stats, I can tell you this. We’re easy to fire—usually the first ones to go in a corporation—because we are viewed as an expense rather than an investment. That is because we fail to educate top management—and get them to truly understand—the merits of what we do.
It will be tougher to fire us if management thinks we spend X amount to get X+1 in return. That we actually bring in revenue or increase the value of the enterprise. And if there’s any organization that’s attempted to support communicators in demonstrating just that, it’s IABC.
Which is why the next bit of news is ironic: IABC has lost 1,000 members in less than a year, according to a Ragan blog.
Yikes again.
It’s understandable that people out of work cut back on expenses. It’s even admirable. But IABCers must understand the same principle we’re trying to teach top management. IABC probably gives you the kind of return on your investment you can’t afford to be without, especially if you’re out of work.
During my career I’ve made all sorts of connections through IABC, including getting lucrative new clients. And I’ve kept up with all sorts of new technologies through the years that have helped keep me competitive in the marketplace. Most of all, I’ve made some good friends who have been supportive when I needed them. Which is just what you need when you’re out of a job.
In short, I think IABC helps make its members a little tougher to fire. So you might want to rethink cutting back on this particular expense. Because it isn’t an expense, it’s an investment. In yourself.