5 Tips On Selecting a PR Agency

  PR is dead, right?  Not really.  It has just morphed into something with much stronger social media and inbound marketing components.  

Unfortunately, many PR agencies / pros did not evolve, which makes it hard for marketing executives to decide whether their agency is effective or not, as well as picking the right one to partner with.

As we revamped our messaging and had several major announcements coming up, we decided to shake things up a little and went through the process of finding a new PR agency.  Here are tips that worked well for us.

1.  Set your goals.  What is the primary reason behind PR efforts in your company?  Is it to bring new business?  Raise money?  Get acquired?  Get noticed?  The primary reason will define the type of agency you will go after.  

In our case, the primary reason was business expansion.  We had over 500% growth last year and we are gearing up for more this year!  We wanted to augment our SEO and inbound marketing activities with increased social media, relevant industry press, blogger and vertical community campaigns.  We have also a major launch coming up.  All that made it a good time to look for the right PR / social marketing agency.

2.  Understand your target markets.  Who is your buyer and how do they find products / services like yours.  If you are marketing to SMB segment, it probably is not the most effective strategy to go heavily after top industry analysts and major publications.  A better strategy may be going to after tier 2 / 3 analysts that blog a lot, as well as vertical communities, bloggers, etc.   

3.  Define success criteria.  How do you recognize the right PR agency when you come across them?  Here is my high-level checklist:

- Industry experience.  It is much easier to work with an agency that has experience in your market segment.  They typically know your sub-segments, market trends and competitors.  They would probably  have have ideas what worked and what didn't in terms of messaging and launch / marketing strategies.  They would most likely have relationships and a database of contacts with key industry figures, analysts, bloggers, and journalists.

Otherwise, you may find yourself spending lots of time bringing your PR agency up to speed in all these areas.  It would take time for them to build a database of contacts, build relationships, etc. 

- Inbound marketing / social media experience.   You would be surprised how few agencies "really" have these skills.  Most claim they do.  70% of the ones we looked at, did not have these skills.  20% thought we would win if only we could be active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  Clearly, we don't need a PR agency for that level of social media presence.  Finally, 10% really understood what it took to win the "inbound marketing battle" with detailed plans and tools that went far beyond the typical social media efforts.

- Track Record.  We wanted to see previous success stories with other clients.  In all fairness, there is only certain level of success even the best PR agency can bring to a company.  However, you can look at their past / current clients' press releases, media coverage, SEO rankings, and messaging and get an idea on how creative is the agency.

- Available Resources.  If a great PR agency is slammed with work and more clients than they can handle, you may not get the attention you need for your success.  So, it is critical to find an agency with enough resources and time to dedicate to your success.  It is also important to find out who specifically will work on your project.  You would want to be comfortable with that person's background, attitude, availability, etc. 

- Proximity.  In this day and age, proximity seems to be not important.  There is Skype, email, IM, and social media for effective remote communications.  That is mostly true.  

All other factors being the same, I much rather work with an agency that is local.  For example, we have spent two days with our new PR agency in person to kick off our upcoming launch planning.  I can't imagine having the same interaction quality, chemistry and results via Skype, con call or email.  

- Attitude. It is critical to find a PR agency that REALLY wants your business.  There  are plenty of stuck up, unfriendly agencies out there.  It will be very ineffective and frustrating to work with them.  

For example, one of the finalists presented really well at the first pass.  However, during the second meeting their attitude turned into, "we get enough business without you" and "you should feel lucky that we are taking you as a client," "sign the agreement now and don't waste our time."

There is no place for an attitude like that.  If they are acting this way before getting the contract, imagine how difficult would be to work with them through the launch when you need their presence most.

- Budget. There is a wide spectrum of prices - from a few thousand dollars a month (typically from PR contractors) to tens of thousands dollars per month (from "high end" PR agencies.)  More expensive does not necessarily mean better quality.  It could mean overhead, bloated infrastructure or just arrogance.

The "stuck up" PR agency was double the price of its competitors.  They "justified" it by more services they provide.  However, after looking in-depth, they were offering half of what others were providing.  

This said, I would warn against the "nickel and dime" approach.  You have to recognize a good deal and know when to stop the bargaining process.  PR agencies are in business to make money as well.  If we are not being fair to them, the relationship may not last.   

4.  RFI. After you know approximately what you are looking for, try to obtain a list of PR agencies that are active in your segment, as well as the ones you have worked with before.  Send out an RFI (request for information) outlining things you are trying to accomplish and what kind of help you are looking for.  You can easily find templates online.

5.  Proposal / Selection.  We ended up with around 50 RFIs sent out.  We got 12 responses.  Picked 3 finalists.  We invited each one of them to pitch the final proposal with expected results, resources, dates, plans, etc.  This step brought some surprises too.  The strongest candidate at the RFI stage turned out to be a "fluff" agency. 

However, #2 agency came in very strong.  We were very impressed with every single attribute of their final proposal.  And we made our selection.

Once the selection process was over and we signed the contract, the winning PR agency came into our office the following week for a 2 days kick-off session.  We refined out social media / inbound marketing plan,  brainstormed on the messaging,  and assigned specific action items.  So far, we are very happy with our choice.  

The proof will be, as everything in Hack Marketing approach, in our launch success and the delta in the overall metrics we have identified.

7 Steps for Turning Twitter Into an Effective Market Research Tool

Twitter:  Waste of Time or a Business Tool?
I used to think that Twitter represented no significant value for business needs.  Just to be familiar with it, I opened an account a while ago, and tweeted here and there.

That all changed as I began working on a startup, developing a technology to prevent cyberbullying.  In that process, I discovered very effective ways of using Twitter as a practical tool for market research.

Challenge
Many business executives, product managers, marketing professionals and sales reps find it hard keeping up with  industry news, competitive info and market trends.  Even though there are plenty of tools, keeping up with the news still requires hours of finding, sorting and reading articles.  People are usually busy with tens of different tasks, leaving market research as something that often gets pushed down in priority.

Enter Twitter
There are armies of people who are tirelessly tweeting 24 hours a day.  Tweets are brief.  It takes less than a minute for us to determine if they are useful or not.  We can use Twitter as tool to quickly get up to speed with the relevant news, spending just 5-10 min a day.  Here is how I do it:

1.  Create a Twitter account that contains the words of the main business problem you are trying to solve.  In my case, it has "Cyberbullying" in it.  This will be useful later, when you would want to use Twitter for marketing needs.

2.  Find people tweeting on the subject of your interest.  You can use the search bar for that.  Play with multiple keywords to get the content you want.  Then check profiles of people you found and make sure they fit your needs.

3.  Create your Twitter list.  Follow as many relevant users as possible.

4.  Get a mobile app.  It may be easier to get quick updates on an iPhone or Android.  I am using TweetCaster on Android.  It gives me updates in a very easy format.  It takes me only 5-10 min to go through the daily news.  I often discover news before they show up in RSS feeds or other major news sources and tools.  The most relevant ones get lots of retweets from many people.  It is sort of "crowd voting."

5.  Trim your list.  As you are finding people who are tweeting irrelevant things for whatever reasons, unfollow them, until you have a "golden list" of sources that bring you the best quality news.

6.  Check few times a day for 3-5 minutes each time and you will be abreast of the latest industry news.

7.  Augment this with your more in-depth research from various sources when you have time.

That's it!  
In military terms, Twitter became my Special Forces team for getting the dirty job done quickly and effectively.  Other tools are like my regular military units for thorough, longer-term type projects.

Microsoft's Social Network Strategy?

Microsoft has been suspiciously absent from the whole social networking game.  That is very much unlike them.  There are several trends that should  drive Microsoft to drastic steps in establishing  strong presence in social networking space... fast.

1. Windows OS is becoming less and less essential with the emergence of Apple, tablets, and smartphones.   More and more businesses are using MacBooks instead of PCs; Apple is winning in the tablet space; Windows is way behind in mobile devices, dominated by iPhone and Android.

2. Office is becoming less relevant too with the emergence of Google Docs and similar free or low cost cloud-based services.  Yes, many of these services lack all fancy Office features, but majority of people never use them anyway.

3. Internet users are becoming less aware of Microsoft too.  IE is being pushed by Firefox, Chrome and Safari.  Bing  is interesting, but not dominant.  Microsoft created a lot of hype on its cloud, but Azure or their other offerings are not dominant - neither in business space, not in consumer.

4.  "VOS".  Daily communications are steadily moving to social networks, both on personal and business levels.  Email is moving to the cloud.  A lot of personal applications are moving to mobile devices and social networks - consumers complete micro-purchases on AppStore, Android Market, Facebook credits for games, etc.  Business apps are moving to the cloud, making the client OS unimportant.

To summarize, Social Networks are becoming the center of consumer computing experience, sort of a "virtual consumer OS."  And all they require are a computing hardware, a browser and an Internet connection.  Microsoft is not dominant in any of these areas.

Google is steadily taking over the "Virtual OS" space.  This has to be a mortal threat to Microsoft.  It has to worry Microsoft.  The questions is, "what is Microsoft doing about it?"  Well, for starters there was recently a "leak" on that subject.

But Microsoft today is not the same fighting machine it used to be.  During the last two decades, Microsoft was a staple of computing.  Competing against them was never a good experience.  It got quite a few companies and industries destroyed.  However, Microsoft went from being an innovator that revolutionized computing to a competition destruction machine to a somewhat civilized corporation to a huge company that is becoming too slow, unfocused, decentralized and stuck in the past.

On the other side, it still has lots of money, really good talent (I know quite a few amazing professionals there) and a huge presence both in the consumer and business space.  I would use that as entry point for its social platforms.

DISCLAIMER!  Back seat driver perspective.  I would start with Outlook.  Why not create a native and rich Web UI for Outlook that would integrate really nicely with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+?  It would transform into a web app that provides business users with an integrated and seamless communication experience that includes email, social networks and documents creation / cloud storage / sharing.  Since many corporate users still "have to" use Outlook, this would benefit them in a way of simplicity - they wouldn't need to switch between applications and services.  It would also benefit Microsoft by making Outlook "stickier" and increasing the usage of IE and Office.

Microsoft could also create a light version of it for consumers.  Do I dare to say a "free," or a "freemium" version for less technology-savvy consumers (that don't buy MS Office anyway, so not much will be cannibalized.)   This would become a gateway to social / cloud experience.  Maybe even as a part of Windows UI in the future.  Having lots of interesting components, Microsoft could offer certain nice to have components as upgrades.  For example, from a free cloud word processor or a MS Word in the cloud.

Then I would grow the business by M&A.  LinkedIn could be an interesting target to build on the business space.

Of course, this is me thinking out loud.  There are many smart folks at Microsoft that may be working on similar functionality as I am writing this.  It is never that easy for a large corporation to switch gears in a dramatic way.  But soon Microsoft will have to make a drastic move or risk becoming a dinosaur.

Google+... Why does it matter to marketing professionals?

Google+ means duopoly.  Facebook's honeymoon is over.  It has a real competitor now.  The "social media" industry took another step to its maturity.  It is now Google+ vs. Facebook.  Just like Microsoft vs. Apple.  Or Toyota vs. Honda.  USA vs. USSR.

Google+ can put an end to the fragmentation in social networks.  Until now, we had Facebook for personal connections and LinkedIn for professional ones.  And most people have been separating personal and business contacts.

Google+ allows combining all your contacts in one place, organized in various "circles", like family, friends, soccer teammates, fraternity buddies, security community, blog audiences, etc.  Then you can communicate with all these circles from one command and control center.

Google+ gives us a new way to simplify and unite connections, social networking, as well as conducting business, e.g. creating user communities, doing research, managing forums, blogs, etc.  It also becomes another way to market - reach target markets, customers, partners, communicate with remote teams, generate leads / demand.

Given Google+ adoption rate stays high, it would be critical for business and marketing professionals  embracing and using it.  The exciting part is that it gives new and creative ways of reaching our audiences, which can turn into a competitive advantage for early adopters.