Category Archives: Social Media

Creating an Attention Wave – Building a Package Around Your News Release

So you have some news you want to get out there. You are thinking of issuing the standard old news release… Yet in the era of the “real-time web”, when new stories are found through services like Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed; when the ranks of formal journalists are shrinking and the ranks of online writers are growing – and the pressure to publish is greater than ever; when there are thousands upon thousands of stories coming out each day… in all of that mess…

how do you get people to pay attention to your news?

Today, in late 2009, I’ve seen many of us in the PR and marketing space sending out more than a news release… creating a “package” of related stories in multiple media. As I’ve tried to explain this method to other people, I have recently found it useful to talk about this in terms of aiming to create an “Attention Wave”. Let me explain – and I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether this framework helps in explaining what it is we aim to do.

THE GOAL

Ultimately, of course, you want customers to read about your news and buy more of your services, products, widgets, etc. or promote your cause, goal, etc. Naturally for them to read about your news, you need to get people to write about your news.

Can you do this with a single news release?

Unless you are Apple announcing their latest sexy gadget – or Google announcing their latest free service, the answer is almost certainly… no. The reality is that journalists, bloggers and everyone else writing online are inundated with a zillion stories every hour of every day. And they are scanning those endless headlines through Twitter, FriendFeed, RSS readers, email inboxes, search results and other aggregation means.

You have one… maybe two seconds to get their attention and have them open your content.

That’s it.

Naturally, you need solid headlines that catch their attention and make them want to follow the link to read your content… but that’s the subject of another post.

What I am talking about here is assembling a “package” of content centered around your news release that hits the web in one wave… multiple stories, some from you and some from others, cascading through the “real-time web”, followed ideally by retweets and other redistribution / re-posting so that journalists and those writing online have multiple opportunities to see your content – and potentially will investigate for no other reason than that they are seeing many mentions of it.

The goal is to lengthen the time of exposure of your story to journalists, bloggers and anyone else writing.

Instead of 1 or 2 seconds while a writer is scanning new headlines, maybe you get 10 or 20 seconds… maybe a couple of minutes as stories appear and are redistributed… maybe more… maybe significantly more.

TODAY’S FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

Nothing I’ve said so far is really different from “PR 101”. It’s always been the goal of PR to earn coverage of your news. We’ve always done pre-announcement briefings with the goal of getting people to cover you and come out with stories around the time of your news release.

The difference in our new world of social media is this:

The opportunity has never been greater to tell your story in your own words.

I’m talking about more than just the social media release, although that may be one of the communication tools you use in your overall package.

I’m NOT talking about creating a series of Twitter accounts to spam Twitter… or generating bogus stories on bogus web sites linking to your content. Those are games played by people who usually lack a story to tell – and in this world of transparency you will probably be called out on doing that. I’m also NOT talking about getting listed on TechMeme, Digg, or whatever the major news aggregation site may be for your industry – that may be an outcome of your work… but I’m talking about before you get to that.

You. Sitting at your computer. Putting together a package around your news. Aiming to generate a wave of attention focused on your news.

THE MAJOR CAVEAT

First, before I go further, there is of course one major caveat:

YOU MUST HAVE A STORY WORTH TELLING!

No amount of packaging can really help a worthless story. People now have a pretty high B.S.-detector. You might succeed in getting your story a bit more attention – but the backlash might also not be to your liking.

Let’s assume you have a decent story to tell…

PACKAGE COMPONENTS

The pieces of your overall “package” will obviously vary according to your industry, your specific announcement, etc., but would typically include items such as:

a formal news release, including components targeted at making it easier for people to tell your story:
- company/organization logos
- pictures of the executives or others quoted in the news release
- pictures of the product, or visually interesting screenshots
- links to a video and other components of your package
a post on your corporate blog (you have one, right?), “humanizing” the more formal language of your news release and explaining the release in a more conversational tone
one or more embeddable videos, posted to your blog site or YouTube channel, providing a video interview, a demonstration, or other content. This could be multiple videos… perhaps one an interview with someone quoted in the news release going into more detail and a second providing more of a demo of the product. They need to have “embed codes” that allow writers to embed the video directly into their blog or news site.
a “deeper dive” post that goes into more detail around whatever was announced. Ideally with some interesting diagrams or other images that could be incorporated into other posts. Potentially, depending upon your industry, some sample apps or source code or items that others can try out.
companion posts on company/employee blogs: if you have other blogs for your company, perhaps targeted at specific audiences, can you plan a post related to your news that is relevant to that audience or vertical? can you ask employees to post on the topic of your news on their own blogs (assuming it is relevant to do so)?
companion posts on external/friendly blogs: do you know of people in the community around your company (you have one, right?) who might be eager to write about your new product or service?
posts on media/blog sites, resulting from pre-announcement briefing of appropriate media outlets.

Note that I am advocating for use of a formal news release. Multiple reasons, including the fact that news releases through wire services reach people who might not otherwise see the news – and also appear in news aggregation sites. They also serve as a formal statement of public record for many companies. The act of creating a news release also ideally has the effect of helping you tune your message and get it down to the essentials. (Or not, given some of the lousy news releases I’ve seen come through my inbox.)

Keep in mind, too, that my list is just a guideline. Maybe you want to include an audio podcast – or a slide presentation posted to your SlideShare account – or a supporting white paper. Whatever works for you… the point is that you are just creating multiple pieces surrounding and complementing your news release.

THE RATIONALE OF MULTIPLE COMPONENTS

Beyond the obvious effect of having multiple pieces go out at the same time and create the wave of headlines, there are some other reasons for creating the package:

Reaching different subscriber bases – Some people will want to read your news in Twitter. Some will in RSS. Some in email. Some in dedicated sites like YouTube. Some will be interested in a particular aspect of how your news applies. In some cases you might be able to distribute pointers to your news release in all those channels. In some cases you may want to create channel-specific content.
Addressing different learning/consuming styles – Some people want just short, brief summaries. Some people want detailed technical info. Some people will prefer to watch a video or a screencast rather than read an article. You can address these audiences through different pieces. Have the formal news release… then put the concise summary on your corporate blog, or perhaps a “news summary” page. Post a technical deep dive on a developer blog. Put a video up on YouTube. Create a summary post somewhere linking all of this together.
Enabling others to tell your story – You want to make it easy for other people to tell your story to their audiences. If it’s a compelling story that people will want to share, make it easy for them to do so. Provide the pictures, the screenshots… make the video embeddable (and please don’t make it “auto-play”!)… make this all easy and “self-service” so that people who want to write about your story can do so.

Creating the “package” of pieces lets you do all of this.

THE MULTIPLE HEADLINE EFFECT

An advantage of building a package like this, too, is that you can also try out different headlines in the different components of the package. The main news release can have the more formal headline:

XXXXX ANNOUNCES REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCT YYYYY

The main corporate blog post can say:

Our Product YYYYY cures cancer, solves world hunger and more

while another post on a targeted blog can say:

How Product YYYYY Delivers 6-Month ROI to the Financial Industry

or:

Man, check out how Product YYYYY smokes the competition

You get the idea… multiple headlines, each of which appears then in those various tools and searches monitored by media/bloggers/others. You have a chance to see what will work.

ASSEMBLING THE PACKAGE

Obviously, putting together all the pieces like this can take a good deal of effort… and time. Generally the process will be something like this:

Finalize the news release in advance of the launch date. Depending upon your capacity to produce online content (i.e. how quickly you can do so), you’ll need that news release some amount of time in advance… 24 hours? 48 hours? 72 hours? More? You need the news release signed off on for your final messaging – and also to get to those who will prepare companion pieces.
Determine the URL of the news release. If you can know the URL where your news release will be when it goes live, you can pass this along to those writing companion pieces so that they will link back to the release on your site.
Determine the launch time and date. (And remember timezones when relaying the info) This is important for communicating to those who will write supporting pieces. Ideally you would like the various pieces to hit in the same general timeframe. This is also incredibly important with regard to who will see your stories. If you are in the US, do you want to go live in the early morning US Eastern time? (probably) Or for a European audience?
Develop your companion pieces. Some of the companion pieces can be developed in advance and tweaked with final messaging – others may need final messaging before you start them. (For instance, video may involve too much post-production to re-do, and so you may want to wait for final messaging.)
Deliver pre-announcement briefings. To anyone writing companion pieces, internally or externally, as well as to media sites interested in writing about your news.

And so on… most of this at this point is “PR 101” in how you gear up for an announcement.

UNLEASHING THE WAVE

At the designated time and date, ideally your news release goes out over the wire… your own blog posts appear… your video is live on YouTube… and the stories start appearing.

Some of this you can prepare in advance. Most blogging platforms let you schedule posts. Videos can be uploaded to YouTube and set to be private (which then also gives you the URL you can add into the wire service when setting your news release to go). Other content can be ready in offline editors for posting. Regardless, there will be work to do to make it all start flowing.

Once it starts, you need to make sure you have a tweet (or several) going out in Twitter, a message going out on your Facebook fan page, in Friendfeed and any other services you use.

After that, it’s engaging in the conversation in the real-time media, responding to comments, retweeting other stories you see appearing, and all the other things we do these days.

MEASURING THE WAVE

It should go without saying that if you are going to put this much work into preparing for a release, you need to understand in advance how you are going to measure the results. What kind of web analytics do you have available to you? Can you include custom (and therefore trackable) URLs in your pieces? Can you use URL shorteners like bit.ly that can track usage?

At a higher level… do you have an idea of what constitutes success?

Entire blogs and blog posts are written on the subject of measurement – be sure you have a plan.

PREPARING FOR PROBLEMS

What happens if someone runs with the story before you are ready? What happens if your video doesn’t work? Or your web site goes down? Or one of the companion web sites? All the usual concerns you need to think about…

IN THE END

If you do this right… with a compelling story… an solid “package” of complementary materials… good headlines, etc., the opportunity is there to see this “attention wave” pass through the real-time aspects of the web today and generate some coverage. If it works well, you may indeed see the wave grow for a while.

There are no guarantees, of course. You may do all of this and at the time you go live there is some major disaster… or some celebrity action… (or Apple product release)… or something to divert attention away from you. But your odds of getting attention are way better than when you were thinking of just issuing that one news release.

THOUGHTS?

This way of thinking about what we are aiming to do as an “attention wave” works for me… but I am curious to hear your thoughts, feedback, criticism and opinions.

What do you think of all this? Do you think this is realistic? Unrealistic? A good way to think about the process? Or just the same basic stuff PR has been aiming for but given a slightly different spin? Any pieces I’m missing above?

Have you used a process similar to this in the past? How did it work for you? What problems did you run into?

Have you seen particular companies, organizations or brands that have stood out in your mind for using a process like this? Anyone specific – or any specific announcement – stand out in your mind? Pointers to examples left in the comments would be greatly appreciated.

Any other comments or feedback?

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Re-examining how I use Facebook – and again the blurring of our lives

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Who do you “friend” on Facebook? And how do you resolve the tension between private and public interaction?

It’s funny how synchronicity works some times. Last week I was thinking about writing a post about how my use of Facebook has changed – or perhaps will change… when a note in my Twitter feed pointed me to a post from Michael Hyatt called “Re-Thinking My Facebook Strategy” which hit many of the points I was thinking about writing.

MICHAEL HYATT’S DILEMMA

Hyatt, who is CEO of Thomas Nelson, Inc, hits one of the central dilemmas relating to our online networking – the incredibly loose way in which we use the word “friend”. Leaving aside all the English teachers rolling over in their graves at the way we are now using “friend” as a verb (ex. “I wasn’t sure if I should friend him.”), Hyatt provides a useful taxonomy of the types of people we interact with online:

Family: These are the people who are related by blood or by marriage. I have occasionally been too loose with term, too. I have used it to refer to close personal friends or even the “Thomas Nelson family.” But I don’t think this is accurate or helpful. It creates the illusion of something that is not true. From now on, I am going to use this word as it was intended.
Friends: These are the people I know in real life. They are people I have met face-to-face, enjoy being around, and interact with in real life. (These three elements are key.) Frankly, a few of these relationships started off online through Twitter. Over time, they grew and developed. Regardless, I have a few deep and significant friendships. But if I am honest, I don’t have many. I only have so much time available.
Acquaintances: These are people I have met online or off. I may know their name or even their face. We may even have been friends at some point in the past, but we don’t have an ongoing relationship. We only know one another at a superficial level, and that’s just fine. We just have to be clear that these are not are “friends.”
Fans: These are the people who know my public persona or my work. This is also where people get confused because the relationship is not mutual. For example, I am a fan of Chris Brogan. We have even met once. I know lots of stuff about him, because of his blog and Twitter posts. This creates the illusion of intimacy. If I am not careful, however, I could fool myself into thinking I have a relationship with Chris. I don’t. I’m just one of his many fans.

Hyatt goes on to discuss his decision to only keep as “friends” on Facebook his family and actual “friends”. His acquaintances and friends he has moved over to a newly-created Fan Page within Facebook. Through this exercise, he has gone from having 2,200 “friends” on Facebook to down to 100. He notes these lessons:

You have to understand the difference between friends, acquaintances, and fans.

If I try to be everyone’s friend, I will be no one’s friend. I must be deliberate and selective.
I will probably offend some of the people I unfriended. That’s okay. My sanity and real friends are more important than meeting the expectations of fans and acquaintances.
I need to be very careful who I accept as a friend on my profile going forward. Just based on mouse clicks, it’s three times as much work to unfriend someone as friend them.

The comments to both this post and Hyatt’s earlier post about his dilemma make for interesting reading. How we relate to each other in online sites like Facebook is in my mind a key part of how we build our online identities as we all live in this increasingly interconnected space. As I wrote about back in January 2009 in a post “The blurring of our lives: Does learning info about co-workers via Facebook improve connections? Or feel creepy?“, the different contexts in which we have traditionally interacted with people are all crashing together. The larger ramifications of this on a cultural level are still to be determined.

MY OWN CASE

Now I’m obviously not the CEO of a publishing company and don’t have quite the high public profile that Michael Hyatt has. But I do have a public profile… through my various online sites and blogs, my weekly reports into the FIR podcast, my fairly heavy use of Twitter, my very public persona for Voxeo in blogs and Twitter and various other ways that I generate content online. Will all of that online extroversion do come the many Facebook connections (and connection requests) from so many people. Through all of that, I’ve made some wonderful connections – many of which started online and grew to include face-to-face meetings at various conferences or events. Some of those relationships have remained entirely online but have grown to become what I would consider true friendships.

And yet in other cases I’ve received connection requests from people who “follow” me in some context… perhaps Twitter… perhaps FIR… perhaps my various blogs… and I haven’t really known how to handle them.

Now I’ve always applied fairly stringent criteria to whom I accept connection/friend requests from on both Facebook and LinkedIn. A number of years ago, I wrote about how “promiscuous linking” weakened the “web of trust” within services like LinkedIn. And I’ve applied that in LinkedIn very strongly… with perhaps only 1 or 2 exceptions that were accepted in moments of weakness, I know personally and have interacted in some capacity with the 500+ contacts I have in LinkedIn. I don’t accept someone’s connection request unless I do know them.

On Facebook, it’s been similar: I’ve been fairly stringent about who I accept as a “friend” – although I admit that in the early days I was a bit more open. I joined Facebook several years back shortly after it had been opened up beyond the college/university crowd and there was a good-sized group of us trying to figure out what this Facebook thing was all about – and also how it could or could not be used for business communication. So for a while, I was accepting many friend requests from people I knew only peripherally, many of whom Hyatt would have termed acquaintances at best and perhaps really more “fans”. Add to that… all the people I know who are friends, but are friends from different contexts… and it gets interesting.

In the words of Facebook… “It’s complicated.”

MY CHANGING USAGE OF FACEBOOK

Along the way, I’ve found that the way I use Facebook has changed somewhat dramatically. In the earlier days, I was exploring it mostly as a business communication tool. My updates… my applications… my notes… all of them were much more business-focused. (And many of my friends probably view my newsfeed today as mainly that… although I can assure them it was more so in the past.)

But somewhere along the way… perhaps sometime after I made my abortive attempt to connect my Twitter firehose directly into my Facebook status updates for a few weeks (resulting example (one of many): “Dan, we are friends, but man, your updates are killing me – you’re making up over 90% of my news feed!“), I found that I wanted to use Facebook differently.

I have found that I want to retreat inside the walled garden of Facebook (even while despising walled gardens and fearing for the future of the open Internet)… that I want to share more private information with a smaller group… that I want to share photos, perhaps even of family… that I want to engage in deeper conversations with people I know well – and through that come to know them better.

In part, I’ll credit my wife for some of this change. An artist whose eyes routinely glaze over when discussion turns to the online world I live in, she resisted joining Facebook for ages. When she finally did recently, though, she became a very active user… and in watching her interactions I saw more of the possibility for deeper interaction. It’s been fascinating, really, to see how she uses it.

THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DILEMMA

My challenge, of course, is similar to Michael Hyatt’s: How do you create a private space in which to have deeper interaction while also simultaneously nourishing and expanding/growing your public persona and public interactions?

Like Hyatt and many of those commenting to his posts, I have a VERY deep and strong aversion to Facebook’s terminology of a “Fan Page”. I’m NOT a celebrity. I want people to be able to interact with me publicly… yet I don’t want them to have to use the bizarre terminology of calling themselves a “fan” of me.

It’s the word “fan” that gives me the most trouble.

Being a “fan” has an implied endorsement… a positive feeling. You are a fan of someone or something… you like it… you support it… you endorse it. It makes me uncomfortable.

The “follower” term of Twitter or “subscriber” term of Friendfeed are far less emotionally loaded.

Perhaps if Facebook, in their current lust to become Twitter, could move to talking about “Public Pages” and letting people “subscribe” instead of become a “fan”, those of us uncomfortable with the current terms might more readily make use of the function within Facebook.

SO… WHAT TO DO?

I don’t know.

I do know that probably in the last year or so, I’ve become even more stringent in who I accept as a Facebook “friend”. My criteria has become:

Do I know this person well?
Do I know them well enough that I am comfortable sharing with them personal information about myself?

If the answer to either is “no”, then I either “ignore” the request or, in some cases, just park the request in my “Requests” area of Facebook waiting to make a decision.

This has from time to time put me in the uncomfortable situation where there have been people with whom I have peripherally interacted – and with whom I would perhaps like to interact more with – but with whom I don’t yet have that comfort level. For those folks, I’ve perhaps tried to interact with them more on Twitter, where through @replies you can interact with people very easily without needing an established relationship.

As noted above, I don’t like the “Fan Page” idea… and so I still don’t know how to interact with those who want to engage with my public persona – and with whom I would definitely like to interact in that persona.

Or is perhaps the whole idea of private versus public interaction one I need to simply discard when it comes to Facebook?

We do, indeed, live in interesting times… and sorting out all these different ways of how we interact with each other in this blurred world will definitely take some time.

What do you do? If you have a public face, how have you separated your private versus public interaction in Facebook? Or have you not?

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“United Breaks Guitars” took far less than a year to hit 1 million views!

Is “family identity” dead? (In a communications form)

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Is the concept of “family identity” dead in terms of communications?

As I was thinking about my talk tonight over the weekend and how the ways in which we communicate are changing, one of the themes that kept emerging was what I’d call “The Death of Family Identity”.

Think about it… once upon a time, there were primarily two ways that people would communicate with members of a household (outside of the obvious one of knocking on the front door):

Postal mail
Telephone

In both cases, there was one “address” for the family… either the postal address or the phone number. In either case, you could contact “the Yorks”, for instance, by sending a letter to the address or by calling the family phone number. The mail or phone might be picked up by any member of the family, but it could be shared or passed along to other members of the family. Mom, dad, brothers, sisters, friends or whomever lived there… anyone could potentially see the mail or get the phone call.

YOU HAVE REACHED “THE YORKS”

Let’s take the phone. My parents have had the same phone number for 35 years. Growing up, anyone could have called that number and reached either of my parents, myself or my brother. That was the number to call us on. Period. End of story. And while there were certainly some disadvantages to this approach… busy signals (pre-call-waiting), messages not being delivered, people listening in on extensions… there was also a solid sense of “identity”. You could leave a message there and someone in the family would get it. If it was urgent, someone could try other ways to reach the person – or could provide info about where the person was.

Fast forward to today… mobile phones are ubiquitous and traditional “landlines” are being shed at a rapid pace. As today’s mobile-phone-using college generation starts to buy homes, will any of them actually bother with a landline? What’s the point? The mobile phone lets you receive your calls wherever you are. No more messages that aren’t communicated to you by a family member… no more busy signals because your sibling is on the phone…

Personally, I wouldn’t invest in the landline biz… sure, many of those who have them in their houses today will keep them until you pry the handset out of their cold, dead fingers… but that’s a market that’s capped. And many of us who have them may move… if I can eventually figure out a solution for fax and 911, I’ll probably cut the cord, too.

But let’s think about that in terms of “family identity”:

Mobile numbers are individual – Each person has a mobile phone. Mom, dad, brother, sister… everyone has their own phone with their own number. For families who have “cut the cord”, how do you just leave a message for the family? Say you want to invite them over for dinner… how do you just leave a general message? You can’t… you have to call one of the individuals. Or maybe you call a couple. (Or maybe you just text them all.) It’s no longer simple.
Mobile phones are less reliable – Your ability to reach the family members assumes, of course, that their mobile phones are reachable. Batteries die and need to be recharged. Phones are lost. Someone is traveling in an area with bad coverage (recall that I live in the wireless backwater known as the United States). Voicemail messages may not be delivered in a timely fashion. None of these were generally issues with traditional landlines.
Mobile phone numbers change – How many mobile phone numbers have you had in the last, say, five years? Some of you may still have the same numbers, but odds are most of you reading this have gone through several numbers. Either because you switch carriers and cannot move your number… or it’s just too much of a pain in the neck and it’s just easier to get a new one. Or you wanted that shiny new phone that another carrier had and so you wound up with two mobile phones? Regardless of the reason, there is more churn in mobile numbers. Anyone seriously think they’ll have the same mobile phone number for 35 years?

So in a world without home landlines, how do you reach “the Yorks”? Sure, you could set up a “family number” through an abstraction layer like Google Voice that would ring all family phones… but how many people are actually going to do this?

SNAIL MAIL

Do I even need to discuss it? When was the last time any of you reading this wrote an actual “letter” to someone and mailed it in the postal service? When is the last time you received a personal letter?

Messages are sent online… either through “e-mail” or IM or increasingly through services like Facebook, etc. And all of those media have the same issues as mobile phones: they are almost always individual, they are less reliable, they change.

Gone are the days of the sending a letter to “The Yorks”. Now you have to cc a bunch of email addresses and hope they all get there… or rely on someone in the family to send it to everyone.

(And sure, some of us, myself included, still engage in this quaint, anachronistic custom of sending “Christmas cards” to a family, but even there I’ve increasingly seen friends and family reciprocating with “e-cards”… that time is probably limited, too.)

SO DO WE CARE?

Is “family identity” dead in our brave new online world of 2009? Does it matter? Are we better of with the convenience we have today and the ways we have to connect as individuals?

I don’t know the answer. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s just another aspect of the changing fabric of our society where we don’t yet understand the full ramifications as we continue our evolution into the cloud… Part of me feels like we are losing something… but the pattern isn’t fully clear.

What do you think?

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