By Josh Cline
Ever since the search-engine giant Google acquired Waze this week for $1 billion reportedly to bolster its planned makeover of Google Maps (and likely to prevent competitors from gaining the app’s crowd-sourced data on live traffic conditions), the mobile-app industry has enclosed itself in a bubble of inflated expectations that is filled to the bursting point with entrepreneurial delusions of grandeur.
In my 25 years as a PR and media-relations practitioner, it never ceases to amaze me how many companies don’t completely understand the “pact” of cooperation that’s required once they sign on with a PR firm. Perhaps it’s because the company has no previous experience with how PR works, or maybe it’s because it is not explained properly enough. But please know from our perspective, this can’t be stressed enough. Once you hire a PR firm, it’s critical to work with them in building the foundation of a successful campaign.
By Josh Cline
For the past 15 years, I have worked for more than 100 companies, mostly in the emerging business and start-up technology worlds, helping them to reach their utmost potential. From my years both at large agencies and working in-house, I have learned the keys to success. People who know me well will recognize the short examples below and the crucial lessons they teach on how marketing and public-relations professionals at agencies should act.
By Josh Cline
As technological innovations occur at an ever-increasing rate, marketers often develop unrealistic expectations because they think that each new gadget or medium has made all of the previous communications strategies obsolete.
Far from it. For example, social media is a form of public relations and not some heaven-sent technology that has changed everything, and as such, it and other online-marketing methods need to incorporate traditional best-practices from the beginning. It is crucial not to throw decades of communications knowledge out the digital window. Companies today need to ignore the so-called “hype cycles” that occur in all new marketing mediums and methods, instead understanding that classic communications theory never changes.
By Josh Cline
Over the past five years, many public-relations professionals (some have called them publicists) became “social-media gurus” overnight, writing books and helping to spin what social-media marketing and SEO allegedly really are. Then, they became “digital-marketing specialists” or gave themselves other titles. Eventually, many woke up and realized again that, in the end, they are still marketing and communication specialists. Several have written three or more books since 2007 to regain their places as true marketing professionals.
By Samuel Scott
At one point in my career, I was hired to manage the digital marketing for a particular Israeli start-up, which would ultimately end up folding over two months later due to a lack of successful fundraising. During this period of time, the CEO had asked me to create an Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint for promising investors on the potential for market penetration.
Supposedly, the start-up had had a way to convert speech to text in some new, exciting manner (the product would automatically transcribe voicemail and then send it to you over e-mail or text message), and the goal, I was told, was to exit by selling to Google. First, however, they needed to obtain investment and subsequently show successful sales and usage within various test markets.
Note: This is the first part in a series.
In 2008, Forrester Vice Presidents Carlene Li and Josh Bernoff published “Groundswell,” a revolutionary book about business and marketing in what was then the beginning of the mainstreaming of social media. Four years later, their thoughts have not only become predicative of the growing trend of social media but have become essential for understanding the greater context in marketing and public relations.
The nutshell: For practically any product or service, there are thousands, if not millions, of Internet users who would love nothing more than to become unknowing brand ambassadors and help to spread the digital word. You just need to locate and then inspire them.
Note: This is the third part in an ongoing series. Parts one and two.
By Samuel Scott
Social media is all about the “social.” On Twitter, you want to converse not only with influencers and journalists but also with current and potential customers. On LinkedIn, you want to brand both yourself and your company as experts in your particular sector while still participating in group discussions and LinkedIn Answers.
On Facebook, however, the rules have changed. Now, the social-network giant has set its sights on establishing its monetary benefits. (More on that later.)
