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RFP FAQ for Businesses: How Do I Create a Strong RFP for Agency Work?
By Laura Alvarado, Director of Marketing, O’Neill and Associates
A request for proposal, or RFP, is a document drawn up by a company that wants a product or service and outlines the specific criteria it is looking for. As a result, the company will receive proposals from vendors or firms that are interested in the work. Sending out an RFP for communications or public relations work can be a great way for organizations to find a firm that can address these needs expertly and cost-efficiently.
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Really, It’s Just a Ratio: Secrets of Communicating Financials for IROs, CCOs and Business Pros
By Randall Bolten, Founder, Lucidity; Author, “Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You”
If you’re an investor relations professional, you have a tough job. Great companies often have complex financials and novel business models, and the investors you’re trying to reach have many companies they’re following, too little time, and competing demands for their attention. Communicating the basic points about a hot company to a distracted audience isn’t easy – especially when your target audience can’t remember last quarter’s numbers or don’t want to do complex arithmetic in their heads.
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Back to School: Social and Video Media in Education Offer a Snapshot of Future Tools
By Bryan Kaminsky for Latergy’s Social Video Channel
What does the future of business communications look like? The answer isn’t down the hall in your conference room or the next AE’s cubicle. It’s at school. That’s because today’s students are tomorrow’s hires – and the tools they use both in school and in their daily lives are the tools your future employees and clients will be using. So, exactly what does social and video media look like in today’s classroom? Luckily for you, I know firsthand. Here’s my take:
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ROI: The Miami Debate
By Prime Research for the PR ROI Channel
Measurement and evaluation of communications is an enduring discussion in public relations research and practice. Recently, there has been a move to adopt business and management concepts and language in order to demonstrate the outcomes of PR activity and to demonstrate the creation of value to organizations, brands and reputation.
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Email Marketing Tip #5: Personalize Your Emails
By WhatCounts for the Effective Email Marketing Channel
You’ve heard this before, but many marketers still overlook this fundamental rule: Add a personal touch to your emails by using personalization. For example, when distributing mass emails, make sure your system will allow you to personalize…
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China’s Space Program a PR Success: Nation Plans to Launch First Female Astronaut This Month
sfgate.com
China’s recent Tiangong missions have proven to be a public relations success for the nation, but it is now preparing for another manned space flight set for June. Chinese space agency officials announced Friday that they will launch another manned mission to low-Earth orbit, the latest such mission for the world’s most populous nation.
Officials say that Chinese astronauts this month will attempt to dock for the first time with an orbiting experimental module. The mission is the latest step in China’s attempt to launch a manned mission to the moon, which the country announced as its main objective late last year. In addition, the crew might include its first female space traveler, a government news agency said Saturday …
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Political PR Gone Too Far? Obama Aides Helped Plan Ads to Back Health Bill
Bloomberg
House Republicans say a drugmaker- funded advertising campaign run by supposedly independent groups was part of an agreement with the Obama administration to help pass the U.S. health-care law in 2010.
Republicans are using e-mails and memos to agitate against the overhaul ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the law’s constitutionality, due later this month. The correspondence involved White House aides, drugmaker lobbyists and Democratic strategists as they built support for the law.
The documents, just releaed, suggest presidential aides helped plan a $150 million advertising campaign paid for by the drug industry. The advertisers were seemingly independent groups created by the lobbyists in consultation with strategists linked to the administration, the memos suggest …
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Olympics 2012 Marketing Hype Sees Growing Backlash in UK
The Guardian UK
The soggy jubilee bunting has barely been hauled down, but Her Majesty’s subjects are already being bombarded by wall-to-wall Olympics marketing guff, plastered over hours of telly advertising, acres of billboards, and even the labels on milk bottles.
Judging by the advertising onslaught, the Olympic dream has little to do with rippling athleticism or heroic sporting endeavour, and everything to do with flogging washing powder and sausage and egg McMuffins.
Each tale of corporate absurdity–from Visa insisting that every cash machine in every Olympic venue be replaced with its own branded ATMs, to the tiny “Olympic cafe” forced to change its name lest customers queuing for a bacon sandwich confuse it with the real thing–is a reminder that, putting on a major sporting event means handing over a humiliating amount of control to multinationals whose main raison d’etre is not promoting sporting prowess …
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Pew Research: Daily Twitter Usage Among Online Adults Doubles
Business 2 Community
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of February 2012, some 15% of online adults use Twitter, and 8% do so on a typical day. Overall Twitter adoption remains steady, as the 15% of online adults who use Twitter is similar to the 13% of such adults who did so in May 2011. At the same time, the proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled since May 2011 and has quadrupled since late 2010 – at that point just 2% of online adults used Twitter on a typical day. The rise of smartphones might account for some of the uptick in usage because smartphone users are particularly likely to be using Twitter. Other key findings from the study: African-Americans continue to use Twitter at very high rates – 28% of online African-Americans are Twitter adopters, and 13% use the service on a typical day. Usage by young internet users (those 18-24 years old) increased dramatically over the last year, with nearly one in three now using Twitter …
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Apple’s Former Ad Man Advises IR Pros to Stick to Minimize Your Messaging
IR Cafe
Ken Segall, a creative ad man who worked with Steve Jobs through the heyday of building the Apple brand, has an idea worth considering in investor relations: Minimize your messaging. Segall came up with the “i” in the iMac brand (which led to iPod, iPhone, iPad …) and worked on memorable campaigns for Apple and other leading companies. Segall spoke Thursday at the Mid-America Corporate Growth Conference hosted by Association for Corporate Growth in Kansas City. When talking to investors, our temptation in IR is to unleash a tsunami of facts. More details in the earnings release, more slides, more bullet points, more pages. We want to overwhelm doubts by flooding people with every piece of information. But perhaps less is more …
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Economy Growth Gauge Falls in Latest Week, But Bernanke Says Fed Ready
Reuters
A measure of future economic growth fell in the latest week and the growth rate weakened on an annualized basis, a research group said on Friday.
The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Leading Index fell to 121.6 in the week ended June 1 from 122.3 the previous week.
The index’s annualized growth rate fell to minus 2.0 percent from a revised minus 0.7 percent a week earlier. It was originally reported at minus 0.6 percent. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday the U.S. central bank was ready to shield the economy if financial troubles mount, but offered few hints that further monetary stimulus was imminent.
Bernanke told Congress the Fed was monitoring “significant risks” to the U.S. recovery from Europe’s debt and banking crisis closely …
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New Research Reveals Banning Email in the Workplace Wrong Approach
Sacramento Bee
Results of the 2012 Work-Related Email Perception Study, “Enough Already! Stop Bad Email,” show that while middle managers typically spend 2.5 work weeks (100 hours) a year on irrelevant email, they don’t want their ability to use email taken away or interrupted at any time of the day or night. They do, however, want policies that could help reduce the overwhelming volume of irrelevant email. Findings reveal: Executives (84 percent), middle managers (83 percent), and employees (77 percent) overwhelmingly agree email is an effective and necessary communication tool. Only 8 percent of executives, 15 percent of middle managers, and 11 percent of employees said limiting email during normal business hours would be very effective. Only 11 percent of executives, 20 percent of middle managers and 13 percent of employees said limiting email outside normal business hours would be very effective …
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Crisis Communications: Nasdaq Not Following Script in Follow-Up to Facebook Stock Debut
Mercury News
It’s crisis communications 101 for Corporate America: when a company bungles an event as big as the Facebook IPO, alienates customers, and spawns lawsuits and regulatory inquiries, the CEO apologizes and agrees to provide compensation to make things right. Everyone can then move on.
Not so at Nasdaq OMX Group, where technology glitches and a communications breakdown marred Facebook’s $16 billion initial public offering on May 18.
Since then, the exchange has done little to conciliate market making clients – a number of which lost tens of millions of dollars each due to the trading problems. There has been no outright apology. And as angry as some customers may be, experts say they have little alternative but to keep trading on the exchange.
And they have. Nasdaq’s trading volume this week is above the monthly average, and its share price is nearly unchanged two weeks after the trading glitch …
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comScore Study Refutes Reuters: Facebook Ads Actually Work Great
Digital Journal
comScore says it will soon release a report, entitled “The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works,” which shows that ads on Facebook are, in fact, effective. The report directly refutes a Reuters poll, which claimed that four out of five Facebook users “have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments” on Facebook. The problem with such a poll, according to comScore VP Lipsman, is that people are bad at recalling why they made a particular purchase, which explains why such a high percentage said Facebook ads have nothing to do with what they buy. Lipsman says that reports that users are spending less time on Facebook are also inaccurate, as they too rely on survey data, unlike comScore’s “behavioral measurement of engagement,” through which “time spent on sites is electronically and passively observed.” Using this method, comScore found that the opposite is true – “time spent per user is actually up a few percent” now compared to six months ago …
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Obama Campaign Sheds Traditional Model, Bets Big on Digital Advertising
The Atlantic
The Obama campaign is shedding the traditional campaign model and focusing its advertising efforts on the Internet, a gamble that could help them write the book on how candidates engage their base online. They’ve already spent more on digital advertising for this campaign than in 2008. Obama’s created a, “holistic, totally in-house digital operation.” One campaign official told Politico, “digital is no longer a part of the campaign. It is the campaign.” They’re using information pulled from Facebook and Twitter to help steer the messages they send out to certain demographics to earn the best response. They have full-time digital directors in about a dozen battleground states to help focus their message there. Requests for small donations, sometimes as low as $3, have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the campaign, and provided a wealth of information for the campaign …
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