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Say What? Five Quick Scripts for Responding to Customer Complaints
Corporate Communications… By Ron Kaufman, author, “Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet”
The last thing a customer with a complaint wants to hear you say is: “You’re wrong.” What they want to hear is that you understand them, appreciate them, and agree with them on the importance of the value they have cited in their complaint. Here are a few quick scripts to use when responding to customer complaints: Customer Complaint: Rude Service Your customer says: “Your staff was rude and totally unprofessional.” You say: “You are right to expect courteous, respectful, and professional staff.”
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Leaping Across the Gap: 5 Helpful Tips For Rebranding Via Social Media
Social Media Zone… By Vicki Flaugher aka @smartwoman
Shift happens. We all know this. When you work in PR and Marketing, taking extensive amounts of time meticulously crafting a focused brand, change kind of sucks. No getting around it, it just does. Beyond the costs of changing letterhead, logos, and more, there is the audience impact – how will your current fans dig the new look and feel? Will they rebel like some brands have experienced? Will they embrace the new? Or worst perhaps of all – will they simply ignore it and not even notice?
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Quora Founder Departs Days After Platform Fails Paul Ryan
By Critical Mention for the Critical Now Channel
Whether the two are related, only Charlie Cheever knows. But the departure of Quora’s co-founder followed by just days an embarrassing lack of performance by the Q&A site for Republican VP hopeful Paul Ryan. We wrote earlier in the week about the dismal lack of engagement on Quora by voters reading Ryan’s post, and noted that Ryan himself failed to respond to the smattering of responses. The official acknowledgement that Cheever, a Harvard grad with ties to Facebook, was stepping down was contained in the post “Charlie Cheever: What is Charlie Cheever’s status at Quora as of September 11th, 2012?”
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An Introduction to Public Relations Research, Measurement and Evaluation: Proving Value and Improving Performance
Google+ Hangout On Air…In The Green Room With Mark Weiner, CEO, PRIME Research
Welcome to PRIME Time … A series of free, online discussions about the ongoing challenge about proving the value of public relations. In this session, participants will learn the basics of research but, more importantly, how to go “beyond the numbers” to refocus attention from “why measure” to “how to apply research, measurement and evaluation” for the purposes of enabling better business decision-making; generating a positive return-on-PR-investment; and improving performance over time, versus competitors and in light of best-practice.
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Are McDonald’s New Calorie Postings More Than Just PR?
NPR
Shortly after McDonald’s announced today that it would begin posting the calorie count of its offerings on menu boards, the anti-Big-Mac forces were out, questioning the global burger chain’s motives. First came a message from Corporate Accountability International, which describes itself as “a coalition of public policy leaders, elected officials, parents and more than 2,500 health professionals and institutions [that] have been putting pressure on McDonald’s to provide complete, accurate and non-promotional information about the health risks of its food.” According to the group’s statement: Sara Deon, Value [the] Meal campaign director at Corporate Accountability International, has this to say about the announcement: “This move is purely PR spin. McDonald’s wants to paint itself as a leader, but in truth, regulations that appear in the Affordable Care Act will soon require McDonald’s to implement these changes. To truly address its health impact, McDonald’s must heed the tens of thousands of people who are calling on the burger giant to make more fundamental, far-reaching changes. The corporation must stop the egregious, targeted marketing of its unhealthy brand to children, and go further to mitigate its impact on our children’s health.”
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Nokia’s Misleading Lumia 920 Ads Create an Ugly PR Picture
Daily Finance
“There was no intention to mislead … we apologize for the misunderstanding.” So said a Nokia (NOK) spokesperson in response to revelations that marketing materials for its forthcoming Lumia 920 smartphone were, at best, misleading. The terms “fake,” “fraudulent,” and “deceptive” were used by some outlets covering the cellular scandal. Whatever you call it, this kind of publicity is the last thing the mobile-handset giant needs right now. There are two marketing pieces in question for Nokia: • Shaky camera-work attribution: The first is a video that was released on YouTube promoting the new mobile phone, featuring footage presumably shot by the built-in new PureView camera. The PureView camera is designed with technology to stabilize images: to make them more professional in appearance. As it turns out, the footage was more than just professional in appearance: It was actually professionally shot, with a significantly more substantial video camera and professional lighting. • Fuzzy snapshot sources: The second item of contention is some still photography that was highlighted in Nokia marketing materials …
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The Three Groups Who Control Google
Business 2 Community
Lately Google has seemed a little scary and all-powerful to Internet marketers, especially those who consider themselves organic or inbound marketers. The search engine is often viewed as an emotionless machine that can make or break your rankings with one line of code. I’ve heard it compared to the mafia and, my favorite, the evil Empire from Star Wars. But there’s really no reason to be scared. The reality is that Google has far less control than most may think. Its search business model forces the company to be a puppet to three groups. If Google ever loses sight of these three puppet masters, it’ll be the last line of code the company writes. I’m sure Bing wouldn’t mind. Before you read any further, let me preface this post by saying that it’s about search engine optimization: not the dead kind, but the most powerful common sense SEO that’s ever existed. Something magical has happened over the last few years: the Empire finally got it right. Today, the same strategies that win at SEO also win at every other Internet marketing channel that matters.
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Looking Beyond the Marketing ‘Hype’: iPhone5 — First Impressions of Apple’s New Bigger, Faster Phone
ABC
When you follow rumors and reports about one piece of technology for months, you hear a lot of hype. And I mean a lot of hype. This phone — the iPhone 5 — is going to be the phone of all phones. It’s going to be so much faster than anything else. It’s going to make the old iPhone look like my Mini Disc player from middle school. On Wednesday, Apple did in fact release the iPhone 5, and after all those months of rumors, it was exactly what we thought it would be. It has a new design, a larger 4-inch display, a new dock connector, LTE, a faster processor, and Apple’s new iOS 6 operating system. But when I finally got it in my hand, did it live up to the months of hype? The first thing I noticed about the phone was not the bigger screen, but actually the modified design. The thinner body and aluminum back plate are enough go give it an entirely new aesthetic, and there’s only one way to say it: It’s beautiful.
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iPhone5 Release Pushes Facebook Stock Higher
Reuters
Facebook Inc. surged as much as 8.9 percent, on track for a record gain, after Apple Inc. said the iPhone 5 has a built-in application for the social network that enables photo sharing and voice-activated posts. Facebook gained 6.7 percent to $20.71 at 2:04 p.m. in New York as its prominence on the iPhone 5 debuted Wednesday bolstered efforts by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to allay concerns over its ability to generate sales from users who increasingly socialize over handheld devices. The stock had plunged 49 percent since the May 17 initial public offering. “Now we are a mobile company,” Zuckerberg said in an on- stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco Tuesday, his first since Facebook’s IPO.
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SEC Study: Retail Investors Lack Financial Liiteracy
Fierce Finance
As directed by Section 917 of Dodd-Frank, the SEC has published its “Study Regarding Financial Literacy Among Investors,” which comes to the conclusion that retail investors aren’t all that financially literate and that the industry could do much better explaining various fees and other disclosures. The study’s conclusions really aren’t anything new. For as long as I can remember, people have been discussing the public’s relative lack of financial literacy and what should be done about it. What is new is the environment in which the study was conducted. These are tough times and the retail investment crowd has taken a step back from the market. While the study has some interesting things to say about fee disclosure and how companies ought to go about it and about literacy in general, it would be a stretch to suggest that raising the level of financial understanding and disclosing fees would really make a huge difference
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The Impact of Values and Culture on CSR
Forbes
Most of what I’ve written for Forbes over the last year has focused on a global view of the social purpose of business. Recently, however, I started wondering about the ways in which CSR varies based on the country where a corporation is located. In what ways do the elements of CSR change based on where it’s practiced? Is there a unique approach to corporate social responsibility that differs from one country to the next? In what ways does the social purpose of a business reflect the values and culture of the country (or countries) where it operates? I recognize that these are big questions and I thought it would be appropriate to begin exploring this where I live in Canada. I also felt it was important to get a perspective from very different types of businesses. Leaders from four remarkable companies in Canada shared their point of view. All felt strongly that Canadian culture has shaped their social purpose and approach to CSR. “Canadian culture has long been influenced by our relationship to the environment and energy has long played a significant role in the Canadian story of that relationship,” said Tom Heintzman, President of Bullfrog Power a company that is founded on a belief that consumers have a unique ability to change the world.
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Finding the Business Value in Big Data is a Big Problem
Computerworld
PHOENIX — For all the promise of big data, the fundamental challenge with collecting massive volumes of data from different sources is finding new business uses for it, according to several IT managers at Computerworld’s BI & Analytics Perspectives event held here this week. Technology vendors and industry analysts tout the enormous business benefits that enterprises can gain from mashing up traditional structured data with unstructured data from the cloud, mobile devices, social media channels and other sources. But business executives have little idea of how to take advantage of big data or how to articulate their requirements to IT, according to several executives at the show. Business leaders often “don’t know what they don’t know,” said one frustrated IT manager, and therefore they are incapable of explaining to IT shops what to do with all this data that’s being accumulated.
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TV, Radio Ad Spend in Local Markets on Rise
Mediapost
Local advertising by retailers will grow their online share of marketing — as well as on TV, radio and local cable by 2016 — while direct response and newspaper budgets will continue to decline. BIA/Kelsey says retailers will spend $4.2 billion this year in online marketing — including mobile — a 13% share out of an estimated $26.8 billion in all local TV advertising spent by retailers. This will climb to a 16% share in three years. Local TV broadcast’s share will rise to 8.4% from 7.9% in 2013 for retailers; radio going to 10.8% from 10.2%; and local cable TV, to 2.6% from 2.5%; and out-of-home, 2.9% from 2.6%. Mobile advertising will more than double to 2.1% share from 1% by the end of 2013.
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Consumers 27 Times More Likely To Click-Through Online Video Ads Than Standard Banners
Daily Markets
MediaMind, a division of DG (NASDAQ:DGIT), announced today that the click-through rate (CTR) for online video is 27.4 times that of standard banners and almost 12 times that of rich media ads, the company revealed in its research on online video. In an analysis of over 3 billion ad impressions globally over the first six months of 2012, the MediaMind study, shows an increase in consumer attention to online video in ads. As the advertising industry adapts the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) and Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) standards, set by the IAB, this news will resonate with advertisers hungry for real figures to support the buzz of online video effectiveness. “We have seen the increased importance of video interactivity from marketers and agencies and this research underscores why. As key pillars of the IAB Video Suite, VAST and VPAID allow the marketing community to drive true engagement with vital creative experiences through video messaging,” said Seneca Mudd, Director, Industry Services and Head of the Digital Video Committee, IAB.
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