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RNC Report Card: The Speeches, the Sound Bytes and the Strategy for this Week’s DNC
Public Relations….By Doug Simon, President & CEO, & Mike Bako, Marketing Manager, D S Simon Productions
Before and after Clint Eastwood turned the Republican National Convention into comedic red meat for every late night host and social media user there were important speeches delivered and yet to be delivered to the attendees and audience watching at home. On the first night of the convention those listening got the Republican version of a both ends of the speech spectrum.
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Is Silo Busting Hopeless or am I Just Tired? 3 Indications that Resistance is Futile
Social Media Zone… By Vicki Flaugher aka @smartwoman
One of our goals here at commPRO.biz is to reach across the boundaries between the traditional silos of PR, Advertising, Marcom and the rest of the world, as well as between each of those disciplines. We have purposely tried to push boundaries, both here at Social Media Zone and throughout the publication. Silo busting is hard work, me thinks. From the extended conversations about the definition of PR and the occasional sharp barb from traditionalists about my insistence on social media’s place…
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Framing a Digital Story for Your Brand
Marketing… By Josh Rosenberg, SVP/Director, FirstWord Digital
Every day we see hundreds of images in our social network feeds that make us take notice –from our friends’ vacation candids to brilliantly edited videos to those hilarious cat memes. It’s no surprise that the way we take in information these days is in short, visual bursts. The proof is in the social networks themselves –with the rise of image-based platforms Instagram and Pinterest, and with the increased importance both Facebook and Foursquare’s redesigns place on sharing visual imagery.
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The Life of a PRIME Research Fellow: Week 5
By Nicole Lee, PRIME Research, for the PR ROI Channel
I can’t believe my time at PRIME Research is already coming to an end. To conclude this blog series, I’d like to share some takeaways from my experience: Academia isn’t only for universities. While client work has to come first, PRIME finds ways to use its resources to answer broader academic questions and pursue research interests to benefit the PR industry in general. PR is art and science. This is something I’ve known since my first PR class at San Diego State, but at PRIME I got a better understanding and hands-on experience with the science side.
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How to Mobilize Your School’s Media Command Center (Free Webinar)
By Critical Mention for the Critical Now Channel
Join our team today at 2pm EST for a webinar highlighting our newest capabilities with AllMedia and how they can help monitor colleges & universities, including 24/7 blanket coverage of television, radio, and now over 36,000 online new sites, 20 million blogs, review sites and forums, and social media platforms. Kye Strance, SVP of Product Devlopment, will walkthrough the growing features of AllMedia and respond to any real-time questions on Twitter @criticalmention during the Webinar. For more information and to register, click here. We look forward to seeing you there.
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Apple Gives iPhone High-5 While Moto, Others Prep Their Own Unveilings
Chicago Sun-Times
Yup, on Tuesday Apple sent out invitations for a media event in San Francisco on Sept. 12. The invitation casts a shadow in the shape of a 5, implying an iPhone 5 (or at least just the fifth anniversary of the iPhone). Meanwhile, other tech companies have packed their Septembers with product launches. The splashiest comes in New York City on Wednesday, where Motorola will likely roll out a revamp of their RAZR phones. If the RAZR M is like the unit that Engadget managed to get their hands on, it’ll be an interesting piece of kit: It features a big, 4.3-inch screen in a package barely wider than the display. Also rumored: the RAZR HD, sporting a hefty 4.6-inch screen running at 720×1280 HD. Nokia and Microsoft are throwing their own Wednesday event, during which they’re expected to show off the 2012 generation of Lumia phones and by extension, continue to build a future for Windows Phone 8. The new mobile OS earned approving nods two years ago. Last year, the Lumia 800 and 900 won fans. This week, Nokia and Microsoft need to prove that they have a powerful, relevant, and competitive platform, instead of just a collection of gold “Great Job!” stickers. TheVerge.com has done the best digging on the new Nokias
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Not a Prop or a PR Problem
The New York Times
Campaign staffers and consultants tend to treat political spouses as either props or problems. Fortunately, we are seldom either of these things, which candidates’ internal polling reveals, if pollsters even bother to ask about the wives. (We’re talking mostly about wives here, for the obvious reason I refuse to mention because it’s so darn depressing for this mother who named her daughter’s Cabbage Patch doll Gloria Steinem. In 1987.) Most people see us as pretty harmless, really. I say this as a columnist married to a U.S. senator from America’s heartland. I’m living proof that you can be full of opinions that stir up angry men and be completely ignored by millions of voters. Campaigns love to trump up the importance of presidential nominees’ wives at convention time. They think it’s a chance to boss around the womenfolk, and they want the media to yak about how these women “humanize” their husbands. Pretty funny concept to those of us who never doubted the species of our oh-so-human husbands. Nine weeks before the election, however, we’re grateful for the laugh. Ann Romney spoke at the Republican National Convention, and we learned that her husband makes her laugh. A lot. Michelle Obama is speaking at the Democratic convention this week, and dozens of writers will blog about her dress. A few pundits will feel the need to mention how far she’s come from 2008, when she joked about his smelly socks. In other words, the coverage of Ann Romney and Michelle Obama will never reflect the complexities and talents of these two obviously bright, patriotic women.
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What the Mobile Payment Craze is Really About: Coupons!
The Los Angeles Times
Your smartphone is going to get more adept at handling money, but maybe not in quite the way you’ve been imagining it would. There’s been a lot of talk lately about mobile payments and how new apps or NFC technology will let you pay for things with your smartphone. But the truth is that this market is less about finding a new way for you to pay for things and more about offering you an easier way to carry and redeem coupons and special offers. What’s the most successful mobile payment system to date? It’s an application that can be downloaded onto your phone to pay for coffee. Yes, the Starbucks app, launched in January 2011, has processed 55 million transactions, the company has said, adding that it processes more than a million mobile phone transactions per week. The app, which is quite simple, uses a bar-code-like technology to scan your phone. But that’s as far as it goes — it’s a payment app used by only one merchant. Then why is it so popular? It’s not because you can pay for a latte with your phone instead of pulling out cash or a credit card, but because it’s also your loyalty card. It keeps track of how many times you’ve visited the store and what you’ve purchased so that Starbucks can push you more offers and coupons that keep you coming into its stores. And the beauty of integrating this into a mobile app is that you don’t have to carry around that card on a key chain or tucked into your wallet. It’s always with you on your phone.
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4 Social Media Marketing Lessons From Barack Obama
Business 2 Community
Politics and marketing have a lot in common. The success of social media marketing has encouraged a lot of politicians to take an interest in social media. Barack Obama in particular has been very quick to adopt social media marketing methods into his campaigns; and showed with his recent appearance on Reddit that he’s always open to new opportunities. Obama’s campaign managers have learned a lot from social media marketing and, now they’ve returned the favor. Last week, during the Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood gave a speech about the ‘invisible Obama’. The majority of that speech was addressed to an empty chair that shared the stage with Eastwood. The speech was designed to damage Obama and boost the chances of Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. With a single tweet, Obama’s campaign ensured the speech did the exact opposite. The tweet? A picture of Obama in a seat marked with his title, ‘The President’, and the words “This seat’s taken.” At the time of writing that tweet has over 54,000 retweets and nearly 22,000 favorites. This was far more than a witty riposte; it provides a great template for all social media posts …
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Facebook Shares Reach New Low; $50 Billion in Market Value Lost
The Los Angeles Times
Facebook shares scraped a new low Tuesday. The new drag on the already leaden stock: Analysts from two of Facebook’s largest underwriters on its botched initial public stock offering cut their price targets. The Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase analysts also reduced their revenue projections. Shares closed down nearly 2%, or 33 cents, to $17.73 as some on Wall Street, floored that Facebook has shed $50 billion in market value in just three months, said they feared the company’s stock is nowhere near bottom. Scott Devitt, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, Facebook’s lead underwriter, cut his price target on the Menlo Park, Calif., social networking giant for the next 12 months to $32 from $38. He also warned that shares could fall as low as $17. Doug Anmuth, an analyst with JPMorgan Chase, cut his price target even more drastically, to $30 from $45.
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Wal-Mart, Others Offer Mobile Investor Relations Apps
The Los Angeles Times
Forget about Angry Birds, Pandora and Instagram. The next hot new app category for mobile devices could be investor relations. Over the past several months, a growing number of companies have been rolling out IR apps that deliver critical shareholder information directly into the hands of smartphone and tablet owners. One recent addition to their ranks is food distributor Sysco (SYY). Its IR app debuted in August, in conjunction with its fourth-quarter earnings announcement. Neil Russell, vice president of investor relations for Sysco, says research about mobile phone usage and the realization that much IR content is tough to access on a mobile device convinced him the time was right for such an app. “It was a bit of an aha moment for us,” Russell said. “It just makes sense. We need to make that information available to the investor on the go.” Russell says many workers nowadays are rarely at their desks, and yet their smartphones, in particular, were not well-suited to displaying PowerPoint slides, PDF files, and audiocasts of earnings calls. Then he read a year-old white paper from consumer research firm Compete that said 20% of investment account owners were using mobile devices to research companies. That number’s no doubt risen …
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Letting Employees Call the Philanthropy Shots
Forbes
Corporate volunteerism is on the rise, yet companies still face challenges getting employees engaged. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, six out of ten companies have now implemented employee volunteer programs. While these programs are growing, engagement is not following suit, with some studies showing that volunteer participation is holding steady at 25 percent. But Freudenberg-NOK is not one of the companies struggling to get its employees involved. Freudenberg doesn’t mandate participation in any corporate volunteering program, yet the company never wants for volunteers. Indeed, Freudenberg-NOK’s Your Community Partner (YCP) plan saw 5,000 employees completing 40 community service projects in the first year of its existence. The company averages 15 volunteer hours per participating employee per year, putting annual volunteer time at more than 55,000 man hours. This extends to all levels of the company, which is why Cheryl Eberwein, Director of Corporate Communications was out of the office on volunteer assignment for eight hours during her first week on the job. How is Freudenberg-NOK able to achieve such high levels of employee engagement? First, the company hires employees who are on board with the company’s vision of corporate philanthropy.
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P&G Directors Face Own Challenges While Keeping Tabs on CEO
Bloomberg
Procter & Gamble Co. (PG)’s directors are facing a time management challenge: monitoring Chief Executive Officer Robert McDonald’s turnaround plan while running their own companies. Until Angela Braly resigned as WellPoint Inc. (WLP)’s top executive last week, six of the 10 outside directors on P&G’s board (PG) were active CEOs, the highest number of any company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, according to an analysis by GMI Ratings in New York. Now that Braly is no longer a CEO, P&G ties International Business Machines Corp. with five, GMI found. The concentration of leaders on P&G’s board (PG) threatens to turn from benefit to burden as the executives confront financial, operational and macroeconomic difficulties at the companies they run. Braly stepped down from health insurer WellPoint after investors called for her ouster, while James McNerney, another P&G director, is steering Boeing Co. (BA) through defense spending cuts and delays to new jets. P&G director Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), had an $8.86 billion record loss last quarter as her company wrote down the value of its enterprise-services unit. “This is probably not the kind of board you want for a company that’s about to face a crisis,” said Jay Lorsch, a management professor at Harvard Business School in Boston. “When you have directors who are busy with their own companies, that limits time they have for P&G and that can be problematic.” Turnaround Plan McDonald, who lowered profit forecasts (PG) three times this calendar year at the world’s largest maker of consumer products, is trying to cut $10 billion in costs and restructure the Cincinnati-based company to focus on developing products and winning back market share. He also faces pressure from activist investor Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, who disclosed a stake (PG) in P&G in July.
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Google Shutters TV Ads Platform But Makes Inroads Against Traditional Ads
PR Web
Google may be online advertising’s 800 pound gorilla, but using its digital dominance to push into traditional advertising markets has proven to be a real challenge. In 2006, for instance, Google began trials of a platform designed to help advertisers more efficiently purchase ad inventory in newspapers. In 2009, the search giant killed the offering. Ditto for a similar platform created to move radio ad inventory. So perhaps it won’t come as a surprise that Google has decided to throw in the towel on Google TV Ads, an extension to AdWords that made it possible for advertisers to “bring digital buying and measurement technologies to traditional TV advertising.” In a post on the Google TV Ads blog, Google’s Shishir Mehrotra’s explained: Video is increasingly going digital and users are now watching across numerous devices. So we’ve made the hard decision to close our TV Ads product over the next few months and move the team to other areas at Google. We’ll be doubling down on video solutions for our clients (like YouTube, AdWords for Video, and ad serving tools for web video publishers). We also see opportunities to help users access web content on their TV screens, through products like Google TV. While there’s no doubt that digital video is an increasingly lucrative market, AdAge’s Michael Learmonth provided some much-needed context: …
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Digital Ad Buys to Surpass TV by 2017?
Adotas
Two years ago, online ad revenues were significantly higher than those from newspaper ads. Now, Mintel, a well-known market research company, is predicting that in 5 years or less, revenues from online ads will surpass those from TV ads. Are these researchers on to something? Let’s allow the numbers to speak for themselves. In 2011, online ads generated $31.7 billion sales, while TV generated $68.5 billion. When you consider that mobile Internet usage overtook PC Internet usage in 2011 and more than half of all local searches are conducted by mobile phone, its easy to see that digital devices will soon be the preferred method for consumers to connect. As such, this will inevitably lead to further declines in newspaper and cable TV subscriptions. In the past, newspapers used to be the source for news and information, but this has changed dramatically. In fact, The New York Times is not making a steady profit on its print publication and is relying on Internet subscriptions and ads for revenue. This also applies to magazines like Newsweek, where staff positions have shrunk to the bare minimum. Furthermore, luxury brands are shifting their advertising funds to mobile marketing. The reason: Mobile marketing is a very lucrative market and appeals to their target customers: …
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