PendryWhite Re-Launches Website & Post-Crunch Positioning

Until today, PendryWhite’s website was proof that cobblers’ children are in danger of going unshod. What was state of the art some three years ago is no longer so. It was a static brochure with gizmos that described a traditional public relations business with marketing aspects. Since then, responding to a major economic crisis, the market has changed, we have changed and so our website has changed.

The website launched today makes traditional public relations a relatively insignificant part of our business. Yes, we still do media relations and we have an excellent side line in press office management for the HNWI clients of our sister company TPPR. However, the vast bulk of our work is now strategic reputation-based marketing that makes full use of the new media that are rapidly replacing the old print newspapers that seem to be hovering between breakdown and hiding behind exclusive online paywalls.

The new website is simple and draws you into a dialogue with us and, using the blog and Twitter, it becomes an intellectual resource which you can return to periodically. The RSS tool keeps you up to date with opinions and Twitter with news. This blog posting won’t puff up what you can read very quickly for yourself on the site but simply draws your attention to its existence and to our Clients whose quality speaks for itself.

In our view, it is difficult for any corporation or firm to steer their way between the Scylla of over-enthusiasm and uncritical engagement in the new media world and the Charybdis of fearful refusal not to innovate. This is why PendryWhite has spent three years building a proposition to act as guide between these monsters. The new web positioning expresses this change.

If you need strategic, marketing, new media or international support to deal with rapid market changes and our approach appeals to you, please do not hesitate to call us on +44 (0) 20 7549 1672 and ask to speak to Roger White, Managing Director, or Jenina Bas, Director of Client Services.

Social Media at the Top End of the Food Chain …

Why should social media matter to a business or professional services firm? This is still not an easy question to answer, especially as most of the answers for most senior executives and partners are based on fear, whether of a reputational blunder, of lost time or of a legal liability.

Let us be clear. There are risks. And the costs of engagement with social media are high in time. Similarly, the most touted channels are still quite clunky and unfocused for business communications, while the ongoing privacy debate has made them far less likely to be useful for marketeers.

Even those qualities that make the public love them – especially the speed of direct engagement with the news – also help to turn these media into transient tools in which immense effort goes into the chance of one sight of a message that cannot easily be repeated by people who cannot be tracked easily.

At the end of the day, as with other traditional advertising media, we cannot know that our target was noticing our message while the format of social media encourages screening out and gives power to the consumer to edit out commercial messages and the people who promote them.

Claims of an ‘instant dialogue’ between company or firm and customer and client are too often theoretical ones. A company’s message will wash over the customer at the margins of perception in a way no different from newspaper or broadcast advertising and it remains the older blog tool where informed postings excite informed commentary. This is where the dialogue of the informed really takes place.

A first bit of advice to any professional or executive is to master the blogs and the online journals that matter to you and to think, with care for liability, how you can engage with your peers in a literate and informed manner.

If there is a gap in the blog information market, some areas in which your expertise can be presented to your public without giving away the intellectual property that sustains your business model, then consider filling it yourself.

Consider also that the entire social media system might be used as a huge free intelligence system in which some basic upfront investment can gain its return in a flow of news that is highly specific to your business needs – and to which you can react in the marketplace faster than your competitors.

This business intelligence value cuts both ways, of course. If you go to a business intelligence firm and ask them to investigate some rival or threat, they will undoubtedly charge you a high sum just to do what you could do by working through the internet – and that means dossiers can also be built up on you through your web footprint.

Managing your and your company’s identity on the internet, which means having effective guidelines for employees, is now a necessary part of defensive intelligence. No executive or partner should engage in this world without understanding privacy controls (and returning to them frequently) or understanding what sort of person is likely to be in the groups that they join or are behind the anonymous ‘follows’. If in doubt, don’t shout it out!

But, on the plus side, social media can be used both as a broadcasting tool (if you can attract the right listeners who connect regularly using tools like Tweetdeck or a mobile application) and as a listening tool – for example, using Twitter lists to build up news channels from specialist Followers.

During the Right2Link Campaign earlier this year, we used Twitter not only to communicate with our natural allies, with a feed to the web site, but we created channels that told us separately what was going on in the political lobby, what was going on amongst the industrial interests concerned, what the general political mood was as election fever mounted and what activists were saying.

What this meant was that we had a virtuous circle by which we pulled information out of the system and re-circulated it to add value to our supporters and then added our own news and action points within a context of being ‘useful’.

Supporters would then engage with us and were more likely to join our campaign and sign the official e-petition. This campaign was a relatively low cost late entry into a political process but, using and integrating multiple channels, it managed to get its core message – the defence of the public’s right to link – into the media, amongst key influencers and, with the support of public affairs associate Portcullis Public Affairs, into Parliament.

Social media are still in their early stage of development. We have been wary of the hype and the specialists because, in the unformed state of the market, a lot of companies are in danger of spending a great deal of time into being seduced by ‘experts’ into a nerdy monitoring operation driven by fear – a sort of neurotic worry about what is being said behind twitching net curtains.

Similarly, though there are stars of the internet with real reach who can turn your brand into fashion or disgrace in a moment, the reality for most businesses and professional services is that they are never going to be in this league. A few hours thought can save a few days blundering by concentrating on classic marketing issues.

1. Who exactly do I want to reach? Adding followers for the sake of followers is absurd: engagement with social media has to be focused and, for most new entrants, this means serious research into a difficult problem – gathering together your market and getting it to subscribe to your channels. You will not get all your targets into one place at the time that you want so, unless you are highly specialist or important, you must expect to use social media alongside other tools (especially networking) rather than as a substitute for them.
2. What do you expect to get from your actions? The problem with social media is that each channel has multiple uses – from broadcasting a brand through to gaining intelligence via attempts to get into dialogue for sales or alliance.  This goes against all traditional thinking where command and control of message is central, where interactivity and questioning is discouraged except at point of sale and where the various uses of information (outwards in sales and marketing and inwards in research and business intelligence) are often compartmentalised internally. In this brave new world, the integration of the flow of information may require new management thinking with two separate trends competing – increased pressure to centralise information coming in and increased pressure to decentralise information going out.
3. How do I manage risk? Risk is becoming salient and not merely in the historic sense of product liability or protection of intellectual property or market change. Two ‘risks’ compete for attention – the risk that a business or firm will be left behind if it fails to engage with these new media and the risk that engagement will create new reputational and even legal liabilities. Since successful use of the new social media relies on its freedom and its interactivity, some serious thinking is required on the balance of risk and it is probably the area on which we have become most engaged in recent months as consultants. We have already been involved in projects to find out how, legitimately, safe use of social media for marketing purposes can be managed within strict internal and even statutory compliance guidelines and it has led us to some innovative models already.
4. Do I have something to say? This is perhaps most important of all because, if there is one thing we have learned from our own involvement in this area, it is that messages need repeating but the market is impatient of repetition – interest in you requires that you show respect for your audience by being useful. And to be useful means either passing on information that is genuinely adding value from other sources (even, if necessary, competitor content under the right conditions in order to develop debate) or creating your own high quality content which you need to launder through the social media system at high speed and without irritating your market by ‘shouting’.

Above all, we would argue against both an excess of fear and an excess of enthusiasm. As always, there is a happy balance to seek.

The ideal social media strategy for the larger B2B will be focused. It will loosen up the internal constraints on engagement but grant communications rights only to those who understand or can be trained in the risks and rules of the game. It will pre-research the channels and focus efforts only on those that pull in the information the company needs and that engages with people of use.  Above all, content is king – there is no social media programme without high quality content that is of interest to the market.

In the end, as it develops into a system, social media will change aspects of corporate organisation. The flow of information from and to a corporation will never be the same again.

It is already having a revolutionary effect on private life. Those engaged in social media have become better informed (even if more vulnerable to ‘conspiracy theory’ or disinformation) and more able to develop an identity that suits them rather than one based on a few personal connections that are met intermittently. The best corporate users of social media will also be better informed and be in more control of their brand identity as the market changes – these will be the rewards of intelligent investment now.

Backing Bloggers

We have been betting for some time that traditional print media are in a slow but steady decline. The internet has transformed the economics of news distribution, making commentary less valuable, turning news into a commodity and making hard inside information more valuable (but only if it is put behind a pay wall).

More and more people are choosing to access news online or are allowing their friends to become editors, distributing free news that meets their needs through social networking sites (to which they contribute their own small parcel).  Such people do not share advertisements or puff pieces but they do share online (free) news stories, videos and blog postings.

We embraced the new media world a long time ago and have been talking to our clients about the potential risks and benefits of websites such as Twitter, You Tube, Linked In and Facebook as part of their wider communication and brand management strategies.

Our involvement in the Right2Link Campaign is well known. We have been looking more recently at how large corporations can find legitimate ‘work arounds’ to enable them to engage with these new tools without creating compliance problems or running undue risks. This is not easy but it is possible.

But bloggers have perhaps still not proved quite as important as they think they are. The current UK Election and dramatic political events overseas are led much more by the association of broadcast and social networks working in parallel to mobilise opinion and even promote radical political change.

The recent TV Debate broke the mould of British politics over a few days (although whether this is sustainable is unknown) and Twitter and Facebook commentary then played their role in shifting herd sentiment towards change.

Bloggers, meanwhile, tend to be more reflective but they can also get over-excitable. They may have stolen some of the territory of the print commentators but they also tend to speak largely and only to micro-communities that cannot move whole societies. Nevertheless bloggers can cause the occasional ripple, eddy or even whirlpool in the business or cultural pond.

Within these micro-communities, bloggers now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with journalists as opinion formers and leaders. We think of Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale or even Pickled Politics as gossips by the Westminster village pump to whom political groupies will go as soon as they have listened to the wise words of the BBC or the Guardian.

There are equivalents now in almost every significant business community – from aviation through automotive to banking – even if this trend is stronger in America than in Europe.

But while bloggers are emerging as key influencers in the market place at this very focused level, many companies are still not adapting their approach to engage with them. Opportunities to stimulate conversation around your company or even or products/services are being lost simply because PR people still communicate with bloggers in the same way that they do with journalists, despite their needs being different.

We must always keep the blogging community in proportion however. At this point in history, they still rarely move large markets and much of the relationship with them has to be defensive – to stop ignorance creating the no-win situation of clumsy litigation.

However, the emergence of social networks is shifting the balance of power more than a little in their favour. Whereas, until recently, most bloggers where small fish in big seas, the aggregation of bloggers into media like Huffington Post on the one hand, improved search facilities and the share function on postings are all radically increasing potential circulation.

A posting can now be put up periodically on Twitter and on Facebook and then, if it presses a cultural button or contains seriously new news, it will spread rapidly from micro-community to micro-community until it comes to have much more influence than you might expect or be able to track.

The new media are also making it very difficult for litigators so that the immediate instinct of a corporation to go to law may well be a bad one. Bloggers may require charm if they are to be managed far more than the blunt instrument of the libel law.

Last year’s Trafigura incident showed how an attempt to silence the mainstream media back-fired as the Twitterati decided to overwhelm the system with Tweets drawing public attention to the facts. The lesson was that it is almost impossible now to silence debate when the main intermediary (the official media) can be by-passed by the massive trans-national interactive conversation of Twitter and Facebook, mediated now through Google.

So, at this stage, blogger influence is still limited, restricted to micro-communities. It also depends on bloggers being dedicated enough to produce a great deal of content, some of which will be dross.

But a sort of survival of the fittest is going on as we write – and eventually aggregation of blogs will build a community of respected independent commentators speaking directly to the people who matter to your business.

So how do we manage this phenomenon without wasting too much time? How do we invest in the knowledge basis required to take advantage of its later maturation?

1. Research bloggers. Find out who they are, what they write about, what sites/blogs/online columns they write for, their interests, who their audience is and what angles they are likely to take on any news. It is also worth looking at who their peers are – many bloggers comment on and link to and from each other bloggers’ sites and you may be able to build up a network of providers and influencers.
2. Build relationships. Any PR person will tell you about the importance of building mutually beneficial relationships with journalists; bloggers are no different. In the same way that you may read a particular journalist’s column in a broadsheet, you can follow blogs. But the difference is you can engage with blog authors much more quickly and begin to develop relationships. Indeed, here is the little secret of blogging – you can comment, comment is debate and debate raises awareness in the other silent readers of the story.
3. Target your news. Bloggers usually have a niche area of interest. Make sure your news is personalised for them, highlighting key facts that they will find of particular interest. Remember that they are not reporting news but commenting on it so the information should be geared to that dialogue with them that can make best use of comments. When creating targeted content, think about what points will trigger conversations and encourage responses.
4. Send a social media news release. Traditional press releases just don’t work for bloggers – they find them too generic, bland and impersonal. Bloggers want to be able to pick up key facts and quotes with speed and be able to link to sources, pictures, videos and sound bytes to support their commentary. A social media release delivers all these elements in bite-sized chunks as well as links to sign up for RSS feeds, so the blogger can keep up to date on the latest information and commentary in the market.
5. Act and respond with speed. Unlike many traditional media outlets, blogs can reach a wide audience within seconds. Therefore if a blogger contacts you to ask for more information or to be put in touch with a spokesperson from your company, be sure to respond in a timely manner. In many cases, the speed with which news is released can affect the blog’s ranking on search engines, and that in turn can impact the number of views a blog has.

This approach is not rocket science. In fact, it echoes the approach for communication with any stakeholder group – understand their needs, deliver solutions to meet these needs in a timely manner and in a way that is convenient for the user, and respond quickly to any interest.

We are all still learning to adapt to the shifts in power between traditional and new media. If Murdoch is sometimes clearly not sure what is going on, then we ought to have the courage to say the same.

But Bloggers’ influence in the long term over customer’s awareness, opinions, attitudes and behaviours can no longer be dismissed as trivial.

Successful companies will need to embrace this shift, and (above all) start to bring multi-media elements into their releases if their messages are to stand out in an increasingly crowded and noisy market place.