My name is Walt Boyes. I am Editor in Chief of Control and ControlGlobal.com, and a principal of Spitzer and Boyes LLC. In both endeavors, I am con@nuously involved in the uses and misuses of public rela@ons. I have been either doing public rela@ons and marke@ng or having them done to me for nearly forty years now. I’ve seen many changes, but not so many as I have seen in just the last decade. We are going to wade through the landscape of communica@ons and try to see what the current best prac@ces are. Some of those have not changed in decades. Some are as new as your last Tweet.
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PR101- effective marketing and public relations for the automation industry
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My name is Walt Boyes. I am Editor in Chief of Control and ControlGlobal.com, and a principal of Spitzer and Boyes LLC. In both endeavors, I am con@nuously involved in the uses and misuses of public rela@ons. I have been either doing public rela@ons and marke@ng or having them done to me for nearly forty years now. I’ve seen many changes, but not so many as I have seen in just the last decade. We are going to wade through the landscape of communica@ons and try to see what the current best prac@ces are. Some of those have not changed in decades. Some are as new as your last Tweet.
Did you ever ask yourself why automa@on companies, integrators and manufacturers alike, don’t do PR? Is the answer simply that the management staff doesn’t understand what it is, what it is for? Do you understand what Public Rela@ons is? Do you understand what it is for? Public Rela@ons, PR, is a fundamental part of any integrated marke@ng program…any integrated marke@ng communica@ons program…any branding program. PR is about communica@on and communica@ng. We’ll talk about the ways PR is ESSENTIAL in the automa@on market.
Public Rela@ons is the art and prac@ce of communica@on in a structured way. The purpose of public rela@ons is to create the desired effect in the minds of the recipients. So what does this really mean? PR prac@@oners typically are aPemp@ng to present a concept, an idea, or a series of ideas, like the values a corpora@on represents…in a way that is structured to:
1. Cause belief 2. S@mulate ac@on 3. Add value
Display adver@sing is designed to cause an ac@on: calling an 800-‐number, reques@ng informa@on from a website, calling a salesperson. Public rela@ons is a bit more general than that. Public rela@ons is simply about crea@ng posi@ve “buzz” in a structured way, around an idea. In essence, a public rela@ons campaign is aimed at all of the stakeholders of an enterprise, while adver@sing is aimed directly at customers. PR serves analysts, customers, shareholders, media, and all of the other en@@es with an interest in the enterprise as a whole.
There is a concept known as the “marke@ng mix.” It is all of the tools and strategies an enterprise uses to communicate its values, its products, its services to the public and to customers. The marke@ng mix includes display adver@sing, tradeshow par@cipa@on, direct marke@ng, field sales, online marke@ng, and public rela@ons. Public rela@ons is an integral part of the marke@ng mix. In fact, it is the glue that holds the mix together. Most enterprises do public rela@ons, they just do it unconsciously, and therefore they do it poorly. The topics we’ll cover in this seminar are designed to show you how to do it well.
The six basic func@ons of PR in the industrial enterprise are talking to the media, product marke@ng issues like new product introduc@ons and new product releases, par@cipa@on in tradeshows, symposia and forums, gaining editorial coverage, communica@ng with all of the stakeholders of your company, and crisis management. There is a seventh func@on, sort of a metafunc@on, that is composed of all six, plus some extra…and that func@on is management and conserva@on of your brand.
Customer empowerment…employee empowerment…the Internet and the social media from email to TwiPer have made it necessary for even integrators to know how to direct, not control, the message they want to present to the public, their customers, and their employees and suppliers. It maPers what you say, and it maPers what everyone else says. Just google www.insertnameofcompanysucks.com And you’ll see what I mean.
You don’t have products, do you? Of course you do, even if you are just an integrator and it is only a proprietary template or two. One of the products you have is the reputa@on of your work-‐products. Bet you don’t really see that as a product of itself. You can use the same skills PR brings to vendors and big customers to gain benefit for your products, your reputa@on, and your ability to aPract and keep customers, regardless of how small a company you are.
Trade shows aren’t dead. They are undergoing a sea change. As the big old ones die, new trade shows are born, more targeted, more effec@ve. But how you do at a trade show depends nearly en@rely on you, not on the trade show management. At a trade show, you can kill several birds with the same stone. Your customers can aPend, your suppliers and vendor partners will aPend. Use a tradeshow, even when you aren’t exhibi@ng. Schedule visits to your vendor partners. And above all, schedule visits with your customers. Invite them to the show. Make sure you have something to show them that’s interes@ng and new. This can be incredibly lucra@ve. You can get a customer to meet with you away from all office distrac@ons. What’s that worth to you? Don’t just go to a tradeshow and wander around aimlessly.
Editorial coverage, I can assure you, is wonderful– especially because it is cheap (but it is not free– you have to earn it) and it imparts the imprimatur of the editor on the coverage. Wri@ng ar@cles, gecng your customers to byline ar@cles, and producing white papers and tutorials is a very simple and rela@vely inexpensive way to build up your reputa@on and increase the number of customers you can touch. Building customer bases is en@rely a numbers game. If they don’t know who you are, you may not even get a chance to bid that project you’d like to do so much.
Lots of @mes we forget to sell to ourselves. That’s bad. It makes for bad blood, some@mes even permanent fallings out, and if you don’t talk to your people, your investors, and the “inside folks” they become disaffected and leave.
You think you don’t need crisis management? What happens if a project you did goes south? Suppose somebody starts saying vicious things to you on TwiPer or Facebook? Do you have a Crisis Management Plan to go along with your Disaster Recovery Plan? If you do, great. Keep it up to date. If you don’t, well…oops. Just look at the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Think about it. Think about Stuxnet and Siemens’ PCS7. Stuff happens, and everybody who faces the media and the public needs to have a message and training on staying on message. AND here is where transparency and honesty make friends. Really.
Public rela@ons is not sales. Public rela@ons is not adver@sing. Public rela@ons is that part of marke@ng that is the glue that holds an integrated marke@ng communica@ons plan together. PR communicates the plan itself. It is important to see how this works. PR communicates any and all of the ideas, concepts and values of the enterprise to all of the stakeholders of the enterprise…and is designed to aPain a stated result. Some@mes that result is more “buzz” about your capabili@es. Some@mes that result is a higher stock price or just higher visibility in the market. Some@mes that result is crisis management.
One of the biggest fallacies people fall into when they think of PR is that they think a PR person can communicate anything they have to, true or not, and get coverage and belief. You have only to look to the realm of poli@cs and consumer business to see that that is far from true. PR can communicate facts, and truth. Yes, the facts are selected to produce the correct desired response, but they have to be true, and they have to be mostly “the whole story” and they have to be interes@ng and worthy of being listened to. One of the most common mistakes people make is sending out the same @red new product releases several @mes a year. It just isn’t “news.”
You have to tell the truth, no maPer how unpleasant. If you’ve been good, you will have an interes@ng story to tell. If you’ve not, your stakeholders will have an interes@ng story to tell about you. It’s always easier to stay in front of the parade. Look at the mess Toyota got into a couple of years ago, not because they had problems, but because they lied about it, over and over. In the old days, you could tell people what to think because marke@ng owned all the informa@on channels. With social media, this is very not true. There are so many ways to communicate sa@sfac@on or dissa@sfac@on with a company now that you simply cannot cover them all. Because the customers control the means of messaging, it is important to be open, honest and forthright. Giving them more informa@on is bePer than less.
Social media is not new. There are graffi@ on the walls of Pompei…that is social media. What’s different is that it is so easy to be heard everywhere, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, TwiPer, Foursquare, and the host of others. The history of the Internet is the history of more and more access to media for the individual. You don’t have to mail a complaint to a vendor– just post to your favorite list. When Robert Crandall was chairman of American Airlines he commissioned a study that found that of every 10 people who had a bad experience, 3 would talk about it, but 7 would walk away and never come back. Now, I think, it is more likely that 7 or 8 will give you a serious par@ng shot on social media as they walk away. So not only do you lose customers you hear about why they are leaving– and so does everyone else.
The key to using social media is to use as many social media clients as you can, use them regularly and make sure you are honest, direct, and clear. You can use email, TwiPer, a Facebook page and a Facebook Group, and the same things on LinkedIn to keep your name and brand in the public eye all the @me. You have to do what Emerson has done. They are the best example of what you can do with social media. In fact, they have a corporate director of social media…that’s all Jim Cahill’s job is…and it is working. Emerson is doing the one thing that counts more than anything in the world of social media…presence must be consistent. You can’t post or blog or tweet once in a while. You have to develop a presence that is consistent and interes@ng. This is hard work, but the rewards are amazing.
A campaign has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A campaign is like a story, and if you think about planning a PR campaign as if you were telling a story, it is not only a good analogy, it also works very well in prac@ce. First, you have to decide what the purpose of the campaign is. What is the desired result? Do you want to drive customers, editors and analysts to your website? Do you want to announce a new product? A new service? Do you want to trumpet the news of a big order or a new contract, or a major strategic partnership or alliance?
A typical editor of a typical industrial trade journal or website gets between 1000 and 1500 press and product releases every month. If this doesn’t give you pause, think about how long it takes to read each one…just to read them. Most editorial departments do triage. They sort them into two piles: frequent adver@sers and not. They go through both piles. If in the first two seconds, something about the release jumps out at them, they save it. Otherwise, it gets “round filed.” In self defense, many years ago, I stopped looking at printed releases, and only consider email releases now. I can’t remember the last @me somebody mailed me a release. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that I can handle them more easily. The bad news is that it is easier and cheaper to send them, so I get lots more of them. I get releases that are not even close to my editorial purview. I get poli@cal press releases, releases on self-‐help books, you name it, because it is really easy to spam editors. This doesn’t mean I read them.
Here is the real trick! The more you know the editors in your market, and the more they know you, the easier it is to get your well-‐wriPen, topical, targeted press or product release run. It is not about “who you know” as much as it is about “do it right, and be known to them.” Editors can do many things for you. You can get interes@ng @dbits of compe@@ve intelligence by trading informa@on for informa@on. You can get that much-‐sought-‐aker commodity, free publicity. You can get ar@cle placements, if the editor knows you, and knows that you can deliver on @me when you say you will. And if you know the editor, you will know what style of wri@ng, and what style of image, are most likely to get you the press coverage you are looking for.
Once you have achieved a rela@onship of mutual respect and trust with the editorial staffs of your targeted publica@ons, you can begin to pitch them ar@cles for editorial space. These are priceless in the way they can affect the market for a product. One of the greatest sins in industrial PR is submicng a “puff piece” for editorial coverage when you’ve agreed to submit a 1500 word ar@cle. The editor has saved space for you, and now he has to find something else to fit in those four pages. He may never accept another ar@cle from you.
It is a fundamental axiom that if you are going to par@cipate in a tradeshow, you must aPend with a plan. Much of that plan is PR. If you are making a new product announcement, you need a PR plan. If you are making some strategic alliance announcements, you need a PR plan. If you are mee@ng with analysts and editors, you need a PR plan. If you want to get your most significant users to aPend and visit your stand, you need a PR plan. A clear and S.M.A.R.T. PR plan for a tradeshow can make the difference between a lackluster and expensive experience and a vibrant and useful venture. That’s, for those of you who don’t know the acronym, a plan that is Specific, Measureable,
PR is the vehicle of choice to communicate the company brand. Together with adver@sing, it is the way the company speaks to its customer base and its compe@tors and the media and analysts who moderate the marketspace the company lives in. The company brand must be communicated in a coherent and totally consistent way to the internal stakeholders, external stakeholders and stockholders of the company.
That’s a big fancy defini@on. Basically, your brand is everything you stand for. It is the image you have created, and that you live up to every day in the marketplace. Anything you do to reinforce the posi@ves in your brand image can only help, but anything you do that contributes a nega@ve to your brand image hurts. And by the “law of 10,000 APaboys” a nega@ve contribu@on to brand hurts more than a posi@ve contribu@on to brand image helps.
While marke@ng is designed to promote the company’s products and services, and adver@sing is designed to generate sales, PR is designed to communicate the values on which the company stands. These values are what stand behind the company’s brand. These values are the company bedrock. As long as the company acts in congruence with these values, PR can further the image of the company, and thus the company brand. When the company acts incongruously, PR can ameliorate the damage, but cannot en@rely reduce it.
United Airlines has stopped using the tagline, “The friendly skies.” Why? Simply put, United has a reputa@on for bad service, surly employees, and general unfriendliness. Their tagline was causing cogni@ve dissonance and was clearly losing them more friends than gaining them. Southwest Airlines is a no-‐frills airline. They promise cheap fares, and nothing else. And for over 25 years, Southwest has been the most successful airline. Why? Because everything they do is congruent with their message. And they do it with verve and élan. They are en@rely “on brand.” There is no cogni@ve dissonance with Southwest. You get what you expect, and more. While with United and most of the other airlines, you expect some service, some ameni@es, some civility, and what you get is a lousy airline. Too many automa@on companies act the same way. Even the best PR
There is a current trend toward debasing strong brands. Even Southwest has fallen prey to this to some extent. The idea is that you can abuse “just a liPle bit” your customers, without hur@ng the brand unduly. This supposed brand elas@city is supposed to allow you to extract more value from the customer without giving them more value…or giving them less value. As Jon Stewart said about the proposed makeover of the “Brave” heroine Merida by Disney: They think they can get away with this because they think we are stupid! Your customers are not stupid, and they have highly tuned super heterodyne BS detectors. They may let you get away with debasing your brand for a while, but they’ll soon be looking around for another vendor with the values they originally saw in you and your products and services.
Just as PR is a channel for external communica@ons, so it can be for internal communica@ons. It is every bit as important for employees, suppliers and other internal stakeholders to be informed on the company’s goals, objec@ves, and values as it is for analysts and editors in the media, and for stockholders to be informed. Communica@ng the company’s brand values and vision internally and con@nually reinforces them in the minds of employees and reduces the poten@al for cogni@ve dissonance when a customer runs across a problem employee. BP fell afoul of this in the Deepwater Horizon mess. BP had, in the five years between the Texas City disaster and Deepwater Horizon, spent over $2 billion (with a B) on training designed to create a new safety culture in the company. Unfortunately, even though the effort had support from the highest levels in the company, it ran afoul of employees who felt it was bePer to con@nue maximizing bonuses, etc. by not improving safety– and the result is that BP has now spent many more billions trying to fix the problems they caused. If all those employees had been truly on board with the safety culture that Tony Hawood, Deb Grube and Ed Sieg were trying to create in BP, it is arguable that the Deepwater Horizon accident might not have happened.
Typically, the only way PR is knowingly used in most automa@on companies is for shareholder communica@ons. Shareholders need the same communica@ons that the internal stakeholders do, and companies who are forthright and forthcoming with their stockholders and stakeholders do bePer at maintaining their stock prices even in the wake of unfavorable news than companies who ignore their stockholders except for the annual report, and ignore their stakeholders en@rely.
The lessons learned from the downsizings of the 1980’s are clear. If you want a workforce that is on-‐board with the goals and objec@ves, vision and brand of the company, you have to be completely honest and open with them, especially about bad news. Hiding the fact that layoffs are coming produces good old cogni@ve dissonance, which leads immediately to a loss of trust in management. Employees (just like your customers) have extremely well-‐tuned super heterodyne bullshit detectors (remember I said this before), and it is stupid to even try to fool them, or to think that they don’t know what is going on, just because you haven’t announced it yet.
Every industrial enterprise dreads the crisis. The call comes in the middle of the night. Your tanker is aground. Your mine has collapsed. Somebody’s plant has exploded, and your product was at fault. There is a leak into the groundwater. Whatever it is, you need to have planned for how to handle a crisis, have a team in place to manage it, take responsibility and correc@ve ac@on swikly, and provide easy access to informa@on as honestly and openly as possible.
These rules are decep@vely simple, yet companies fail the crisis test every day. Maybe it is just too simple. The secret to crisis management is to be open, honest, and work hard to solve the problem. If it is your fault, accept responsibility early in the crisis, and start correc@ve ac@on immediately. Take your lumps. The correc@ve ac@on you say you will take must be clear, quick, meaningful and actually correct the problem– and make the situa@on whole again. Stonewalling in a crisis will get you what Nixon got. If it is not your fault, communicate that at every opportunity, while emphasizing that you are there, shirtsleeves rolled up, working to solve the problem anyway. Remember that you are telling a story, as it is happening. You are a reporter for your company’s side of the story. Keep it to Who, What, When, Where, How and Why as much as you can. The simpler the story you tell, the more likely it will not be changed much by the media as they report it.
Okay, everything I’ve told you is true. But it begs the ques@on. The real issue is how do you actually put together an integrated marke@ng communica@ons plan that works. For the next few minutes, we are going to look at a new way of seeing the problem.
I find it useful to look at the things you need to do as part of a cascade control loop– appropriate for automa@on industry marke@ng, no? Look at the tasks as OUTBOUND communica@ons, first. All of these things allow your customers to find you, touch you, on their terms. Note that all of them are designed to make you “authorita@ve” in the Google sense. The more authorita@ve you appear to Google, the higher you will appear in the organic search rankings– and the majority, maybe even the vast majority of customers find you on Google now. Note that all of this is content. It is high value content. You can’t post much self-‐serving bullshit on Wikipedia. People stop reading white papers if they are thinly disguised brochureware.
Ever since the studies showed that (except for poli@cal hot buPon issues) Wikipedia is as authorita@ve as any other reference work, people have been looking up automa@on related topics there. One of the most significant things you can do is to make sure that you have good Wikipedia pages for the company, for its products, and that your principals and experts have biographical essays, CVs and bibliographies on Wikipedia. It is also worth many bonus points to contribute to pages on industry issues. Wikipedia can then become the core of your campaign to make your brand “authorita@ve.”
Highly technical marke@ng has always had a spot for ar@cles and whitepapers. The problem is that while everyone knows that you should write them, everyone also has the opinion that if an employee has the @me to write them, he or she isn’t doing their real job, or is underemployed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, customers want NONCOMMERCIAL sources of informa@on. Your company has some of the best experts on how to apply the products you make anywhere. It is really important to consistently create good, high quality, non-‐commercial whitepapers and applica@on and case study ar@cles. Again, like social media, it is important to do this consistently, so that customers and poten@al customers can expect to see new material on a regular schedule. There are also numerous ways to campaign those white papers and ar@cles, too, and the sales leads you get are generally either A or B level leads.
Presenta@ons, short courses, and webinars are another way to aPract an audience to share your exper@se. Once again, these cannot be sales pitches. Webinars used to be prohibi@vely expensive to do, but with tools like GoToWebinar (which happens to be the webinar engine we are using today), anyone can produce, present and record a webinar. Recorded webinars are tremendous sources of more data for Wikipedia.
Once you have your recorded presenta@on, and your webinar, post them on YouTube. There are thousands of automa@on related audio and video tracks on YouTube. You can stream them to your website, you can campaign them, you can send people to them in many different ways using social media. How much viewership can something like flow measurement, for example, get? Well, the video of me talking about “Back To Basics: DP Flow Measurement” has had over 55 thousand views in four years.
Just like Wikipedia is the anchor of your Outbound communica@on loop, your own blogs are the linchpin of the inbound communica@on loop. Yes, blogging is an outbound ac@vity, but the reason you are doing it is to increase the crea@on of a community around your company and your products. But you can’t just blog. You have to push the stuff you are blogging (as well as all the stuff you are producing as outbound content) to your customers, and people who might become your customers. Blogging must be consistent. You can have one blog, or mul@ple blogs. Each blog should have its own “voice” that people come to recognize.
Here is where social media are cri@cal. This is how you interact with your customers and stakeholders– how you disseminate the knowledge you have amassed, and the content you have created. Here is where people comment on what you say, and expect you to listen to them. This is the feedback por@on of the cascade control loop.
This en@re system, this en@re integrated marke@ng communica@ons program, depends on content, and lots of it. The good news is that there are content creators available who are capable of producing as much content as you want or need, without breaking your bank. Look for people with industry and applica@on specific knowledge already. You should not have to spend hours or days teaching the content provider your business. There are several good content providers I recommend to people when they ask. You do have to spend the money, though. You can’t just say you are going to do all these things. You have to have the content wriPen or produced, and you have to have schedules for producing and publishing it. Otherwise, you are just mouthing motherhood statements. And then you’ll have the opinion that all this newfangled interac@ve marke@ng communica@ons stuff doesn’t work. It does, YOU don’t.
So that’s PR for Automa@on Professionals. I hope you have a bePer understanding of PR’s place in the marke@ng mix, and how important proper use of public rela@ons can be to the strength of your company and your brand. In a minute we’ll open the discussion up to ques@ons, but I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I’ve enjoyed it and I hope you have too.
We will be pos@ng the recording of this webinar, but if you want a PDF copy of the slides and speakers notes, send me your contact informa@on at [email protected] and I’ll see that you get one.
If aker the webinar, you have ques@ons on a specific issue, feel free to contact me either at Control or at Spitzer and Boyes LLC.