Category: Blogs

When embracing the power of public relations, it’s crucial that you get the fundamentals in place so that your efforts aren’t wasted. A few simple tricks can make the difference between some nice name-checks in a magazine, and a genuine return on investment. Here’s a few quick tips to remember…

1. Clarify your message
Before carrying out any PR activity, you need to know exactly what your company’s key messages are. Identify what you can offer prospects that your competitors can’t, sum up what your main objective is as a business, and consider the crucial elements of your service or product offering. By doing this early on, you’ll ensure that any content, interviews or commentary you’re putting in the public domain positions your company appropriately and correctly.

2. Identify your most important media targets
Pick 5-10 publications with the most relevant audiences to your company, and make them a priority for your PR activity. Yes, quantity coverage is impressive to see, but you need to ensure that your prospects are reading what you’re getting published – otherwise it’s wasted. If you get a chance, speak to your customers and find out what they read. Get to know these publications really well – what their regular features are, what sort of topics they cover and what content they’d be open to receive from you – so you can focus your PR efforts and get quality results too.

3. Maximise your coverage through other channels
When you receive a piece of press coverage, make the most of it! Share it on your social feeds, reference it in newsletters to prospects and post it on your website. It’s also important to share it internally, so your colleagues are aware of how your brand is building in the media and can share it with their own networks. Sharing coverage can be a great talking point, an opportunity to engage online and also a chance to build better relationships with the publication that published it.

4. Let your expertise speak for itself
When writing any content for a publication, start by thinking about what articles you’d like to read if you were browsing a magazine or website, rather than beginning with what you want to say about your own brand. Generally, advice or opinion articles will be well received as you’re offering tips for free, but pushing your own company name too much will switch people off. Make your writing anecdotal and let the by-line do the talking.

5. Don’t use PR as your sales function
Finally, don’t forget that PR is only part of the story – you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Ensure your PR activity is part of an integrated communications plan and recognise it as an essential tool to build your brand’s profile. It should work alongside any existing marketing or sales activity, not instead of. The should work together to grow your business.

Ask About Results-Driven Campaigns

We’ve all heard the quote “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Well it’s possible that sometimes there can be. As explained by author Jay Baer: “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not story telling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger”. If the PR content that is produced is just spouting about how great a company and their product/service is, then it’s possible that the audience won’t read any further than the introduction. There’s also a chance that the audiences view of the company will become slightly tarnished as a result.

This is exactly why content needs to get across a client’s key messages, while looking at the wider industry landscape in terms of challenges and opportunities. It is also important for them to appear in the right media and get to the right audience. And it’s here that PR can be measured, linking back to ROI.

Arguably, the efforts of PR can all be wasted if the outcome is not measured effectively. As a junior account executive, here at Whiteoaks, measuring PR is something that my job role revolves around and is a strong part of our 360PR strategy. By writing articles on a client’s specialist area, addressing industry trends and challenges, the messaging is more targeted and relevant to the target audience. This helps get into target publications and meet the campaign deliverables.

We measure the impact of the content by monitoring each client’s target media and various other media outlets for coverage achieved. Again, tying back to the campaign deliverables. We will also assess the media that it has appeared with and rank them in relation of relevance and importance to that client.

Measuring PR can also help gauge what content is found interesting and relevant, helping to guide the direction for future content. By having a ‘quality over quantity’ approach to content, we can build and maintain relationships with publications and earn a reputation for providing good quality, thought-provoking and interesting content.

Overall, if you aren’t measuring content and its success, how can you really tell the impact that PR is having, how engaging the content is and if you are really getting across what the client wants to achieve from PR? By measuring content it can be just as rewarding for us as it is the client, seeing the successful results come through that we as a team have put our efforts towards achieving.

“Football is a simple game, complicated by idiots.”

While quoting a Liverpool FC legend might be an odd way for me to begin this latest Whiteoaks blog, it was a cause for discussion earlier in the week.

The summary is that there really is a huge amount of waffle written about B2B PR strategy. “You must do this or you must do that or else you aren’t strategic”. Really, that school of thought is a vain attempt to confuse something that should be very simple.

Our 360PR approach simplifies PR strategy. We start with business objectives, as that is ultimately what PR is there to support. Yes, we are a cog in the marketing machine, but ultimately we must be aligned with what the business as a whole wants to achieve.

From there we look at the target audiences we need to engage with and the behaviours we need to elicit from them, which enables us to create desired perceptions and messaging.

And that, we believe, is it.

If you understand those four key areas, you can consider yourself the proud owner of a PR strategy.

This is not a flippant approach, I should add. It is of crucial importance in B2B technology, where the buying cycle can be particularly long, complex and varied.

The tactical plan to meet those original business objectives can also be wide ranging, but must always have a purpose. “Doing PR” for vanity purposes or paying a monthly retainer so that you can say stuff is happening really offers businesses nothing.

We at Whiteoaks do not try to bamboozle our clients by muddying the water in this way.

So here is to clarity. Happy weekend all.

Putting my journalist hat back on for a few moments, the issue of storytelling in PR is one that has interested me since I made the move to the dark side just shy of five years ago.

When inundated with press releases, the wider issue, point or key message pull through was invariably lost – particularly on a news-hack who wasn’t interested in what I now know to be opinion leadership. If it had a purpose and was relevant to our readership, I was interested.

Fast forward a few years and I am obviously far more attuned to PR content and what is trying to be conveyed. Rather than being oblivious to it, I am now annoyed and frustrated by the notion of “storytelling”.

To my mind, dressing up content as a story is to ignore its true purpose. There is no point in hiding the fact that PR content is generated to meet specific aims (or at least it should be!). Rather, it is an attempt by lazy agencies to dress up part of their offering with a pleasant-sounding phrase and hope that attempts to disguise its fluffy nature.

This is where Whiteoaks’ Content with Intent approach, to my mind, encapsulates everything PR content should be. I absolutely agree that – and have seen examples of – B2B technology vendors are rightly passionate about their products, but often focus too much on the bits and the bytes of what they do, rather than what would resonate with target audiences. This is the issues, challenges and pain points that they are facing.

So yes, all content must be audience-centric. From the outset I was delighted with how strongly we adhere to this. But this content must have a purpose, it must contain the right messages, or else how can you possibly hope to drive the right perceptions of your client in the media?

PR has earned itself a bad reputation by trying to hide its flaws through jargon. Storytelling is all well and good, but it has to have a purpose.

Virtual Reality or VR is nothing new but in the last few years it has been trying to break in to the mainstream market. But just how far away is it from reaching wider consumers? According to some in the industry, 2016 was set to be the year that would make or break VR. I’m not entirely sure where we stand now that we’re in 2017, especially seeing as I’m not a VR or technical expert. However, as a B2B tech PR person, I’m interested in its development in the market, as well as seeing the implications it has for use in PR and marketing campaigns.

The media is still full of VR news, so perhaps we’re well on the way to see its wider adoption, particularly in gaming. We also see It a lot of buzz at broadcast tradeshows around VR but the message from vendors seems to differ. Earlier, this month we were at BVE and saw some great VR demos but other vendors were saying the tech was going to the same way as 3D and wouldn’t take off.

Just this week, ITV announced that it will promote the broadcast of the Cheltenham Festival with the release of a daily virtual reality highlights package, its aim is to place racing at the heart of mainstream popular culture. Keeping with the racing theme, William Hill has also responded to customer feedback that all betting shop fronts look the same by unveiling innovative displays in its flagship shops featuring a hologram-style animation of a racehorse and jockey, which appear to gallop across the window before picking up pace and breaking through the glass. The aim here was to add a sense of theatre and get people engaging with the company.

VR is also being used in films, adverts and social media with more experiences being created as it makes its bid to go mainstream. Last week, Oculus unveiled Mission: ISS, a free VR simulation of the International Space Station for the Oculus Rift, produced with the help of NASA and the Canadian and European space agencies. It’s the most detailed, realistic space-related VR experience ever produced but you obviously need a Rift headset to view it, which does limit its audience.

But where does VR leave the marketers and PRs? At this year’s Mobile World Congress show, Adobe Primetime demonstrated how a brand could potentially interrupt a VR experience with an immersive advert. Although, industry experts still do not see it as a game changer for marketing professionals.

While, I don’t think as marketers we need to rush out and learn all things VR, it could become part of our working life in the next few years — especially in the B2B tech space where it would help us fully understand our clients’ tech and solutions a lot quicker. And it can be used as a strategic tactic in campaigns, from adding a more immersive dimension to storytelling, to better demonstrating products and features.

Working in tech PR we don’t have to be experts on all things tech but it’s fair to say we’re all interested in innovative advances stuff we can get quite geeky about. We need to be aware of the latest tech and digital transformations and how they are impacting our work and what advantages they can bring. It’s fair to say that whatever industry you are in, VR is creating a buzz and while it may take some time to become mainstream, it’s one to keep an eye on.

Yes it is, in no uncertain terms. Why do you think it’s so easy to get free unlimited minutes on your phone contract rather than data? Because everyone uses a messaging app to ‘talk’ nowadays.

With the increased focus on new innovation in the technology space a new buzzword comes out every week. But one buzzword is quickly becoming a lost art-form. I’m talking about communication. When was the last time you had a good conversation? I’m not talking about the last funny text you received or the latest meme. I’m talking about speaking to someone on the phone or face-to-face. When was the last time you picked up the phone to talk to your friend rather than send them a text? It’s probably a rarer occurrence than you’d like to believe.

Convenience and a lack of time are factors that we all struggle with in modern life, but you could point out that they are increasingly being used as excuses. While we could work around this in our personal lives, we simply can’t let it become the norm for businesses.

There’s a movie called ‘The Last Samurai’ – yes this does have a point, stay with me. The movie has a scene where Tom Cruise, playing an American character in Japan, fails to introduce himself to his host, a culture-rich samurai whose native tongue is obviously not English. The samurai’s reaction, predictably, is that this lack of introduction was extremely rude. But after Cruise’s character atones for his error, the samurai cuts the conversation short and states ‘this was a very good conversation’. This may seem odd to us, but in actuality what makes a conversation positive for one person may be completely different to another person of different culture, background and lifestyle.

How does this relate to PR? Well fundamentally our day-to-day job at Whiteoaks requires us to have a strong element of good communication — whether that’s to our clients, the media or the end customer. And the importance of being able to communicate properly is utterly critical for brands, especially those that have a presence on social media. The key to good communication is adaptability. If person A tweets your company using slang and person B uses properly formed sentences, should you respond to each one in the same way? Well of course not, the same way you wouldn’t speak to two customers in exactly the same way if they came into your shop. But this is something many companies are failing to realise, two customers might have completely different views about your brand.

Businesses must understand that the way they communicate with not only their customers, but also with other stakeholders, like the media has a huge impact on reputation and how they are perceived. While tailoring communications according to audience may seem like a pretty standard approach, increasingly it’s losing momentum as we veer more towards using social media. Is it really possible to please all of the people all of the time?
I think it is possible – certainly to please most audiences most of the time — firstly by understanding the need for the art of communication, and secondly by working with partners like PR firms that have specialised resources, like in-house content creation, to ensure you’re ticking the messaging boxes and engaging with audiences in the right way.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) can’t be doubted — the popularity of robotics has spread through retail, hospitality and now into our homes. Scenes from Spielberg’s 2001 sci-fi blockbuster ‘A.I’ no longer seem a world away, and with recent gadgets such as the Amazon Echo, the technology is now affordable, shifting our interaction with AI from a novelty, to a part of everyday life.

Alas, with the ability to control music selection, request news updates and boil the kettle hands-free, it would be naïve to think there are no concerns around privacy while using devices like the Amazon Echo (otherwise known as Alexa) in your home.

So is Alexa’s constant eavesdropping an infringement on privacy, or is this a minor price to pay for the convenience? In this blog two Whiteoaks Echo owners explore both sides of the coin.

Bekki
Alexa came into my life around Christmas time last year and I have never looked back. Whilst I’m aware of the concerns around ‘always listening’ devices such as the Echo and Google Home, I place greater value on the convenience this brings me over the potential embarrassment of having my private conversations leaked or snooped on.

The conversations that Alexa is privy to in my home largely consist of daily chit-chat and whatever is on the TV, therefore should Amazon’s servers be hacked, or in fact the device itself fall victim to cyber criminals, then I don’t believe there to be anything of value at stake. I can understand reservations businesses may have around confidential information or sensitive topics being discussed, but this is easily controllable by holding down the microphone button to temporarily restrict Alexa’s ability to listen or by simply unplugging it at the wall.

I actually find it quite reassuring to know that Alexa is constantly collecting data. For example, Alexa’s data collection may prove incredibly helpful in Arkansas where police are turning to Amazon for access to data from conversations the Echo may have overheard during a murder. To me this is a win-win scenario. If Amazon does oblige, then data is being used to get justice when it’s needed, and if the request is denied then Amazon’s commitments to customer privacy is explicitly demonstrated.

Scott
It’s fair to say my concerns around Alexa, and voice assistants in general, are linked to cybersecurity and snooping in a wider sense. However, I feel the in-home, ‘always listening’ concept brings a much more intimate aspect to the situation, almost as if I’m leaving the curtains open for my whole neighbourhood to watch every move I make.

The data-breach dangers are obvious, and of course I’m under the same threat of phishing and theft as I would be if somebody stole my online account details from Amazon. Although with Alexa, I wonder about the additional data she collects about my interactions with her (it?), such as my requests for details about certain locations or activities, which give her a much more personal insight into my life.

Alongside the data generated from when I do address Alexa, what about when I don’t? Voice assistants MUST listen even before they hear a ‘wake’ word, it’s built in to the technology, so it’s not a stretch to imagine criminals can develop wire-taps, essentially transforming a novel gadget into a covert ‘bug’.

To finish, I’d also like to make the point that HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ could have eliminated all of the astronauts aboard Discovery One without fail, had he been equipped with all the data that Alexa can generate.

What do you think about the role of voice-assistants in your life? Does the trade-off between convenience and risk deter you, or is it the standard in today’s connected world?

12 January 2017 The Whiteoaks Consultancy has announced the appointment of Andrew Marsden as a Non-Executive Director to help drive business growth in 2017 and beyond.

Marsden’s varied and high-profile marketing career has included senior positions with major brand owners Unilever, HP Foods, Freudenberg Vileda and Britvic Soft Drinks.

He is currently Chairman of the Hofmeister Brewing Company and a Non-Executive Director of MMT Digital. He has previously held directorships at a range of marketing and communications businesses, including as a Non-Executive Director of Weber Shandwick.

Alongside this, Marsden has a significant record of professional and industry and is a former Chairman of the Institute of Promotional Marketing and Chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority Code Review, having also served on the Governmental Advisory Committee on Advertising.

He joins James Kelliher (Chief Executive Officer), Suzanne Griffiths (Managing Director) and Hayley Goff (Client Services Director) on Whiteoaks’ four-strong board.

Marsden, a former President of the Marketing Society and Master of the Worshipful Company of Marketors, says: “I am delighted to take up this role. I have known Whiteoaks for a number of years and have been impressed by their knowledge, professionalism and commitment to demonstrating real return on investment. I look forward to working with the team in this exciting period for the company.”

CEO James Kelliher adds: “Appointing a person of Andrew’s experience, calibre and profile is testament to the potential he sees in the growth and development of Whiteoaks. Suzanne, Hayley and I very much look forward to working with Andrew and believe he will bring significant value to the business.”

Marsden took up his new role on 1st January.