corporate communication

Has PR Become An Unsustainable 24/7 Profession: Do We Really Need Social Media Mission Control Centers?

~ K. Quesenberry ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media affects our professional lives. One particular development has been in the back of my mind since I saw a keynote presentation at the WVU IMC INTEGRATE conference that has particular relevance to the Public Relations profession. Fred Cook, CEO, of PR firm GolinHarris spoke about the many changes in the industry and how his firm has adjusted to the digital revolution. In particular, he talked about a new 24 hour, 7 days a week social media monitoring lab they built to listen and respond to live consumer chat on behalf of their clients. I’ve kept thinking about how they staff the room. Like marketing and advertising, PR has not traditionally been an hourly, shift working profession. And GolinHarris is not alone in reacting this way to the 24 hour news cycle and 24 hour consumer chatter. London based Chapel PR  recently launched their own 24/7 rapid response social media listening lab for client Thomas Cook to monitor their 60+ global brands.

How is this changing the human side of the profession? In a Social Media Today interview, PR pro Bernice Burnside of Bvisible says, “The ‘Golden 24 hours’ within which a company needed and was expected to respond to issues has become the ‘Golden Hour.’” This 24/7, 1 hour response time expectation does raise the issue of possible overwork. Occasional all nighters is one thing, but marketing and communications departments and firms are not built like a customer service or operations department used to functioning at this level. An extreme case is the death of a 24-year-old Ogilvy PR employee in Beijing, who died of a heart attack at his desk. Ad Age reports there are rumors that the cause was overwork, but nothing has been confirmed.

And how much does all this around the clock listening cost anyway? PR Newswire did some calculations in this area. They estimated that is takes a typical PR Pro 8 hours a day to manually monitor social media and compile a clipbook including scanning sites, collecting clips, generating a data spreadsheet, plus analyzing and reporting. With the average PR Pro wage, this could cost $80,000 a year just for one employee for 1/3 of the day. Dave Folkens from TopRank Blog observes that when one upset customer on Facebook or an angry blogger can send a brand into a crisis mode, PR is in an “always on” mode. Certainly, PR has always had to deal with “on call” issues, but social media has expanded the potential complaints and the public visibility of these issues. Has it gone so far that “on call” has now become 24/7 shift work at the office?

Of course, not all of these 24 hour listening labs are being built-in PR firms. Some marketers have chosen to invest in their own internal social media monitoring centers with branded design and important names like “Mission Central.” For example, Gatorade has built a Mission Control room in the middle of their marketing department to monitor the brand in real-time across social media. Gatorade has used it to leverage a popular song in one of their commercials that was getting a lot of buzz, optimize landing pages to increase engagement and host live events such as a nutritionist answering consumer questions.

Still, does all this activity justify an elaborate, branded lab that is staffed 24/7? Gatorade admits that all the real-time data reported in Mission Control is also available to employees on their laptops. Perhaps deep down inside all of us, there is a childhood dream to work on something as critical as Mission Control at NASA. Or perhaps we all have seen Apollo 13 way too many times.

Marketing Communications: The Language That Drives Business Revenue

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

An article I tweeted  talks about the increasing emphasis on content creation for marketing: “@Kquesen: The tables turn – in social media marketers must think & act like publishers: 4 tips for building brand & audience … http://t.co/MQiGxDFe”

But that is just one small example. B to B reports that marketers such as Nick Panayi from the IT services company Computer Sciences Corp. have gone all-in with content creation with an in-house department of former journalists who create branded content for their website and social media channels.

Marketers are becoming bloggers and are Tweeting and creating videos and filling Facebook pages. They are creating a lot of content. Content  with value that delivers knowledge, entertainment, something people will choose to engage with like they do newspapers, magazines, and TV. Forbes agrees saying brands such as Virgin Mobile, American Express, Marriott, L’Oreal, and Vanguard are becoming publishers and this is a vital part of their overall strategy.

You may call this content marketing, but it made me think about the overall importance of communications in business. We live in an age of customer-driven capitalism where the customer is now in charge. As Steve Denning, author of Radical Management points out in one example “… focus on customers first doesn’t hurt Whole Foods’s bottom line. The ten year share price of Whole Foods is up 330%, compared +30 percent for the S&P 500, and minus 40% for a traditionally managed supermarket chain like Safeway.” That’s consumer focused communications increasing revenue.

How many e-Books/White Papers do you get invited to download? They are generating valuable sales leads. As I highlighted in an earlier post, Forester Research reports in the book groundswell a case study where a corporate blog is credited with generating five contacts a week – contacts that represent early leads worth millions of dollars to this B to B company’s salespeople. That’s consumer focused communications increasing revenue.

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek article credits carefully worded and tested fundraising e-mails as the main source of $690 million raised online for the Obama campaign. Of hundreds of tested subject lines “Hey” was the most successful bringing in millions of dollars alone. That’s consumer focused communications increasing revenue.

Those are positive examples, but poor communications can cost corporations revenue. Poor communication contributed a great deal to Merck loosing $253 million in the Vioxx trial. The jury was confused by their scientific explanations. The Wall Street Journal reports juror John Ostrom as saying “Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah. We didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.” That’s poor consumer communications losing revenue.

An Accenture study reports American and European consumers returned over $25 billion in electronics in 2007. Between 60%–85% had nothing wrong ($15.2 and $21.5 billion). Why? Confusing interfaces, features difficult to access, no customer education, and weak documentation. That’s poor consumer communications losing revenue.

In 2006, a disgruntled customer used YouTube and Twitter to spread a music video about United Airline’s mishandling of his $3,500 guitar. Within a week the video received 3 million views (12.5 million by 2012) and coverage in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, BBC and the CBS Morning Show. Fast Company reported that Carroll contacted United for nine months with calls and emails, but only after the video’s success and United’s stock price drop of 10% ($180 million) did the company try to make things right. That’s poor consumer communications losing revenue.

Then there is the tweet that sent the Dow average down 145 points in Spring of 2013. Hackers used @AP to spread a rumor that two explosions had gone off at the White House, injuring the president. This caused a two-minute selling spree in which the Dow stocks dropped $200 billion in value, which emphasized the power of social media content on the financial industry.

Of course no article about communications would be complete without a reference to Apple – the World’s Most Powerful Brand valued at $87.1 billion. In an Entrepreneur article “Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success,” six of the seven rules are communications oriented: Have passion, deliver vision, make connections, create experiences, master messages, and sell dreams.

Jeffrey Rohrs takes this concept to the next level in his latest book Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers. Communications, through publishing content, is how you build audience and proprietary audience is a valuable business asset. Whether you are a CEO, CMO, marketer, or entrepreneur communications can be a competitive advantage. Do you believe that what we say and how we say it matters to the bottom line?