Chapter 5

Search and Social Media for Online PR

Business-to-business marketers have been slow to enter the online public relations arena, but now that the impact of search engine optimization and social media marketing in the consumer marketplace are clearly documented, B2B marketers are ready for a complete guide to making the most of online PR. Written by Greg Jarboe, an expert with firsthand knowledge of the field, this chapter explains how to leverage the SEO press release, blogger outreach, and social media influence to generate leads online.

Chapter Contents

  • Overview of Traditional B2B PR
  • How Online PR Is Different
  • Three B2B Online PR Case Studies

Overview of Traditional B2B PR

In the late 20th century, B2B marketers relied largely on traditional public relations: they put press releases and a prepackaged set of promotional materials into press kits, used news clipping services to monitor media relations and article placements, and put someone in charge of analyst relations to influence the industry influencers. Nevertheless, B2B marketers still hadn’t come up with a meaningful way to calculate their return on marketing investment in traditional B2B PR.

The Traditional Press Kit

It was standard practice in the 1980s at companies like Wang Laboratories and Lotus Development Corporation to create two press releases for each major product announcement: one written in plain English for the business press and the other using more technical terms for the trade press.

The PR director put both of these press releases into a press kit along with a glossy photo, a company backgrounder, a prepackaged set of promotional materials, and a business card—and mailed them in envelopes to the entire press list.

In other words, B2B PR professionals spent time and money tailoring their message to different media that reached different market segments, and then they spent more money on materials and postage by shipping everything to everyone in the same bulky package.

News Clipping Service

As for publicity, we would hire a news clipping service to read each print edition of every major publication. This list of publications included the following:

  • Daily and nondaily newspapers
  • Regional publications
  • Consumer magazines
  • Trade magazines
  • Professional journals

Then we would spend time—which is money—to put together a clip report each month that tried to estimate the “advertising value equivalency” of our publicity instead of the number of qualified leads that our publicity had generated.

We assumed that qualified prospects had read our clips—and hoped that some unknown percentage of these prospects would respond to the messages in these publications at some indefinite point in the future. And we were afraid that, sooner or later, somebody in the top management of our companies was going to demand more meaningful metrics.

I learned that the hard way, when I became the 13th director of corporate communications at Lotus. And that was when the software company was only four-and-a-half years old.

After my first month on the job, I took a very thick report of about 700 newspaper and magazine clippings and walked casually down the hall to the office of Jim Manzi, the chairman, president, and CEO. I nonchalantly dropped the clip report on his desk.

Manzi took a quick look at it and said, “Jarboe, if I could deposit these little pieces of paper in a bank, then I’d know what they were worth. But until you can measure the impact of PR in cold, hard cash, don’t waste my time with these so-called reports.”

Then, he added, “I know how much money the company would save if I laid off half the people in your department. I just don’t know what impact it would have on sales. So, you’ve got six months to figure it out.”

The first thing I did was commission some market research. Actually, I didn’t have enough money in my PR budget, so I co-commissioned a buyer study with Bill Huff, the director of marketing communications, who was under the same kind of pressure to come up with a similar answer for advertising.

We surveyed recent buyers of Lotus software and asked them what “information sources” they had used before making a purchase decision. We also asked buyers what types of information had the most influence on their purchase decision.

When we presented our findings six months later, Manzi dismissed them because they were counterintuitive. Articles in trade publications ranked higher than articles in business publications, print advertising ranked higher than TV advertising, and friends and co-workers ranked higher than Lotus salespeople. And product reviews were much more influential than industry news.

Nevertheless, Manzi didn’t cut my department in half—and I kept my job for two more years, which was a record at the time.

Tracking Analyst Relations

I first met George Colony when I handled analyst relations at Wang and he was an analyst at the Yankee Group, before founding Forrester Research.

Since industry analysts were frequently quoted in trade publications and business publications, analyst relations was considered a traditional part of B2B PR. However, many industry analysts also performed advisory (consulting) services to corporations and public service organizations, so they had an impact on sales.

When Lotus launched Computer Library, a CD-ROM reference product, in the fall of 1986, I went nuts when I discovered how easy it was to find out how many times an industry analyst had been quoted. Computer Library contained a database of articles that had appeared in the previous 12 months in any of more than 100 sources.

That’s also when I first began to suspect that Forrester Research was compensating its analysts in part based on how often they got quoted. However, my suspicions weren’t confirmed until September 1997, when Scott Kirsner wrote an article for Wired entitled “Please Quote Me on That.” Colony was quoted in the article—twice.

“Quotes help us sell,” Colony told Kirsner.

How Online PR Is Different

The dawn of online public relations didn’t break until the early 21st century. It coulda, woulda, shoulda arrived a few years sooner, but too many PR professionals weren’t prepared to put “the public” back into public relations.

Too many PR professionals used the terms public relations and media relations interchangeably, even though that was incorrect. Too many PR professionals were myopically focused on learning how to generate publicity in new media, and too few were farsighted enough to figure out how to generate website traffic.

As B2B marketers enter the online PR arena, you can learn some important lessons from the pioneers of the SEO press release, blogger outreach, and social media influence. And you can use these insights to know how to generate leads online.

Understanding the SEO Press Release

The launch of Google News in September 2002 prompted a new generation of pioneers to reinvent the press release for news search engines. One of those pioneers was my agency, SEO-PR Inc., which is why Tad Clarke, the editorial director of MarketingSherpa, called this innovation “the tactic known as SEO PR.” Others have called it the SEO press release, press release SEO, press release optimization, or the optimized press release.

But whatever you call this innovation, when the SEO press release arrived, it faced mixed reactions from public relations professionals.

Learning how to write a press release for Google News and Yahoo! News is a five-step process that can be taught in a half-day public relations workshop. So, why haven’t more public relations firms and departments seized this opportunity? As Columbus discovered, training the crews of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria how to sail west was a relatively straightforward task. The real challenge was convincing Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand that they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world.

Google News shifted the PR paradigm when it included press releases in its results, as did Yahoo! News a few years later. That’s when a few innovators and early adopters started exploring this new medium. Now it is a voyage every B2B marketer must take to be competitive.

The first step in learning how to write a press release for Google News and Yahoo! News users is identifying a target audience and developing a segmentation strategy. This requires a redefinition of public relations that is significantly broader than media relations.

Many PR people think their primary purpose is to pitch the press, not reach prospects. Since news search engines use computer algorithms instead of human editors, they can’t imagine placing stories there. However, among the thousands of news sources that Google News and Yahoo! News continuously crawl are Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire, PR Newswire, and PRWeb.

When users of news search engines conduct a query for a term or phrase, they find press releases and articles in the results. This means that PR people can use Google News and Yahoo! News to pitch their news stories directly to prospects. PR people can also use news search engines to reach the press.

A decade ago, a Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World stated, “Journalists now use the Internet as easily as the phone.” As Figure 5-1 illustrates, a 2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey found 95 percent of journalists use Google and other search engines during the course of research for a story and 36 percent use a website of a commercial newswire.

Figure 5-1: Search engines are now a common research tool for journalists.

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This is the new PR world.

The second step to writing an SEO press release is conducting keyword research and finding your search term sweet spot. This requires learning to use a keyword suggestion tool. There are a number of free keyword research tools for SEO, including Google News Autocomplete, Yahoo! News Search Direct, Google Trends, and Google Insights for Search. You can use one or more of these to identify the best search terms for your SEO press release.

The third step is optimizing press releases to get high rankings on Google News and Yahoo! News for as long as possible. According to Compete PRO, Yahoo! News had 57.1 million unique visitors in December 2011 and Google News had 9.4 million.

To succeed, you need to do the following:

  • Place two or three keyword phrases that are closely related to your company, product, or benefits in the headline, subhead, and lead paragraph of your press release.
  • Add links to your press release that use these keyword phrases in the anchor text. These hyperlinks should help people find interesting, related content on your website, where the reader can fill out a lead form.

The fourth step is distributing your press release using a commercial newswire that is crawled by Google News and Yahoo! News, such as Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire, PR Newswire, or PRWeb.

The fifth and final step is tracking the effects of optimization and measuring the results of promotion. To track and measure, you must learn to use web analytics and other measuring tools. While press and analyst influence remain important, lead generation and sales are the new metrics of marketing performance.

Reaching Out to Bloggers

By 2004, the rapid growth of blogs and equally rapid decline of trade publications prompted a new generation of pioneers to reinvent media relations. It was involuntary. Their old boat had sunk.

Many trade publications have merged or vanished completely. And the few trade magazines and trade journals that are still being published today are much slimmer than they were in the 1990s, and they now have skeletal editorial staffs and anorexic travel budgets.

Fortunately, the vacuum was filled by the explosive growth and maturing of a new arm of the fourth estate: blogs. And in most industries, many of the top bloggers were former journalists. According to Technorati’s 2011 edition of State of the Blogosphere, “We continue to see a very large overlap between bloggers and traditional media. Almost one third of bloggers have worked for the traditional media, with a monthly magazine being the most common form (41%).”

This means that online PR professionals should use the same best practices for blogger outreach that they’ve used for years in traditional media relations. Here are the most important ones:

  • Reach out to bloggers because you have a “remarkable” story that might be of interest to them and their readers.
  • Spend time reading the blogs that you plan to contact, and don’t pretend to have read a blog if you haven’t.
  • Before you email bloggers, check out their About and Contact pages to see whether they prefer to be reached a specific way, and adhere to those requests.
  • In your outreach email, explain why you think they might be interested in your story.
  • Always be transparent and clearly disclose who you are and for whom you work. Explain how blogger outreach and their blog in particular fit into your campaign strategy.
  • Remember that bloggers are free to write about information you give them in any way they see fit. (They can even say they hate it.)
  • Understand that when a blogger agrees to write a story, it may not happen overnight. They usually have their own scheduling of blog posts to deal with and might take an “I’ll post it when I post it” attitude toward you. If you bug them too much, they may not post it at all!
  • If bloggers are initially interested in your story but don’t respond to one of your follow-up emails, don’t follow up a second time. Leave them alone.
  • If you reach out to bloggers with a story, don’t offer to provide monetary compensation, because many believe that it’s unethical to “buy” favorable publicity, and you don’t want to appear as if you use illicit practices.
  • If bloggers have advertising opportunities on their blogs, then your advertising people can consider purchasing ads as a way to reach their readers. Understand, however, that buying advertising doesn’t mean that they’ll post something about your company and product or, if they do, that they’ll say something favorable.
  • Don’t be afraid to contact as many bloggers as possible. If you have the time and resources to do so, you might as well; other bloggers won’t see it as a slight unless you promised exclusivity. The more places your story gets posted, the better its odds of being filtered up to the mainstream.

In many industries, blogs are the new trade press. To find the top blogs in your industry, just go to Technorati and search for a relevant term or phrase. If you search for blogs, you’ll quickly discover the ones with the most authority.

The good news is that bloggers are more likely to add links in their stories than the editors or reporters for the old trade press. If you look at the top referrers in your web analytics software, don’t be surprised if a disproportionate percentage of your web traffic already comes from blogs.

Social Media Influence

The launch of LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006 has prompted a new generation of pioneers to reinvent the model of influence for social media.

The most interesting and useful insights and best practices in this new field can be found in a study published by Traackr in October 2011 entitled “From the Frontier of Online Influence.” Traackr works with PR and marketing professionals on the leading edge of influencer communication. The company asked more than 100 practitioners—most executive or senior level—to share their unique perspective on the discipline of influencer discovery, engagement, and measurement. The company also spoke with other professionals—non-Traackr users—who are very active in influence communication and asked them to share their thoughts and insights, as well.

As Figure 5-2 illustrates, advanced practitioners of influencer communication use a combination of free and paid resources to find influencers. And approximately 80 percent of the respondents use two or more of the top five resources; the remaining 20 percent of the respondents use 38 different tools.

Figure 5-2: Top 10 resources to find influencers

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Respondents to the study also shared eight best practices for finding influencers:

Determine Keywords Use Compete PRO to find out which keywords drive traffic in an industry category; then create a search with them in Traackr to find the influencers.
Validate Use the automated tools as a stepping-stone in the influencer discovery process, read their blogs, and validate the data to build relationships with influencers.
Show Commitment Influencer identification is not a one-time thing. You need to do it regularly. It is a marriage, not a date.
Welcome Surprises Don’t discount the “little” guy. Some of their one-to-one interactions are stronger than those of broadcasters. It takes only a pebble to start an avalanche.
Combine Tools Use Google to find the most relevant keywords, Traackr to gain insights, and Klout to validate Twitter.
Value Relevance Over Popularity Choose relevance over popularity. The most popular influencers on social media are often the least helpful in a social media campaign.
Study Understand the influencer’s core audience.
Combine Human and Machine Tools and technology are a good place to start, but we always need the human element.

As Figure 5-3 illustrates, nurturing relationships with influencers is a key challenge. Respondents, who were allowed multiple responses, also said that articulating the value of the relationship to the influencer was a challenge.

Figure 5-3: Challenges of influencer engagement

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Respondents to the survey shared four best practices for engagement:

Make Something Special Study the influencers on your list and, their audience study and create a value-add campaign or event.
Target Your Engagement If some influencers are not helping you close business, why are you talking to them?
Keep No Secrets Don’t hide why you’re contacting influencers; they understand you want something from them. Be open.
Be Authentic Use subject-matter experts, not marketers, to engage. Avoid marketing speak: be authentic.

As Figure 5-4 illustrates, defining a meaningful way to calculate return on investment for influencer campaigns is the key measurement challenge, especially as ROI analysis has to be in line with the specific campaign objectives.

Figure 5-4: Measurement challenges in influencer campaigns

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Respondents shared four best practices for measurement:

Measure What Matters Define and communicate your goals and make sure your measurement aligns with your business objectives.
Choose Different Tools for Different Purposes Use Traackr Monitors to measure impact in the influencer community and Sysomos to track coverage in the overall conversation.
Timing Set up your analytics before you start your campaign.
Don’t Forget One way or another, everything ought to lead back to sales.

Three B2B Online PR Case Studies

The most extensive research that I’ve ever read on the true behavior of the people actually involved in purchase decisions at thousands of companies is The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a Digital Marketplace, by Gord Hotchkiss. The major B2B research initiative was conducted by Enquiro with input from Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo, and Demandbase. The research included more than 100 face-to-face interviews, hundreds of eye-tracking sessions, and more than 3,000 survey responses.

The BuyerSphere Project found that most B2B marketers aren’t effectively leveraging online assets to their best potential. The research also overturned many of the traditional beliefs long held in the B2B marketplace. The research challenged tradition with the following insights:

  • The notion of a strictly followed, traditional buying funnel is simply not accurate in many instances.
  • Risk dictates buying behavior.
  • Search is incredibly important as an integrator across online and offline channels.
  • Face-to-face persuasion is still necessary in many high-risk, complex purchases.

The BuyerSphere Project also looked at how online strategies became artificially separated from traditional best practices, how they can be more effectively integrated, and the part search plays as a major influencer.

The findings of the BuyerSphere Project are the biggest whack on the side of the head—or kick in the pants—that conventional wisdom in our industry has received since the early days of online PR. But the research helps explain how B2B online PR is different.

The research also explains why a new approach to B2B online PR can do more than generate website traffic. The following are three recent case studies that demonstrate that it can also generate leads online.

Rutgers Center for Management Development

On February 10, 2009, Econsultancy’s Michelle Goodall asked questions in her blog post “SEO PR: What Is It and Why Should You Care?” One was, “How do I benchmark and measure SEO PR success?” As the president and cofounder of SEO-PR, the company that pioneered the tactic, I looked for an opportunity to answer Goodall’s question. And I established a benchmark for the Rutgers Center for Management Development (CMD) using an unoptimized press release and traditional media relations and comparing the results generated by an optimized press release and blogger/social media outreach.

Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, launched a new Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing Executive Certificate Program in April 2010. The first program was limited to 30 students.

Each student enrolling in the program received an Apple iPad. A YouTube video made during the program explained that the iPads were not intended to be shiny new toys offered as gifts just for participating. Rather, they were an integral part of the 10-course program, customized with Apple’s help to provide a new dimension to executive education in a field that is defined by technology.

Rutgers faculty and leading practitioners from around the world taught the 30-hour program. For example, I taught both the Online PR Strategies and the Social Media Marketing courses.

Eric Greenberg, director of marketing programs CMD, wanted participants to learn about the latest research and best practices in the industry through case studies, interactive sessions, and class exercises. I proposed creating a new case study just for his course. Rutgers would establish a benchmark using an unoptimized press release and traditional media relations. Then, SEO-PR would compare the results generated by an optimized press release and blogger/social media outreach. Greenberg approved the idea.

On April 20, 2010, the local newspaper ran a story about the program, which was shared 18 times to Facebook. The same day, the unoptimized press release was posted on the Rutgers website. Its unoptimized headline read, “Rutgers to Put iPad to the Test in New Digital Marketing Program.”

Five days later, a post about the program appeared in the Search Engine Watch blog, which generated 225 tweets. The next day, an optimized press release was distributed via Business Wire. Its longer, optimized headline read, “Apple iPad Tablet to Be Tested in New Rutgers Mini-MBA Digital Marketing Executive Education Courses.” The longer headline included additional search terms, including Apple iPad, Apple iPad tablet, mini-MBA, Rutgers mini-MBA, executive education, and executive education courses.

Both releases included links to a landing page on the Rutgers website with more information about the Digital Marketing course using the iPad. The news story and unoptimized news release generated a modest spike in page views on April 20 and 21. The blog post and optimized press release generated a spike in page views on April 25 and 26 that was 116.9 percent larger. The blog post and optimized press release also generated the first registration for the program. This was verified in July, when I asked the 30 students in the Online PR Strategies course how they had found out about it.

The $4,995 registration generated by the online PR campaign also gave Rutgers a 3.0 return on its marketing investment of $1,665. By comparison, Nielsen Analytic Consulting has found by conducting numerous studies worldwide that the average short-term return on marketing investment—sales return within three months of media execution—is 1.1.

Students also appreciated this focus on measuring the return on marketing investment. Two students, one who landed a job while he was still in the program and another who had been dabbling in social media, provided Rutgers with video testimonials that praised the ROI of the Rutgers social media course.

SES Conference & Expo

During the worst economic downturn in decades, attendance at conventions and trade shows fell by 8 percent in the first quarter of 2009, and the number of exhibitors participating at tradeshows dropped 10 percent, according to Tradeshow Week magazine.

Instead of hunkering down, SES Conference & Expo, the leading global event series that educates delegates in search and social marketing, and my agency, SEO-PR, launched a social media campaign called “Must Attend” that integrated blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The goal was to listen to and communicate with attendees, exhibitors, speakers, and bloggers in North America and Europe. The key topic of this conversation was the value of attending conferences and expos in a recession.

According to a Tradeshow Week survey, CEOs and other senior executives said that in a challenging economy it was even more important to keep up-to-date with industry trends, see new products and services, and maintain and build relationships—all areas where events provide significant value and efficiency. In short, attending leading conventions and trade shows during a recession kept executives informed and competitive.

Despite aggressive budget cuts to get out in front of weak economic trends, 89 percent of the survey respondents said they were going to the most important events in their industry. The core message of the SES campaign was that the conferences and expos in Toronto, San Jose, Berlin, Chicago, London, and New York are “must-attend events” in the search industry.

SES and SEO-PR used YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs for the “Must Attend” campaign. These social media channels were used to engage previous and potential SES attendees in discussions about how the conference helps them “keep up-to-date on trends and issues,” the expo hall lets them “see new products,” and the event enables them to “network.”

For example, the SESConferenceExpo channel on YouTube featured interviews with conference speakers about the “future of SEO” and “future of search.” Attendees were asked to share their opinion of SES. Exhibitors were asked to demonstrate their new products. And the channel featured a comedy sketch, “Searching for Santa at SES Chicago 2009,” which was shot at a networking event.

In addition, bloggers were offered interviews with speakers who would be discussing the latest trends and issues at upcoming SES events. When large numbers of bloggers expressed interest in interviewing keynote speakers like Charlene Li, coauthor of Groundswell, and David Meerman Scott, author of World Wide Rave, SES held free webcasts and gave away copies of their books to the bloggers who asked the most compelling questions.

From April 1, 2009, to January 31, 2010, the SESConferenceExpo channel on YouTube had 97,856 total views of all videos. For the same 10-month period the previous year, the channel had 50,245 views. This means the outreach to the YouTube community almost doubled the views year over year.

From April 1, 2009, to January 31, 2010, bloggers wrote 292 posts before SES events. An additional 319 blog posts were written during and after SES events.

Finally, there are now 10,390 members of the SES group on LinkedIn; 2,034 followers of SESConf on Twitter; 1,189 fans of the SES page on Facebook; and 599 subscribers to the SESConferenceExpo channel on YouTube.

In 2009, the “Must Attend” program met its objectives for SES Toronto and SES San Jose, which remained flat in a down economy, and exceeded its objectives for SES Berlin and SES Chicago, which were up over the previous year’s events. And in January 2010, conference registrations for SES London and SES New York were up more than 10 percent over the previous year, and space in the expo halls sold out for these “must-attend events.”

Piper Aircraft

On Thursday, January 13, 2010, the Piper Aircraft marketing team faced a dilemma. The good news was that Piper management had just inked a licensing deal that would allow the company to bring a game-changing personal aircraft to the market, the PiperSport. The bad news was that launch day for the PiperSport would be just eight days later, on January 21, at a major sport aircraft show in Florida.

The eight-day timeline would be short even for a traditional launch. But PiperSport seemed to be a product tailor-made for social media: a hip new personal transportation product targeted at young pilots at a price point roughly double that of a luxury car. With the timeline tight and the budget even tighter, Piper decided that a digital marketing campaign would be the quickest way to build awareness and excitement about a new airplane.

Commissioning digital marketing agency DigiNovations to take the lead, Piper quickly assembled a tightly integrated program on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that produced strong awareness, eye-popping sales results, and many turned heads in the aviation marketing field. Piper turned a budget of less than $50,000 into presales of more than a dozen $140,000 aircraft, more than half of which were ordered via $10,000 deposits made through a PayPal web link.

This is the story of that campaign.

With time short and resources scarce, Piper and DigiNovations settled on several objectives:

  • Create broad awareness of the new PiperSport within two weeks of launch, as measured by search inquiries, website visits, and social media engagement.
  • Steal the thunder from a major competitor, Cessna Aircraft, whose entry in the same class had suffered a major manufacturing delay.
  • Create strong interest in the aviation press, fueled by a sense of market interest and momentum, sufficient to earn a major aviation magazine cover.
  • Build a communications channel of at least 5,000 “fans” via a social media channel, feeding enthusiasts and evangelists with a steady stream of news and updates.
  • Create at least three aircraft sales directly attributable to social media channels, more than amortizing the full cost of the social marketing program with margin on the sold aircraft.

The time horizon of the first phase of the campaign was January 21 through mid-April, when the first PiperSport would be delivered to the first customer at a major air show in Florida.

The Video The longest lead-time item would be creation of a marketing video to introduce the PiperSport to the public. Making it trickier was that the initial aircraft were in a secret location and had not yet been certified and insured to fly. The DigiNovations team settled on a highly personalized, informal approach to introducing the PiperSport, featuring key Piper executives taking the viewer on a video “tour” of its features, Piper’s chief pilot discussing detailed flying characteristics, and a young woman taking her first lesson in the aircraft.
The YouTube Channel A custom-designed YouTube channel would host not just the main video but also shorter supplemental “tell me more” pieces built from outtakes, as well as reviews from various web-based independent video reviews when they became available. A mechanism was set up to scan for new videos twice a day so that all new independently produced video material could be discovered and “favorited” for inclusion in the the PiperSport YouTube channel.
The Facebook Fan Page The team created a Facebook “fan page” and began loading it with useful content so that it would look vibrant and “full” even to the first visitors who arrived. The team took advantage of the fact that there was a small but very enthusiastic cadre of fans of a predecessor to the PiperSport in the United States who could be attracted and cultivated to enthusiastically review and post about the aircraft, even before the official PiperSport would fly in April. This group provided plenty of photographs, stories, and personal videos to keep the anticipation high even before the first delivery in April. The Facebook page was launched simultaneously with the announcement and seed-promoted with pay-per-click ads on Facebook targeted at pilots and aviation enthusiasts. The Piper team posted several times a day during the first two weeks, daily for the following month, and even now posts every two to three days (and comments daily).
The Twitter Feed While the Facebook page was targeted at enthusiasts, a Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/PiperSport) was more narrowly targeted at aviation journalists and opinion leaders. The objective here would be quality, not quantity: to keep opinion leaders well-informed about every event, milestone, new material, and so on. The team measured success here by retweets by opinion leaders to their respective audiences.

Here are some of the important results milestones for the social media launch of the PiperSport:

  • On January 20, 2010, a Google search for PiperSport turned up zero results; 90 days later, it returned more than 126,000 results. What’s more, the company’s official channels—website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, videos, and other materials—occupied seven out of the top 10 search results.
  • The video “Inside the PiperSport” was viewed more than 112,000 times. The PiperSport YouTube channel, which contained 16 video segments, recorded 82,000 visits.
  • The PiperSport Facebook page had 10,950 fans (or “likes”). In a typical week, members contributed more than 350 postings, comments, photos, and interactions.
  • The PiperSport Twitter feed achieved almost 100 percent share of a targeted list of aviation journalists, bloggers, and opinion leaders.
  • Market enthusiasm inspired Flying Magazine to put PiperSport on its May 2010 cover.
  • By late April, at least 15 new PiperSports had been ordered at an average order size of nearly $140,000 each. Eight of these had been bought via $10,000 deposits made through PayPal; Facebook had been credited publicly by at least four buyers as influencing their sale. PiperSports were being sold much faster than they could be made.
  • The PiperSport program has been cited in both Technorati and Search Engine Watch as a groundbreaking program in social media marketing effectiveness.

The knowledge from the PiperSport social and video marketing program has formed the foundation of an expanded digital program that is now spreading across all of Piper Aircraft’s brands. All this goes to show that you can teach a 73-year-old company new tricks.

Interview with Greg Eden of Autodesk
Greg Eden, the senior director of public relations at Autodesk, is a 16-year tech PR veteran. He has run public relations for Autodesk since mid-2010. Before that, he ran PR for Dell Computer as its agency of record. Before that, Greg ran the PR operation for VMware. And, before that, he served in the PR function for EMC Software for 11 years starting in 1996, ending up running the department by the time he left in 2007.
Eden has been in the PR function since the dawn of the Internet age, with deep B2B, client-side, and agency-side experience. He was kind enough to share a few hours of his expertise with Bill Leake as we were writing this book.
How has traditional PR changed with the onset of online marketing?
Some things have changed; some things remain timeless. The importance of a credible story and credible storytelling certainly hasn’t changed. Who tells that story and how they tell it and how others comment on it certainly has.
When I chose to go to PR school rather than advertising school back in the early 1990s, I was attracted by the credibility factor, the voice of the third party as it were. And that is as true today as it was when I began my career with National Public Radio (NPR) in the early 1990s. The importance of having your story told not by yourself, but through the lens of credible influencers and the validation or debunking of your story that happens in that process certainly remains central.
Online marketing has brought changes, though. There are many more vehicles and places to tell a story. Earned media has expanded dramatically. The content world is really broad and a lot shallower. Fewer reporters are doing the deep reporting that was really commonplace when I started. There is not as much time invested into stories (and the fact checking behind the stories), with really few exceptions.
I have lots of conversations with my friends in the media about the “journalistic guidelines” and “where is the professionalism?” Back in the newswire days, you couldn’t report on a story without three sources. The yardsticks they had to jump over to get a story “printed” in traditional media are high…and this is still true today.
Reporters still have editors who will green-light or red-light a story and will ask some very tough questions to ensure they meet some standards in the reporting. Bloggers don’t hold themselves accountable to these standards, so we’re seeing a lot more content but content that isn’t necessarily fact-checked or reviewed.
Additionally, social media has changed the way that people get their news. When I started, it was all about getting that cover story, for example in Section a1 or b1 in The Wall Street Journal. It was all about the two p’s: the placement and the publication. That was all that was ever read or ever seen.
Now, due to the advent of online and digital media proliferation, combined with social sharing, that story can be in a variety of outlets but delivered to your audience in a very compelling way, through trusted social referrals.
This is changing the way we think about engagement. For a company like Autodesk, there are different influencers and different news outlets that are much more inclined to report about us given who we are and the nature of what we bring from a story perspective to their audience. There are more opportunities to engage more directly with your audience, whether it’s through social or blogs, online user communities, or other digital forums.
How have traditional and online PR both changed with the onset of social media?
Primarily, this is driven by the ability to extend the story you want through social media. For example, we had Bloomberg broadcasting live through our Autodesk University back in early Q4 2011. Bloomberg’s team had a sit-down with our CEO and did a five-minute interview.
Historically, with traditional PR, that stuff comes and goes quickly and has a very limited shelf life. In other words, we achieve whatever initial viewership we can, and then impact rapidly trails off. Same situation with articles and other PR wins. Now, in the digital world, we can do the Bloomberg content in ways we couldn’t even dream of a decade ago. We can put it up on our YouTube channel. We can promote the audio on our blogs and emails, and we can distribute this content throughout our ecosystem of friends and influencers. The ability for PR to extend a story online, both its life and its visibility, has certainly changed—for the better.
Anybody doing marketing today should be looking at the media mix (earned, owned, and paid media). Social straddles all three of these and sits at the core. There are tremendous earned media aspects to social media, which offer potential for fantastic return on time invested payoffs. There’s the corner of the Web you own (blogs, video, imagery, corporate Twitter accounts, etc.), the corner of the Web that is paid (ads, sponsorships, etc.), and the corner of the Web that is earned (friendly blogs, reporter and publisher websites, key online influencers, etc.).
In many ways, Autodesk is toward the front of the pack, but in so many others, we’ve got lots of ground still to cover as the ecosystem evolves rapidly.
Has the role and relationship to journalists, bloggers, and influencers changed?
Part of your relationship with journalists today is very much social media. When you tweet a story, there’s necessary “good hygiene” that needs to be practiced with respect to media relationships.
PR professionals and media people actually converse more these days, in my opinion, than they used to, because brief conversations (like Facebook comments) are so much easier than they used to be in the phone-only world. In the B2B technology arena, at least, it’s quite common for a reporter who has a major story, when the story breaks, to post the story in their newsfeed and elicit comments from media and PR people alike about that story on their Facebook page and on their blog.
On the analyst (e.g., Gartner, Forrester) side of the fence, now the individual analyst can actually have more power. A decade ago, the big analyst brands were paramount, but now individual analysts have built huge personal brands (often while apprenticing at a large analyst shop) and then go independent or join boutiques and still retain their followings.
At the end of the day, it’s still always about the story. Social media is incredibly democratic. Sharing and promotion are based on the value of the story. You still need to make sure you have a story worth telling and then tell it well (and in the right places).
Because you’re not picking up the Wall Street Journal on your lawn and reading it cover to cover…more often you’re turning on your iPhone; we’ve got a complete change in the way people consume data. Less and less is information about getting the news based on “trusted publication A” or “trusted publication B.” More and more things are about getting your data based on your friend’s referrals.
Does PR still exert control over the sound bite or brand reputation?
Influence for sure. Control, not so much. But then, PR never really exhibited control.
In our current environment, the characteristics that have long defined good PR have even greater importance. I see lots of connections between PR 101 and what is happening with marketing today vis-a-vis social media and other things. Foremost in my mind would be the importance of being honest, transparent, and straightforward. These have always been important aspects of PR and are just as important if not more in social media.
Here’s a use case: all this fairly recent Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) stuff. Autodesk is a pretty strong voice on software piracy (we’re against it) right up there with Adobe and Microsoft. And SOPA was in theory addressed toward reducing electronic piracy, of which there is far too much. We had worked on what traditional PR would call a drawer statement (positioning) in case Autodesk execs were asked about SOPA, so they would know what our official position would be.
It just so happens that on Christmas Eve Twitter started going nuts. Someone had alleged Autodesk was on the list of companies supporting the SOPA legislation. Within an hour, we had a statement out there that poked a hole in a rapidly inflating balloon. All this happened with no traditional media involved. It never got as far as traditional media. However, we made a huge, huge impact on our followers in the social space. This was all done exactly the same way we’d have done traditional PR. Our “sound bite,” if you will, was just a few characters long, but it did the trick, and we avoided the GoDaddy list of companies to boycott.
Our statement communicated our position and got us out with our reputation intact. It was quick, pithy, and addressed piracy, but not as a supporter of SOPA. What we focused on was that 90 percent of manufacturing jobs were fleeing to China, which has cheap manufacturing in part because they steal design software, not just because they have lower labor costs.
How is PR different in the B2B (vs. direct-to-consumer) model?
I think frankly B2B is easier than B2C. Most often when it’s B2B, you’re addressing a need. You’re addressing a company through your communications that tells a story that incorporates an issue that a customer set somewhere is facing. Here is a problem they need to solve, and here’s a way we think you can solve it.
In B2C, quite often, PR is about creating desire for something they didn’t necessarily desire before (e.g., 10 years ago nobody was looking for iTunes or Facebook). So, this makes it harder. Consumer is often new needs, while B2B is an alternative solution to the status quo (e.g., cloud—you don’t need to do this; it’s simply an alternative). Contrast that to consumer plays, where if it’s something new, you kind of have to create the buyer for it. We have a consumer division at Autodesk, and it’s primarily PR for the demand generation—doing new things rather than an alternative.
ROI of B2B PR almost always comes into play, so this part is different from B2C, where ROI can come into play, but not always. In B2B, you can pretty much always draw a hard or bottom line between spend and benefit.
How has your life changed?
A decrease in control and a necessary increase in influence. There was a school of thought with PR (and I don’t doubt many people still do it) where there was almost 100 percent control in what was communicated from a company. Now, because of what is being communicated through social media, we need to be advancing education about how to communicate the important messages far more broadly to both the internal constituencies (employees) and the external advocates and friendlies. It can’t be just a few PR-approved individuals anymore.
It’s more important than ever today that you educate and communicate within your company now that your employees have taken to social media. You need to play “whack a mole” and train more. Develop the right kind of policies and guidelines. Create social media guidelines for all employees…and not stop anyone from getting into the conversation.
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