Airfoil Public Relations

New News Is Good News

Needless to say (but I will), it was a relief to read today’s headline on MSNBC.com: “Recession Ends in 79 Metros.”  An index compiled by the news outlet and Moody’s Economy.com showed that the recession ended in August for one of every five metro areas in the United States. 

 

Instead of constant doom-and-gloom headlines on news home pages, we’ll be reading turnaround stories and comeback sagas, which may finally drown the frowns and dial an occasional smile on the faces of those who have been so wounded by this recession.

 

For their part, communicators need to be careful not to overstay their now-two-year-long visit to the muck of the economic downturn but to get in front of the tide of positive stories that may be coming our way.

 

Here are a few areas that we should be preparing to explore as the well-known new reality becomes the next-new-reality:

· The impact that health care reform is having on each and all segments of our nation, now that legislation is likely to pass within the next 60 days. 

· Many manufacturers already have geared up for a clean and green future and are likely to rise to the top rapidly as the economy recovers, while online companies have learned the value of virtual relationships and will build an even broader base for their growth.

· The dwindling distinction between “media” and “social media” as blogs, social networks, comment sections of news sites and crowd-generated stories become the trusted, word-of-mouth methodology for communicating news. 

· As the economy improves, will the fortunes of print editions do the same?  Not likely. Instead, watch for respected—and now jobless—journalists forming more collective Web sites where they will publish their investigative feature articles.

·  The return of entertainment in exciting new forms.  After cutting back during the recession, Americans will want to be cutting up during the recovery—without the lavish spending that got them into trouble way back 24 months ago.  We should be watching for the impact of 3D television, coming to homes in 2010. 

So there’s the challenge, communicators.  A good-news world is coming—deal with it.

 

--Steve Friedman

 

(See the full version of this post at Steve's blog.)

Wearing the pants in the relationship

One of my passions in life is a good pair of denim. Lame, no. Expensive, yes. Unimportant/shallow, maybe. But the word pants has always lent itself to meaning something more than Japanese cross-stitching. Working in public relations puts this all in perspective.

The stitching between the media and public relation professionals is a fragile one that needs to be carefully hemmed. You see, no one likes to feel like they are inferior or that their opinion is not held in as high-esteem as the next guy's. Being conscience of how your message comes across can make all the difference. Being confident about a brand and image is a great quality, but each pitch angle needs to give the user some leg-room and flexibility.

In order to ensure that embarrassing need for a patch doesn't occur, switch up your approach by disguising your preference for taking control and molding the pitch for the reporter. This is especially true for social media who don't like to copy and paste but rather to form their own statement. Instead, be confident about your client and pitch the high-level topic rather than pushing a word for word statement.

And that's the fabric of our relationship.

-- Heather Arft

Resuscitating White House Communications

After eight years in a coma, presidential Q&A sessions and addresses have been reinvigorated by the White House—and just in time.  Hearing from President Obama virtually every day during his current campaign for health care reform may be called politicking by some, but his messages are informative and often inspiring. 

He has been visiting health care facilities, talking with doctors and nurses, patients and parents; and it’s important to know that he is so close to the issues in the field, not just in briefing memos.  He is fielding questions from the White House press corps on a regular basis now. 

But he has moved beyond this conventional venue to grant individual interviews to network anchors.  At the same time he is projecting his regular-guy image on the pitcher’s mound at the All-Star Game and in commenting on the Michael Jackson tunes he still carries on his iPod.

On health care, Obama has also been resolutely on message, despite pressure from the opposing party and his own to go slower or allow taxing of benefits or any of a number of other concessions.  The package will be paid for without increasing the budget deficit, he repeatedly promises. No one making under $250,000 a year will see higher taxes, and so on.

With the health care reform campaign, President Obama may be creating a welcome new template for communicating national issues:  

• Visit impacted people and places first and then communicate policies, rather than the reverse.   Obama saw and appreciated the results of health care inequities long before he took the oath of office.

• Do you homework and labor diligently in creating your proposal—then stick to it in unwavering fashion.  Compromise details if you must, but don’t compromise principles.

• As every marketing executive will affirm, speak often and in many different venues to ensure your message remains high in the public’s awareness.

• Be eloquent, not encyclopedic.  Real-life issues require real-life anecdotes and real empathy with target audiences.

• Set ambitious deadlines for ambitious projects.  Beyond the “to-the-moon-in-this-decade” analogy, any small-business owner who has sold a company will tell you that the deal should be completed within 30 days—otherwise one or both parties can lose focus and interest as minor issues impede major progress.  The president insists his August deadline for a health care proposal—and December deadline for passage--can be achieved if we all focus on the principles of reform that must be implemented.

Let’s hope that a healthier White House attitude toward communication produces a more robust and constructive discussion in the public forum.

--Steve Friedman

 

Are we making our client announcements Tweetable?

While reading a blog post by PR Newswire’s Sarah Skerick, I found myself thinking about how much we encourage our clients to leverage social media. But are we taking it to the next level in our profession?

Skerick’s post, When Will PR Catch Up with 2009? It's Time to Make Pitches Easier for Journalist-Twitterers to Use , focuses on a disgruntled journalist who received a pitch for a product launch that followed all the “traditional” best practices of  creating a pitch in that it was well written, succinct and compelling. As PR pros, we know that journalists are more pressed for time than ever as staff reductions continue to occur. We work hard make their job easier by providing them all the details they need in our press releases, offering expert sources, photos, etc.  However, what this pitch lacked and what many PR pros may not be considering in their pitches and press releases is the social media component.

The best tip I found in Sarah’s post was to include a “tweetable” link in pitches and press releases, both the headline and shortened URL fitting within Twitter's 140 character limit so that anybody looking to post the information can do so with a simple copy and paste.

Tip: When creating the URL, use services that offer measurement tools such as HootSuite. Providing the URL through HootSuite will give you the advantage of being able to track how many people click on the link the reporter or others post to Twitter.

-- Deana Goodrich

 

Ragan UnConference offers advice for digital marketers

This past weekend, myself and my fellow social media-aholics Tonja Deegan and Allen Arnold traveled to the Windy City to attend Ragan Communication’s UnConference. The goal of the conference was to create a forum for communicators to discuss their uses and challenges in the social media and digital marketing space.  No surprise to us, Twitter remained a hot topic for most of the day along with other tools including Flip cameras and Facebook.

During the four-hour forum, it became clear that communicators and clients alike have reservations about engaging in social media for fear of opening the flood gates and receiving negative responses from customers or competitors.  Several suggestions were offered and if companies use them wisely, it will be hard to argue against online engagement:

• Have a social media policy – Develop rules of engagement for clients and fellow communicators representing your brand. These are no longer the days of the Internet wild, wild west and developing guidelines for types of posts made on blogs, Twitter or Facebook is necessary.  Moreover, it will give your fellow communicators a framework for developing the type of online persona that consumers can recognize.  For those considering developing these types of policies, the NewPR Wiki links to several corporate policies.

• Break the rules – Nobody ever said the ways companies and communicators are using social media sites are the only ways.  A fellow communicator shared a great initiative that utilized several facets of social media to present an online event called “Sleepover 2.0.”  The communicators invited friends on Facebook, looked for sponsors on Myspace, promoted it on blogs and streamed the event live.  The four women at the event used Twitter to solicit other users to contact MC Hammer by enacting a TweetBomb and received national coverage for this initiative and accolades on social media sites, not to mention a phone call from Hammer.

• Measure – Our role as communicators is to gauge the overall sentiments about the brands we represent and improve the perceptions. Opening a forum for consumers to complain can be scary, but it can also become a way to improve (and more importantly, measure) public sentiment of your brands.  Through engaging with customers, influencers and media, the brand is able to build relationships and measure improvement.

• Rethink what you already know – Consumers are changing their behaviors – accessing more information online before making purchases, reading online versions of their daily papers and looking for the best deal possible. Social media has become a powerful tool to get in front of these consumers and provide them direct communication and updates.

• Have a strategy – Oftentimes, communicators can get caught up in social media tools as a strategy.  Twitter, Facebook, online video and MySpace are not strategies.  Rather, they are tools and tactics.  A strategy with goals and metrics is the best way to ensure a brand’s integration into the social media world and to track success.

The most important take-away for any communicator who attended this unconference does not have to do with the tools, tips or advice offered by colleagues.  The most important advice is that when it comes to social media and your brand, use these tips and start exploring digital media.

-- Nicole Yelland

HIMSS for communicators

After several years working in health care PR and marketing, I recently attended HIMSS for the first time. The must-attend conference for the health care IT world detailed a lot of changes that are facing the industry:

• Health care is going digital, whether physicians are open to that change or not. This will save our government, our insurers, our hospitals and consumers valuable time and money. It will also save lives, improve the coordination of care and reduce complications. And it’s not all about EHR and PHR. It’s also about RFID, ePrescribing, HIE, measurement and more. That is why the ARRA (PDF) is pouring tens of billions of dollars into the support of this transition.

• There is a clear communications disconnect.  If you are in health care communications and are not actively engaging in social media, public affairs and education about eHealth for both physicians and consumers, you might as well continue your one-way dialogue with the wall and wait for your pink slip.

• EMR and PHR providers are struggling with differentiation.  The most common response when I asked what a fellow attendee’s company did was “EMR.” OK, well, what makes it different from the 200 or so other EMR providers here? Companies need to figure that out before their competitors do.

• Private and group practice physicians, as well as consumers, need to hear “What’s in it for me?” One physician said that the paper-to-EMR switch saved him $33.15 per patient visit, which totaled tens of thousands of dollars a year in additional revenue. He also said more than 13,000 patients visit his practice’s portal each month to participate in their own health management. If you build it, they will come.

• Physicians are currently positioned as technology novices. The industry is not giving them enough credit. These people graduated from med school. We just need to persuade them based on factors that are important to them: time, money and outcomes.

The dialogue that was missing from the conversation at HIMSS is how this digital shift will affect health care marketing in the next five years. As outcome measurement becomes more thorough and more regularly reported, hospitals and physicians will be able to more effectively market their results, giving consumers opportunities for more educated provider decisions than “it’s near my house” or “it was the first name on my insurance provider’s Web site.”

Vendors and users will also need to have a strategy to gather and digest the vast amount of information being generated by both the private and public sector, as well as strategies on where and when they should participate in this fast-moving dialogue.

Some of the particularly interesting companies I met have technologies to watch, including OnBase, Epic Systems, TeleHealth Services, Microsoft’s HealthVault, Zynx Health and triPRACTIX. The HIMSS site also has additional details and news from the conference.

-- Keith Donovan

Building online credibility and the role of public relations

Let’s face it: If I wanted to, I could post a blog entry detailing a plan that the U.S. Treasury wants to implement to replace the U.S. dollar with the peanut.  I could even make up quotes and cite them to unnamed sources in an attempt to make the post look legit.

But even though it looked professional, it would still beg the obvious question: do you believe it?

Chances are, you wouldn't.

Why?

Because I lack the ‘street cred’ that comes with years of proven, newsworthy material.   

As an information-starved reader, you would likely dismiss it and move on, save for the 20 seconds it took you to tweet to your followers about the crazy rumor you read.

But let it be known that as a public relations professional, identifying who is and isn’t credible is going to become an important question asked of our industry as more and more print newspapers cut, or eliminate, staff.

Judging by what a group of reporters at the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News intend to do to keep their journalistic spirit alive, it’s not unreasonable to think that more and more laid-off reporters and out-of-work journalists will turn to the already muddied waters of the Internet to get their voices heard.

Since they’ll want to retain the credibility they enjoyed when their words appeared in print, they’ll look to us for assistance.

It then becomes our job to not only continue that relationship, but also to discover where our client message will get the maximum exposure.  These new sites might be in their infancy, but we will be tasked with accurately expressing to our client that they should reach out with their message and justify influence, even though their current metrics don’t, at least on the surface, compare to a local paper’s.

As this transformation continues, the days of blogs getting away with providing rumor-fueled "news" to their readers will be limited.  Readers will prefer the sites that offer them solid information and will increasingly take lazy bloggers to task.  (Or, stop reading them.)

Essentially, they'll expect the same set of standards from the people providing the information as they did when they could hold their words in their hand.

It’s up to us to help deliver it.

-- Brad Marley

Hospitals, health systems begin path to electronic media record adoption

Late last week, HIMSS Analytics, a subsidiary of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), recognized 15 hospitals within two health systems with its first Stage 7 Award. Stage 7 is the highest possible level on HIMSS’ Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Adoption Model, and represents an advanced patient-record environment.  Stage 7 hospitals can deliver patient care without the use of paper charts, can share standardized patient information securely with other providers, can use medical information to drive measurable patient care improvements, and are “best practice examples” to other hospitals looking to implement EMRs.

President Obama has allotted $17.2 billion in incentives via the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act beginning in October 2011 to Medicare and Medicaid providers who can prove they’re using healthcare information technology (HIT) “in a meaningful way.”  No matter what your views on his policies, it’s clear President Obama understands the role HIT can and should play in delivering quality healthcare at reduced cost.  It’s also evident that while “Stage 7” HIT adoption won’t happen overnight, he’ll be looking to the industry to begin moving in that direction from now on.

How can the industry start on the path to “Stage 7” in HIT?  Start investing now, and tell Health & Human Services in Washington you want a say in what constitutes a “meaningful” HIT investment, and standards for HIT implementation when incentives arrive in 2011.  It stands to reason the focus on HIT only works best when the playing field is level.

-- Brian Barthelmes

Upcoming tech events discuss issues in social media, traditional media and the economy

We’re up to a lot of new things at Airfoil, and technology communications remains a large part of our focus.

This week, I’ll be in our Silicon Valley office and will be participating in PRWeek’s technology breakfast and technology roundtable.

On March 19, PRWeek’s technology breakfast at the Santa Clara Marriott< features a Q&A session with Carolyn Pritchard, managing editor of the GigaOM Network.

Following the breakfast, I’ll be taking part in a PRWeek technology roundtable discussion with some public relations colleagues and companies in the Valley. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with and meeting some of my peers, including Susan Butenhoff at Access Communications and Frank Shaw at Waggener Edstrom, not to mention hearing from companies including Microsoft, eBay<, HP, LinkedIn, NetApp and Cuil.

Although the roundtable is not public, PRWeek will report on the discussion in an upcoming issue. We plan to have a lively discussion regarding the economy, staffing and recruitment, the shrinking traditional media and the continuing evolution of social media.

-- Janet Tyler

Tech stimulus is just what we need

The stimulus bill introduced by the Democrats in the House, with its strong focus on technology, is just what our economy needs.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “If the bill becomes law, it would allocate billions of dollars for tech projects to improve healthcare, education and government funding, among other things. Much of this money would be spent on computer hardware and software.”

President-elect Obama has professed his support for electronic medical records previously. As the new administration shapes a stimulus package to help individuals and companies survive, information-technology innovators can assemble their own package of public relations initiatives and techniques to help them stimulate interest in their products and services and continue to thrive.

Recently, we developed a white paper with marketing communications strategies that IT companies can employ (or partner with a PR agency to employ) to help them emerge from the downturn with an advantage over competitors.

A stimulated tech sector will have a ripple effect across industries such as health care. With some planning now, companies can be in the perfect position to take advantage and propel their businesses on the right path.

-- Janet Tyler