Zer0 to 5ive

According to Mitch Joel, the author of Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone, we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation, but rather six pixels of separation – effectively changing everything we know about doing business, as the online realm becomes increasingly relevant in communication and decision-making.

Joel notes that it is crucial that all companies leverage digital channels to get their voice “out there” by connecting with others, becoming better community citizens, and, ultimately, making strategic business moves that will increase revenue, awareness and overall success in the marketplace.

Here are some of Joel’s key tips for engaging consumers through digital channels:

• Drive consumers to take action and keep them engaged
• Be active in blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter), podcasts, online social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr), user-generated content (audio, videos), and wikis
• Be compelling and consistent in everything you do
• Add value to the conversation – add personal insights and establish yourself or your business
• Be present, active and involved – respond to questions asked and ask your consumers questions

Digital channels will work for you based on what your users, community members and readers do with your content. It is important to understand that your reputation is online – so be helpful, sincere, credible, responsive and FAST!

It takes time to build content – find your voice, develop a community and earn trust and respect. Digital channels are about building real relationships, with both current and potential customers – they are built on trust and trust alone – and trust is built slowly over time.

Connect with us on Twitter: @Zer0to5ive

I recently put together a blog post with steps one through five for getting more and better consumer media coverage.  Here’s a look at steps six through 10:

6. Create Expert Tips/Top Five Lists – Pitch the reporter with a top five list pertaining to your client’s product. Some examples include the top five places to hear sounds better (re: sound enhancement product) or the top ways to maximize summer value and fun (re: travel discount card). Offer up the client as an expert and work your product into the pitch as an example. The idea here is to give reporters a fresh idea for a new story or post without your product coming across like an advertisement (which turns away reporters).

7. Build the Relationship – Begin to foster the relationship with the reporter from day one. This will put you ahead of the pack when contacting the reporter for your client’s launch or other announcement. Reaching out early ensures that you have the right contact; learn the reporter’s communication preferences and see what upcoming topics and trends the reporter is covering.  Sending an intro email is another way to get on the reporter’s radar.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
8. Leverage Reporters Across Accounts – Pitch reporters across accounts to help generate momentum with new clients. For example, do you know a consumer producer who might want to book a new client? Or perhaps a medical reporter that switched to the financial beat that will cover a new investment advisor client? Making the connections across accounts is not always obvious – thinking outside the box will help to connect the reporter to new clients while strengthening the relationship with the reporter.

9. Master the List – Leverage your media database to put together a strong media list.  This step might seem obvious, but I’ve found that fully mastering all the advanced features of your media database can lead to additional contacts and coverage. For example, most databases offer the ability search for keywords in reporter titles such as “consumer” or “new products,” which I’ve found helpful when offering up new consumer products for review.  Always prepare to vet your list in advance of your pitch as contacts often switch beats.

10. Pick Up the Phone – Add the phone to your pitching toolkit.  Is relying on email enough when the top reporters are getting 100+ pitches a day and juggling deadlines, breaking news and special requests from their editors?  My teams have used the phone to their advantage when we’ve done our research on the reporter, know our technology inside and out, and simply haven’t heard back by email. However, the phone is not always appropriate, such as when the reporters are deadline or they already said “no” through email.

A copy of my presentation is available here.

Post by Michael Levey
Zer0 to 5ive Director
Twitter: @mikelevey

With the top consumer reporters getting 100+ pitches a day, while also juggling deadlines and special requests from their editors, it’s important to have a solid plan of action for opening the door to more consumer coverage.

At our recent company retreat, I put together a presentation on ten steps for getting more and better media coverage for consumer clients.  Here are my tips:

1. Address the Pain Point – Start your pitch with a clear and convincing pain point.  For example, if you pitch a direct-to-order hearing aid, how about sharing that 36 million Americans suffer from some kind of hearing loss, but less than ¼ are doing anything about it?  Or if you push a rapid HIV test, how about including the fact that prior to the introduction of rapid testing, more than 1/3 of the 2.2 million Americans that tested for HIV at public health clinics never returned for their results? Numbers and statistics build credibility and interest with the media.

2. Tie to Breaking News & Events – Connect your product to breaking news and events to help drive immediate interest.  For example, can you tie your water purification product to the Gulf Oil Spill?  How about connecting a financial crime monitoring software to the Super Bowl or World Cup events that have a large spike in transactions?  Breaking news and events are bound to be covered – so offer up your client to talk about the product or service in the context of the big news.

3. Use Catchy Subject Lines – Create a short and clever subject line.  Think about it… how much more likely are you to open an email that catches your attention?  Some examples of catchy subject lines that my teams used to drive national coverage include “Is RFID Sponge-Worthy” (re: RFID counting and detection system for surgical sponges) or “Are We All on Drugs? The Answer May Be in the Water Supply” (re: new pharma drug take-back program).  The subject line should also be short enough that it can be read on a PDA.

4. Pitch Seasonal Gift Guides – Product gift guides are a great way to connect your products and services with the top publications on a regular basis.  Mark your calendar for important dates such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s/Father’s Day, and back-to-school season.  Offer to send a sample product and high-res photo – and be sure to reach out several months in advance.

5. Target the National Days/Months – Take advantage of the national days and months set aside by industry organizations to connect your product or service.  This includes days from Earth Day to World AIDS Day to National Doughnut Day.  And if you can’t think of one, invent your own.  For example, 7-Eleven created “Free Slurpee Day.”

These are five steps to get you started.  Stay tuned for part 2 that will discuss tips six through ten and give you an opportunity to view my complete presentation from the retreat.

Post by Michael Levey
Zer0 to 5ive Director
Twitter: @mikelevey

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia covering just about every topic out there. It is maintained by a worldwide community of volunteers, who routinely edit and update the information. PR professionals can help their clients be part of Wikipedia either by creating an original article (often referred to as “entry”) or ensuring an existing article is up-to-date.

How Wikipedia Helps PR

• It’s credible: With high standards for its articles, Wikipedia maintains accurate information that consumers and media can rely on.
• It’s popular: As one of the leading online encyclopedias, it’s estimated that traffic has risen by about 170% in the past few years alone. If your content is there, people will have easy access to it.
• It’s editable: Because articles can be edited by anyone, you have some control over what is published, and you can report inaccurate information.  As your clients evolve, so too can their Wikipedia entry.
• It drives traffic: The site is highly ranked by Google and other search engines; an article in Wikipedia can greatly boost traffic to your website.

Wikipedia Checklist

Before submitting an article for Wikipedia, make sure you fit the required criteria:

• Be sure your topic is notable. By Wikipedia’s standards, a topic is considered notable if it has been written about or featured in an independent, authoritative publication.
• Make sure your article is unbiased. Write from an objective point of view.  Read Wikipedia’s page on neutral point of view here.
• Study the most popular pages on Wikipedia to get a sense for how they are written. Examples are here.

How to Leverage Your Wikipedia Article

Once your article is posted to Wikipedia, there are several ways to leverage it within your PR campaign strategy.

• Explore Wikipedia to see if any other topics naturally relate to your content and provide a link from one to the other to generate additional traffic.
• Include external links to other content on the company/company employees. These are valuable for referral link traffic, although harder to keep listed.
• Consider consulting a backlink analyzer to discover which external websites are linking to your Wikipedia page (such as Yahoo! Page Links).

Wikipedia is a valuable tool in a PR professional’s toolkit, allowing for the dissemination of accurate company information, while simultaneously generating site traffic.

Lisa Graham
Zer0 to 5ive Strategist
Twitter: @LisaMargetich

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of entrepreneurs at the Corzo Center at the University of the Arts.  The topic was “Moving Your Ideas Forward,” where I talked about brand building and what that means to brand success. Connect to presentation here.

What I liked best about the night was the excitement that young entrepreneurs have for their companies.  Everything is shiny and new, and the journey is just beginning.  I have always loved this time in the lifecycle of a company.  It’s all about potential and opportunity.  This is where branding begins.

I’ve given this presentation a few times, but added in a new section – defining brand success.  One of the important aspects of branding is where you think the brand will ultimately go and how you define success.  For some, it’s money, others fame, others just doing good work.  As you contemplate your brand and your vision for your company, don’t forget to define how you will measure success and how that contributes to the brand you are building.

Michelle Pujadas
Zer0 to 5ive Founder and Co-CEO
Twitter: @Pujadas

November 5^th marked the annual WordCamp Philly – a much-anticipated conference for designers and developers in the Philly area that use WordPress. WordCamp Philly is intended to be the premiere WordPress-related technical conference in Philadelphia, offering various seminars and sessions designed to grow and enhance your WordPress skills.

I signed up for WordCamp Philly, excited to attend and listen to the presentation given by Doug Stewart: Adding a Social ‘Stache: BuddyPress, bbPress And Beyond.

Doug Stewart is co-founder of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and an established BuddyPress developer – an expert, in my opinion.

Doug did a great job of explaining multiple benefits of adding these social applications, BuddyPress and bbPress, to your WordPress-enabled website.

Below are some notes from the presentation:

Why go social with WordPress and your website?

• Increase capability and potential for user engagement
• Encourage contribution for users
• Make it easier for users to engage with content
• Give “freshness” to a site
• Increase a sense of ownership
• Add a sense of community

Why use BuddyPress versus bbPress?

For smaller, simpler applications – use bbPress. bbPress is only a forum solution, meaning that it will only add forum capability to your site. Alternatively, BuddyPress offers a lot more features, including messaging and friend connections, but it is more complex.

Who uses bbPress: WordPress.org forums, WordPress.com forums, Dropbox Support Forums

Who uses BuddyPress: CUNY Academic Commons, Solo Practice University, hMAG, GigaOm Pro

Doug made a very valid point that you should not implement tools on your website that will not be used. If your community is small, it doesn’t make sense to implement friends, private messages, etc. Start with a forum and, as your community builds, implement new features that your community will love and utilize regularly.

bbPress – http://bbpress.org/

BuddyPress – http://buddypress.org/

Travis Hoglund
Zer0 to 5ive Senior Developer

I just finished a whirlwind of 3 “tech” conferences in 4 weeks: EDUCAUSE (higher ed tech), Aspire 2011 (LivePerson’s global summit on customer engagement) and Defrag 2011 (internet innovation around information transformation).  Three different conferences, three different vertical markets, three different locations and three different “feels”.  But that’s not the interesting part.  The interesting part is that all three talked about the same four things and those things weren’t so techy:

• Culture
• Connection
• Collaboration
• Content

It was astounding to me that culture – what many might think of as the least techy thing of all – was so important in so many of the presentations.  Why is that?  I’m not sure I know, but what I think is that the past few years – fueled by technology – have created a major shift in how we work, learn and engage – and that culturally, we are trying to keep up.  Education, application development, customer service – they are all feeling the same impact.

As importantly, in many cases, we weren’t talking about tech at all, but rather content.  Content that drove learning, content that created leadership, content that engaged buyers.  “The pipes don’t matter!”  “The LMS as we know it is dead!”  “It’s online and offline – content when and where you want it.”

The best part of all of these conferences for me was that at some level they were all about marketing.  Defining what’s important, where the engagement needs to happen, how the engagement needs to happen and how the brand and culture need to be consistent and honest.  All of this against a backdrop of incredible speakers who challenged us to be honest, to challenge status quo, to look beyond the obvious.  Oh, and that it’s okay to be a Geek.

I can’t give these conferences their full due – literally too much content (!), so check them out yourself with their Twitter hashtags: #EDU11, #defragcon, #Aspire2011.

Michelle Pujadas
Zer0 to 5ive Founder and Co-CEO
Twitter: @Pujadas

Social media started as a peer-to-peer connection tool – it was something people used to stay in touch, post photos, and share news and events. In the beginning, it was a channel used among friends and colleagues, like any other social venue.

Within a year or two of the social media explosion, corporations began to see the value in social media outside of conversations between peers, and they leveraged these concentrated cyber venues to connect with their customers, validate their brand, and sell their products.

The business tactics worked – and millions of people began to interact with these companies, posting on their Facebook pages, re-tweeting their tweets on Twitter and commenting on YouTube videos. But, even though this movement has exploded over the last several years, most of the companies involved are still B2C companies.

So – how can a B2B company benefit from Social Marketing?

According to Paul Gillin, author of “Social Marketing to the Business Customer,” the answer is simple.

In his book, which focuses on how B2B companies can successfully engage in social marketing, Paul Gillin lays out some best practices that all B2B marketers can benefit from. He argues that business buyers are looking to make decisions as quickly and intelligently as possible, and that the Internet is the best place to engage these buyers. He writes that social marketing tactics are not right for all B2B companies, but used in the right ways for the right corporations social media can be a very effective business-to-business tool.

Below are what he considers to be the top 3 benefits of social marketing for B2B clients:

1. Social media offers a way to humanize a business

Your online presence is the “face” of your company, resonating with people and engaging them in what your company has to say. Being able to connect with customers online is effective because it is essentially an extension of your brand, through a channel that your customer understands and can relate to.

Using your name, or even a picture of your face, is a literal translation of this (and it has been done!) – but another way to achieve this is by starting a company blog, and giving your company a voice.

2. Social media can provide opportunities to achieve market intelligence through surveillance

With social media you have the opportunity to monitor what is being said about your industry, from potential buyers and the general public. This information can make you more intelligent about your industry, and can be used to strategize future plans. You also can use your role in discussions to show your thought leadership and expertise.

3. Social media allows a company to discover new product opportunities or holes in the current market

As a member of the social media community, you are also a part of online conversations and discussions on new products, trends or news in your industry. More importantly, you can also monitor what your competitors are doing – or what they are not doing.

For example, you can monitor what people are tweeting or blogging about a competitor and get clues on how you can also be optimizing your business or using opportunities to get ahead.

With the right strategy and tools, B2B companies can (and should) effectively take action through social marketing channels.

For more information and additional resources, check out Paul’s website here.

Kelsey Rodenbiker
Zer0 to 5ive Strategist
Twitter: @KRodenbiker

The days of hard copy press kits may be gone, but that doesn’t mean that the media no longer needs the information that these kits contained.

Management bios, corporate fact sheets, FAQs, the latest company news – how do you organize this information on a website so the media can access it easily?

Here are six must-haves for today’s online newsrooms:

1)    Media contact: make sure your media contact is front and center. Provide email, phone and cell.

2)    Press releases: make sure that the newsroom contains all the company’s press releases, organized chronologically from newest to oldest for the past 12 – 18 months. Archive older releases to reduce clutter.

3)    Links to media coverage: For every article, include the title and link to the outlet where the article appeared. Keep coverage organized chronologically.

4)    Upcoming events: Include the name of the event, booth number, speaking topics (if applicable), links to the event and a form to fill out to schedule an interview at the event.

5) Links to all the company’s social media profiles

6) Access to logos, product images or screen shots

Other potential assets for your online newsroom include topics that the company can speak to the media about, story ideas, industry metrics and areas of expertise for your executives. You can also add a resource area, where you aggregate information from the industry. Finally, if your company has video or b-roll, access to this makes it easier – and more appealing – for broadcast media looking for story content.

A few clever online newsrooms that have taken it to the next level are:

• www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.asp
• www.google.com/press/index.html
• www.crayola.com/mediacenter/

Regardless of the amount of news that your company distributes, make sure the content is well organized, accessible from the main navigation and searchable with a URL structure with “news” included.

Kathleen Fusco
Zer0 to 5ive Senior Strategist
Twitter: @kathleenz10

In marketing and PR, attention is often focused on the ability to write the perfect press release or successfully pitch the media to secure a placement. Not often is attention paid to the art of working in teams – a fundamental skill all those in marketing and PR should possess in order to be effective.

Being a team player leads to added creative brainpower and more productive results. However, the ability to work with peers in a constructive way is often challenging, time consuming and requires a great deal of compromise.

Adam Bryant, author of the New York Times column Corner Office, interviewed dozens of CEOs to get their input on what qualities foster the ideal team player. Here are a few key takeaways:

Nothing is more important than the ability to deliver what is expected of you, when it is expected of you. No surprises, no excuses. Being reliable is the cornerstone of being a team player.

Just like in sports, it is imperative to cover your position consistently, but the best players are the ones who are able to spot the opportunities to score a goal or steal a base. Don’t be afraid to be a playmaker–– your team will appreciate your ideas and forward thinking.

While it may seem straightforward, team objectives should be established and discussed often to ensure everyone has a common goal. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle of everyday business operations, but keeping objectives at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts, will keep team members focused and stimulated.

In many industries, including marketing and PR, teams are in constant rotation. The ability to work in ad hoc teams and adjust to different personalities, different managers and different work styles will make life a whole lot easier. How do you do this? A good start is by applying the three steps above with each new team!

I would recommend this book as a must-read for anyone in PR and marketing. Corner Office demonstrates the importance of being a team player, and offers valuable advice on how to be most effective while working as a team.

Are you ready to implement your team smarts? Set, GO!

Kristen Filippini
Zer0 to 5ive Strategist
Twitter: @krissyfilippini