The pandemic has given B2B marketing leaders a golden opportunity to rethink the culture of their marketing teams. Rather than worrying about how to recover, the best B2B marketers are thinking about how to get stronger. While true culture change takes time, one of the best ways to start is by integrating it into your employees’ professional development plans. After all, you are what you measure. According to Campbell’s Law, if my raise is solely dependent on meeting a sales quota, I’m going to do everything I can to meet that quota, even if that means slacking on other parts of my job (managing my teams, developing my own skillset, etc.).

That’s why you need to build innovation into development plans and, subsequently, into employees’ annual reviews. This way, you can start holding them (and yourself) accountable for the change you want to make. The metrics of what a successful employee is has to start including those behaviors you want to see. Otherwise, your teams will treat culture change as a “nice-to-have” rather than giving it the focus it needs.

Unfortunately, telling your employees to “be more innovative” or “take more risks in your work” isn’t all that helpful. Instead, focus on creating professional development goals that are specific, attainable and measurable, and then provide detailed recommendations that are time-bound and actionable.

If you’re a B2B marketer, use the pandemic as an opportunity to assess your professional development plans, both for yourself and your teams.

• Do you have a development plan? Do your employees? When was the last time it was updated?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What are your career goals? This year? Over the next 3-5 years?
• What do you need to accomplish those goals? From yourself? From your team? From your boss? From the organization?
• When was the last time you spoke with your team members about their personal career goals?
• Do you have a plan for how to help them achieve those goals?
• Do you hold them accountable for meeting their goals?
• When was the last time you went down on the factory floor to better understand the complexities of your product manufacturing?
• Do you monitor industry associations and know what the latest trends are?
• Have you shadowed your sales force to truly hear the voice of your customers and understand their needs and what they are looking for?

Once you’ve assessed the current situation, start creating plans that will form the foundation for a more innovative and effective marketing communications department – one that will attract, develop and retain innovative employees.

Professional development plans should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely). Here are a few sample development plans for employees up and down your org chart that will build a foundation for a more innovative marketing team that could actually apply those strategies and tactics you see in conference agendas, blog posts and white papers.

These plans should always be customized to the individual employee – everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, goals and interests – but they provide a good framework for creating lasting culture change in your B2B marketing.

The pandemic may have forced us to adapt on the fly and come up with creative solutions to challenges we couldn’t have imagined a year ago, but it’s also showed us what’s possible if we think beyond best practices and identify new solutions. Let’s do more than recover from this. Let’s make this the start of a new beginning for all of us.

The post Create a Culture of Innovation With This Professional Development Plan for B2B Marketers first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

Over the last decade, PR pros became enamored with words like omnichannel, PR-led creative and disruptive marketing. Harboring dreams of Cannes Lions and huge marketing budgets, agencies pivoted resources toward consumer marketing. Then on one March night in Oklahoma City, everything changed. Corporate affairs became fashionable again. As PRovoke Media put it:

“…it is painfully clear that the agencies that are surviving best amid this year’s chaos are those that bring industry-leading expertise in such areas as corporate reputation, crisis counsel, public affairs and employee engagement.”

As COVID-19 presented an opportunity for corporate communications to truly contribute to public health efforts in a meaningful way, organizations rushed to call agencies for help with corporate reputation, internal communications and crisis communications. Someone had to reassure the employees. Someone needed to communicate what to do in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak. Someone had to explain the new operational processes and procedures to staff, vendors and media outlets alike. And someone had to expedite the cadence of communications to public officials to near real time.

The pendulum swung back, hard, to an old standby: corporate comms and its suits, process documents, strategy decks and employee memos. As we look ahead to a post-pandemic world, it’s tempting to think brands and organizations will remember this and maintain this emphasis on corporate communications.

History tells us otherwise. The pendulum will swing back toward those sexy consumer marketing programs yet again. Budgets will not only shift back toward performance marketing, consumer marketing, social media advertising and other ROI-driven activities, they may even increase to compensate for time spent out of market.

But that doesn’t mean corporate communications will go back to where things were in 2019. The past year and all of its high-profile challenges—public health, social justice, climate change—reminded us of the value of consistent strategic corporate communications programs led by senior experts. Now that they’re in the spotlight, corporate communications pros at agencies and brands should take advantage by staking their claim to the executive support, budget and resources they need to maintain their pivotal role. To do this, they should apply the techniques their counterparts on the brand marketing side of things have used for years to increase their budgets and influence in the boardroom:

1. Spice up your work with more photos and graphics.

Compare a project pitch or proposal created by the consumer PR team vs. one created by the corporate comms team. One looks like a term paper, filled with jargon and a lot of extra words. The other includes photos, charts and graphics, outlining consumer-driven ROI. Which one do you think will grab the attention of the decision-maker? Which one are you more likely to set aside to read later?

2. Come up with your own ideas.

It’s never been easier to find case studies of “best practices” and “lessons learned” for whatever problem you’re trying to solve. There’s sometimes less risk in following what someone else has already done, but when you rely on what’s worked for someone else, you’ve made yourself a commodity, a replacement part. Why pay top dollar for expertise if all I need to do is Google the best practice?

Instead of trying to find out what worked for someone else, start coming up with your own ideas for how to address your company’s unique problems—understanding that there arguably is no existing plan for what brands have faced in 2020.

3. Commit to those ideas, and sell them.

Any creative will tell you it’s not hard to come up with a good idea. Anyone can do that.

The real value lies in people who can get that idea into the final presentation deck, get executive buy-in, secure the budget and get final approval to execute. Stop saying: “That’s great, but we could never do that.” Stop letting the bureaucracy kill your ideas before they even get started.

4. Connect the dots to show your value.

Marketing does a great job at marketing itself. Teams create shiny, shareable video case studies that tell the story of the challenges they overcame and the results they delivered. They point to data that show that for every single dollar invested in consumer marketing, they delivered three, four or even five times that in sales.

Corporate communications, on the other hand, is too often viewed as an admin expense. Corporate reputation leaders should take advantage of the spotlight and create compelling case studies and stories that demonstrate the ROI of what they have accomplished.

By nearly every measure, 2020 has been a terrible year for agencies and marketers. Corporate PR has been one of the few bright spots. This is a golden opportunity to completely reframe the value of corporate communications.

The post Can Corporate Communications Stay in the Spotlight Post-COVID? first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

Over the last few months, companies around the world moved millions of office workers to remote work in a span of just a few weeks. Restaurants moved their entire business to carryout and delivery. Retailers figured out how to do curbside pickup without months of red tape getting in the way.

I’ve been particularly impressed at how agile brands (big and small) have been in adapting to this “new normal.” And while some of these adaptations have been most welcome (no middle seats!), they’ve been driven primarily  by survival. What happens when brands start using this as an opportunity to strategically think about how to transform…everything?

Looking forward, there won’t be a return back to normal. The story won’t be about recovery. It will be about transformation. The agility that we’ve seen over the last few months will become the new expectation, and the brands that realize this will come out on top.

Across industries, there are virtually limitless first mover opportunities for brands to creatively address some of the most long-standing and frustrating customer experience issues. I’ve listed some below but could easily come up with a dozen others over a beer or two.

Home Improvement

• Will contractors that commit to wearing PPE while in your home become a permanent policy?
• What commercial hygiene products (sanitizers, air dryers, etc.) will become “must-have” items for today’s homeowners?
• Will homeowners look to create permanent “quarantine spaces” to allow for easier separation of sick family members?
• What builders will focus on retrofitting homes with multi-generational spaces to allow older family members to cohabitate vs. going to a senior living facility?

Retail

• Will contactless payments via phone replace credit cards much faster than we thought?
• How should shoppers navigate the store differently?
• Is there a more hygienic way to touch and try out in-store products before you buy?
• Have masks and hand sanitizer received permanent placement in checkout aisles?
• Will self-checkout become the new standard at all retailers – clothing, toys, electronics, etc.?
• How can the dressing room be re-imagined to keep people coming into the store to try things on?

Dining

• Which restaurants will replace the traditional tipping on the receipt with Starbucks’ “post-purchase tipping” method?
• What’s the most realistic/effective face covering for cooks? Servers?
• Is there a new algorithm for determining the optimal seating arrangement in a COVID-19 environment that minimizes the spread of the virus?
• Which traditional sit-down restaurants will embrace the pizza slice model and transition entirely to carryout and delivery?

Sports

• Can we develop a new way for football fans to watch a game at the stadium?
• What’s the new way to sell hot dogs, beer, and cotton candy to fans in their seats?
• What’s the new way for players to give autographs to kids?
• Beyond touchless toilets and faucets, is there a way to make stadium restrooms more sanitary and efficient for fans?
• What do live broadcasts look like when there’s no fans?
• What sports broadcast will finally move forward with the most obvious of innovations – real-time on-field audio?

Travel

• What’s the future of the hotel check-in counter?
• What’s the new standard for cleaning hotel rooms?
• How can we eliminate middle seats on planes forever?
• Is there a safer, more efficient way to board passengers on a flight?
• Can seatback touchscreens be made touchless?
• What’s the optimal post-COVID seat design on trains, buses, and planes?
• Do we really need to still manually adjust the fan dial above our heads?
• Will subway cars reorient seating so no one faces one another? Will car occupancy be limited?

Amusement Parks

• Is there quick and effective anti-viral material or spray that can be used to disinfect rides in between runs?
• What can be used to show you purchased a ticket instead of relying on wristbands?
• What replaces the turnstiles everyone touches as they enter the park?

Beauty/Fitness

• How can makeup counters be adapted to be more sanitary?
• Nike’s created hijabs using performance material – who’s going to innovate face masks optimized for sports?
• Is there a better way to sanitize gym equipment in between uses or will we continue to use sprays and paper towels?
• We’ve already seen companies specialize in creating gym equipment that fits into your décor – who’s going to create furniture that doubles as gym equipment? Chairs that convert into weight lifting benches? Rugs that double as yoga mats?

Commercial Real Estate

• What’s an optimal post COVID office seating plan look like?
• How many office buildings are going to install walk-through body temperature scanners?
• Touchless faucets/soap dispensers/toilets and toilet lids seem obvious, but what companies will use this opportunity to rethink the very way a toilet or a sink is designed?
• What will doors without door handles look like? More automatic revolving doors? Foot-operated doors?
• Will we see voice-activated elevators?

Electronics

• What TV brands will make webcams and microphones standard in their TVs (to allow for easier at-home fitness sessions and remote learning classes)?
• What laptop brand will make ring lighted webcams standard?
• Which company will create the mobile UV light sanitizer that can be attached to your phone?

Education

• Learning to live with roommates is a key part of the college experience. What college will be the first to rethink the way dorms are set up?
• Sitting students every other seat is the most simplistic way to create social distancing, but is there a more creative way to rethink the traditional classroom setup?
• What college will entirely rethink remote learning as a core part of the four-year college experience?

Whatever industry you’re in, there are unlimited opportunities to write a new future, all while your competitors are trying to return to the past. And if you don’t, someone else will…push the envelope, create the headlines, fail (and learn) quickly, and create an entirely new reality, one that may or may not include you.

The post We Have Infinite Creative Opportunities to Solve Customer Experience Problems first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

These trends have resulted in canceled pitches, cut and reallocated budgets, and agency layoffs. But the reality is that the role of a brand’s PR agency has never been more important than it is right now. For brands evaluating their PR teams and budgets this year, consider these nine benefits to having a PR agency partner.

1. Integration – Agencies provide a third-party perspective to identify synergies and drive opportunities to add value across the organization. In-house PR pros are often too silo’ed, especially in large organizations, to connect the dots across multiple teams and functions.
2. Drive business results – While in-house PR pros focus on telling their organization’s story, agencies are experts at creating narratives that differentiate brands in the market. This creates brand preference that drives the upper funnel and positive business impacts.
3. ROI – Although a relatively small part of an overall marketing budget, PR represents one of the strongest dollar-for-dollar investments a brand can make, and helps make the overall marketing investment to work harder.
4. Experience – Agencies employ PR pros with decades of PR experience who are able to provide strategic counsel based on experiences with dozens of other brands across many different industries.
5. Strategic Focus – Agencies have the ability to focus on long-term strategies rather than the day-to-day challenges and deadlines that can distract internal staff.
6. Flexibility – A PR agency partner gives brands the ability to easily pivot to different tactics by pulling in different team members and skill-sets on an as-needed basis.
7. Unbiased Perspective – Agencies can offer honest, unbiased POVs rooted in best practices that help identify strengths and weaknesses that may be hidden to internal staff.
8. Brand Protection – Insulated from the brand’s own internal politics, agencies proactively identify internal weak spots and emerging news trends that could have a negative impact and develop strategies for avoiding and/or mitigating that impact.
9. Talent Attraction, Development, and Retention – There’s a reason top PR talent go to agencies instead of brands – they offer top-notch mentoring, professional development opportunities, and diverse experiences. Most brands struggle to provide these types of resources and experiences necessary to attract and retain top PR talent.

Maybe the trends I mentioned at the beginning of this post have you considering cutting your PR agency budget or canceling that RFP, but the pendulum will always swing back. That could be during the next crisis, or the next election, or the next missed opportunity. Consumers have higher expectations for brands than they used to and the brands that invest in their relationships with all their stakeholders – employees, customers, the planet, their communities – will not only survive, but thrive.

via GIPHY

The post Yes, Your Brand Should Have a PR Agency Partner first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

Headlines like this may soon be a thing of the past

September 30, 2019 will be the date that changed NCAA athletics forever. Maybe. Or Not. Who knows at this point?

That’s the date California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act. California’s Senate Bill 206 made it the first state to mandate deep reforms over how college athletes are compensated for their efforts. Right now, the NCAA rules bar players from hiring agents or receiving compensation from outside sources related to their sport. But the Fair Pay for Play Act would change that. College athletes wouldn’t be paid by the school as employees, but they would be allowed to earn money related to their “name, likeness, or image.” That obviously opens the door to everything from paid endorsement deals to social media “influencer” relationships.

Travis Knobbe, who also happens to be an attorney and a sportswriter has started a series of blog posts on this topic over at the Last Word on College Football. In those posts, he’s covering issues like who is going to pay the athletes, recruiting, transfers, and competitive balance. Those are fundamental issues that will be discussed ad nauseam among dozens of teams of lawyers and NCAA officials over the next 13 months (the NCAA Board of Governors has set a deadline of January 2021 to modify its rules to permit student-athletes to benefit from the “use of their name, image and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.”).

No matter what happens between now and then, there are also going to be some fundamental PR, communications, and marketing issues that need to be ironed out. And colleges and universities are incredibly naive if they think this is only going to impact a small % of their student-athletes. This isn’t just about the Tuas and the Zions of the world. It’s for the Ohashis and the Tituses too.

Think about the junior four-star football recruit from a small town in the middle of nowhere who hasn’t quite lived up to his potential. He may be a third-stringer now at his university, but he’s still one of the biggest names to ever graduate from his high school. You mean to tell me there’s not a car dealership in his hometown who would gladly give him a free car to drive around town in exchange for using his face in their ads?

As a PR and communications professional has worked with everyone from local small businesses to big global brands, my head is spinning with the possibilities that exist not only for the student-athletes, their schools, and the NCAA, but for brands, big and small.

• Oregon’s ties to Nike are well-established. The obvious conclusion is that close school-brand relationships like this could become even more popular. But what about smaller-scale partnerships? “George Foreman Grills, the official grill of the LSU Tigers.” Or “the Southwest Airlines locker room at the University of Texas.”
• As a brand, is it better to sponsor the school or the individual athlete? What’s Zion Williamson without the Duke logo? Still a mega star. But would you know who Kenny Pickett is without the Pitt jersey? If you’re a brand looking to partner with a student athlete, are you more interested in the person or the school he or she plays for?
• Remember what you were like in college? Now think about how a brand paying you thousands of dollars would feel about those photos of you at that fraternity party at 2am appearing on Instagram. These are college athletes acting like college kids. As a brand, are you comfortable entrusting your reputation to an 18-year-old college kid? The rewards are high, but the risks may be even higher.
• Brands are going to fall all over themselves trying to get to the star athletes. But the real opportunity for brands lie further down the depth chart. Established stars like Baker Mayfield, JJ Watt, and Scottie Pippen were all walk-ons in college who worked their butts off and became huge household names commanding millions in endorsement deals. A brand could have signed them for beer money when they were freshmen. Could brands sign dozens of these players to four year contracts in the hopes that one or two strike it big?
• What if as a brand, you could personally keep a player at your preferred school for an extra year? Every year, you read about a player who left college chasing a payday only to not get drafted. They’ve now burned their college eligibility and don’t have a team. They’re worse off than they were before. Now, what if you got wind that the best player on your favorite team may be entering the draft early because they wanted to get paid? Maybe you decide to make college worth his while and give him a five or six figure endorsement deal if he stays in school another year.
• From energy drinks to beauty products to Amazon, brands have infiltrated college campuses via “social media influencers.” Due to NCAA rules, student-athletes have been unable to participate in this trend, but pending the outcome of the Fair Pay to Play Act, these doors will be opened to them too. How long do you think it would take Head & Shoulders to reach out to Trevor Lawrence and his 393,000 Instagram followers?
• What about the athlete from a second or third tier sport who rockets to viral fame? Had this law been in place last year, we would have seen Katelyn Ohashi’s face everywhere, from leotards to toothpaste to beauty products. But what does that do to her teammates? To the school? NCAA football and basketball teams are much more prepared to handle stars that get the media attention (and soon, the endorsements). How would that play on a gymnastics team? Or a field hockey team? Brands have the potential to create rifts within the very teams they’re purportedly interested in helping.

At the end of the day, no one knows how this is going to play out. It could be the end of collegiate sports as we know it. Or maybe nothing really changes. The NCAA did, after all, did drop this nugget into its announcement – “in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.” What does that mean? No one knows. But it’s going to be a very interesting 13 months, potentially followed by a 21st century gold rush as brands, schools, and athletes navigate an entirely new era of college sports.

If you’re a collegiate student-athlete or college administrator, I’d love to talk more with you about this. What are you telling your student-athletes about this? What rumors are you hearing? What questions do you have? Hit me up on Twitter at @sradick or Travis (@travisknobbe) and let’s talk.

The post Brand Marketing and the Fair Pay to Play Act first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

Not my best photo

I get distracted easily. I don’t call my mom nearly often enough. I’m sometimes, ok, oftentimes, arrogant. I have constant anxiety over the fact that I give presentations talking about how success isn’t measured using impressions and likes, yet I find myself building client reports that do exactly that. I’ve sent emails complaining about how bad my client is…to my client. I have no idea how to use power tools.

The list of my mistakes and flaws could go on and on. Just ask my wife. So could yours. So could everybody’s…if people were willing to talk about them.

But no one wants to talk about their flaws, mistakes, screw-ups and failures. They’re embarrassing. They’re uncomfortable. They’re awkward. They make us seem weak and inadequate.

That’s why we use technology to hide every flaw, cover up every defect, and filter every word. Every text, email, post, and Snap is concepted, staged, shot, and shared to emphasize our strengths and optimize our brands.

We can present the absolute best version of ourselves all the time. And that’s the problem.

Our flaws are our greatest strengths and we’re not only not using them, we’re actively hiding them.

Don’t believe me?

• Think about the waiter that tells you not to order the fish because it’s not fresh.
• The car salesman who tells you the car you’re considering has a lot of reliability issues.
• Or the politician who goes on Saturday Night Live and lets the cast poke fun at him.

Now think about your reaction to those situations.

• You don’t order the fish, but you do order the pasta the waiter recommended.
• You believe the salesman when she directs you to another car she says is much more reliable.
• You start to think that politician isn’t such a bad guy – you might even say you’d have a beer with him.

These reactions are driven by science. The Pratfall Effect states that people viewed as highly competent are deemed to be more likable following a blunder. And as Robert Cialdini explains in his book “Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade” – when you admit your flaws, people are more receptive to what you say or do next. And several recent studies have demonstrated that while we over-magnify our own flaws, we minimize flaws we see in others.

It’s why we still embrace celebrities like Charles Barkley or Britney Spears. It’s not despite their scandals and mistakes. It’s because of them. It’s why celebrities read mean tweets about themselves on Jimmy Kimmel. It’s why shows like Worst Cooks in America: Celebrity Edition and Dancing with the Stars exist. It’s why Dove’s Real Beauty campaign has won every award. It’s why Eminem won the final rap battle against Papa Doc.

Psychologically speaking, it’s our own insecurities that prevent us from using some of our greatest assets in building and maintaining relationships. We underestimate the power of authenticity, flaws and all. Our flawed reality, no matter how difficult it is to talk about, creates a stronger, more sustainable brand than a perfectly manicured one.

That’s why flaws were the basis for PRSA Pittsburgh’s annual PR Summit – “Failing Forward.” We have all bombed job interviews, flubbed presentations, sent emails to the wrong person, and shared unflattering pictures of ourselves. Instead of hiding those things, we celebrated them. Let’s turn our flaws into our strengths.

The post Our Flaws Are Our Strengths first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger said the Internet would turn markets into conversations, audiences were actual human beings, and companies would come down from their ivory towers to create meaningful relationships. Eight years later, I read their book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” Social media was going to change the world, and I wanted to be at the tip of the spear.

I joined a rapidly growing cadre of change agents using social media to radically transform everything from fixing potholes and broken stoplights to managing city budgets. 

Social media wasn’t the realm of any one person, department or organization. It was owned by everyone and no one. The only thing early adopters of social media had in common was the desire to create change.

These conditions applied:

• People were people, not fictionalized digital personas.
• No one talked about social “content.” These platforms were for conversations with constituents in real time.
• The organizational hierarchy flattened dramatically. Corporate silos crumbled as people throughout the org chart could easily collaborate with other departments.
• Customers talked to one another about brands all over the Internet, and marketers were invited to join.
• Social media accounts were run by actual people, with real names and personalities.

We enforced these changes because this was an opportunity to do things differently, to do things better.  We could say, “No, senior director, you don’t get to approve every tweet we write. Do you follow me around and pre-approve my conversations, too?”

But social media became too popular, too fast. It didn’t take long for marketers to start measuring the ROI of every tweet, post, and photo. Eventually, they were able to overwhelm the change agents with processes and best practices.

Instead of recognizing social as an opportunity to fundamentally change how companies interact with employees and customers, companies did what they always do: blanketed people with ads, driving as many impressions as possible, as cheaply as possible, until they derived every last piece of revenue. “Social media” became less social. It became another place for brands to push out advertising.

Other things happened:

• Conversations gave way to content.
• Social media got integrated into IT, with complex usage permissions.
• Thriving unofficial fan sites were shut down in favor of sanitized (read: boring) official sites.
• Humans with personalities and names were replaced by corporate personas and branded voices.
• Success was measured in clicks and likes rather than relationships and loyalty.

Rather than fundamentally changing how marketing works, marketing fundamentally changed what social media was.

Today I see a world where social media has been weaponized to manipulate the public, and where everyone — brands, influencers, politicians, friends, and family members — is no longer interested in conversations, but in capturing the most likes, clicks, and views as efficiently as possible.

Still, there are signs the pendulum is starting to swing. Unilever recently said it will no longer work with influencers who buy followers or use bots. Mozilla and Sonos pulled Facebook ads after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And many direct-to-consumer brands like AllBirds, Warby Parker, and Glossier have grown without losing their soul: their personality and relationships with their consumers. Maybe they’ll be the change agents that reverse the trend.

The post Social Media Could Have Transformed Marketing — Instead, It Amplified Its Flaws first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

There’s a common request I’ve been receiving, and it has me simultaneously annoyed, disappointed and scared for the future.

The question comes (via email) in one of two forms:

1. We’re interested in doing an editorial story on your client. For a small fee, we’ll be able to put together a feature story including an interview with your CEO.
2. We’d love to develop an entire issue on your client including an interview with your CEO, several other members of the leadership team and a feature video that will run online. In exchange, all we ask is you provide us with a list of partners we can contact to see if they’re interested in purchasing advertising in the issue.

The initial request is usually followed up with something along the lines of “we do have a line between our editorial and advertising departments, but we also have to remember that we’re running a business too…”

Infuriatingly, these inquiries aren’t just coming from scam sites like The Leading Edge or Worldwide Business. I’ve been getting them from legit magazines, newspapers and websites, and even when I am working on something that’s purely editorial, it usually doesn’t take long for someone from the advertising side to reach out and ask if I’d be interested in purchasing an ad as well. I’ve even had publishers call me directly and tell me they keep editorial and advertising departments separate, but if I bought an ad, he’d “talk with the editor and make sure we got a story in there for you.” The worst scenario is when a reporter is interested in a story but is only willing to run it if you buy ad space, too.

Thanks to the popularity of native advertising and the shrinking of editorial departments, this pay-for-play approach is becoming more prevalent, and sadly, more accepted. There used to be a very clear separation of church and state, and now this line isn’t just blurred, it’s become almost non-existent.

For a PR guy like myself, this trend is disheartening for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it minimizes the work I do earning an authentic interest in my clients’ stories. No, the more concerning consequence of this mixing of church and state is the audience no longer knows the provenance of the content they’re consuming. Are those headphones really a best buy for Christmas, or did the publication include them because of that headphones ad that’s also in the issue? Is that thought leadership article really the work of a visionary, or is the author the CEO of a company that happened to do a media buy with that same publication?

In an era of “fake news,” Russian social media bots, and Bell Pottinger, this is a very dangerous development. What was once an outlier is now becoming more mainstream, and by fundamentally undermining the credibility of the media, this administration has created a self-fulfilling cycle of mistrust between the media and the public.

If the public no longer expects impartial reporting, then why should we even try? If the public is OK with pay-for-play content, then why wouldn’t we offer more of it?

The convergence of PR, marketing and advertising has only worsened the issue. While I may view these quid pro quo arrangements between advertising and editorial as abhorrent, many of my colleagues with marketing or advertising backgrounds celebrate it. Why wouldn’t they? They get the article, the editorial control, the timing and the impressions they want, all guaranteed for a dollar figure they can plan for versus paying someone like myself to try and earn that coverage with no guarantees. Add on surveys and studies that show the public doesn’t care if the content was paid or earned, and you’ve got an industry-wide ethical crisis on your hands.

What’s the solution? It’s going to take more than well-intentioned letters to the editor or codes of ethics to solve this problem. After all, the problem lies primarily with practitioners outside the confines of organizations like PRSA or CIPR. It’s marketers who view this as another extension of native advertising. It’s media buyers who think they’re doing PR people a favor by negotiating editorial as part of their ad buys. It’s CMOs who only look at the impact on their marketing campaign instead of the impact on their business.

Maybe Unilever’s threat will spur other brands to take a more active role in media ethics, but history tells me otherwise. As these walls between editorial and advertising tumble down, it’s become more and more difficult to spot pay-for-play content in the media, even for people in the industry like myself.

The answer must start and end with the general public. Call out lazy, biased reporting. Flag fake news as such. Check multiple sources. Report undisclosed sponsored content to the FTC. Pay for journalism so the media isn’t forced to rely on brand dollars to survive. A free and impartial press is integral to our democracy. Insist on it—for all our sakes.

The post Watching Church and State Slide Down the Slippery Slope first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

True omnichannel marketing is about understanding how the dominoes fall across the entire organization, not just in marketing.

Congratulations on your integrated marketing plan, your omnichannel marketing strategy, your paid-earned-shared-owned media strategy — you’ve now completed the bare minimum of what customers expect.

Just because marketers have finally started to consistently create integrated cross-channel plans doesn’t mean we should toot our horns too much. After all, we’re the ones who embraced channel-specific media plans over integrated strategies and working with dozens of specialized agencies instead of one or two integrated agencies-of-record. The fact that we’re now unpacking these silos, because customers have demanded a more consistent experience, is simply the beginning.

This was a problem of our own doing. And rather than focusing on the real challenge — creating a consistent brand experience at all touchpoints — we focused too much on the how rather than the why.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked with plenty of clients, spoken at dozens of conferences, and connected with hundreds of colleagues. Unfortunately, a common thread has emerged – every customer touchpoint has become specialized and sophisticated. And while that’s made each channel more efficient and effective, it also results in a fundamental fracturing of the customer experience. In our rush to optimize every tweet, email, and click, we’ve created inconsistency and unpredictability not just for customers, but for people in the organization too.

When someone talks about “omnichannel marketing,” they’re usually talking about the channels marketing controls — social media, digital, TV, print, PR. The list goes on. Unfortunately, just because it doesn’t fall under marketing doesn’t mean it’s not a marketing channel. If you want to create a true omnichannel plan, you better make sure you’re also addressing channels that are supported by other departments. The following questions don’t have easy answers. But guess what? The customer doesn’t care about your politics. They care about the experience.

• Before you start brainstorming the next big campaign, are there other departments doing something incredible that could be proof points?

• How are you going to use internal communications to activate employees?

• Have you equipped the customer service team with new talking points?

• Does the investor relations team have new messaging for the next quarterly report?

• Does the new campaign impact the advocacy issues your government relations team is tackling?

• Are operations committed to making marketing a reality on a day-to-day level?

• Is the C-suite aligned with how you measure success?

• Is sales using the content you created? Or are they using what they’re comfortable with instead?

• Can your IT team even create that microsite you’ve proposed?

• Have you spoken with PR about any potential public backlash the campaign may face?

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for cross-department collaboration challenges. The reality is it requires more human-to-human communication and conversation. It can’t be fixed via a memo from the CEO or an employee town hall meeting. It can’t be fixed with a steel cage wrestling match between the CMO, the CIO, and the CSO either. What it requires is a fundamental shift in marketing strategy. And marketing cannot be the sole owner and creator.

This may seem obvious but it’s become abundantly clear, to both employees and customers, that more often than not, “omnichannel strategies” really mean “consistency across a few different-channel strategies.” Let’s start creating true omnichannel strategies that address all of the channels available to us.

The post Omnichannel Marketing is the First Step, Not the End Game first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.

Brands spend millions of dollars on innovation—establishing innovation labs, commissioning studies, and paying high-priced consultants—all to ensure they don’t become the next Kodak, Blockbuster, or Tower Records. From Tesla to Google to Amazon, tech companies are entering into new markets and disrupting brands that have controlled market share for decades. As a result, corporate R&D departments are spending millions to try to develop the next Instagram, Nest, or Echo so they aren’t the next “what not to do” casualty.

While your R&D team works on your company’s moonshots, remember that innovation isn’t always the result of millions of dollars or teams of dozens of people. There have been many innovations with much more humble beginnings. Dollar Shave Club was developed by a guy who was tired of buying razors from the drug store. Equipter was developed by a roofer who wanted a better way to remove old roofing shingles. Domino’s Pizza famously embraced the ingenuity of its employees in its “a great idea can come from anywhere” campaign, which touted the story of a new product, developed by a franchise owner in Ohio, that was then sold at locations across the country.

The most common difference between the corporately funded labs and these examples? The R&D teams focus on what will deliver the highest ROI whereas the others have a much simpler goal: to solve a problem. And the latter is something that every employee at every level at every company should be striving to do.

The home building category is ripe with opportunities for this kind of streamlined, simplified innovation. While the big brands invest millions in discovering the next billion-dollar idea, individual inventors and startups are busy identifying ways to help make the average builder’s job easier instead of worrying about what will make millions.

While the tech industry has made significant inroads into the home building industry, it has also opened up a world of opportunity for those builders. Technology, like the Amazon Echo and Nest Thermostat, have created entirely new homeowner behaviors, all with thousands of new data points.

If a builder would talk to my Echo, they’d hear an awful lot of my complaints as a homeowner and DIYer. There’s no shortage of terrible user experiences begging to be fixed:

• In an era of apps and big data, why do HVAC inspectors still rely on stickers to track furnace maintenance?
• Why don’t bolts have the size etched on top so you don’t have to test and try different sizes to see what fits?
• Why do we have to play a guessing game to discover what’s behind our own walls? (I hate hearing the contractor tell me, “We won’t know for sure until we rip the walls down and see what’s inside!”)

This is the genius of Intuit’s “Follow Me Home” program. It forces the company’s engineers to understand the end user—how they’re using the software, what they like about it, what they wish it had, etc. It gives the Intuit team key insights that lead to small tweaks that have the ability to become a big success.

One way to get at the small, simple innovations is to bring in a new perspective. Remember, a great idea can come from anywhere. In an industry where customers are getting smarter and their expectations are climbing higher, home builders and housing developers should be striving for more innovation, both big and small.

The post Sometimes Simplicity Leads to Big Innovation first appeared on Public Relations Strategery.