PR 101

My brother died 13 years ago. My mother died 11 years ago. Neither ever lived Wisconsin. They lived in Florida.

Yet, at least once a month, sometimes more often, we receive mail for them at the Cole household. They have  been offered credit cards, had requests for donations, to buy health insurance, and in my brother’s case, offers to help him manage his diabetes. A little late on that I think.

We started receiving mail for them about six months after my mother died. I was the executor of the estates, so my address did end up on all correspondence. However, both estates were closed out years ago. I haven’t sent out anything involving either of them in at least seven years.

Yet, somehow, a bunch of lowlife list companies and lazy marketers still send mail for them. Initially, right after both deaths, it upset me. The wounds were still raw. I used to return the mailings with “addressee deceased” written on the envelope. I gave up after awhile because it stopped nothing from coming. Now, I do not even bother to open anything. They just get tossed.

Now, I have to say, I hate junk mail. I always have and I always will. I cannot believe it is all that effective. All it does kill trees. Since the advent of the “no-call” lists blocked telemarketers, direct mail has to be the dumbest way to try and reach customers. Okay, spam email might be worse, but at least I can block most of that.

Do the people who do this really think I am going to buy a product from an unsolicited mailing? Do these people even read marketing research? Do they not know that there are other more effective, less annoying, and less intrusive ways to reach their marketing goals? Have they not heard of the Internet or social media?

And as long as I am ranting, what about these groups that send address labels? Do they really think some sticky pieces of paper with my name and address on it are going to move me to make a donation? It won’t. I have no qualms about using the labels. I just don’t send any money back.

Least you think I am a scrooge, I volunteer with several charities in the Milwaukee area. My wife and I also make donations to groups whose work we want to support. But we choose the groups to which we are going donate. We do our research, check out the group’s federal tax filings and then write a check. Research is key. I want to make sure at least 90 percent of our donation is going to go help someone. I don’t want pay for a large office or a trip to a seminar.

I also do pro bono work for a Milwaukee group that needs the help.

As a note, do not send me a solicitation for anything based on this blog. I will not answer it.

Getting back to my point about how of much of a donation goes to help the given cause, that’s what really bothers me about mail solicitations. How much does it cost to write, print, prepare, and send out those direct mailings? Wouldn’t that money be better spent helping people?

Instead of licking envelopes, find another, more effective way to reach people. Don’t know what they are? Send me an email.

You’ve decided it’s time to dip a toe or more into the social media pool. You know the Internet can be a very unforgiving place. You want to make sure you are going to do it right. It’s time to hire agency, but before you do that you want to have your own plan. While you are going to listen to the agency’s advice, you also want to know the landscape and have a general idea of how to get from Point A to Point Z.

This is what I encourage all of my clients to do. Yes, I am the expert, but it helps when they have some ideas of their own. One of the mottoes I live by in my business life is: “all of us are smarter than one of us.” You should do the same. If an agency is unwilling to listen to your input, you are working with the wrong agency. You are paying the bills after all.

Before anything else, this what you have to keep in mind about social media: it is not a tactic, or a strategy or just another way to do what you have always been doing. It is an entirely new way of marketing and it is taking over fast. I am going to cover how fast next week, but know that its use is increasing very, very quickly.

So, what to do first? It most definitely helps that you have your own ideas. The first thing I do when I sign a new client is meet with the principles to discuss their wants and needs. The process goes much faster when both sides have a good idea of the road map they are going to use.

Remember, your social media, marketing and public relations plan should be key parts of the company’s overall strategic plan. Marketing communications should never be treated as an island or silo. Rather, it should be one of the engines driving your company to be successful.

Integrating marketing communications planning with the company’s overall plans is key. I have seen too many companies that keep public relations and marketing in silos. They are only taken out when some senior executive needs to get a message out or sales are dipping. That is just wrong. Public relations and marketing are a company’s front door. It is the first thing a potential client or customer sees.

So, the first step should be to do discuss and define what you want to accomplish. Do a situation analysis. Discuss what the positive and negative forces. Figure out who want to reach and how to do it. Come up with a goal. A goal should be a broad-based destination, where you want your company to go.

It will be up to agency to figure out to reach that goal, to come up with the strategy and tactics for getting you there. But it is key, especially in social media, to know where you are going.

The second thing you should know is that a successful social media campaign takes time and your involvement. This is not like an advertising campaign where you approve campaign concept, check in on the production and then approve the final product.

Social media is a continuing process. It calls for doing things such as blogging, tweeting, creating a Facebook fan page, and posting videos on YouTube. It is highly effective when done right. However, none of those are things you can do once and forget about. It takes your commitment to the process to make it work. Success does not come in a week. Usually it does not come in a month or two. I always tell clients to expect the process to take at least six months to show results.

But when those results do happen, and if done right, they will, the success will be far better than what comes from other method.

NBC demonstrated to me Sunday night that they are tone deaf when it comes to social media. Which means they are tone deaf when it comes to listening to their viewers. That’s dangerous. They should ask United Airlines or Proctor & Gamble what happens when you ignore people who use social media.

If you were watching the Olympics Sunday, you saw what I thought was a pretty good closing ceremony. If you lived anywhere other than the United States, you got to see the ceremony straight through without interruption. If you were unlucky enough to be watching the NBC television network, your Olympic viewing was interrupted by an insipid reality show called “The Marriage Ref,” and local news. In all, there was about an hour break in the viewing. For those living in the eastern time zone of the U.S., that meant they had to stay up until 1 a.m. to see the entire ceremony.

As one who closely monitors social media, I can tell you the Twittersphere was alive with complaints. I have no idea how many, but I can you there were thousands judging by how fast the hashtags #NBC and #NBCFail kept updating. And the anger wasn’t just over the decision to cut off the Olympics; it was also over the decision to bring Jay Leno back to the Tonight Show.

Here’s a sample of the tweets going out on #NBCFail:

• wtfgerard: RT @nNoela: NBC is continuing their Winter Olympics coverage with a new downhill event. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. #imwithcoco #nbcfail I give this tweeter credit for combining his anger on two events into one tweet.
• disappointedme: BOYCOTT LENO and his Olympic killing network. #TeamCoco #imstillwithcoco #NBCFAIL #RIKSHAZ9LIRK #SuckitNBC As a note: the hashtags “I’mwithcoco (Conan O’Brien) was the third most popular topic on Twitter Monday. That’s quite an accomplishment considering there are an estimated 50 million tweets a day.
• MONTANAinAZ: RT @ColorMeRed: Just to thank NBC for their exceptional coverage (sarc) of the Winter Olympics, my TV will be reprogrammed to everything but NBC #NBCfail This was a particularly popular tweet. I saw it at least a dozen times.
• lvnTrey: RT @ChefMark: Although sad that the Olympics is over, I’m happy that NBC’s reign of tyranny on my set is over! #NBCFail. Oh, and #shutupCostas

You get the idea. There was a lot of anger. And a lot of calls for boycotting NBC. The anger went viral pretty quickly. As I write this on Tuesday, it is still going on. If anything, the flames are burning brighter.

What surprised me is that I never saw any response from NBC to all of this. They did apparently use an application called TwitterFeed to send out positive sounding tweets about “The Marriage Ref.” TwitterFeed is an app in which you enter a bunch of tweets at one time and then schedule them to be sent out over whatever time period you want. Judging by the tweets, I would say someone decided to send a tweet about every 10 minutes.  You can often tell someone has done this because the tweets tend to be phrased alike. They stopped when several people called NBC on it.

Doing that is a violation of one of my social media rules: don’t ever pretend to be something you are not. The social media universe hates lying. And, it destroys credibility.

Getting back to my main point, I am shocked frankly that the once proud Peacock Network did nothing to calm down angry viewers. NBC is in fourth place in a four-network race. They cannot afford to do something like this. This is not 15 years ago. Social media keeps things alive.

In NBC’s position, they cannot alienate their stakeholders. Those viewers have other choices. Fox, CBS, ABC and the hundreds of cable channels will all benefit from NBC’s decision not to engage with its viewers. It doesn’t appear NBC understands that. It’s sad.

NBC demonstrated to me Sunday night that they are tone deaf when it comes to social media. Which means they are tone deaf when it comes to listening to their viewers. That’s dangerous. They should ask United Airlines or Proctor & Gamble what happens when you ignore people who use social media.

If you were watching the Olympics Sunday, you saw what I thought was a pretty good closing ceremony. If you lived anywhere other than the United States, you got to see the ceremony straight through without interruption. If you were unlucky enough to be watching the NBC television network, your Olympic viewing was interrupted by an insipid reality show called “The Marriage Ref,” and local news. In all, there was about an hour break in the viewing. For those living in the eastern time zone of the U.S., that meant they had to stay up until 1 a.m. to see the entire ceremony.

As one who closely monitors social media, I can tell you the Twittersphere was alive with complaints. I have no idea how many, but I can you there were thousands judging by how fast the hashtags #NBC and #NBCFail kept updating. And the anger wasn’t just over the decision to cut off the Olympics; it was also over the decision to bring Jay Leno back to the Tonight Show.

Here’s a sample of the tweets going out on #NBCFail:

• wtfgerard: RT @nNoela: NBC is continuing their Winter Olympics coverage with a new downhill event. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. #imwithcoco #nbcfail I give this tweeter credit for combining his anger on two events into one tweet.
• disappointedme: BOYCOTT LENO and his Olympic killing network. #TeamCoco #imstillwithcoco #NBCFAIL #RIKSHAZ9LIRK #SuckitNBC As a note: the hashtags “I’mwithcoco (Conan O’Brien) was the third most popular topic on Twitter Monday. That’s quite an accomplishment considering there are an estimated 50 million tweets a day.
• MONTANAinAZ: RT @ColorMeRed: Just to thank NBC for their exceptional coverage (sarc) of the Winter Olympics, my TV will be reprogrammed to everything but NBC #NBCfail This was a particularly popular tweet. I saw it at least a dozen times.
• lvnTrey: RT @ChefMark: Although sad that the Olympics is over, I’m happy that NBC’s reign of tyranny on my set is over! #NBCFail. Oh, and #shutupCostas

You get the idea. There was a lot of anger. And a lot of calls for boycotting NBC. The anger went viral pretty quickly. As I write this on Tuesday, it is still going on. If anything, the flames are burning brighter.

What surprised me is that I never saw any response from NBC to all of this. They did apparently use an application called TwitterFeed to send out positive sounding tweets about “The Marriage Ref.” TwitterFeed is an app in which you enter a bunch of tweets at one time and then schedule them to be sent out over whatever time period you want. Judging by the tweets, I would say someone decided to send a tweet about every 10 minutes.  You can often tell someone has done this because the tweets tend to be phrased alike. They stopped when several people called NBC on it.

Doing that is a violation of one of my social media rules: don’t ever pretend to be something you are not. The social media universe hates lying. And, it destroys credibility.

Getting back to my main point, I am shocked frankly that the once proud Peacock Network did nothing to calm down angry viewers. NBC is fourth place in a four-network race. They cannot afford to do something like this. This is not 15 years ago. Social media keeps things alive.

In NBC’s position, they cannot alienate their stakeholders. Those viewers have other choices. Fox, CBS, ABC and the hundreds of cable channels will all benefit from NBC’s decision not to engage with its viewers. It doesn’t appear NBC understands that. It’s sad.