PR Case study: Steps to get your content read, viewed and remembered

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Shaping Influence®: Connecting brands with target audiences

Influencer communications is a concept that eludes many of our fellow flacks and marketers, for whom the inability to prove a campaign's value and financial worth is increasingly problematic. Believe it or not, some companies are okay with that, and results that hover close to the status quo. They're complacent, led by managers who care just enough to make sure current strategies perform close to expectations.

While results bordering a notch or two above grossly underwhelming may merit a participation trophy, empowered brands have a shaping influence on the marketplace that can be measured.

Influencers: Engagement or Communications?

Influencer Communications is a 360-degree approach to communications and marketing. Combining tried and true marketing methods with multichannel engagement ensures that the right messages reach the right person at the right time. While you might not be leveraging celebrity or micro-influencers of any type right now, there are some high-value candidates walking your hallways, working at the next cubicle, and sitting across from you in meetings.

It’s your own employees.

Why Social Selling is so successful

Employee Advocacy & Social Selling on LinkedIn

Where traditional marketing relies on sponsored posts, re-marketing, paid placements and ads, Influencer Communications are organic and tap into the existing social reach of your workforce - from the C-Suite on down.

Smart companies are hiring sales and biz dev people that take full advantage of LinkedIn, Twitter, MeetUp Groups and Facebook to keep in touch with former, current and potential customers, agents and potential partners.

It boggles my mind - really - how such a powerful tool is so tragically underutilized. People from all departments can positively influence perception, and communications and marketing teams can measure the value of their engagement.

Posts from corporate accounts are necessary, and for the most part, serve a distinct purpose. But when friends and trusted colleagues recommend an article, case study or research report, it's personal. Authenticity counts, and every click, like, and share helps populate evergreen newsfeeds with your brand's messages.

Influencer Communications need as many people as possible in your company to get involved. Your executives, business development team and anyone else that drives day-to-day operations are directly (or indirectly) connected to your target audience.

Influencer Communications First Steps

Influencer Communications begins with content that your brand ambassadors can leverage.

Content type and message can vary depending on your industry and target customer. Some popular choices include multimedia, infographics, video testimonials and case studies, white papers, blogs, etc, In most cases, it’s considered best practice to develop assets that fall into all of these categories.

The more assets you have, the better your chances that employee advocacy and brand ambassador campaigns will move the proverbial needle. With some planning, building a cache of assets can be done quickly. For example, marketers can dissect a single case study into a variety of photos, videos, blogs and other repurposed assets.

Employee Advocacy with CEI: JMRConnect's award-winning platform

As you’re developing your assets, be mindful of the methods by which you plan to use them. The many social media platforms will become an integral part of your plan. Analyzing your target audience will tell you which you should be using — and avoiding. If your target audience isn’t using Instagram, it might not make sense to produce many photo-based assets.

As I mentioned in a previous article, LinkedIn is an essential medium of B2B marketing. Hubspot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74 percent, almost three times (277 percent) higher than Twitter (.69 percent) and Facebook (77 percent). If your company has any focus on B2B transactions, it would behoove you to focus on developing blogs and thought leadership articles that can be shared on LinkedIn.

Facebook is also a very powerful messaging medium. In a study conducted by Facebook, Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph, the company indicated that the average Facebook user has approximately 130 friends. Leveraging those friends of your employees, and their friends, can have an exponential effect in spreading your message.

Inform & Educate: Bridge the Gap Between Sales and Marketing

Bridge the Gap Between Marketing & Sales

Once you identify the mediums best for your business and create assets, it’s time to get your employee involved. An influencer-based engagement effort should be clearly articulated to employees, easy for them to participate in, and potentially even incentivized.

All assets should be easy to locate and your employees should be given tools to help them share the content quickly and easily.

For example, to drive and sustain adoption, program managers must regularly provide a list of assets (perhaps via a weekly email), along with pre-written comments they can use in their social media posts. Again, the goal is to make sharing brand content as simple as possible for employees, removing any points of friction. This method also has the benefit of creating a unified message.

If you share content, you must measure the effectiveness of engagement to its being shared with the right people via the right medium. There are, of course, tools to help this measuring and analysis of the effectiveness of your engagement.

Do Influencer Communications Work?

Ummm...you tell me?

Award-winning Employee Advocacy

Recent studies show how influencer-based marketing outperforms traditional methods by a wide margin. Collective Bias, a company specializing in influencing campaigns for brands and retailers, performed a recent study that underscored the value of influencer content. Results showed that consumers view content from influencers seven times longer than a digital display ad (two minutes and eight seconds compared to 19.2 seconds).

Shaping Influence with Viral Marketing

Social sharing on LinkedIn is very powerful.

All those statistics aside, we shouldn’t need any data other than common sense to know that Influencer Communications is effective. This descendant of word-of-mouth marketing is tailored for digital communications.

Research from Nielsen shows that 92 percent of consumers trust word of mouth recommendations over any other form of advertising.

Research from Ogilvy, Google, and TNS that showed that 74 percent of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision.

Influencer Communications takes the “word-of-mouth” and augments it with communication on social media. Despite the change in how the message is being delivered, the outcome is the same: highly effective engagement that moves the needle and bring in sales.

Lastly, barrier to entry is very low, because the delivery mechanism is already on your payroll...in case you needed another reason to buy-in.

The People Have Spoken!

The people have spoken! The Daily Record’s 2018 Reader Rankings are in and JMRConnect has been voted a top Baltimore PR Agency by readers. More than 1,400 nominations were collected during the nomination period in March.

How strategic PR helps private equity firms raise money

 What private equity firms need to tell their story While the private equity market remains robust, it’s no longer a given that firms will make the kind of money they did just a few years back. In the fourth quarter of 2012, U.S. private equity activity hit a lofty high—with 1,070 deals closed to the tune of $190 billion, according to PitchBook. Fast forward to mid-2016, though, and it’s slower going. The 719 second-quarter deals, worth $135 billion, marked a one-third drop in volume. Yet in the quest to survive and thrive, the value of media attention often goes overlooked. That’s understandable, given that the phrases “private equity” and “public relations” imply diametrically opposite spheres.Since public listing or trading never enters the picture, does it really make sense for private equity firms to seek attention? The answer, it turns out, is ...”

Employee Advocacy with CEI: JMRConnect's award-winning platform

Converting brand excitement into sales: building your business through employee advocacy

Who speaks for you in the marketplace? If it’s your ad agency, you’re at least getting the word out. But you can go much further by getting the people who work for you to carry that same message, only in a less scripted way your current and potential customers will instantly find more authentic.

Imagine for a minute that your sales team had the ability to exponentially amplify visibility for case studies, whitepapers, blogs and other strategic content with prospects and partners through a simple click of their mouse?

That is the power of employee advocacy programs that make it easy and rewarding for people to share brand-approved messaging and content on social media, which, per an Inc. article, results in a 5x increase in web traffic and 25% more leads. That might sound like a point of debate, until you consider this: Only 15 percent of people trust recommendations from brands, while a whopping 84 percent trust recommendations from people they know, and employee advocacy programs that make it easy and rewarding for people to share brand-approved messaging and content on social media,

 

WebRTC for real-time communications

WebRTC is a free, open project that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs.

WebRTC also represents the latest evolution in the world of real-time communication. WebRTC reuses many of the protocols and standards that were analyzed in the previous articles (Media transfer in Unified Communications – SDP Protocol, RTP, RTCP and Jitter Buffer) to create real-time communications between different devices. Other standards, such as TURN / ICE / STUN, have been also used by WebRTC. We will discuss these standards later in this article.

The complexity of using these standards is hidden behind a simple set of Javascript APIs, which...

According to a study in Mountain Marketing Group, an ad featuring a custom vanity number had a response rate of 30% or better.

How many times have you needed customer support and couldn’t for the life of you find a company number? Or are you just frustrated and exhausted by the constant ping of a chatbot that can’t really solve your problem? You’re not alone.

There is still a big contingent of consumers who want to talk to a real human. And if you’re a small business that offers a service, you need to be available to help if the going gets tough. For some customers, solving problems online or through messenger apps simply isn’t enough. So if you’re a new startup, an emerging business, or an established company looking for a refresh, you’d be wise to jazz up your phone number.

A custom vanity toll free number isn’t just an assurance that your customer base or potential new customers can reach a real person, it’s a fantastic marketing tool.

NexusTek Cloud Services

Buyout activity is booming for American small businesses, and the prices being paid are at or near records for companies up to $50 million in value, brokers say.

Many small-business owners are fielding more cold calls asking if their companies are for sale, and owners who do put their businesses on the market are often receiving multiple bids. "I'm excited because now we have more capital, more access, more people," he said, "and we can really tactically execute on the vision" to become a national leader in what has been a regionalized industry.

NexusTek Cloud Services

 Businesses have options

Thursday, September 13, 2018 — As cloud technology has grown, new options are available for businesses besides traditional locally-hosted information technology solutions. How should a business decide what cloud technologies to adopt, as well as when to keep or develop resources in-house?

James Hwang, chief operating officer of NexusTek, a cloud technology, managed IT services and cybersecurity consulting firm based in Denver, says a business must not rely just on cloud security, but must consider physical aspects of security when using these services, such as, “how is it encrypted, what levels of encryption are there and who has the roles and roles-based access.” A third issue to consider is what access specific users have and who does the logging when the products or data are accessed.

ZINK Zero Ink

Zink Imaging, based in Billerica, is counting on a renewed interest in instant-print photos.

In 2015, one of the last vestiges of the once-great Polaroid Corp. was “teetering on the brink of insolvency,” recalls Chaim Piekarski.

That vestige, Billerica-based Zink Imaging, had raised nearly $150 million to commercialize a new version of instant color photo printing, developed in Polaroid’s research labs. What made this new process different was that it didn’t rely on traditional film or ink cartridges. Its name, Zink, referred to “zero ink.” It was a moment when 400 million Instagram users were uploading 40 million photos every day, but consumers hadn’t... 

Acquiring distress assets

How Second-movers Can Identify When a Failing Business Venture Merits Investment? For the aware and open-minded entrepreneur eyeing the purchase of distressed assets, it is critical to identify and understand the factors behind the target company’s demise. Due diligence can solve the riddle as to why a company failed, and provide answers to questions such as:

  The Daily Record’s 2018 Reader Rankings are in and JMRConnect has been voted a top PR Agency by readers. More than 1,400 nominations were collected during the nomination period in March. The winners were determined by more than 12,600 votes cast from April 30 to May 14.

“The Daily Record’s business and legal professionals are proud of the outstanding businesses they work with and support throughout the state of Maryland,” The Daily Record publisher Suzanne Fischer-Huettner said. “Our readers voted, and we are excited to reveal the 2018 Reader Rankings honorees."

Employee Social Advocacy: Connect. Engage. Influence.

Foot Locker recently announced a new development to its collaborative relationship with Nike – creating an optimized in-store customer experience through the addition of two popular pop-up shop apps. The Sneakeasy NYC and House of Hoops apps offer fans early access to Nike and Jordan gear through social media interaction, online reservations, and VIP/PLUS membership. This joint effort to enhance the consumer experience is predicated on employee advocacy and brand awareness.

Employee advocacy has become one of the most applied concepts in the modern business world, as demonstrated by the most recent expansion to the Foot Locker and Nike partnership. It is vital that the correct staff be enlisted, as they must demonstrate both enthusiasm towards the products they are selling and pride for the brand they are representing. Nike and Foot Locker have labeled their workers for this project “Nike Pro Athletes” and “Nike Pro Leads” – emphasizing the priority placed on employee advocacy and brand awareness.

The employee advocacy initiative suggests businesses recognize their personnel as brand ambassadors, since they are the ones working closely with the products and services they develop and sell. It is exceedingly imperative for an employee to feel connected to the brand they represent, as they will be much more inclined to promote that brand; due to the fact that it symbolizes an extension of their own personal identity.

Employees have certainly become dynamic marketing tools, utilized to promote brand identity and better connect consumers with the businesses they are patronizing. The concept applies to all businesses, regardless of product or customer base; employees are becoming major parts of marketing initiatives, largely because they are a previously unheard voice that comes with an inherent level of trust.

More than 2/3 of our population gets their news and information on social media; amplifying visibility on these channels is a must.

Employee advocacy works because people are more likely to take action when a recommendation comes from a trusted source. According to Social Media Today, content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels. Unlike advertising and paid influencer marketing, employee advocacy is an organic, natural extension of 1-on-1 digital communications.

Key messages, delivered by a friend, colleague, or connection, are naturally more trustworthy than a company post – sponsored or not. Simply put, personal recommendations have a shaping influence that cannot be matched by paid-for, subjective advertisements.

CEI, which stands for connect-engage-influence, is a customizable platform that allows communications and marketing teams maximize the value of the content they create and raise its organic visibility across social forums, including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram – with a single click.

Customers referred by advocates have a 37% higher retention rate. Interested in learning more? Send us an email at [email protected] with Employee Advocacy in the subject line to tap into your most under utilized branding resource, and to give your brand a shaping influence!

 

  “Mobile Wallets Help Sales,” Said No Retailer Ever.  Jack Connors, as Head of Commerce Partnerships at Google, leads Google’s merchant partnerships for Android Pay and helps merchants use mobile payments as a way to address a broader set of business objectives. His message, delivered during his keynote presentation at the 2017 Mobile Payments Conference,  is especially invaluable for merchants who may have implemented one or more mobile pay options in their stores, but just aren’t getting the returns they hoped for.

Connors got the audience’s attention by showing that he understands the frustrations many merchants feel trying to keep up with all the latest mobile payment offerings only to find that customers barely use it. He then made the case for why Android Pay is different from the myriad of other mobile payment options. First, for every smartphone owner walking into a store, there’s a nearly 82 percent chance that they’re using an Android phone, according to Gartner’s latest projections on worldwide smartphone sales. “And, Android Pay is pre-installed on 90% of those phones via carrier relationships,” said Connors. So, even if you’re a merchant whose marketing department has an affinity for Apple Pay, PayPal, Square or perhaps your own mobile wallet, keep in mind the reality that the vast majority of your customers already have Android Pay on their phones, so half the battle... 

At the 2017 Mobile Payments Conference in Chicago, one of the most memorable presentations was moderated by Brett King, founder of Moven and host of the BREAKING BANK$ radio show on Voice America. On the panel was Travis Dulaney, Co-founder & CEO of PushPayments and Dan Gonzalez, VP of payment industry relations at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The main topic was faster payments. And, more specifically, when and how can the U.S. can get from where it is currently to the frictionless Utopia many other countries are now enjoying? Read More ➢

Turbomachinery International magazine

Lean, Premixed, Prevaporized (LPP) combustion technology converts liquid fuels into a substitute for natural gas, which can power most combustion devices while yielding emissions comparable to that of ordinary natural gas. By allowing a wide range of otherwise liquid fuels to be vaporized into a clean burning natural gas substitute to power gas-fired turbine electric systems, LPP Combustion’s patented technology reduces both costs and emissions.  LPP Combustion’s Clean Shipping entry centered on its patented fuel-processing technology that allows a range of light liquid hydrocarbons to be used in place of liquid natural gas (LNG) in low-emissions gas turbines for shipboard power generation.

Because LPP Combustion skids enable clean use of readily storable liquids in gas turbines, they...

Danielle Fugazy reports on substantial changes in the private equity industry have occurred in the last few years. PE firms are quickly adapting to compete with other PE firms and with strategic acquirers for capital and deals. Interesting look at NewSpring Holdings in Mergers & Acquisitions’ Special Report on Private Equity >>>

 Brett King, host of BREAKING BANK$, the First Global Fintech Podcast, will broadcast live from the 2017 Mobile Payments Conference (MPC), being held August 28 – 30, 2017, at the Swissotel in Chicago, Illinois. In addition to hosting the popular podcast, Brett King is also a four-time bestselling author, a renowned futurist and keynote speaker, and the founder of Moven. MPC 2017 attendees will hear about the latest developments in faster and real-time payments adoption, as King interviews interviews Dan Gonzalez, vice president of payment industry relations for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Travis Dulaney, co-founder and CEO of Push Payments, on Tuesday, August 29th at 1:10 pm CST.

According to Dan Gonzalez, vice president, CRSO Industry Relations, “Payment system change requires a consensus-driven approach to accommodate the views and behaviors of the many financial institutions,...

  Yorktel recently announced that its mobile telehealth kit, FeatherMed has won the MedTech Breakthrough Award for “Best Overall Telehealth Solution.” MedTech Breakthrough, if you’re not familiar, is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global health and medical technology market. “FeatherMed is a niche product that fills a gap in the Telehealth market for a lightweight, portable unit to manage telehealth encounters on the fly in remote locations. FeatherMed is our latest example of Yorktel’s continued focus...

 Lately there’s been much hand wringing over the Department of Labor’s new fiduciary rule, which went into effect this month. Enacted by President Obama and initially challenged by the Trump administration, the new rule asks brokers to avoid conflicts of interest when giving retirement advice. The rule is non-compromising regarding the legal and ethical role wealth managers must fill in looking out for the best interests of their clients. As wealth managers ready themselves to adopt and adjust, this is where quality management software comes into play as a timely and powerful ally.

But what exactly is QMS? What does it do? And how will it help wealth managers rise to the compliance challenges posed by the new rule? Answering the Qs of QMS...

Awarded the 2017 SABRE award for "Best Marketing Technology," JMRConnect CEI proves that employee advocacy on social media has a profound effect on brand integrity.

Why was JMRConnect honored over several of the largest global agencies? Because we understand that earned media is inherently more credible than other forms of marketing, by virtue of being content created by an independent 3rd-party. But in today's world where more than 50% of our population gets their news and information on social media, amplifying visibility on these channels is a must. Unlike paid influencer marketing, which can produce handsome dividends, employee advocacy is a more natural extension of corporate communications and PR, as it organically raises visibility.

CEI, which stands for connect-engage-influence, is a customizable platform that helps communications and marketing teams maximize the value of the content they create and raise its organic visibility across social forums, including LinkedIn, Facebook,YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram - with a single click. Key messages, delivered by a friend, colleague, or connection, are naturally more trustworthy than a company post - sponsored or not. Simply put, personal recommendations have a shaping influence that cannot be matched by paid-for, subjective advertisements. Our Sabre award win was based on the data and results from a  case study with Yorktel, a longtime client.

“People tend to listen more when a message comes from their peers, whereas messages posted to a corporate entity can be tuned out as self-promoting and sales-oriented.  YorktelShare not only helps us exponentially increase the visibility of our posts, it also ensures that important news and information is kept consistent when our employees share company news on social media platforms,” said Samantha Osowski, vice president of marketing, Yorktel.

One click from a user sends approved messages across integrated popular social channels from its proprietary platform, so users don’t have to recreate the wheel.

Defining a concrete interest group within the CEI platform helps employee advocates invite followers into the program through personalized invitations and links, instantly making them part of a community of like-minded, targeted participants that then also become deputy brand advocates, so to speak.  With each share, click and like, the content becomes more relevance and with a shaping influence among constituencies worldwide.  Because posts shared through JMRConnect CEI appear as first-person recommendations, not promoted content.

"The form helps brands build credibility and expand reach,” she added.  “One click takes content viral, extending earned media value while promoting approved brand messages on multiple channels.”

The platform fills a gap in corporate communications' capabilities between content creation and sales & marketing. In addition to increasing visibility for earned media, CEI empowers social selling by providing sales leaders and teams tools to find and share branded content easily to influence buying decisions for existing prospects and new leads.  Deep analytics capabilities increase ROI by allowing leadership to measure engagement and run cost-benefit analyses. PR and corporate communications professionals are too often fighting an uphill battle when it comes to convincing employees to share company content, and in many cases, just making them aware of media coverage, case studies, whitepapers and other content is shockingly difficult. CEI solves these problems by not only pushing this information to them, but by also empowering them to share on multiple social media platforms with a single click. They no longer have to take time away from their jobs to search for this information and create individual posts. Each post is developed for them and tailored for the respective platforms.

Amplifying organic visibility and quantifying the value of each campaign has never been easier.

 

  Public relations agencies and teams, says Paula Bernier, must 1) address artificial intelligence and machine learning; 2) influencer marketing; and 3) focus on millennials. Sarab Kochhar, director of applied research for the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, writes that, “Researchers and practitioners in the field of public relations should explore how AI and ML are helping organizations automate campaigns and create new and stronger connections with customers leading to hyper- personalized experiences,” in the report “Top Three Trends That Will Drive Public Relations Research in 2017.”

As Kochhar mentions, influencer marketing is another trend impacting businesses, consumers, marketing, and public relations. Influencer marketing is important because influential individuals can help or harm a company’s brand, can greatly increase brand awareness, and can even drive conversions.

“Wharton Marketing Professor David Bell says that brands looking to create a presence in the digital space quickly realize that the way to get to their audience is through...

Marketing professionals take note: YouTube's website is getting a big makeover. Business Insider reports that starting Tuesday, you'll be able to preview the video site's new design by signing up here. It'll eventually roll out to everyone. Neal Mohan, YouTube's product boss, announced the change at the Collision tech conference in New Orleans.

The update is based on Material Design, Google's home-grown design language in Android, Chrome, and (full story)

Employee Advocacy and Social Selling on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is now connected to Microsoft business software. The B2B social media platform now boasts more than 500 million registered users, Microsoft said Monday, up from 467 million in October, when LinkedIn released its last quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company. Microsoft’s $26 billion acquisition of the Mountain View company, announced in June,

The SF Gate reported that Microsoft is adding links between its business-focused software and LinkedIn, the biggest move yet to make use of the company’s largest-ever acquisition.  LinkedIn now boasts more than 500 million registered users, Microsoft said Monday, up from 467 million in October, when LinkedIn released its last quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company.

Winner: BEST MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

Public Relations has many industry honors, among which one of the most prestigious is The Holmes Report SABRE Awards. On February 16th in Chicago, as part of its In2 SABRE Awards Summit, The Holmes Report named JMRConnect CEI the 2017 North America In2 SABRE Awards winner for Best Marketing Technology. The program targets the most innovative PR and marketing agencies, highlighting new and innovative ways brands are utilizing employee advocacy, social engagement, and other channels to connect with and influence target audiences at a time where...