If you are a marketer or PR person or senior executive with power over how your brand is seen in the marketplace, you’d be crazy not to spend a few hours over the Christmas break reading one or more of the books discussed below.
Bottom line is: the world is changing before our very eyes.
Unless you’re immersed in the work of the world’s most progressive marketing thinkers and bloggers…unless you’re reading books like the ones below, then potentially you’re already behind. Sorry :)
Following is a selection of recently released business books that may help you re-think your current take on marketing (and possibly even help you kick-start the new year with a re-energised focus on what’s possible from a marketing perspective).
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Marketers today face a dazzling array of mediums through which to promote their brand to the masses.
More often or not it seems many brands, when faced with such choice, take the easy option and fall back on lazy habits – spending lots of money buying airtime and print media space to promote their wares and if that doesn’t work, buy more airtime and print media space!
Okay, in some circumstances this might be the right strategy. But more often than not in today’s hyper-connected world marketers need to be a little more thoughtful in their approach.
Rather than simply select a mix from all the various channels available and then retrofitting into an ‘integrated campaign’ (it happens more than you’d think!), how about standing back for a minute and thinking a bit more strategically about how ‘media’ can set the tone at a deeper level?
There are three types of media you need to be concerned about and understand intuitively – ‘paid media’, ‘owned media’ and ‘earned media’.
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As a society we’re obsessed with quick fixes, instant celebrity and immediate gratification.
The marketing industry, being reflective of broader society, is no different; too often it approaches everything from a short-term perspective.
Even social media – a still-emerging but already powerful communications (r)evolution – is bizarrely often treated in the same way as a TV commercial or direct mailer i.e. another channel to broadcast a one-way sales message. Weird, but that’s the way it is in a world where senior executives at large organisations don’t take the time to better understand the seismic societal shift that’s happening around them (topic for another post methinks).
All of which, of course, is counter to the process of building a brand.
All of which goes against the grain of building a company’s name and reputation in the marketplace.
Content exclusive to Marketing Magazine.
I WROTE THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE FOR MARKETING MAGAZINE'S JUST-RELEASED '2010 MEDIA SURVIVAL GUIDE'.
The annual guide is a bumper read, and provides a range of insights and commentary from experts across public relations, events and experiential, print media, TV/radio, mobile, web and social media.
Featured writers in the section on social media include Laurel Papworth, Gavin Heaton and Stephen Collins.
Okay, on with the article...
In his classic novel The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” - he could have been referring to the public relations industry in Australia from 2010 onwards.
A seismic shift is occurring in the way people communicate, connect and collaborate with each other.
Seeing as though PR is all about communication, connection and collaboration, it would be safe to assume the emergence of social media is going to have a significant bearing on public relations and allied fields, if it isn’t already.
Is this the best of times?
Absolutely! The art and science of strategic brand communication continues to become a lot more direct, in your face and interactive - while at the same time, thanks to technology, it’s becoming even more complex and counter-intuitive to what many people in the industry are used to.
All this, of course, spells opportunity for PR practitioners able to fully understand the new media landscape and what it means for companies and brands.
To be fully conversant with social as well as broadcast and print media will be a valuable skill. Companies and organisations will be depending heavily on communication experts who can ‘join the dots’ across the various channels, as well as understand the nuances of each.
Creating hooks, stories, content and ideas that resonate with the public has always been a key strength of PR. In the past much of that work was directed towards the media in the hope they’d pick up a story and help spread the word, and this continues to be an important part of PR.
Today and in the future, however, the opportunity is for companies to take their brand story and converse directly with consumers and other stakeholders.
The worst of times?
If you practise PR but you don’t understand the social media space, you run the risk of being marginalized as companies, brands and organisations seek integration of their brand story across the internet, traditional print and broadcast media, and face-to-face via roadshows, events, sponsored-properties and experiential promotions.
Do blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook et al spell the death of media publicity, the ‘bread and butter’ of PR practice? No, but experience from overseas tells us clearly that they’ve certainly shaken up things.So what will the public relations industry look like in years to come?
The continued fragmentation of communications will mean one thing for the PR industry: increased specialisation.
On the strategy front, the new masters of the PR universe will be those who not only ‘get’ social media and all it stands for but also understand how it fits with the other ‘pieces of the communication pie’ i.e. traditional media and ‘live’ media (i.e. events, experiential marketing, sponsorship etc).These experts will be adept at seeing the bigger picture. They will understand intuitively the messaging, the brand story (hooks, angles and ideas), potential issues – and devise programs that resonate with consumers (and other stakeholders).
In terms of tactical specialists, there are three core areas of PR that will be crying out for seasoned experts (N.B. for the purposes of this overview, I’m not talking vertical industry specialties or covering ‘high end’ functions such as investor or government relations):
When you're active in the social media space (as I tend to be, along with countless others in the marketing sphere), it's sometimes easy to get caught up in the minutiae of Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs and the like.
I've been having my kitchen renovated these past few weeks and – as anyone who has gone through this process can attest - you get to meet a variety of people who come in, do the work, have a chat and then leave. In my instance, it was Nigel the chippie, Nick the plumber and Elizabeth the fine arts student who paints kitchens on the side (and a damn 'fine' job she does too!).
As a communications practitioner, I'm always interested in the best and most effective ways to reach people. Elizabeth the painter, for example, couldn't give a brass razoo about Twitter or social networking sites generally.
She's not alone by any means
and there are plenty of consumers who are happy with the 'traditional' media
diet of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio (this is despite my 77-year-old
mother the other day asking me about Twitter – now that freaked me out!).
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Trevor Young has built PR Warrior into one of the world’s foremost showcases of what can be achieved at the intersection of public relations and social media.” - Brad Howarth, Smart Company, September 2011 More »
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