AGILE ENGAGEMENT by Linda Lingard

White Paper

The Dawn of Agile Engagement

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ENGAGE OPPORTUNITY EVERYWHERE

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ENGAGE OPPORTUNITY EVERYWHERE

White Paper

The Dawn of Agile Engagement In an era of constant, multimedia content streaming back and forth between brands and their audiences, PR and marketing professionals must be constantly listening, creating, curating, targeting, distributing and engaging in order to truly resonate with these audiences and rise above a cluttered landscape. We call this emerging real-time communications phenomenon agile engagement.

Social media has wrought changes that require PR professionals and marketers to engage authentically with a wide range of stakeholders, across numerous channels and devices. Call it the Dawn of Agile Engagement. Communicatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; success in this rapidly evolving era depends on effectively targeting their audiences and infusing messaging with audience insights gleaned from social conversations. And speed matters more than ever in this real-time world. Increasingly, leading brands are calling on many departments to answer the call for agile engagement. It turns out that empowering more enterprise employees to engage can produce more timely and authentic interaction across a greater number of engagement points. All of which raises the bar on PR and marketing professionals to work together in leading their organizationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; online engagement. The rewards in brand awareness, audience growth, coherent brand voice and business impact can be high. This white paper explores agile engagement: what it is, how it works and its potential returns for your organization.

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White PAPeR The Dawn of Agile Engagement

Streaming your brand with agility Just how far brand management has come – and how quickly it has changed – is requiring unprecedented agility. The evolution of traditional, new, owned and earned media has led cutting edge communications professionals to the practice of brand streaming. That is, real-time, always-on communications to promote your brand across a full range of media – from your most coveted news outlet to the most vocal blogger in your market – bringing your best videos, white papers and other owned content to share across Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels. By its nature, brand streaming follows the agile engagement process (see Figure A below), which involves interacting cycles of listening, creating, targeting, engaging, distributing and measuring.

Figure a:

Agile Engagement

CREATE & OPTIMIZE CONTENT

ENGAGE & INTERACT

Create/curate and optimize high-quality content in multiple formats to drive engagement. Customize your content for optimal relevance to audience sub-sets.

Create content ‘hubs’ where you can host your content such as online communities, digital content archives, and the like, to provide a destination for your audiences to engage & interact with that content.

White Papers

Tweets

Webisodes

LISTEN, ANALYZE, STRATEGIZE

Blogs

Webinars Demos

eBooks Photos

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Microsites

Coupons

Games

Cut through the noise to listen to and analyze what’s being written and said by relevant sources about brands, people, trends and topics. Use these insights to develop content strategies.

Multimedia Archives

Presentations

Infographics Offers

Communities

MNRs Media Rooms

Videos

IDENTIFY & TARGET

DISTRIBUTE

Identify your target audiences and engage with them directly, putting your content in front of the right audiences, creating the interactive conversation you need to amplify your message.

Distribute content via optimized platforms across a network that reaches all channels including digital, search, social, traditional and mobile, leveraging all content formats.

listen, engage, analyze

Audiences

Influencers

MEASURE

Dashboard

Measure and report at every step, and on everything… reach, impact, interaction, sentiment and results… within a comprehensive metrics framework.

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You’re always keeping the customer experience at the top of your mindset – how they interact and the value and relevance you can bring to their interaction.

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

“Brand streaming is an ongoing cycle of communications,” says Rachel Meranus, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for PR Newswire. It is not a one-way flow of content. Rather, content streams from brand to constituent, and the responses generated by this content throughout the social ecosystem flow back to the brand – full of insight and opportunity – in the form of one’s Social Echo.

Listening at all times “Active listening is where opportunities for agile engagement take shape,” says Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire’s Vice President of Social Media.

Listening (on the left side of Figure A) involves pulling in what’s being said by relevant sources about brands, people, trends and topics; analyzing it all; and then using these insights to develop communications strategies. But listening is not a one-time affair; it involves the essential monitoring of your brand’s Social Echo on an ongoing basis to uncover new opportunities, as well as areas for improvement.

Adele Sweetwood Vice President of Americas Marketing , SAS

“You’re always keeping the customer experience at the top of your mindset – how they interact and the value and relevance you can bring to their interaction,” says Adele Sweetwood, Vice President of Americas Marketing, for SAS, a provider of business analytics and business intelligence software. Additional benefits of listening include the ability to:

> Communicate with audiences within their context, to avoid seeming irrelevant > Pinpoint the vernacular your audience uses, to incorporate into messaging > Identify the keywords your audience uses in social networks, to further content optimization and online visibility > Discover influential sources of conversation > Assess hot-button issues and risky areas, to either avoid or meet head on

Customizing content for optimal relevance With the insights gained from active listening, the next step in the agile engagement process is to create and optimize content to engage more effectively with various audiences. Customizing content ensures optimal relevance to the many subsets of your audience. This often means not only targeted messaging, but producing it in multiple formats for consumption across multiple channels and via multiple devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) – whether press releases, white papers, podcasts, apps, tweets, blogs,

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

webinars, text messages, demos, coupons and special offers, infographics, microsites, ebooks, videos or presentations. “When you’re writing, think about how you can make it easy for various people to find, share and interact with that content,” Skerik says. She suggests the following:

> Use multimedia > Format the written content for easy finding and tweeting > Use keywords from smart social listening “All of these taken together can ignite a lot more interest and visibility for your content,” Skerik says. Additional benefits of content optimization include the ability to:

> Build brand credibility > Sustain audience engagement

Targeting for amplification Targeting is the third piece of the agile engagement model. Simply put: Targeting increases the chance that your content will be found and amplified by the right people. Target individuals, influencers and media sources in real time to engage and guide conversations. (Remember, agile engagement means you are already listening to what they care about and are prepared to deliver the content they value in the format they prefer.) Even while targeting, though, you also have to think about crossover to multiple audiences.

Remember, agile engagement means you are already listening to what your audiences care about and are prepared to deliver the content they value in the format they prefer.

Here’s a simple example: You send out a piece of information over your network and a top influencer likes it, shares it, tweets it or links to it. At this point, your content has earned a powerful third party endorsement. It has gained social currency, and as it is further amplified in your audience’s own social curation pipeline, benefits will accrue in terms of visibility and search engine rankings. At the end of the day, this all rolls up into new authority and influence for your brand.

Even with the best content, targeting is crucial to success. One example is State Farm’s viral video of actor William Shatner humorously warning about the annual Thanksgiving spate of deep-fried turkey injuries. Despite the star power, “Eat, Fry Love: A Turkey Fryer Cautionary Tale” was a true PR (rather than commercial) initiative. And many time-tested PR techniques assured its viral uptake, according to Heather Paul, Corporate Public Affairs Specialist, Digital/Social Media, at State Farm. The video was pre-pitched to media outlets that had picked up on previous State Farm

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

releases. Bloggers with a similar track record were also tipped. In addition, State Farm issued a multimedia news release, which included multiple content assets related to this campaign. Additional benefits of targeting include the ability to:

> Build relationships with members of the media, bloggers and key influencers > Extend your reach among the audiences who follow a particular journalist, blogger or influencer

Engaging and interacting with audiences Creating multimedia content “hubs,” such as social media portals, knowledge centers and microsites, can help create ripple effects for your brand.

Creating multimedia content “hubs,” such as social media portals, knowledge centers and microsites, can help create ripple effects for your brand. It’s all part of the “Engage and Interact” component of the agile engagement approach. What type of content is included on such a site? Downloadable PDFs (white papers, brochures, sales sheets), videos, coupons, calls to action, photos, images – all with sharing features built right in. The ripples begin with an advisory to your networks and communities, whether via a press release, on the editorial section of your Web site or as a tweet. Each content piece reaches its target, but then draws the target back to your full range of content.

For instance, viewers of “Eat, Fry, Love” who arrived on State Farm’s multimedia microsite found several additional fire safety videos, a PowerPoint of William Shatner incorrectly deep-frying a turkey and other content assets. And most bloggers picked up more than one of the assets in their posts, Paul says. Additional benefits of such engagement tactics include the ability to:

> Garner additional visibility as each multimedia asset is amplified individually > Engage multiple influencers through a variety of content formats

Distributing via push and pull Distribution is, of course, a critical cog in the agile engagement wheel. Like the others, it is a multifaceted endeavor, comprised of reaching traditional media sources, Web sites, blogs and social media channels. But here’s the key: Traditionally, distribution has meant outbound, one-way communication, but this definition is outmoded. Today, distribution takes both push and pull into account. Even the traditional press release – PR’s workhorse – is recast in a scenario where push and pull are no longer mutually exclusive. The press release is the official communication of Copyright © 2012 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

record from your brand. But you can increase the engagement value of this vehicle through tweetable press release headlines and the incorporation of multimedia content, as well as by sharing useful facts – especially numbers – from the text via social channels. The same goes for owned content such as white papers. Then, pull occurs when new audiences are directed to your message from within the social and digital ecosystem – through referrals from search engines, Web sites, social networks or the like – and, in turn, share it among their followers, creating a viral effect. Additional benefits of effective distribution include the ability to:

> Maximize earned media opportunities > Establish one’s brand as a thought leader > Interact with and play forward your audiences’ feedback, comments and reviews in your own social channels

Measuring on an ongoing basis Measurement, the sixth component of agile engagement, need not be thought of as the final step in this process. Rather, it is the linchpin perpetuating the ongoing cycle of agile engagement. By keeping a close eye on the results generated by your campaigns, you can gauge areas of success in order to build on these successes in the future, and also assess areas of weakness that can be further refined moving forward. Additional benefits of measurement include the ability to:

> Test messaging in the social sphere > Validate the performance of a particular tactic via tangible metrics In the case of “Eat, Fry, Love,” results not only included some 500,000 views of the YouTube video, but a drop in fryer fire claims that Thanksgiving Day, State Farm’s Paul reports.

Finding efficiencies in agile engagement New efficiencies are emerging as another upside of agile engagement. For example, it reduces reliance on paid media, enabling you to use it more selectively – not as the core of all campaigns, but sometimes as an accelerator for owned media produced in-house and released into social networks. And you can test ideas for paid media in the social sphere. Likewise, “we’ve seen some pretty interesting shifts in what people are doing with press releases,” Skerik says. Press releases can drive engagement with owned content, such as announcing new white paper findings or the launch of a blog. Releases are also increasingly

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

being used to generate qualified leads directly – for instance, connecting readers to webinar registrations or directly to landing pages that have a transactional basis. “It generates returns on investment beyond the traditional scope of PR,” says Tom Stein, President and Chief Creative Officer of Stein+Partners Brand Activation.

Discovering new opportunities to unify departments and brands Because so many parts of the enterprise are engaging in social media today – from PR to marketing to customer service, human resources and more – collaboration has become an imperative. SAS, for instance, created a structure under its “Digitize the Business” initiative to communicate, prioritize and provide corporate social guidelines and training. The questions driving their initiative were many: Where do search, social and content intersect, and how do you make that effective? What happens when you add communities to the mix? How do you avoid overlap or mixed messages? “We didn’t force everyone to have to reorganize, but to function differently,” says SAS’ Sweetwood.

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It used to be that marketing focused on ads, brochures, trade shows and branding, while the PR department worked with the media – all of it designed to influence the public through other people. But with the Web now, those things are absolutely converging.

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David Meerman Scott Marketing Strategist and Author of Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage

As a large enterprise, SAS created a council and seven task forces that have improved coordination and the ability to move projects forward faster. Within the corporate structure, marketing team members sit alongside the PR team as two sister teams comprising the department of external communications. “Marketing and PR are converging,” says marketing strategist David Meerman Scott, author of Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. “It used to be that marketing focused on ads, brochures, trade shows and branding, while the PR department worked with the media – all of it designed to influence the public through other people. But with the Web now, those things are absolutely converging. If someone goes to Google and finds a New York Times article, a blog from a third party, a blog from the company and a video from an employee of the company, the average person no longer discerns from among those sources.” Of note, PR and marketing professionals each have something valuable to offer the other. “PR can learn a lot from marketing about measurement, and then adapt marketing techniques that help PR quantify its impact,” says PR Newswire’s Meranus. On the other hand, the marketing department can learn from PR’s strengths in earning media, which, after all, date back to the days when it was mostly a matter of pitching stories to newsmen.

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The common thread that can bring people together is to understand what the audience cares about rather than what the organization cares about – injecting business intelligence on a real-time basis.

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Sarah Skerik Vice President of Social Media, PR Newswire

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

The list goes on. PR may have more facility with listening tools, whereas marketing has its market research and focus groups. Above all, “it makes no sense to have siloed departments that are spreading separate messages – that are not taking into account the knowledge of each department,” Meranus says. Unifying brand messaging becomes even more challenging as additional departments pile into the social sphere, for personnel recruitment, customer relations and other functions. And the cost of social media in terms of time, energy and other resources can mount. For all of this, agile engagement provides a unifying thread. “Organizations are generally still bound by individual agendas, goals and plans defined by their respective departments,” Skerik points out. “The common thread that can bring people together, for a more united response and to capture opportunities in a united way, is to understand what the audience cares about rather than what the organization cares about – injecting business intelligence on a real-time basis.”

Conclusion: exercising agility in communications leads you to constant – and effective – engagement The evolution of media is requiring much higher levels of agility in listening, creating content, targeting influencers, engaging and interacting, distributing brand messaging and measuring the results. Approached systematically, these six continual cycles of activity can form a framework for effectively planning, preparing and leveraging communications – a framework that helps communications professionals make the transition from a pattern of campaigns to the practice of ongoing engagement. There is a saying that “chance favors the prepared mind.” With an agile engagement framework in place, communicators can be in a constant state of preparedness, and reap the benefits of effectively streaming their brand in a real-time world.

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White Paper The Dawn of Agile Engagement

About PR Newswire PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms and solutions that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry 58 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content – from rich media to online video to multimedia – and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, social, search and mobile channels. Combining the world’s largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world’s enterprises to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company.

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