In 2017, as the popularity of podcasts continued its incredible growth – 42 million Americans now listen to a podcast each week and the average podcast fan listens to five shows every seven days – we had the fascinating experience of producing and launching podcasts for some of our clients.
One such project was the ThinkSet Podcast, published by Berkeley Research Group, a management consultancy based in the Bay Area. BRG joins a list of innovative corporate communicators getting into the game.
As we work on more and more podcasts, we’ve learned a lot about storytelling in the digital age. Much of what has worked in more traditional business-to-business communications remains relevant. But there are quite a few wrinkles to podcasting that set it apart from traditional content production.
The ThinkSet Project
Edward Newland, business development analyst at BRG, reached out to us in early 2017 about launching a podcast as a sister product to ThinkSet Magazine, a quarterly publication BRG would debut that spring. Newland’s idea was to build each episode around an interview with an author of one of the magazine articles.
We worked with Eddie to determine standing elements of the show – format, music, regular introductory and closing remarks – and showed him how to distribute the series via iTunes and other podcast channels. Before long we were producing two episodes a month, and we plan to do the same through 2018.
Early Assets, Obstacles
Importantly, Eddie’s idea was a good fit for a podcast. He would serve as the host role and anchor – a hallmark of many popular podcasts (think Marc Maron) – and the content from the magazine would provide fodder for lively and informed conversations with people who had deep knowledge and strong points of view.
Eddie also had done his homework about why a podcast could resonate with BRG’s audiences. At a time when breaking through the noise and reaching decision makers has never been more important, or difficult, for professional services organizations, podcasts offer a compelling channel. Podcast listeners, according to Edison Research, are typically more educated than the population at large. They also skew younger – 77 percent of monthly podcast listeners above the age of 12 are between 18-54, compared with 59 percent of the U.S. population in that age range. In other words, podcasts are popular with the current and future generations of decision makers.
And, of course, podcasts provide an owned-media alternative to the printed word or video, which is expensive and heavily reliant on visuals. Podcasts also offer a sort of escape for audiences, like busy executives, who might be experiencing screen fatigue. As Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, wrote in Forbes last year:
“Exciting at first, screens have become exhausting for many users, and podcasts represent a refreshing alternative. Rather than using your eyes, you use your ears; there are silences, pauses, and genuine human voices rather than words and images on a screen.” He also noted that “the cost-to-value ratio for podcasts is incredibly low.”
When Eddie first reached out to us, he had figured out something we had been telling clients for a while: Compelling video footage of thought leaders at professional services firms is hard to get, and often amounts to little more than a lot of people sitting at desks, talking into the camera.
Podcasts also helped avoid a scheduling problem that’s common in today’s world. Eddie’s potential guest list was spread around the globe, so getting them together for a video would be unlikely. Podcasts, of course, don’t rely on video. And while in-studio/in-person recordings remain the gold standard for audio quality, there have been some important advances in remote recording audio quality in recent years.
Employing a new online recording platform, Eddie has recorded episodes of the ThinkSet podcast from his Boston office, interviewing guests across the United States, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, all of which is captured by Greentarget producers in Chicago (and, once, in Bangkok).
Tried-and-True Methods
Most of the content we create for Greentarget clients takes the form of writing on a page (blogs, research reports, bylined articles, etc.). But many of the tasks involved carry over to podcasting. For BRG’s podcasts, we conduct extensive background research prior to each episode. Then, we have a discovery call with Eddie and each episode’s guests. This is similar to the work that goes into writing articles and blog posts.
The editing process is also similar. We typically record for up to an hour, with the aim of producing a podcast of 20-25 minutes. Working with Eddie, we pare down the recording to the most impactful and interesting pieces of audio that also coincide with BRG’s overall messaging goals. This is quite similar to the work we do with clients on written content pieces.
Episode 10 of ThinkSet went live this week, and we’re expecting three episodes to be released this month. This isn’t the only way to do podcasts, of course, but it is a good example of a progressive company seizing on new technology and audience behavior to get its insights in the hands of the people it wants to reach.
Greentarget, since its earliest days, has endeavored to give back to the community by working with a variety of pro bono clients. In 2016, we contributed hundreds of hours to worthy organizations across the country. And we’re on track to do the same this year.
Now, with 2018 just around the corner, we want to expand our list of possible pro bono clients with the first ever GT Cares Grant. Throughout January, we’ll be collecting applications from U.S.-based organizations. We’ll evaluate and pick one client to work with as part of a 90-day engagement in early 2018 – and we’ll announce the winner in March. Organizations submitting applications must have a 501(c)3 designation and a communications goal that can be achieved in 90 days. They also should be new to Greentarget and not have a religious or political affiliation.
Greentarget can offer pro bono clients services in media relations, content production, social media, digital strategy and/or public relations training. But we don’t want to limit potential efforts to those buckets. Organizations submitting applications can also suggest other related types of work.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ll judge applications based on the likelihood of a fit – that is, how well we could serve your organization. Here’s a sampling of organizations we’ve worked with in 2017:
- Barrel of Monkeys: The Chicago-based arts education organization focuses on teaching creative writing to grade schoolers and turning their stories into performances for the public. The organization celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017, and Greentarget helped create messaging that resulted in coverage in several local media outlets.
- Cameron Kravitt Foundation: CKF teaches future doctors, particularly pediatricians, how to tell parents their child has died. With a primary goal of increasing awareness of and engagement with CKF, Greentarget leveraged earned media as a channel to articulate the CKF story. We also provided a social media framework for the Junior Board to consider implementing in the second half of the year.
- Culinary Care: The organization provides made-to-order meals from a network of quality restaurants for families facing cancer. In September, the nonprofit held its 3rd Annual Corporate Cook-Off with a Chopped-inspired affair. Leading up to the event, Greentarget provided traditional media relations counsel, and post-event we developed follow-up material to help Culinary Care reconnect with sponsors, patients and families in need, as well as social media messaging.
- Heartland Alliance: Each year, Heartland Alliance hosts a Home & Garden Tour in Southwest Michigan offering a glimpse into homes and gardens with interesting architecture and interior design. Because all proceeds go to the Heartland Alliance Fund, ticket sales are of utmost importance. To increase awareness of the event, Greentarget secured media coverage in numerous event calendars, as well as articles in Road Trips for Gardeners and Harbor Country News that promoted the tour.
- Humble Design: The Detroit-based nonprofit helps families transitioning out of homeless shelters by furnishing their new homes soup to nuts (furniture, curtains, towels, dishes, art, books, etc.). The nonprofit opened a Chicago chapter in March 2017 and wanted to get the word out locally. Greentarget secured broadcast coverage on ABC, NBC and CBS.
- Kids in Need of Defense: KIND strives to ensure that no child appears in immigration court without legal representation while continuously educating lawmakers and the general public about what the kids are fleeing and who they are. Greentarget helped get the word out by leveraging traditional and social media to promote two reports on sexual and gender-based violence in Central America, and we produced two Q&As with legal volunteers.
- United Way of Metro Chicago: Greentarget facilitated planning discussions about the organization’s new neighborhood network program, developed an executive positioning plan and engaged in story development conversations with the organization’s CEO and SVP of Community Impact. We also instituted a twice-weekly news monitoring notification newsletter to flag stories that United Way can be positioned to comment on.
- Describe your organization. (200 words or less)
- Give us your best pitch about why we should work with you. (200 words or less)
- What specific communications challenge can Greentarget help you solve starting in early 2018? (200 words or less)
- How do you envision Greentarget helping you meet that challenge in 2018? (200 words or less)
- What is your ideal outcome of the work associated with this challenge – e.g., improved overall messaging, media coverage or increased social media presence? (200 words or less)
- Describe your organization and staff, particularly your communications/public relations personnel. (200 words or less)
It’s an old question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
But in this era, the more appropriate question might be: If you were there to witness the tree falling, would you hear it if every other tree in the forest fell at the same time?
The second question is emblematic of the challenge business-to-business communicators face — a beautiful piece of content or original research can go unnoticed with so much other content available. Without a distribution strategy, truly good work can get absorbed in the noise.
This was one of the primary topics of the 2017 Critical Issues Forum held on September 15 in New York. The event is convened annually by the PR Council, and this year’s forum drew industry leaders to discuss brand transformation, the effects of new platforms and how the iGeneration is challenging marketers. Participants also were offered the chance to ask former White House spokespeople what they think of the current administration’s communications team.
Greentarget attends the forum each year with clients and friends. This year, we attended with senior business-to-business marketing communications executives from several organizations, including a leading provider of financial solutions, a top insurer, a valuation advisory firm, a litigation financier and several global law firms.
Here are the takeaways they were thinking about after the event.
Do as I Do, Not as I Say
On a panel about marketing transformation, Heineken CMO Nuno Teles said, “Trust what customers do, not what they say they are going to do” — meaning, don’t waste your time (and money) asking clients what they think about your brand. Study how they behave around your brand.
Greentarget’s technology clients pay close attention to where different customer segments look for and digest information about products and services. These clients develop “personas” that represent each customer segment based on predominant behaviors and then craft a content strategy to precision-target each persona. This approach has been around in political and consumer marketing for a while — remember Soccer Moms and NASCAR Dads? For business-to-business communicators, understanding what information can tip people from consideration to adoption, and how they prefer to receive it, should be no less commonplace.
TXT ME!
Snaps CEO Christian Brucculeri and Txt Me author Bonin Bough impressed participants with the potential of messaging apps to micro-target prospective customers. Digital platforms are proliferating rapidly. Messaging is the common element across these platforms — both established and emerging — and it is overrunning how we communicate.
Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion monthly active users; it is among the top five apps in every demographic of U.S. consumers, according to ComScore. iMessage easily exceeds this. As anyone familiar with the iGeneration has observed, there is an entire generation of consumers that doesn’t know that e-mail exists.
And yet according to Brucculeri and Bough, almost no one is working to organize and manage communities on messaging platforms, as is common on popular social networks. So anyone who needs to tell stories to drive engagement with a brand should be packaging everything they do on social platforms for messaging apps or risk missing the next massive opportunity in consumer engagement.
How this will play out in the business-to-business space remains uncertain. But Signet, the preferred messaging platform of Edward Snowden (it’s an encrypted service), surely presages a wave of messaging apps that can enable secure business communication.
The Best Communicators Serve the Audience
Greentarget believes that one of the principles of journalism — that the message must serve the audience — is essential to effective business-to-business marketing. This was echoed by Karen Hughes, a former counselor to President George W. Bush. On a panel of communications directors from the Bush and Clinton administrations, Karen asserted that the White House press secretary, in fact, serves the people, not the president.
To what heights of sincerity and authenticity might our storytelling ascend if we took a lesson from this as business-to-business communicators? We possess a nuanced understanding of our audience and a narrow focus on its needs, and it’s exciting to think about crafting exactly the right story, at the right time, on the right medium — and inspiring clients to act.
You can view videos of all the panels mentioned here and others at the Critical Issues Forum’s website. Please watch a few. We’d love to hear what sticks with you.
Ever wonder where all those crazy political headlines on social media come from? There’s a good bet they originated in Veles, Macedonia – which is (incredibly) treating fake news as a growth industry. They used to make porcelain there.
But, of course, social media isn’t all bad. As another RR entry notes, victims of recent hurricanes have used it to get help. We’re also reading about counterfeit shoes, a fabled Forbes editor, how zoos and aquariums deal with natural disasters and a podcast about the nature of self.
Also, make sure to check out Senior Vice President Pam Munoz’s post about Greentarget’s work with the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic.
With that, here’s Recent Reads.
The Fake News Machine – You’ve probably never heard of Veles, Macedonia, but it’s one of the origin points for fake political news – and its entrepreneurs are getting rich and ready for 2020 (with the not-so-tacit support of local government officials). This is a chilling account of what we’re facing as a democracy – as a world? – when it comes to finding enough shared beliefs to even function. With headlines like “Michelle Was Caught Cheating with Eric Holder – OBAMA IS FURIOUS!!!” – and the knowledge that 2017 isn’t even a major election year, I can’t imagine what the next presidential election will look like. – Paul Wilson
Hurricane Harvey Victims Turn to Social Media for Assistance – As a Houston native, my Facebook feed – typically filled with photos of babies, political frustration and bold asks from “friends” to buy the latest life-changing product – was flooded (pun intended) by people I grew up with asking for emergency assistance in real time in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. This article focuses on the use of social media relating to the storm, including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Houston Police Department urging people to call specific phone lines for disaster response instead of using social media. But as detailed in a recent Vogue story (which quotes a friend’s dad), when one man called an emergency phone line, the operator told him there were 2,000 calls ahead of him. A philanthropist with celebrity connections, the man reached out to his pal Montel Williams who made a plea via Instagram and got him the help he was looking for. Sounds to me social media was the way to go. – Lisa Seidenberg
Counterfeit Yeezys and the booming sneaker black market – Replica sneakers have taken street fashion by storm. Sneaker companies do what they can to stop counterfeits, but the buzz surrounding Yeezys and other designs boosts the replica industry even more. Sneaker collectors don’t feel the need to hide the fact that their shoes are replicas either – buying a pair that is indecipherable from the legitimate design is a badge of honor. This article explores the replica sneaker market and the global network of sneaker collectors that fuels it. – Scarlett Wardrop
Flamingos In The Men’s Room: How Zoos And Aquariums Handle Hurricanes – With much of the country dealing with major hurricanes and their aftermath, human evacuation becomes a priority – but what about the animals? This story highlights the unusual solutions zookeepers had to come up with to solve an impossible problem: what to do with the zoo animals when the hurricane hits? In my own career, I often find myself with my own flamingo problems. In PR, it is inevitable that you will need to create unusual solutions to impossible problems. Much like the zookeepers, we get creative and find a way to “make it work” even when it shouldn’t. Although the flamingo situation makes for an interesting photograph, it required some PR thinking to solve the problem. – Lauren Kokoskie
The instructive poetry of a legendary Forbes editor – The last six months of Jim Michaels’ 27-year reign as editor of Forbes were my first six months as a staff writer there. A former UPI reporter who broke the news of Gandhi’s assassination, Michaels gets a lot of credit for bringing classical journalistic discipline to business news. At Forbes we worshiped and feared him in equal measure. His editing notes in our stories usually took the form of profane all-caps whippings. For those of us who wanted to be good at it, the response was always “thank you sir, may I have another?” – Brandon Copple
GT Podcast Recommendation
The Road Back to You – Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile teach not only awareness of the self, but also how to develop an awareness of others in this podcast. Derived from the Enneagram personality type system, this program explores nine distinct personalities and the intricacies of each. Unlike traditional personality tests, the Enneagram is uniquely fluid in that it recognizes the adaptive nature of human personality. The test reveals each personality type’s tendencies when healthy, stressed out, happy, etc. Cron and Stabile interview nine individuals who each possess a different one of the nine personality types outlined in the Enneagram. The podcast provides valuable introspection while opening up a great capacity to empathize with the ways other personality types view the world. – Aubrey Martin
Pro bono work has been part of Greentarget’s mission since our earliest days – and we contributed more than 1,000 hours in 2016. Through these efforts, our staff gets a chance to use their professional skills to support organizations they believe in, and our junior staffers get to work on higher-level projects.
And our pro bono clients get to see how our team can elevate an executive’s profile – and elevate the conversation around the issue they’re dedicated to.
For example, in the past year we’ve worked a lot with the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic (DVLC), a Chicago nonprofit that provides free legal services to survivors of domestic violence. Their work comes in the midst of crisis (orders of protection) and in the aftermath (divorce, custody and immigration). Our work with the DVLC began in April 2016 when we introduced Executive Director Margaret Duval to local reporters. We provided Duval with media coaching, wrote a crisis preparation plan, drafted media advisories and social media posts and generated attention for DVLC’s annual spring benefit.
We established a PR strategy for DVLC based on its business goals and fueled by our tactics for both achieving short-term milestones and laying the foundation for long-term progress. DVLC wanted to expand its sources of fundraising, so our mission was relatively simple: Increase the organization’s recognition in Chicago to extend DVLC’s fundraising base.
Our media coaching sessions paid off when Duval received a barrage of interview requests from reporters at local and national outlets – print, online and broadcast. They were writing about a Chicago native who in 2016 started a local movement when she announced via Twitter that she would donate $10 to DVLC each time Aroldis Chapman, a pitcher who had been acquired by the Chicago Cubs after allegations of domestic abuse, saved a game.
As soon as the reporters started calling, we went to work, coaching Duval on interview tactics and facilitating introductory calls. She was interviewed by The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, NBC 5 Chicago and ESPN, among other online and broadcast media.
The initial coverage helped Duval quickly identify the media and fundraising potential of a formal fundraising campaign around the Chapman story. It also showed sports reporters that she was insightful and could be a valuable source on domestic violence issues. For example, the New York Times reporter who wrote about the campaign reached out to Duval for a recent story, then quoted her on the good and bad of making domestic violence public on social media when the alleged abuser is a professional athlete.
Greentarget’s corporate journalism approach applies to media relations as well – we engage with reporters who write for the specific audiences that are most valuable to our clients. When we began conducting media outreach around DVLC’s 2016 annual benefit, we focused on reporters who covered nonprofits and events at publications such as Crain’s Chicago Business, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, the Chicago Sun-Times and more. Most reporters were busy on the days of DVLC events, but our outreach familiarized them with the DVLC.
These efforts made the Chicago Tribune’s Balancing Act columnist more open to our proposal for an in-person introductory meeting with Duval in June 2017. Duval’s ability to tell DVLC’s story, discuss how the state budget crisis was impacting DVLC and its clients and speak about trends in domestic violence led to a profile in the Chicago Tribune, which published in July and generated valuable buzz among potential donors.
