Greentarget

Trending Topics

by

Just like you, we are actively monitoring the developing COVID-19 global pandemic. Our team has quickly acclimated to a new way of working while staying focused on addressing and supporting our clients’ most pressing and emerging needs. Everything we’re doing as an organization centers on two questions:

1. How can PR/Marketing maintain demand for services NOW?
2. How can PR/Marketing drive demand for services LATER?

Guided by these critical questions, we’re currently focused on these five paths forward:

Modeling the news to identify “white space”

We’ve established a COVID-19 news bureau to stay ahead of the accelerated news cycle. Our team uses several data tools to identify the white space on saturated topics so that we can help craft fresh and empathetic POVs heading into the next phase of the reporting (and buying) cycle.

Increasing the signal, reducing the noise on high-demand topics

Organizations are publishing around the clock, offering clients actionable guidance via resource centers, alerts, webinars and podcasts. Our team is working to extend the reach and impact of these critical efforts to distinguish POV. But we also know that we need to remain sensitive to the extraordinary circumstances these audiences are facing. Guided by the words of our editor-in-chief, Brandon Copple: “We can’t forget that this is a human crisis. Every sentence and every angle must be crafted with care and with empathy.” Audience fatigue on the COVID-19 topic is already setting in as the noise steadily increases. Your audiences want information that is concise and grounded in utility – what do I need to do now?

Understanding what buyers need now

During a time of social distancing and shifting buyer needs, our research & market intelligence team’s experience in conducting online focus groups and qualitative interviews with C-level buyers has never been more important to identifying new and emerging areas of need by practice and industry. We predict that the social distancing in practice across the country will create opportunities to tap into the collective intelligence of audiences that have historically been hard to reach and engage.

Innovation no longer a nice to have but a need to have

Our research and innovation teams are collaborating to help our clients reimagine their value propositions based on what their clients need today in response to the pandemic– and what they will need tomorrow. Leveraging a process developed in partnership with our longstanding partner Greenhouse: Innovation, we stand ready to help identify new ways to market and message both existing and NEW offerings in development.

Next-phase scenario planning

With COVID-19’s threat to business continuity, we are actively planning to identify the next wave of pandemic-related scenarios and issues so that we can model and message against them in advance. The goal is to ensure maximum preparedness when new events and circumstances arise. We are also acutely aware that the next phase of the narrative will almost certainly involve the need for organizations to message carefully around workforce reductions and mergers/acquisitions.

We’re here to help and would welcome a chat to discuss what we’re learning in real time.

Return to COVID-19 Resources for Communicators

by Leave a Comment

The troubling spread of disinformation doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. But news consumers don’t view media sources as the leading culprits.

According to the 2019 IPR Disinformation Report, 63 percent of Americans view disinformation – defined as deliberately misleading or biased information – as a significant problem in society, up there with gun violence (63 percent) and terrorism (66 percent). However, nearly two-thirds of respondents to the IPR survey say local newspapers (62 percent) and local broadcast news (62 percent) are trustworthy. And some of the country’s largest newspapers – USA Today (47 percent), The New York Times (46 percent), The Wall Street Journal (44 percent) and The Washington Post (42 percent) – are widely viewed as trusted sources.

But simultaneously, according to another research report, Americans’ trust in the mass media dropped over the past year – findings that echo the sentiments of panelists at a recent event in Chicago.

Reporters Not Feeling the Love

The current media landscape is something we plan on digging into a lot in 2020, specifically with the upcoming presidential election. But we had a chance in 2019 to hear from some members of the media during the panel, “Preserving the Truth in an Age of Misinformation,” sponsored by Indiana University’s Chicago Alumni Association. Several reporters who spoke said public perception hasn’t swung back in their favor after years of intense attacks against the news media.

Veteran Reuters reporter and foreign correspondent Elaine Monaghan moderated the discussion, which focused on how best to navigate distorted information and share news responsibly. The panel included Meghan Dwyer, WGN Chicago; Traci Rucinski, Reuters; Andrea Hanis, Chicago Tribune; Hannah Alani, Block Club Chicago; Eric White, Chicago Sun-Times and Kale Wilk, Times of Northwest Indiana.

Several panelists blamed the disinformation crisis on a singular culprit: “fake news.”

Dwyer said that the phenomenon is (literally) hitting broadcast reporters on the streets. She recalled doing a story about Jazz Fest in New Orleans. After throwing a beer can that hit her in the head, a heckler shouted, “FU – You’re fake news! Get out of here!”

“We have terrible things said to us daily while standing in the cold, trying to give people the information they need to know about a shooting,” she added.

Hanis agreed. “The fact that people feel journalists are reckless about the truth is hilarious. As journalists we live in a constant state of paranoia,” she said. “Our job is to make sure our reporting is right. We wake up at 3 a.m. scared we got something wrong and run to our laptops in the dark to make sure we didn’t.”

Hanis walked through the process for addressing corrections at the Tribune, illustrating how serious the paper is about getting things right.

“We have a full-time standards editor who creates the policy and holds us accountable,” she said. “Everyone knows that when we get something wrong it’s a big deal.”

Elani addressed how accountability drives her work. “At Block Club, we work for the people, and they pay our salary. We don’t have advertising streams; we don’t have shareholders. The readers own us; we must be accountable,” she said. “They also live and work in the neighborhoods where we live and work, so that impacts our accountability as well.”

Elani talked about how a reader reached out via Twitter with a suggested change to a story. Elani didn’t have time to respond but that same reader happened to see her out that day while jogging and followed up on whether she had caught her suggestion.

Elani handles the fake news talk by taking the time to educate her community about the job of a journalist. “Many times, fake news comes from people recycling the term, but not understanding what journalists do and why they do what they do.”

Headlines and Other Ways to Combat Fake News

While the panelists agreed about the importance of accuracy, they also addressed sensitive topics such as whether they are pressured to create “click bait” headlines to drive readers to stories.

“While our goal is to use a headline to get a reader to read a story, we don’t include anything in our headlines that is untrue,” said White, of the Sun-Times. “That would go against everything we do.”

At Reuters, while headlines are essential, they’re mostly targeted towards the publication’s fastest-growing clientele: media clients.

“We are cognizant that our media clients like Google, Apple, MSNBC and Yahoo are looking towards our headlines and our ability to turn a story around quickly and accurately so that they can repurpose them for their platforms,” Rucinski said.

The reporters also provided great advice for consumers of news who would like to help combat the “fake news” epidemic.

“Talk about the news and cite where you read an interesting article,” Dwyer said. “If you see someone sharing information that’s false, comment on it and then link to the actual source. Sign up for multiple news outlets. Pay for the news, because the news can’t pay for itself.”

Keep Calm and Carry On?

The evening concluded with a final question from the audience: “What keeps you all going given the constant pressures and doubts about your commitment to truth and accuracy?”

“It’s the comradery,” White said. “We’re understaffed and trying to do a good job every day. You feel responsible for the others sitting with you and doing this thing that matters even though it’s not easy and the hours suck.”

Added Dwyer: “I really believe in what we do. We are the Fourth Estate, damn it, and we must hold people accountable. I still love it, even on my bad days.”

Wilk, a reporter and photojournalist at the Times of Northwest Indiana, says that it’s his love of the craft that drives him. “Photos are an incredible and concrete way to capture humanity,” he said.

by Leave a Comment

What if a yogi with a JD was a law firm’s highest-paid employee? What if a law firm committed to paying a law student’s loans once they passed the bar – if they committed to stay with the firm for two years?

These were just some of the ah-ha moments that Greentarget team members and students of DePaul University’s Public Relations & Advertising (PRAD) Grad class arrived at during a problem-solving workshop guided by innovation sherpa Howell Malham, founder and managing director ofGreenHouse::Innovation. Malham drove the conversation using Innovation Dynamics, his groundbreaking approach to true social innovation and problem-solving that involve large groups of actors: people, in other words.

Our goal? Find answers to the following question:

How can the legal industry attract and retain new talent in an age of clashing cultures?

That question, a critical one for many Greentarget clients, centers on how old-guard attorneys might be more comfortable with long work hours, whereas younger attorneys yearn for wellness programs, robust cultures, professional development opportunities and work-life balance.

The workshop could have taken a lot of different paths, but Malham kept us on track and used his Innovation Dynamics playbook – designed to seek out unseen social forces holding the status quo in place – to produce ideas to disrupt the legal industry. Malham’s playbook identifies six elements that form norms, unwritten rules that govern our behavior and interactions.

Over the course of two hours, we focused on one of those elements: actors, people with close relationships to the problem. Identifying law firm partners, clients, law schools and the students themselves, lateral recruits and families and spouses as just a few of the key players involved in recruiting and retaining legal talent, we discussed their motivations and asked questions such as:

What are the actors’ behaviors related to the problem? What do behaviors suggest about actors’ interests and motivations? What current behavior by a current actor could subvert the norm? What behavior by a new actor might subvert the norm?

The answers present clear challenges to the traditional law firm model.

The partner track is not necessarily attractive to all incoming attorneys, and compensation and benefits are not necessarily enough to keep them around. Younger people are waiting longer to settle down and have families, leaving them flexible to explore options at all stages of their careers. They also enter the job market hungry for meaningful work and purpose. Putting in long hours as an associate to earn their spot on the partner track can clash with those motivations.

Figuring the law firm model is still valuable to many law firm employees and partners, Greentarget and the PRAD Grad students brainstormed the following ways to better align that model with younger lawyers’ motivations:

  • Ex-Lawyers on Staff: Hire and engage employees who have earned their JDs and pursued alternative career paths, such as yoga instructors, journalists and therapists, to tackle recruitment challenges. These individuals understand the pressures of working at law firms and can provide fresh perspectives on the culture and wellness elements firms are trying to employ.
  • “Scott’s Tots”: Inspired by “The Office” episode when Michael Scott (Steve Carell) promises to pay an entire third-grade class’ college tuition after they graduate high school, a firm could sponsor a class at a target law school for recruitment and offer to pay their law school loans if they pass the bar. This level of financial support when so many students are drowning in debt promotes a sense of loyalty from employees.
  • Pro Bono Focus: Once a year, host a marathon where the firm’s lawyers focus solely on pro bono matters and work in shifts for one straight week, 24 hours a day. This level of commitment would not only drive good publicity but also engage all employees in purposeful work outside of their standard client work. 

DePaul’s PRAD Grad students participated as part of a course called Chicago Corporations & Their Agencies, which focuses on working relationships between agencies and clients. The Greentarget team had a great time – and it sounds like the students did too.

“The class couldn’t have gone better,” said Ron Culp, instructor and professional director of PRAD. “Seldom do students linger afterwards, especially when the evening runs past 8 o’clock. No complaints last night.”

by Leave a Comment

College students angling for a job in PR can basically forget about their resumes – nobody cares about them anymore.

So says Ron Culp, professional director of DePaul University’s Graduate Public Relations and Advertising Program (PRAD). According to Culp, prospective employers are more likely to find his students through LinkedIn. “That’s why it’s crucial to update your profile and make sure you’ve got your 500-plus connections,” he says.

Culp dished this advice during a recent Q&A session about the evolving media landscape at Greentarget’s Chicago office. The veteran PR pro – Culp led media relations at Sara Lee Corporation and Sears, among other places – dropped by as part of our speaker series.

While piling up more than 500 LinkedIn connections might seem daunting, Culp says the significance they have for college students is indicative of the many ways the industry has changed in recent years.

Case in point, PRAD, which Culp joined early this decade, has moved from a traditional textbook-driven program to one that prioritizes real-world experience. About 80 percent of the PRAD faculty previously had full-time jobs in advertising or public relations and guest speakers appear regularly, so the students get first-hand insights into how the public relations world works outside of academia.

“For most of my classes, I take my students to corporations and agencies in person,” Culp says. “We’ll sit down and brainstorm with the agency – maybe they’ve got an idea they’d like to kick around that they’d like some good millennial perspective on.”

“For many of the students, it’s the first time they really see what their career progression might be. Invariably, someone will say, ‘That – I want that job.’”

As they shift away from textbooks, Culp instead asks students to find and share real-world examples that reflect particular lessons (which he provides in advance). He then has his students share those examples online and discuss them.

Culp also shared his observations about how students are consuming news. “They get everything from their mobile – and they’re very selective about what they read,” he says. He added that traditional media still resonates though and that knowing your audience has never been more important.

After content has been created and published, it becomes more important than ever to drive engagement – for news organizations and businesses alike. “If you have a client base that understands what you’re trying to do, you can maximize coverage by building an influencer program,” Culp says. “People used to think they didn’t have the resources, but now they’re realizing how easy it is to do.”

One thing that has remained constant: Culp says students are still primarily interested in working for an agency and less interested in working in-house. “Most students want to work at the big agencies in town,” he says. “But there are 465 agencies in Chicago, so I say, don’t necessarily feel like you have to work at one of the big 10.”

We ended the conversation by asking Culp what we at Greentarget could do, particularly in our internship program, to make sure we’re as welcoming to the next generation of PR practitioners as possible. Culp’s advice, which he directed to the industry as a whole: Prioritize inclusion and diversity.

“Forty percent of my students are diverse students – they are concerned that they’re being set up for failure because they’re not being managed well,” he says. “We need to create programs to make sure that everyone feels comfortable and can see themselves in an agency.”

by Leave a Comment

The tech industry stands at a critical juncture. The consequences of the fake it till you make it culture have come home to roost, opening a yawning trust gap between companies, their customers and the society they so earnestly promised to uplift.

In this environment, enterprise tech thought leaders must take up their responsibility to contribute to a smarter conversation — by providing valuable information and intelligence to the audiences they want to influence. Of course, they’re busy building businesses, leaving it to their marketing directors to find creative new avenues to break through the noise in an information-saturated world.

In our work with clients at the growth stage and enterprise level, we’ve sniffed out a few of those paths. Here are six ways to build a holistic thought leadership program that will resonate with enterprise technology buyers.

1. Understand Your Audience by Mapping Personas and Journeys
Before developing a PR and marketing plan, it’s critical to develop a stronger understanding of your best customers, where they’re coming from and the journey that will lead them to you:

  • Interview customers and the sales team to develop what we call an audience proto persona — a brief tactical snapshot that helps you get aligned more nimbly so you can better anticipate what customers need and how to reach them efficiently in ways that matter.
  • Perform market intelligence to ensure your approach and message deliver something exceptional to the people you want to reach.
  • Develop a journey map to help you reach your customers in the awareness, consideration, nurturing and conversion stages.

2. Define and Develop a Signature POV

  • Once you gain a strong understanding of your different audiences and can prioritize them, it’s time to develop a narrative for your company through a signature point of view that explains why you’re doing what you’re doing to the people that matter.
  • Write out and share your vision, informed by the conversations you’ve had with your community of customers.
  • We like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why framework as a guide.

3. Launch and Sustain Public Relations

  • Once your customer journey and narrative are developed, your marketing team can incorporate your vision into planning and structuring milestone announcements including product launches, pivots, M&A activity and important new hires.
  • The complexity of the business drives how much is required here, so prioritize where you’re going to start before allowing the planning process to get too big. We expect and like a high degree of iteration in this process.

4. Plan and Execute Proactive Media Relations

  • Reach out to journalists whose work you, your network and your best customers like and respect; offer them meaningful interactions with your leadership team, and R&D team if appropriate. It’s important to play the long game here. You are not looking for coverage out of the gate, so much as for relationships that are useful to journalists (which in turn must be useful to their readers and, only then, to you).
  • For a client who leads an international network of startup accelerators, we invited several journalists to come check out the flagship accelerator in New York. The next day a few reporters posted pieces based on things they heard; others came back to the subject after a few weeks. But the most powerful story came from a journalist who did not return to the subject for many months and seemed for a long time like she would never write about the accelerator. She was not going to risk her very considerable credibility sharing how unique the accelerator was until she knew its ins and outs, had independently corroborated what she saw and heard, had seen the character of our client. And, most importantly, not until the story was relevant to her readers. Expecting a transactional sequence — “come see us, then write about us” — would have been shortsighted.

5. Develop a Content Strategy
One of the biggest challenges many of our tech clients face is establishing a content strategy. There are several effective ways to implement a customer-centric approach to focus your narrative and plan its execution.

  • Host a summit with key stakeholders to hash out and agree on your key messages and points of differentiation
  • Articulate a content strategy, which is really a plan for consistent storytelling and sharing ideas, and set an editorial calendar for publishing.

6. Promote Your Leaders for Executive Visibility

  • As one of our most successful founder-clients likes to say, even in big-ticket enterprise sales, people buy people, not technology.
  • Continue to refine the conversation tested through the work described above and build it out through the presence of leadership and partners so that a beneficial cycle takes root in which the thought leadership the business shares and develops through its community continues to serve as a reference in the marketplace, where it can be tested with other thought leaders.

These six steps can lay the foundation for a strong thought leadership program. If you want to differentiate your organization, your aim as a marketer is to contribute skillfully to the conversations that matter to your customers, as well as your investors. In an era of rampant noise, ideas that serve your audience and perspectives that help them comprehend and thrive in an era of unpredictability and mistrust deserve to be heard.

by Leave a Comment

Keeping a watchful eye on the changes in the media landscape is part of our jobs in the PR business. Our clients depend on it, and we can’t do our jobs well if we don’t understand what’s happening at the publications we work with. But it’s also in our DNA — most of us are news junkies at heart.

So we’re all well aware of what those publications are up against, especially in local media, where viable business models and paths to monetization have been all but impossible to come by. The results are mostly discouraging, with news deserts popping up all around the country.

But there are some rays of hope. Speaking to our staff over lunch, ProPublica Illinois investigative reporter Jodi Cohen recently told us that “the public is yearning for reporting that exposes wrongdoing.” She pointed to the creation of her organization and Block Club Chicago in the last year as positive signs.

Cohen isn’t the only one who sees hope for local journalism. We recently spoke with Douglas K. Smith, co-founder and architect of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative. Launched in 2015 as the Knight-Temple Table Stakes project, the initiative was developed to strengthen local media in the face of disruption by accelerating the transition to audience-first and digitally skilled news enterprises, improving their practices and helping them grow audiences and audience-related revenues.

Smith, who coauthored Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News, told me that participating organizations have made good progress. Four major metros participated in the first year of the initiative in 2016. Since then, more than six dozen local journalism organizations have participated in what are now five different Table Stakes programs.

The initiative calls for participating journalists to share current challenges and opportunities and discuss strategies. That collaboration has revealed that most news organizations face similar challenges. They include juggling two monumental undertakings. “Journalistic efforts in today’s digitally disrupted world all work hard to put audiences first, create and monetize as many sources of value as possible,” while at the same time newsroom leaders must “retool skills, work and technology in ways that are sustainable going forward,” Smith said.

Early results are encouraging. “Participating enterprises have made significant progress toward success at the challenges selected,” Smith said. That progress includes revenue gains from a variety of sources, ranging from digital subscriptions to native advertising to local digital marketing services to fundraising to events and more.

Some of the success stories were recently detailed at Poynter.org:

  • The Houston Chronicle revamped its newsletter and expects that by the end of this year, it will have more readers coming to its subscriber website through newsletter click-throughs than through homepage visits. The morning report newsletter has grown dramatically, from 1,000 subscribers in January to 20,000 in August.
  • The Philadelphia Media Network, one year after focusing on the performance management models taught in the Table Stakes program, has more than 25,000 digital-only paid subscribers, 25 percent above the goal they had established for the newsroom.
  • The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel grew page views 20 percent year-over-year since 2017, unique visitors by 29 percent and digital-only subscriptions from 13,000 to 30,000.

Three years into the newsroom initiative, Smith hopes that all local news organizations embrace the core tables stakes needed to be in the game:

  1. Serve targeted audiences with targeted content
  2. Publish on the platforms used by your targeted audiences
  3. Produce and publish continuously to match your audiences’ lives
  4. Funnel occasional users into habitual, valuable and paying loyalists
  5. Diversify and grow the ways you earn revenue from the audiences you build
  6. Partner to expand your capacity and capabilities at lower and more flexible cost
  7. Drive audience growth and profitability from a “mini-publisher” perspective

“Healthy and sustainable local journalism is a linchpin to healthy and sustainable local democracy,” Smith said. “We cannot have one without the other. We must reverse the now decade-plus slide in the quality and sustainability of local journalism.”

Smith, who is also the author of On Value and Values, a book of moral philosophy for the 21st century, added, “When local journalism gets stripped down to the bare minimum, democracy’s light dims. Citizens, consumers, employees, families and friends all depend on local journalism shining democracy’s required light — not only by shining light on abuses of power, regardless of origin, but also on how local audiences can solve the necessities of their lives and work together to make the places where they live better.”

Close
Close