Let’s Clarify What the Job is….

While there are many talented, smart and creative people and firms out there for PR, Advertising and Marketing I have found that many have deviated off course from what the job truly is, what the goals really are and what the clients really need.

Creative ideas and bright ideas are absolutely vital however, they must push forward the end goal – sales and revenue. In this day and age this is not a nice thing to have, it’s a must. That sounds like a simple thing to say and a common and basic knowledge but I see examples everyday that are clearly off-course and not forwarding client goals.

Here’s an examples:

A Facebook widget or video game – look, I like to have fun as much as the next guy and I am guilty of downloading a game or two on my iPhone for sure but here’s the thing… what is the clear goal for the Facebook Game? How are you measuring it? Are you getting reach, interest, sales? There were many many many bright ideas during the 1995-97 period for dot com companies and ideas that sounded cool which distracted millions from the actual goals of what a company must do – which is produce sales of their product or service and generate revenue. It’s not a negotiable point.

The job of any PR agency, marketing firm or advertising agency is simple – create an idea, execute a strategy and communicate with the clients target public audience in order to make the client known to them, create interest and generate actual reach that can be used to assist the sales team and further the company growth and revenue. That’s it! If you have been sold on something other than this, well then they probably are creative geniuses but they are not serving your best interest.

Now is the time to get back to basics while the shift of traditional media continues to become less effective and new media is the vital way to communicate with the massive audiecne that is online using the interest that is now intertwined into every aspect of their lives from laptops to iphones. We must focus on people, relationships, what they need and want and how to communciate with them, service them better and build, cultivate and nurture those relationships in order to generate long term clients.

If you focus on the audience and the clear goals of your company to drive sales and revenue your PR, Marketing or Advetrising efforts will be dramatically improved. Don’t lose sight of the goal. Every tweet should have the goal in mind. Every facebook post should reflect the goal. Every blog article, press release, banner ad, video, photo gallery etc should have the goal clearly in mind and being systematically executed.

-Robert Cornish

Richter10.2 Media Group

http://www.richter10point2.com

Attention is Income

The concept of attention is a drastically underestimated element in most companies, CEO’s and business people’s mind. While gauging ROI for a given promotional strategy be it marketing, advertising or PR, many people fail to take into account the power of attention and what that means to the company and why it is absolutely an intrinsic value item that must be looked at to calculate ROI.

The amount of attention a company can attract will directly relate to how well that company does. To the degree that you have “heard of” a company will dictate how well they are doing.
Have you ever heard of GE? How about Virgin? Geico? BMW? They all get a huge amount of attention for their brands. They are all a “heard of” quantity. Yet I speak to companies daily that won’t allocate funds to their brand and attention in order to become a “heard of” quantity because they can’t figure out the ROI. The fact is that their target public audience may need or want their products or services right this second but – they have never “heard of them”. These companies are failing to get a sufficient amount of attention in order to become a known quantity.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystalflickr/190713106/

Get attention and you will gain clients, customers and revenue, period.
You can never get enough attention. It’s something that must be pushed and expanded week after week. Your public audience needs to know about you. They need to “hear about you”. If they don’t, it will be rather difficult to cultivate new business.

The amount of attention you are attracting will affect your bottom-line. Get the word out! Put your company in the spotlight.
The ways to do this are unlimited with the internet these days. Her

e are a few ideas:

- Social Media
- Blogs
- Videos- Press Releases- Photos
- Events- Twitter
- Status Updates
- Comments
- Websites
- Bookmarking
- RSS Feeds
- Advertisements- Recommendations- Mobile Apps
- Communities
To the degree that you are failing to fully utilize the above, you are missing or losing business and hurting your bottom-line revenue.

Make a point to expand the attention you get week after week and watch your sales and revenue grow

http://richter10point2.com

Personal Contact

The value of personal contact in this day and age is incredibly high. So many businesses have automated processes and have lost touch with people, relationships and what clients, consumers and customers really want or need.

Yes – it’s a little time consuming to add a personal touch. I can’t tell you how many “out of the office” email replies I get, automated phone messages and thank you for contacting our company auto messages. It seems most businesses have lost sight of what PR, relationships and ultimately sales is all about – people and personal contact with those people

If you are looking to grab someone’s attention, take the time to find out a little about them and make your message personal. As an example, I went to San Francisco this past week and went to a small niche cupcake boutique called “Kara’s Cupcakes”, it is a fantastic cupcake shop and so I grabbed a business card. When I came home I made a point to send them a simple introduction message to introduce our agency to them and in the message the first line read something like this – “I spent the last week in San Francisco and stopped by your store in Ghiradelli Square, I loved your cupcakes and wanted to introduce our agency to you…..

Personal attention and contact gets’s noticed and stands out more than anything else. It also get’s a far better response!

This requires someone who understands PR and how to make relations with companies and people. PR and relationships are the powerful foundations that can dramatically improve your sales. Try this the next time you are prospecting another company or person and figure out how to add a level of personal touch to make your communication authentic.

-Robert Cornish

Find out what we do … http://richter10point2.com

A Simple Guide to Social Media in Business

As you may have already figured out, I am a strong believer of social media in business. I use Twitter and Facebook and blogs every day in my job, and you can too. Here are a few tips and tools to getting yourself started in the social media world.

Social Media for Business Resources

http://courtspencer.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/twitter-is-time-well-spent-not-money-well-spent/ <– Twitter is time well spent, not money.

http://enovapr2.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/its-the-law-2-0/<–Web 2 .0, social media guide.

http://blog.neoco.com/2009/07/22/a-z-of-social-media-this-is-actually-pretty-good/ <– the A-Z of Social Media

http://jeffbullas.com/2009/07/22/5-steps-to-optimize-your-email-for-social-media/ <– 5 steps to Optimize your email with Social Media

http://www.richter10point2.com/buildyourown <– Build your own WebPR campaign!

http://www.whywebpr.com/alimagnano <– My Social Media Press Kit

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
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The Good Samaritan

I recently visited my hometown, Chicago, for a family wedding. While en route back to Tampa, I did the inexcusably, unbelievably silly thing of leaving my laptop on the plane.

Of course I had a sleepless night when I returned home and discovered that I didn’t have my laptop. Of course I called the Lost and Found departments of all three airports I had been to that day, only to discover they were all closed and I would need to call back in the morning.

The next morning I woke up dreading how I was going to tastefully inform my bosses that I wouldn’t be able to go into the office that day (no laptop = no work to do). After many internal debates, I decided to say it – plain and simple. My bosses were very understanding and wished me the best of luck on my laptop hunt.

However the stars aligned when I received a voicemail message at home from an American Airlines flight attendant named John Stewart letting me know that he had my laptop and would be keeping it safe until he heard from me. I immediately called him back and thanked him profusely! I asked what he wanted in return and he adamantly told me that he didn’t want anything, maybe just for me to something nice for someone else if the opportunity arose. I had my laptop shipped overnight, thanks to Mr. Stewart calling me when he had arrived to the UPS store to ask which shipping method I preferred. My computer arrived the next day and all was golden.

When all of the dust settled from this ordeal, I realized that there are a lot of WONDERFUL people out there in the world we live in. Despite the bad news we constantly hear about the failing economy, crime and terrorism, there is still much more good in people than bad.

I then asked myself, “What can I do to pay it forward?” Of course, I will be on the lookout next time I travel for stray laptops in need of their owners, but there is a bigger thing that I can offer: SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTISE. The company I work for, Richter10.2 Media Group, specializes in helping businesses expand using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. If your business could use some help getting up and running in this new day and age of Web technology, then we’re your people.

We have lots of free tools, articles, blogs and links on the subject that can help demystify social media and how you can use it to expand your business.

To learn more click here.

Julia Jaquillard

Richter10.2 Media Group

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Skittles tasting success with the latest Social Media experiment?

Skittles has relaunched their website so that it is essentially a Twitter search for the word “skittles”.

Visitors to Skittles.com are now directed to the Twitter search result for the term “skittles” and invited to navigate their way about Skittles’ social web presence by using the flash navigation menu that overlays the page. (Their homepage is now a Facebook page.)

We have experienced a lot of controversy on the Skittles new Social Media campaign. Some think that the “colors of the rainbow” have experienced an epic fail on launching this new campaign but as reported by Marketing Pilgrim in a recent post, the Skittles web site traffic experienced a “1332% increase in web visitors on March 3rd.” Pretty impressive considering only one day had passed since Skittles launched this social media experiment, which was quite a risk.

A consideration that I am hearing a lot is that, what about the ordinary people that aren’t as experienced with Social Media? And is Social Media really a way to represent a corporate website like Skittles?

Buying a piece of candy is an impulsive thing. You’re not buying a car or a house or something that you will need a lot of information on about the product and the price. Skittles is just a sweet, innocent and colorful candy, with a huge corporation. Do they really need an informative ad on their product? Not really. They are focusing on building their presence on the web, and Social Media has proved to be the way to do that. And are there really any regular web users who have never heard of social networking and the most common web apps?

I suspect not. So, after all, great work Skittles.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
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