Having an unhelpful media section on your website tells your prospects that you are small-fry, and reduces the media’s goodwill towards your company.  Fixing it is easy.

So, here is a quick guide to what we consider to be best practice in creating a clean, useful and attractive section.

1. Separate sections for press releases and articles

When perusing your website, it gets frustrating if it is not clear which links are for press releases and which are for third-party articles about you.  Put yourself in the shoes of a journalist.  They are looking for the news you have announced, the press releases.  Any time they have to wade through, trying to work out what are write-ups and what are press releases is a frustration, getting them closer and closer to contacting your competitors.

2. Do a good “In the media” section

The impression that you want to convey here is “wow, these guys get a lot of press”.  Load up this section with the articles featuring you and your spokespeople.

Make it neat.  If you are using the logos of the publications, make it look good or don’t bother at all.  You know what I’m talking about.  The stretched logo.  The so-low-res-that-it-looks-pixellated-logo.  Also, go for quality.  If you load up automated press release pick-ups from TMCnet, for example, you start to look desperate.  Real editorial articles only.

3. Include a real media contact

When media peruse your website, they want to quickly find information about you and they want a real person to contact if they need something extra.  Give the journalist what they need – a clearly defined contact, on its own page or clearly labelled on a sidebar.

Do not give them a pr@company.com or press@company.com email address.  It gives very little assurance that anyone will actually answer their email.  It has to be a real person.

If a journalist wants to find sources for an article, they are unlikely to send their time-critical (they are always time-critical) request in the vague hope of getting an answer in time.

And although there are good reasons for tracking inquiries using a contact form, give the media a break – do not use a contact form here.  Real person, please.  With email and phone number.

4. Separate section for events

Unclutter.  Keep your events section separate.  There’s not too much to say here.  The main thing you need to do is to ensure that you have highlighted some way that a prospect or journalist can use to meet you at the show.

5. Give them some logos at least

Make life easier for the media and for yourselves by laying out your logo(s), some lo-res for web and hi-res for print.  It’s not difficult.  Then if you are feeling kind, give them downloadable headshots of your spokespeople and any other imagery journalists could use to supplement a story about you.  And no, including your logos on your website does not mean that people are going to be using your logo for nefarious reasons as they can already do that now with a simple right-click and copy on your homepage…

My view on tweeting, like talking, is that you tweet when you have something useful to say.  So what is “something useful”?  Well, that depends upon the audience you are trying to reach.

A pretty safe assumption is that you are trying to reach potential customers, partners or investors (or the people that can influence them, like media and analysts).  Something useful to them means giving them something that will help them do their job, while putting you in a good light.

For the sake of this blog post, I am going to ignore the “having a chat” aspect of twitter, which is less about content and more like a public SMS.  For instance: “@Someone’s_name Hey, haven’t seen you in ages.  Want to grab a coffee?”

With this in mind, here is my hierarchy of the best content to tweet:

1. Links to your thought-leadership content:  The numero uno reason to tweet in a b2b setting.  Show your ecosystem of potential customers and partners that you have something new and interesting to say, that you have some intelligence and insight that they need.  The content can be a blog post, a whitepaper, a case study, a bylined article.

2. Events and webinars:  All your twitter followers have opted in to receive information from you, so you should absolutely work the list and let them know what shows you are going to attend and how they can reach you, give them details about your webinars and show off that your execs are speaking at top events.

3. News about you: Again, you have an opt-in list here, so you have to assume that they want to hear about what is happening to you as a company.  Tell them your good news, your big wins, your awards.  And make sure you include the link to the press release or article.

4. Re-tweets of positive mentions of you: I don’t believe in re-tweeting for the sake of it (at least not while you are working on the company’s dime), but positive mentions of you from other tweeters are absolutely worth doing.  It shows third-party endorsement and gives a polite nod to the endorser.

5. Re-tweets of relevant industry news and opinion: Re-tweeting is fine, so long as the content you’re linking to is interesting and useful to your audience.  But don’t prioritize promoting someone else’s content over and above your own.

You need one because potential customers are visiting your site and leaving because there is little useful to them beyond product information and platitudes about innovation.  You need one because your rivals are creating useful, educational content, which is helping them to be found and helping them to convert new business.

When a company hires an outside firm, they do so because that firm has expertise that they do not already possess.  However, whether you have the expertise that company needs or not, you will be instantly dismissed if the company cannot see evidence of your expertise, right there on your website.  That is why you need regular, interesting new information.  You need thought-leadership content and you need a plan so you keep on track to deliver it regularly.

Matching your content needs to the buying cycle

To make your content meaningful, you need to think things through from the perspective of the buyer, not the seller.  That means working out the issues faced by the different people involved in the buying cycle at the different stages of the cycle.  In a business buying cycle, there are typically six stages.  They are: identifying the problem, defining the criteria of the solution, search, evaluation, selection then procurement.

Overlay the different job roles involved in the buying cycle and you have an accurate picture of the buying cycle in your business.  When you can see it in black and white you can understand the different types of content that you need at different stages.

Some people at the start of the cycle maybe need some persuasion that the issue needs to be addressed.  Or they need to be shocked out of complacency.  Or they might need an ABC of the stages involved in addressing their issue.  Later in the cycle, people need more third-party reassurance in the form of case studies, testimonials, analyst reports etc.

Brainstorming the content

In my experience, some of the best content ideas come from the product manager/director level.  They are typically very close to the strengths and weaknesses of the product and the challenges faced by customers.

In the best case scenario, you schedule time with the product managers and listen to all the great ideas they have been dying to share with someone.  In the worse case scenario, you prepare a guided brainstorm where you probe them on everything.  The neatest way of doing that is by presenting the buying cycle to them and asking them what problems each individual faces at each stage in the buying cycle.

Developing and scheduling the content

Ideas, like seedlings, need the right support to help them grow.  When you have an idea, start writing it down, so you have at least a paragraph of content that can be expanded upon later.  Just like you would see with the first paragraph of a feature article in a trade magazine, introduce the challenge, some of its facets and hint at the solution.

Gather those paragraphs of ideas and plan out what you are going to do with them.  Maybe it is as simple as translating each idea into a blog post once a week for the next eight weeks.  Or maybe four become blog posts, two become bylined articles to place in trade mags and one becomes a whitepaper.  You’ll know what you can do based on your own (or your agency’s) bandwidth.

Keeping the content fresh

Your content plan is unlikely to be a long-term plan.  Products, companies and the market never stands still, so plan by quarter and you have enough structure without tying you in to ideas which external circumstances may make old.  Plan to refresh every quarter and you can ensure you have fresh ideas which are constantly in tune with your changing market.

On a final note, just do it.

When you have fixed this, you will be amazed at just how much simpler the PR and marketing program becomes.  No wonder content planning is one of the fundamentals of our “three Cs” approach which marries competitive positioning, content planning and channel planning.  When all of these are in place and acted upon, the marketing machine becomes a thing of beauty.

If there is no budget assigned to media measurement (because more than likely there is very little understanding or sympathy at the top that it’s a real thing you have to spend time and money on), it doesn’t stop executives wanting to understand the impact of their PR spend.  As the massive impact that PR can have is usually undervalued at tech companies, frankly, it is in the best interests of every internal PR and marketing practitioner to provide solid data to keep their executive team happy and their jobs and budgets secure.

So here is how it can be done with just a humble Excel spreadsheet, 30 minutes of your life each month and zero external costs.

The theory

In PR, it can be quite difficult to get to the reality of how successful media relations has been.  Too often, PR activity is judged upon less-than-scientific means, like the gut-feel of senior execs, what a salesperson said to a VP and whether the CEO reckons that there is a  constant stream of articles about a competitor that they think has a worse product.

It is certainly true that a PR campaign should not be judged in isolation. To create a bubble around your PR efforts, discounting the noise created by your competitors does not make sense in any competitive market.  If you are receiving one good article in a month, while your rivals receive ten good articles, then it is hard to argue that you are doing well.

So, in summary, it is important to benchmark your company’s profile in the media versus your competitors.  For competitive measurement, the share of voice is the most basic and meaningful statistic to showcase your media relations success.  It shows how often people are likely to read about you versus your competitors.  However, most companies are not interested in “people”.  What they are interested in are their target audience.  So, assuming you are marketing to service providers, you are interested in the service provider share of voice.  Here’s how to do it in a very simple, low-fi way.

The preparation

First of all, decide on the target audience and geography that you are tracking.  Assuming it is the service provider community in North America, for example, work out the service provider reach of the top publications.

Taking Light Reading with its 300,000 unique visitors to its website each month, its 22% service provider readership and its 59% North American readership, you have a simple calculation to reach Light Reading’s NA monthly service provider reach of 38,940 (300,000 x 0.22 x 0.59).

Do that for each of the top publications.  Note that collecting the raw data can be very time-consuming as not everyone has a media pack and not everyone even puts that information out in the media pack.  If you want a shortcut, email me and if I like you, I can provide that information to you directly

Lay that information out in a spreadsheet with the first column with the top eight or so publications with the greatest service provider reach.  I say eight because in every region, below that point, the reach gets pretty thin.

In your next column, put in the service provider reach of each publication.  In the subsequent columns put in your company name and your competitors’ names.

Then create a formula at the bottom of each company’s column to show the number of opportunities that a service provider had the opportunity to read about you (the service provider opportunities-to-see), like this:

=SUM((C2*B2)+(C3*B3)+(C4*B4)+(C5*B5)+(C6*B6)+(C7*B7)+(C8*B8)+(C9*B9))

So your effort should look something like this:

The grunt work

Then start searching for how many genuine, editorial write-ups you and your competitor received in a given month.  I think it would be cheating, not to mention a little dangerous to include non-editorial press release pick-ups.  It is one of the ways you could paint a target on your back, should an exec want to look at the data behind the numbers.

I estimate that it takes around 30 minutes to compile the number of articles for you and four competitors for a single region.  Add another 30 minutes for each additional region you are tracking.  For future reference it is probably smart to copy and paste links to all articles at the bottom of the sheet.

The presentation

This is where you see the fruits of your labor.  When you have the raw data, you can create a number of very solid, meaningful representations of your PR efforts.  Such as:

Share of voice per region is extremely compelling.  Five regions alongside each other (North America, Europe, MEA, APAC & CALA) looks impressive and will have taken just 2.5 hours to organize.

Taking the information in a slightly different way, you can simply add the number of articles generated by each company in each region and aggregate them to show this information.

I am distrustful of any “black box” algorithm when it comes to measurement of success or influence in marketing. I think I share this trait with the majority of mobile and telecom vendor execs who will be quick to dismiss something that does not explain their working-out.

That is why something as straightforward as “the number of times service provider employees had the chance to read about [your company]” is inherently meaningful.  And for 30 minutes work per month (plus set-up time) it has to be worth a shot.

One final thing I will note is that this is just the start of the journey, a place to get on the ladder.  Beyond this comes measurement of the financial impact, putting PR & marketing it in its truest light – an investment in future revenue.

Unfortunately when it is done that way, the whole process can be very blinkered, meaning the perceptions of their prospects are undervalued and the strengths of their competitors are ignored.

Positioning starts, and always did start, in the minds of your prospects. If you’re looking elsewhere, you’re digging in the wrong place.

“Positioning” was introduced to the world by two gentlemen, Al Ries & Jack Trout in 1969.  They followed up their first paper with a three-part series of articles in Advertising Age, before publishing their seminal book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” in 1981.  Since then, the word has firmly entered business life, even if many people are a little hazy about its meaning.

The premise was that in order to thrive in these over-communicated times, companies needed to carve out a unique position in their prospects’ minds to be remembered and understood.  Now, if that was the case as early as 1969, it is infinitely more true in today’s uber-communicated world.

Positioning is an exercise which requires structure, as well as a little creative, military thinking.  It is the art and science of becoming known and recognised for being something but not everything, rather the default position of being nothing in particular (while keeping your options open).

Here’s how to get started.

1. Mapping the terrain

Working out what battlefield you’re on is not as straightforward as it may seem.  You may like to think that your terrain is “intelligent broadband traffic management solutions”, but chances are, service providers will call it “policy” or “traffic management”.  Find out what the real pigeonholes or mental “buckets” are, and you have started the exercise.

Google search can provide good clues as can Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights, as well as the various LinkedIn Groups for service providers and the top telco and wireless media.

2. Assessing yours and your enemies’ strengths

What position do you currently hold in service providers’ minds?  And what about your competitors?

If you have the budget (and C-level sponsorship), then you can go ahead and commission a research project to determine and map the real associations that service providers have about you and your competitors.  But beware of framing the exercise in prescriptive marketing-speak.  For example, don’t waste your time measuring how “agile”, “cutting-edge” or “industry-leading” people think you are.  Real people don’t talk like that.  Find out what technologies they associate you with and what attributes and expertise they volunteer about you.

For those that don’t have the luxury of being able to commission a full research project, again, Google can take you a lot of the way there.  Google search results are about the closest thing we have to a map of the human collective consciousness.  Using the right search parameters you can see how much your company is mentioned alongside a particular technology or category, and compare that to your rivals.  When you lay yours and your competitors’ data side by side within a particular category, you have a strong proxy for how the market sees your place within that category.

As part of this section, if you have the tools, also map out the comparative size of your sales and marketing teams with those of your competitors. When the data is laid out in front of you, it is very clear where you fit in the food chain for a particular market.

3. Determining your best plan of attack

The best strategy for your company varies dramatically depending upon your position in the food chain.

Being the clear leader in a particular sector (and not just being “a leading company” like hundreds of boilerplates claim) brings massive benefits.  The leader position is safer and the revenues are stronger.  The optimal leader strategy is to fortify against competitors, use your scale to innovate and constantly improve on your own products, so you will be the only ones making your products obsolete.  Then keep spending more on marketing than anyone else.  For inspiration, look to Gillette which only ever compare its products to their own past products or Google, who do everything to build an unassailable moat around their advertising business.

But what if you’re number five or number six in an industry?  It is not always an option to do a Jack Welch and drop every sector where you are not number one or two.  If you’re genuinely number five or six in a category (and not actually part of a sub-category like emerging markets specialists), then you’re probably losing money and getting weaker all the time.  Go more niche.  Make something smaller.  Target a different geographic market.  Use a different distribution method.  Make it cheaper… or more premium.  If you’re going head-to-head with the 800-pound gorilla in your market on their own terms, you’re going to get squashed.

The good news is that by being different, the company becomes orders of magnitudes more memorable and your telecom PR and mobile PR efforts can suddenly break through with greater clarity.

When a service provider peruses your blog, do they find genuinely educational content or just poorly-disguised sales pitches and information about why you’re great?

If it’s the latter, it’s time for a wake-up call – your blog is failing on two counts.  It is not pulling new prospects in and it is not converting browsers to followers.  The humble blog is all too often a mis-used tool in the mobile PR and telecom PR armoury.

Today, the “sales cycle” is being replaced by the “buying cycle”.  Buyers reveal themselves much later in the process, having undertaken research to find answers and educational content to guide them.  If your blog is all about you and not all about your customers and their pain points, you’re mis-interpreting the blogging opportunity.

Blogging gives you the opportunity of being an expert content publisher, which brings two  major benefits.

Firstly, because service providers are constantly Googling niche questions about technology and business processes – your blog posts can attract the perfect target audience of service providers who have the exact problems you can solve.  Google typically treats blog posts extremely well and allows the expert content publisher to be found easily, pulling in a “long tail” of self-selecting prospects.

Secondly, while it occurs to every vendor to service providers to put details about their products on the website, it does not occur to everyone to make their blog content on the website so damned useful that you’ll be bookmarked and actively followed from now onwards.

Thankfully, you can easily re-direct your efforts to make your blog vastly more useful to the business.  There are two simple ways to re-direct your efforts and create a blog content plan that will attract (and retain interest from) a self-selecting audience of hungry prospects.

1. Ask the sales team what the top ten questions that they get asked are.  That is the quickest way to discern what your slice of the service provider market is concerned or confused about.  These ten questions can be the stimulus for ten great blog posts addressing exactly what your market cares most about and needs to learn more about.  Don’t worry that if you answer those questions publicly, then the salespeople won’t be contacted any more.  The exact opposite will happen.

2. Also ask yourself what ten things your company does better than anyone else.  What technology do you understand better than anyone else?  What markets do you understand better than anyone else?  What business processes and best-practices do you know better than anyone else?  These areas can be the inspiration for ten detailed, educational blog posts, which single you out as the expert resource.

Educational blog posts do not necessarily take any time to write than sales-y or boastful blog posts, but can be many times more useful.  Following the simple two-step process can deliver you a very respectable 20 posts a year, more than enough to start to dominate the expert content in your market.

One of the most frequent questions we get from clients and prospects is what to do about social media.  In the b2b world, there is still a lot of confusion about which social networks to prioritize and where the ROI of social media activity is hiding out.

In our world, many vendors to mobile operators and service providers “have a presence” but don’t quite know what to do beyond that.  Here’s a quick snapshot about the value of social media marketing, but for now, I wanted to get started with the first of a series of posts which point out very simply where the value lies, and what you should be doing with each social network.

I’m kicking off with LinkedIn, because this is the social media platform that has the most immediate value when aiming to reach service providers.

LinkedIn’s strength is the ability to find people, whether it’s for sales or for recruitment. That’s why Light Reading’s survey of people in the communications industry showed that LinkedIn is by far the most useful social network for helping them do their job, way ahead of Twitter and Facebook.

Just because the communications industry finds it useful to do their job, it doesn’t necessarily follow that LinkedIn is a good platform for marketing to service providers.  However, when you realize that through LinkedIn you can reach the 1180 listed employees of Orange Romania, for instance, you can start to see some of the potential.

To get going, here are four things that every vendor should be doing:

Sharpen up your company profile page.  LinkedIn typically creates a company profile page without any input from the company’s employees, so it may even come as a surprise that it is there at all.  It’s a blank slate for you to write your company profile and upload information about your products and services for any curious service provider to peruse.  Any employee of that company should be able to make changes to your company information.  Think of it this way, if your website is your company’s home on the Internet, your LinkedIn profile is your second home.

Technical difficulty: low

Time requirement: low

Respond to questions in LinkedIn Groups.  Businesspeople, service providers included, are turning to the thousands of LinkedIn Groups to find answers to their questions.  There are a lot of groups set up for service providers.  They need information and vendors often have the right expertise to help them out.  There is great scope for carving out thought-leadership through intelligent responses.  From your company, in my opinion, this is an activity best owned by product marketing managers or technically-minded sales people.  That is, people who have enough technical knowledge to know enough to help, but who also have a vested interest in impressing prospects.  Like with any knowledge-based forum, coming across as too sales-y turns prospects off quicker than you can say “lost opportunity”.  Subtlety required.

Technical difficulty: low

Time requirement: high

Try out LinkedIn Ads.  For a b2b audience where you have a niche audience (say, messaging portfolio managers at North American wireless carriers), LinkedIn Ads are scarily good.  You can specify the exact companies and the exact job titles within those companies that you want to reach.  If you haven’t actually checked out LinkedIn Ads yet, just hover over the “Home” link and in the drop-down menu, select “Advertise on LinkedIn”, put in some dummy data on the first page and prepare for your mind to be blown by how detailed, granular and big-brothery the targeting can be.

Technical difficulty: medium

Time requirement: medium

Add your blog feed to your LinkedIn company profile.  This means every time you have a new blog post, the people that choose to follow updates from your company will be able to see it on their LinkedIn homepage.  You can also set up Twitter updates in the same way, but that’s not always wise, as it can start to get a little spammy.  Expect your company’s updates to be “hidden” from view if there’s too much coming from your company.

Technical difficulty: medium

Time requirement: low

Marching ahead, head held high, thinking that if they can just get the next PR or advertising campaign out the door then maybe, just maybe, that damnable 800-pound gorilla would just go away and stop winning all the business.

There’s a reason the 800-pound gorilla is going to win most of the time.  His sales force is 200 times larger than yours, he has a marketing budget larger than the GDP of Algeria and he’s the equivalent of a household name in the service provider industry.

BUT, dynamics in a market can and do change through the actions of one company.  The point is that they don’t change through force of will or from failing to address the presence of your larger simian friend.

Think judo.  Use your competitors own strength against them.  Do your large competitor’s procedure-led approach have a downside of inflexibility or slowness?  If so, how can you use that?  Do they have a reputation for sending an overwhelming army of engineers?  How could you use that?  What about the areas that your competitor isn’t addressing because he’s too big?  How could you use that?  Does their strength in one technology mean you could establish yourself as the solution for a different technology?

You get the point.  In a straight fight, the 800-pound gorilla will squash smaller competitors.  You won’t win by ignoring the 800-pound gorilla.  You can win however by taking stock of its strengths and weaknesses and positioning yourself as the alternative choice to them – and not just a copycat, tiny version of them.  Being different can become your story, allowing your telecom PR and mobile PR efforts to become orders of magnitude more effective.

So with that said, let’s explore why the title is true, with a typical example.  You are a French start-up, you have an amazing new technology and you want to sell it to mobile operators, starting with Europe.  The problem is that your company has virtually zero visibility among the service provider community.  So, the phone is not ringing and your lack of credibility is making every potential sale difficult.  You make the leap that you need to increase your profile through PR.  You know a friend of a friend who does PR so you talk to them, find out how much it costs and decide to give it a try for a few months.

So, what’s wrong with this picture?  Everything.  Even assuming you’re ready for PR, the PR agency’s value is their expertise and their proven ability to increase your visibility in your market, not how close they are to your office.

Seven out of the top eight publications with the greatest service provider reach in Europe are based out of the UK. They are pan-European and English-speaking.

Maybe your local agency knows this fact already and knows the editors well.  Probably not.

Maybe your local agency speaks perfect English like the editors they should be communicating with.  Probably not.

Maybe your local agency has deep experience of the service provider market.  Probably not.

So, more than likely, your local agency doesn’t have the right experience, is based in the wrong country and is speaking the wrong language.  It is little wonder that I hear the same phrase over and over again, through the years: “We’ve been using a local agency for a few months, but I’m not sure it’s working out so well.”

If you have a rare heart condition, you don’t ask your local General Practitioner to operate.  That will get you killed.  You find the specialist and you get the benefit of their years of expertise.  The same principle applies to finding the right agency.  You don’t go where you just happen to already know someone who “does PR”, you go where the expertise is.