Tag Archives: #PRfirms

January 5, 2012 · 10:44 pm

Glassdoor.com: Social Media Tool or PR Nightmare?

Learning to Live With Employee Opinion

Since its founding in 2007, Glassdoor.com has become an important research tool for job hunters, corporate recruiters, and anyone looking for unvarnished behind-the-scenes insight into what really goes on behind corporate doors. Although Vault.com – established more than a decade earlier – serves much the same purpose, Glassdoor.com represents a far greater online brand risk…largely because the website provides free access to remarks posted by real, bogus and often disgruntled employees, and because those negative postings are often found on Google page one searches involving the company under fire. For many of the 250,000 companies it currently covers, Glassdoor.com can be a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

Websites dedicated to employee dissatisfaction were social media pioneers; empowering workers to publicly call their manager a “5-Alarm Nut Job” without retribution, to gripe about low pay or a lousy lunchroom, and to warn others to look elsewhere for a job. The most notorious of these early sites included RateMyEmployer.com (currently on life support), F**kedCompany.com (which died in 2007) and JobVent.com, which was acquired by Glassdoor.com in 2009. The demise of this scruffy first generation of workplace gripe sites gave way to an even more powerful and credible second generation of professionally managed, sophisticated sites like Glassdoor.com, backed by private equity investment, and fueled by business models that ensure their long-term existence.

Here’s a survival guide for companies seeking to avoid, minimize or benefit from brand exposure that’s delivered on Glassdoor.com:

Address Root Causes – Companies that focus on employee satisfaction and provide internal channels for rank & file feedback have far fewer negative postings on Glassdoor.com. Effective workforce management, however, does not ensure a positive outcome on the site. For example, Texas-based Beryl Health (formerly Beryl Companies) is well-known for its employee-focused culture, and was a “Best Place to Work in Healthcare” according to Modern Healthcare magazine. Beryl’s former CEO Paul Spiegelman even wrote a popular book about the importance of employee motivation. But Beryl’s current Glassdoor.com rating is 2.5 (unsatisfactory) on a 5-scale, based on a few negative postings (of seven reviews in total) from its employees.

Work The System – To their credit, Glassdoor.com does have a protocol for screening out employee rants that violate their standards of legality and good taste. They also have a viable internal system for moderating comments that are flagged by another party as “Inappropriate.” As a last resort, if a posting is believed to be bogus, particularly harmful or libelous, a company can appeal directly to Glassdoor.com’s corporate General Counsel. There’s no need to be victimized. Companies should monitor employee comments on Glassdoor.com, and respond directly and aggressively when appropriate.

Purchase a Profile – For a fairly reasonable price, Glassdoor.com will provide an “Enhanced Employer Profile,” featuring a comprehensive description of your company. I don’t work for Glassdoor.com in any capacity, or receive compensation for promoting its products, but it’s a no-brainer to take advantage of an opportunity to provide credible, positive content that can offset misinformation, warts and shortcomings that others are sharing online.

Lobby for Support – It’s no secret that many companies “encourage” their happy employees to post positive comments on Glassdoor.com as a means to bolster their overall Company Rating. Unfortunately, some companies assign this role to their PR department, whose staff members pose as anonymous employees, pumping out false praise and motivating detractors to post additional rants. In some cases, it may be beneficial to lobby for employee support on Glassdoor.com by asking them to express their satisfaction with the company. However, this solicitation must be carefully planned and expressed in a genuine manner, or the potential for this effort to backfire, internally and online, is fairly high.

Embrace Criticism – When online detractors echo similar complaints, it usually means there’s some underlying truth to what they’re griping about. It also means that Glassdoor.com visitors will begin to believe them. Although it’s contrary to corporate instincts, the quickest way for a company to stop online rants is to fix the related problems, or to explain to employees why it won’t or can’t. Allowing Glassdoor.com to serve as a canary in the coal mine can avoid problems that may be more significant than brand reputation.

Glassdoor.com is an online reality that requires pro-active and consistent oversight by fiduciaries of the corporate brand. Understanding how to peacefully coexist and leverage this influential social media tool enables companies to minimize negative brand impressions, drive recruitment and demonstrate their institutional backbone to current employees.

3 Reasons to Avoid One-off Press Quotes

Your Media Strategy: Steak or Sizzle?

For reasons often directly related to justification of a PR firm’s monthly retainer, many corporate websites are littered with press clippings featuring one-off quotes from its executives. Although this popular genre of “Hey look at me, my name is in the news!” visibility can feed corporate egos, the exposure seldom moves the needle, in terms of tangible business outcomes. Here’s why:

The likelihood of target audiences seeing your quote is close to zero. Given the increasing volume of on- and off-line media noise, and because most people are surface readers, getting people to notice a quote buried in the fifth paragraph of a story is akin to getting on camera while sitting in the bleachers at the Super Bowl. More importantly, even if your quote does get noticed, it’s even more unlikely that readers will either remember it or act on it. In most reporting, quotes from sources simply support a premise the reporter is making; they’re not intended to make the sources look smart.
The marketing value of your media quote is absolutely zero. In media coverage that includes quoted sources, typically more than one source is featured, and those other sources often will be competitors. Having a competitor or two quoted in your media coverage will either kill or greatly reduce its merchandising value; meaning the piece cannot be leveraged as a sales tool. To address this issue, some companies extract or isolate their executives’ quotes to remove references to competitors, but this practice of “selective transparency” does not reflect well on the organization’s integrity.
Promoting one-off media quotes can devalue your company’s brand. Here’s an acid test: Do well-known, much quoted companies – McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, General Electric, SpencerStuart, for example – feature one-off media quotes on their websites? Or (God forbid), do they write press releases announcing that one of their executives was quoted in the media? A quick way to label your company as “bush league” is to base its media strategy around building and promoting an inventory of media exposure consisting of one-off quotes.

If your company is seeking to leverage media exposure to gain 3^rd party endorsements, and to establish bona fide thought leadership, one-off media quotes offer a highly inefficient way to accomplish those goals. More effective media placement strategies involve company profiles, interviews, bylined articles and OpEd pieces…the type of exposure that shines an exclusive and relevant light on a company’s intellectual capital, and that can be converted into powerful sales and marketing tools.

The challenge in pursuing a media strategy based on steak rather than sizzle is that the underlying content requires focus, thought and effort, and that the coverage is much more difficult to attain. Companies and their outside agencies must decide whether their media strategy will be based on short-term ego gratification, or on long-term, meaningful brand exposure. At many companies, that conversation never takes place.

Sales Tips from PR Legend Lee Levitt

Lee Levitt, sans fedora and shoulder bag

Lee Levitt, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 80, continues to be remembered as a PR practitioner who gave much to the profession; as someone who lived up to his characterization as an industry visionary.

Paging through Lee’s “Manual of PR Sales Strategy & Tactics,” the insights he offers are as relevant today as when he wrote them in 1992, and apply across all professional service disciplines, not just PR. Here are a few Levitt gems:

“What most managements want to buy today is the accomplishment of specific substantive corporate / institutional goals… So that is what you must sell. You cannot simply come in and enumerate the skills you have, the technical things you can do. You must explain how applying them will solve some substantive problem or take advantage of some substantive opportunity.”
“Telling people that you are going to counsel them can make you seem presumptuous and arrogant. No matter how diplomatically you put it, you seem to be saying that management is dumb and benighted, while you are smart and enlightened.”
“What prospects really want to hear about is themselves. They want you to tell them about themselves in exactly the same words they use… And they want you to want their business and be enthusiastic about it.”
“Never criticize what the prospect has done in the past. Let the prospect tell you what went wrong and whose fault it was… If asked if you could have done better, say you hope so.”
“Most salespeople believe it is their job to talk, and up to a certain point that is true. But once the prospect is primed to talk, it is your job to shut up and listen. Some salespeople never learn this.”

If you can find a copy of Lee’s book, buy it and read it. If you have a copy on your bookshelf, pull it out and re-read it. But don’t ask to borrow my copy, because it’s not going anywhere.

Lee Levitt embodied craftsmanship in public relations, and left a lifetime of wisdom for those who follow in his footsteps.

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August 31, 2011 · 11:27 am

Death by Content: How Press Release Abuse Killed Public Relations

Self-serving Press Release Content Has Killed PR

The origins of the press release are unclear, but in the not too distant past, this communication tool was called a “News Release.” And its sole purpose was to provide the press with information likely to be of interest to the public; containing what journalists still call “news value.”

Prior to popularization of fax machines in the 1980s, news releases were delivered by human messengers to major wire services such as AP, UPI and Dow Jones, which in turn communicated that news to their subscribing media outlets over a broadtape machine – much like a financial ticker tape, but using a much wider roll of paper. For non-daily news sources such as magazines, news releases were often sent through the US Mail. Regardless of how they were delivered, news releases served an important role in mass communication.

But the news release has lost its franchise as a communication tool, for two reasons:

Thanks to technology, news releases became an anachronism. Online news portals and email killed the underlying functionality of paper releases as a news dissemination tool. The internet delivered news faster, and this was a good thing.
Thanks to the PR profession, news releases (aptly re-named press releases) became platforms to deliver content with little or no news value, and largely of no practical value or interest to the press. Flacks began using the press release as a marketing and propaganda tool, and this was a bad thing.

Over the past two decades, the sustained volume of press release abuse by PR practitioners – driven in large measure by CEOs (and clients) who fail to understand that journalists are not ad hoc members of their company’s Communications Department – has greatly diminished the stature of the public relations profession in the eyes of journalists, and has also reduced the ability of PR pros to leverage the media as a valuable means of securing objective, third-party exposure and validation for their company, product or cause.

As the number of journalists who post “Do not send press releases or pitch story ideas to me” on their Cision or Vocus profiles increases every year, the PR profession will eventually lose one of its most fundamental roles: to discover or create content that has bona fide news value, and to properly package and present that information to media sources.

If journalists find no practical need for flacks, organizations will likely follow their lead. For public companies, dissemination of financial results and material events will be handled by their legal department. Because press releases are now considered sales collateral by their target audiences, “media relations” for all companies will be managed by the marketing department. Public Relations, as a profession and a function, will simply cease to exist.

Twitter, blogs and other social media-based “pull” tools may eventually replace the press release. But unlike social media, press releases have been pushed at journalists, filling their inboxes, wasting their time, and reinforcing the media’s perception of PR as a self-serving and often ignorant generator of meaningless noise.

It may be too late to repair the self-inflicted damage done to the PR profession by years of press release abuse. Morphing from a Public Relations professional into a Social Media professional may buy some additional career tenure for young communications practitioners, and hopefully they’ll learn from the lessons of PR’s suicide: that whether it’s tweeted, posted or contained in a press release, news and information lacking intrinsic value will always reflect poorly on its source. And over time, it will make you irrelevant.

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April 30, 2011 · 11:29 pm

The PR Industry’s Dirty Little Secret

If you’re looking to hire a PR firm, and they suggest their deep relationships with journalists will be of benefit to you, that’s when you should show them the door.

Regardless of the size of their Rolodex, seasoned PR practitioners do not use those media contacts to sell their services. They know those long-term professional relationships are more important to them than the short-term needs of any client. They understand that success in media placement is based on what they know, not on who they know.

And “what they know” is how reporters think, and what they need. This insight enables PR pros to ferret out appropriate news and ideas. To package that information so that it’s not self-serving. To present story ideas in an appealing manner. To push back or disagree with reporters and editors when it’s called for. And to NEVER pitch a reporter solely based on their relationship with them.

Conversely, seasoned journalists do not cover news or accept story ideas from flacks simply because they’ve shared a few beers or worked with them previously. A reporter’s reputation is too important to compromise by covering items that don’t meet their editorial standards or address the interests of their readers or viewers. On a personal level, journalists also don’t appreciate the implication that they can be influenced by someone with an agenda.

PR firms that leverage media relationships to pitch substandard content are playing a losing game. Companies led to believe they’ll gain from their PR firm’s media contacts are simply being played.