Take a look quickly at Google Analytics for Bing’s share of our search on an average day in June:

That’s not all that spectacular, is it? Only 2.69% of our search traffic is from Bing, while Google has the lion’s share at 95.17% of search traffic. Bing doesn’t matter, right? Not so fast. Bing powers the search results for Facebook. I wanted to see how Bing search interacted with Facebook, so I went and did a search for SHIFT:

There we are, search results powered by Bing. It would be logical to conclude that if I clicked on this search result, it would show up in Google Analytics as a Bing search result. Logical, but it turns out that conclusion is wrong. I fired up Google Analytics Real-Time and clicked on the Bing search result, and here’s what it was recorded as:

Facebook’s web searches via Bing come across as social referrals, not search results.

If you look at the source code for Facebook’s search results, they’re wrapped up in the same link shortener that every Facebook link is wrapped in, making Bing search results indistinguishable from other shared links on Facebook and making them invisible in your analytics. You don’t know how many visits from Facebook are actually searches.

What does this mean for you? At the very least, you need to pay attention to the basics of optimizing your website not just for Google, but for Bing as well. Facebook’s search results are powered by it, Apple’s results will be powered in part by it, and chances are other services will be as well. Make sure you’re registered for their version of Webmaster Tools, get your site verified, and do all of the basic things needed to make sure that you show up reasonably well in their search results. Google isn’t the only game in town, especially in the iOS and Facebook worlds. If you’re adding focus to your PR and marketing efforts in mobile and social, you need to add focus to Bing.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

Disclosure: Microsoft’s Bing search engine is a past client of SHIFT. SHIFT was not compensated to write this post, however.

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First, if you want members of the press (including new media press like bloggers and social media influencers) to participate, be sure to contact them in advance and add them to a circle on your Google+ account so that they can participate in the Hangout.

Next, you’ll want to set a date and time for the event, then create an event invitation for it:

To broadcast to the world, be sure to create an appropriate landing page on your website that contains a YouTube placeholder for the event’s video feed. If you want to make it registered-guest only, consider using a registration form or password protection on the page:

On the day of the event, you’ll want to switch out the video placeholder with the embed code from the Hangout on Air.

Finally, you’ll want to host the press conference someplace appropriate. If you plan to do a series of them, or you plan to do webinars and other events with Google+ Hangouts as more than just a one-time event, consider purchasing an inexpensive Chromebox and hooking it up to your conference room TV. (the SHIFT one is Velcro-taped to the back of the TV)

This gives you full Google+ Hangouts capabilities in a dedicated machine at reasonably low cost.

No matter what, you’ll want to follow some basic guidelines for Google+ Hangouts.

1. Good sound. As David Tames from Kino-Eye.com says, great video begins with great audio. People will watch a fuzzy TV that they can hear, but they lose interest quickly in a TV with no sound.

Get a decent headset or microphone setup to do Hangouts with. It doesn’t have to be high-end professional gear – just something that puts a microphone relatively close to the mouths of the people speaking. Bad choices would be the microphones built into laptops, webcams, and mobile devices. Good choices would be lavalier microphones, USB desktop microphones, and USB headset microphones.

2. Good lighting. Being well lit is an essential part of Google+ Hangouts (and all video). You don’t need to spend a fortune to be well-lit! At a minimum, you need two lights in front of you. One should be a close light source in front of you, like a nice desk lamp. The second should be a filler light source, like a floor torch lamp, to your side. Ideally, you’d have a three-point lighting system, with a close light to the front, a medium light to the side, and a distant light behind.

Google+ video isn’t super high definition, so you don’t need to go overboard – visit the home furnishings section of the local big box retail store and pick up a couple of inexpensive lamps to get the job done.

3. Ethernet/wired Internet connection. The one thing Google+ Hangouts are hungry for is Internet bandwidth. You need a high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet connection, which automatically rules out any kind of wireless Internet access. Plug an Ethernet cable straight into your router or modem for the best results, or if you’re working in an office space, get to the router with as few connections in between as possible (ask your IT folks).

What’s the difference? Without getting too technical, imagine a highway. It has a number of lanes and a speed limit. Your Internet connection’s bandwidth is equal to the number of lanes on your information highway. All other things being equal, more lanes are better. Your Internet connection also has latency, or how fast the data flows. A 10 lane highway clogged at rush hour can be slower than a local road that has no traffic. Likewise, a big bandwidth Internet connection can still be slow – and that’s the biggest problem with wireless Internet connections. Lots of lanes, but very slow!

4. A script, show notes, or outline. Unlike conventional videos, Google+ Hangouts are much more like webinars and real world press conferences. They’re fully live videos, so having a script, show notes, or at least an outline of what you want to have happen is super important to avoid confusion and appearing unprofessional. If you’ve got co-hosts, work out some signals and methods for communicating whose turn it is to speak so that there’s a minimum of dead air time. Consider a Google+ Hangout to be identical to a live TV talk show and you’ll get an idea of the level of preparation you should have to make it a success.

Let us know if you try out a Google+ Hangout for your next press event!

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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For example, AirBnB disrupts existing hotel chains by allowing consumers to connect with each other for lodging. Uber disrupts the existing taxi economy and Lyft even more so. 3D printing disrupts existing manufacturing processes and companies by allowing consumers to share real world printing patterns with each other. Breather disrupts traditional executive suite businesses by letting people share private working spaces on demand.

In the Altimeter white paper (which I encourage you to peruse), one of the models for businesses to adapt is to lend the name and trust of an existing brand to a collaborative company. For example, if Marriott wanted to pivot, they could offer “Certified Marriott Providers” on AirBnB: homeowners who engage Marriott to inspect their AirBnB room, provide cleaning services, and promote the room on AirBnB for either a fee or a portion of the revenue. Marriott could disengage its brand from just being brick and mortar hotels to being a provider of hotel services to any AirBnB supplier.

In a world where there are a million little businesses, a million entrepreneurs, a million providers of services that traditionally a few companies used to provide, what’s the role of public relations? In a world where consumers are supplying each other and circumventing traditional businesses, is there even a role for public relations? The answer is: of course. The central reason why public relations and marketing communications as a field will never go away is because every business needs three fundamental communications drivers:

Awareness: are consumers aware of the product? Imagine wanting to keep a bed filled on AirBnB. In Boston alone, there were 1,527 open spaces just now.

That’s 1,527 different “hotels” all competing for fellow consumers’ business. You’ll need to do marketing and PR just to make people aware that your space exists.

Engagement: are consumers engaged with you? Suppose you’re a Lyft driver or an Uber driver. Right now the only feedback mechanism is a star-based rating system. Suppose you wanted to let more people know you were available as a Lyft provider? Perhaps you’d go the extra step of marketing yourself outside of the Lyft app itself, taking reservations. Only with effective marketing and PR could you make something like that work.

Trust: This is the big one in the collaborative economy. With a million businesses vying for your attention, how do you know who to trust? For existing known brands like Marriott, how can you leverage the trust in your name in the collaborative economy? Marketing and PR are instrumental in helping to build credibility and trust in brands, old and new, to help consumers choose to purchase from you rather than one of the many other near-anonymous providers.

Finally, the one area where public relations will be absolutely essential in the collaborative economy is in crisis communications, especially when brands begin to license out their name to independent providers. Franchises already grapple with these thorny PR situations, such as when fast food employees make embarrassing YouTube videos at work. Take that effect and multiply it a million-fold, and public relations crisis communications will become more essential than ever.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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I’m an Android user, something that I actually think is decently well known among any of my SHIFT colleagues who watch my reaction when someone emails in search of an iPhone 5 charger. While there are many, many things about Android that we usually get first (*cough* copy-paste *cough*), sometimes we get left out in the cold when it comes to applications. I’ll admit defeat long enough to note that the Apple developer process is better suited to innovators and in encouraging some sleeker offerings, and it’s no surprise that apps like Instagram and Vine were iOS first-and-only for awhile.

I remember the day that Instagram finally showed up in the Google Play Store (Android Market) – it was April 2012, all of a week before Facebook bought the app and people behind it. Now, I had only had the app for a few days, but I still was completely amazed by an entire ecosystem of a social network that I didn’t know existed. Instagram wasn’t just an photo filter to post Toaster-fied images to Twitter and Facebook; it was a world of its own, one that I had no idea existed. It was one that was well connected, too, through Throwback Thursdays and GPOW, combining some of those anonymous interactions from Tumblr within its own network.

Facebook wasn’t buying photo filters for $1 billion back in 2012. It was after that social interaction around photos, which was not only connecting people with their friends but also people they didn’t know because of linked conversations. This was defense, because Facebook knows its marketing bread is buttered by user interaction with photos – that’s where engagement levels are the highest and that’s where an absurd amount of content is generated in its network – and if people were getting that photo fill elsewhere, a big market share could disappear.

That’s where we can finally find the business reason behind Facebook’s move to bring hashtags to its network. If content is being generated and connected, and that is driving this separate social network that Facebook bought for not-a-small-amount-of-money, it is in Facebook’s best interest to bring those highly engaged users into its news feed. The news feed is where Facebook users spend most of their time and in which marketers end up spending the most for those litany of sponsored post options. Combine it all together, and Facebook stands a chance to make the most of their investment in Instagram count.

If you want to get all Da Vinci Code on it, Facebook didn’t exactly hide the Instagram-influenced decision. Even in the language of its own release on the forthcoming hashtags, Facebook listed Instagram first – ahead of Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest. I also think that NBA Finals example it used looks a little bit like it’s been run through a filter, but now I’m reading too far into it.

There are no indications that marketers will be getting access to run content at a cost against these new hashtags, but you don’t need marketers to sponsor hashtags. You just need to keep that News Feed engagement strong so that the Facebook user is more likely to be in front of the most lucrative ad space. That’s the bottom line on Facebook hashtags.

Dave Levy
Senior Account Manager

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Continuing our discussion of social influence and how ideas spread, today we look at Dynamic Social Impact Theory (DSIT), a followup to Bibb Latané’s original social impact theory work. Latané’s DSIT looks at how ideas spread through groups, especially since groups are not static audiences that never change. In DSIT, there are four behavioral characteristics that groups exhibit which you can take advantage of as a marketer and communicator:

1. Consolidation: Over time, opinions, attitudes, and actions of a group tend to become more uniform. In cases of differing opinions, the majority opinion spreads to the minority.
2. Clustering: Overtime, people interact with clusters of other group members who share similar opinions, and interact less with people who have different opinions. Minority opinions are thus preserved and clusters of people who share a minority opinion may eventually leave the group and form their own group.
3. Correlation: Over time, individuals’ opinions on a variety of issues converge and correlate, even about issues that are not discussed by the group.
4. Conservation: A degree of diverse opinion is conserved in the group if minority opinion members cluster together or if majority influence is weak. However, the larger the majority opinion or more isolated the minority members are from each other, the less diversity of opinion is conserved.

How do these principles apply to your social media marketing, PR, and communications? Think of these four characteristics as ways you can help to get your ideas to spread. Let’s say you’ve got an audience of mostly unfavorable opinion about your brand, products, or services. Conservation means that there will still be some diversity of opinion, which means that there are still some diehard fans in the crowd. Find them and isolate them from the majority opinion! Doing so will promote clustering and protect the minority opinion. From there, determine what it is that those fans still love about you and determine how easy that will be to spread to the next cluster of people who are neutral in feeling about you. Once you’ve acquired and clustered the fans and the neutrals (winning them over), you can march on the majority opinion with a significant minority that you’ve strengthened and get your point of view across.

Let’s say, as a different example, that you have a loyal audience, a loyal following, perhaps a loyal customer base. In order to strengthen the opinion of you (and insulate your audience from competitors), you need to follow the same DSIT principles but reversed from the example above. Create a customer community, whether it’s a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, your own customer portal, etc. to provide as many interactions and as many touch points for that audience to reach each other. Remember based on the original theory that the more people concentrated together, the stronger the influence generated. Provide as many unifying themes as possible so that similar opinions can mesh faster, and make sure to provide social outlets so that group members can share other passions, interests, and ideas. The goal is to use the DSIT principles to consolidate positive opinion in your favor and make it self-reinforcing.

Public relations and social media can be powerful tools to repair your brand or increase its strength. Pair the tactics you already know with dynamic social impact theory for maximum impact!

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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The post Using dynamics of social groups to build customer loyalty appeared first on SHIFT Communications PR Agency | Boston | New York | San Francisco.

Not in the aggregate. Not in your industry. Not even in your own audience as a whole. There is no best time to tweet, to post to Facebook, to blog, to send email, to do anything digitally.

Think carefully about this. Even in a household with two parents and two kids, there is a “best time for going to bed”, but that time varies wildly among the different members of the household, doesn’t it? If you can’t get four people to agree on when bedtime is, what’s the chance you’re going to get four thousand or four million people to agree on when you should publish to social media to reach them?

The good news is this: through frequent testing and simple, basic qualitative research (i.e. asking people), you can determine when your publication schedule can deliver the highest impact to the audience that matters. It’s incredibly simple to do: ask them, then test to see if your qualitative data matches up with their behavior when you actually publish your emails, blog posts, tweets, etc.

If you’re unwilling or unable to do that work, then at the very least use some common sense and look in your web analytics. What day of the week to people normally visit your website the most? What day of the week do people normally convert the most? What time of day do they visit and convert the most? Use that common sense data to adjust your publication schedule and measure. Did it make a difference? Did your open rate or retweet rate or conversion rate increase? If so, you’ve got a winner. Keep refining your tests. If not, then try another hypothesis.

Whatever you do, don’t blindly accept the advice of some infographic that some intern likely slapped together based on lousy data. Would you bet the rest of your business on the advice of a random infographic you found on the Internet? Would you alter your financial structure or change your employee benefits? No? Then don’t do it with your marketing and communications, either.

There is no average best time for anything in aggregate that will ever deliver maximum results for your unique audience.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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The best PR campaigns are creative, smart and downright ballsy. And last night this fierce-looking table of 8 arrived in Boston to represent Team SHIFT at the 2013 Bell Ringer Awards, hosted by the Publicity Club of New England. It is such an invigorating night – to be recognized for the hard work we do, and to recognize our peers throughout New England for their achievements as well.

Product/Service Publicity: B2B Campaign
GOLD AWARD goes to: Pitney Bowes Software

Organizational Identity Campaign
GOLD AWARD goes to: McDonald’s
BRONZE AWARD goes to: Rethink Robotics

Community/Consumer Affairs Campaign
SILVER AWARD goes to: HIMSS

Product/Service Publicity: High-Tech Campaign
SILVER AWARD goes to: Rapid7
MERIT goes to: zSpace

Product/Service launch: B2B Campaign
BRONZE AWARD goes to: Cylance

Print Feature or Commentary Placement: National
BRONZE AWARD goes to: Genesys

All in all, SHIFT Communications scored 8 awards, well, 9 if you count the surprise award of the night: a SHIFTer winning the raffle for complimentary eyelash extensions. And we’re gonna need those to walk future red carpets….

Congratulations to all the SHIFTers who worked on these PR programs and a special thanks to our outstanding clients who every day trust us with their brands to bring them the attention they truly deserve. Are you a great company that isn’t currently being represented by SHIFT? Contact us, get started, and next year you might be on stage with us!

Catherine Allen
Senior Vice President

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In 1981, long before social networks, Ohio State University psychologist Bibb Latané coined social impact theory after a series of experiments to validate his hypothesis about how influence works. The three factors that make up social impact in his theory are:

1. Strength: How important is the influencing group to the target of the influence
2. Immediacy: How close in proximity and in time is the influencing group to the target of the influence
3. Number: How many people are in the influencing group

Latané’s three rules of influence are based on these factors:

1. Impact is a function of strength x immediacy x number of sources.
2. The greater the number of sources, the greater the impact.
3. The most significant impact occurs between 0 sources and 1 source.

What does social impact theory mean to you, the marketing and communications professional? The theory was created in a time when there were no social networks, when there was no social media save for real-life events and locations like the office water cooler. The principles become vastly more powerful in the context of social media. For example, look at what a network like Facebook or Twitter delivers to Latané’s theory.

1. Social media provides strength in the form of friends, colleagues, and family, people you have relationships with and whose opinions matter.
2. Social media provides immediacy both temporally and virtually: the people you are connected to are never more than a mobile device away.
3. Social media provides enormous opportunity for number of people in the influencing group.

How do you make use of this theory in your marketing and PR? While you can’t necessarily impact your audience’s connections to each other (unless, perhaps, you’re Hallmark or another sentimental brand) and you can’t necessarily impact your audience’s immediacy (though you can be present with frequent content), you can have an impact on how deeply embedded you are in your audience’s community. The more people who are aware of your brand, the more deeply you are entrenched in that audience, the more impact you’ll have by way of part 3 of Latané’s theory. Get in front of your audience frequently with effective marketing and communications, and get in front of as large a part of audience as you possibly can. Be present and ubiquitous, and the impact you have on your audience should significantly increase.

Next, we’ll look at the 4 dynamics of influence and how they impact your PR and marketing.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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The post Social media and impact theory appeared first on SHIFT Communications PR Agency | Boston | New York | San Francisco.

“Do PR firms have special arrangements with media companies?”

While some of the largest firms in the industry certainly do have corporate partnerships with equally large media companies, for the most part, the relationships that exist in the media world are at a personal level. Individual account team members work to develop good working relationships with individual journalists and publishers over time, in specific verticals. These professional friendships keep lines of communication open so that when a journalist is looking for sources for an upcoming story, they call their short list of PR folks they’ve worked with successfully in the past.

These professional relationships are one of the top reasons to hire a PR firm – developing relationships as a source can take months or years of effort on your own. You cannot take shortcuts or accelerate the growth of friendships and good working relationships, so if you need results faster than can be measured in years, hiring a firm with many of those connections is typically the best solution.

This is also why it’s so vital for both you and whatever PR resources you work with to have deep connections to various media types. It’s just as important to have strong connections to Facebook-based communities of interest today as it is to have connections to the industry trade publication. It’s just as important to have “earned media” in the form of search listings (after all, Google is implicitly endorsing you when you’re the top result) as it is to have a newspaper front page story. This isn’t having a special arrangement with media companies so much as it is understanding how media works (and how to work with it) in today’s highly-distributed digital media world.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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The post Mailbag: Do PR firms have special arrangements with media companies? appeared first on SHIFT Communications PR Agency | Boston | New York | San Francisco.

Active impressions are impressions in which there is confirmation that the reader got to and through the content. For example, on this blog, we track to see how far down the page you’ve read using Google Analytics:

If you get to the bottom, then we’ve made an active impression on you. After all, if you’re not interested, chances are you won’t bother to reach the bottom of the page. That active impression is what impressions are supposed to be about: even if you don’t fill out a contact form, we’ve made an impression on the people who read 100% of the page, and that’s an active impression.

Active impressions can be recorded for any form of digital media. Here’s how many people made it through a YouTube video, for example:

The most accurate count of “impressions” would be the 30% of people who made it through all 5 minutes because they watched the whole thing, the active watchers.

The reason why impressions are most often discounted as an effective PR metric is because no one knows whether a media outlet’s impressions are active or passive. When a major publisher shows you views of the article, is that page views count overall or number of people who reached the bottom of the page? Knowing which is which is vital if you’re going to use impressions in your analysis of how PR is going.

Incidentally, if you’re a publisher and you’d like assistance setting up analytics to understand how engaged your readers actually are, and you’re using Google Analytics, contact us and our Marketing Technology services team will be happy to help you get set up.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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