1. You have helpful people who know the organisation inside out as the first point of contact for journalists. These people see themselves as facilitators not gatekeepers, and are known by your switchboard, whatever the country. Their contact details are easily found and include direct-dial phone numbers and out-of-hours mobile numbers. These always get answered and never go to voicemail. The nominated out-of-hours person has the personal mobile phone number of your organisation’s chief executive.

2. Part of your website and content is dedicated solely to visitors from the media seeking information and resources. It doesn’t mandate registration, qualification or log-ins. It includes a well-thought out FAQ, RSS feeds and searchable content, intelligently tagged to deliver the best results quickly. Sweden’s Swedbank clearly understands this. These media resources include company logos and images, but make sure you deliver what you promise, unlike airports operator BAA in this example. All images can be downloaded in numerous formats depending on the intended final use. It also includes up-to-date transcripts of any significant speeches and slide decks of presentations given by the executive team. You have relevant video/audio clips and any stock film footage you can make downloadable, filmed, formatted and edited to comply with broadcasters’ needs. Perhaps you’ve pulled all this content together using something like MyNewsDesk. You have a list of subject experts and a news archive showing how the company has been reported.

3. When you receive a media enquiry, you follow a simple handling and escalating process. Your front-line spokespeople are empowered to speak on behalf of the company because they are viewed as vital, trusted members of the organisation’s ‘inner circle’. They know what’s going on; what they can and cannot talk about and where to direct calls outside their level of authority. You have a KPI for returning, handling and closing media calls.

4. Your executive team accept their collective role as custodians of the organisation’s reputation. They will leave a meeting to talk to a journalist on deadline. You always try to field the most appropriate senior executive first but you know who their deputies are just in case (no mobile signal, illness, etc).

5. Senior managers know who deals with the media in your organisation. They respect them and prioritise their requests.

6. You hire photographers and videographers with a background in news media. They guide you on the style and format of photo-calls and corporate shoots.

7. You and your management colleagues make an effort to build a healthy stock of relationship capital with important journalists, recognising that it may help you at some future point.

8. You only ever make promises you can be certain to deliver, whether it’s the availability of a senior executive for a live TV interview in 3 hours or a routine return call in 5 minutes. Deadlines are never missed.

9. You understand what a sound-bite is and how to give one. You help journalists even when there is no immediate benefit to you.

10. You resist the natural urge to complain when a reporter gets something wrong, accepting that it will sometimes happen because of the unique nature of the job.

I’ll stop at this point, although I haven’t covered social media, search optimisation and several other vital areas. This post helps to explain why some organisations are set up to fail and some are set up to excel when it comes to media relations. Which one are you? If you found this valuable please share it and be sure to add your own experiences or views in the comments section below. And to reward you for reading this far, I’ve posted this interview with Quentin Tarantino in which he becomes distinctly unfriendly when a reporter asks a legitimate question he happens not to like. The action happens at 4 mins 35 seconds into the clip.

Credit: thanks to Jane Bird for reviewing this article. Jane was awarded Recruitment and Engagement Journalist of the Year in the Towers Watson Excellence in HR Journalism Awards 2012

1. Can you give me an overview as to how B2B social media differs from the B2C environment?

• Audiences are much smaller
• Users often unite around a shared interest and/or common problems
• More likely to use social media during normal business hours
• More likely to be using a smart phone or tablet to access
• LinkedIn is the dominant network
• Blogs are used to show authority, expertise and credibility
• Purchase decisions have longer gestation periods and involve multiple decision-makers
• YouTube use less about entertainment, more about education

2. Please can you give me three or four core differences between the two?

B2C has a larger number of social channels. B2C buyers make decisions fast and can be any age – from pre-teens to pensioners. B2B buyers are usually middle and senior level managers who make slower buying decisions and have to follow a process, often involving procurement colleagues. B2B buyers are considerably more time-pressed compared to most B2C buyers.

3. How do these differences impact on your content and brand social media strategy?

The emphasis for B2B is about being informative and helpful to decision-makers and those around them who influence purchase decisions. It’s a long-haul game where you build confidence and trust so that when the critical moments in decision-making arrive, your company and/or product earn their place on the client’s shortlist.

4. Why do you feel there needs to be a different approach for B2B?

The approach doesn’t necessarily have to be so different; it depends what your company sells and who to. A wholesaler selling low-value tools and materials to thousands of self-employed builders is entirely different to an aircraft engine manufacturer selling to a handful of airlines. The key point is to first understand how your target audiences use social media. If they currently don’t, how might you encourage them to begin?

5. What similarities are there between B2B and B2C social media?

The risk of reputational damage by ill-considered behaviour. People respond to similar triggers (i.e. appeals to vanity, the chance to be the first in on something, gossip, humour)

6. Why do you feel that B2B social media is important for building your brand?

Decision makers will increasingly reference people and products via their social footprint. They will seek ‘social proof’ that you can deliver the claims you make. Social media allow you to reach a larger, global audience more quickly and more cheaply, but they are not a tool to be used in isolation. The best B2B users integrate social into other marketing activities.

7. What are four things that you think are essential to any B2B social media strategy?

• Know your audience and their media habits. Listen before acting.
• Help and inform, while playing down the sell
• Recognise it as a long-haul requiring patience
• Test, check and measure against realistic, achievable goals

Most of us in business think never stop to ask ourselves if we’re any good at explaining but we should. How many times have our eyes glazed over, our attention drifted, when listening to someone’s poorly explained idea or proposal? Often the speaker has failed to properly assess the audience’s existing level of knowledge. Or they’ve failed to contextualise their message and make a connection with something the audience is already familiar with. Sometimes, they do both. One of the problems for the person doing the explaining is that they are often too close to the subject; they assume too much knowledge on the part of their audience and they fail to ask themselves why anyone should care.

That’s where an outsider can play a valuable role. Our job as PR professionals is to role-play the audience, ideally before our clients start trying to communicate to target groups. If we aren’t convinced ourselves, if we fail to counsel our clients on the importance of thoroughly answering the question  of why should anyone care, how can we expect the outside world to be anything other than cynical in their response?

Read the full book review on the B2B Marketing website here 

For years Abbey did what many banks believe to be clever marketing; it tempted customers to switch accounts with unsustainable deals, the idea being that once you’ve got them, apathy prevents customers defecting to rivals. You then whack said customers with all sorts of highly profitable fees and tariffs. Result: easy money and huge bonuses all round!

On the lookout for a new business bank account provider, I became one of those moths-to-the-flame customers on the recommendation of former accountants. But I later ditched them after numerous fights over unfair deductions from my account. The final straw was after they took a series of ‘penalty fees’ from my account when I was on holiday. These fees were levied because I was hadn’t moved sufficient funds from one account to another. Fair enough, except that to do this required access to my online bank account, which was unavailable because of unspecified ‘IT system problems’.

I began by contesting the fees with Abbey’s customer service team. They insisted these were fair and said I could have called into a branch or used its call centre banking service to move the funds. I wrote back politely explaining that I was on holiday abroad at the time, and that when an online banking system crashes, every single customer trying to make a transaction flocks to the alternative telephone service resulting in call centre meltdown. I knew this because I’d repeatedly tried calling.

Once again they refused to see events from my perspective so I decided to write to chief executive António Horta-Osório (Abbey was by now part of Santander). I was polite and direct, pointing out why the fees were unfair and inviting him to see common sense. He wrote back telling me that he’d looked into my case, that the fees were justified, and that I shouldn’t write to Santander again on the matter. So I followed his advice and took my complaint instead to the Banking Ombudsmen. It found in my favour and ordered Santander to refund the fees, after which I closed the account.

That was all several years ago and I’d hardly given it another thought until a few days ago, when well-known PR agency founder Nick Band posted the following update on his Twitter feed.

that’s it. I officially hate #santander business banking. never, ever had such a diabolical service. huge shame on you

— Nick Band (@nickband) January 25, 2013

Seems nothing much has changed at Santander despite Horta-Osório jumping ship to rival Lloyds in 2011. Meanwhile, that particular institution is doing better than most, beaten only by Barclays as the UK’s most complained about bank. Just don’t expect Mr Horta-Osório to give a damn.

You don’t necessarily need The Queen’s Horse Budget to become ubiquitous

It gets even more interesting when you can identify an issue that people are writing about regularly and offer yourself up as the archetype, an exemplar. Which leads me to my best piece of advice for companies: appoint more women to your executive team. Bear with me a moment and I’ll explain.

Hardly a day has gone by since the 2011 Davies report without somebody writing about the subject of women on boards. You may have seen the European Union’s report on the same theme late last year. And now The German government’s upper house, The Bundersrat, has backed minimum quota plans for German companies, following in the steps of Italy, Belgium and France. In the UK, this is an issue that has pitched the corporate lobby into direct conflict with the coalition’s business secretary Vince Cable.

So here we have what any journalist would recognise as a story ‘with legs’. The opportunity up for grabs is for one company to latch on to it and show how it’s leading the pack on this; with more women than men on its executive board. The company that can do this, while also being media-friendly, will quickly become ubiquitous. It may also find it can attract and retain better talent, be more innovative and outperform competitors. But doing it just for the acres of free, positive publicity would be reason enough.

Image credit: MOD picture library

Fred Smith has started at ABC International in the newly created post of head of global communications, based in London. Fred joins from XYZ where he served for the past five years as UK director of communications. He has more than 20 years of experience as a senior corporate communications adviser, including 12 years in the professional services arena.

“I’m delighted that Fred is joining our organisation in this new global role,” explained (name withheld), ABC global head of people, performance and culture. “He joins a strong team and I look forward to working with him to continue to build ABC’s profile in the market.”

“I am excited at the opportunity to join ABC and very impressed by the firm’s growth and development plans,” added Fred. “I’m also looking forward to working with ABC’s very talented marketing and communications teams.”

The first problem with this is that no-one seems to have spent more than five seconds thinking about what to say, let alone how to say it. The quotes are self-serving and mutually flattering to the extent that they read like a parody. One golden rule for quotes is that they must add something of value, above and beyond the information being conveyed. If they don’t, leave them out. And always apply the inverse test to help eliminate statements that are not just pointless but also obvious (He joins a weak team, I’m not excited, I’m not looking forward, etc).

We learn nothing about why this firm needs someone acting ‘globally’ in this role, nor what he aims to do to help his employer. Perhaps they don’t know. It does, however, reveal quite a lot about the organisation’s culture; and it’s not exactly flattering.

The irony here is that such a bland, ill-considered statement, which tells us nothing other than the company has filled a newly created post, is that the job in question is for a head of communication. That someone in such a senior role in such as large organisation could have signed off such turgid rubbish beggars belief.

Whether they are any good at it is a different question, but the best do an excellent job and some of them have been doing so for a very long time. John Deere is one example. For more than a century it has been publishing The Furrow, a B2B magazine for US farmers, and has now embraced the multi-media, digital age. Another is up-market British supermarket chain Waitrose with its Food Illustrated consumer magazine, originally launched in 1998 and since rebranded as Waitrose Kitchen.

One thing that really is interesting amongst all the hype is that some companies, notably Nissan, have gone beyond publishing. They have moved into broadcasting and content creation that by-passes traditional, independent media entirely and goes directly to consumers. The idea is that they can better control what people see and hear without the inconvenient filtering effect that independent journalists subject all stories to. There’s every chance they will be successful if they adhere to one guiding principle: create quality content that is useful, relevant, interesting or entertaining.

If you need some inspiration about what that looks like, here’s a handy list of 10 B2B companies that excel in this area. They’re mostly US-based, but that doesn’t matter on this occasion. And here’s a short video of Nissan’s Simon Sproule talking about what his company is doing.

That’s because someone who is on the payroll is predisposed to look after their own skin and resist speaking truth to power. There’s been a veritable stampede of ex-journalists taking well-paid corporate communications roles but to my mind they’d be better off joining PR consultancies where they can be a bit less constrained about telling you how it really is. The worse that can happen in a PR firm is that they’re shunted off the account.

How many senior level in-house communications professionals would have the courage to tell their chief executive her strategic plan makes no sense at all to the outside world, and risks being negatively reported? How many will commit potential career suicide by telling the CFO his habit of talking in the most verbose language is off-putting and deathly dull? How many will tell a main board director they look shifty and unbelievable on camera?

Get someone in from outside if you really want to make the most from your media encounters. But first make sure you can handle the truth.

P.S. This post was prompted by someone seeking advice on ‘train the trainer’ courses for media trainers. I’ll preserve her anonymity but can reveal she’s an ex-journalist turned head of PR for a company subjected to huge, overwhelmingly negative media interest recently.

Starting with LinkedIn, from your personal home page open the drop down menu under the ‘More’ tab. Click on ‘Answers’ to open up the main answers page, where you’ll find Questions requiring answers under a wide range of topics. Once you’ve found a question you want to answer, look at who’s asking, when they posted the question, who has already answered and what they’ve said. The point here is to be selective about what you spend your valuable time on, but also to identify opportunities to offer good advice to the person posing the question. You especially want to focus on answering questions from prospective customers for your services or product, although there’s a secondary reason for answering questions from others, which I’ll come on to.

If you provide a really good answer, you often find that the other party makes contact with you directly via LinkedIn to say thank you, and perhaps ask for more information. When this happens, you could have a genuine sales prospect in front of you. This has happened to me numerous times and in one case resulted in an opportunity to work with Deloitte. You can also use these interactions to build your LinkedIn network with new contacts and amplify your social media reach.

I’ve answered more than 140 questions on LinkedIn and 26 of these have been rated ‘Good’ or ‘Best’ answers by those who posted the questions. These accolades provide strong, third-party evidence that you are genuinely expert in your chosen subject areas. They also appear on your LinkedIn profile page. That’s the secondary reason I referred to a moment ago. A third reason is that your responses can be found by anyone else who types the same question into a search engine.

It’s really important to think carefully about your answers and to try and provide useful, well-argued replies, along with web links that support your points. Also try to be succinct; there are countless examples of answers that stray off topic and waffle on, ad-infinitum. These just reflect badly on the poster, as do grammatical and spelling errors (type your draft response in a Word document and run it through a checker before pasting it into LinkedIn). Don’t launch into ‘heavy sell’ mode, just as you wouldn’t in any face-to-face encounter.

Quora is a dedicated Q&A website that’s a little over two years old. Once you’ve registered, you can dive straight in to ask or answer questions. But first, I’d recommend browsing what others have asked and received answers to in order to get a good feel for the site. The main difference to LinkedIn is that users can vote replies up or down; the best rise to the top! A second is that you can earn credits from these votes or if people decide to follow your question. A third is that it covers a much wider range of topics, many of them not related to business. I’ve answered 45 questions so far on Quora. Here are links to three examples:

Can anyone offer guidance on how to choose a pr agency?

How do you write a PR agency brief?

How do you know if you are getting value from your PR firm?

Discussion forums are the oldest and potentially the best places to experiment from a business building perspective. Once you’ve found relevant forums (try asking your customers, peer groups or trade associations what they are involved in), join up and start looking for opportunities.

You can set up Google Alerts to notify you when particular questions arise in your domain that you definitely ought to answer. Depending on the frequency, you may also need to set up an email rule that directs these alerts to a dedicated sub-folder so your main email inbox doesn’t get flooded. Browse that sub-folder regularly but at least once a week because speed of response is usually important to the person asking questions.

Discussion forums can connect you directly to new customers and drive them to do business with you. Here’s just one example I know of. A former service technician for Italian cult coffee machine manufacturer Gaggia sells his spares and repairs service by offering free help and advice to people on this forum for coffee aficionados. If you find there are no forums covering your area of expertise, consider starting one; there are numerous service providers – including this free one. It’ll take some organisation and promoting, but it could soon grow into a great funnel for new sales leads.

I believe I’m about to reach my time limit for three minutes of reading, so I’ll end it there. Be sure to let me know if you found this helpful (or not) using the comments feature. And if you’d like to suggest a future topic for a 3 Minute Management Briefing, do get in touch.