Here’s a small sample of the coast-to-coast TV coverage our client, RiseSmart, received for its study comparing the jobless rates of Super Bowl cities. If you think your B2B company can’t get coverage like this, maybe you just need a little help to get your message out.
Our Silicon Valley client RiseSmart, which provides outplacement and recruitment solutions, scored big with an analysis we did correlating Super Bowl winners with jobless rates. Here’s an excerpt from the Jan. 31 news release:
Could a city’s economic prosperity, as measured by employment level, make a difference in its team’s chances of winning the Super Bowl? Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that it does. According to a new analysis by RiseSmart, the team whose metropolitan area boasts the lower jobless rate has won 16 of the past 20 Super Bowls – an 80 percent success rate.
Based on this historical correlation, the Green Bay Packers should be the favorite to defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV.
Of course, the Pack won. And so did RiseSmart, with the study being covered from coast to coast in television newscasts, radio talk, in print and online. RiseSmart received TV coverage in markets like Chicago, Phoenix and Seattle — and of course, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee.
Here’s an article on the study that appeared in the Arizona Republic, one of the many newspapers that covered the story.
With Green Bay’s win, that means the correlation we identified has held true for 17 of the past 20 Super Bowls. I’m sure we’ll come up with some new wrinkles to explore this time next year.
An anonymous commenter just offered up a piece of brilliance in response to this post and this post, and we wanted to highlight it:
My father (who was in a position to know) used to tell me that you can tell a company’s position in its lifecycle by looking at who is calling the shots in the executive team.
1. birth – creatives such as inventors, engineers, scientists to create the company
2. growth – sales and marketing to generate new sales
3. maturity – accountants, et al for cost reduction and efficiency
4. death – lawyers to handle M&A, bankruptcy or to finesse how to sell products at a price no longer justified by their actual value.
I’ve worked for half a dozen companies over the last 30 years and I’ve seen the same pattern.
Makes you think about situations like this, doesn’t it!
Indeed.
Post-Modern PR Lesson: Don’t Let Legal Letters Speak for Your Company Online
One of the first things a good corporate communications exec explains to his or her CEO is that the communications department — not the legal department — should direct all important communications to the public.
While this might seem like a no-brainer to those of you who have never worked in a corporate environment, the reality is that it can be a constant battle to protect the communications function’s strategic role — particularly in times of crisis, when the lawyers start to get panicky.
As I’ve explained before, corporate attorneys are trained to shield themselves and their clients against risk. But sometimes, you have to take on a little risk to succeed in business — and specifically, in talking to the public.
When a company makes the ultimate PR mistake by saying “No comment,” for example, there’s usually a risk-averse lawyer, not a PR person, to blame. When Exxon committed one of the worst PR mistakes in history by not sending its CEO immediately to the scene of the Valdez oil spill, lawyers — not PR people — were behind the decision.
Now, in our post-modern PR world, cautious companies face even greater risks from attorney-driven PR. That’s because corporate legal letters, intended to be private, are increasingly ending up online — effectively turning your lawyer’s most formal (and often snippy) communications into your brand’s public persona.
I’m reminded of this by an interesting little online battle between two photo scanning companies, ScanCafe and DigMyPics. DigMyPics has chosen to aggressively attack its competitor, claiming that ScanCafe intentionally downplays the fact that it ships customers’ “one-of-kind photos” to India for processing, among other charges.
DigMyPics’ PR strategy is one I would never recommend. For one thing, it kind of gives me the same queasy feeling as those “American Owned” signs at roadside motels. And from a marketing standpoint, negative attacks generally hurt both brands involved.
That said, I’m not a fan of ScanCafe’s response, either. The response has been to ignore the attacks, even though they pop up on the first page of ScanCafe’s Google results and are surely a hot gossip topic in the photo-scanning space. Instead, ScanCafe has taken what it calls the “high road” by making no public statements.
It has, however, sent some pointed legal letters to DigMyPics – which DigMyPics immediately posted online. This has effectively enabled DigMyPics to frame the dispute and to present itself as the straight-talking defender of the consumer in its battle against ScanCafe, its offshore scanners, and its “lawyer talk.”
Here’s the lesson for marketers:
In 2007, you must understand that your legal letters are now part of your marketing and PR program, because people will post them online. So while they aren’t intended to become part of a public battle, they can and will be used against you.
In the absence of other voices, legal letters become the spokesperson for your organization by default — which is never good.
A better option would be for ScanCafe to use its CEO blog to address the issues (and non-issues) raised by its competitor. Frankly, I think ScanCafe could turn DigMyPics’ arguments around pretty effectively if it tried — and wouldn’t have to lose the “high ground” by simply defending itself.