Tag Archives: audiences

Aug 30 2010
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On Media, Social Media, Strategy and Planning

Taming the Squiggle: Making Sense of the Communications Pipelines

Last week, Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project, presented to a group of executive management students at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Pew was gracious enough to post the PowerPoint to their website.

It’s a real treasure trove for PR and marketing people and I hope it doesn’t go overlooked. For me, the gem was slide four, a representation of “Media Ecology” in the information age. It’s a much more elegant representation of something I’ve communicated before on whiteboards and cocktail napkins, which always ends up being a deliberately confusing set of squiggles.

Pew's Presentation: Media Ecology in the Information Age

The point: compelling information now reaches the end user via a host of avenues. And the original source of the content only has control over a handful of them. What’s more, end users now provide feedback to the source, only adding new squiggles to the equation.

But in the confusion of squiggles, there is freedom — the freedom to focus on the target audience.

I always use Nike Plus as an example (not just because I’m a fan of the product) of alternative ways to reach the target audience in the new media ecology. Nike used its audience’s passion for running and use of iPods as a way to engage and solidify a fan base. That base now keeps coming back to the site and engaging others in the process.

“Taming the squiggle” means working backwards from your audience, not just what they’re looking for, but how they’re looking for it.

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Aug 24 2010
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Strategy and Planning

Promotional Pyramid: Messages (or “Now You’re Talking”)

Good messages are the peanut butter & jelly of a marketing or communications plan. They stick the top slice of branding to the bottom slice of stories.

Not only do they inform the kinds of stories you should tell, they help evaluate marketing outputs. You should be able to look at a media clip and say “did this get some of our messages across?” Same goes for your other marketing outputs — things like:

  • Ads
  • Blogs
  • Twitterfeeds
  • Events
  • Partnerships

If they’re not accurately portraying your messages, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

(C) Brendon Shank 2010

Messages: Connecting Your Stories to Your Brand

Here’s the real beauty of messages: unlike your unified brand, you should probably have more than one. Different messages give you the freedom to communicate diverse elements of your campaign (assuming they’re not at odds with one another) without diluting your overall brand.

For instance, if you’re an alumni organization, one of your messages may be a call to action to your audiences for recruiting and development (“join the Springfield College Alumni Association”). Another message may promote the association’s philanthropic work to maintain its status in the community (“We’re helping to make Springfield County beautiful and livable”).

It’s your call with the number of messages you have. I fall in with the conventional wisdom that three is about right. One or two probably doesn’t adequately reflect what you’re trying to do with your marketing and you could end up losing audience members. Five or more and you’re really running the risk of diluting your most powerful messages and ensuring that your audience doesn’t know what to think.

Once you’ve developed consensus around them your messages, they will also be your “safe place.” Get tripped up in an interview? Ease back to your messages. Don’t know where to start with a revised website? Go back to your messages.

When the mayor of Springfield walks up to you and says, “I know Springfield College Alumni Association. You’re the ones making Springfield beautiful,” you’ll know you nailed your messaging.

Next up: Stories.

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Aug 12 2010
3 Comments
Great Stories, On Media, Strategy and Planning, What to do when...

Promotional Pyramid: The Intro (Or “How to Get Started When You Don’t Know Where to Start”)

Lots of companies and organizations desperately want to convey their brand or mission “out there.”

But the catch is that very, very few brands or missions are compelling enough by themselves to get their target audiences to change their behavior. A brand (or mission) is important, as it forms the core of operations for an organization, but — as I may have mentioned before — good stories change behavior.

That’s why, when folks ask me “how do we get ‘out there’?” I talk about the promotional pyramid.

It’s a simple construct that helps organizations develop good, compelling stories and make sure that they’re strategically aligned with their larger branding and messaging. Rather than go into a 2,000-word blog post about the Pyramid, I’m going to break it up into a series of posts that focus on the relationships between one layer to the next, starting from the top down.

Rather than wait for a big, dramatic build, here’s my very professional rendering of the Promotional Pyramid:

A Template for "Getting Out There"

Four Layers of Marketing Fun

The promotional pyramid is the Swiss Army Knife of marketing. It applies to three-person nonprofits just as well as 15,000 employee corporations. And, it can apply to different marketing disciplines, like public relations, advertising and social media.

We’ll get started on brand & mission soon.

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