Spin and Other Delights at SF PR Summit 2013

Yesterday I took a break from the challenging road of startup marketing and spent the day being inspired by peers and leaders in the media, technology and life.

The overarching theme of the conference is storytelling, which is really the new buzzword for marketing.  Storytelling has always been at the heart of brand creation and elevation.   Even in the driest B2B presentation, you are creating the image in the buyer’s mind of a better organization, driven by the successful use of new tools.  

As the app marketplace becomes increasingly more and more crowded, the latest numbers being over 1 million offerings in each of the Apple and Google stores, it is becoming more and more difficult to elevate products above the noise.  Some thoughts on taking your product to the next level from yesterday’s speakers:

Noel Lee of Monster Cable– Romance your product, make others fall in love with it.   No one “needed” better cables, but his passion to help others experience better audio has driven category expansion and profit.

Kym McNicholas– Show me, don’t tell me.  Create an emotional connection.  Every good product interview should revolve around five must have points and there should be stories for each.  Stories that don’t involve the words:  revolutionary, game changer, leading and thought leader.

Brian Solis- Businesses need to create experiences to succeed in the future.   Good marketing “creates a sense of urgency to do something with it.”  This is key to preventing your app from being removed from someone’s phone.   Check out Brian’s new book for more.  “What’s the Future of Business?”

My favorite panel was on competitive analytics.  What is clearer and clearer to me every day is that marketing requires more math than ever before, which as a liberal arts major who took the minimal amount should frighten me.  But, it doesn’t as I think that all the new available data just makes me smarter than ever before.   The key is figuring out what the right metrics are for your business, which will tell you whether or not your strategy is successful.

Favorite speakers who I’d like to hear on a panel again:

Jolie O’Dell @jolieodell

Kumi Rauf @ilovebeingblack

Jai Decker @jaidecker

Chris Heuer @chrisheuer

Sarah Cornwell  @sccornwell

 

Sites/Apps that I need a minute to check out:

Tracker, Kissmetrics, Compete, TimeHop

 

Want to get inspired today?  Follow the conference on Twitter at #sfprsummit

What is a “Do” PR Headline?

I will be the first to admit that as a blogger I don’t spend as much time editing and critiquing my own materials as I do for company and client materials.  So, I actually had to give pause when writing the headline for this entry as it doesn’t seem quite right to just throw a headline up when talking about writing good headlines.

A former colleague sent me a note after reading my last blog entry commenting on bad headlines.

“Before I edited a recent success story, one essentially said <name of big bank> uses <company name> for massive data storage.   Seriously, why should anyone care? What’s different, is there a unique quality that made them choose that company or that product, is there a unique situation or problem the storage is solving that might have wider audience appeal?  You have to keep it short, but you also need to say enough so someone can identify a problem he or she has or might have  or a benefit they’d like to have and therefore have a reason to read the story.  People write their white paper or solution brief or success story and the headline is an afterthought – something slapped on at the end, and yet it needs to be every bit as carefully crafted as the piece itself to draw people in without over promising.”

I could feel the years of her frustration in that paragraph.   It is always interesting to me how good marketing people think differently.  Too often I see mediocre work getting rubber stamped by people.    It can be a painful process to get just the right words, but it can be the difference in whether or not the press release actually gets read or written about.

If I was to sum up what NK wrote about a good headline, I would offer these suggestions:

1. Imagine the headline that the journalist would write–if you can’t imagine a clever one, neither will he.
2. What problem does your product solve?  Talk about the benefit in the headline.  Don’t tell how fast it is–talk about how going faster will make people more productive.
3. Even if your product is a commodity, there must be interesting ways people are using it.   Dig deep to give people a reason to want to try it.  How are your best customers using the product?
4. Leave the ego out of the discussion.   Being the owner of the words is not as important as being part of the team that finds the right words.

Looking at my headline above, I think it still needs work.  Suggestions?