Shun shovelling shit

All brands benefit from helping not hindering the press; and it’s easy to do.

Mar 26, 2023

📸 First, flashback to last summer when I advised you to become a B Corp. This week, I would be remiss not to mention that the organisation’s effectiveness is in queastion.

👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:

① Making the media's life easier is low hanging fruit for your comms team.

② You should put yourself in the shoes of a journalist on deadline.

③ Big American banks deserve praise while….

④ …UK asset managers should hang their heads in shame.

⑤ Online advertising is less effective than it used to be.

⑥ It will take more than Brexit to keep the City down.

⑦ There is reason to be concerned about Deutsche Bank.

What's new

Twitter took a turgid - if not turdy - turn this week. Its press email now auto-responds with a poop emoji, Mashable reports.

In short:

“After firing the press relationship team at Twitter (and nearly everyone else), CEO Elon Musk is once again showing the dirty, rotten media what he thinks of them. On Sunday, Musk announced that press@twitter.com, the company's address that used to serve for handling inquiries from the press, now automatically responds with a poop emoji.”
“The man fired Tesla's PR department in 2020 and seemingly took over to (fairly randomly) address queries of all sorts on (where else) Twitter.”
“The ugly side of this is the fact that Twitter is falling apart at the seams as Musk keeps firing workers from Twitter, often offending and denigrating them publicly while doing so – something which PR departments were invented to prevent.”

Why it matters

Musk’s disdain for the press is arrogant, misguided and foolhardy.

This story matters because it’s a text book example of how not to treat anyone, let alone journalists who play such an important part in your brand building and messaging. Although Musk is in the rarefied position of not needing to rely on traditional public relations to attract coverage, none of us should make anyone’s life harder than it needs to be.

① Some PR truths I hold to be self-evident:

Earned media - i.e appearances in the press - are still the best way to increase market awareness and build trust with your audiences.
In the age of online media, journalists work to tighter deadlines than ever, so it’s often the spokesperson who responds first, rather than the one with the most thoroughly thought through and perfectly articulated view, that gets quoted.
Online publications have unlimited space and a hunger to fill it with media content. Provide it, and chances are it will be used.

Making the media's life easier is low hanging fruit for your communications team and your brand will benefit almost immediately.

What to do about it

Take action

② One of these weeks, we’ll have the ‘PR agency vs doing it in-house’ debate. It’s one I have with myself regularly. But for now, let’s confine ourselves to things your marketing & communications team should be doing regardless. Here is a handful of suggestions:

Cultivate relationships with key media: No journalist worth their salt will write positive things about you unless they’re true. But that’s not why you should stay close to a few of them who really know your segment. They’re invaluable sources of information on market trends, competitive opinions and customer drivers. And, sure, they might be able to help you get an alternative opinion across in short order, should the need arise one day.
Provide a dedicated single point of contact: In the spirit of making journalists’ jobs easier, be sure to have a simple and obvious email address they can send their enquiries to. Don’t rely on online forms, Twitter handles or a PR agency for this.
Offer a fully-featured online media centre: Dedicate one page of your website to journalists. Use it to house everything they might need if they were writing about you. No, that’s not just a repository of your press releases. It’s also a clear ‘about us’ description; a list of your spokespeople - with downloadable bios and high-resolution photography; a set of your logos and branding assets like images, animations and charts; and perhaps some highlights of your past appearance in the press - ideally in multimedia.
Have a deep bench of spokespeople at the ready: To my earlier point about responding first not best, securing regular coverage often depends on your senior team prioritising media relations and understanding the importance of being prompt.
Maintain an engaged social media presence: Twitter is no longer the place to build brand, let alone generate leads (was it ever?), but it remains somewhere journalists research/procrastinate their stories. Engage with them there in a timely way and you could well find yourself quoted.

Get help

Visit InMarketing, my resource library for leaders in finance or technology who want to innovate, interact and influence.
Join the InMarketing community, either on Twitter or on Substack (you’ll need to download the Substack app and head to the chat tab). Either way, you can ask questions of me and fellow senior marketing practitioners.

Help me

If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. Every time you do, it really helps me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

JPMorgan, Citi, BofA tell staff not to poach clients from stressed banks

③ Big American banks deserve praise for excellent corporate comms this week.

“As a series of U.S. lenders were besieged by customers yanking out their money this month, banking behemoths including JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc and Bank of America Corp. warned employees: Do not make it worse.”
“JPMorgan, the nation's largest bank, told all employees they ‘should never give the appearance of exploiting a situation of stress or uncertainty,’ in a March 13 memo, extracts of which were seen by Reuters. ‘We do not make disparaging comments regarding competitors’."
"‘We all have a vested interest in keeping America's financial system strong and thriving,’ a JPMorgan spokesperson said. ‘It's the envy of the world with thousands of institutions of all sizes serving every corner of the country’."

TECHNOLOGY

Fax machines remain 'backbone' of UK asset management operations

④ UK asset managers deserve to lose business to more automated competitors.

Source: Professional Adviser, 21 March 2023

“Calastone's Global Funds Automation Report revealed that only 41% of UK asset managers believed their organisation was mostly or fully automated and a almost two-thirds (62%) of them admitted to still using fax machines.”
“These results clash with the priorities of asset managers, who identified client service (80%), operational cost reduction (75%) and regulation (53%) as key drivers of their automation strategies.”
“In contrast to the UK, Singaporean asset managers pointed to advanced technologies such as distributed ledger technology (46%) and machine learning and artificial intelligence (54%) as the most important in their automation strategies.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

How TikTok broke social media

⑤ Online advertising is less effective than it used to be.

“TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it hooked on algorithmically selected short videos. Users love it. The trouble for the platforms is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so. TikTok monetises its American audience at a rate of just $0.31 for every hour the typical user spends on the app, a third the rate of Facebook and a fifth the rate of Instagram. This year it will make about $67 from each of its American users, while Instagram will make more than $200.”
“The ad load in video is inescapably lower than on a news feed of text and images. Watch a five-minute YouTube clip and you might see three ads; scroll Instagram for five minutes and you could see dozens. Watching video also seems to put consumers in a more passive mood than scrolling a feed of friends’ updates, making them less likely to click through to buy.”
“Short-video apps are also hampered by weaker targeting. For audiences, part of the appeal of TikTok and its many imitators is that users need do no more than watch, and swipe when they get bored. The algorithm uses this to learn what kinds of videos—and therefore ads—they like. But this guesswork is no substitute for the hard personal data harvested by the previous generation of social networks, which persuaded users to fill in a lengthy profile including everything from their education to their marital status.”

WILDCARD

London clinches Europe finance crown

⑥ It will take more than Brexit to keep the City down.

“London has again clinched Europe’s financial centre crown, beating back glum predictions that Brexit would knock the capital’s competitiveness on the global stage, a new index out today reveals. The capital scored well across think tank Z/Yen’s 33rd Global Financial Centres Index, helping to to retain the top spot in Europe.”
“London’s access to a deep worker pool and financial markets, compounded with strong legal oversight and efficient transport system, helped it shrug off its Continental pretenders.”
“Ranked second globally, the Square Mile beat Paris, which came 14th, Amsterdam (16th) and Frankfurt (17th) to keep pole position in Europe. London still trails New York for the top spot. The Big Apple overtook London in 2018 and the gap between the two is the largest since the index began.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, on fears over Deutsche Bank:

Olaf Scholz. Source: The Financial Times, 24 March 2023

“Deutsche Bank has fundamentally modernised and reorganised its business and is a very profitable bank. There is no reason to be concerned about it.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Strive for InMarketing: innovate, interact, influence.

Wishing you a productive week,

P.S. By the time you read this, I’ll be at the Royal Academy to see Spain and the Hispanic World. You have until 10 April to catch it, if you haven’t already.