Archive for 2010

Looking Back at 2010

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

To say 2010 was a busy year for MSL Chicago is a major understatement. It was a great year, but busy. Since Top 10 lists are always in style at the end of the year, I thought it would be appropriate to create our own. Here is a quick recap of some of the MSL Chicago 2010 highlights:

1. Going Green. In September, we hosted the Sustainability Leaders event with colleagues from NativeEnergy, Motorola, and Natural Capitalism Solutions to share thoughts and best practices on communicating a strong sustainability story to internal and external audiences.
2. Silver Anniversary. Senior vice president, Nancy Brennan, reached the 25-year milestone of working at MSLGROUP, an unheard-of accomplishment in the agency business.
3. Adding to the Trophy Case. MSL Chicago won numerous awards for our work on the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and other clients. Our managing director was also named PR Professional of the Year from PRSA’s Chicago chapter.


4. Libations and Learning. We sponsored the Social Media Club event in September at the Palomar Hotel. Jason Steinberg, vice president of digital strategy, presented and discussed social media trends, infographic design, and intersections with PR, followed by cocktails and networking.
5. A Fond Farewell. Congrats to our finance manager of 38 years, Judy Huisman, who is now enjoying retirement and some extra time with the grandkids!
6. Digital Roundtable. We hosted an expert panel from the MSLGROUP network to share digital insights and real-time engagement best practices, including Jason, Lori Laurent Smith and Webster Lewin.
7. Moving on Up. Our staff has gone through a number of well-deserved promotions— most recently Christiana Brenner, to vice president, consumer practice, and Dawn McKenzie to vice president, corporate branding.


8. New Brand. This fall, the company launched the new MSLGROUP brand to tightly unite our capabilities and resources across the agency to meet the rapidly changing needs of clients and marketplaces.
9. Growing the Client Base. The Chicago client list continues to grow with the addition of Sealy, Masco, Verve Living Systems, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana, and many other leading organizations and brands.
10. Growing the Leadership Team. Adding new clients means adding new leadership, and we’re very happy to have brought on Joan Cetera (SVP, consumer practice), Jason Steinberg (VP, digital strategy), Kevin Metz (VP, corporate branding), and Katie Feltz (VP, consumer practice) to lead the account teams!

Highlighting a year’s work in one blog post doesn’t seem to capture all of the accomplishments of 30 people…but reflection is an important step in assessing our focus, our direction and our opportunities for the future. We’re looking forward to 2011—and happy holidays to our clients, colleagues and friends.

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The New “Conversation” Economy

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

PR Week recently conducted an interview with MSL Group CEO Olivier Fleurot and Jim Tsokanos, president of MSL Group/Americas, during the PR Week NEXT Conference in New York .  Olivier and Jim did a great job articulating where we feel PR can best accelerate and lead brand engagement in the new “conversation” economy that continues to evolve and fuel change in our industry. 

Anyone in the marketing industry knows we are living in a time when change is measured by days, not months, and consumers are demanding more authentic and meaningful interaction from brands.  Content, Conversations, Communities and Conversion are today’s marketing lexicon, and regardless of where you sit in the marketing food chain, we must live it every day.

It’s a quick interview, and I hope you’ll take a few minutes and let me know what you think.

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Congratulations Nancy, on 25 Years with MSLGroup!

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Today, we are celebrating a rare milestone in the agency business: an employee celebrating her 25th anniversary…with the same firm. 

Nancy Brennan, who leads our corporate branding practice, started her career with MSLGroup in the Washington, D.C. office in 1985, then spent a short time in our New York headquarters before settling in Chicago with her husband, John.  Nancy, a  native of New Orleans who went on to graduate from Brown University, is one of the few across our industry who has been able to spend nearly all of her career with one agency.  Anyone in this business will tell you that to accomplish that remarkable feat, you have to make yourself indispensable to your clients and your firm year-in and year-out.  She has been a great counselor to clients, a wonderful mentor to employees and reliable partner to her management colleagues across the MSL Group network. 

In honor of Nancy’s milestone, we arranged for the Saints to win the Super Bowl earlier this year.  Actually, there will be more practical expressions of our gratitude going to Nancy.  Let us know what you think by sharing a post below. Geax, Nancy!

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Facebook + Skype = Efficiency

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Don’t follow where the path may lead, instead go where there is no path and leave a trail.”  These are also the lines that read under my high school yearbook photo.  To me, this relates most to my passion for travel.  There is something about the thrill of going to an unfamiliar place, tasting a different culture, and getting out of my comfort zone that delights me more than anything else.  I’m always on the search for the next globetrotting adventure. 

The most beautiful part of the journey, in my opinion, is meeting a new place’s people.  We learn how different, and yet how similar we all are.  I am so grateful that there are social mediums in place where I can keep in contact and uphold the relationships I’ve met through my travels with employment, school, and play.  To me, advances in social media are more than just the latest buzz.  Advances in social media help make it easier to network and keep in touch.  Via my Facebook and Skype accounts alone, I can keep my precious relationships with my good friend studying reef conservation in Cambodia, my old Aussie mates from studying abroad, and my cousins in Poland.  It allows me to see and communicate with ease and efficiency everyday if I wanted to.  The rumored merger of Skype and Facebook will help us all to connect our web with even more efficiency.

One in every fourteen people in the world use Facebook, and 50 percent of people log into Facebook everyday.  In the first half of 2010, Skype users made 88.4 billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls.  In most purposes, Skype and Facebook serve similar functions, that being, staying connected.  Therefore, it is only logical that these forces join together.  In my opinion, it’s yet another brilliant move for Facebook, and equally as advantageous for Skype.  Tech24.org states that “Global markets for Skype and Facebook are expected to improve since Skype is much more popular outside the U.S.”  These two social network powerhouses will achieve Facebook’s goal for the merger “To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.”

The new feature will offer SMS, voice chat and “Facebook Connect.”  The feature will allow you to call your Facebook friends from Skype.  Called “Skype 5,” the new version is currently in Beta testing and should be announced and integrated in a few weeks.         

There’s no doubt in my mind that the rumors are true.  I’m excited for when “there’s an app for that!”

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Sustainability Q&A with Motorola: Emily Barton

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

This week, Emily Barton, Motorola’s Global Manager for Strategic Environmental Programs, contributed a guest post to the MS&L Chicago blog. As a panelist at our Sustainability Leaders Roundtable next week, she shared her initial thoughts on sustainability, metrics, communication challenges, and more.

What are the best metrics for developing a sustainability plan and to measure your organization’s success?
This is a really timely question- I’ve been in the process of putting together long-term goals for 2011 and beyond, as I’m sure many sustainability managers are. Benchmarking is really important. Many companies have a long history dealing with operations metrics and resource management like water and energy, and issues like waste. Now more companies are looking outside of these typical buckets and into their supply chains at metrics applicable to product design and supplier standards and setting benchmarks. These go beyond operational goals and can be challenging to measure and even more challenging to manage. In these instances, identifying numeric targets and tying key performance indicators to where the impacts exist can be very important. Still, stakeholders and external audiences look to us for traditional metrics—so we strive to do both and try to push ourselves to measure our sustainability progress more outside the standard operational goals.

How are initiatives between sustainability departments and communications teams integrated?
It wasn’t as integrated as it is now. Today, both teams really must collaborate to get good results. For example, five years ago, our environmental report was mainly written and published by our environmental, health and safety department that managed the process. Now our communications and public affairs departments are managing the development of our corporate responsibility report, getting key inputs beyond just EHS department, and handling the process of distributing it out to the right stakeholders. It’s really important that both groups are working as a team.

Do you see any differences in sustainability planning or marketing regionally? For example, how does the Midwest differ from the East or West coast in sustainability strategies?
I see more differences between countries, since I’m the global manager… we don’t set strategies on a regional basis. However, I have noticed a difference from an internal corporate level. For example, if you have a West Coast headquarters, there may be a higher expectation from employees in a corporate campus setting that you’ll have sustainable practices in place- from the cafeteria to the containers that you source. I hear a lot in the news about Google and their sustainable food initiatives at their headquarters. This focus is more embedded in the work culture on West Coast. We definitely see the value from an HR perspective. Organizations are often approached by the HR department to have a stronger sustainability message to help bring in top talent. It’s important to tell talent that we have a strong sustainability point of view during the hiring process.

What kind of challenges do you see in communicating sustainability plans and initiatives to different audiences?
One issue that I see internally and externally is having consistent and accurate messaging. There is definitely an educational aspect here. We need to ensure that PR and communication teams understand the technical side. There may be a negative stigma attached to “eco-marketing” in some cases, so we work with our communications team to develop clear key messages upfront on a particular subject in an effort to assure the messaging is consistent so the subject matter experts don’t have to look at every piece of collateral. I always insist on keeping the message simple and stating the facts in lieu of defining our products with catchy terminology. For instance, instead of going on about how a product is green or sustainable, I like to put forth information about the attributes that will lead the customer or consumer to that conclusion. Personally, I know there is a lot of controversy around Cap-and-Trade, and topics like renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets can be confusing. We invest time with the communications team around subjects like that—it is a critical time in this market to have a strong, accurate sustainability message.

About Emily Barton, Global Manager for Strategic Environmental Programs, Motorola
Emily is responsible for Motorola’s Climate Change Strategy and other related activities. She is the President of the National Association of Environmental Health and Safety Management (NAEM) Lake Michigan Chapter and has held environmental positions at Waste Management, the State of Massachusetts, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Emily received her masters in Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University.

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#CustomerServiceFail

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Lately, I’ve been having a nagging sense of deja vu. Like a small rock in my shoe. It’s the feeling that internet services can’t be relied on. Back in Y2K, everyone expected the entire system to fail at any given moment. Broken links and sites were fairly common. People just dealt with it. No one expected an email returned right away. Fast forward a decade to cloud computing. Internet services are expected to be even more available than their real world counterparts.

But it’s like 1999 all over again if you’re a Chase.com customer, but then Twitter users are probably used to that. Or a Digg reader.

We’ve become accustomed to internet services being as reliable as phone service, available 99 percent of the time. In reality, we’re not quite there. Companies that offer software as a service need to be prepared for crisis communications if and when they experience a service interruption.

Chase.com is an instructive case in what not to do during unplanned down time. On Monday September 13, users began experiencing problems logging in, then the banking service went down – for three days. Late Wednesday, Chase finally restored full service though users continued to report issues. During that time, Chase did little to calm its customers who relied on its internet banking service.

One needs to make friends, before they need to rely on them. Not after. As the crisis began, just when Chase most needed good friends to help tell its story, it had no one to turn to.

To understand the frustration, check out #chasesucks or #chasefail on Twitter. The “I Hate Chase” pages on Facebook are experiencing explosive growth renaisance and with no other alternative, people have taken to venting on what appears to be an unofficial profile.

This became a full blown communications disaster for Chase. It will be interesting to see how Chase responds from here.

What should they have done differently? Many things, not the least of which is having a backup system in place. They also could have leveraged their past social platforms like Chase Community Giving which has 2.5 million followers on Facebook. One thing is certain, they let the situation get out of hand by not having a social media presence in place and ready to communicate with its customers who mainly interact with the bank online. Here’s a few things they could have done to mitigate the situation:

·     Maintain and monitor social media channels.  Chase not only wasn’t listening to their audiences online, they didn’t even have a way to communicate.  Despite the fact that Chase.com has 16 million monthly uniques, it has no managed page on Facebook and @chasebank has been hijacked and now suspended on Twitter.  Nothing could be found on YouTube outside a promotion for its Blueprint feature.  That means for many of its customers, Chase couldn’t be found.

·     Treat online posts seriously.  Like Chase, many companies don’t treat online conversations with the same seriousness as traditional media coverage. Big mistake.  Things  can get ugly quick online.

·     Maintain and monitor a corporate blog.  This would have allowed Chase to at least address the situation.  

·     Respond.  Even if the situation is unclear and evolving, engaging customers is an inherently re-assuring step.

·     Coordinate response with company spokespersons, and of course, customer service.   Sending confusing or contradictory messages is like throwing gas on the fire.   The message should be consistent across traditional, digital and social channels. Rightfully, many of Chase’s customers became alarmed at the situation.   Frustrated they couldn’t pay their bills, afraid their identity had been stolen and generally worried about the safety of their hard-earned money.   Customer service, although reassuring and able to help with transactions had no explanations.

·     Be conversational.   It helps to appear human.  Customers are more likely to forgive people than corporations.

·     Communicate often.   It’s better to deliver a little information often than go long  periods hoping to tell a complete story.

·     Use paid media like search to get the message out quick.  Sometimes, waiting for earned media to work isn’t fast enough.

Arm chair crisis coordinators, what do you think?

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Posted in Digital and Social Media, Issues and Crisis Management, Reputation Management, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Exploring Audience Fragmentation in a Digital Age

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

We live a fragmented existence. Gone are the days when across the United States, we all tuned into the same TV channel at the same time to watch the M*A*S*H finale. Even the Super Bowl isn’t what it used to be.

As a marketer and communication professional, it’s difficult to connect with a broad swath of consumers. Digital channels provide both solutions and new challenges for getting the message out – but delivering any message to the masses in a meaningful way still takes skill.

By trying to speak to everyone, we often risk not connecting with anyone. Aggregating audiences online through social, behavioral and content targeting is all well and good, but if we just deliver single brand message to them, in many cases it may not be worth the effort.

Exploring this topic and creating innovative solutions for clients has been a focus of mine for the past several years. I’m excited at the opportunity to host a presentation and discussion at SXSW Interactive next year where I plan to share real-world examples of how to connect with large cross sections of demographics and divulge some tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

Clients often ask me for my advice on designing campaigns for different audiences and demographics. Some of the questions I aim to answer in my session include:

• What are the challenges to marketing the same digital campaign to different audiences?
• How can marketers tailor messages and campaigns to these audiences?
• What kind of audience data can be aggregated and leveraged from social media campaigns?
• What are the effective tools to reaching fragmented consumer groups?
• What are the benefits and ROI that companies have seen from tailoring campaigns to specific audiences?

But before that happens, the public has to vote for my panel via the SXSW Panel Picker. So please, vote thumbs-up for me today and everyday until Aug. 27th. And feel free to add your suggestions or questions to the comments section—I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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My Experience: Networking in the Public Relations Community

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010


Moving to a new city can be very challenging both emotionally and physically. When I first moved to Chicago, I only knew a handful of people. Luckily, I had brought with me valuable networking skills that I had learned from my travels abroad.

So how do you go about networking? One way is to get involved in your local community. See what’s going on in the neighborhood; attend hobby-related events that interest you. For example, my interest in technology led me to several networking events ranging from topics such as mobile technology to strategic marketing. Typically, those who attend these events are interested in meeting new people, so it’s a great place to start. Whether you’re pursuing a passion or simply expanding your professional knowledge, you’ll find like-minded individuals at networking events. The key is to network with individuals outside your particular industry, as well as your own, because you never know when a connection could turn into an opportunity.

Getting involved online is another fantastic way to network and has quickly become the meeting place for millions of people. Before you know it, you’ll be sitting down for coffee with people you met at an online networking event. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all wonderful social networking applications. Personally, I use them all. In today’s world, it is quite easy for people that share a common interest to initiate conversations with one another. While you may not meet these individuals in person, they can still serve as a great resource and stepping stone into a larger network. I find myself using Twitter frequently to keep an eye out for networking events that appeal to my interests in public relations. Although it may be daunting at first, maintaining an online presence is worth the extra effort to get ahead in the networking game.

Regardless of your passion, do not be afraid to get out there and meet people. Utilize the right resources and you’ll have plenty of events to attend and people to meet. Don’t forget the social networking applications– they are a great place to discover like-minded individuals and to stay in touch with those contacts you’ve already made. Now you have the knowledge, hit the road and start networking!

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Balancing the equation: Media math is hard to reconcile if you’re speaking a different language

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Every digital strategist with dreams of running big high-awareness-front-page-of-Yahoo!-with-full-social-integration promotions is gunning for “TV money.” By TV money, I mean the kind of money that 30-second TV spots traditionally cost to both create and run — hundreds of thousands of US dollars for the creative, and several million for the prime time spots it will fill.

The fact is, TV isn’t what it used to be—which means the dream of snagging TV’s abundance of wealth is more alive than ever. TV dollars are finally transforming into digital dollars, but there’s still a ways to go.

One of the barriers digital had to overcome to unlock TV dollars was making sure that CMOs were comfortable speaking the language of TV: rating points and reach. When trying to build awareness for a brand or a product, and getting a piece of the marketing budget, these metrics were (and still are) the keys to the castle.

Digital strategists traditionally talked about impressions, clicks and engagement. This made it very hard to evaluate the marketing mix across channels. Do TV households equate to impressions? For that matter, what is an “impression?” A “cookie?” A “visitor?” What is the value of a click compared to an eyeball? CMOs had to educate themselves on these questions before shifting the dollars around.

Fortunately, these questions have largely been settled. Over the past several years, digital marketers raised (or lowered, depending on your perspective) the level of its discourse and began speaking in the same language as traditional channels. Thus, the language barrier was removed. The net result? Banner ads for every awareness campaign.

Today, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s all about social media. And as a result of public relations firms taking the lead in the social media space, a fresh marketing discipline is now sitting at the table during the creation process of awareness campaigns.

PR is no longer relegated to only issuing press releases and launching events – social media has thrust us into the spotlight. But PR metrics differ from other marketing channels such as TV, print and traditional online campaigns.

As a result, digital public relations practitioners are going through a similar transformation that digital did several years ago as it tries to reconcile its metrics with the other big marketing channels – TV, print, online, and radio (out-of-home has its own measurement issues to contend with). At the heart of the issue are the definitions of “reach” and “impressions.”

In traditional media math, an ad impression is a single instance of an advertisement being displayed. In order to compare ads across mediums, impressions are measured by their CPM, or cost per thousand. (The ‘m’ comes from mille, Latin for thousand.) “Reach” is the total number of unique people (or households in the case of TV) exposed to an advertisement during a set period of time.

In public relations, we do things a little differently. ”Impressions” represent an opportunity to see an inclusion or mention of a brand or product – this is what other channels would call as “reach,” or “circulation.” This does not account for the percentage of the audience that actually viewed content. Compounding the issue, many PR practitioners use a multiplier on impression numbers to account for pass-along readership or to quantify the credibility PR has over advertising.

This practice can lead CMOs to discount or dismiss PRs effectiveness, as they simply can’t compare PR CPMs apples-to-apples against other mediums when it comes time to allocate dollars.

To command larger marketing dollars, PR as an industry will need to reconcile its media accounting practices with the larger marketing community. This will be challenging and will require education. But it will help unlock more of those “TV dollars” and will ultimately be worth the effort.

Got some war stories about translating media metrics from one discipline to another? Let us know in the comments section.

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3 Easy Ways to Engage Audiences on Facebook

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

These days, it seems like everyone and their mother has a Facebook page. (Side note: My mother literally has a Facebook page through which she enjoys sending me virtual soup when I’m sick. But I digress.) Thousands of brands have created their own hub on the social networking site, hoping to increase visibility and strengthen their social media reputation. But what many forget is that just creating the page itself isn’t enough. Maintaining a vibrant and interactive environment on your brand’s Facebook page is a full-time job that requires thought and ingenuity. Below are three ways to get you started.

1) Encourage discussion. You should make sure that there’s an open-ended component to the content you are posting. For instance, if you’re posting an interesting video, ask your fans to respond to it, or even post their own video responses. And be ready for real feedback—both good and bad. When your fans feel like they’re being heard, they’re more likely to speak up. Moreover, they may have suggestions or ideas on how to further improve your page or even your brand and products—and if you listen to them by making real changes, they’ll keep coming back for more.

2) Only post things that you’d want to see/read/hear. Though your initial instinct may be to post as much content as possible to your Facebook page, ask yourself—“Is this something that I would want to look at? Would it make me stop and pay attention?” If your content isn’t intriguing, it’s just wasting space—and alienating your audience, who’ll become more and more skeptical of your motives. Make sure your content is newsworthy, engaging, stimulating or just plain entertaining. If it isn’t, toss it.

3) Keep your content current. If your brand is coming out with a new product or announcement, don’t wait three days to post the information. Keep your audience abreast of any new developments (good or bad) as they happen. Similarly, if your company is being mentioned in the news, or your industry is getting national attention, make your page the destination for your audience to discuss the topic by starting a conversation in real-time. Your Facebook page can act as another channel through which you promote your own products and media coverage, but it should also act as an informative and dynamic setting where your audience can interact with each other and your brand.

Essentially, it’s important not to think of your Facebook page as a stand-alone entity. Integrate it with your other social media channels and with your brand’s messaging and platforms. Most importantly, pay attention to your fans by listening to them and rewarding them when they interact with you. They’ll become loyal brand activists as a result.

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