Our friend Tom Fishburne recently published this great cartoon on the “Five Stages of a PR Disaster”. Tom’s corresponding blog offers some very simple, yet frequently ignored ground rules for managing a crisis. Among the most important rules for crisis management pros is to be accountable and communicate in ways humans can relate to.

Companies are run by humans. And all humans make mistakes. In looking at recent corporate crises, however, brands are largely judged not on the mistakes they make, but on the way in which those mistakes are handled.  For more Bateman Banter musings on this topic, check out this post from Tyler Perry on the Airbnb snafu or the one I wrote after the BP oil spill.

This is the first in an ongoing series of Q&As with marketing executives and senior management at Bateman Group client companies. The series aims to spotlight the critical issues senior marketers are grappling with and offer practical advice about PR’s role within the broader marketing mix.

The following interview was conducted with Carlos Carvajal when he was vice president of Marketing at Baynote, a leading provider of software solutions for personalizing the online customer experience. Currently, Carlos is vice president of Product Management at Baynote.

Q: What do you view as the most important element of a successful B2B marketing program?

Having the right team in place is first and foremost critical to the success of any marketing organization. Beyond this, there are really three core pillars to running a successful B2B marketing program.

First, marketing needs to be in alignment with the overall corporate strategy which should guide all tactics and campaigns. This sounds simple but all too often is overlooked. Staying true to your strategy often means a slow and steady approach. But in my experience, this approach always wins the race.

Second, a marketing program cannot be successful in this day and age without a strong customer reference program. It’s become increasingly difficult for marketers to differentiate their messages from the competition. This means the real differentiation is best coming through a third party that’s viewed as credible to your target audience. Customers are the most credible source in the eyes of their peers, with industry analysts and media also playing an important role.

Finally, the third requirement is compelling content. There are too many cases where marketing content simply regurgitates a company’s positioning and product messages. Content needs to be useful. It needs to make people feel like you are trying to help them, instead of selling them because people are so desensitized to traditional marketing messages.

Q: In what ways has social media changed the way you approach marketing?

Social media has changed the dynamics of marketing in many different ways but from my vantage point at Baynote the most profound changes are around how we communicate thought leadership and interact with customers. For example, a successful corporate blog allows companies to show thought leadership in a way that conditions people to look for them on a regular basis. This phenomenon didn’t exist with traditional websites because the content wasn’t dynamic and marketers couldn’t truly engage their audience in a two-way conversation.

The important rule with social media is that slow and steady wins the race. You really have to invest and stick with it. It takes time to build a loyal following, but once you have established one it will truly pay dividends.

Q: PR is under a lot of pressure to improve the way it measures business outcomes yet it often lacks access to the KPIs used by marketing, such as data on lead flow, revenue growth and company valuation. What KPIs are you currently held accountable for at Baynote and which of these would you like to see better integrated into PR measurement?

Marketing lives to service sales. Our overarching performance metric for marketing is marketing sourced revenue. We also look at different marketing functions and those that mattered most. From an awareness standpoint, we look at traffic and bounce rates. Is there a steady uptake in traffic? This is far more important than the number of impressions.

With lead generation we look at two things: marketing sourced pipeline and marketing qualified leads. Finally, with product marketing, who’s main job is to enable sales to close leads, we track the opportunity to close ratio.

In terms of the measurement opportunity for PR, I’d like to see a system that tracks the effectiveness of the PR assets the sales team uses, like media coverage and blogs. Through better understanding what specific articles or blog posts played an active role in the different phases of the sales nurturing process, PR could play a more focused role in tangibly driving revenues.

Q: What technology company do you admire most for their marketing effectiveness and why?

It’s hard to pick just one. I really admire Apple for their brand which they’ve built around their relentless focus on staying true to their vision and core competency. Google has done the same thing. Everything with the Google brand and service offering is about simplicity and speed.

I also think Marketo and Hubspot have done an exceptional job establishing thought leadership around the problems they are solving for their customers. They both excel at content marketing.

Q: What piece of advice do you have for PR teams on how they can work more effectively with senior-level marketers?

First, I think it’s important that we look for better ways to share ideas beyond email. This is not limited to PR/Marketing. Businesses simply need more effective collaboration systems that foster better ideas and encourage ways to track progress. At Baynote, we have been experimenting with Box.net to improve collaboration and communication around critical marketing projects and campaigns.

Because marketing is so busy, PR can also help by creating “cookie cutter” emails around company news or competitive moves that can be easily shared with the entire company. This concept of helping senior marketers communicate big wins internally is really simple, and equally as important.

Earlier this month, Bateman Group, along with fellow boutique PR agencies Mindshare PR, LewisPulse, Borders + Gratehouse, Kulesa Faul and Eastwick Communications co-hosted a panel discussion on the evolving forces impacting the marketing leader and how PR can improve the way it works with the broader marketing organization. Moderated by Bateman Group’s Bill Bourdon, the panel included Anurag Wadehra, CMO at Baynote; Darby Williams, VP of Marketing at Sociable Labs; and Michelle Cox, VP of Marketing at Metacafe. All of the panelists offered a unique point of view that made for a very lively discussion. Here are the highlights:

Biggest disruptors to marketers in the past decade: All of the panelists agreed that social media has been the biggest disruptor to the marketer over the last decade. Anurag explained that social media has forced marketers to take on a new role of establishing credibility, and Michelle added that the direct brand-consumer conversation has led marketers to shift their goals from pure customer acquisition to creating brand ambassadors in their customers. This new socially-driven climate has empowered consumers to speak directly with each other continuously, so rather than just push messaging to their customers, marketers need to inform their audience so they can make the right decision.

The relationship between sales and marketing: There was a resounding agreement that marketing is all about driving sales. Anurag provided a great analogy for this relationship: marketing lays down the tracks and sales runs on them. In the end, sales is the most important customer of marketing, he said. On the consumer side, Michelle said sales depends on marketing to recruit new customers, but more challenging is the expectation that marketers will maintain customers through engaging digital experiences so they will return again and again,  ultimately acting as brand ambassadors.

Web content: It used to be that the website was one channel for marketers to deliver their marketing message to customers. Now it’s not just a channel, but a necessary component of an organization that serves as the digital hub for all forms of communication, from sales, to internal communications to outbound marketing. From an outbound marketing perspective, marketers today are acutely focused on influencing the influencers, which means they are talking directly to a highly sophisticated audience that demands direct access, brand transparency and content that speaks directly to them. Content needs to speak to pain points of the customer, and provide tools that the customer can put to use immediately.

Where PR fits into the marketing mix: This portion of the panel was particularly insightful for the agency representatives in the audience, and each panelist offered unique points of view that served as an excellent reminder of what in-house marketers expect of their agencies, and how we can improve our client service.

The key takeaway was that all companies need to tell a story, and PR agencies serve as the amplifier. The best PR agencies fight for a good story and prevent a company from fading into the background. A PR agency does its best work when it has deep knowledge of its client, but can also step back and offer a valuable outside perspective.

It’s was also interesting to hear the panelists say that it’s common for companies to use their agencies inappropriately – while it’s up to the agency to be proactive and driven to deliver results, in-house marketers need to be savvy consumers and recognize the strengths of their PR agencies and give them what they need to be successful – that could be a clear product roadmap, corporate vision, or data like customer references or industry surveys.

I’d like to thank Anurg, Darby and Michelle for being straightforward and honest in their responses – it’s not often that you get an opportunity to hear in-house marketing executives explain their pain points and issues that keep them up at night, and I learned a lot!

The online media landscape today is largely driven by a “break the news first” mentality. Page views, search rankings and publication speed are the new currency for journalists and publishers as they race against time to gain reader eyeballs and click-throughs.

As PR professionals, it’s critical that we adapt our clients’ media strategy to fit this pace. To gain mindshare and the ever-coveted “share of voice,” how can we run in this race? While it’s certainly a sprint, not a marathon, there are many steps you can take on the back end to position your client to seize the opportunity to be included in a story when relevant news breaks. It takes advance planning, combined with a smart blend of social media and traditional media/blogger outreach.

Here are some best practices and strategies for getting your client’s voice included in breaking news stories:

1) Create a trove of pre-approved “Point of Views.” When industry news breaks, time is your enemy. It’s critical that you pitch your clients’ perspective early and quickly to increase the odds of inclusion. Enter the dreaded time killer: the approval process. In the time it takes to draft a viewpoint AND secure client approvals, your media contact has likely already written the story. There’s an easy way to circumvent this – work with your client to pinpoint their industry’s top five issues (e.g., industry consolidation, the new iPhone, mobile payments, etc.) Secure approval for these points of view from the executives. When news breaks, you are now empowered to send out the pre-approved content without a time-consuming approval process.

2) Make it easy for the journalist. In this new media landscape, reporters and bloggers are under pressure to spot and publish original stories on breaking news quickly. Some U.S. outlets have even moved their staff to London in order to get a jump on the U.S. workday. By dipping into your handy trove of pre-approved points of view, you can help out a journalist facing a tight deadline. Also in this email, provide them with everything else they could need to include your client in their story –your spokesperson’s availability for further comment that day, his/her credentials and links to relevant images and background documents. Do this and you’ll quickly establish yourself as a go-to PR contact for sources and commentary.

3) Social media is your friend. Corporate blogs and Twitter are ideal vehicles for broadcasting your client’s perspective, as it not only reaches media but also customers, prospects and other industry influencers in one shot. If your client has a blog, post their breaking news viewpoint and share this link with media. This may even lead a reporter to include a link back to your client’s blog post in their story – goldmine! To maximize exposure, tweet the blog post and invite others to share their perspective on Twitter or by commenting on the post. To reach more reporters, consider direct messaging the ones you follow on Twitter with the link to your client’s post and ask if they are covering the story.

4) Track rumors and speculation. Regularly scan industry blogs that comment on rumors and big pending industry announcements like Engadget and TechCrunch. If you spot something relevant that may bubble up to the surface soon, work with your client to get ahead of the eight ball and get their perspective ready.

These are just a few easy tactics you can use to stay ahead of breaking news. Would love to hear other tried and true tricks!

It’s not a text book, but it should be. Going into my fourth and final year at the University of Oregon, I’ve read my share of textbooks, not all of them good. Famed blogger, speaker and marketing strategist, David Meerman Scott, wrote The New Rules of Marketing & PR which I have to say would be a great supplement to marketing or PR instruction.

For those of us who have grown up immersed in social media, some of what he encourages is intuitive, but a lot of it isn’t. We see public figures misuse social media on a daily basis, and we see our friends do it too. From marketing ourselves in pursuit of a job, to managing a corporation’s reputation, to communicating with consumers, Scott explains what’s necessary to be successful with PR and social media in today’s market (job or otherwise).

Without further ado, here are my impressions on Scott’s new book – from my perspective as a journalism student and two-time summer intern at the Bateman Group…

Favorite Part: “Social Media is a Cocktail Party.”

Growing up in social media is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it’s familiar and second nature; it’s a curse because it’s easy to forget the power of a tweet, status update or post. Scott presents a simple set of rules, a mindset really, to think about. He says that the social rules of a cocktail party are the same as those of social media. Some of the things he urges people to consider:

• Do you go into a large crowd of people, most of whom you don’t know, and shout, “BUY MY PRODUCT!”?
• Do you ask everyone for their business card?
• Do you listen more than speak?
• Do you try to meet every single person, or do you have a few great conversations?
• Do you avoid interaction altogether?

I find this are helpful things to keep in mind for those trying to dip their toes in the social media pool (a little late in the game) and those who forget about the power of social media.

One of my teachers last year surprised us all on the first day of class by presenting a slideshow of everything she could find about us online – one slide per student! Some were good, some were embarrassing and some were downright horrifying. If a few of these students had thought about Scott’s cocktail party analogy, our professor may have respected them a little more for the rest of the term. Then again, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a classy cocktail party in college.

What’s Missing: Cross-Platform Strategies?

One thing that I learned in one if my strategic public relations writing classes at the University of Oregon was how to write a Twitter pitch and search engine optimize a press release. While Scott does give tips to make press releases more visible to the average consumer and internet browser, he doesn’t address how to leverage press releases through social media channels and what the rules for doing so are. Since press releases are no longer meant just for the press (according to Scott), distributing them to consumers is that much more important. Scott espouses the importance for brands to participate where their consumers are participating, but didn’t offer enough practical guidance on how to make press releases more visible to consumers where they read news most, online.

I was also looking for Scott to provide a little instruction on how to make social media presence most productive. There’s not a PR or marketing professional in the world who doesn’t understand – at least on some level – the importance of social media. But with so many marketers still misusing Twitter, for example, what are some proven ways to improve engagement? Contrary to what some may think, you can’t just post a link on Twitter to draw followers in. A good percentage of tweets coming from organizations include a link; and not everyone clicks on every link. Creating an attractive pitch that tells your followers the news, why it’s important and lures them to click in 140 characters or less is no easy task, especially if you have complex news.

Overall Grade: A-

It was a great read. A little long, but Scott’s blogger-esque voice made it more entertaining than the typical run-of-the-mill textbook. Although he covers most of his bases, there are some things missing. I would definitely recommend this book to any professor, grad student or entry level coworker.

In Part 1, we learned about the takeaways one could derive from working at a café, a summer camp, a haughty swim club and a Ryder Inc. rental center. Part 2 will focus on the men of the Bateman Group – Christmas calendar coming soon.

This is Part 2 of 3 profiling the most interesting summer jobs of the Bateman Group inspired by the AdAge article “Guess Which Adman Used to Be the Kool-Aid Man.”

The ever stylish Fred

Fred Bateman

CEO and Founder

Job: Wendy’s Food Server

Lesson Learned: Get the support of your peers

I worked for about three months at a Wendy’s very close to where I grew up in Revere, Massachusetts, a city located just five miles from Downtown Boston and adjacent to Logan Airport. Revere does not enjoy the best reputation and never has. Its inhabitants are best known for being working class, of Italian-American descent (with a smattering of Irish, like my family) and for having very strong Boston accents. Emotions in Revere tend to run high about, well, just about everything.

Revere could be a scary place to grow up – especially if you failed to recognize who sat atop the social hierarchy. It wasn’t the monosyllabic, steroid-filled meatheads who had abs in the third grade and could barely squeeze their enormous frames in their new Chevy IROC Camaros. Not even close. In Revere, it was the girls everyone feared.

Against this colorful backdrop, my summer job at Wendy’s began on a good note. Once the manager realized I could do rudimentary math in my head and could speak to customers in full sentences, I was quickly moved off the food assembly line and on to the cash register full time. This move by the manager; however, did not make me popular with my co-workers, which included four of the toughest, most notoriously violent girls in town – Stacy, Heidi, Kim and her sister Antoinette.

Just how tough were they?  Well, one time Heidi and Kim had a falling out over a guy. Kim “flipped the bird” to Heidi while driving by the restaurant in the passenger seat of the guy’s new IROC Camaro convertible. Heidi, never one to tolerate such a show of disrespect, exacted her revenge by dragging her now former friend Kim into Wendy’s the following night (literally by her hair) and breaking her middle finger in front of all of us. Snap! It was the first and only time I’ve heard the sound of breaking bone.

So, needless to say, it was critical I repair my relationship with these girls and fast. The manager wasn’t helping matters as he continued to give me special treatment, including more flexible shifts. To keep in the girls’ good graces, I would often volunteer to take the trash out even when it wasn’t my turn as well as cover shifts for the girls when emergencies arose – which was frequent. I can’t say we become close friends, but I learned that while it’s important to impress the boss, you also need the support of your peers to actually get the job done and be successful. That, and having all ten digits in working order at the end of the day is an added bonus.

Young William

Bill Bourdon

Senior Vice President

Job: Painter

Lesson Learned: It’s all in the prep work

The summer after I graduated from college, several friends and I started a house painting business to save up enough money to move out of our parents’ houses and venture off into the real world. While I gained a lot of valuable lessons from the business side of this experience – like managing teams, budget forecasting and client service – my biggest take away came from a cardinal rule of the manual labor. It all comes down to the quality of your prep work.

In house painting, prep work is the less glamorous part of the job, including scraping, sanding, priming and caulking. It’s everything you do before the painting begins, and if you want your paint job to stick for many years over – the prep needs to be flawless. Taking shortcuts on prep means a quicker path to seeing that shiny newly painted house. Unfortunately, it also means the paint will prematurely peal off within a year or two. Quality prep and planning is the foundation of any successful communications program. If the message isn’t well crafted or targeted to the most appropriate audience, then the results will always suffer.

I didn't always have long, luxurious hair

Rod McLeod

Senior Associate

Job: Painter

Lesson Learned: Missed details can detract from a stellar job

Bill and I actually listed the same job, the same lesson learned and basically the same narrative, so here’s a different take on the thrilling life of a painter. During the summer after my sophomore year of high school, one of my crew coaches offered me a job to work with him as a painter. He was willing to pay me $9 an hour (San Francisco minimum wage was around $5.75 at the time), and the work was consistent. I thought why not, painting can’t be that hard.

I did everything from landscaping to carpentry to painting, and when it came to the actual painting, it really wasn’t that hard. But like Bill, I soon found out that meticulous prep work was the key to doing a good job, and to go one step further, it was the cleanup that ultimately determined client satisfaction. I could’ve painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but if I left specks of paint on the window and caulk on the floor the client would remember the lack of cleanup, as opposed to the amazing job that I did overall. Paying attention to details applies to every aspect of business, and I’m sure everyone can remember a time when a senior level executive walked away remembering a typo in an email that you sent, instead of the amazing results that your project yielded.

Side note: I would’ve done the gold leafing in Sharon Stone’s house if I didn’t have to quit for water polo pre-season. She has a pretty awesome pad in Sea Cliff.

Max lives a hard life

Max Bourdon

Gentleman of Leisure/Official Office Dog

Job: On-command Recycler

Lesson Learned: A life of leisure is good, but a life of purpose is great

This is my second summer spent as the Official Office Dog of the Bateman Group. In that time, I’ve made friends with the mailmen (except the one whose wedding ring I ate!), splayed my manly belly on every inch of the office and have tasted just about everyone’s used tissues, much to my Dad’s dismay.

But lately, I’ve really been applying myself. You see, the Bateman Group works with a great company called Recyclebank, and while it may be fun as hell to tear up paper and leave it splattered across the agency’s carpets, it’s neither nice nor sustainable! So this summer, I’ve been working on living greener and doing my part to make the world a better place.

But don’t just take my word for it, humanoids. Look at me in action!

Office Dog Max Recycles for Love from Bateman Group on Vimeo.