Digital Insight: Five Elements for Real-Time Engagement

By Gina Gretchko, Annie Elzey, Nick Lucido and Bill Mrazek Senior Account Supervisor, Account Supervisor, Senior Account Executive and Assistant Account Executive, Chicago

Real-time engagement efforts are at an all-time high for brands. While it’s difficult to predict the unpredictable or prepare for the unknown, there are many strategies brand teams can utilize to best adapt to changes in social media.

These five considerations will help organize a brand for real-time engagement:

1. Compatibility Between the Opportunity & Brand Objectives
   Evaluate the event or trend in the context of your brand. Can the brand add value to the conversation or offer a unique position? Does the opportunity fit within the brand’s content and engagement strategy? Just because the topic is generating a lot of buzz doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your brand’s audience or warrants involvement on behalf of a brand.
   
   
2. Building the Real-Time Engagement ”Dream Team”
   Pick your players wisely. Day-of, your real-time team should reflect back to your objectives for the program, ensuring every player has a deliberate purpose. Take account of the resources needed to achieve your desired results, and consider various scenarios that could come into play. Carefully arrange the right team of disciplines – from strategy and creative, to legal and brand representatives, to community management – and confirm how much support is required from each. Then, work to ensure the assigned players have a clear picture of expectations and their roles, understanding how each might affect one another. At the end of the day, an integrated approach will avoid missteps in execution and be critical to your success.
   
   
3. Planning with Fluidity
   Eighty percent of the work should be done before the moment takes place. This includes identifying the value your brand can bring to the conversation and how to deliver that value with content. It is possible to produce skeleton creative templates, such as an image that can be quickly manipulated for real-time publishing. The team must be able to adjust pre-planned content to adapt to unforeseen situations, audience reactions and emerging trends. For example, if a Twitter hashtag emerges, a brand team should consider how it fits within the conversation, while adding value. On the contrary, efforts can quickly decline in quality when brands try to force relevance. Successful real-time engagement relies on planning and instinct. In both cases, processes should be put in place to allow for double-checking of plans and instincts before moving forward.
   
   
4. Persistent Measurement
   It’s essential to consider ways to measure your efforts from the get-go. After setting objectives and goals for the activation, consider what the key performance indicators look like. Determining this framework and ensuring you have the people and platforms necessary to obtain this data will help your analysts pull the proper figures in real time. After the activation is complete, consider developing a recap report that includes benchmarks for future activations to help more accurately determine success.
   
   
5. Transparency & Stakeholder Communication
   It goes without saying that brand teams need to constantly communicate changes in strategy and newly discovered opportunities, but it’s crucial to take that a step further and maintain communication with all stakeholders involved (partner agencies, client contacts, brand influencers, etc.). Maintaining communication and transparency throughout activations will ensure a consistent brand voice and messaging, not to mention allows everyone involved to make adjustments when a tactical audible is called.  

These steps will help a brand prepare for real-time engagement opportunities and unearth any unforeseen weaknesses or opportunities.

The Big Hit: TIME for DigitalGlobe

By Abby Van Uum, Account Executive, Austin

The Big Hit is a monthly feature of notable media coverage secured for a client by an Edelman Southwest team member.

After securing a significant hit with TIME last fall, Austin’s Abby Van Uum worked to establish DigitalGlobe, a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth imagery products and services, as an ongoing photo resource for the outlet. This relationship paid off several months later when photo editor Jonathan Woods reached out looking for a before/after satellite photo of the conflict in Syria.

Because of the relationship Woods and Van Uum had built up, Abby was able to provide a photo and position Digital Globe’s analysis team as expert sources. The result was a full feature that included client quotes, nine images and a specially-built photo tool that had never before been used by TIME.

“The Destruction of a Nation: Syria’s War Revealed in Satellite Imagery” was TIME’s most-read story online, ultimately reaching nearly 3.6M unique viewers. It was shared 1,400 times on Facebook, 1,304 times on Twitter, and 640 times on Google+.  Now that TIME is familiar with DigitalGlobe’s images and expertise, Abby has helped unlock several additional opportunities with the outlet. The full article can be found here. 

Data Security, Privacy and Reputation

By David Chamberlin, General Manager, Dallas

Over the past several months, data and data security have been at the center of public discourse as a number of stories and scandals have come to light. Three of these stories have made major news. A high profile malicious data breach at Twitter led to more than 250,000 users’ data being compromised. The Chinese military is alleged to be collecting information from both the public and private sectors in the United States, including state secrets and privileged corporate information. Finally, the revelation by activist-whistleblower turned international fugitive Edward Snowden of the National Security Administration’s collecting of domestic phone and internet records through the PRISM program continues to stir controversy today. All of these have played roles in making data, and the risks and costs that unsecured data can pose, a top-of-mind issue. 

The simple fact is that all organizations run the risk of having their data compromised. No matter if a business deals with private financial information, personal health records or a trade secret that provides a competitive advantage, there is a hacker somewhere in the world who sees this valuable information as a potential mark. Data breaches pose major reputational risks to organizations. Breaches that result in the loss of proprietary or confidential business information can make a company look ill-prepared, careless or incompetent and customers expect organizations to safeguard their information.

According to the Ponemon Institute’s ninth annual “Cost of Data Breach Study,” the average data breach in the United States now costs an organization over $5.4 million in a combination of detection, notification, post-breach and lost business costs. Additionally, 41 percent of data breaches in the United States are now the result of criminal or malicious attacks. It is also interesting to note that data breaches in the United States that are result of a malicious attack are 60 percent more costly than those attributed to  a system glitch or human error. 

The study has also been able to determine factors that led to a lower cost of that breach. It’s often said that “poor planning on your part shouldn’t constitute an emergency on mine,” but in the case of a data breach, planning is the principal thing that will save a company money. According to the Ponemon study, organizations that had an “incident response plan” at the time of their breaches saw an average cost that was $42 less than the national average, per compromised record. 

So what does this mean for senior executives? Reputation is one of an organization’s most valuable assets and managing it when a data breach occurs is not about spin and is not a job to be left to the legal department. It is a management function that must begin at the top. When a breach occurs, every interaction must be well planned and aligned, including media interviews, customer and employee outreach, regulator and policymaker interactions and operational decisions. The only ways to mitigate the reputational and financial repercussions of a data breach are, following the Boy Scouts’ lead, to be prepared. 

Media Trends: Native Advertising

By Donya LaHaye, Mike Shriner and Carolyn Pilkington Account Supervisor, Senior Account Supervisor and Vice President, New York

Storytelling, journalism and advertising have evolved significantly over the past decade, resulting in many new tools to effectively tell stories. Accordingly, there’s been a paradigm shift in how forward-thinking agencies and clients generate content and interact with their target publics.

Native advertising, a method in which the advertiser provides content in the context of the user's experience, is the new model for advertising online. Take the recent Buzzfeed post, “15 Reasons Why Cats Are the Most Fearless Creatures,” for example. It appears similarly to other Buzzfeed content, but is actually a Target ad for pet food and toys. Another example is found in Forbes BrandVoice content, sponsored articles such as “Artistic Entrepreneurs Fuel the Creative Economy - It takes a community...,” which appear as other Forbes articles but are native ads.

Media outlets including the New York Times, FOX News and more are turning to native advertising for sponsored content that will hold viewers’ attention, and it’s an area Edelman is pushing head-first into. 

Here are some tips on how to do it successfully:

• Don’t be intrusive, but create a value exchange with consumers. Create something that people want to experience and that touches or entertains them versus something they have to endure.
• Play to a platform’s clearest and purest intention, and deliver your brand message in a way that’s organic to that platform/location.
• Participate in spaces that are authentic to the brand and to the audience.
• Be transparent when you’re advertising, not deceptive, or you break the social contract with consumers. For example, don’t try to disguise an advertorial or paid content as editorial, as 58% of people find sponsored stories misleading and lose trust in a brand as a result.
• Content is only as valuable as the strategy to push it out, which platforms you push to and who helps push it out.
• The media landscape is only going to be more cluttered. It’s increasingly important to be diligent about the story we tell, why it matters, why we have the right to tell the story, who we are telling it to and how we are telling it.

Begin It Now

By: Helen Vollmer, President, Edelman Southwest

I just got back from Edelman’s Global Leadership meeting in Germany where our own fearless leader, Richard Edelman, did a brilliant job of articulating where we as a company are headed. As the world’s largest public relations firm, we take very seriously our role in continuing to raise standards and evolving our industry to better serve our clients in relevant, strategic, effective and creative ways that mirror marketplace needs and propel us all forward.

Vision is a tough, risky business. It’s definitely not for sissies. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and even easier to rest on our laurels. We should be diligent about looking at our work and core values through a different lens periodically, but the details of life often get in the way.

That’s where we all have a role to play. Far too often in organizations, vision is seen as the playground of top leadership only. It’s easy to defer to others rather than taking on the vision mantle ourselves, owning it and acting on ideas that may make some uncomfortable. The truth is that the people we most admire didn’t start out as leaders; Henry Ford and Steve Jobs were just regular Joes like the rest of us. They just stepped up to the plate as visionaries and boldly took us all forward.

My favorite words to live by come from the German philosopher Goethe and say it better than I ever could: “Whatever you do, or dream, begin it now.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

And vision I might add. Our time to step up to the plate is now.