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Face it, you're talking to a person
April 08, 2010
An interesting tweet relating to Hubspot’s findings that those with a Twitter avatar displaying a photo stand to gain ten times as many followers as those without, kicked off a healthy debate which prompted me— the Marketing Donut Twitterer — to question whether I should come out from behind the logo and show my face. If it wasn’t already conflicting enough to know whether ‘I’ am in fact a ‘We’ during commercial tweeting hours, this dilemma hits me. It was almost enough to induce a psychotic episode.
There are valid reasons for presenting the Marketing Donut as a face. It could produce tangible gains in number of Twitter followers and the quality and quantity of interactions. But when you communicate with @MarketingDonut - or any of the Donuts for that matter - you may not always be talking to the same person. Holiday leave, sickness and just being plain busy can often mean a personnel shuffle when it comes to Twitter. Without blowing the lid on the Twitter Magician’s code here at Donut Towers, we try to maintain the same team member on each Donut account for reasons of continuity and to give each Donut its own distinct personality. But, as the theatre waiver goes, the performance may be subject to last-minute cast changes.
On the whole, it is me - James Ainsworth - behind the tweets and if you were to DM the Marketing Donut, characters permitting, I would sign off as ‘James’. But I hope you enjoy following the Marketing Donut Twitter account for a plethora of reasons, not least for the content we share but for that little sparkle of personality that comes through every day.
The salient point from the discussion was made by @benparkatbjs, “Surely it depends. If a one-man band, tweeting with your own pic is fine, but if you're a donut, surely donut logo better?”
In a recent blog post written by Jan Minihane on the topic, she rightly points out that face value is better for individual accounts. But Jan also concludes from further discussion with her Twitter following that corporate accounts with multiple staff should “Use your logo as you are promoting the corporate brand, not an individual. (unless most of the brand value is you, in which case you may want to go with a picture of yourself).”
And what of the deliberate tactic deployed by @web_D, “I have used really small text and oversized logos to encourage people to click and see the full version”?
Should the Marketing Donut — as a publisher of resources for small businesses — be identifiable by the branding that has been created already or -as a mainly one man Twittering band - should I have my world-weary face as the avatar, bedecked with some kind of Marketing Donut insignia or, if you please, a Twibbon?
If you really want to see me on Twitter then you can follow me here but don’t expect such useful small business marketing advice. You have been warned!
PR doesn't work
May 01, 2009
What have I learned from spending the thick end of a decade in PR? Well, I’ve learned many things. And one of them is that PR doesn’t work.
Never mind my own experiences and opinion, I’ve heard it said so many times it must be true.
I’ll try to explain.
I spent about three years as a supplier of PR services to Microsoft UK, in particular developing and managing PR-related services that were made available to Microsoft’s network of Gold and Certified partners. These partners came in all shapes and sizes – some were very well versed in PR and marketing, others hadn’t a clue. Plenty had an ad hoc approach to this sort of thing and it was from this group that I learned that PR doesn’t work.
If you’ll forgive me for generalising a little, I can give you a taste of what I heard – usually it went something like this...
“PR..? Yeah, we tried that once a few years ago. It didn’t work.”
And that’s the thing with PR – if you only try it once, or if you don’t invest any focus in it, it probably won’t work.
PR requires commitment – a consistent series of messages pushed out to your target press. I’ve worked with companies who have successfully used PR to out-gun much larger competitors when it came to public perception, proving that hard work and knowing your onions can beat deep pockets time and again.
For a lot of smaller businesses the target press is often the local press or the trade press in your market sector.
You can push out your messages with press releases, letters to the letters page (where better after all..?), photo opportunities, and a host of other things.
But whatever you do don’t just decide to punt out a press release about your new office premises and expect the cry of “hold the front page” to echo throughout the land. Read the press you’re targeting, see what kind of stories they run and try to emulate them. Better still, see if you can identify which individual journalists write about the sort of things you want to say and contact them directly when you have something interesting to tell them.
Finally, remember that one of the differences between PR and advertising is that you shouldn’t expect the press to write word-for-word what you tell them, nor will they show you what they’ve written in advance of publishing it – don’t ask, you’ll only cause offence! Journalists are not an extension of your marketing team and editorial is not the same thing as advertising. It is independent, free from fear or favour (supposedly) and that’s why it can be such a valuable and effective way of publicising what you do.
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