Customer Service Sets You Apart – Especially When Things Go Wrong

Posted on: 06.13.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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In the past two days, my perception of two brands changed for the better, even though things went wrong with both of them.

This week we are rapidly closing-in on two coincidental yet important events: Father’s Day and my annual family vacation.  Usually before we leave for a week in the Carolinas, I stock up on a few things and invariably order items online.  And with Father’s Day on the horizon, a lot of guy stuff is on sale.  So here’s what I shopped for and why my perceptions changed.

One of my clients gave me a gift card from Dick’s Sporting Goods.  I had never shopped there before as the nearest location is about an hour away, and I have literally no brand perception of Dick’s beyond hearing the company’s ads on sports radio.  I decided to use the gift card to order a new tackle box.  It arrived yesterday, in time for my trip, but it was missing some pieces (not sure why).  I called Dick’s and without any fuss, the company agreed to send me another tackle box via overnight delivery.  (I have to ship the incomplete one back but on Dick’s dime).  Despite the fact that someone didn’t properly check my original order, Dick’s created a favorable impression with me because when I complained, they treated me right.  I didn’t have to beg, raise my voice, ask to speak with a supervisor or otherwise “escalate” it to a higher authority.  So guess what?  Even though there isn’t a Dick’s Sporting Goods store within 30 miles of me, the next time I want to order golf equipment or other fishing gear, Dick’s will get the nod.

Also in advance of the trip, I made my annual “kicking and screaming” pilgrimage to buy “menswear” for work and off-days when I’m supposed to be presentable.  Again, everything is on sale in advance of Father’s Day, and I have been regularly bombarded with ads from the oddly punctuated clothier JoS. A. Bank (turns out Joseph A. Bank Clothiers, Inc. is a NASDAQ-traded company that has been around since 1905 and has more than 600 locations.  I had no idea).  So I went to the store near my house and bought several dress shirts and a few pairs of pants.  Said trousers were supposed to be hemmed before I left on vacation, but the store called a couple days ago and said the tailor had been sick and it would take a few extra days.  I called them back and politely told the store manager that the delay was unacceptable as I would be leaving town in a few days and needed to wear pants.  When pressed about the pants (ha), he agreed to have them done for me on time.  When I stopped in to pick them up (they were ready with no further hassles), the manager was so nice and apologetic that I decided to do some additional shopping.  Amazingly, I found a blue blazer that fit me right off the rack (which has never happened, ever – ever).  The price was right and I bought it, but when the clerk took the coat into the back room to pack it up, he noticed a tiny hole where the shoulder met the sleeve of the coat – and he wouldn’t sell it to me.  Frankly, I would have never noticed the itsy bitsy hole had he not pointed it out – Mrs. David would have, but not me.  I tried-on another blazer but I couldn’t find one that fit as well as the original, pin-holed version.  The charge was reversed and I left the store without a new coat, but with a whole new appreciation for JoS. A. Bank.  I still don’t understand the name and how they abbreviate it, but I like the brand.

Muhammad Ali once said: “Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.”  How we handle adversity in customer service has as much to do with our brand’s success as the quality of our product and the nature of our message.  I imagine the “The Greatest” would agree.

I wish everyone a great summer and a Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there.  And if you are still looking for a last-minute gift, might I suggest Dick’s Sporting Goods or JoS. A. Bank. 

Have you ever had a similar experience, when good customer service trumped a bad experience?  Let me know.

—John

www.miamipublicrelations.com

Author: John P. David

Specialists Outflank Daily Newspapers

Posted on: 03.13.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Each morning, I walk outside and pick up my copy of The Miami Herald, rescuing it from my driveway after its morning skid along the asphalt.  Sometimes I wonder how many dinosaurs like me remain, actual subscribers who read the print edition of a daily newspaper.  Except for the Sunday edition, which still has some heft, the Herald continues to thin.
 
Experts and novices alike have been waiting to “call the body” on dailies like the Herald for more than a decade.  But the publication lives on, as do dozens of other “major” dailies around the country.  Not only are the metro dailies thinner, but the long-term revenue model appears untenable (has for years).  And a daily newspaper has to be the “least green” product imaginable – it’s made from trees and is usually obsolete a few minutes after it hits your stoop.
 
While the advertising model is a monster challenge and the printing costs are exorbitant, what I believe is truly grinding down dailies is their continuing effort to try to be media generalists.  Papers like the Herald cover national news, the crime beat, entertainment and food, fashion, sports, neighborhood happenings, and on and on.  If I tried to get venture capital funding for a business that wanted to cover all these areas on a metro level, I would get laughed out of the room.  Speaking to my friend and really smart marketing guy Carlos Blanco about this, he was cold-bloodedly forthright: “The Internet killed the generalists.”  My take: He’s right and the big dailies don’t know it or can’t seem to admit it.
 
Meanwhile, the specialists soar.
 
One of the breakout stars of the 2012 election coverage was a wonky blogger named Nate Silver.  His FiveThirtyEight.com blog was licensed for publication by the New York Times, and for the final weeks of the campaign, his polling prognostications were like “must see TV.”  Friends on Facebook were checking his blog several times a day with cult-like verve.  Silver is the ultimate media specialist.  His Wikipedia bio calls him “an American statistician, sabermetrician, psephologist, and writer.”  I don’t even need to look those up; certainly, he’s no generalist.  A couple days after the election, Silver appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!”  (Watch it here).  I’m guessing this was the first time Stewart featured a psephologist (which is an expert in the study and scientific analysis of elections – OK, so I did look it up).
 
For local stories, specialists triumph too.
 
One of the biggest “Miami” stories in recent memory is the saga of Ponzi schemer and ne’er-do-well former University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro.  Yahoo Sports first reported his exploits, which allegedly included supplying cash and prostitutes to football players.  Somehow, a gifted specialist working for the editorial side of a flagging search engine swooped-in and scooped the Miami Herald on one of its most-prized beats.
 
Another big story, the steroid scandal involving Major League Baseball players, more UM athletes and others, was first reported by Miami’s New Times, a paper with the main goals of muckraking and entertainment coverage.
 
And it’s not just here.  Do you think daily reporters in Chicago and South Bend, Indiana were happy to see Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o’s story break on DeadSpin.com?  Aside from learning the wacky details of the fake girlfriend, I was surprised to read that several members of the team of specialists from the Gawker.com-owned DeadSpin were actually interns.
 
Back home, generalist daily publications like the Herald are trying to cover subjects as varied as the Everglades, county hall, Castro, condos, Art Basel, the Heat and the humidity.  It’s an impossible mandate because the reporters, regardless of their talent, don’t have the time to cover all of these areas well.  And if they dig-in on one topic, they will have to leave another unguarded – and that’s when the specialists will jump in and eat their lunch.
 
I’m not sure what the answer is for metro dailies.  They face tremendous institutional pressure to be the catch-all media outlets in their markets.  Sadly, I don’t think it will necessarily be printing costs that lead to their ultimate demise.  As long as metro dailies remain “masters of none,” the specialists will continue to siphon-off their readers and their revenue.

Do you still get a daily newspaper delivered to your home or business?  Let me know.  And to see other blogs from top Florida marketing minds, visit www.marketinggroupie.com. 

—John

www.miamipublicrelations.com

Author: John P. David

Not Calling the Marlins Disingenuous

Posted on: 03.06.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Some PR efforts don’t succeed.  Last week, Miami Marlins owner Jeffery Loria bought full-page ads in South Florida’s daily newspapers and published an open letter to fans.

He defended last year’s dismantling of the team, suggested that money it receives from tourist taxes is not “public” money, and largely blamed everyone but himself for the team’s tattered reputation and abysmal ticket sales.  He followed the widely panned letter with a press conference reasserting the same points.  None of it was well received.
   
A columnist for the Associated Press has since asked the question: “Is Jeffrey Loria the worst owner in the history of sports?” 

Aside from all the rich material here, I was struck by the word choices and tone taken by Marlins President David Samson in a recent story in The Miami Herald: “I’m not going to say Miami is not a sports town,’’ he said. “Or that there is something wrong with the fans? I would never say that.”

Oh you wouldn’t, would you?  I think you just did.

I find this type of language fascinating.  A former client once said to me: “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but I think…”  Guess what?  He was telling me how to do my job, just as Samson is saying there’s something wrong with the fans in Miami.

Given my fascination for this “saying it but not saying it” tactic, I decided to seek an expert opinion.  I called my friend Dr. Oren Wunderman, a psychologist who also serves as CEO of Miami’s Family Resource Center, a wonderful non-profit group that helps foster kids get adopted.  Oren has forgotten more about psychology than I will ever know.

He called Samson’s language a “paradoxical assertion,” where a person asserts a point in one part of a statement and then negates it in another.

“State it and withdraw it,” said Wunderman.  “Very sneaky.”
 
For some of his adolescent patients, Wunderman says such language is unconscious, and he doesn’t hold them accountable for it.  With adults, he sees it as a form of manipulation.

Now, I don’t just want to pound on Loria and Samson while they are down.  I have never met Loria, but I like Samson.  I have heard him speak several times at chamber of commerce meetings and he’s a very smart guy.  He’s an advocate for the arts, a proponent of increased fitness and was even pretty good in his cameo role in the recent “The Three Stooges” movie (I’m not kidding: Here’s more on it).

Regardless, the Marlins leadership misjudged how the latest PR efforts would play out.  To right the ship and reconnect with South Florida’s fickle fans, I have a few suggestions for Loria and Samson.

Stop talking about the public financing issue.  Some people will always be upset that your stadium is publicly financed.  Stop worrying about how the stadium was paid-for and stop bringing up the negatives.  Get over it.  In Miami, we are used to government using our money incorrectly.  Defending the financing plan is impossible – our last mayor lost his job because of it.  And by the way, whoever gave you the “it’s not public money” sound bite ought to have their head examined.  “It’s not public money because it’s from the tourist bed tax?”  Are you kidding me?  So the millions in tourist taxes would just evaporate into the humid Miami night if we didn’t earmark it for your stadium?  A lot of people will hate it forever and you can’t change them; so move on.

Stop blaming.  Blaming is bad for business.  Sorry, but it is neither the media’s nor the fans’ fault that the vitriol is flying and nobody wants to buy a season ticket.  Yes, people are piling-on, but every sports franchise has to take the good with the bad.  Each time a Marlins executive blames the fans or media, he sounds like a petulant child.  At this point, nobody cares if you take your ball and go home.  Remember, the fans pay your salary and right now they don’t think you have earned your pay.  As for the media, no other business aside from sports has multiple pages of daily newspapers devoted to it everyday.  Media coverage is a tremendous gift, but with coverage comes scrutiny.  You have to roll with it. 
   
Stop being so disingenuous.  Right now, all fans hear is whining and double-talk.  Saying that the team is better off now because it has improved its farm system doesn’t play at all in “win-centric” South Florida.  My suggestion would be for the team’s executives to sit down with fans and season ticket holders and get their feedback.  Listen to your base of support and hear them out.  Take your medicine, then explain your decisions and be honest that you believe this strategy gives you the best chance to get back to the World Series.  Next, develop a long-haul position that focuses on what fans will see on the field this year.  Lastly, get your promotions team working on plans to put some butts in seats, so you can start genuinely re-earning faith.

The Marlins face a long rough road to improve their on- and off-field performance.  If they back down from the negative messaging, and take a long-term and genuine approach, then they can win back South Florida fans.  If not, expect the chilly relationship to continue.

What do you think?  Did the Marlins need the reboot or is it another money grab?  Will you be going to any games this year?

—John

www.miamipublicrelations.com

Author: John P. David

How a $50-Per-Article Blogger Can Damage Your Brand

Posted on: 02.28.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Last week, a blogger for a national news website wrote a hit piece on one of my clients.  Without getting into the details, the story was riddled with a nasty mix of inaccuracies, poor reporting and marginal grammar – as well as a number of typos. My client is in an industry that is no stranger to attacks, but this one was particularly troubling not because of the message — but because of the medium. 

One of the downsides to the Internet’s democratization of journalism is that nearly anyone can act like a journalist.  While this is a tough reality for actual journalists and PR people alike, the economics make it even rougher.  As we dug into the background of this particular blogger, we learned that she was a fairly new contributor to the outlet, and we also found out how she was compensated.  In black and white on the organization’s website, I read (I swear in genuine horror), that this blogger was probably paid about $50 for the article.  For fifty bucks of short-shrift work, she did harm to my client’s brand. 

At a mere fifty dollars per article, one is automatically incentivized to produce quantity over quality and therefore good writing, actual reporting and solid journalism get lost.

If you write one article a day, that means you earn $250 per week – which is less than minimum wage if it takes you all day to do it.  One can only assume that bloggers for publications like this are pumping out as much content as they can each week — grammar and accuracy be damned.

Later that same day, I had coffee with another PR professional, and we had a conversation about crisis communications.  Of course, we talked about Carnival and its poop cruise, but I decided to add in my recent experience with the fifty dollar blogger.

Naturally, cruise ship fiascos, product tamperings and kids in harm’s way are the most read-about PR crises.  But I suggest that almost every high profile company should have a plan in place to not only deal with possible human tragedy but also Web journalism miscues.

What is a PR crisis anyway?  Does it have to be as big as Carnival, Lance Armstrong or Penn State?   For example, I believe that when a business has to lay off 50 people, that’s a crisis.  If an employee is victim of a random act of violence, that’s also a crisis. 

If an under-compensated blogger inaccurately rips your brand with a piece that gets syndicated nationally, then guess what, you have a crisis on your hands too.

What to do about it
Keep a lookout.  If you aren’t already monitoring your company’s media coverage through Google alerts and other web searches, hop to it.  Make sure you do everything you can to see coverage of your company the moment it hits.

Articles can be corrected.  Fortunately for the client I mentioned earlier, we reached out to the outlet and they made a number of meaningful corrections.  Pre-Internet, you had to live with errors and fight publishers for a correction.  Today, web-based publications can make changes after the fact, so the offending copy doesn’t have to live online forever.

Figure out who to complain to.  This can be tough.  We had a similar issue with a blogger a few years ago, and I truly felt helpless.  If you are dealing with a well-known publication, then you will have a better chance of securing changes.  If not, you have to find your way to the original author and make your case.

Take the right tone.  Lay out your options and consider your tone before deciding to “rip ‘em a new one.”  Most reporters want their stories to be accurate, so I believe in taking a softer approach.  A strategy that includes pointing out inaccuracies and incorrect inferences usually works better than harshly demanding a correction.

Get legal, if you absolutely have to.  Honestly, this is a last resort in my opinion.  In many instances, reporters make mistakes but it’s rare for them to break the law.  Believe me, some reporters are unethical and slippery, but I have never had a client sue one.

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This and That.  If you like learning about marketing from some of Florida’s top advertising, branding and marketing minds, check out a new e-paper called Florida Marketing Groupie.  We just launched it.  Subscribe (it’s free) and I’ll be your best friend.

Have you ever been burned by a blogger?  Is any PR a good thing, as long as they spell your name right?  Let me know what you think.

—John

www.miamipublicrelations.com

Author: John P. David

Turn Your Oreos Into News

Posted on: 02.22.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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While the lights were out at the Super Bowl, Nabisco sent out a tweet with an image of an Oreo cookie and the caption: “You can still dunk in the dark.”  The free tweet garnered as much post game attention as many of the million dollar commercials and also showed how quick and clever social media marketing can outpace the most expensive mainstream campaigns.

While I can’t say I have ever made national news from a clever, well-timed tweet, I can say that one can regularly get news coverage by jumping on a trend or taking advantage of breaking news.  It’s actually a cornerstone of media relations, and one PR professional recently coined a term for it: “Newsjacking.”

Marketing guy David Meerman Scott wrote a book on the topic and also talked about it at South by Southwest (SXSW), the film, interactive and music festival/conference that takes place every spring in Austin, Texas.  He defines it as “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.”  You can buy his book at here.  Most interesting to me was this graphic which shows the best time to capitalize on a breaking news story.

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Most media relations pros have been newsjacking for decades.  A couple years ago, we were discussing the latest happenings in the automobile dealer world with our client, attorney Alex Kurkin of Kurkin Brandes, and he mentioned that he was swamped with calls from his dealer clients who were confused about the “Cash for Clunkers” stimulus/rebate program.  We jumped on the case and pitched his perspective to reporters around the country.  We ended up securing several interviews for him, and he was widely quoted in the New York Times.

Last year, as Facebook was slowly rolling out its Timeline feature, we learned from our client The Lifeline Program that its senior citizen Facebook fans were up in arms about the change.  Lifeline had switched its Facebook page to Timeline early to try to prevent confusion but instead got hit with blistering complaints from angry octogenarians (some of them can swear with the best of us).  We quickly pitched this story to tech reporters who had been monitoring the big switch to Timeline, and a journalist from the San Jose Mercury News interviewed Steve Terrell of Lifeline.  The story was picked up by dozens of newspapers around the country including the L.A. Times, Kansas City Star and Chicago Tribune.

And I did some newsjacking of my own recently.  After writing a blog post early on about how Lance Armstrong could mount a comeback, we pitched our PR expertise and landed an interview with Metro in London.  The reporter’s story was picked up by a number of outlets online including Spiegel in Germany.  Call it an international newsjack.

My Keys to Newsjacking
In the interest of complete disclosure, I haven’t read Scott’s book.  (It would probably just upset me that he thought of it first.)  But I’m confident that I can offer some tips that can help anyone newsjack a national story.

Be quick.  As Scott’s diagram shows, you have to identify a trend that you think will be national news before it reaches the top of the arc.  For example, Lance Armstrong announced his intention to come clean on a Friday afternoon.  I saw the story over the weekend and got inspired to blog about it.  Our news release on the topic was distributed shortly after the news broke that he would appear on Oprah.  We had some credibility because we had already posted about the topic, and we were ahead of other PR people with the same idea.

Use real examples.  It’s not good enough that you are an expert on a topic.  Wiggling your way into a big story requires you to have an opinion and hopefully some real world examples.  For our client Alex Kurkin, he had firsthand experience with the chaos being created by Cash for Clunkers.  Steve Terrell of Lifeline had been deleting expletive-laden comments written by angry seniors from his Facebook page.  The examples give a story color, and an expert needs to talk specifics, not just generalities.

Take a position, now’s your chance to give your opinion.  When major news is forming, people are starting to take sides.  If you are on the “less popular” side, you have a better chance of getting coverage.  I’m not suggesting you always look for the contrarian position, but it helps if you can make arguments for either position.  Whenever I ask my commercial litigator brother Chris for his opinion about a legal case in the news, his answer is always the same: “What side am on?”  Having a counter-balancing opinion can pay off.

Keep pushing.  The PR game is a marathon, not a sprint.  If you feel as though you can be an expert on short notice for national media, keep pushing for it.  New stories come along every day, and the media’s attention shifts like the wind. 

Have you ever newsjacked a national story?  And more importantly, do you dunk your Oreos?  Let me know.

—John

www.miamipublicrelations.com 

Author: John P. David