Dan O’Keeffe, CEO & President of O’Keeffe PR, appeared on an episode of “Side Hustle City,” a podcast that shares experiences, provides inspiration and lessons learned with listeners who are working hard to achieve their dreams.
In this episode, Dan shares his perspective on how you can become a successful marketer and grow your business, even if it’s a side hustle.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. The coronavirus may be the most global and universal crisis business leaders have had to face in their careers, but it is far from the only one. Cyber attacks, the #MeToo movement, and account fraud scandals have forced many businesses – both big and small into crisis management mode.
In times like these you can see the that there are companies that are ready to communicate effectively during a crisis, and those that aren’t.
A crisis doesn’t have to be cataclysmic, like communicating with employees and customers during a once-in-a-generation pandemic. Maybe it’s a workplace accident that highlights your safety protocols. Or a failure to deliver hundreds of products on time to various customers.
Managing Communications in a Crisis
Managing a company through a crisis is about relaying essential information to the right people, efficiently and effectively.
A crisis really multiplies when it catches the attention of the media. Whether that media is social, traditional or otherwise, it can put your problems under an unwanted spotlight.
Planning is Key
The point is to be ready, and to have a plan. Think about the ways in which your company might be susceptible to an unfortunate event. Then map out what might happen, what the ramifications might be and what the public might see or hear. In today’s fast-moving news world, you can expect that news of your crisis will spread quickly so you want to be in control of the message.
Three Basic Rules
The basic rules for crisis communications are simple:
Think about the people who need to know what’s happening. People in your company deserve to know first.
Even if your company has managed to avoid the spotlight, you’ll want to be ready for a sudden increase in attention.
In all of these conversations, your goal is to be consistent. Work with one set of facts and statements and return to them often.
Navigating To the End
The goal is to offer as much information as you can, to do it quickly, and to the right audiences. This simplified plan helps you with the other job: solving the problem that created the crisis in the first place.
Finally, know when you need some expert help. When you’re faced with a communications challenge, contact us.
It’s down to the final days before the election, and no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall to, we all are anxious for a conclusion. The election seems to be everywhere you turn, and unsurprisingly, that includes social media.
Elections provide their own set of challenges for marketers, even if your brand has nothing to do with the election. Here are three key takeaways for social media that we’ve identified that are particularly important during election season.
Increase in Political Noise
From billboards, to TV ads, to social media, it’s hard to avoid the election. Candidates both cause and experience a huge increase in digital activity as the big day gets closer. While your brand may have nothing to do with such content, it is still taking up space that could otherwise be filled with your brand. Some of this content is candidate promotion, news stories, or simply conversations about the candidates. Social platform algorithms will favor this content, not just because people want political content, but because it’s the hot topic that everyone is talking about.
Decrease in Organic Performance
Along with this increase in political content comes a corresponding decrease in your brand’s social media performance. Not only are you competing with huge volumes of political content, but other brands are increasing their advertising budgets to rise above the noise. It’s going to be tough to compete in this crowded arena, but polls from the Pew Research Center suggest that 46% of social media users were already feeling exhausted by political posts on social media. And that was a year ago! If users are taking breaks from social media, whether for days, weeks, or months at a time, you can expect to see a dip in organic metrics (reach, engagement and followers).
Increase in Ad Cost
It’s the simple law of supply and demand; as demand for political ad space increases, the cost of those ad placements will increase. Combine this with some users taking a break from social media, and you are going to get much less for your ad dollars.
Home Stretch
The good news for all of us is that the end of the latest political season is coming to a close. In the meantime, you are going to want to level-set your expectations for social performance for the next couple of weeks. And take heart, once this is over, there will be an increased appetite for new and different content. That’s when your brand can make a statement. To learn more about improving your social media and metrics, connect with one of our experts.
Collaboration is critical to the creative process. And where collaboration often begins is with brainstorming…that moment when a project team puts their heads together to come up with a solution for the problem at hand. It takes planning to conduct a good brainstorming session. Without proper planning, it can be a colossal waste of time.
Now, imagine the kind of chaos that can come from brainstorming with people in various locations. Due to ongoing precautions related to COVID-19, many, including the O’Keeffe team, continue to operate remotely. We’ve had to adjust the ways we collaborate to ensure we can still meet the demands of the job.
So, how do you replicate the effectiveness of collaborating in person?
Reviewing the topic and goal at the beginning of the meeting can cost valuable time and just sucks more air out of the room. By distributing the topic and goal in advance, your team will have an opportunity to prepare. Ask each individual to come to the session with a few ideas so you can jump right into the discussion.
Be respectful of the team members’ time. With many working from home, it’s easy to unknowingly encroach on personal time or obligations that come from working remotely. Also, keep in mind that teams aren’t always in the same time zone. So, while running a little long might not be a problem for you, it can interrupt someone else’s dinner.
Appoint a facilitator who can establish and maintain focus on the topic at hand. It can be difficult for teams to stay on track for an extended period of time. One topic can lead to another, and the next thing you know your hour is up and you have accomplished very little.
It’s important that you don’t let your brainstorm session become a waste of time and energy. It’s essential that you turn those ideas from the brainstorm into actions. The facilitator should follow up with participants to remind them of ideas generated and any “to do” lists for the team to turn those ideas into reality. The O’Keeffe team creates a Google Doc to house all of the information from our meetings so participants can add to the conversation.
Effective virtual brainstorms can be conducted; they just take a little extra time and preparation. Hopefully, these tips can help you get started and stay on track. How is your team navigating brainstorms in the age of Zoom meetings? Let us know!
O’Keeffe PR, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based content marketing and public relations agency, announces that Rick Hackman, former leader of The Procter & Gamble Company’s (PG) North America Regulatory and Technical External Relations Organization, has joined the O’Keeffe team to launch its Brand Steward Services division.
Brand Steward Services leverages Hackman’s 33 years of experience at P&G to advise companies and organizations in diverse industries on how to identify and assess business risks related to products and services, how to create plans to mitigate risks, and how to interact with government agencies in managing risk and crisis situations, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Enhanced by Hackman’s expertise, O’Keeffe can guide organizations in addressing top threats to their brands, training key personnel, providing scenario planning, and developing respected external stakeholders who will stand by an organization in times of need.
“The potential for damage to brands seems to lurk around every corner in today’s hyper-social and visualized world. Rick brings an unparalleled mix of experience, wisdom and clarity that can help brands navigate and overcome obstacles that otherwise could sink an organization’s future,” said Dan O’Keeffe, O’Keeffe PR’s CEO and founder. “We’re excited to have Rick join our team and now raise the bar globally for quality and longevity to enterprises and brands.”
During his time with P&G, Hackman led key interactions with critical regulatory agencies, developed trusting relationships with key external stakeholders to build and protect the business, and led crisis preparedness and business continuity planning (BCP) for P&G’s North American organization. Hackman was instrumental in helping to resolve important product safety issues and challenges across a variety of P&G brands. At O’Keeffe, Hackman will help organizations evaluate their product and business risks, develop action plans to mitigate identified risks and develop business-building relationships with professional and technical thought leaders.
Hackman joining O’Keeffe broadens O’Keeffe’s services to include:
About O’Keeffe PR
O’Keeffe PR is a public relations and content marketing agency focused on helping its clients tell the right story, on the right channel, to the right audience, at the right time. Founded nearly two decades, O’Keeffe specializes in both B2C and B2B outreach, with clients ranging from technical organizations to nonprofits to retail, restaurants, and CPG organizations. From media placements to social media engagement, O’Keeffe delivers outcomes that extend beyond the limitations of traditional PR methods and works to become a seamless extension of its clients’ marketing teams. With the right mix of strategy and outreach, O’Keeffe can drive awareness and create opportunities for prospects to convert to customers and even advocates. O’Keeffe aims to be the best partner in storytelling by providing best-in-class strategy and services to its clients.
Content marketing is a great way to engage new prospects. But, constantly churning out marketing content is unrealistic. Leveraging old content, however, is free.
You spent a lot of time and effort to create your messaging, which you dutifully employed in your marketing. It’s all over your website and social media. You used it in email distribution to your network and perhaps even in a blog or white paper. That’s great, but do you realize fresh content doesn’t age well? Within weeks, the search bots have moved on, your customers have seen it, perhaps read it and moved on, and a prospect probably had no reason to read it to begin with. Why? Because a customer or prospect views content from a singular perspective: what’s in it for me?
Content marketing is one of the most important ways to attract a prospect to engage with your brand. Sadly, unless you have a dedicated team who understands the true purpose of content, and with a mandate to continually churn out fresh content and gain followers, simply distributing your elevator speech will not suffice. It’s expensive and time-consuming to build new creative. So, the odds are that at some point you’ll find yourself trying to figure out how to create marketing content on a budget.
Any marketing department with a content campaign running typically follows these steps:
Then you quickly move on to the next piece of content or campaign for the rinse and repeat cycle.
It costs a whole lot to create new content, and it’s far more economical to pull historic content off the shelf to give it a new lease on life. An easy way to think about how to accomplish this is with the “3 R’s” of content creation – Repurpose, Reposition and Reuse.
Let’s say the content piece is from last year. It’s a topic that’s worked and still has legs. However, your audience has seen this particular piece. It might be time to re-purpose the content. With this strategy, you take one piece of content and turn it into a bunch of other pieces using the same core content. Turn a single white paper into one or more blog posts, a slide deck, and a podcast. The expanded variety of media will engage with a new set of prospects, who may not have been interested in reading long-form content. To capture potential leads, direct visitors to the original white paper as a call to action in the introduction of the repurposed content.
Sometimes just changing up how the white paper is positioned with a few small edits to the body copy and a new headline will create something that looks and feels new. What has happened within your industry since the original white paper was published? Is there a new, fresh twist that can be included? This is probably the simplest way to breathe some life into an older piece.
You’ve already shared this content. The whole world has already seen it, so why do they want it again? While I’d love to think that everybody reads each email, dives into every blog post, and absorbs all the points of the original content, it just doesn’t work that way. Your customers and prospects only care about your content if it is meaningful when they need it, and their needs don’t always align with your marketing calendar. What wasn’t of interest six months ago, could be the answer to their current problem. Hit re-send to the people that didn’t open the email or click on the original link. In addition, think of all the contacts you’ve added to your database since you first published the piece. They don’t know it’s repurposed. Remember, there is a lot of content out there. Your visitors are pummeled with messages every day. Use these strategies and engage people that have shown some level of interest and that will find it useful and relevant.
Reach out to us! We can help you develop a strategy and create compelling content that targets your audience.
Help us welcome a new team member to the O’Keeffe team! Claire joins us with 20 years of experience in public relations, marketing, and investor relations.
Hi there, I’m the newest member of the O’Keeffe team as well as a newbie to the Cincinnati area! I relocated here for my husband’s job after I spent many years working in PR and marketing just up the road in Dayton. I’m thrilled to join such a hard-working, intelligent and fun group of people. It takes teamwork and collaboration to deliver superior results for our clients and we have a great one here.
I have a passion for communications and I have a particular interest in crisis communications and reputation management. I have worked on developing crisis plans for both large and small companies as well as nonprofits.
What’s your best piece of advice for a new marketer?
Don’t ever stop learning. This business is constantly evolving with trends, tactics and technology changing quickly, and as marketers, we need to change with them. You can learn something from people in all stages of their career, from the CEO to the intern.
If you could tell our clients one thing, what would it be?
We consider ourselves your strategic partner. And in order for us to be the best possible partner for your business, we’ll need a thorough understanding of your business, your competition and your strategic plans for growth. We can’t be effective if we don’t have the full picture.
What was the last book you read?
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. It’s a fantastic story of two siblings, spanning five decades, and their relationship to each other and to the third character, the House. It’s a grown-up fairy tale complete with motherless children and a wicked stepmother. I can’t wait to see the inevitable movie/TV series. If you like audiobooks, Tom Hanks does a great job of narrating this one.
Favorite word?
Sweetie. I use this instead of my kids’ names when I’m talking to them. But I promise I’m not one of those people who uses it with strangers.
Least favorite word?
Moist. Isn’t that everyone’s?
What profession other than marketing would you like to attempt?
I would love to be a travel or food writer. Polly Campbell of the Cincinnati Enquirer has my dream job.
Tell me two truths and a lie.
I’ve lived overseas. I’m a great dancer. I’m addicted to Diet Coke.
After Uber’s license was suspended in London, we had to wonder how PR professionals were handling the situation…
London’s transport regulator has ruled that Uber cannot renew its license in the city because of a “pattern of failures” that puts passenger safety and security at risk. The company has 21 days to appeal (Update: as of December 16, they have appealed) the decision and can continue to operate in the city during that time.
The UK government transport authority, Transport for London, found out that more than 14,000 trips booked through Uber’s platform had been taken with uninsured drivers. It said the company was failing to do adequate checks on drivers, insurance, and safety, and breaches in these things had put passengers at risk. The biggest issue it identified was that a change to Uber’s systems let unauthorized drivers upload their photos to other drivers’ accounts, meaning customers couldn’t be sure they’d get the driver they had booked. Crucially, the regulator said it did “not have confidence that similar issues will not reoccur in the future,” which has led it to conclude that the company “is not fit and proper at this time.”
There are 45,000 drivers who work for Uber in the UK capital who await a final decision over the future of their jobs. It won’t necessarily be a major blow to consumers, who can pick from one of the many other ride-hailing apps available, or get one of the city’s famous black cabs. But what will be the long-term impact on Uber’s ability to continue providing ride-hailing services around the world? Will other cities follow suit and ban the service? And how in the heck is a PR professional supposed to spin this story?
You must never spin anything. Spinning a story without company management addressing the underlying cause of the crisis is like trying to put lipstick on a pig. It will still be a pig, only with red lips. What is required is for Uber to clean up its operational act rather than try and cover it up, and to then initiate Public Relations to tell the story of how they used this event as a wake-up call to improve their services and the safety of the consumers.
Publicly recognize there is a problem. Provide a detailed plan the company will initiate to fix the problem, and regularly self-report on the company’s progress. Good news can trump bad news ONLY if it’s true and authentic.
Get ahead of the situation and contact us. In the meantime, check out some of our content on crisis communication, like Dan’s take on how to handle a crisis, or Lisa’s video on identifying if you are really in a crisis.
Dan reflects on 50 years of the internet and discusses how it has changed storytelling and news over the years.
Two amazing things happened this year that have caused me to reflect heavily on my life and career as a public relations professional, content marketer and storyteller. I turned 50, and the Internet turned 50. Why then do I just keep getting grayer and grayer every year while the Internet appears to get more and more colorful by the day?
My self-reflection kicked off Saturday night, October 26, at an annual event held by The Mercantile Library, a historic library in downtown Cincinnati that promotes history, reading, enrichment and community engagement. The event was the Library’s 32nd annual Niehoff Lecture, which featured Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward (one of the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Watergate story on June 19, 1972). As the guest of my good friend and fellow former journalist Carolyn Pione Micheli, I had the great fortune to meet Mr. Woodward. That evening, a dream I never thought would come true was realized.
Growing up, I remember studying about Watergate, which led to Richard Nixon’s resignation from office. Of course, I also was mesmerized as I watched Robert Redford portray Woodward on the silver screen in 1976’s All the President’s Men. I knew that Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s reporting was at the center of this national scandal, and as I grew older and began pursuing an education and career in journalism, I came to better appreciate the process the two journalists pursued to uncover the facts, apart from rumor and partisan politics. I was inspired to pursue and then obtain a degree in print Journalism.
I emphasize “print” for a reason. Because as I was making my way as a newspaper and magazine reporter, editor and eventually public relations consultant, a game-changing technology was slowly percolating within the halls of academia and government that in the mid-90s would begin to turn the world of journalism on its head. On October 29, 1969, just a few months after I entered the world, the Internet was born. And just three days after I met a bona fide living legend of journalism, the Internet celebrated its 50th anniversary.
The irony of these two occurrences happening around me within days of each other is staggering. The person who epitomizes investigative print journalism in its most ethical and objective form stands contrasted in my mind against the very platform that enables so many to share information in its most raw and unverified form, causing chaotic firestorms of misinformation and rhetoric on a daily basis.
Amidst the chaos, I believe we must look hard for meaning. Since the beginning of human existence, information has been communicated and shared as stories. Over the eons, the vehicles by which that information was shared has evolved and advanced with one consistent objective at play—to communicate facts. Yet, today, the facts are relegated to a supporting role in telling stories, and those trusted to convey the news that we trust to inform our decisions are…well…you and me. We no longer depend on newspapers and magazines or the once modern mediums of television and radio to deliver our news. We seek it out on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, on blogs and subscription news feeds, and of course the websites belonging to those news outlets that used to only exist in print and on our air waves. And each one of these outlets and platforms is competing for clicks, impressions and unique users. The rush was always on to break a story, but never until the facts were collected and verified. Today, we’re simply in a rush to be first, as he or she who gets the most visits wins.
No telling what the future looks like, especially as technology continues to advance. My hope is that we can find a compromise between our voracious appetites for information and minute-by-minute updates to that information and the ability of professional storytellers to once again be afforded the time and resources to tell their stories with all of the facts in tow. Until that time, we must embrace one of the many pros the Internet affords us today—the ability to research for ourselves the facts, and the boundless ways in which we can tell our stories.
Looking back on this past year, especially with respect to these recent milestones I’ve just shared, I see 2019 as neither the end to my first 50 years nor a new beginning. Rather, it’s like the fold in the newspaper I still read every morning. In Journalism school, having a story appear on the front page was never enough. It had to appear “above the fold.” That was the money shot, because…in theory…that story always got read first. The funny thing is that it didn’t really matter where a story landed on the front page, because it was only the beginning, and often was only a couple of paragraphs in length. You still had to open the paper to get to the meat of the story and digest all of the details. That’s where you decided your opinion of the story and those in it.
For my next 50 years, I will continue to follow Mr. Woodward’s example of doing the hard work, resisting the urge to be first, and focusing on getting it right…whatever “it” happens to be in my case. I’ll use the Internet as a resource for achieving my objective, not as the objective. I’ll search for the truth, and do my best to encourage those around me to do the same. And as a storyteller, I’ll strive to shed light on all sides of those stories, and hopefully encourage those after me to do the same.
Lisa shares four quick tips for writing a press release.
So, your company has an announcement they would like to make, and they have asked you to make that announcement via a press release. A quick Google search will tell you that your release should cover the Who, What, When, Where, and Whys, and you might even be able to track down a release template. That’s great; you’re well on your way! But allow me to offer a few tips and tricks that I have picked up throughout my years as a public relations professional. They might just help you craft a better release and make sure your announcement (assuming it’s newsworthy) gets heard.
Never forget to include your contact information on your release. While this may seem obvious, I have heard many horror stories where journalists really want additional information to tell a great story but have no clue whom to follow up with to get the facts they need. Ugh, that hurts. Don’t be that person.
If you receive coverage as a result of your release, be sure to say thank you! Again, this might seem like common sense. But often times this simple act of appreciation can be overlooked. Plus, your mother would be proud.
Well, there you have it. In addition to your Google research, you now have some tips and tricks of the trade! If you need additional guidance on crafting the perfect pitch, check out this blog to pitch like a pro and enjoy some pretty amazing Elle Woods gifs, too!
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