4 key points to consider before you integrate emerging technologies into your traditional marketing

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and on this podcast I'd like to share some thoughts and some tips about how you can get noticed. And on this show, I would like to share with you a response to a question, which is how can you integrate emerging and well-established communications platforms? That has come from one of our listeners. Which is great. And if you've got a question you'd like me to answer, then please drop it in an email to jim@easyspr.com and I will answer it for you on the show. So I have put some thinking into this. So how do you integrate emerging and well-established communications platforms? Well, I think first of all, let's just define the difference between an emerging and an established platform, starting first of all with these established ones. Now, established platforms for most companies have been predominantly residing around websites. Websites and email and email newsletters have been the predominant way that companies have relied on social media and considered those to be their platforms and built out large content management systems as well. Some companies have got staff portals, um, and some have got, for example, customer and dealer or partner login so that they can serve their clients online. On the whole then, those platforms— the website, the email, email newsletter, and staff portals, which resided mainly on a website or sometimes through a company intranet— would have been really built for the desktop computer. So one of the really transition points for us to consider of why we've got emerging technologies is the impact of the 3-screen market. In other words, that it's no longer just the desktop, it's also the tablet and the mobile phone. So the introduction of the 3-screen strategy has really led to the transformation in the number of platforms that we can use. And with the 3-screen and the change in device types has come the additional issue of portability. So it's the different platforms and the fact that these platforms are being accessed no longer just at the desk that have created a whole number of new martech opportunities. In fact, this is considered to be the, the second golden age of martech, with over 8,000 martech applications, and I'm not going to list all of those here. But what I'd just like to sort of do is to bring them into categories of emerging technology platforms, and I'm going to bring them into categories by content type. Now, I've mentioned about the website, and the first piece of emerging technology that can be embedded into a website is that of the on-site chat. I'm always amazed when companies have got a website and don't have an online chat. Because it's the equivalent of building a showroom or having a retail outlet and having nobody on the shop floor. So one of the emerging technologies that can simply be bolted onto the website is that of online chat. Now, if we look at the nature of most websites, tends to be a lot of text, but video can now be added onto that website and hosted through platforms like Vimeo so that you don't have to have the YouTube interruptions on your corporate website. So an emerging platform for the content type of video would be both hosting your own information but also now 3 other functions. So video is now being used in emails, and there are tools like Bonjuro out there that can be used for sending out video emails, and that's proven to be very efficient. I've used that recently for some media relations work, for example, Another, of course, is the streaming of video. And I've done a podcast before about live streaming. And there are a number of platforms, including those like Zoom, in fact, and Vimeo as well has a live streaming option where if you want to broadcast your content directly to an audience, either within or outside of the social media platforms of Facebook or LinkedIn, or Instagram, you can actually stream directly. And this is of course very useful if you've got, for example, a corporate audience and you want to have them in your own, in your own environment, and you don't want to share that with one of these social media platforms. Another aspect of video which is new is video gathering, and I interviewed the CEO of Gather Voices on one of my earlier shows, and Michael Hoffman was talking about how now companies and organizations around the world are using his platform to aggregate content from all of their stakeholders. Because everybody's got a camera on their device, they can actually now film and send in their own, if you like, field reports And that can all be ingested and edited centrally and made into a common format and a common brand look and feel by using a platform like Gather Voices. This is actually a technology that CNN and Bloomberg, of course, have been using for many, many years, where they used to have field reporters using digital cameras and then uploading the content straight into the digital jukeboxes. So video as a content type has moved away from being the preserve of a few high-end corporate clients with large budgets and become extremely affordable for any company of any size. And I talk about companies using platforms like Lumen5, for example, or even the new Descript. There are a number of platforms out there now that will enable you to create video from text and to edit it. So an emerging platform which is about video can be integrated into the website, but also into that staff portal, and also into those emails. Now, the next emerging technology has been around text. Now, text itself, of course, is not new, but what we can do with it has become more exciting. MMS and SMS text going through to mobile devices has become increasingly possible and prevalent. I use one called ClickSend. There's a platform called Twilio, and these can be embedded into the CRM system so that when people come onto a website or through a shopping cart, for example, it will automatically send to that respondent the confirmation of the order, for example. So text and text messaging has become an established platform. The difference now is that it's embedded within the whole funnel and CRM process, and that's making it a key and an integral part of the communications strategy. The, the next format on text is about reading of text in real time. Now I've talked on an earlier podcast about the technologies that one can have on one's website that enables those that are visually impaired to click a button and have the website content read to them. Now, if you use Siri, you'll know that you can have Siri read your email for you. It gets a little bit frustrating because Siri doesn't necessarily know when to start and stop, but on a website Text can now be read to the visitor to the website. That's got all sorts of implications for people that are sharing content in places where reading it on the website may not be easy— bright sunlight in the daylight, for example, or on a device which may have a low-quality screen— or for those people that are maybe older or those that are visually impaired. The next one then on audio, which is our next format of course, is around podcasting. Now, as I'm doing here, podcasting has become the growth category really because the technology that we've all got to hand has enabled anyone to be a broadcaster. Of course, when we talk about how this can be integrated into a company website, Of course, we can have audio on the website. We can have our own audio platforms through established players like iTunes, for example, or now the Google Play or Spotify. So podcasts can be integrated into the existing platforms within the company, but also into the broader social media distribution channels. The final one, of course, is graphics. Now, graphics, of course, are on their own static, can be used on websites and have been for many, many years. Emerging technologies around graphics are those that are starting to embed graphics, for example, into videos and auto-assemble videos for you, like on Video Samurai. So there are tools out there now like Canva that are enabling people to create infographics at speed and then to use those either on the established platforms like the website, also into company presentations, but also into sales presentations and into social media. So graphics has become a lot more engaging, a lot easier to create and to distribute. So the next element then, having define the different platforms between established and emerging is to really think about the audience. Now, is it an internal audience? Is it an external audience? Or is it a partner audience? Because the audience type— and what we talk about in the Speak PR program is the avatar— the audience determines, of course, the nature of the information to be shared and whether information needs to be, for example, in a gated area or needs to be privileged or needs to be part of a CRM sequence to work within the funnel. Because obviously we have people that are potential customers, current customers, and past customers, so they all need to be treated slightly differently. And emerging technologies like CRM programs enable us to track those people in an automated way at scale. And what we talk about on the Speak PR program is personalization at scale. So determining the audience is the next element to address. The next element then will be the objective of the campaign and the activities, because this will affect which platform is deployed. Is this a branding opportunity or exercise? Is an attempt to be informative for example, as we are now doing with the medical information going on around COVID-19, and using, for example, a platform like unless.com, which enables websites to be responsive to the individual visitor rather than just a broad category by IP address? Is it an engagement-led exercise? Do we need to have interactivity, in which case the chat, of course, is going to be important? And are we establishing rules that we need people to simply follow? Are we asking them to download and accept those rules, for example, or are we just promulgating these rules and need to know that they've watched them so that we can prove that later if they don't follow those rules? So the objective for the information being shared is absolutely important. The next part then is the content. On SpeakPR, we talk about a content-centric approach, and what we do is we always start with the content at the heart of it. And that is going to be— the different kinds of content are categorized quite simply as: will it be watched, will it be read, or will it be heard? Those are the 3 functions. And if you can decide the nature of the content and if it's going to be watched, read, or heard, or a multiple of those, then you can start to think about what goes into that content. The research that we found shows that content that's going to be shared needs to be new, it needs to be simple, and it needs to be context-sensitive. In other words, it needs to be relevant. So deciding on the nature of the information to be shared, the format that it's going to be created in, will of course impact which platform is used, as will the audience and the objective. So let's just look at a couple of examples, shall we? If we look at Tesla, for example, They have a website, but they have their own dedicated showrooms. They have their own social media platforms of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube. Tesla engages on social media, but they also have an app. My friends that have got a Tesla that drove it to France for skiing told me that they were given an alert whenever the car was running down on battery and given the directions and the length of time and distance so they could get to the next charging point. If we look at airlines, airlines have got websites, but also when you go and book either on their own website or on a third-party booking website, you get an email confirmation. You also can use the membership app, which would then synchronize as it does, for example, with Singapore Airlines does this very well. You can then get an SMS alert in advance of your flight. You can get an SMS alert to tell you which gate you're going to be going to. You can even get an SMS alert to which baggage carousel you're going to be getting your luggage from. And that also can be on the membership app along with your rewards points. So the integration of these established platforms with emerging platforms creates much greater immediacy and a journey for the customer with the brand from start to finish. So as we close, let's look at the summary. We want to think about the objective of the campaign. We need to think about the audience, which avatar, where they're going to be and when they're going to be consuming the information, what they're receptive to. We need to think about the content being relevant. And then we need to think about which platform is most efficient and effective at delivering that information at the time it's going to be needed. And delivery is so important because we can now track through all platforms what's happened to that content. So if we're not tracking content delivery and open rates, for example, and responses, then we are missing the whole beauty of the new emerging technologies, which is that there's attribution to all activity. So the question was, how does one integrate established and emerging platforms? Try to address that by saying that we can build on from the established platforms, enhance them with new technologies, but incorporate some of the new technologies to really wrap the customer or the partner or the audience, the staff members, with consistent information delivered when they need it and in a format that's accessible to them. I hope that's useful for you. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If I can answer a question for you, please write to me at jim@eastwestpr.com. I've got over 30 years of running my own business and running a PR firm. If you like this, please do subscribe to our newsletter. At eastwestpr.com, or you can also come and join us at a mastermind at speedpr.co. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, or at least a sustainable one, and that if you're going to have new and emerging technologies, integrate them so that the customer experience is consistent and for you a rewarding one.