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Coming to you live from the studios of Media Training Worldwide in New York. This is Inside Communications and I'm your host, Mike Baco. Today we go inside and find out what can be with CRT Tanaka's Ellen Lanicka Albanese and we find out what went into their award winning campaign for Bissell. So Ellen, award winning campaign for Bissell. But tell us a little bit about CRT Tanaka. What can be is an overriding slogan with a lot of the clients that you work with and the general atmosphere of your firm.

Yes, it is. Well, thank you for asking and thank you for having me on the show today. So CRT Tanaka is an award winning mid sized national public relations agency. We have offices in five different cities and as you said a moment ago, we really live by the ethos of something we call what can be. And what can be is something that we've internalized both in the way that we treat our employees, the way that we interface with our clients and the way that we reach out to the community at large. It's looking to combine both goodness and genius to create greatness. And we believe if you do that, you come up with award winning work and you also come up with an environment where internally employees go after their own personal dreams. We know that if employees are able to fulfill their own personal dreams as part of their work, they're happy employees. They do better work, they stay longer and we have a better environment.

When you're pitching a client, how does that translate into your pitch to them? Do clients understand this or are they just looking for bottom line results or does everything sort of come together once you're able to fully explain it to them?

The wonderful thing about what can be is that if you do it really religiously and you follow the process and it really is an internalized process for account planning and how we approach the creative product that you can impact the bottom line. In fact you do impact the bottom line and you have to. We're here in business to help the clients achieve their goals. But the what can be process is a win win situation for both the agency to come up with award winning work and for the client to be involved in the process of creating the solutions.

Okay, so let's go inside one of those award winning campaigns. Recently a PRSA big app winning campaign for Bissell. How did that start? Bissell has been around for 134 years. Family owned business. How do you regenerate their brand name recognition? How do you start a campaign for them?

Good question. So Bissell's A wonderful company. You just said they're family owned. They're in the seventh generation of family ownership. They are based in the Midwest. They are solid people. They're incredible innovators and, and they come up with products to clean the floors, our carpets, our wonderful tile floors, our hardwood floors, anything to vacuum your floors deep, clean your carpets, clean your hardwood floors. The things that you need to have a healthy, safe and clean and wonderful environment Bissell will create. And they came to us at a time last year when they were launching two brand new products, one called the Steam and Sweep, which is a marvelous product that will clean the debris, dry debris off your hardwood floors. And then at the same time, a steam element will have an ecologically friendly way to disinfect and sanitize your floors and make them sparkling clean. Beautiful product, cuts the time in half that it takes to clean your floors. Second product was something called Poweredge. And like the name suggests, this is a wonderful product which has a V shaped foot which when you're using that to vacuum up dry debris, it eliminates what's called the snow blower effect. You know, when you're there with the snowblower and everything goes all over the place. Not with this product. You can go on the side, you can go in crevices. Picks up everything beautifully. It has a bagless cyclonic technology that's very lightweight, maneuverable, great to use. So the question is, how do you launch these two new products? And, and what we found was that we went back to our what can be process. And the first part of that is to do research. The what, what is it that you're looking to do? What is the competitive environment? What do you have in your favor? What we found that we had in our favor was we had a wonderful trend. And the trend, and this will not come as a surprise to any of your viewers, is that Americans are increasingly putting wonderful hardwood floors in their homes. In fact, the Floor Covering Institute found that 37%. There was a 37% growth in the amount of hardwood floors in American homes. All right, that's great. We've got a trend we can go on.

Although if they're anything like me, they don't like cleaning those hardwood floors. So that might be a problem for Bissell.

It is a problem for Bissell. So how do you get somebody to buy your products when your products are inherently designed to do something that people don't want to do? And in fact, one of the Bissell surveys found that only 7% of people said that if they had 30 minutes to clean that they would mop their floors. Well, maybe I wouldn't be one of those 7% either if I didn't know about some of their products. So to compound that, here we've got these wonderful products, one of which, remember I said was an electric steam cleaner. And we also found that 52% of Americans don't even know what an electric steam cleaner is. When they think I have to clean my floors, they're thinking the old mop, the old broom down on my hands and knees. I mean, who wants to spend their Saturday doing that? So we had the classic, classic PR case of needing to educate Americans that there was a faster, easier, better way to clean your floors in less amount of time with these brand new products that can make your life much easier. So we went about an educational campaign.

And how do you do that educational campaign? Are you doing traditional advertising? Are you, are you going the social media route? Are you combining the two together? What was the innovative way that you did this that led to an award winning campaign?

So in this campaign we did not do any advertising. Our charge is to do public relations. So the components of this campaign were both traditional media and social media. It's really important today to combine those in your, particularly a product launch. You need to get out there to the public in any way possible that you can reach them to let them know the difference about these products and why it's important to their lives. So we had five really core tactics that we used to launch the campaign. The first was this creative mailer which landed on different media's desks to pique their interest about the campaign. And we also produced a digital slideshow. You know that media are really busy, they can barely get outside of their desks to attend a great big event. And desk size are getting harder and harder to execute. So we make it easy for them. We created this digital slide show that took our cues from what we knew that Americans out there were identifying the mopping and the cleaning of their floors with this horrible, you know, old 1950s image of a woman down on the floor with the mop and the broom and everything else. So we showed them first the hard aspect of cleaning their floors and then very quickly in this digital slide show took them through the information about the two new products that really took the hard clean out of hard floors. So a digital slideshow, a creative mailer. Secondly, we aligned with a spokesperson. It's important, I think today to, particularly if you're talking with bloggers and traditional media, to align with the experts that are out there in the public, that have a credibility. And so for this campaign, we aligned with Donna Smolin. She's the author of eight books. She appears frequently on CNN and hgtv. And she helped us with content, helped us to provide tips and really put her branding really behind these products because she believes in them as well.

Let's talk a second about those experts, bloggers. The Internet has really leveled the playing field in terms of getting a placement in the New York Times might not be as important as getting one influential blogger that everyone reads in a specific area of interest for someone. So speak a little bit about that, about targeting those experts in that field.

Absolutely. Well, you have to do your homework first. You have to do the research to see who is out there in that space. In this case, bloggers who write about things for the home, things used to clean the home, and also bloggers that write about family issues. Because moms and mommy bloggers, they're really concerned with the family and how do we make the best, cleanest, safest environment for our kids. So you target that list and then you do your homework. You figure out do they want to execute a giveaway? Some of them do. There's a wonderful group called the Grateful Giveaways where a number of bloggers come together to join together to talk about your product. And you can get multiple blog posts at one time. Some of them do like to do giveaways, some like to do product reviews. Some really will accept the product and test it and let their readers know what's good, what's bad about the product. So we have an ongoing dialogue with them and people like cool mom pics or Home EC101. These are really powerful bloggers that provide you an opportunity to have a one to one conversation, really an engagement with the public. And so blogger outreach was an important part of what we did.

And how long does that actually take to reach out to those bloggers? Do you have to send them multiple emails? What's the communication process like in terms of moving the campaign forward? Because you do need those influential bloggers.

You absolutely do. So yes, we contact them by email. Email is really for bloggers. I'd have to say the killer app. But you respect their privacy. And if after one or two emails you get no response, there's a good chance that maybe this is not the right time for them to do anything with that product. So you move on. You don't bug them. I mean, they're human just like the rest of us. So yes, we contact them by email. And the whole process between the outreach and then the execution of their blog posts for us usually takes about six weeks to two months because it involves product shipping, it involves product testing, and then the blog post, and then you wrap up the engagement.

When you are talking to clients and you bring up blog posts and you bring up the Internet and Twitter and Facebook and things like that, are they receptive to that? Or are clients really just looking for placements on the Today Show? The brand recognition of those tried and true things that we've sort of come to understand as the place where clients want to be. But now with again, that leveling of the playing field, are clients understanding that sometimes a blogger is just as influential as a major TV appearance?

Well, I can tell you that our Bissell client has been very blog savvy for a long time. They totally understand the power of the Internet. They have used it very effectively. We have a group called Bissell Bloggers that we work with on an ongoing basis. So yes, they have completely bought into the power of social media. I find that there are still some small pockets of clients for whom the importance of social media has to be a little bit of an education. But by and large, most clients understand that this is an incredible tool that they have at their fingertips.

Okay, so let's highlight the last couple steps that led to this award winning campaign for Bissell. We mentioned the outreach to the influential bloggers. What else did you hit on for Bissell?

So aside from the influential bloggers, there are people that are called influencers and they're everyone from Julie Edelman, who's a wonderful, wonderful woman that I've known for 20 years, and she runs a website and does media appearance. She's called the Accidental Housewife and she writes about how you can make house cleaning easier. Simple. Make it your friend. So we reached out with product samples to people like Julie Trisher from Clean House, the Beekman Boys, I mean, people that are out there in the media, on hgtv, on the various cable shows, and we gave them products, we asked them to try these. Just try it, see what you think. Tell us how it works, tell us if it works well, and then if you're interested, if you'd like to, we'd be thrilled if you would make a post about it. And many of them have. So the influencer outreach and the direct press release, let's not forget the press release. Don't ever forget the press release.

So there's still a traditional angle that you need to follow that people are expecting you to follow. And that actually works?

It actually works. So a press release sent out on PR Newswire or a controlled media vehicle, which we also used in this particular case, we went to ARN Content and that way you get your message out across the Internet to all the journalists who are looking for products, trend, stories, information. So yes, don't ever forget the press release.

So as with a lot of things, the initial push is very exact. You have a lot of people behind the team that are working on this. What happens once the campaign winds down a little bit? Are people still keeping up with the social media contacts and updating the pages and still trying to push out the information?

Yeah, well, you never stop updating your social media contacts and you really never stop updating the pages and the information. So as we get new, say an influencer comment about these products that gets reposted on our Facebook page on Bissell's Twitter handle to keep people in the loop about the fact that there's still discussion about these wonderful products. And the wonderful thing in the end of the day was that this combined social media and traditional media strategy led to 107% of our goals. So we met our goals and we exceeded them. We had over 157 million consumer impressions and over 1100 placements. So it's sometimes a lot of roll up your sleeve sleeves and do the hard work, but in this case the hard work helped us take the hard clean out of hard floors.

Exactly. And helped you win a PR award. Yes, it did a great campaign. Ellen, thanks for going Inside Communications with us. Thanks for joining us on Inside Communications CRT Tanaka. Certainly showing us what can be with their award winning Bissell campaign. I'm Mike Baco. Join us back here each week for Inside Communications.

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