Hammerkit Blog

After the success of the Hammerkit One Month Master Class, we decided to look back over some of the more salient topics in greater details. Consider this the Hammerkit PhD Project. Not for the faint of heart, but it gets you ready to hang with the best.

Repeatability - Waste Not, Want Not (focus on the theme of wasted time and energy with non-repeatable solutions)

Formatting - Understand The Form (focus on how thinking in terms of web formats is absolutely necessary to understanding the industry)

Digital Media - This Is What The Modern Campaign Looks Like (focus on how digital is calculably unavoidable if you want to stay relevant)

Lean - How A Buzzword Becomes a Battle Cry (focus on how lean solutions became a point of pride)

As well as diving into these topics in more detail, we will also be producing our new podcast focusing on these topics to help you get to grips with the changing face of PR. So look out for these articles over the next few weeks and stay tuned!

Today as the PR adapt to the era of digital communications, a lot of agencies face thought competition from digital ones, and struggle to maintain profitability and retain market share lost to digital. Producing one-off online campaigns and digital marketing projects no longer works, proving that PR and marketing agencies need to adapt to new era, and use the right tools in order to regain its position.

Recent statistics show that the digital marketing is gaining bigger market share, while traditional PR and marketing are losing it. Some examples here:

Leading communications groups WPP[i] and Havas[ii] are doing extremely well, with WPP posting a 10 percent increase in full year profits and Havas a respectable nine percent for the same period. In WPP, while the top line growth for PR at 6.2 percent was lower than the advertising and media arm of the business, which posted 12.2 percent revenue growth, PR still increased its profit margin by 0.3 percent to 16.1 percent. WPP reaffirmed its long-term target to improve the staff cost/revenue ratio by 0.3-0.6 percent per annum, with a focus on the application of new technology. For Havas, digital and social media now make up 23 percent of revenue compared to 19 percent in the previous financial year. This is a 20 percent annual growth rate and at this level digital revenues will account for 50 percent of the firm's revenue within four years.

The latest research from Kingston Smith W1[iii] indicates that PR bosses are very optimistic about 2012 with 71 percent predicting greater profits. Perhaps with a greater focus on digital and the application of smart technology, the industry will also be able to rise to the challenge of controlling the cost/revenue while taking back territory from the digital agencies.

Saying that, in the digital age, agencies need to change their mindset from a one-time, one-hit wonder approach and turn every project into an instant global sales opportunity to kick those pesky digital agencies out of their PR field.

That's why Hammerkit is here, giving PR agencies tools to execute online campaigns faster and better with greater global scale, so they can regain market share that they are now losing to the digital. With Hammerkit repeatable solutions, PR agencies can build intelligent web services that are based on a coordinated, connected and collaborative production process, instead of wasting time and efforts on creating new campaigns each time!

[i] Source: WPP FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[ii] Source: Havas FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[iii] Source:”PR Bosses retain 2012 optimisim, finds Kingston Smith”, PRWeek.co.uk

There are many steps you need to take to implement lean digital production in your business, but, in my opinion, the most important aspect of lean is standardization. When you standardize, you create a baseline for improvement that allows you to know how much better you are doing things that you were before. The trouble in our industry is that we seem unable to create standardized production methods because we are locked into the belief that everything should be a one-off, unique creation that is built by hand to order. We believe this and it has become the norm. However, now is the time for a change.

Almost all service industries have been going through a process of service design that seeks to define the value to the customer and try to maximize it. This leads to service process standardization that helps a business to focus improvement efforts. You can think of examples from airlines, banks, insurance companies, health providers and even government offices that seek to provide better service with less resource commitments. They want to focus their resources on the parts that matter – those that add value to the customer – rather than on wasted effort.

The web industry is a service industry. We deliver digital solutions to people that order them. Those people have different tastes, wants and desires so we need to be able to cater for them if we want to prosper. What we do not need to do is provide an infinite palette of choices that lead to an infinite number of ways a problem can be solved. It is not good for the customer or the producer.

If you are familiar with Gordon Ramsay and his approach to fixing failing restaurants, you will see standardization in practice. Ramsey does the same episode after episode: First, clean the kitchen. Remove everything that is unwanted, unnecessary or downright dangerous. Second simplify the menu focusing on a core dish or two (the house specials) that you can produce to the highest standard every time. Third, coach the staff to deliver the service you want and be attentive to the customers needs. Next, simplify the environment and focus on how the service will flow from the first moment a customer enters the restaurant. The final step is to promote the newly improved, standardized, simplified elegant restaurant by sharing the house special with prospective customers.

Not only is Ramsay fixing a restaurant, he is doing it with a tried and tested process that delivers results. A standardized process creating a new baseline service for a failing establishment.

When you standardize, measurement becomes easier. Measuring means you can make processes visual. When process results are visual, your people will respond and raise their game. You get better.

So standardize. Do it. Improve it. Repeat. This simple formula is enough to make large-scale gains in your digital production efforts.

When building new client relationships as an agency or advising your clients how to leverage the web to enhance revenues, you need to be aware of techniques that help. Funnel marketing is one of the oldest forms of published marketing approach and has both ardent supporters and detractors that believe it just does not work.

From a digital marketing perspective, when good content meets a good marketing process a funnel is easy to construct and always leads to positive results. Period. However, the web is much more complex a world that traditional marketing media, so how do you leverage funnel marketing in your digital PR strategies – after all, as we have been talking about, your success is now measured in concrete results.

The first step is to construct the funnel. This basically means starting with an audience - the number of people you have access to that are potentially qualified to buy your services. You want an audience to become aware of your offering, as this is the first stage in the funnel – Awareness.

Next you convert your aware audience into prospects that identify themselves as being in the market for your stuff. These people self-select, as they are shoppers looking for something like the services you supply. This is Interest and this converts prospects to leads.

The third stage is converting interest into Desire. Desire is the stage where leads indicate a willingness to become a customer if the offer, the timing and the deal are right. The final part of the process is Action, where a person completes a transaction with you to become a customer.

The funnel of Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (or AIDA as it is more commonly known) was first promoted in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis. It has become the de facto sales process of the last century and I believe it still works today.

When we reflect how it would work in todays context we have ready methods that PR can tap into to:

• Reach an audience and create awareness such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, mobiles sites, augmented reality challenges
• Convert the broad audience into prospects such as using Likes, Retweets or Facebook competitions that allow individuals to add their details voluntarily to become leads
• Approaches to build desire by offering the right deal to the right lead at the right time, such as Google Adwords campaigns that promote offers when the user is searching for that product or outrider sites that draw leads back to the main site when they are looking for similar products
• Ways to drive sales action, like email offers that help to close the deal by offering a slight discount or other incentive if action is taken.

What do all of these methods have in common? They are all content-led – meaning that there is every reason why digital PR should take the lead in making them happen.

One very nice trend that is happening in web design that reflects the success of the funnel is the approach of providing multiple front doors to your services on your web site that reflect the stage of the AIDA process a potential customer is in. This is very well shown and discussed by The Sales Lion (Marcus Sheridan) who writes about the approaches he has used to drive his successful swimming pool business. Sounds bizarre, I know – but if he can use it to build a business around large value, one-off purchases then most business-to-business services can do likewise. You can read more about it here http://www.thesaleslion.com/home-page-design-funnel-marketing/.

The simple fact is a funnel is good on many levels. It provides a structured process, evidence in the form of data and results that can be measured. If you have been following my other posts on lean digital production, one of the things you will know by now that if you have these things you have something you can continuously improve. Regardless of whether you are doing this for yourself or if you are helping you clients, this will lead to results that count. Just do it!

The web industry is obsessed with facts, figures, trends all packed into beautifully presented infographics. However, there seems to be one area of fact-collecting that evades the industry – what are the best-selling web services right now?

We can, of course, use deductive logic to work out that Facebook apps are on the rise, that blog sites have been massive for ages or that general corporate websites are the mainstay of the industry, but between the lines we do not know what features, functionality and services are really beginning to trend worldwide. This might seem like a “so what” issue, so why is this important? Well, every industry knows what products and services are selling well and use that information to direct sales teams, marketing resources and customer attention to drive revenues. If we are not able to know what is a best-selling service, how can we do this?

The truth of the matter is we do not. We are reactive as an industry, not proactive and we are certainly not aware of the trends that shape the activities of teams of developers around the world. When designing the CloudStore we had this thought in our minds and wanted to ensure that every agency that uses our service would be able to see at a glance what is selling well and know where the sales are happening.

Again, why is this important? Well, it means that the agency can ensure clients are shown things that they should consider and that opportunities for new sales and revenue can be shared across all of the offices of the group. Web services have a limited shelf life, so getting this information around the group quickly is important.

I would love to find a service that helps me see web best-sellers, so if you know about any, please drop me a line.

There are many things that we need to consider when trying to repeat a digital solution. At Hammerkit, we have developed our “Lean Digital Production” methodology to make it as fast and efficient as possible and I have tried to break the challenges into a few categories to help you understand what we do to make solutions more quickly, cost effectively and to a standard level of quality. The key to beating the challenges is systems-thinking, i.e. trying to broaden the scope of the challenge beyond the immediately obvious impact to solve ancilliary issues as you go.

Functionality
The core of any web service is “what does it do?” – these are commonly referred to as the functionality and when we create a web format (the original web service we use as the master version) we embed a specific set of requirements as core functionality. We document this functionality as a set of features (along with their advantages and benefits for the sales materials: systems-thinking) and we loosely couple the functionality to the front-end interface via an example deployment. This will be with one or more dummy companies and lets the client understand how similar functionality can be reused and repurposed.

Information Architecture
The next aspect of an solution is “what inputs and outputs are needed?”. Typically these will follow the functionality that has been requested, but it may be that the information architecture comes first. We have to build certain data structures in our database to make the solution work, so this forms the basis – but clearly we do that in a way that lets clients add their own requirements for data and information capture. This extends to how outputs are passed to the user (screen reports, PDFs, excels, etc.) We try to keep these easy to customize so that there is minimal addition work to make it fit a client requirement.

Integrations
The web format will probably contain certain key integrations needed for the functionality to operate, but we leave it open for the client to define certain additional integrations. These are achieved via pre-built interface elements in our platform that minimize the need for custom coding to the very minimum. We also look at the integration requirement to understand whether it is actually necessary at all – in many cases an email can suffice where a data integration was requested. Usually all that is required is asking the right questions.

Content Management
The end-client will always wish to update their own content, so it is important to add an admin interface that allows this to happen. When we construct a web format, we construct a content management interface (CMI) to make this easy. As content is often the single biggest delay in the roll-out of a solution, we try to make the CMI available as early as possible in the production process.

User Interface
This is the part that can be given much more attention. In typical projects, the vision of the designer is lost in the transmission to a final web service. We try to remove this danger by ensuring the designer is fully aware of the features and builds a user interface that leverages them as well as possible. This removes the need for rounds of review at design stage and then again at programming stage, as typically happens in traditional web projects.

Our Lean Digital Production methodology is mostly about standardizing how we approach the creation of services. The truth is that it is possible to get the functionality 80% ready with a web format and spend more time on the design and messaging aspects of a site. We know from experience that clients will appreciate that more – it is words that sell, not functionality. 

Lean is buzz word in vogue at the moment in the tech community, especially in connection with the “just do it” mentality of the startup scene. I think this is a fantastic trend and I believe that if we start to embrace lean principles in the way digital service businesses work we will reap rewards aplenty.

There are some really simple things you can do to promote lean-thinking in your organization, so lets take a look at them and apply them to digital production:

1. Create ways to get the voice of the customer (or VOC) firmly embedded in your production processes. The best way to create value is to solve the real pains of the customer and to do that you need to know what they are. VOC allows you to prioritise the needs of the customer and maximize the value you create at every stage.
2. Map your value creation to visualize your processes. This is the fastest way to identify challenges with work in progress, set-up or waiting times. Too much work-in-progress (WIP) causes work to go more slowly as individuals deal with complexity of trying to juggle tasks. Long set-up times result from difficulty in switching from one task to another and waiting time is where WIP stacks up before the next person can handle it. When you map your process these things come to life and you can start to rearrange your workloads and limit WIP to get the optimum flow.
3. Create a pull system to reduce WIP – that means creating a way for customer orders to only enter your production system when something else leaves. This way you can balance WIP and maintain optimum flow. To do this, you need to know one important fact – what is the lead time for orders? This is the time you take to complete an order. When you know your lead time you can work out what your WIP limit is.
4. Be aware that if you limit WIP, you need a method for “triaging” orders to the top of the list. This is not about queue-jumping, but about selecting the most likely to create the most value based on agreed criteria. This will ensure the right orders get handled, not just the “rush job”.
5. 20% of the activities cause 80% of the delays. The main goal in lean – speed –can only be achieved if you remove anything from a process that slows it down. Once you map your processes, seek out steps that slow things down and try to remove them. In most service businesses, processes are “unlean”, so there will always be a way to remove wasted time.
6. Invisible work cannot be improved. Sounds like a simple statement, but on a production line you can see new products emerging. If you run a digital production house, it is not so easy. To overcome this, create high level measures of production and display them prominently around your office. If you have ever seen a picture of the Toyota production line you will see scoreboards everywhere. This is to make sure everybody knows precisely how things are going at every moment. It is actually the best way to motivate production to achieve best quality and fast production.

If you would like to read more about how to apply lean to your service business I recommend “Lean Six Sigma for Service”. I have just scratched the surface here, but you will find much more detail on tools and techniques here.

The massive changes we have seen in the last 5 years in the way business promotion and sales happen is fantastic news for the PR industry. We have seen a move towards social selling and content-led marketing and to be good at both of them you need to master the art of conversation. This is something that PR pros have been doing forever and that means that if you work in PR you should be really excited by what is going on right now.

Hang on a moment though! To be good in this new world you need to update your skills, especially your numerical ones. In the past it was good enough to count up the column inches and the number of articles placed to report back to the client, but now you need to be able to link the amount of money they spend with your agency with real business results. This is typically a return on investment (ROI) figure and to work this out you need to know the true effect of your work on your clients’ sales.

So where should you start? To get to an ROI figure you need to think about your clients sales process and how your PR-based content marketing approach can go from grabbing attention of prospects to a completed sale.

Jay Baer of Convince & Convert, has identified four layers of metrics that you can use to make the connection from end-to-end. In an article with the Content Marketing Institute he stated these metrics are: 

• Consumption metrics – knowing how much your content is being read by your target audience (the equivalent of your old column inches metric). You can easily measure this with something like Google Analytics and hopefully you already are!
• Sharing metrics – knowing how many times your audience shared your content. You can measure this by putting simple social sharing buttons with counters on your site to know which social sites it has been shared on.
• Lead metrics – knowing how many times your content led to a new lead being created. This again can be done with Google Analytics to measure the number of times a “goal” was achieved, like the completion of a form or the registration for a newsletter.
• Sales metrics – knowing how many times the leads you created turn into sales. This can be done by connecting email addresses from leads with customer information from sales. It might be a little more complex, and there is not really an easy way to do this, but all you need is a single report from your client on completed sales and you can tie your work to their results.

As you can see from above, these metrics are layered one above the other. This is very close to a traditional sales funnel, and in fact, you can use this funnel approach in other ways to promote improvements in your metrics. Once you have your metrics in place, you go further and suggest that your client actively alters their web site to promote better content-led marketing strategies.

You want to deliver the right message to a person visiting the site at the right time and you can do this by simplifying site design to lead visitors to the right content. This is called funnel marketing, and many very successful sites use this approach to drive from consumption to sale. I will cover funnel marketing in the final Digital PR Master Class next week, so stay tuned.

Now, you may feel that to get from beginning to end in this series of metrics that you are stepping outside of your normal role in PR…and you would be right. The key, however, is to view mastery of these metrics as the key to a better client relationship, higher fees and more of your clients marketing purse heading your way.

Jay Baer quotes a colleague as saying, “that too many companies act like 19-year-old dudes. They try to close the deal on the first night, and that’s very, very true when it comes to content and social media”. This highlights the real point of knowing how to get to ROI for your work – that is, it is about relationship building and that takes time. You need to be able to prove to your clients that your efforts are paying back over time. Master your metrics and you will be able to do it effortlessly.

“New techniques, new approaches, new technologies and upset the old order and change the rules of the game. This is what trucking and air transportation did to railroads, what container shipping did to traditional ports, what superstores did to small shops, what microprocessors continue to do to computing and what digital media might do to entertainment.”

This statement from Andrew S. Grove in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, published in 1997 succinctly summarizes the how things progress from the way it was done to the new way. He goes on to talk about very large changes in one of the competitive forces in an industry as a “10x” change, suggesting that the force has become 10 times what it was in the past. This he calls the “strategic inflection point”.

So what has this to do with web formats and repeatability in PR? Everything – because PR is facing 10x changes to its daily work from forces it cannot control, like social media, citizen journalism and digital tools that empower clients directly.

One powerful lesson that I drive from Andy Grove was that if you want to change something you have to think big. You have to 10x it – meaning if you want your sales to increase by 10% next year, 10x that number and aim for that – the result will be more than 10% not because you aim for 100% growth, but by 10xing you have to think of new ways to achieve it – you innovate, get creative, think of ways to save, ways to market and grow that you just would not if you aimed for 10% growth.

Web formats are a 10x lever for your digital PR business. The force you to think, “Could I sell the digital solution again?”, “How many sales opportunities do I have for this?”, “What other offices could sell this format?”.

Web formats 10x your business in three important ways:

1. They take a one-off project and turn it into a product that you can sell again.
2. They force you to ask your clients what they really need and to create just that
3. They make the intangible into a tangible thing that a client can use and understand.

Web formats are not a technical innovation in themselves, but you can apply format-thinking to your digital practice and help to multiply your revenues.

So, for the next web project you build, ask “Could I sell this 10 times to 10 clients?” If the answer is yes, you just may have invented the new best selling web format.

As industry professionals, we sometimes forget that we have in-built capabilities to see beyond the look and feel of a web site. This means we understand what it takes to make something, and just what you can do to repeat a solution. You may have encountered the challenge that your clients cannot do this – they just cannot imagine what it will be and they need you present something that looks just like them in order for them to be confident that you can handle their digital project.

Typically, you need to go through a rather involved process to create a vision for your client of what their web service is going to look like - paper-prototypes, wireframes, static mock-ups and functional descriptions - and a lot of this work is done before you get the deal in many cases! This is risky, time-consuming and more often than not unfulfilling for both you and client. The problem is always, that no matter how beautiful your art is, the final product always misses something that the client thought was going to be there.

There are fantastic examples of how to do it right, and I remember clearly the advice from Paul Boag (@boagworld) that he never, but never does more than one suggested layout and never just sends a visual - he sends a video with him explaining the design choices in context. His view was this avoided what he called "Frankenstein" layouts with bits of functionality grabbed from various options and thrown together in a haphazard way.

When we devised the CloudStore we thought about this. We listened to a many industry practitioners about their approach to the challenge and decided we needed to make it easy for clients to know what they were going to get. To do this, we decided early on that we needed to show "live prototypes" demonstrating how one format has been repeated for different clients. What we underestimated was the value of this small feature – it has gone from being an afterthought to one of the key aspects of repeat ordering.

The point is that the client should not only know what their site is going to look, but also know exactly how it will do it - meaning they can put their hands on the format before they order from you. This sets the expectations at the right level and means the client can order with a high degree of confidence in what they will receive. This is a big change from the current "Ta-Da!" approach to showing the client the finished article (usually to their initial delight and subsequent disappointment).

To overcome this challenge, we are adding more example sites and trying to provide a range of look and feel options that reflect different classes of client; from banking to FMCG. The idea is that we can make it easier for the client to imagine how it will look for them and shorten the sales cycle a little bit more.

It would be great to hear how far you have had to go to get a client to understand what a service might look like before they have ordered. 

The classic case for the study of all things lean is Toyota, and more specifically the Toyota Production System (TPS) pioneered from the 1950s onwards. This development of this methodology of production was credited to Ohno, an engineer with a passion for perfection.

The Toyota production system was a shining example of how principle-led production can become more than just how things get done. It is about why, where and when they get done. It was about focusing energy on the parts that matter, not wasting effort on the things that work well.

To create the environment for focus, Ohno and Toyota created core principles that are pure common sense:

Empowerment – allowing the people who do the job to reimagine their job to make it better

Creativity – seeking hundreds of ideas and using everything you can from wherever it came from

Expertise – relying on deep knowledge and understanding to pursue perfection

Flow – creating continuous, uninterrupted value-adding activities in a natural order

Perfection – pursuing the goal of perfect elegance

What did I learn while reading the books on TPS? That discovering the true value you add is challenging, but once you have found it you know it. It is like love at first sight. You just know. The job of lean is to discover value and to stop doing the things that do not add value completely. To discover value, you have to look at the whole picture, not the details inbetween.

Understanding the whole picture means “seeing” everything. This is what lean practitioners call the value stream - and it begins and ends with the customer, not the producer. The point is to remove waste and reduce the time from zero to value to the minimum time possible.

When you understand the value stream, you can then design your production methods to allow value to flow. This means aiming for frictionless production where value is added at each step of the production process. The goal is to minimize waste of all types and to ensure that the thing of value moves forward, not back, through the process. Our eyes perceive flow – so to gain flow you must institute simple visual cues that allow everyone to understand that something has arrived, is being worked on and is ready to leave your section of the production process. This ensures people behind you keep giving you things at the right speed and that you give people in front of you things at the right speed. Regular frequency is more important than raw speed.

Once you have attained flow, you want to ensure that you don’t push unwanted goods out of your production line (think unneeded features or iterations in web development). Instead, you need to design things for demand from the customer (or pull). Pull is difficult to achieve, as it needs everything to be working in flow and everyone in the value stream to be in step. The purpose of pull thinking is to eliminate waste before, during or after the production process. You make what you sell, not sell what you make. That way you do not have unwanted inventory, have to discount prices to move old stock, or have capital tied up that could be put to better use.

The final step brings in the concept of Kaizen (or continuous improvement) to the equation. It is the pursuit of perfection. In Kaizen there are three steps; create a standard; follow it; make it better. The pursuit of perfection is a continuous process that never ends. The final step also brings into play another important concept – elegance.

The pursuit of perfection seeks to embody elegance in the value delivered to the customer. Elegance is simplicity on the other side of complexity – not easily achieved, but once down so seems obvious to all.

So when focusing, the things that matter are the value you can add to your customer, the elimination of waste and the creation of flow. If you can focus on these business will be good – trust me on that J

PR has always found it difficult to quantify precisely the business effect of its work. Fortunately, today it is getting easier and easier to offer clients rock-solid metrics that connect the work you do with the returns your clients enjoy. The key is to know what to measure and how to connect them. To do this you need to adopt a more analytical and data-driven approach to the day-to-day issues you are tackling and ensure you have the tools you need to provide the numbers your clients crave.

I thought we should take a moment to consider what are meaningful data points for your clients and how to provide a link between them and their bottom line. For me, matters such as sentiment, mentions, influence and most importantly sales leads are the key data points. It might be argued that there is a causal link in this chain from sentiment through to lead, but so far I have not been able to find any service that will let me analyse that chain (please let me know if there is one!). Leads drive sales and sales hit the bottom-line. The truth in sales is more leads, more sales. It should then follow that the more influence (thought-leadership), mentions (mindshare), positive sentiment (customer love) you have, the more leads you will create.

Sentiment: To measuring sentiment is a tricky business, but there are newer tools like Leiki or Connexor are available that allow you to automatically quantify positive and negative in social streams. This is a very powerful way of learning almost in real-time what people are saying about your organisation or your clients. Cutting edge stuff, but worth understanding today.

Mentions: The trick with mentions is to understand what is driving peaks and troughs in your mentions. Therefore, you need to tie your mentions to your content to discover the discussions that drive the numbers up. No tools needed here – just review your mentions on Facebook analytics or your Twitter account. If you do want to make it easier, however, you could always use something like Sprout Social to gather the numbers for you.

Influence: This is something you both have and can leverage from others. Today it is the new metric that measures your collective ability to move the SoMe masses. Influence is more of a vanity measure at the moment, but I think in the next year or two it will become a key determinant of buying decisions by consumers, so start getting into this now. If you have not signed up for Klout then do so. This will provide you with a score of your influence across SoMe networks. The more you engage, the higher your influence. Another service to watch for is Traackr. This allows you to identify the movers and shakers related to a topic of interest. The idea is that you can then connect with them to help you reach your audience. Choose and topic and try it - it makes for interesting reading!

There has been some great work published lately by Deirdre K. Breakenridge on Social Media and PR (Social Media and Public Relations, Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, FT Press, 2012) and if you have not yet got a copy I recommend you do. Practice #8 is all about measurement in the SoMe context.

Final thought for this entry comes from Katie Paine, author of Measure What Matters and CEO of KDPaine & Partners. In her opinion, “The key to good Social Media Measurement is to be clear about goals. Is the intent to reduce marketing costs? Improve positioning relative to the competition or the marketplace? Shorten the sales cycle?” If you can help your clients set clear goals, collect the data and understand what it means, you can create actionable insights. That’s what your clients will pay you for.

In a word: profit. The most successful form of television for the last 5 decades is format TV. From the standards we know today like American Idol, to ages old game shows like Family Fortunes, formats are a perfect fit for the consumption habits of the TV viewing public.

Viewers love formats: why? Because they know what they are going to get and the producers know that for a format to fly it needs viewing figures. When we relate this back to the digital PR world, we find that clients also like to know what they are getting – surprises are not good – so format-thinking helps the client to order with confidence, in full knowledge of what they will receive.

Producers love formats: Why? Because formats are cost effective and fast to produce. They have clear production guidelines (called Format Bibles) that set out in minute detail how to make the programme. This makes it easy to budget, finance, staff and roll-out. In the digital PR world, we are pioneering the use of Format Bibles for our web formats that make it faster and easier to produce new web solutions using the same principles.

TV Advertisers love formats: Why? Because formats draw huge audiences of a given demographic to a particular timeslot that buy products and services. This makes it easier to target the audience and, consequently for the TV channel and producer to leverage supply and demand to drive up the price of advertising. In the digital PR world, a close-fitting format targeted at a demographic of client can create be offered at a premium price – because building a one-off would not be possible at that price point, but being without the solution would be more costly.

In the digital PR world, treat clients like viewers, developers like producers and clients like advertisers. Give them tried and tested formats that will deliver what they need and profits will follow.

One of the key findings from talking to the digital directors of over 50 PR companies in the last 12 months is that we still think in terms of “1s and 2s”. What I mean by that is that we consider that if we create a great solution for a client, we might be able to use it again, maybe, with another client – while the truth is that this seldom happens.

Why is this and what opportunity is being lost? Well, I believe one reason is related to the complex, programming project-oriented approach to creating solutions for clients. These are difficult, challenging and nearly impossible to deliver on-time, on-budget and to the original specification. I have felt for a long time that it is time for a change from project-based deliveries to a production process orientation, and we have created our business to support PR agencies moving in that direction.

Another obvious reason is a lack of continuity in the way services are sourced, created and managed. Even if you are lucky enough to have a great internal team, invariably they will get more excitement out of starting with a blank sheet of paper and solving a who load of new programming challenges than repurposing something done before. If you outsource, then you probably do so on the basis of cost/quality criteria for that project – meaning you have different external contractors working on different projects. In both cases, there is a break in any potential for a viable back catalogue to emerge.

The missed opportunity is staggering.

If you are a large agency, with say 50 offices and perhaps 1000 retained clients you have 50,000 potential sales opportunities for a typical digital solution. Selling it 50 or 100 times rather than once or twice could have a massive effect on your top and bottom lines. With a solution retailing at $10,000, the missed turnover is $1m.

So how do you do it?

First, separate form and function – learn to look for the underlying solution that could be repeated. If you have just developed a charitable giving service, could that same underlying functionality be used by another client?

Second, share the great ideas across your agency – use your intranet, your project space, or even our own Hammerkit CloudStore to share your back catalogue and help your account teams to sell more. Clients appreciate being offered new things – we know because we asked them.

Third, move the thinking from once or twice to 10x and 20x – then on to 50x and 100x. There is a huge latent sales potential in your client base and working with repeatable solutions you have the capability to make your digital deliveries faster and more easily.

A tip we have discovered is that clients find it difficult to imagine how you can take one site and make it look like another – help them out with visual mock-ups that look like them – the sales will happen very quickly after this.

We specialize in repeatable digital solutions, so if you would like to find out more just send me an email or message me on Twitter @msorsaleslie.

Today the vast majority of web services for business clients are created from scratch. I call these one-offs – pieces of original art commissioned by a client from a supplier.

A typical scenario is a client with a business need meeting a web developer. Brainstorming then ensues arriving at ideas as to how the client need can be solved by the supplier. The ideas are then turned into wireframes, that are then filled in as beautiful artistic layouts and then given to programmers to be turn from static to working sites. It is a project, with the attendant challenges of every project. So,hand-built, one-off, commissioned projects built by small teams in specialist suppliers. Sounds like how Rolls Royce build cars doesn’t it?

Taking the lead from mature production industries, it seems logical that we move now from one-off, hand-built creations to something a little more efficient. The question is how to ensure that clients get what the need (a unique digital creation) while finding better ways to produce it.

Some of the research our team has done has looked at how production has changed in other industries to see how it might affect our industry. At the end of 1980’s people started feeling that mass marketing was no longer the way to go. Consumers were demanding more customization, they wanted products faster and they wanted better quality. A research area called mass customization was developed in order to bring customers what they demanded.

Mass customization was introduced as a term by Stan Davis in 1987 as

“the situation when the same large number of customers can be reached as in mass markets of the industrial economy, and simultaneously they can be treated individually as in the customized markets of pre-industrial economies”

Davis S.M., 1987, Future Perfect, Addison-Wesley, New York

There are eight (8) different levels of customization that range from mass production at one end to one-of-a-kind production at the other. Mass customization places in between these two, as can be seen in image below.

The focus of mass customization is to offer the variety and customization needed to be able to deliver individualised products to customers. The goal is to offer these products at an reasonable price. This way you can offer customized products that your clients want at a price they can afford. Mass customization focuses therefore on a variety of different niches, or market shares.

We have taken this challenge on board, with the goal of trying to make a core product that is developed as far as possible while not customizing it to a specific client. We call these web formats, and each is ready to be tailored to order. The benefit to us is that our product development and product life cycles are shortened with mass customization.

So, consider your digital production approach and look for opportunities to apply mass customisation. You will gain massive benefits from focusing on a single process that can produce a variety of end products that are similar but customized in the end to a specific client. You will be able to broaden the scope of products you can offer without extending your risk too far, and, importantly, lower your production costs so you can be more competitive and profitable.

I would welcome your thoughts on whether mass-customisation has a place in our industry and what the very best examples there are of it in action today. Ping me @msorsaleslie and lets talk.

I am indebted to Petteri Streng for allowing me to borrow some of his work in the production of this article. 

Just a few short years ago the business media landscape was a relatively simple place. There were journalists that worked for media outlets, such as newspapers, print magazines, radio and TV and if you wanted to get your story out you needed to work with a PR person who could help you get to them. Today the picture is vastly different. 

The rise of social media and citizen journalism (blogging to you and me) has meant that how you get your message out is changing rapidly. It is a much more nuanced world, where you should pre-announce, announce, retweet, repost, blog, link, comment and pin in order to cover your bases. This means you are using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, online Wire Services, blogging platforms, Quora and a whole host of other services even before you get to your own website, print media (which still is interested) and the big boys like radio and TV. 

So today, to be an effective PR person you need to know about all of these channels and be fluent in how to get your message out there.

Your core skill used to be creating a good press release, but how many times have you heard "The press release is dead" in the last 2 years? In my opinion it is not - it has just evolved, fragmenting into a series of short messages that can prolong comment and discussion, get you noticed and convey the core message - but not as a single document.

You cannot promote your business without social media today. So to win, you need to leverage your knowledge of great messaging, learn which platforms to send it to and be an active contributor to the discussion that ensues.

My advice: find a way to bring as many of the channels under control as possible. Use Sprout Social or something similar to gain a grip and then coach your clients in the art of the new press release - the social media release. This way, you will win.

A web format is a package of materials that allows a new web service to be localized, redesigned and rolled out according to a pre-defined formula.

The obvious thought is that a web format is just a site template that we copy. If that were true, we would all be using web sites that work like that. In actual fact, to make a format you need a lot more. It must encompass the sales and marketing, design, production and maintenance phases of the solution lifecycle. Here is the list of the things we design and produce when we make a format: 

-       a product design: what it is and what it does
-       a web site template: how the functionality is packaged
-       a format bible: how we made it and make it again and again
-       a business case: what the business benefits are for a client
-       a range of examples: what it can look like
-       a financial case: how much a PR agency can make from it
-       a FAQ and support statement: how we support the agency and client
-       a commercialization plan: how we licence and sell the format
-       a 2-sheet and 4-slide sales pack: support materials for account teams
-       client reviews: what the clients think of the solution
-       delivered repeats: what the real delivered cases look like in live action

We are not going to into all of these in detail here, but suffice to say that you need to broaden the thinking beyond just making web sites to make repeatable digital solutions a reality.

How do we know this? We worked with a range of producers and borrowed ideas from an industry that has been making formats successfully for decades – TV. We are all familiar with formats like Pop Idol, X-Factor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire – but we are probably less conscious of just how much TV is format-driven. The commercial reality is that format TV far outstrips ready-made TV in the profitability stakes and we believe that the Internet industry is heading in a similar direction.

There are lots of potential examples of great web formats for the PR industry, from corporate communications and mobile sites to social media integrations. This means lots of potential for completely new sources of revenue and profit.

If you would like to learn more about how we make web formats and repeatable solutions send me an email or connect with me on Twitter @msorsaleslie

Since starting Hammerkit in 2007 we have, like all young businesses, been seeking our sweet spot – that place where our combination of experience, expertise and technology can add the most value. We believed from the very beginning that nothing much had changed in the how web services are created and that we could change that.

The breakthrough came for us when a PR agency client suggested they needed “something that allowed them to create products on a shelf that could be reused, resold and repeated.” We took this statement and matched it against ourselves and discovered our sweet spot – repeatable solutions.

There is a joy in finding your niche.

We decided to split the web world in two: One-offs, the pieces of art that are possible because a client has the will, the budget and the timescale to develop a beautiful, unique and ultimately short-lived solution; and Repeatable Solutions, the web formats that allow high quality functionality and web concepts to be reused while still providing a unique experience for the client using lean digital production approaches. The key to this is to remove as much of the coding effort needed to repeat a solution – a feat our Hammerkit platform is sublimely positioned to do.

When we thought about this more deeply and we understood that we should not try to be a magic bullet solution. Looking at any other industry, there are custom-built, hand-crafted, beautiful pieces of art that exist at the premium end of the price scale and there are the solutions the rest of us can afford. These solutions are still high quality, well-design and fully-functional but because they are mass-customised rather than created from scratch they are more affordable.

So, the next time you are working on a set of requirements for a client just think, “Is this ART or BUSINESS I COULD REPEAT?” – if it is the former great! If it is the latter, contact us and find out how we can turn it into a repeatable solution.

Last week, we wrapped up our Repeat This! 2012 World Tour with a wonderfully productive and enjoyable evening in New York City. The event was in many ways the perfect last stop for the tour, which has been a blur of good fun, good people and real business. Let's take a look back, starting with our new unofficial mascot.

We got started in London and quickly established the hallmarks of a Hammerkit event: full glasses, full stomachs and a phalanx of Hammerkit swag.

Did we mention the full stomachs? Everybody ate well on this tour. Very well.

Next stop was Brussels, where we fell in love with The Atomium. This was a beautiful spot to have an event!

And our final stop was in New York, where we got to feel exclusive and shut down one of the city's best cocktail locations just for us and our friends. It was all very New York of us.

Of course, the best part of all the events was the people and we are thrilled to have met so many wonderful ones. There's nothing quite like a room full of brilliant people enjoying a cocktail and that, more than all the rest of the perks, is what we will remember most about our tour.

See you on the next one!

Well, the time has finally arrived and we are in The Big Apple for our Repeat This! 2012 World Tour event. The venue is awesome, the buzz in the City because of Internet Week is palpable and we even managed to gain a glimpse of President Obama as his car swept past us!

We have a great group of guests coming along - truly the great and good of the digital PR industry in NY. If you are not here, you should be. Personally, I am looking forward to sharing the mix for the exclusive Hammerkit cocktail that has been dreamed up by the guys at Employees Only - amonst other things of course. We will post the recipe and some of the snaps from the event tomorrow.

Over the years there have been a number of attempts to define I.T. as dead, or to redesignate it along with communications tech. I think in 2012 we have reached the death of I.T. as it is consumed by the social media juggernaut and the dependence we have on apps. "What?" you might say, "Dead - are you mad??!!" - and I would say no. I believe that the "I" should be replaced with an "S" - for service - because that is the most important form of technology on the planet.

Developing great service is difficult, and wrapping that service in great technology for convenient delivery is equally difficult, but I believe that the future is all about Service Technology. When you bring together data, context, demand and supply to fulfill a customer need you are delivering service, not information. The winners in this world will be the ones that understand that this seismic shift is underway and think more about service design than data and information architecture.

I am going to write more about this in the coming weeks, but I would welcome your thoughts on Service Technology vs. Information Technology.

t:M

The great content at Counselors Academy continued with a fantastic presentation from Pierre Loic (@pierreloic) and Shonali Burke (@shonali) about the hype behind influence on social networks. Pierre was able to share seven insights to dispell the myths about who has influence online and how PRs should approach trying to discover who these people are. These were:

1. The Law of the Vital Few - 3% of people = 90% of the influence online - but, importantly, they are only influencial about the topics they know about. So influence is driven not by popularity but by context. PRs need to think about who the 3% are for subject they are tasked with promoting and treat them just like any other group of analysts or journalists - the 3% really can influence the masses about that subject.Think relevance over popularity.

2. Influence is both art and science - This means PRs need to use finesse to select the keywords that really represent the subject they are interested in and then dive into the quantitive data to find the real influencers.

3. Be strategic - you have to set goals for what you (or your client) wants to achieve through engaging with influencers. The goals could be "likes" on FB or funds you want to raise, but you must know what you want to get out the process. From here you can then move to a cycle where you discover the influencers, listen to what they are saying, engage with them and then measure the impact towards your goals. This really is a cycle, so you can keep going through this process to continue to improve your results. Being strategic is about knowing what you want to measure.

4. Provide value - Try to provide real value to the influencer, whether that is helping them to help you with content or providing them with an opportunity to connect with their circle of influence. To provide value you should be doing something that is relevant and, most importantly, genuine and authentic.

5. Read the book - "Measure what Matters" by Katie D. Paine is essential reading. Knowing what to measure is key. Once you know what to measure, you can learn what works and do more of it.

6. No silver bullet - "Success is for those that show up" said Woody Alan, so a lot of the secret of making influence online work for you is to work hard. It takes time and effort, so don't expect immediate results.

7. Drive with value not hype - To really get the impact you want when running campaigns in social media you need to deliver value all the time. Messages alone will not work - you have to give something to get something back.

I think these are real gems of insight and I would love to hear a little about your experiences of trying to engage with influencers and leverage their circles for your clients. Thanks to Pierre Loic, Traackr.com for this.

I just listened to a great keynote from Marcus Sheriden (@TheSalesLion) at the PRSA Counselors Academy event in New Orleans. This guy turned his swimming pool company into the most successful one in the US using content marketing. Almost everything he said was pure common sense, but I think the most important thing was to be human.

Here are the 5 things:

1. Brainstorm the 50-100 questions you are asked all the time by clients and turn them into blog posts. This will give you 25 weeks of content to get going!

2. Being open about issues like price, quality and what you really deliver. These are the questions that prospects really are interested about and they will then ask you more questions. These questions are inbound links and they will boost your rankings.

3. Use the x. vs. y approach to showcase how you are different/better/not so good as the competition - again this will create debate and this is great for rankings.

4. Face up to problems about your service and be open about the solutions to the problems. Authenticity and trustworthiness is key.

5. Write how you talk. Answer the real questions your prospects and clients are asking in the way you would talk to them. Google will sort out whether you get good rankings, but it is not about tagging and meta data - its about search terms, and a prospect will ask like "Who is the best PR company in London?", "Why should I use a PR company?", "What ROI do I get from PR?" - these are the questions and all you need to do is answer them!

Check out www.thesaleslion.com for a free ebook on content marketing - and watch the video - Marcus is really entertaining ;)

t:M

We had a wonderful event at Atomium in Brussels and the final leg of the Repeat This! World Tour heads to New York for Internet Week. We are holding an invite only event for the digital PR elite to learn about repeatable digital solutions, CloudStores and how to take back turf from their agency competitors.

We will also record a webinar from the event itself and try to get interviews with some of the great and the good during Internet Week. It should be a blast!

If you would like to apply for an invitation, send an email to [email protected]. If you are coming along, I look forward to meeting you!

We head to the fair city of Brussels next week and are hosting a Cocktail Party at the world famous Atomium for the PR community. The idea is to share our findings from talking to many people working in the industry and to learn a little about how the scene in Brussels does digital. The response has been fantastic and we are looking forward to meet you all.

If you work in PR and have not already received an invite, please send a tweet me @hammerkit or send a message [email protected].

I just read a bunch of books about lean production and the pursuit of elegance. I thought I would share with you my take aways from these, as we are actively pursuing lean principles in the reinvention of digital production at Hammerkit.

The first thing is discovering the true value you add is challenging, but once you have found it you know it. It is like love at first sight. You just know. Your job (if you want to practice lean) is to discover value and to stop doing the things that do not add value COMPLETELY. To discover value, you have to look at the whole picture - not just what you do, but upstream to your suppliers and downstream to the people you supply and the client.

Understanding the whole picture means “seeing” everything. This is the value stream and it begins and ends with the customer, not you as the producer. The time taken to go from zero to true value can be months or even years in a value stream. Your job is to remove waste and reduce the time to value to the minimum possible.

When you understand the whole picture, you can then design your production methods to allow value to flow. This means aiming for frictionless production where value is added at each step of the production process. The goal is to minimize waste of all types and to ensure that the thing of value moves forward, not back, through the process. Our eyes perceive flow – so to gain flow you must institute simple visual cues that allow everyone to understand that something has arrived, is being worked on and is ready to leave your section of the production process. This ensures people behind you keep giving you things at the right speed and that you give people in front of you things at the right speed. Regular frequency is more important than raw speed.

Once you have attained flow, you want to ensure that you don’t push unwanted goods out of your production line. Instead, you need to design things for demand from the customer (or pull). Pull is difficult to achieve, as it needs everything to be working in flow and everyone in the value stream to be in step. The purpose of pull thinking is to eliminate waste before, during or after the production process. You make what you sell, not sell what you make. That way you do not have unwanted inventory, have to discount prices to move old stock, or have capital tied up that could be put to better use.

The final step brings in the concept of Kaizen (or continuous improvement) to the equation. It is the pursuit of perfection. In Kaizen there are three steps; create a standard; follow it; make it better. The pursuit of perfection is a continuous process that never ends. The final step also brings into play another important concept – elegance. This has been defined by Matthew May as containing four dimensions: symmetry, seduction, subtraction and sustainability (a later blog entry on this). The pursuit of perfection seeks to embody elegance in the value delivered to the customer. Elegance is simplicity on the other side of complexity – not easily achieved, but once done, so seems obvious to all.

What I learned most of all was that simple actions at no cost could fundamentally change the way things get done.

Some ideas of what you can do with minimal capital outlay are:

• Visual control with simple information systems
• Moving people and equipment (desks in our case) to create physical flow
• Getting rid of expensive, complex machinery in favour of lighter, nimbler approaches
• Taking time to work in the middle of production to understand what is going on
• Experiencing the world from the customers point of view
• Rewarding ideas with action, not money
• Focusing only on the parts that are broken, one at a time.
• Creating big STOP buttons (physical or virtual) to solve problems when it is cheapest to do it.

It seems there are a couple of common theme arising from the conversations we have had over the last few weeks with PR agencies. One of the most notable ones is that just knowing what each office in your network is doing is tricky - more often than not the best ideas are only shared internally once an award is given!

We recognised this challenge we created the Cloudstore. It provides a real-time view of web formats are available to offer clients now, what has been done and delivered and what is in the process of being produced. We break this down by office and client to make it easy to see what is going on.

Our mission is to save PR. We want to do that by making sure PR agencies have the most effective, high quality digital production service of anyone in the agency world. Its time to stop reinventing things and repeat, repeat, repeat.

This will be one of the topics on dicussion at our next Repeat This! World Tour event in Brussels. This is going to be a select gathering of the movers and shakers in digital PR in the city, so if you would like a VIP invite email me [email protected] with "Brussels VIP" in the title. I will make sure you get one - space is limited though.

The latest results posted by WPP[i] and Havas[ii] for their FY2011 show some interesting glimpses into the future of the industry. In both cases, they are doing extremely well, with WPP posting a 10% increase in full year profits and Havas a respectable 9% for the same period. Looking a little more deeply, though and we see that while PR performed well there are some issues on the horizon.

In WPP, while the top line growth for PR at 6.2% was lower than the advertising and media arm of the business, which posted 12.2% revenue growth, PR still increased its profit margin by 0.3% to 16.1%. WPP reaffirmed its long-term target to improve the staff cost/revenue ratio by 0.3-0.6% per annum, with a focus on the application of new technology.

For Havas digital and social media now make up 23% of revenue compared to 19% in the previous financial year. This is a 20% annual growth rate and at this level digital revenues will account for 50% of the firms revenue within 4 years. The Havas CEO, David Jones, referred to this "as another strong year driven by aggressive growth in digital".

The latest research from Kingston Smith W1[iii] indicates that PR bosses are very optimistic about 2012 with 71% predicting greater profits. Perhaps with a greater focus on digital and the application of smart technology, the industry will also be able to rise to the challenge of controlling the cost/revenue while taking back territory from the digital agencies.

With not much legacy in digital, PR has the opportunity for its Estonia moment – to leapfrog the old ways of doing things to move straight to the best available technology and methods just as this fledgling country did when it emerged from the old Soviet Union. This kickstarted their economy and offered immediate benefits to all. Is it time for PR to leapfrog the digital agencies? Let’s hope so.

[i] Source: WPP FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[ii] Source: Havas FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[iii] Source: ”PR Bosses retain 2012 optimisim, finds Kingston Smith”, PRWeek.co.uk

That’s right, you heard us. Get ready to get repeated because Hammerkit is taking its Repeatable Solutions for smart PR agencies on a world tour. Think of it as Repeat2012.

You have three chances to catch us live - London (Watcha!) in March, Brussels (Bon Jour!) in April and New York City (Hey you!) in May.

Hammerkit’s Repeatable Solutions turn your one-off web projects into best-selling digital products. Whether it is newsletters, campaign sites, annual reports or internal tools - Repeatable Solutions let you offer new services to your clients quickly, creatively and with consistent quality across the board. Just get a Hammerkit Cloudstore for your agency just Repeat It!

Join us for cocktails, excellent snacks and the magic beans that will kick those pesky digital agencies out of your backyard and take back your turf so you can do what is best - smart digital communications.

Follow us on Twitter @Hammerkit and look for updates!

IN THE UK:
In 2010 PR revenue was up by 9.24%. 2012 revenues are expected to outstrip that.
However, in 2010 PR profits were down 23% and PR employment costs were up 9%. In 2010, profit per employee in the UK's top 40 PR agencies was 13,400 GBP per year.

IN THE US:
In 2010, agency revenue was up by 7.7%.
Traditional PR represented only 6.5% of revenue for US advertising/marketing agencies in 2010. Digital marketing represented 28% of U.S. agency revenue in 2010, but the leaders of the pack such as Edelman could only achieve 12% of U.S. revenues from digital.

Total takeaway: Digital marketing - including social media and CRM/Direct marketing, will supplant "traditional PR". The future is all digital/social/online.

Take back your market.

In the past week or so, we have seen two very big cases that indicate both the power and the torment of social networks. The Komen case in the US and the TripAdvisor ruling here in the UK have proved that you can ruin a reputation at light speed today if you are not careful. In both of these cases there has been significant damage to their reputations not only by official sanction, but by the negative energy permeating from the social networks. It has never been more important to understand your online reputation and to create coping mechanisms for if/when it all goes horribly wrong.

One format we have been looking at recently is the concept of dark sites. These provide a mechanism to launch a completely self-contained site for managing a crisis. The format includes a video blog, social network integrations and a blog/RSS feed to help you get across your message, share important information with customers and stakeholders and react quickly and professionally. Importantly, you can direct traffic to this site and when the crisis is over, you can close it down (unlike your .com site).

If you would like to know more about our dark site format contact me and we can share it with you.

We believe in repetition, repeating and repeatability. Specifically, we believe that the PR and marketing industries will flourish in 2012 with the right repeatable solutions. This is why we’re hosting the Repeat This! monthly webinar and CloudStore clinic series to show you how you can turn your one-off web projects into best-selling digital products.

Repeat This! monthly webinars will explore different aspects of the PR industry and introduce you to key industry speakers. The webinars will then be followed by interactive CloudStore clinics, which will give you an opportunity to learn from case studies and suggest what tools, campaigns or client cases can be repeated.

If you work in PR or marketing and want to be ahead of the curve, this is your chance to learn and make digital your very best friend. You can sign up for the webinars and/or clinics by emailing [email protected] and we’ll add you to our mailing list.

During the market research we undertook to create the CloudStore I discovered that there seem to be three different approaches that PR agencies took when attempting to deliver digital projects for their clients. I wanted to share what I have learned to help to demonstrate why PR is missing an opportunity to be better at digital than the pureplay digital practices. I found out that there were three types of practice:

The Practice of Denial: this is the agency that is still trying to be a traditional PR agency. I heard comments ranging from "we don't have the staff, so we use local web designers when we need to", to "we want to move up the value chain and be delivering strategy, not web projects - the digital agencies can do it better anyway." I fear that these practices disappear as clients side-step them and go direct to the agencies offer digital services as standard. Typically, this type of practice has only recently appointed a digital director and is still trying to workout what the job should entail.

The Practice of Illusion: this is the agency that believes IT IS doing digital because they have a few members of the team that know how to buy web projects from smaller suppliers. They are acting as a procurement service for their clients, rather than actively influencing the use of digital. There are revenues flowing from digital and several team members with a good understanding of how things work on the web - they know digital is more than just managing a social media stream. This is the agency that needs to invest in building expertise and capability to leverage the knowledge it has gained.

The Practice of the Big Brain: this is the agency that worked out a long time ago that to do anything serious in digital they had to attain critical mass. They did this by creating a crack team inside the organisation that deliver almost all the digital projects the agency produces. The Big Brain is very knowledgeable about digital and can do almost everything. It is, however, a bottleneck in the organisation that creates tension in the rest of the business. The Big Brain can do digital, but scaling it across the business globally is painful and challenging.

Do you recognize your agency in any of these types? I think there is a chance that these types exist together in the same global agency, so it is possible you have encountered more than one. 

I believe that if the PR industry wants to move forward to become the champion of digital, it needs to break out of these three practices and become the practice of globalisation. I think that to do this you need to:

decentralize the ability to deliver digital products effectively: provide a standardised way for your teams around the world to offer high quality digital services regardless of the local expertise in place

share a common memory of the best ideas and services: ensure that the services that are used by lots of your clients and easy to discover by anyone in the business

leverage client power and practice scale: work with your clients to develop new ideas that can be turned into massively successful web products for you and for them. Use your global office network to spread those ideas quickly and gain thought-leadership points.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on digital practices you have seen in the PR industry.

It was really interesting to read about GolinHarris acquiring FUSE to boost their digital street cred. It really is an important change that PR firms go after digital pureplays and was most recently commented on by Steve Barrett in his PRWeek blog article “The Agency Revolution continues”, where he said that digital is both an opportunity and a threat for PR firms. Acquisition of a bespoke digital agency is certainly one way to deal with that double-edged sword, but is it a wise one? Could it be a very costly mistake?

Clearly, there are new skills required to be a modern PR firm – and being digital savvy is really not enough. You need to be able to confidently deliver digital solutions to clients that have increasing demanding and wide-ranging tastes. It makes sense, therefore, to bring in talent from outside to gain that confidence and ability. The test will be whether two very different business cultures can become one and deliver what is the client needs on time and on budget.

My experience tells me that acquisitions have a 8/10 chance of failure. That’s not to say that GolinHarris has made a mistake. Indeed, I believe that their g4 approach is a really interesting way to trying to focus energy on how digital can help clients, but I can’t help thinking that some of that energy will be drawn to integration rather than revelation.

I believe that what is needed in the PR industry is to look at how to do digital more intelligently – not just how to do digital. At Hammerkit, we preach repeatable web solutions not because their different, but because they are obvious. Rather than buy in digital talent, buy in repeatable solutions and train your existing PR talent to be fantastic solution sellers. After all, many clients have very similar needs. That way, you can spend all of your energy on the client and not on melding cultures.

I am delighted that today we are announcing the completion of our latest investment round of €1.25million. We are thrilled that The North West Fund from the UK has joined forces with our existing investor Veraventure together with further support from Tekes NIY to back our business plan. We have secured the growth capital we need to push forward with our repeatable solutions offering by strengthening our team, expanding our operations and developing our core platform.

We start by creating a new sales and production centre in Liverpool in the UK. From there we will run our CloudStore operation and help our global PR clients deliver digital services more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Indeed, our ambition is to help define the industry of repeatable digital solutions and now we have the gas in the tank to allow us to do it.

Our Board has been strengthened with the arrival of Brenden Holt as incoming Chairman. Brenden brings with him a wealth of knowledge around building successful technology-based companies and he and the Board will play a vital part in ensuring our success.

I look forward to working in partnership with our clients and all of the PR community to drive forward lean digital production. The PR industry has a fabulous opportunity to grab the high ground in the battle to deliver high quality digital services. We want to help the industry implement production processes that drive down costs, drive up quality and ensure that more time is spent on the developing the clients message to the market. We believe that repeatability is the key to this, and I hope to be able to share that vision and our solutions with you in person over the coming weeks and months.

I want to thank our clients; in particular Hill+Knowlton and Edelman for their support in helping our business concept go from idea to reality. I also want to thank my team who, to a person, has worked their socks off to make Hammerkit a success. I think they deserve a heap of recognition for that. So thank you all!

Now it’s Hammertime!

Download the English version of the press release here
Download the Finnish version of the press release here

As part of our growth plan we are looking to recruit talented, committed team players to help us deliver repeatable solutions to the PR industry globally. We have a number of positions open right now in our account management; production and development teams and you can review them here.

In a nutshell, our account management team will be helping clients to get their CloudStore up and running and will have a unique position in the industry of being acting as format producers, working with clients to help them discover the web services that could be repeatable and making sure they are created and placed in the CloudStore.

Our production teams will be working on original web formats as well as managing the fulfillment of format repeats. This requires talented web designers, developers and UX gurus with amazing organizational skills.

In our development team we build and maintain the Hammerkit Cloud Platform. Joining this team will give developers and DevOps people the challenge of creating a world-class software development platform and cloud infrastructure that has to perform 24/7 for a global user base.

If you feel you have the talent, the track record and the tenacity to help drive our business forward then apply. We’re waiting to hear from you.

In the meantime, why not have a look at the roles currently available in our careers section

There seems to be precious little positive news about how technology is or will impact PR in the coming year. Short of discussions around the use of the social networks, I do not get a sense that PR is really looking at how digital services can boost their clients business success and I am wondering why.

Clearly, we are in the age of social video, so I would have thought it would make sense for businesses to be looking at how to use video to boost understanding of its products and their benefits. There are also wider opportunities to educate, inform and influence demand that help to shape a whole product approach to marketing beyond PR. A recent study by the Content Marketing Institute found that only half of businesses considered this to be a viable content marketing approach in 2011, but that more than 60% of the companies that used it thought it worked. Many still prefer articles, social media and blogs, but conversely are less sure they work as well as video (50%/50% and 58% respectively). (Members only report:  B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends). However, the trend toward video is dramatically positive with 27% year on year growth. Expect this to increase further in 2012.

Moving forward, however, the biggest growth area is going to be in mobile. I believe that 2012 will see a rise of the mobile content delivery that may even eclipse traditional web channels. For PRs advising clients, you should think about mobile sites, mobile applications and mobile magazines as power tools to get their message across. At present, mobile content only makes up about 15% of the content marketing mix, so look out for this growing fast to reach similar levels to social networks and blogs.

I would be really interested to learn a little about the trends you see as a PR professional, so lets discuss it.

I read with interest an article in ReadWriteWeb about the launch of a new cookie cutter design for mobile web services. The thing that was interesting was the how the author, Dan Rowinski, positioned the idea that it might be a negative thing for services that make it easy to create sites and apps. His question to mobile web developers was "Are we going back to a mass of websites that all look the same, back to the era of Netscape and boring design? Or are services like FiddleFly a good thing for the development community?" The readers comments that came back were predictable:

• if you make it easy you cannot produce sophisticated services
• you can only do simple stuff with WYSIWYG
• to really create an engaging presence you need to create a unique service

The presumption that efficiently produced products and services should be any less engaging, powerful or sophisticated is an interesting position for the industry to adopt. Clearly, almost every other major industry in the world has worked out how you can combine "cookie cutter" production with customer delight. To move forward, the digital industry has to break this mentality of hand-crafted is the only way to produce great services.

Our challenge for 2012 is to help the PR industry undertake digital intelligently. By repeating the basic functionality and avoiding reinventing the wheel every time, PRs are going to focus more energy on the parts that matter to a client - their message and whether their call to action is converting to sales.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on whether "cutting the dough" is the same as selling a delicious cookie?

We had a great discussion at our Repeat This! webinar yesterday, with industry practitioners posting some great questions for Ulla Jones (@UllaJones) from Hill+Knowlton and myself to mull over. This webinar is the first in a series where we will look at how repeatable solutions can boost the revenues, margins, quality levels and collaboration within PR agencies and over the coming weeks we will be taking the show to meet some amazing people in the world of PR.

The big themes that came through were certainly around the fact that the PR industry can really surprise the established "digital agencies" by creating digital services efficiently and being the champions of the digital conversation on behalf of their clients.

We spent time discussing how repeatable solutions are already helping Hill+Knowlton in Helsinki to produce high quality digital projects at light speed, and Ulla was really pushing the point that clients need help to define what they need when it comes to web solutions.

Ulla's prediction for 2012 was centred on social media moving even faster, but with PR agencies helping clients to learn to "swim for themselves", and the rise of the mobile site as the key deliverable for many PR related activities. If Ulla's predictions are true, we will be producing a lot of repeatable solutions for mobile and I have sneeking suspicision it will be.

Big news! I repeat, big news! Not only will I be hosting a webinar with Hill+Knowlton tomorrow at 4PM CET, we are planning to follow the webinar with a whole series of webinars and clinics that are designed to educate the PR industry about repeatable solutions and the benefits they bring. The schedule for the rest of the Repeat This! series will be solidified in January, so stay tuned for updates.

We hope you join us tomorrow when we kick the series off, but if you can't make it, fear not! True to fashion, we will repeat the webinar again in January.

Register here

With the growing shift of client marcomms spending from traditional to digital channels, what does it mean for PR? I think it means that unless your agency starts to gain the capability to produce digital well - not just post and manage social media conversations, but actually move into the world of helping move internal and external comms on to the web.

For example, more and more businesses are creating digital annual reports for shareholders, or producing digital newsletters for clients and staff. They are creating Facebook landing pages that capture "Likes" and engagement and microsites to drive SEO rankings. These used to be complex productions, but today there are many ways to produce them effectively.

We talked to a number of clients and many of them have set the goal of 100% of the marcomms being spent on digital productions. This literally means no more print publishing of any type. What does this mean for PR agencies and what opportunity does it create?

Personally, I believe that content has always been king, so if PR agencies can do digital intelligently, then coupling this with the ability to write well and the trust of the client to put their message out, I think PR has a great future. What do you think?

I will be hosting a webinar together with Hill+Knowlton at 4PM CET on December 15th 2011 to discuss how the PR industry can borrow a few good ideas from other industries to improve the way digital services are created for clients.

If the most recent predictions will come true, next year is going to be a difficult one for the industry. I believe that to cope, the PR sector should focus on three things to ensure business can boost profitability: repeat, repeat, repeat!

"Repeat what?", you may ask. We are going to look at how PR agencies can do digital intelligently by focusing on turning one-off web projects into global best selling products.

Please join to learn more about what will change in 2012.

Register here

The PR industry now finds itself in a rather amazing position. In this era of economic uncertainty, reduced spending on advertising and increasing digital conversation, PR has the potential to become the “new advertising” modeled for and by the times. So, why then is the PR industry going backwards when it should be moving forwards? Something doesn’t add up.

What is going wrong lies somewhere between revenue and profitability. Revenues for the industry are up dramatically (by 9.24% in 2010) but profitability is down, burdened by increasing employment costs and a lack of productivity. The profitability of the Top 40 agencies in the UK fell by a staggering 23.8% in 2010 according to the Kingston Smith W1 report, heralding the lowest profit margins for seven years. So what needs to be done to increase productivity such that the increased revenues are no longer squandered?

According to Avril Lee, UK CEO at Ketchum Pleon, as quoted in response to a PRWeek report, "everyone in PR is having to be flexible about how we use resources and our most precious asset – our people. The need to cultivate and find great talent, and having it available ‘just in time’ when campaigns do get the green light, is often our most pressing day-to-day challenge."

Flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes new challenges. What can be done to help this most precious resource with consistency? Strategies, especially in the digital marketplace, must be equally nimble but must not sacrifice productivity. What is needed are high quality repeatable solutions that can be rolled out at the drop of a hat.

Think about the kind of digital projects you are asked to do for clients. Many of them are similar. Corporate websites, product microsites, newsletters, Facebook campaigns, LinkedIn applications, social media aggregators, etc. are all great examples of repeatable solutions that are different in content but similar in form. We recently interviewed a director at one of the world’s largest PR agencies, who said that about two-thirds of the solutions they produce for clients could be repeatable, meaning that in most cases repeatable solutions could reduce production costs, shorten turnaround time and, most importantly, guarantee consistently high quality.

At Hammerkit, we have been working with repeatable solutions for many years and believe that there has never been a better time for the PR industry to use them to their full advantage. Beyond that, we believe that to ignore repeatable solutions is to be left behind, facing statistics like nearly 25% drop in profitability mentioned above. Repeatable solutions accelerate profitable growth, improve productivity and create happy clients.

Here is how Hammerkit can help. We recently launched our Cloudstore for PR, which makes it easy for agencies to turn one-off web projects into best selling products. Every project has the potential to become a repeat sale, another solution added to your bag of tricks. It is like having your own PR AppStore. Our Cloudstore allows your agency to share all of the best selling items, shortening the sales cycle, and recycling what works. Valuable creative resources are stored rather than lost, and thus, also revenue is stored rather than lost.

If the PR industry doesn’t answer the call in 2012, it risks squandering its advantageous position. Smart agencies will focus on three things: repeat, repeat, repeat.

PRWeek Article
Kingston Smith W1 Report