As ConLib cuts just keep on coming, we thought we’d canvass the opinion of senior managers for their views on essential service areas for the chop. Read a summary of the results here.

With a track record for successful award entries for our clients – here’s a case study example for those interested - we thought we’d share a few tips to help you in your planning for next year.

1. Try to build your case study portfolio throughout the year so you have a selection of well written and already approved customer stories that you can potentially enter.

2. Speaking to your customers about entering awards well in advance gives them a chance to organise themselves and appropriate approvals in good time – this will help with the last minute sign-off.

3. Make sure that there is tangible evidence for project/contract success and that your customer is happy for you to include quantifiable outcomes – this will be the key to whether you are short-listed or not!

4. Tell a story – an awards entry is not a sales tool or piece of collateral. If you treat it as such, you will only end up alienating the judges.  The entry needs to give the judges a real idea of what your organisation has done to deserve this award and why. So you should look to build a picture of the original customer pain, aims or goals, solution implementation and benefits. Just copying and pasting from an existing piece of material isn’t good enough.

5. Read the entry criteria – you don’t want to waste time writing up a great entry which may not qualify.

In short, drafting successful award entries requires a fine balance between persuasiveness without being salesy or pushy.  Knowledge and experience of tailoring content to different audiences is vital if you’re to have a chance of being short-listed.

I wonder if there’s an Award out there for writing award entries?  Perhaps that’s one for PR Week …

Trouble is, all too often, the public doesn’t buy it. It just doesn’t wash. And companies do too little to manage expectations or demonstrate to people that they are trying to cope. Their PR can be the disaster that follows the disaster.

Take the on again-off again relationship that the airlines and holiday companies have been having with that puffy Icelandic volcano. Yes, the clouds grounding flights across Europe have clearly been beyond their control and at first unforeseeable.

But the way they handled the aftermath was very much something they could get a grip on and the negative reaction to those that did little to help their customers could plainly have been predicted. But too many companies just left travellers stranded and only did the bare minimum to help their customers even once the threat of legal action seemed inescapable.

BP has been faced with a PR nightmare of mammoth proportions. The company may fairly claim that the massive oil leak off the coast of Louisiana was unforeseeable and is largely beyond its control – in the aftermath anyway – and we’ll see who gets blamed in the coming months and years.

Certainly there is widespread anger in the US at BP, which has been seen as arrogant, in denial, and more concerned about its share price than the catastrophic environmental damage the leak has caused. Whether this is fair or not isn’t the point. The company should have been prepared for this sort of reaction from the start – and managed expectations accordingly – but BP has instead seemed to be playing catch-up with the media reports and public outcry.

On the other hand, this week’s announcement by David Cameron that tough cuts in government spending will hit everyone and the accompanying “we face years of pain” headlines may just be the smartest move the media-savvy former PR man turned PM has made yet. While there has been a little blaming of the previous guys in charge – as there always is in politics – at least the coalition government is largely taking responsibility for the future and trying to create realistic expectations. There is little point in saying things will get better soon if no one is at all confident they will.

The only thing the new coalition government could have done better is to be a bit more realistic and up-front about the possibility of income tax rises. While the Cameron’s Tories certainly don’t want higher taxes, they could be a necessary evil if this government is to really succeed in bringing down the deficit – at least that’s the opinion a good many of our business leaders voiced in a recent survey we did of top financial mangers across the UK.

People will always play the blame game and those in a position to be blamed need to be ready face the flak. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how often they don’t see it coming.

The theme of tinkering around the edges can also be applied to today’s marketers.  Look at the mirage that is e-marketing.  Sure, some works – and Linked-in communities provide a very good example of that.  Yet time after time, we find companies saving pennies on print and going totally online.  It just doesn’t work.  There is a substantial proportion of the business community – at least half by our reckoning – who say that they NEVER respond to online or email marketing pieces.  What utter twit would therefore save a couple of thousand on print and mail, in order to studiously ignore half their target market who might represent a potential market of several millions?  It just doesn’t make sense.

In business and in politics, it’s the people who can see the wood for the tress who succeed.

Ipex is an international print show – a once-every-four-years occasion that attracts all the industry big-hitters. Multi-million dollar marketing budgets are flexed as exhibitors jostle for the limelight amidst a fanfare of new launches.

Clearly, many months of planning had gone into some of the booth designs.  The sheer scale of many stands was impressive.  And yet, all too often, the on-stand messaging delivered nothing but bold, bland claims – ‘we do this; we do that; and oh, we do it very well!’ Yes – you and the rest of the hall. 

One exhibitor chose another route. Their stand featured larger-than-life cut-outs of their customers. Onto each cut-out was printed a quote explaining how the exhibitor had helped improve each of the customers’ operations.

Amidst all the corporate power-plays and self-eulogising how refreshing to see a company with the confidence to let their customers do the talking.

Content isn’t just about words on the page or on screen. Businesses must take care to find the right messages at every point of contact with customers or prospects.

What you say might be very similar to competitors. How you say it can give you the edge.

If got right, the tagline can be an effective and memorable device that is a true reflection of what your company does and your brand values. If got wrong, it could be the business world’s equivalent of an awful bar-side chat-up line.

While a number of great consumer taglines spring to mind, it seems to be more of a challenge to get it right in the B2B environment and so easy to go off message. Take for example the tagline for IPEX 2010 – the international print exhibition that happens every four years:

Perfect time. Perfect place. One unique opportunity.

This is just a bit too cryptic. It doesn’t tell us what the event is all about. There’s no mention of print or communications anywhere here. One unique opportunity starts to say something but if you didn’t know what IPEX is all about then the audience is left thinking, “One unique opportunity for what …?”

In the B2B world, marketers have the challenge of competing with their consumer counterparts whose brands and products naturally lend themselves to more catchy, funny, or even ‘sexy’ lines. The B2B remit however is more complex and tone will most likely remain businesslike. Yet there’s so much scope for effective tagline creation.

Working with a specialist agency who understands the B2B and vertical landscape is important. A good tagline that reflects your core value proposition and cutting edge principles can often be a perfect springboard for consistent messaging across all your content. And as we all know, “content is king”.

What really helped make the campaign unique was the role of media – but the new-style media coverage did not unfold quite the way some observers thought it would. Early in the election contest, I wrote about the fact that many in the political class were expecting this to be the UK’s first real digital election – in the mould of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 when online communications played an unprecedented role.

Well that wasn’t quite how it worked out, was it? Instead, this was the election in which good old television played a huge role – maybe a bigger role that ever – as the TV debates dominated the campaign. So, while new media may be interactive and speak more directly to the individual, it took a back seat while an old mass media made a massive impact on the campaign’s trajectory as the old-fashioned big broadcast event created an excitement that set the election apart from any other in recent history.

For the Liberal Democrats, the television debates provided an unprecedented platform to showcase their leader and air their views – with Nick Clegg emerging as a serious player and legitimate contender for prime minister. But it was also another old medium that may have knocked him back down, as many of the mainstream newspapers went on the attack with a series of withering – and in most cases unfair – attacks on the LibDem leader who seemed bemused at the idea of going from the new Churchill to a Nazi sympathiser in the space of a week.

So while old media, particularly newspapers, have struggled to maintain their relevance and influence in the digital age, they certainly demonstrated that they can still be wheeled out take centre stage – to in fact provide centre stage – when Britons want to watch the big event unfold en masse before they gather round the water cooler. Even in the election’s compelling aftermath.

In fact, there are two issues that the successful party or coalition must address immediately and seriously.  First is the economic black hole of the UK public deficit (expected to be around £70bn once the temporary bank prop-up allowance is removed).  The other is giving small and medium-sized businesses proper recognition and a strong representation to government.

I believe that the existing small business organisations are frankly ineffective in forcefully carrying the SME lobby to parliament.  There is plenty of wooing of large firms by political parties, but only token recognition really being given to the 1.5 million firms that produce half the country’s revenues.  The Conservatives have pledged that 25% of government contracts would be awarded to small businesses.  The LibDems say they will force banks to lend more to small businesses.  Labour says it will provide £4bn in new venture capital for growth businesses.

All this is very well, but what pressure group is going to scrutinise government and lobby for real delivery on these promises?  In my personal view, certainly not the feeble organisations that currently claim to represent SME interests.

So with a new government, we need a new representative organisation to drive through SME issues.  Any volunteers?

1. Don’t sit there while you try to fix the problem and hope that it won’t affect your customers. Why not be pro-active and inform customers in the affected areas that you’re working to sort the problem out? They’ll appreciate your honesty and forward planning a whole lot more.
2. Don’t try to make out that the business or person calling up is in fact not a customer. That will just make you look (a) silly and (b) show that your internal systems cannot perform the simplest of tasks like confirming whether you are a customer or not.
3. Don’t say that the problem is ‘only’ affecting 500 customers. Any number going into three digits sounds like a lot to me, particularly when so many organisations rely on broadband to complete every day business tasks and important transactions.
4. Don’t take 5 working days to try to get some sort of resolution or organise an engineer to be sent out.  A lot can and should be happening in 5 business days with a good internet connection!
5. Don’t refuse to offer any apology whatsoever, ignore the requirement for some sort of compensation or provide an interim solution to ensure business continuity.  With mobile broadband (you know those dongles/USBs that you see everyone using) a commonly available service these days there’s no excuse not to provide your business customers with a short-term solution while you fix the problem.

The business world, and marketers in particular, are always trying to highlight the importance of customer experience and crisis management in maintaining good relationships and stemming churn rates. Our recent office experience just proves that large corporates are still not practising what they preach to handle these situations effectively.

Okay rant over.  Anyone know of a good broadband provider that doesn’t have a two letter acronym as part of its name…?

I booked a well-deserved holiday this month and conducted all of my destination research online. How antiquated the thought of browsing through dog-eared brochures in a High St. travel agency now feels. Online I was able to search on price and location, view videos of possible accommodation, read reviews from other travellers – everything but dip a toe in the pool.

However, one common niggle kept distracting me like a persistent Mediterranean mosquito. Too many websites offered inadequate translations.

The language choice would be given – click the union jack for an English version. But once clicked, the resulting text read as if written by a Spanish waiter who’d learned English from touring stag parties. And that was just the French websites!

I have no doubt that many UK holiday companies are just as poor in this respect as their European counterparts. In fact, I wonder how many even offer a translation? And yet, in a world made smaller by faster, cheaper travel, what price this fudging of the language issue? How much lost business results?

Badly written English certainly made me feel less confident about spending my money with the holiday operators in question. I imagine foreign tourists feel the same about the English equivalents. At a time when every business is fighting tooth and nail for market share, surely it’s not too much trouble to find a native-language speaker to check and double-check text?

Once again, it all comes down to content. You might have the finest product known to man. But if the words you use to describe it are poor, your sales will undoubtedly suffer.

Now, where did I put those Speedos…