Mass Ave PR | Founding Principal | Jennifer Wagner

If you work in public relations or communications and didn’t catch this story about Slingshot SEO in the Indianapolis Business Journal over the weekend, read it now.

Pay particular attention to this paragraph:

Digital Relevance believes it stakes better odds of earning media interest by providing research showing industry trends rather than pitching often-rejected news stories about new products or services.

Meanwhile, other employees are researching online news websites and trade journals to find who covers what subjects.

When the studies are done, the PR professionals notify news organizations or trade journals that would be interested in the research. Or Digital Relevance’s own writers post guest blog entries in publications or on clients’ websites. It’s often a mix.

The more that stories float from media outlet to media outlet, or the more times those links are shared through social media, the higher up customers’ websites appear in Google searches, driving up traffic.

Ideally, some of the readers will land on a Digital Relevance customer’s website, throwing them some business.

“If you create that [research] piece right, it’ll fire on all cylinders and create digital relevance, hence our name,” Bailey said.

In a nutshell, content is [still] king.

Google and other search engines figured out that companies like Slingshot were gaming the system, so they changed the rules to fix the problem.

Now, Slingshot has decided to focus on earned media.

To which I respectfully say, “Yeah, duh.”

There are plenty of PR practitioners who just know how to pitch. The secret is tying everything together. Social matters. Earned media matters. Blogging matters. Multimedia matters. But most importantly, knowing your audience matters.

A lot of SEO firms made a killing for a few years using boilerplate content geographically targeted with a few industry-wide keywords. That’s just not good enough.

Knowing a market means knowing market specifics, and depending on the client, that could mean anything from the top-rated television station to the best dive bars.

I wish Slingshot the best of luck as it trades out impersonal SEO tactics for more personalized earned media strategies. Those of us who’ve been practicing public relations for years already know that it’s almost always more effective to be relevant than pervasive.

Turns out, the Google bots now know it, too.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.

Mass Ave PR | Founding Principal | Jennifer Wagner

There’s a beautiful home for sale in my neighborhood. The historic property has been redone with all the finest upgrades, and the owner clearly loves the house he spent almost two years and countless hours of his own time restoring.

Last September, he put it on the market as a FSBO. He held open houses every weekend, and lots of people, including nosy neighbors like yours truly, stopped by. He even had a few offers.

But no sale.

So he raised the price (presumably to cover the commission) and hired a real estate agent. More weeks and months have gone by.

Still no sale.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why.

It’s a gorgeous house, but if you compare his asking price and the specs to recent sales and listings in the area, the price per square foot is off the charts. We’re talking more than double what anyone else is asking or getting.

I know there’s a buyer out there for every house, but being that far outside the current market is a recipe for failure. While it’s true that real estate in Indianapolis is picking up (houses in the neighborhood move fast if they’re priced right), it’s unlikely that someone would overspend by more than $100,000.

Decades ago, a potential buyer might not have known that a sale price was horribly off-base. It used to be challenging to find out about the real estate market. You had to go to the courthouse and sift through records or get an agent to do it for you using a proprietary internal database.

Now you can download any number of apps to your smartphone and have data galore at your fingertips.

What does all this have to do with public relations and publicity?

Mass Ave PR just celebrated its one-year anniversary, and it’s been fascinating to watch the effect of the honest pricing business model in the local marketplace. We’ve won clients away from big agencies, and I’ve had solo practitioner friends tell me they’ve informally adopted the Mass Ave PR menu.

It’s easy for them to ask for $125 an hour when they can send a prospective client to our website for a price-check on the going rate.

We’re doing for PR and publicity what technology and public records have done for real estate: making the industry more transparent.

It’s not the right fit for everyone. Some clients want a huge team of consultants, even if half of them are learning on the job. Some are happy to overpay so they can tell their friends they hired XYZ Agency. But most folks just assume that PR pricing should be mysterious and secretive because it’s always been that way.

As we expand the model in the coming year, we’ll continue to work on piercing the veil of secrecy and changing the way businesses and non-profits think about PR and publicity.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.

This week, my piece on the rise of a new Indiana swing voting population is featured on the cover of the section. I’ve posted the text of the column below.

Quick, describe a Hoosier swing voter.

White, married, middle-class male from southern Indiana, somewhere between 35 and 55 years old, right?

Nope.

The new swing voter in Indiana looks like me—a 30-something mom—who lives in the counties surrounding Indianapolis. And that’s going to change the way we run campaigns.

Before we get into the numbers, let’s start with this premise: Indiana is a red state. Our election cycles typically start with at least a six-point GOP advantage.

But the wonderful thing about Hoosiers is our willingness to listen and be persuaded.

Democrats who win statewide depend on persuadable voters to tip the scales, and southern Indiana used to be the place to find them.

The data from the 2012 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races tell an evolving story.

By the numbers, Joe Donnelly beat Richard Mourdock by roughly 148,000 votes. Mike Pence got about 75,000 more votes than John Gregg.

While neither Donnelly nor Gregg won any of the so-called doughnut counties around Indianapolis, Donnelly earned almost 21,000 more votes than Gregg in those counties. It’s worth noting that Donnelly also received almost 18,000 more votes than Gregg in Marion County. Those votes add up.

Looking at the data another way, Donnelly earned 38 percent of the vote in the doughnut counties compared with 32 percent for Gregg and 31 percent for President Obama. Glenda Ritz, who upset Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, received nearly 41 percent.

Clearly, the electorate around Indianapolis is persuadable.

Things get really interesting when you bring in exit polling data.

In the Senate race, women voted for Donnelly over Mourdock by a 12-point margin (53-41 percent). Donnelly won 48 percent of white females to Mourdock’s 46 percent. Donnelly performed extremely well in the 30-44 age range.

In the gubernatorial race, women supported Gregg over Pence 52-47, but white women voted for Pence over Gregg by eight points (53-45). Voter age was not a strong factor.

When you analyze these numbers alongside census data showing a higher percentage of white residents in the doughnut counties than the statewide average, you begin to see the profile of a newly persuadable electorate.

It might be tempting to dismiss the $50 million Senate race as an outlier. After all, Mourdock imploded in the final weeks of the campaign with comments that very much alienated women.

But Democrats have won statewide before, and Ritz, with a significant funding disadvantage, was still able to win by capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the incumbent.

Well-managed campaigns use data-driven methodology to identify swing voters and persuade them with well-crafted messages.

The emergence of a thoughtful suburban female electorate could change both what candidates talk about and how they say it, affecting every issue from marriage equality to education to gun safety to mass transit.

Most reflective of this new demographic is congresswoman Susan Brooks, who represents the suburbs north of Indianapolis as well as more rural areas. She defeated an all-male field, including a former congressman, in the primary last year.

Brooks is a moderate, but she’ll have to walk a fine line in Congress to maintain her moderate record without attracting a serious challenge from the right.

After all, divisive in-fighting felled former Sen. Richard Lugar last May, paving the way for a moderate Democrat to win in November with help from strong Democratic counties like Lake and Marion and persuadable suburban women who were paying close attention to the candidates and issues.

Here’s to the ladies who vote.•

__________

Wagner is a lifelong Indianapolis resident and founding principal of Mass Ave Public Relations, a local public relations and publicity firm

Pictured here (L to R): Eli McCormick, Kelli Waggoner (KWK Management Group), Jacob Nichols, Robert Haag, Jennifer Wagner (Mass Ave Public Relations).

Lieber, who calls himself a “disrupter,” said he has invented a new delivery vehicle in a town filled with law firms that have been slow to evolve.

Lieber charges clients around $300 an hour for his lawyers. He turns around and pays the lawyers around $125. Lieber keeps the rest, which covers salary for the firm’s three administrators, its overhead as well as reinvestment in the firm.

Lieber has seen monthly billings rise from $30,000 in January 2012 to $350,000 in January 2013. The total revenue for 2012 was $1.7 million before his lawyers received their cut.

Lieber is projecting revenue of $4 million this year, of which $1 million will hit Potomac’s bottom line. He will likely earn a mid-six-figure salary, I estimate.

Potomac Law Group has 40 lawyers in its stable, some of whom earn as much as $250,000 a year. He doesn’t hire anyone without seven years’ experience and does not offer benefits at the moment. Most don’t need benefits because they have an employed spouse who is the chief breadwinner.

Overhead is kept to a minimum. The office lease is less than $10,000 a year. Lieber works out of his home, which is near American University. The technology-savvy former rocket scientist has figured out a way to tap into the Internet cloud for most of his computer services, saving even more money.

Some firms want to be pals with their clients — attend sporting events, go out to dinner, meet for drinks on a Friday night.

That’s just not who we are.

Time is money. Your money, to be more specific. The more time we spend wining and dining, the less time we spend working on your account. Oh, and you’re going to pay for those dinners and drinks one way or the other.

Look at it like this: Are you friends with your accountant? Your attorney? Your car mechanic? Your child care provider? Maybe, but odds are you hired the best, most experienced person for the job.

In PR and publicity, the best person for the job isn’t always the sweet, giggly account executive who meets you for coffee to talk about, like, shoes and sitcoms and, like, the open jobs on your account.

We think your time is more valuable than that. After all, you’re busy running your company or non-profit, and we bet you enjoy spending your spare time with your family and actual friends. So let’s skip the small talk and get down to business.

The law firm in this story has it figured out: Cut excess costs. Hire people who know what they’re doing. Give clients what they need.

Shouldn’t your PR agency function that way, too?

To learn more about our honest pricing public relations and publicity business model in Indianapolis or nationwide, click here to schedule your free consultation with Mass Ave Public Relations.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.

Participants watched and critiqued “good” mock interviews with WISH-TV political reporter Jim Shella and Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute president John Ketzenberger. I offered myself up for the “bad” mock interview, where we showcased all the things you never want to see a source do or say on camera.

Participants then had a chance to ask Jim and John questions about working with the media, including how to set ground rules, repair less than favorable coverage and build strong relationships with reporters.

Thanks to the Indiana State Bar Association for inviting us to be part of this great session, and a special thanks to Jim and John for spending time with a great group of future legal leaders.

Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute president John Ketzenberger, WISH-TV political reporter Jim Shella and Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner respond to questions at the Indiana State Bar Association’s 2013 Leadership Development Academy media training session.

To learn more about our honest pricing public relations and publicity business model in Indianapolis or nationwide, click here to schedule your free consultation with Mass Ave Public Relations.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.

Mass Ave PR | Founding Principal | Jennifer Wagner

In the traditional world of PR pricing, big clients almost always pay more. The sales pitch is that big clients require more resources, need more attention. The reality is they have more money, so agencies ask them to pay higher fees.

Reality check: Big clients with big budgets should actually pay a more equitable rate and make better hiring decisions when it comes to outside PR and communications counsel.

There are two reasons why.

First, almost all of those clients come to the table with established brands in the marketplace, which means it’s easier for them to attract attention. Look at this way: Is it harder for a small non-profit or the biggest employer in town to make the evening news?

Second, big clients typically have in-house staff who handle the first round of messaging. They often farm out the more routine stuff (copywriting, collateral development, pitching) to outside practitioners. That means the degree of difficulty for someone working on a big account can be far less than for someone helping a smaller client. And if you peek behind the curtain, you’ll see that agencies often assign what they call “grunt” work to their less experienced employees to teach them how the process works. Pay more, help someone learn the craft? That seems unfair to you, the client.

(Before you object, big firm pals, this theory clearly does not apply to all large clients, but you can look in any media market and find large, established entities overpaying for PR and publicity services simply because someone told them they should be paying more or wowed them with swank office space and a steak dinner.)

Naturally, this all comes back to honest pricing.

Our rates aren’t cheap. They’re fair. And when you factor in the fact that we don’t work with rookies (see also: a huge reason why big agency fees are high to begin with), they’re more than fair.

Instead of paying $7,500 a month for a principal, a senior account manager, an account manager, an account executive, an intern and a fancy coffee machine, you pay $3,500 a month (or $3,000 if you sign up for a year, which most big agencies require) for a principal and a network of highly experienced allies to help you navigate your PR and publicity needs. No hidden fees. No gimmicks.

Oh, and know this: We’re efficient. You might wait two or three weeks for a big agency to finish copy for your report or send you a final press release. When you work with seasoned pros, you cut through layers of bureaucracy like, well, someone who wants to get a message out without breaking the bank on frills.

Which brings us to one last point: Our coffee machine, it’s new and always clean, but it’s not fancy. We’re happy, though, to pick up the tab for your caffeine infusion at Henry’s or Starbucks or another local café of your choosing. And you’ll never see that added to your monthly invoice.

To learn more about our honest pricing public relations and publicity business model in Indianapolis or nationwide, click here to schedule your free consultation with Mass Ave Public Relations.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.

Mass Ave PR | Founding Principal | Jennifer Wagner

Think you’re incredibly productive, spending every hour of every day laser-focused on your clients’ needs or developing new business?

I bet you’re not, and I bet you don’t realize just how much time you spend browsing Pinterest and checking Facebook.

Don’t worry. I’m not picking on you. It happens to everyone, and the best solution is to find out what you’re focused on by tracking your time.

Even if you work in an industry where you regularly monitor your minutes, you’ve probably never done an intensive audit that includes your personal hours as well as your nine-to-five time.

To get started, I recommend creating an Excel spreadsheet with seven tabs — one for each day, including weekends — so you don’t see entries from prior days when you go to make an update.

From the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you hit the hay, document your day in 15-minute increments. (If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can use six-minute intervals — the dreaded point-one! — like they do in large professional services firms.)

If it takes you an hour to get ready, write it down. Spend 45 minutes at lunch? Write it down. Google Chat with your old college roommate about her choice of bridesmaid dresses? Write it down.

At the end of the week, you’ll want to determine the purpose of each activity and tag it appropriately. This could be as simple as categorizing personal, pleasure and business activities, or it could be a more complicated rubric. Up to you.

Once you’ve tabulated the categories, give your results a good, hard look. Then decide whether you’re happy with the way you’ve been spending your time or whether you need to nip/tuck your self-management system.

If you’re like a lot of folks who go through the week-long audit, you’ll immediately recognize the trouble spots, and you won’t need to continue the rigorous spreadsheet method to know how long you’re spending on certain activities. It’ll become second nature.

I got in the habit of tracking time early in my career as a government affairs staffer at a mid-sized law firm that billed in six-minute intervals. It was tedious at first, but I quickly came to understand the value of those minutes — and not just to the firm’s bottom line.

Tracking time has made me more efficient as I work with my PR clients (even those engaged on a retainer basis), and it helps me intuitively know when things are out of balance. That’s particularly important given that I’m a mom of two young children as well as a small business owner.

I won’t tell you it’s fun to spend a week accounting for every quarter-hour of your life, but I encourage you to try it and see what you discover. You might be the most productive person in your office, or it might be time to put down the Twitters and rejoin the real world.

To learn more about our honest pricing public relations and publicity business model in Indianapolis or nationwide, click here to schedule your free consultation with Mass Ave Public Relations.

Learn more about Mass Ave Public Relations founding principal Jennifer Wagner.