Why Care about Fonts

Janet Park
Sr. Account Executive

One day on Facebook I got one of those little quizzes entitled, “What font are you?” I took the quiz with great trepidation, anxious with the fear that the result would be Arial or Comic Sans Serif (God forbid!). Luckily, I was able to sigh a breath of relief as I ended up being Helvetica.

"What’s the big deal," one could ask. For most, the answer would be nothing. To many, however, the answer is everything since the choice of a font can say much about a person, brand or company. E.g., when opening up a Word document in some versions of MS Office, the default font is Times New Roman and in Outlook, Arial. To many design people this would mean "boring" and "safe." I have yet to see a large company or even a small start up use either as the typeface for their logo, Web site or campaign. When developing marketing materials here at Fusion PR, we are careful to avoid either font.

When choosing or purchasing a font, the most important things to keep in mind are legibility, message and context. It may not seem like a big deal, but in reality, it says a lot.

Multitasking – Why Managers Must Avoid the Trap

By, Stephen Andrews, Senior Vice President, (@stevebandrews)

How many times each week or each day does someone annoyingly chime in something along the lines of, “You’ll just need to multitask?” For me, it hits one of those big red buttons in my psyche right next to the one labeled, “Work hard – play hard.”

My personal dislikes aside, multitasking has become a mantra for managers simply overwhelmed by the volume of work tasks faced by their companies. It’s a cop out and highlights an individual manager’s inability to properly manage their employees’ workloads and only serves to hide this incompetence or worse and more often, keep a bad business model limping along. After all why not simply use one train on the subway line instead of hundreds, it can multitask. How long would any of us put up with that solution to our morning commutes.

None of this is new, back in early 18th Century Lord Chesterfield gave the following advice to his son and heir, “There is enough time for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you do two things at a time.” And research indicates nothing has changes since the Victorian era. In fact, a recent study from Stanford found that multitaskers do not pay attention to information, control their memories or switch from one task o another as well as their singularly focused counterparts.

The Stanford study brings ill tidings for the social media gurus among us, pointing out that multiple streams of information, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and the like, caused study participants to become what researchers termed, “Suckers for irrelevant information and easily distracted.” In each test the heavy multitasker group was outperformed by those who focus on bringing a single task to completion.

The message here for managers looking to increase productivity and efficiency is: help your staff manage their time and tackle one task at a time.

Hey Marketers: Don't Count Out the Developers!

By Suzanne McGee, Account Director, Fusion NY (@mcgeepr)

Today' blog post by Max Kalehoff, entitled, "Are Marketers More Important Than Developers?," caught my eye. I’ve never thought that there was a difference in terms of involvement, strengths or needs when working with internal development or marketing teams. Both serve very different purposes, but both provide unique benefits and insights to their company.

In our PR work, we welcome the opportunity to meet with everyone from developers to sales pros to executives. They all have very valuable contributions and viewpoints that are helpful in telling corporate and product stories. In fact, it’s an area of concern for us if we can’t speak to a range of audiences, including company employees. Most will never talk to reporters, but they have insights that we find helpful in our jobs. And many times, it’ll be a developer or sales rep that may see a new trend coming that we can promote.

Include ‘em all – a company is made up of everyone working in it. Anytime you leave someone out, you don’t have the full story.

Hey All You PR Folks: Twitter Just Might Be Your New Best Pitching Friend

By: Talia Andrews-Rankin, Senior Account Executive (@taliaAR)

On my run this morning, I was thinking about a common question my friends ask me: “Why do you use Twitter?”

My most common answer is: “for work.” Then I tell them to try it out. As I have found, the usage of the term “tweet it” is gaining on the world’s most common response: “Just Google it.”

Why do I use Twitter? One of the reasons is that it can be an extremely valuable PR tool. Here are just a few of the reasons I believe every PR person should be using Twitter, even just as a follower:

Staying on top of the news
By following publications, reporters, friends, coworkers, etc., I think you will be surprised to see some of the valuable news that comes through your Twitter feed. By following people who are interested in similar topics, you’ll find your Twitter feed more useful than scanning the NY Times, CNN.com or GigaOM for your news.

Learning about reporters
I’ve learned some great things about the reporters I work with – which helps when establishing more personal relationships as you pitch these reporters on a consistent basis. Why not personalize that pitch a little bit?

Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Jon Swartz at USA Today: Loves the SF Giants and Syracuse University (my alma mater).
• Natali Del Conte at CBS: Mom loves to Twitter and is actually getting the hang of it!
• Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek: Huge fan of Apple.
• Peter Ha at TIME Magazine: Loves to surf.

So start following those reporters you are looking to talk to, read their stories and take the time to learn about them – it will pay off.

Pitching reporters via Twitter
In my opinion, Twitter has become a very valuable resource for companies, PR professionals and reporters themselves. Douglas McMillan at BusinessWeek is a great example of a reporter who uses Twitter to find sources. More times than not, you’ll see a tweet from him looking for experts to speak on a larger trend story he is writing.

Doug is not the only one. “The World According to Twitter” author David Pogue also gets a great deal of valuable feedback from his followers replying to questions/comments he tweets.

So look out for those source searches and keep an eye on stories your clients can contribute to and provide comment. Reporters do value your replies and will consider them when writing.

Blurring the Lines: Pogue, Snow Leopards and conflicts of interest

By: Justin Finnegan, Senior Account Executive, (@justinfinnegan)

New York Times tech columnist, David Pogue has been under fire because he seemingly had a conflict of interest by giving Apple’s new OS, Snow Leopard, a glowing review, while at the same time writing a book about the Apple’s Snow Leopard OS.

This week, Pogue appeared on Leo Laporte’s podcast to defend himself, citing that other top tech writers have similar conflict, name dropping The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and USA Today’s Ed Baig. He also went to say that he’s never claimed to be a journalist, calling himself an “opinion” columnist, so technically a conflict of interest didn’t exist. (Valleywag, by the way has an excellent takedown of these claims, including clips from the Laporte podcast.)

As print journalism continues to lose influence, more and more print journalists are looking for additional revenue streams, in some cases finding more success outside of newspapers. (Clark Hoyt, the Times’ public editor has a phenomenal read on this whole situation. He cites a number of other Times reporters who bank on additional projects outside the purview of the Times, but the paper has painted itself into a corner because it can’t deprive its readers of their reporters expertise, nor ask the reporters to give up their outside interests as the New York Times needs the publicity.)

As the lines continue to blur, it will be interesting to see how the traditional media handles these conflicts, which will no doubt increase in frequency in the next few years. Will they ignore these conflicts, adopt a new code of ethics or draw a line in the sand?

Press Embargoes - Our take on the Debate

Robert Geller (@rgeller)
Senior VP

Press embargoes are once again in the news. Yesterday, Michael Arrington issued his latest rant which follows a series of announcements over the past year from TechCrunch, the WSJ and others regarding stated policies on embargoes and exclusives.

For the uninitiated, an embargo is when you agree to share a news story in advance of its official announcement, with those who agree to hold onto the story until you are ready. As the word implies, an exclusive is when you do the same for one outlet. In both cases, the idea is to maximize the impact of news by choreographing its unveiling. They serve the interests of media and their readers by enabling the reporter or blogger to develop the story in advance so that the reader gets a more comprehensive take on the news when the announcement is made public.

The debate and evolving policies on exclusives and embargoes may leave many wondering how to best proceed. In my conversations with PR industry colleagues I have found that there is lots of confusion.

First, let me say that, although I do not take away from the importance of TechCrunch or WSJ, just because one or two or a dozen outlets publicly rail about the practice and proclaim it to be dead does not make it automatically so. There are good reasons for the embargoes, and the many comments about Arrington's post show the passion for (and diversity of opinions) on the topic.

I don't blame Arrington for being upset. In the example that set off his latest rant, one outlet jumped the gun and stole the headlines for a story that he had been laboring on. As he said:

Whoever broke the story in the first place generally gets more eyeballs and attention than the others, so there are lots of incentives for mistakes. Particularly because no one ever punishes the offenders.

Arrington should rest assured that on the PR side (at least, speaking for Fusion PR) we do not take these agreements lightly and do in fact remember who offenders are when it comes to breaking exclusives or embargoes.

Second, we fully agree that it is a controversial practice and one that should be used with caution. Invariably you make enemies as well as friends because there are outlets that will be left out of the first round of stories. From a practical standpoint, in this era of blogs and Twitter it is much harder these days to hold onto and choreograph the release of information. There is every chance that your precious story will be blogged or Tweeted about in advance without the benefit of elaborate plans and despite many different conversations and agreements.

Our advice is to proceed with caution. Understand the value of your news and who is most likely to be interested. Understand the risks and opportunities that come with attempting to control the release of information. Don’t waste your time selling a blogger or news organization on an embargoed pre-briefing if they have made it clear that they will cover the news only on their terms.

Metrics. You Can’t Escape Them.

By: Suzanne McGee, Account Director (@mcgeepr)

There have been some online exchanges lately about how to prove the ROI of your PR program. While not new, the questions tend to be the same. How many hits will you get? The number of publications? The number of pick-ups? Reposts? Potential clients ask for a single indicator, but most are fixated on only one number, never mind the quality of coverage, reach of the site or publication, target audience, and more.

In thinking about this, Kyle Johnson’s Media Post’s Metrics Insider piece, “Any Idiot Can Optimize One Variable,” caught my attention this afternoon. While he is addressing online advertisers, he has a great premise that our industry and clients need to ask: “…how many planners and buyers focus only on one metric when setting goals, judging success, and optimizing?" Johnson calls for a more evolutionary approach that is flexible, open and leaves room for new ideas and focuses.

I believe that the same is true for our industry. Rather than spitting out an arbitrary number or measuring by a single factor, now is the time to work together to talk about the goals and achievements for success. First of all, what business goals are we supporting with the communications efforts?

Once this is decided, then we can move on to the myriad questions and variables that ultimately determine next steps for evaluating ROI. What are the goals for media interviews? Why those publications? What do you have to gain? How do you judge a successful media interview? How do you judge coverage? Just by volume? What about the content? Was a quote included? (Did the CEO give quote-worthy material?) How was the company portrayed? Did your messages find their way through the media filter? These are some of the many aspects that need to be considered when determining ROI.

Whew! It’s a lot of questions, but better to ask them up front then to have your expectations shattered by misconceptions. Now is the time to help clients understand how outreach really works and what it means for them, but in context of what it means for their business and corporate image.