BusinessWired – Business Wire Blog

by Warner Boutin, Senior Account Executive and Luis Guillen, Media Relations Specialist/ Business Wire LA

Business Wire members and guests packed Silicon Beach hot spot ROC Santa Monica on Wednesday, April 3 for cocktails, appetizers and a chance to talk social media metrics with Business Wire and our social media analytics partner, NUVI.

Spun out of creative agency Struck in 2011, NUVI is a real-time social media analytics platform focused on listening, engagement and reporting.

NUVI founder Dave Oldham and EVP Stuart Dean discussed ways in which companies can leverage their monitoring dashboard to ultimately lead conversations happening around an organization’s shareholders, potential customers or other target audiences.

“Even if your company doesn’t publish social content, listening to (and monitoring) your industry trends impacts every aspect of your business,” said Oldham.

Oldham described one beverage company that purchased NUVI’s portal to understand purchase intent. In this particular instance, the client tracked weather patterns, which ultimately impacted their sales volume in one specific region.

NUVI founder/CEO Dave Oldham demonstrates their visual intelligence platform for social media at the 4/3 Business Wire event in Santa Monica.

In another setting, an energy drink company engaged NUVI to monitor the entire sports landscape surrounding their product (message boards, blog posts, competitors’ social content).

On social media’s immediate impact on the news landscape, the NUVI team compared a 2005 photo of Pope Benedict XVI’s inauguration to the 2013 picture of Pope Francis papal ceremony. The 2005 picture featured a small handful of people waving their flip phone; the 2013 photo illustrating an entire audience wielding their mobile devices to instantly capture and share the event.

On measuring sentiment, Oldham highlighted NUVI’s ability to pin-point positive and negative editorial bumps realted to product launches, press releases or campaigns to help PR pros quickly respond to and interact with their audiences.

By the evening’s conclusion, everybody agreed that listening is the cornerstone of any effective media monitoring program.

“In order to be great, you must engage a conversation and be a good listener . . . like a relationship,” said Oldham.

The NUVI real-time visual intelligence platform can be ordered on a monthly basis; NUVI social media monitoring reports can be added onto your Business Wire press release distribution.

To request a NUVI demo, click here

For upcoming local Business Wire events or our award-winning webinar series, visit our events page ; and follow Business Wire events on Twitter under the hashtag #bwchat.

by Stephen Zelezny, Business Wire Marketing Intern

Stephen Zelezny

As a public relations student with an emphasis in business, it seemed like it was a no-brainer that Business Wire was the perfect fit for a spring internship – especially heading into graduation this May. When I first arrived to the office in late January, however, I quickly realized my ability to learn on the go would be far more important than my degree on paper. And perhaps that’s just the reality of the professional workforce – a reality I’m fortunate to have seen as a soon-to-be graduate.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the degree students pursue is important, not just to our day-to-day satisfaction as a college students but also in our immediate careers after college. And, in some way or another, I do see the art of advocacy communication – whether in the political realm or in the corporate world – as a lifetime pursuit.

But what was vastly different from my experience at the Business Wire from previous internships, or even from my numerous PR courses, was the need for me to learn EVERY single facet of the company’s operations. In a nutshell, it was all about learning on the go. Sales. Investor Relations. The newsroom editing process. Trade show events. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Equally as importance as our products and services are the variety in demographics the company reaches out to. Whether it was chatting with Danny Selnick about Public Policy Wire, or learning about the scope of LatinoWire, I further grasped the real power of appealing to niche audiences through Business Wire’s extended network. Some might think it’s too complex to work with so many demographics at once. But for me, I see the company’s expanded reach as a challenge worth learning about. It’s an opportunity for absorbing information and, along the way, getting to know some really smart and talented professionals.

Long story short, it was critical to have a basic understanding of how every single department within Business Wire operated before I could even begin to understand how the marketing and PR team communicated BW’s message to its notable clientele.

Above all, I learned nothing is more important for a professional communicator than to understand the ins-and-outs of the company. In a corporate setting such as this, it was evident we have to look at ourselves as less of “communicators” and more as “business people” who happen to have a niche in communication. And that requires us not only to get to know everyone in the BW family, but also to fully grasp and to appreciate the roles they serve within the leading global press release distribution company.

As communication platforms evolve within the blink of an eye, young professionals such as myself will soon be in charge of advancing the way in which our business community converses to serve the larger public interest – its customers. Having seen firsthand how a leading wire service functions to not only evolve, but to lead that change, I couldn’t be more excited for the future ahead.

And above all, I can’t wait to keep learning on the go.

Stephen Zelezny is a graduating Senior at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He recently worked as a marketing intern within Business Wire’s Los Angeles office. 

by Raschanda Hall, Global Media Relations Manager,  Business Wire/Chicago

It comes the same time every year, and despite our best efforts to keep our guards up, many of us will be taken aback by a prank or a piece of false information convincingly told to us on April Fool’s day.

What if it’s your job to separate fact from fiction and disseminate truth over confusion?  This is the role that news and information sources like the Associated Press play.  When it comes to news, reputation matters and that must mean serving as a trusted source for news 365 days a year.

Understandably there are many who don’t take kindly to a jovial day of pranks.  “We don’t consider April Fool’s jokes to be very funny,” says Tom Kent, standards editor for the Associated Press.  Kent says while others may consider it lighthearted fun, “We have a responsibility to get the facts right.”  According to Kent, the AP takes that responsibility very seriously all year round.  “We don’t think our vigilance and standards should be suspended on April 1st.”

Legacy media are not the only ones on the lookout for fake news leads.  Online websites and blogs, often stereotyped as more easily fooled, are on the lookout as well.

We all know there are many examples of April Fools jokes that have backfired, creating marketing nightmares instead of fun news coverage.  Still, there is the temptation for companies to be clever. But is it worth the risk of damaging relationships with the media?  Asked if a prank pitch could change his view of a PR person Kent says, “Definitely.  We would not view someone who tried to hoax us on April 1st as credible on April 2nd.”

For us that warning is clear. At Business Wire we have our own one-liner of a policy and it is  to leave “releases not marked as April Fools’ item[s] off our wire on April 1^st. Sorry jokesters”

Still, don’t want to skip out on April Fools.  Here are some tips to be funny without damaging your company culture using in-office humor.

Guest Post by Dave Oldham, CEO, NUVI

I frequently encounter one particular notion when discussing social media with prospective B2B clients: “We don’t tweet, and nobody tweets about us. Why should we care about social media?”

Dave Oldham

If you are a B2B tech, pharma, energy, supply chain, logistics, or similar type of company there probably aren’t many people talking specifically about you or your products (currently) across social media channels. It might seem that spending any time in social media would be a waste of time for your company.

The truth, however, is that there are conversations happening across social channels — even if they are not specifically about you — that are extremely valuable for you to be aware of, engage in, and even potentially lead.

It is fascinating how the world of business is becoming more social. This is not a fad; social is permeating every aspect of business —  product development, customer support, innovation and education, competitive insights, sales and marketing, communications, and even HR. The conversations that were taking place at trade conferences and expos, in print trade journals, in conference rooms and training rooms, and in cafeterias and even at the water cooler, are all now becoming digitized and instantly accessible around the globe.

Even if you aren’t currently publishing content through the various social networks that have now achieved critical mass, and even if people aren’t mentioning your brand or specific products by name, if you ignore the conversations that are taking place about the general technology, broader industry and environments you operate in, you are missing out on an extremely valuable source of insight for your company.

Social intelligence includes three phases maturation: Listening, Engaging, and Leading. ALL companies should at least be listening. While the volume of conversation varies across topic, industry, and interest, there are insights to be gleaned, relationships to be nurtured, and trends and innovations to keep up with that are valuable to you, regardless of what type of organization you belong to. In a rapidly evolving social age, you simply can’t afford to not listen.

As you begin listening, your perspective expands and new ideas, relationships, and opportunities present themselves. The constant stream of information available can even become overwhelming. This is where intelligent tools can help you find, analyze, categorize, and prioritize the content available, and point you to what is most interesting and important. Regardless of what tool you select, it is critical to start listening to and understanding the conversations that impact your industry, your competitors, your customers, and ultimately — your bottom line.

Not listening to and understanding the conversations taking place in social media because you aren’t publishing content or because people aren’t mentioning you by name is akin to not reading or watching the news because you aren’t mentioned in the article or on the broadcast.

Once you have perfected the art of listening you can graduate to engagement, and ultimately to leadership. These are the stages where you start interacting with clients and partners via social media, then publishing valuable content and taking a thought leadership position in your market. If you are competing with one of the B2B tech companies that still thinks social media isn’t for them, you have a perfect opportunity to differentiate yourself and lead.

Join Dave Oldham and Stuart Dean, EVP for Sales & Marketing at NUVI, at our upcoming event series, The Value of Social Monitoring, in Los Angeles, Newport Beach and San Diego.