ChatGPT wants my job. It can’t (and it won’t) have it.

Time to read: 4 minutes

As a professional and experienced copywriter, AI and how it will come to influence humanity has been the cause of much recent existential dread for Anthony McNamara, content creator at The Comms Crowd. In this post, he looks at ChatGPT, AI’s risks and benefits, and what’s in store for us as the technology advances.

As a professional and experienced copywriter, AI and how it will come to influence humanity has been the cause of much recent existential dread. Especially as mine is one of the professions the technology – especially the likes of ChatGPT – is gunning for. Admittedly, binging on every documentary and podcast the topic has to offer, all with contributions from long-time experts in the field has done little to assuage my fears.

The speed with which AI is developing is raising questions that those in power seem unable to answer. This is a problem. Once artificial general intelligence (AGI) is rolled out, the technology’s passage into maturity will be complete, and humanity’s relationship with robotic intelligence will become one where we are the dependents.

It will mark the most significant point in human history since the first homo sapiens discovered how to create fire. AGI, however, will be a blaze over which we could all too easily lose control forever. Hence the recent dread.

The dread gets real

When ChatGPT trampled onto the scene like a heavily caffeinated Wildebeest in a pensioners’ yoga class, I admit not thinking too much of it. “Another AI service that I can spend my free time interrogating on whether 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 is the more effective football formation. Big wow.”

But then I used it, and beads of sweat began forming on my expansive brow. I typed in a made-up, generic title and sat back in horror as the chatbot generated a grammatically sound and, on the face of it, relevant 1,000-word blog.

If it were dread I had experienced before, I wouldn’t even know the word to describe what I experienced at that moment. It was a feeling that lasted for weeks. The gig is up. Time to start thinking about re-training.

The importance of knowing your enemy

Having sought reassurance from family members, friends, and colleagues, I began to excavate my resolve and free it from the claws of the relentless Large Language Models. I love my job, and I’m not losing it to a set of precocious algorithms.

It was time for me to step into the ring with ChatGPT, and we were going bare knuckle.

Instead of using some generic blog title, I re-engaged ChatGPT and typed in the title of an actual blog a real client had asked me to write. The blog outline was separated into different sections and looked depressingly appropriate. Next, I gave the chatbot permission to write the blog in full, and within seconds, it cascaded down my screen.

However, upon reading the blog, an almost transcendental sense of elation washed over me. It was crap. Littered with repetition, from sentence openers to entire sentences, it had zero personality and was laughably light on credible facts and figures. It was crap.

Friend, not foe

With round one going emphatically to the human, I began to recalibrate my whole attitude toward ChatGPT. Although it has undeniably improved since 2022, its ability to produce quality content remains limited, to put it politely. But it does offer other functions that have since proved to be handy.

It is superb for beating writer’s block and has become essential for brainstorming ideas. I’ve also long since learnt that the ability to construct excellent prompts is the most important skill you can acquire when using any form of generative AI.

True though this may be, even with the most professional prompts, the resultant copy is not what any self-respecting copywriter or organisation would ever think to publish. But it can give a decent starting point, a handy blueprint for a competent human to improve upon radically.

In other words, generative AI can be considered a promising work-experience student, approaching their employer and saying, “Hi, I’ve done this for you to try and save you a bit of time.” And I, the employer in this dubious analogy, reply with, “Thank you. I can probably use some of this. Now, you run along and finish transcribing that video for me.”

Even if ChatGPT does become a little too self-assured in the future, it faces another problem even more formidable than me.

The search engines won’t stand for it

When the likes of Google cottoned on that people were stuffing their websites with keywords to dope their SEO, the backlash was ruthless. Many websites were penalised so heavily with SERP (Search Engine Results Page) relegations they never properly recovered.

Expect the same for AI content. Indeed, a raft of AI content detector tools are already sweeping the marketplace, and it seems to be a matter of time before they’re integrated into search engine result generators. The last thing any search engine provider wants is for its users to be pummelled with a load of robot content during their cyber surfing sessions.

Apart from the inevitability of this development is the delicious irony – AI saving the livelihoods of copywriters from AI. *chef’s kiss*.

ChatGPT knows its place. For now.

I don’t know what the future holds for ChatGPT. That’s the one thing that’s still quite scary – no one really does.

However, I do know that in its present form, it can’t respond to detailed briefs as competently as a human copywriter. It can’t understand the unspoken reactions of clients during calls. It can’t offer original insight on any topic, question a client’s approaches or ideas, or inject personality (unless it’s pretending to be a well-known human).

Mercifully, it also seems to understand all of this. With ChatGPT draped against the ropes, sweating and bloodied, I asked it directly if it was coming for my job.

Its response?

“As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to predict the future. However, it’s unlikely that ChatGPT or any other AI language model will completely replace copywriters. While AI can be helpful in generating content and assisting with certain tasks, copywriting involves creativity, critical thinking, and a deep understanding of language and communication. These are skills that are difficult for AI to replicate, and human copywriters are likely to remain an important part of the industry.”

Maintain that attitude, ChatGPT, and you and I will get along just fine.

Let’s talk shop

Internal Communications: 3 tips to boost your start-up’s culture

Time to read: 2 minutes

Emma Tucker, our internal communications consultant, provides her top three tips for creating a company culture that is right for you.

All companies have a culture regardless of how old or new they are or the condition of their internal communications. Your culture captures the essence of who you are and how you do things. It can attract people to join you and keep them working effectively and loyally.

For start-ups, culture and vision can be used to convince prospective hires and intentionally defining and promoting both will keep you honest as you grow.

Here are three ways to get intentional with your culture.

1. Define it.

Get your people in a room and discuss what makes the company special. Write it down. Get specific on the words you choose, and don’t be afraid to disagree; it’s in the debate that you’ll uncover areas of tension and uniqueness. Think about the stories you tell about your company – what do they say about you?

Define the values and behaviours you want to live by. For example, you might choose “Impact” as a value and explain the accompanying behaviours as “You accomplish important work that positively impacts our clients”, “You consider the impact of your work on the people around you”, and “You leave a good impression because you take action and deliver on your promises.”

Involve employees in the process by letting them discuss the values and prioritise relevant and helpful behaviours for their work. Then, test it with your clients and external stakeholders. Honest feedback will be your friend.

Keep refining the descriptions until they feel right and truly reflect your thoughts. Aim to define four or five company values. Teams can then decide on the relevant behaviours (aim for three behaviours per value).

2. Embed it.

Weave your culture into every interaction with your employees and clients. It should:

• Be part of hiring, developing, and assessing your people.
• Become integral to how you innovate and grow your business offering.
• Be part and parcel of how you approach client meetings and deliver results.
• Be reflected in your communications, tone, and methods.
• Be instantly recognisable in everything from financial updates to processes and procedures.
• Be projected in team meetings and one-to-one conversations.

Ultimately, your culture should dictate how you measure your performance and success.

3. Evolve it.

Your culture is organic and will evolve whether you intentionally maintain it or not. Revisit the definitions. A set of values and behaviours appropriate for year one might need another look by year five. Check that you haven’t missed an important touchpoint as you’ve grown.

Smart leaders keep their finger on the pulse. Return to your employees and clients, listen to their stories, observe their behaviours, and act on their feedback. This is true internal communications in action. The speed and scale of your growth will dictate the frequency of these checkpoints, but every six months is a sensible guide.

This process is worth the effort because getting intentional about your culture will drive better business outcomes. McKinsey’s Organisational Health Index shows that organisations with top-quartile cultures post a 60% higher shareholder return than median companies and 200% higher than those in the bottom quartile.

People who want to add to your culture will perform better, more easily adapt to change, and help you attract more talent. They will be your champions.

Putting in the effort to define, embed, and evolve your culture during the early years of your start-up will save you a lot of time, money, and energy in the long run.

Let’s talk shop

Corporate culture: If you’re going to improve it, talk about it

Time to read: 4 minutes

Anthony McNamara, content creator at The Comms Crowd, looks at why companies need to talk about their corporate culture and values. And why it should be part of every communications plan.

Businesses must regularly monitor and assess seated KPIs to perform optimally. Typically, these KPIs surround functions such as sales, technology infrastructure, PR and marketing, and client relationships.

Critical though these metrics are, they are the supporting walls of the corporate edifice. Without a solid foundation, they are liable to collapse.

That foundation is the corporate culture. Many businesses neglect corporate culture in favour of shorter-term pursuits, yet developing a strong, inclusive, and supportive culture is the key to unlocking maximum potential.

However, simply embedding a strong culture is not enough if you want to reap its rewards; you have to talk about it.

In this blog, we look at the benefits of a great corporate culture. How a selection of Comms Crowd clients developed theirs, and how we’ve helped spread news of their successes to the masses.

The ‘Great Resignation’ has brought corporate culture to the fore

Developing a robust corporate culture was always important, but the Covid-19 pandemic made it critical in the years that followed.

In what became known as the ‘Great Resignation’, employees voluntarily quit their jobs in unprecedented numbers. Between July and September 2021 alone, over 400,000 UK workers left their jobs.

Employees frequently cited a hostile working environment as a reason for leaving. Indeed, such was the prevalence of the phenomenon that ‘toxic workplaces’ became a trending topic nationwide.

The disruption of the Covid years prompted fresh expectations among the workforce regarding what behaviours they are prepared to tolerate. A poor or neglected corporate culture may have been grudgingly endured before the virus escaped ground zero. Times have changed since.

Quorsus, a strategic financial services consultancy and former Comms Crowd client, led discussions on the dangers of toxic company cultures and how to avoid them. Indeed, the company itself was established on a vow that its corporate culture would be positively imbued and reinforced by core values.

Consultancies must prioritise embedding a robust culture and strong values because their people are their product. Quorsus will tell you that it has gone some way to explaining the extraordinary success.

We amplified Quorsus’ approach and message, ensuring its impact was felt across its sector and beyond.

A robust corporate culture breeds productivity

Ask any education professional, and they’ll confirm that praise is essential for a child’s development. The chemical reaction experienced from being told they’ve done a great job immediately boosts a child’s sense of self-worth. It encourages them to continue working hard so they might experience it again.

In other words, it has the power to supercharge their productivity.

Yet, something changes when we reach adulthood and enter the world of work. It’s as though we forget these reward centres exist and how powerful they are. Consequently, praise is often replaced by criticism and our inner child – still so easily motivated by encouraging words – is swallowed by a vortex of ruthless expectation.

Ignoring this reality is short-sighted, to say the least. A national Workplace Culture Survey of US employees found that 63% of respondents claim that workplace culture directly impacts their organisation’s success.

Abundant opportunities drive productivity. When former client and friend of The Crowd dxw, a leading employee-owned digital agency, launched its Returners’ Programme, it broke new ground.

dxw partnered with The Comms Crowd to share and disseminate its story with potential stakeholders. The coverage was such that dxw has become recognised as an expert provider of digital public services and opportunities to those who may feel they have passed them by.

Together, we ensured the world knew of dxw’s leadership position in creating a positive, inclusive culture. In fact, it became one of the first companies to introduce gender pronouns into email signatures.

dxw’s small size notwithstanding, the firm won an array of company culture awards, helping to attract exceptional like-minded talent. Essential for any fast-growing technology enterprise.

Positive cultures promote development

‘The Great Resignation’ jolted many organisations into action. Not wanting to lose their top talent, these firms put a renewed focus on facilitating professional development. They recognised that avoiding high employee turnover requires more than just an amenable working environment.

Before any recruitment drive, senior leaders review factors such as pay scales, perks, and benefits. However attractive they can make each perk if the organisation is renowned as a place where careers stagnate, the drive is doomed to fail.

As such, building a positive culture requires embedding opportunities and routes to success at all levels of the business. The best cultures underpin this by committing to personal development as much as professional development. Achievements are properly rewarded, and a healthy work/life balance is respected.

Another former client, JDX Consulting, since acquired by Delta Capita, attributed its sustained global success to a carefully developed culture. It promoted inclusivity, coaching, and empowerment, allowing the firm to attract diverse, high-quality talent from all walks of life.

By entrusting The Comms Crowd with articulating and sharing its methodologies, JDX became the corporate culture benchmark within its sector before being acquired by Delta Capita.

We then worked with JDX to promote its Festival of Learning, a professional development programme set up by the firm’s HR division. The initiative gives employees the space and tools to grow professionally at their own pace and take control of their career progress.

Showcase your corporate culture with The Comms Crowd

Our clients love us because we’re adept at getting their messages and successes into the public domain and the publications their stakeholders engage with.

It deserves to be celebrated if you have invested time and money into developing a corporate culture that breeds energy, achievement, opportunity, and happiness.

Moreover, potential talent, partners, investors, and clients want to know what you’ve done and are doing. Speak to The Comms Crowd today; our internal comms consultant, PRs, and writers can ensure they will.

Let’s talk shop

The Importance of Building Trust in the World of Regtech

Time to read: 2 minutes

Lauren Bowden, Fintech content lead at The Comms Crowd looks at the opportunities and challenges facing Regtech firms, and the role trust plays in ensuring future success.

When the term Regtech burst onto the scene circa 2015, it was met with mixed reactions. Some were cynical. They dismissed it as spin for existing regulatory technology vendors to benefit from Fintech’s halo effect. Others saw it as a way for new start-ups to shake things up, offering more cost-effective and agile SaaS-based solutions to post-GFC problems.

Regtech is here to stay

Seven years later, with the market projected to reach around USD 33.1 Billion by 2026, countless players are thriving in all areas, from tax to cannabis. Established vendors embrace the portmanteau with open arms and invest in more flexible, forward-looking business models. Few would now dispute that Regtech is here to stay.

That said – there are still a few hurdles these firms must jump before they can realise their full potential. According to the FCA, one of the most active regulators supporting this burgeoning market, it all comes down to trust:

“The trust element is ingrained in the complex ‘business case for RegTech’ – RegTech firms need to convince firms to allow them to work with their most sensitive data assets and systems to solve their problems.”

For regtech firms, trust is everything

Policies, procedures, and – most importantly – legal documentation go a long way to ensure sensitive data assets and systems remain safe. But before anything gets signed, Regtech firms must find ways to demonstrate their trustworthiness. Of course, trust needs to be embedded internally through a solid culture. That culture must cascade from the top down and be cultivated by HR. However, it must also be demonstrable externally, especially in a crowded market. This can be achieved with transparent marketing communications.

• External communications should be planned carefully for start-ups with many moving parts. Investing in building relationships with trade journalists marks the beginning of the journey and is always time well spent. These independent and credible sources are essential conduits for getting news out when the time is right.
• For more established vendors looking to move into the Regtech space, a solid analyst relations programme should be at the heart of the product roadmap. Honest, open, and regular dialogue with the gatekeepers of those ever-important magic quadrants, waves, or rankings should be prioritised.
• Solid content marketing and a strategic social media plan should be shared directly with prospects and customers, including blogs, e-books, infographics, and whitepapers and posted to social media platforms like LinkedIn. Content must speak authentically to the right audience, be relevant, add value, and avoid the overly promotional. With the amount of change in the regulatory landscape, the opportunities for subject matter experts to demonstrate thought leadership and guidance are plentiful.

Your voice deserves to be heard

Regtech firms can employ an arsenal of comms tools at various stages of their evolution. The art is knowing when, what, how, and to whom.

Working with communications professionals who understand the nuances of this complex, jargon-filled environment and how to get messages to hit home will ensure your voice is heard.

Six ways to annoy a journalist – without really trying

Time to read: 3 minutes

We are very lucky that our head of tech content Sandra Vogel is also a working journalist. It helps keep all of us PRs on our toes. Here she shares some journalist pet hates – forewarned is forearmed.

PRs try their hardest to achieve success with every pitch. Journalists spend big chunks of their day reading pitches and working out what is useful to pursue.

For both parties, it can be a bit of a battlefield. Journalists never have enough time to triage an inbox. For the PR, there are never enough successful placements of a pitch.

There are ways PRs can up their pitching game – and perhaps the first place to look for clues on strategy is identifying things that annoy journalists so that these can be avoided.

Here are six things that can annoy a journalist – and obviously enough, they are six things a PR might want to avoid.

1) Bombarding

One email is enough. If you’re going to send a follow-up, wait a while. Wait a couple of days. Sending a follow-up within hours is not going to win you brownie points. If several PRs are working on an account, ensure only one sends an email to a particular journalist. Journalists don’t want or need to receive multiple copies of the same email from different people.

As for follow-up calls, tread carefully. “Did you get our email about….” is not a good way to go. If you sent it, the journalist got it. If you are going to follow up, do so with more information and a new snippet of interest. Don’t give the task to a junior who may know neither the journalist nor the subject matter. Follow-up calls are part of your journalist relationship building. Use them rarely, use them wisely.

2) Inappropriate addressing

I don’t want to receive emails that start “Hi, Vogel”, “Hi [name]”, “Hi, Andrew”, or anything else that’s not “Hi, Sandra”. But I do receive them. Even though I know this isn’t personal, it annoys me. For some journalists, it will result in immediate hitting of the Delete key before the main point of the email has been reached.

3) Media database errors

If you’re taking the personal approach and setting aside time to check a journalist out and reference their work, ensure you get it right. I’ve had emails that start something like, “I really enjoy your work at [website], and I wanted to run an idea by you”. OK. But if I’ve never worked at [website], alarm bells ring.

This can cause a journalist to decide in a split second that whatever comes next is irrelevant to them and spark another quick reach for the Delete key before any further words are read.

4) Spelling mistooks and word-related offences

Journalists are writers. I know, talk about stating the obvious. But the point is that they are, therefore, highly attuned to spelling, grammar, and other word-related matters. Emails and pitches that have not been through a spell checker, or those with poor grammar and syntax, won’t get much traction. Not everyone is a super-wordsmith. However, a person unable to write a proper sentence or pay attention to a spellchecker should not be let loose on journalist emails.

5) Errors in accompanying documents

Accompanying documents include things like press releases and report summaries. In late February, I received a 2021 press release dated 2020. Seven weeks into the new year. Oh, how the PR and I laughed. I’ve also had press releases and report summaries with tracked changes left in them. These can be amusing and informative, but sometimes the tracked changes can be a bit near the knuckle and embarrassing for the PR and their client. The PRs don’t laugh quite as much then. I am afraid an email request to “please delete without reading” is sent more in hope than expectation.

6) Jargon and weasel words

Any pitch that claims what’s on offer is “unique”, “groundbreaking”, or “game-changing” gives itself a lot to live up to. Usually, it can’t meet the highfalutin claims, and a journalist will not need long to confirm that. Tread carefully about what you claim in a pitch. The watchword here is to sho,w not tell.

Related to this point is the overuse of a range of words that just set journalists’ teeth on edge. Here are a few: showcase, synergy, disruptive, next-generation, revolutionary, innovative, DNA, passionate.

It might be hard to avoid using words like these, but many journalists find them lazy ways of expressing ideas. Avoid.

It’s not too difficult to find out what irks journalists. Just ask a few of those your own agency values and respects the most, and you’ll get a good, strong list of annoyances. That’s step one. Step two is doing something with what you’ve learned. Onwards!

Should PRs be doing more to promote the benefits of earned media?

Time to read: 3 minutes

Tech PR lead Debbie Smith looks to balance the more subtle benefits of earned media against the instant gratification of the click through…

So you’ve just achieved two great pieces of coverage for your client. You send them the links and pat yourself on the back. Then you get a reply from their SEO expert: “But one piece doesn’t link to the website at all, and the other only has a link at the bottom.”

They go on to explain that for SEO purposes, it’s good to get links. But ideally these links would be towards the top of articles to increase click-throughs.

Resisting the temptation to throw your coffee at your screen in exasperation, you take a deep breath and explain PR 101: the difference between earned, owned and paid media.

This is not the only time I’ve had to explain earned media in recent weeks. So, I’ve been thinking about why the question is being asked. Although it may seem glaringly obvious to those of us who’ve spent our careers in B2B PR, perhaps the convergence of different channels has muddied the waters for some marketeers?

It’s not that PRs don’t understand the value of SEO and obtaining links back to the client’s site. It’s simply that earned media is, first and foremost, the tool to build credibility, increase brand trust and manage reputation.

First, let’s clarify what we’re talking about.

• Paid media: you pay for visibility or reach through advertising, advertorial, PPC or affiliate marketing. You have complete control, but it’s the least credible. Ultimately, you are paying to get your audience’s attention.
• Owned media: includes your website, your blogs, your newsletters and your social media channels, where you control both channel and content. This is ideal for education and demonstrating thought leadership. No money is changing hands, but it’s still you explaining to the world why you are so great.
• Earned media: third-party objective endorsement, i.e. someone else is talking about you as an expert, and no money has changed hands. This includes media coverage obtained through PR, where a journalist has covered the story because it’s newsworthy, not because you’ve paid for the coverage. To get this, you need strong content. Whether it’s a genuinely innovative product, an opinion which provides new and informed views, or a piece of thought leadership.

The great benefit of earned media is the credibility it brings which the other two routes can’t provide.

However, the downside is that you don’t get to dictate to the journalists where to put a link back to your client’s site. Or indeed if one is there at all, depending on their editorial policy. You certainly don’t go back to a publication and ask for a link to be added. You’ll be promptly referred – with a few choice words – to their advertising department, and they’ll unlikely feel inclined to write about your clients again.

It gets blurry when earned media becomes ‘online word of mouth’, including shares and reposts, content picked up by third-party sites, and media developed through partners and influencers.

Say you post about your new blog (owned) or the latest press coverage (earned) on your company’s LinkedIn page. When these are shared, they are both ‘online conversations’, even though the content has originated in different ways. Are posts from partners truly earned or based on a mutually beneficial relationship, i.e. owned? And while tech and fintech analysts (i.e. influencers) review products and provide editorial independence, the ASA has taken many so-called consumer influencers to task for not making clear when content has been paid for.

There’s a tendency to class all click-throughs as equal. Perhaps that’s true for buying trainers. It also makes reporting more straightforward! However, in B2B, the clicks driven by third-party objective endorsements are the most likely to generate genuine interest and preference.

The journalists we work with pride themselves on their editorial integrity. This week, a discussion on a journalist and PR social media group made that abundantly clear. So they’ll only cover material that, in their view, has earned its place on their websites.

We’ll continue to focus on obtaining that earned media and other third-party objective endorsement, as well as on generating the strong owned content that drives it. We’ll celebrate when journalists write about our clients because we know there is more to building credibility, increasing brand trust and managing reputation than including a backlink.

Where we sit in the digital marketing mix

The editorial calendar is dead – long live the proactive pitch

Time to read: 1 minute

FinTech PR lead Chanda Shingadia recalls the days of the editorial calendar when features were spoon fed and compares that to how our skills have evolved in order to still be part of the conversation today.

Pitching has evolved in different ways since I started working in PR over 17 years ago. Back when I was a sprightly and eager account executive we spent hours calling and emailing publications at the end of the year to get their upcoming editorial calendars. These editorial calendars were an integral part of our PR programmes and many of us would trawl through these to see which features would be relevant for our clients and ensure we pitched for them in advance of the publication date.

How times have changed. Only a handful of publications now create these editorial calendars and those that still have them chop and change the features around. A lot of this has to do with many print publications moving to online platforms. They are therefore not tied to advertising and can be more flexible with their themes and topics which are more relevant to current market activity and world events.

So if the mountain isn’t coming to the prophet… then we have to get proactive with our pitching.

Reading around the subject, working out where the sweet spot is, where our clients can add value to the debate of the day and then distilling this down to a succinct and compelling pitch – that’s where a decent PR demonstrates their worth.

Proactive pitching and good relationships with journalists are more important now than they have ever been to ensure clients are still getting their spokespeople in upcoming features and articles that the journalists are writing. Relying on forward features lists simply won’t do and speaking to key journalists that are relevant for your clients on a regular basis is imperative. We like to check in with our journalists to see what’s their focus and suggest a proactive topic that might make a good feature or contributed article idea that fits in with their thinking.

As the industry and media landscape evolves, our job as PRs doesn’t get any easier for sure, but being a more intrinsic part of the editorial process is a reward in itself.

Thought leadership, it’s a mindset

Time to read: 2 minutes

Take a step back before embarking on a thought leadership comms programme.

So, you’ve got news …

Which PR consultant hasn’t heard this one before: “Our new [insert latest product name here] is the best/biggest/most efficient/. …”

If it really is, congratulations. You can leave your mark on your industry and be remembered for this innovation.

If it isn’t, you’ll still be able to contribute to the market with a product or service that your customers appreciate. Moreover, one which will, in all likelihood, enhance and complement the market’s existing product offering.

The new product is finally ready

Naturally, you’ll want to give it all the support possible to quickly get sales off the ground. You’ve done your research and know exactly which products you are competing with and who your target audience is. All you need to do now is advertise your product and issue a press release. But is it really that simple?

Rarely.

New technology products and services are launched daily, and marketing messages promising all kinds of benefits flood your audience’s social media channels.

How can you ensure your message is heard and noticed over and above the general chatter?

By leveraging your position as an industry expert and thought leader.

Thought leadership is not created overnight

Take some of the most eminent experts in your field of specialism. What are they known for? How long have you been aware of them as industry experts? Where have you heard about them? Do you know them in connection with one specific product? Probably not.

True thought leadership is based on industry expertise, not just product knowledge. You know your market and how your product range fits. You are probably aware of a number of vertical sectors in which your product is specified and their particular issues. Take advantage of this knowledge, and you will take the first step on the road to thought leadership.

It is critical to be honest with yourself and your communications team about whether your product is a true first. It will harm your thought leadership standing if advertised as such when it really isn’t. If it isn’t unique, concentrate your messaging on other important features and how it fits with existing technology and improves it.

Take a mental step back from your product and the sales target figures it is supposed to achieve soon after launch. Consider the wider industry and your technology’s impact on this environment. Perhaps there are solutions in development that will make a difference in a few months or years. Are you aware of the latest relevant scientific research?

Preparing the ground by establishing thought leadership takes time and effort. But, once a reputation is established, it is much easier to maintain it with regular communication and information and it will benefit you and your team in the long run.

Getting our own house in order

Time to read: 1 minute

Founder Sam Howard reflects on how it’s easy to forget to talk the talk when you’re so busy walking that walk.

Simply put, our role at The Comms Crowd is to help companies best articulate what they do. How they help their customers, and why they do it better than their competitors.

We then roll out – in various engaging formats – across the most appropriate comms channels for their target audiences:

• Website
• Content
• PR
• Social media, etc.

We have all built our careers focused on this and only this. Naturally, we have become really rather good at it. As a result, we have enjoyed eight years of strong and steady growth.

But then we made the CLASSIC MISTAKE:

We were so busy looking after our clients we fell behind on our own positioning and comms. Fairly embarrassing for a comms agency!

Like the firms we work with, our strengths have evolved over the years. This means our competitive advantage has shifted, as has the type of clients we work with.

In the early days we sported the start-up vibe of, ‘we are small, agile and affordable’ and of course we were, and still are. However, over time we attracted and retained some of the best independent talent in the industry. We also developed a deep pool of sector knowledge and a wider skill set. And as a consequence, we have enjoyed working with a much wider range of companies. Thus, alongside our first loves, the start-ups, we find ourselves increasingly working with larger firms, too.

Yet our website, blog content, and social feeds did not reflect this evolution at all.

Having identified the problem, we spent a few long weeks at the keyboard as we overhauled everything from the ground up. Now, our website and all our social content clearly articulate our core value and how we are best able to help our clients.  We have created the space to demonstrate our fintech and tech/cyber experience and our comms expertise, and made sure we have lots of lovely client stories to go with.

So now we are all set! Bring it on, 2020; we’re ready for ya!

What Does a Great Blog look like?

Time to read: 3 minutes

So you’re a B2B Tech firm and your marketing team has agreed that a blog is the way forward (and indeed it is). This is the blog you need to read next. Sandra Vogel, who heads up tech content for The Crowd and ghost blogs for a range of firms, passes on her advice.

So what does a great blog look like? The answer depends on what you want to get out of a blog, so for the sake of argument let’s say you run a business that sells goods or services. There’s a lot of competition for whatever it is you do, and you need to remind people you exist. You use a range of different methods to do this – a blog on your web site is part of the mix.

To meet the requirements of your business, your blog needs to keep people coming back. It’s a tool for you to deliver useful information to existing and potential customers or clients. It’s a way of showing off your organisational personality. And it’s a way of helping people understand more about your products, new launches, upgrades, exciting ideas and plans you have for the business.

That’s a lot for a blog to do. Here are some guidelines for better blogging:

• Keep it short. In general try for no more than 600 to 700 words. People will get bored if they have to read more than that, and you might easily stray off the topic at hand.
• Keep it simple. Don’t try to cram all your wisdom into a single blog. Have a point to make, make it, expand a little, maybe give some examples. Develop your point of course, but be careful not to make things too complex.
• Do you need a call to action? I see some blogs that include a call to action every single time. As a reader I know how the blog will end – it’ll be ‘now go and look at our great product’. If that happens every time readers know a blog is a glorified advertisement. They’ll get bored, go away, and maybe never come back. Calls to action are important. But you probably don’t need one in every blog.
• Connect well with the rest of the site. Do you publish white papers, news releases, new product updates? Of course you do. Tie blogs in so that there is continuity, and so you can link to other resources where possible. Don’t leave the blog out on a limb.
• It’s a good idea to have a forward plan so that you don’t get to ‘blog day’ and sit staring at a blank screen wondering what to write. If you work with an agency – and that’s a really sensible idea – then they’ll help with this.
• Be regular. It’s a good idea to have a schedule. Perhaps you want to put a new post online every two weeks. If that’s what you want to do, stick to it. When you make your plan (above), make your schedule too. Both plan and schedule can change in the light of events, but if they’re not in place a blog is the kind of thing that an organisation can let slip if it is busy. A blog that’s not up to date is arguably worse than no blog at all.
• Look from the outside in. Visitors might not use your product or service, might not know your business at all, might just be passing by. Think about it from their point of view. This can be hard to do in-house. It’s another area where an agency can be really helpful.

There’s another guideline that’s overarching on all of the above. It’s about the writing quality. The tone, writing style, grammatical accuracy and readability of your blog speaks volumes – it’s probably more important than the content. Really. You might have the most fantastic point to make, but if the message is garbled, nobody is going to get to the bottom of the screen.

If a blog is going to work for you, you need to put energy, effort and expertise into it. Writing a blog is hard work, and it is a skill people learn and hone through years of experience. Ensuring that the blog plan and schedule are well managed and that topics are spot-on can also be tricky in a busy business. There is no shame in lacking the skills or the time that’s needed in-house. Bringing them in from outside can take your business blog to the next level.