How to allocate a finite PR and Marketing Budget

There is a universal problem afflicting Marketing & Communications Departments worldwide. This issue applies equally to corporations the size of Coca-Cola and one-man bands operating out of the spare room. It is simple enough to define:

We have a finite amount of money to spend on marketing and promotion. What is the best way to allocate it?

Understandably, it’s hard to be sympathetic to Coca-Cola’s plight; they have to make do with a measly US$1.7 billion annual marketing budget¹. So we’ll assume we’re talking about more down-to-earth figures.

Before you start spending money, it is vital to make sure you have a clear desired result, target audience and message (see our article Distilling the Message).

To get your message heard, you need to understand how your target group obtains information. There are industries, for example, in which the standard promotional mechanism is the trade show. For purposes of an ongoing presence, however, the two most common promotional methods are PR and advertising.

For some people, PR & marketing are synonymous with advertising. Yet branding does not always have a direct correlation to advertising. The clothing company Zara is the fastest growing retail chain in the world, and only runs two ads per year, focussing instead on public relations and word of mouth. Microsoft’s Xbox had such an effective advance PR programme that 75% of its target audience expressed an interest to buy before the company had ever run an ad.²

Every time your company is mentioned in an article, people are hearing about you and forming an opinion. Every time someone talks about your product to a friend or a colleague, they are affecting your public perception.

It’s important to understand what can and cannot be accomplished through the various promotional avenues. Let’s examine three characteristics of advertising and PR that are likely to impact how you decide to spend your time and money: credibility, certainty and cost.

Credibility

Information received from friends, acquaintances family members and colleagues has the highest amount of credibility. These people presumably have your best interests at heart and don’t stand to benefit from your purchase decision. This is known as Word of Mouth (WoM), and is the most credible form of promotion.

Next to WoM is editorial coverage, the kind generated by a good PR programme. In order for journalists to run with your press releases, attend your media launch events or agree to review your product, they have to be convinced of the story’s independent merit and newsworthiness. And because these people are seen as impartial, their messages are far more convincing than those coming directly from the company by way of advertising.

“Frequent mentions of IPOs by the media can help drive up interest from investors and have greater impact than official prospectus information on IPO prices.” Timothy Pollock, Ph.D, Penn State University

Certainty

Advertising is the most certain of the various promotional tactics. You pay for a specific spot, to be published or broadcast in a specific timeframe, and you have complete control over the look and content of the message. Advertising also allows for a precise level of repetition and consistency.

On the other hand, while you should be wary of any PR agency that guarantees coverage, a good PR person should be able to tell you when a story is newsworthy, and know which avenues to go down to maximise the editorial opportunities. Experienced PR professionals will also have established relationships with a variety of journalists, and will know what angle to take to make a news item more intriguing for a publication’s audience.

Cost

It can be tricky to make an apples-to-apples comparison of the cost of advertising vs. PR. Advertisements usually carry a high cost per impression – guaranteed exposure comes at a premium. The cost of design and production has to be added onto the cost of the ad space, and, in general, ads need to be run multiple times before they will be effective.

When PR is successful, however, the ‘bang for the buck’ tends to be significantly greater than that of advertising. You can potentially get more space than you would if you paid for it (articles can be two or more pages in length, and some TV news segments can go as long as two minutes). One press release or story can be run in as many outlets as are willing to cover it, as opposed to an ad which is limited to how many outlets you can afford.

A good PR campaign can be effectively complemented by strategically placed ads, particularly once the company has achieved a certain reputation. Once these umbrella tactics are laid out, other promotional avenues such as trade shows and direct marketing can be used to fill in the gaps as budget permits.

Every company will need to analyse its market context to make effective decisions on how to allocate the marketing and promotions budget. This comparison of the various techniques, however, can assist you to decide which strategy or combination of strategies is most likely to deliver your desired results.

Some Promotional Avenues

• Advertising
• PR (editorial, media launch events and releases, product reviews, feature tracking)
• WoM Marketing
• Expos
• Roadshows
• Direct Marketing
• Viral Marketing

Sources

What are you trying to say?

To communicate successfully, you need a clear message, aimed at a specific audience, with an explicitly defined intended result. This article describes several steps to help you clarify what you’re trying to say.

If you are in business, you have a message. This message is the key to compelling customers to spend money with you, and should be a primary focus of your promotion campaigns. Yet many companies have a tendency to overwhelm potential clients and stakeholders with information overload.

Unfortunately, there are few audiences with the patience to wade through an encyclopaedia of technical specs in order to figure out whether your product has the one feature they are looking for. To make matters more complicated, different target groups will be seeking diverse types of information.

Ideally, the information you need will be easily accessible in your business plan. If not, this exercise will be beneficial for your business as a whole, not just sales & marketing.

An effective way to tackle the problem is working from the end result backwards. What do you hope to achieve? The most obvious objective is sales, but there are a lot of other possibilities. Stakeholders, such as investors, need to be kept apprised of your activities. Potential partnerships and business opportunities require nurturing in the form of regular communications.

Some products are driven by public demand even though the public doesn’t actually sign the cheques. Syft Technologies in Christchurch has a product that fits this profile. Their innovative Voice100 instruments are already used at ports in Australia to detect fumigants that could be potentially harmful to dock workers. Although the port employees union doesn’t make the purchase decision, their buy-in can be instrumental in achieving a sale.

Defining Your Target Audience

Once you know what your goal is, you will be in a better position to define the target audience. There will probably be several distinct groups you are looking to communicate with. If your goal is sales, then who are your customers? Alternatively, you may be looking to target resellers, influencers or investors.

These diverse audiences can then be listed in order of communications priority. If you have a product with low barriers to purchase, you can place the customer group at the top. If you know people won’t buy your product until it has been proven in the scientific community, you may initially have to put “scientific community” ahead of customers.

Determining Your Key Messages

Now that you know your ideal end result and your target audience, put the two together: what is the message your audience needs to hear in order to obtain your desired outcome? A useful tactic is to continually ask the question “Why do they care?” or, more specifically, “How does that benefit them?”

Note that this is very different from asking, “What do you want your target audience to hear?” You may be very excited that your new widget has fifteen more transistors than the old one, but your audience may not care. They just want to know if it will clean the carpets. So make sure to put yourself in your listener’s shoes.

Some areas to think about may include technical specifications, features & benefits and intangibles (is your product cool or trendy?). Your various messages will need to be distilled into the essential: the simpler the better.

Your company’s stage of development will affect the message as well. Is this the first time people will be hearing about you, or is it a safe assumption they already know who you are? If you are introducing a totally new product or technology to market, you will need to take time at the beginning of your promotions program just to educate people on your offering.

By the time you complete these exercises, you will have an excellent idea of the essence of what you’re trying to communicate. Now put it to the “elevator test.” If you got on the lift with your sales prospect or a potential investor, and you only had until the fifth floor to talk to them, what would you say?

It takes a bit of work to identify your core message, but the end result of having people hear, understand and respond is well worth it.

The success of a public relations strategy depends on far more than a letter to the editor of the local paper. This article looks at the benefits of working with a professional PR services agency.

professional (adj.) characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession; exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace

It happens all the time. Someone in the company wonders, “How hard could this PR business be?” He starts to write a press release. She starts a cold call letter to a journalist. Next thing you know, it’s six months later and the ‘PR campaign’ has been quietly hidden in a drawer.

The next time you are thinking about your PR programme, consider the many reasons to work with a professional PR services agency.

We take a long-term, strategic view.

In order for a PR campaign to be effective, it must be cumulative. The target audience must view regular and repeated stories about the company, and those stories must build on each other. In this way, readers and viewers develop a robust perception of the product or service offering. With every additional piece of positive coverage, trust in the company will increase.

Professional PR agencies look at an organisation’s overall business plan and objectives to develop a long-term strategy designed to grow with the company. We also monitor progress against the PR strategy to ensure that the programme is staying on track. Finally, our professional experience helps us know how best to communicate with the public if the company does not progress as anticipated.

We have personal relationships, not just contact names.

Anyone who has ever tried to contact a journalist knows that they are busy people. If you don’t capture their attention in the first five seconds, it’s too late.

PR professionals build personal relationships with the media to help us understand which stories are useful and interesting for which journalists. Because we try to only present relevant story ideas, the journalists are more willing to take the time to hear us out. We also track their deadlines so we know the most appropriate times to call.

A professional PR services agency will develop a reputation for certain clients and types of stories. In our case, we specialise in technology companies, so when a journalist is looking for commentary for a technology feature, they know to come to us – and we point them in the direction of the appropriate contributors among our clients.

Clients also benefit from these relationships with the media. The same process of targeting relevant stories allows a PR services agency to intelligently advise companies on story angles and distribution strategy. Our professional and focussed presentations to journalists also elevate our clients’ reputations in the eyes of the media.

The end result is more effective and more efficient for both clients and media.

Just like you, we focus on what we do best.

A professional PR agency has the resources to ensure that the organisation will get the maximum mileage from its PR campaign. Because all of our time is focussed on what we do best, we become both skilled and efficient.

There are also economies of scale associated with focussing our efforts on public relations. Maintaining a thorough media database, for example, is generally not cost-effective for individual companies, while it is absolutely necessary in the infrastructure of a PR agency. Combing through editorial calendars to find relevant upcoming features is a time-consuming activity, but it’s something we do regularly.

“The primary advantage of a niche firm is that the principals of that firm typically have a very strong background in the discipline they focus on,” says Peggy Stuntz, editor of American publication PR News. “They know the media, the competition and the general landscape, and they usually have strong relationships with media analysts and other key stakeholders because they’re the people they talk to every day.”

We keep abreast of the public relations landscape because that’s our job – that’s what we do best.

We know how to present your story so that it will be heard.

Frequently, people inside a company are too close to an issue to understand how it will look to the outside world. We encounter this frequently with technology experts, who may have a hard time explaining their stories to lay people. A PR professional will bring an objective eye to your story, developing it with the audience and objective in mind to effectively get the point across.

Because we write press releases, case studies and newsletters all year long, we know how to craft each new story to truly stand out. It also means that we can quickly understand the key point of interest of a message, and how best to communicate that.

Professionals are called that for a reason. When you employ one, you get strategic thinking, access to a network of solid relationships, expert advice on communications, and economies of scale. In the long term, that translates to the most important thing: professional results.

Contact us to discuss how your company can benefit from a Communicate IT PR campaign!

Before you spend your valuable dollars on a PR programme, you need to determine exactly what you want to get out of it. Studies and statistics can demonstrate the value of PR as a discipline, but to measure meaningful results for your company, you must first define exactly what it is you’re hoping to achieve.

Well-executed PR has a definite and positive impact on a company’s bottom line. But it is important to track what your specific PR campaign is doing for your company. So how do you go about measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) of your PR dollars?

Clearly, it is easier to measure ROI for some investments than others. For example, a new machine costs $10,000 and produces $1,000 in profit per month: the machine will pay for itself in 10 months.

PR, on the other hand, is not as straightforward due to the intangible nature of such things like ‘attitude’, ‘reputation’, and ‘awareness’. The value of PR, though, is real, and has a direct impact on the success of the company. To implement and maintain an effective PR campaign, you need to understand exactly where this value is created.

We have found that businesses experience many benefits as a consequence of their PR activity:

• Companies with favourable media coverage receive increased public interest, new business enquiries and referrals.
• The business introduction and sales process can be shortened considerably, because when people read about businesses in the media they are perceived as market leaders and are more likely to be trusted.
• PR reaches a wider audience and creates longer-term results than advertising.

• Employees like seeing their efforts in print and reading about what their clients say of their work.
• PR is good for recruitment, as people regard companies more favourably when they read about them in positive editorial of the business and technology pages.
• Customers respond positively to joint case studies and the response they get when they are published in the media.
• Students, applicants and customers around the world can also find PR generated coverage and news releases on the Internet. Those who are written about most are considered more dynamic.

Case Example – Holliday Group / iTouch
The Holliday Group employed Communicate IT at the beginning of 2000 for a sustained PR campaign with news releases and case studies to the media every month, plus regular tracking of relevant features that would be appearing in industry publications. The exercise has provided enormous value for us,” says Phil Holliday, Managing Director. “While we knew we were good, most others didn’t, but suddenly people started calling us. I remember getting a phone call from Dave (Ffowcs Williams) saying that he had experienced a ‘landmark change’. A freight company had called to say that they were looking for a wireless system and that they knew we were market leaders because they had read about us.” The increase in profile raised the perceived market and brand value of the Holliday Group and attracted many enquiries from the industry, some from people keen to buy the company. After months of negotiations, Holliday Group was acquired by iTouch PLC for a multi-million dollar figure in December 2000. While PR can’t take all the credit for their success, Holliday feel their average $2.5K per month spend on PR helped create significant return.

The nature of PR is that nonbiased third parties are speaking about your company of their own volition. The fact that there is an element of the message that is outside of the control of the campaign is precisely what gives media commentary such high credibility. Direct calls to action, however, tend to be best left to traditional advertising, where your company will have complete control over the content of the message.

The Value of PR as a Discipline

In 1999, the American Council of Public Relations Firms surveyed the hundreds of companies on the Fortune “Most Admired Company” rankings to determine if there was a pattern in their PR spending. The results of the survey were undeniable: the Council found that the more a company spent on PR as a percentage of company revenue, the better their reputation.

The survey also showed that the top 200 companies in the Fortune Reputation survey spent more than twice as much as the bottom 200. The findings confirmed that reputation can make a significant difference to the bottom line. While the top 10 ‘Most Admired Companies’ posted a return of 70.5%, the bottom 10 went down by 26.8%.

The report clearly proved that good reputation is directly correlated with strong financial performance.

Evaluating Media Coverage

While quantity and size of any coverage generated can give an indication to the success of the programme, this alone will not take into account the quality of the media or its relevance to your target audience.

Case Example – Bluewater Systems

Bluewater Systems began their PR campaign just under a year ago, and have received substantial trans-Tasman media coverage of their embedded computing solutions. Tim Trewinnard, the General Manager, describes the value Bluewater has received from an increased and improved public image:

“While Bluewater could not tie down new revenue directly related to an article published, there is an interesting correlation between the use of PR, a real increase in business revenue for the company and an observed increase in market recognition and respect. What we have observed in the market is that the Bluewater ‘brand’ has become increasingly recognised and on top of that, increasingly respected by potential customers. Companies are coming to us already understanding the work we do and of the mind set that we do it well. Typically they have all seen our name mentioned at some point in the past year, re-enforcing the fact that Bluewater has moved on from being a small ‘Fred in the shed’ developer to be a real company, doing real things for real customers.”

PR practitioners can provide a more subjective assessment by analysing the coverage, providing reader profiles of each key publication in which the coverage appeared and detailing how many executives with specific job functions have had opportunities to see the client name. The number of media interview opportunities identified, the status of journalists attending an event and quality of resulting coverage can also be used as the measurement criteria.

For most PR programmes it is valuable to maintain a press clipping service, as this will demonstrate the coverage your PR efforts have generated and, in turn, enable an accurate evaluation of the effectiveness of PR.

A further technique is to establish a message check protocol, which identifies key messages that need to be communicated in any given release. The release coverage is checked for key words.

These and other evaluation techniques provide useful indications as to whether or not the coverage can be considered successful. Over time, trends can start to be established. Such research can also enable you and your PR consultancy to know when to change and adapt both strategy and approach.

Determining the ROI of Your PR Campaign

To evaluate the ROI of your PR strategy cost-effectively, you must support and help monitor the programme with a professional and detailed sales conversion process. In this section we will demonstrate how you can support the PR evaluation process by measuring related activities.

To measure the effects of your PR programme, you need to determine the intended result before we begin. Different companies have different objectives for PR, and each objective has multiple variables that can be measured to determine the impact. Below are some examples of how specific objectives can be quantified. This list is by no means comprehensive, but will serve as a starting point to gauge the success of the campaign.

Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, some of these items will be easier to measure than others. Most small-to-medium companies, for example, have a ‘gut feel’ for the length of the sales cycle, but few track it with precision, making change difficult to measure unless it’s dramatic.

You can refer to the criterion you are measuring as the success variable. A quantifiable success variable allows you to evaluate results by knowing the starting value and the value after the PR campaign:

Measuring website hits is a nice way to gauge interest because most people have ready access to precise figures. However, for that variable to be truly meaningful, you’ll have to go a step further and quantify the meaning of increased website hits. Do you know what percentage of people who visit your website enquire about your product? And what percentage of people who enquire eventually buy?

To get the best response from your PR efforts, therefore, you need to make sure that anyone interested in contacting you after reading a positive story will continue to have a positive experience. The usability of your website, the warmth of your company representatives, the professionalism of your marketing collateral, and the quality of your products and services are what will bridge the gap between interest and sales.

Notice that you must know the starting value of your success variable or you will have no way of knowing whether the end result is good or bad. To effectively measure the campaign, you have to ask good questions before you begin: What measurement information is in place? What is the variable that a) you are hoping to change and b) you are realistically able to track? And, most importantly, how will you follow up on increased exposure so that you can convert that publicity to dollars on your bottom line?

You’ve all heard it discussed before. What’s the angle? What makes your story unique? The angle is the lifeblood of every good journalist, and the ability to present the most intriguing facet of a given situation is what earns loyalty from a publication’s readers. In this article, we’ll take a look at angles and how to develop the most appropriate one for your story.

Angle is about audience

To develop a worthwhile angle, you must put yourself in the shoes of the target audience. Who are they? What problems do they face? Frame the presentation of the story in terms of a response to those questions.

In the case of a media release the first audience is the publication itself. What do they care about? They care about newsworthy, informative and factually correct stories that their readers will be interested in. If you are hoping to get media coverage for a story, you must answer the question, “Why is this story interesting to the readers?”

A story that takes the perspective of the reader will be far easier to sell to the media than one that takes the perspective of the company.

One of our clients, Bluewater Systems, is a provider of advanced embedded electronics solutions. If we’re proposing an article for a technical publication, we’ll focus on the technical angle. When we pitch stories about them to the mass media, though, we don’t mention bits or bytes; we talk about how a company like Bluewater can help entrepreneurs turn a vision into reality. With this angle, the story becomes relevant to everyone who has ever had a brilliant idea for a product.

Which brings us to another point: the angle is entirely subjective, and changes depending on the audience.

Angle is about results

It may sound cheeky, but a useful technique for figuring out the best angle is to repeatedly ask yourself, “So what?” You can also phrase it, “Why will this audience care?” You’ve added six widgets or switched technology from Acme to Megamart—what does that mean to the publication, the reader or the customer?

When we wrote the release about a Syft Technologies Voice100™ being installed at Christchurch Hospital, we asked ourselves those questions. Why would people care that a machine has been put in a room? We realised that the story isn’t about the technology, it’s about what that technology can do. The result was an angle that everyone cares about: saving lives.

Angle is about attention

The angle’s home is in the headline. The two-and-a-half seconds it takes people to read the headline is how long they will spend deciding whether the story is worth their attention. This handful of words is where the essential message gets conveyed, and the equation is simple: if people care about the angle, they’ll read the story. If they don’t, they won’t.

Remembering that your first audience is the publication itself, the equation becomes: if they think their readers will care about the angle, they’ll print the story. If they don’t, they won’t.

The rest of the text is there to back up the initial point. Elaborate on why this topic is even more significant than people think. Explain how your product or service solves the problem better than anyone else’s. And, towards the bottom, briefly describe the technology behind it.

It can be difficult to focus on the angle of a story. When you work closely with a technology, it becomes near and dear, and there’s a temptation to think everyone cares as much as you do about each wire and solenoid. If you can step back and put yourself in the reader’s shoes, though, you’ll be a lot more likely to achieve positive media coverage. With the right angle, people will understand why they should care.

The media can be fickle. One day they can’t spare a column inch for you, and the next they want all your stories and they don’t want anyone else to have them. Here’s a short primer on how to handle the sometimes desired, sometimes dreaded exclusive.

Weigh the story
The biggest thing about exclusives is the merit of the story. If you’re announcing that you just hired a new middle manager, send the story to all the migrations columns at the same time. If your story is likely to capture significant public interest, however, an exclusive might be appropriate.

Weigh the outlet
If you know you have a big story, aim high. Why not? In general, give the exclusive to the highest circulation media outlet that is likely to run with it. If, on the other hand, you think you’ll be doing well if the local paper picks it up, then perhaps it’s not worth the effort to bother with an exclusive. Come to think of it, in that case it might not be worth the effort to distribute the story at all.

Make a list of your preferred A-list media; for example you could start with television and move on to Sunday papers, national publications, daily newspapers, etc. When you have an exclusive start at the top of your list and work your way down.

What’s in it for you?
If you have an exclusive-worthy story, there are lots of benefits to keeping it that way. By giving an exclusive, you can get a bigger story with a higher calibre of publication or show than you otherwise might. The media are generally grateful for exclusives, and granting them fairly allows you to cultivate a positive relationship with them. Finally, if you are giving an exclusive and the journalist knows it, you are far more likely to be able to confirm whether or not you will get coverage. It is perfectly reasonable to say, “I’m holding the story for you, so please let me know if you’re planning to use it.”

How to handle them
As with most things in life, the best policy for exclusives is honesty. Discuss the nature of the exclusive with the reporter. If you’re only willing to hold it for a certain period of time, say so. If you talk to someone else about the story, be explicit about when it will be available to the rest of the media.

Timeframes
One of the indicators for the quality of an exclusive story is that it is quite time-sensitive – i.e. the media consider it to be “news” as opposed to something that could sit on the desk for a few weeks and fill a slot when they have one. Given that your story is time sensitive, e.g. a significant company announcement, a relevant response to a crisis or situation that is generating headlines, discovering or launching a breakthrough technology etc. you don’t want the media you are talking to holding up the process for long. If they can’t express a firm interest within a relatively short timeframe (i.e. two days at the most) then it is important to move on quickly to the next option. Failing a high level of interest from the key media, it is time to send out the release en masse.

If in doubt … always consult with your PR consultancy – we are happy to evaluate the story and discuss management options with you!

Have you noticed that you are reading anything remotely connected to Twitter lately? Previously the domain of celebs, teenagers and hip consumer brands, businesses from every sector have jumped on the Twitter band wagon. Indeed, for marketing professionals around the globe it has become some what of a right of passage. No communications strategy is complete without a chapter dedicated to Twitter’s promised land.

And rightly so – as a communication channel it simply cannot be ignored. And this, for many businesses still hovering on the side lines or with one toe in the water, is part of the challenge – “I cannot ignore Twitter, but I have no real idea how to use it to its best advantage”.

Should I even be on Twitter?

First things first, Twitter is a communication channel and in principle can be analysed in the same way. The key difference, and beauty, of social media is that in contrast to traditional forms of media, the communication is real-time and truly two way, making it more powerful in every respect. So, when thinking about Twitter, consider:

• Who do I want to speak to?
• Are the people I want to talk to using Twitter?
• If so, what do I want to tell them?
• What would be interesting or useful to them?
• What do I want to learn from them?
• How will I measure the effectiveness?
• Do I want this information in the public domain?

There may be different answers to each question for each area of your business. By far the hardest starting point, and it is why many businesses dismiss Twitter or quickly become disenchanted, is beginning with the premise that you want to raise your company’s profile using Twitter. The aim is too broad for this type of medium and frequently results in off-putting company flag waving. Imagine monopolising a conversation with a colleague by telling them how fantastic you are, what exciting new thing you’ve just done and what your social calendar looks like. That colleague would certainly never progress to a friend and would be very likely to go and moan about you to 3 other people. On Twitter, you can magnify that situation by a 100 at the very least.

Instead, consider how different parts of your business could use Twitter. Product Development might want to build a community of analysts, journalists and technology partners to swap ideas and exchange information. Marketing may want to aid CRM programmes or User Forums by building more informal relationships with key customers to encourage better feedback.

How do I use Twitter for PR?

From a PR perspective, a great use of Twitter is to engage with it as your company press office. Some businesses choose to make this their default company Twitter, as it allows control over what corporate information enters into the public domain. Set up a Twitter specifically for your press office function, naming it as such, and use it as another distribution channel for press announcements, case studies or opinion articles. By following key journalists and analysts, you can circulate not just your own interesting, useful information, but hook into other industry news using tools such as Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed allows you to feed your Twitter account via self-selected RSS feeds, providing relevant, topical news. You can fine tune the feeds using key word searches, though be aware that as well as posting informative, news-led tweets, you could also be tweeting links to a controversial industry topic.

Tools such as Twitterfeed can also be used to feed company blogs through to Twitter, and clearly, there is much to be gained from this type of activity in terms of supporting web search engine optimisation and carving out a thought-leadership brand position.

Is it right for my business?

The trick for businesses, is to move away from the Twitter as “minute by minute update of what I’m doing”, through to “how can I use this medium to engage with my customers, influencers and prospects in a mutually useful way?”

But don’t forget the golden rule of any marketing communications activity – measure it! Twitter is free and powerful, but it costs your company time to use it effectively. Measure it in the same way you would measure any investment in any other communication channel. Set clear goals for what you want to achieve using Twitter – is it about learning? Encouraging customer referrals? Increasing traffic to the company web site? Lead generation? Building a market leading brand position?

If the people your business wants to talk to are out there on Twitter, use it. Just spend some time thinking about it first to avoid any tweet-haps.

Useful links

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/ – an introduction for first time users
http://twitter.com/downloads – the world of Twitter applications to customise your Twitter experience
http://twitter.pbworks.com/Apps – more Twitter apps, good for advertising and analytics info
http://twitterfeed.com/ – how to tweet something useful without actually tweeting
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ – organise your Twitter universe
http://tweetfeed.com/ – find what your most interested in from the tweeting world
http://tweetbots.com/ – manage multiple Twitter accounts, automate follow actions