Saying it’s just you and me here is a popular television comedy gag, “hey you can tell me your secret, it’s just between us,” and the TV host takes a sidelong glance at the national audience, showing they know they’re asking the secret to be shared with what might as well be the world.
That’s how we counsel our clients to think of every media interview. Visualize an audience. Imagine the interview as a live radio broadcast, or a moderated panel discussion in an auditorium. In the audience are your competitors, regulators, customers, investors and other stakeholders. You are not speaking to the reporter who is asking you the questions per se. You are also speaking to that larger audience out there.
This will help you focus and diminish the tendency to want to confide in the reporter with things that may come back to haunt you if placed in the context of an article.
This frankly can be a service to the reporter too because they won’t end up with something you’ll complain about later claiming it was off the record, or that you’re going to try to chase them down in a panic to retract because you thought it was obvious that what you said wasn’t for print.
Remember, the reporter’s job is not to protect your reputation, but to get the news out with the greatest accuracy achievable. So if you said it during an interview, it’s fair game.
Of course speaking to the larger audience isn’t a license to resort to platitudes or generalities that don’t do the reporter or you much good. If you were indeed making a presentation or participating in a panel with your stakeholders, you would want what you have to say to be meaningful and you want to be frank and as transparent as regulations allow.
Now there will be things you would like to share with the reporter that may in fact be valuable for the accuracy of their story, but that you may feel will unnecessarily hurt you if they appear in quotes next to your name. Make note of them and share them with the PR professional working with you. That person can find a way to share them with the reporter and let them decide the merit and the process for getting them out if they are indeed valuable to their story.
Be careful with this however, trying to get a reporter to write things that you aren’t willing to stand behind with your name is a good way to alienate a journalist.
Public Relations
So you want to be on TV?
Nearly every doctor and manufacturer of medical devices believes they have a made-for-television story, and most are right.
But what’s made-for-television is not necessarily the doctor herself, or the breakthrough technology the company has developed. It is the patient who is anticipating an upcoming treatment.
It is often fairly easy to identify a patient who, after a successful medical procedure, is willing to talk about his experience on television. But what a TV news producer really wants is the ability to broadcast a live procedure.
TV viewers stop changing channels and pay attention to live procedures, or the drama building up to a treatment. As a result, TV producers will often push back on a story pitch about exciting medical technology and hold out for a prospective patient. To increase the likelihood of success, we prefer to have a compelling patient case in-hand as we’re pitching a technology story. Doing so lends validation and timeliness to the story that is difficult to reproduce. Interestingly, while live procedures are tailor made for television, we’ve found that print journalists prefer them as well. Seeing a procedure first-hand can lead to a more accurate and colorful explanation of complex technology, which can ultimately result in a more readable story.
This Fox News Story is a great example. A male patient suffering from varicose veins shows how varicose veins are not just a “woman’s problem,” and how treatment is not driven by vanity. The bulging veins are a symptom of a progressive disease that can significantly impact a person’s health and quality of life. In the video, Dr. Gina Louie of Advanced Vascular Solutions treats the patient with VenaCure EVLT technology, made by AngioDynamics.
But it’s the patient, Brian, who is the focus of the piece and it’s his story that animates it.
Investor Relations
No Invite to JP Morgan? No Problem!
Just because you weren’t invited to present at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference doesn’t mean you can’t present during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.
The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference has trended more and more towards showcasing large caps in recent years. The spots open to small caps and private companies are highly coveted and hard won. If your company isn’t one of the lucky few, you can still spend a very productive day or two in San Francisco meeting with actionable investors regardless of your market capitalization. Small cap fund managers and sell side analysts come to San Francisco during the first three days of the conference in droves. They are very happy to go anywhere near the St. Westin Francis Hotel — where the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference is held — for one-on-one meetings with companies that have attractive stories. EVC Group has conducted highly successful targeting efforts during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference for many years. To make the most of your “satellite” presence at JP Morgan Heathcare, we recommend the following tactics:
First Impressions Always Last — This year, JP Morgan Healthcare runs from Monday, January 11 through Thursday, January 14. Investors tell us that their Tuesday and Wednesday schedules are booked solid, but Monday is surprisingly light. Aim for Monday meetings and be one of the first stories a portfolio manager hears that week.
Party like an Investment Banker — Many brokerage firms with a healthcare focus host cocktail parties at popular San Francisco hotels and restaurants, typically on Tuesday night. They are well attended by the buy-side and are great opportunities for networking. Hire a car service and party-hop. The hired car is especially valuable when it’s raining. San Francisco cabs don’t cruise the streets much.
Start Now! — Most of our clients coming to JP Morgan Healthcare already have full meeting schedules. Identify the firms you want to meet and aim to complete your itinerary before Christmas. If you wait until after the New Year, you are more likely to hear that the right firms don’t have time to meet you.
JP Morgan Healthcare has become a Mecca for healthcare investors and industry executives. Companies with compelling growth stories — but not formal invitations — can still make the annual pilgrimage worthwhile with some creatvity and planning.
Investor Relations
Holidays? The markets aren’t closed yet…
The Dow has surpassed 10,000, your valuation has risen with the NASDAQ by 40 percent during the past year and your Board of Directors wants you to strenghen your balance sheet, make an acquisition, boost R&D or launch a product early in the New Year. It’s time to raise some capital.
Contrary to what you may be hearing, while it is the second week of December, don’t think that the market is closed to new deals for the remainder of the year. Buyside investors tell us that they are actively seeking compelling new opportunities to deploy capital through year-end. And a $20 to $30 million equity raise can be completed, start to finish, in less than two weeks.
EVC Group has relationships with a number of quality investment banks who can complete transactions this calendar year and provide longer-term, after-transaction market support. We’d be happy to make some introductions — quickly! Give is a call.
Community Relations
“We Visit With Our Neighbors.”
Any company’s major new operation can stumble if the project’s neighbors are surprised by it, or learn about it first from third-parties. Franconia Minerals (TSX: FRA) has delivered on a smart, homespun strategy to help its project stay on-track. “We visit with our neighbors,” explained Bill Brice, Director of Government and Community Relations.
Franconia is a mining company presently focused on developing several large copper, nickel and platinum group metals deposits in the Duluth Complex of northeastern Minnesota. The Duluth Complex is potentially the largest untapped Cu-Ni-PGM resource in the world. While Franconia and its peers will bring thousands of well-paid jobs back to this historic mining region, new mining projects always attract scrutiny. Franconia understands that attention must be paid to those who have environmental and other community-related concerns.
Bill spoke at a special symposium earlier this month about Franconia’s approach to such concerns. The company has endeavored to communicate face-to-face with those who live near its planned project. So while the company developed a video describing the projects’ scope, local economic benefits, and environmental safeguards for viewing at town hall meetings across the region, and while it hosted tours of its facilities for local townspeople and others interested in the project, Bill most importantly made sure he made himself available to say “hi” to people with property and interests around the project and explained what the company was up to. If someone has a question or a concern about the project, Franconia wants that person to feel sufficiently comfortable and familiar with the company to call it directly, and not someone else who may not be fully informed. And the caller comes to expect a straightforward answer from the company, not oblique platitudes.
This is far better than having your neighbors hear about your project from someone else who doesn’t fully understand what you’re aiming to accomplish. The takeaway: be the first to explain who you are.
Franconia’s approach is not exclusively applicable to mining or other heavy industrial projects, but to any company with a new initiative or expansion plan that might impact the citizens of its local community. EVC Group’s public affairs practice identifies and engages with activists and other community members that can have an impact on our clients’ businesses. We assist Franconia with web-site and local media dimensions of its community-relations effort, and have had successes in this realm with pharmaceutical and medical device companies, as well.
Bill explained his approach earlier this month at “Mining in Minnesota,” a symposium for institutional investors sponsored by Northland Securities, EVC Group and Leonard, Street and Deinard. Convened at the Cornell Club in New York City, the symposium featured presentations from the companies preparing to mine copper, nickel, and platinum group metals in the Duluth Complex, and the leadership of local regulatory authorities, associations and NGOs involved with Minnesota’s mining industry. Franconia delivered this presentation at the event. For more information on the program, please contact us.
Social Media
Your company is already on social media, you just don’t know it yet…
Pondering whether your company should be using social media?
You already are, you just don’t know it yet.
Throughout your organization people are on Facebook, Twitter or they’re blogging about the company on their own sites. Your sales force is on café pharma anonymously posting comments about your upcoming marketing strategy.
Some of this is harmless. Some of it is brilliant, like the sales rep in Connecticut who is making videos of himself explaining your product and posting them on YouTube so potential customers can find him online. He’s driving revenue with it.
Another portion of users in your organization represent a serious breach of security and are giving a smart competitor an advantage.
Companies are coming to terms with this in unique ways, and it doesn’t always mean clamping down.
Online shoe retailer Zappos.com Inc., of Henderson, Nevada, has more than 450 employees using Twitter to communicate with one another on topics ranging from politics to marketing plans. They have begun offering classes to teach basics like how to follow a friend’s updates to advanced topics like using third-party services.
GE has a Tweet Squad that helps employees get up to speed with using social media.
What to do.
A social media policy is the right place to start.
IBM for instance has developed an evolving social media policy that gives employees best practices on the assumption you’re not going to be able to stop them from using social media anyway.
You will recall in a previous post we mentioned your legal department losing their cool when you started a company Twitter.
The process of setting up the social media policy can help avoid this blowup. Include your legal counsel and regulatory officers. Together you can establish a framework for the company to proactively use these tools in a way that isn’t overburdened by a stiff approval process that erases many of the virtues of social media’s spontaneity, speed and responsiveness to the market. But on the other hand you should end up with a structure that allows you to avoid doing stupid things online.
A well crafted policy not only tells employees what they shouldn’t be doing online, but can also frame up best practices and can serve as a roadmap for harnessing some of the good ideas already being used by the rank and file.
We recommend all our clients have a policy, and most do or are working with us on developing one.
There are three scenarios a comprehensive social computing policy needs to address.
The first is when employees maintain personal blogs, tweet, or post information about themselves on Wikis, message boards, e-mail groups, Facebook or other social forums online and may occasionally reference information relevant to their work at the company.
The second is when employees who maintain personal blogs, tweet, etc., specifically to profess their professional interests and therefore feature their work at the company prominently.
The third is employees who maintain official corporate blogs, or maintain personal/professional blogs described in scenario two, that are actively encouraged by the company and for which the company makes publishing resources available.
If you account for all of these and are clear with your organization about the benefits of helping the company tell its story online, and are transparent about the penalties for missteps, you can achieve some amazing results.
Public Relations
Most reporters don’t want to talk with you.
Most reporters don’t want to talk with you. They want to talk with your customers.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch recently featured Stereotaxis on the front page of its weekly health section. The story led with an anecdote:
About eight years ago, John Rhoads of Godfrey began experiencing atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rate that causes poor blood flow to the body.
At first, it wasn’t too bad and prescription drugs helped. But it kept getting worse. The episodes, which left Rhoads weak and tired, became more frequent, sometimes every other day.
“As soon as I felt better, I would have another. I was worn out all the time,” he said. “It makes you feel like you’re going to pass out.”
Finally, on March 26 at Missouri Baptist Medical Center, Rhoads, 74, had a radiofrequency catheter ablation in which energy is used to destroy tissues causing the problem.
The rest of the story is available here.
This is a classic example of the key role that patients play in medical device storytelling. But it goes beyond this one industry.
Customer-to-customer referrals are typically the most powerful. Customer-to-reporter referrals are the same.
Journalists at consumer-facing news organizations in particular are not inclined to interview the company behind the black box. They already know you think the product is great. That’s not news.
In healthcare PR, journalists prefer access to patient stories first, then input from doctors, or other experts if the subject is in a different industry.
They then prefer to speak with activists, clinical associations, or other third-party observers. In order of preference, the company is often last. This is especially true on television. Note the example from Good Morning Virginia’s discussion of the overactive bladder treatment by Uroplasty, and ABC News‘ presentation of Apieron’s technology for the diagnosis and treatment of asthma.
Even with a hard news hook, garnering local television and print media for any service-oriented business often requires the company know its customers well enough to identify those that can bring forward stories made possible with its product.
Social media is another matter entirely, requiring a different level of customer engagement. On that, stay tuned.
Investor Relations
Doug’s Midwest Investor Musings
Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago…during the past two weeks I met with 15 analysts and investors in these three Midwestern cities. The purpose of these meetings was to learn what they are looking for in the way of micro-cap and small-cap stocks, and to market our clients who meet their parameters for investment. Thoughts about where the market was heading were all over the place, but not many were optimistic about another 30 or 40 percent rise. Sideways was probably the consensus.
Concurrent with my travels, the CEO of one of our client companies was meeting with buy-side investors in the same three cities. The reception for this company… which is a small-cap with a cloudy short-term outlook, strong balance sheet, solid management team, and solid long- term growth opportunities…was excellent. We already know that several of the investors he met with have become new holders of the stock, which rose more than 10 percent during the period while the rest of the market was down.
The moral of our Midwest investor musings…there’s been a dearth of non-deal road shows in strong micro-cap and small-cap markets such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago. Yet, many, many fund managers have assets to deploy and they are looking for new ideas. If you can target investors that are actionable, that is, have a demonstrable interest in companies like yours and have the ability to buy your stock, get out and see them. They aren’t getting many calls.
Investor Relations
Preparing for Russell Rebalance 2009
Friday, June 26th is fast approaching – do you know where your company ranks on the Russell indices?
Russell began announcing preliminary updates to its Russell Global Index®, Russell 3000® and Russell Microcap® indices on June 12th. The rebalance of the Russell Investments indices will be finalized on June 26th.
Index funds that track the performance of the Russell 3000 will buy or sell stocks at the close on June 26th based on additions, deletions and weighting changes within the Russell 3000 and its components. “Russell Rebalance Day” is often one of the busiest trading days in the equity markets and a day when stocks added or deleted to the Russell indices often see elevated trading volume.
Companies began distributing news releases announcing their addition or deletion from the Russell indices starting at market close on Friday, June 12th, when preliminary additions and deletions were announced.
Issuing a news release stating that your company has received preliminary indication that it will be included in one of the Russell indices can build interest in your stock with investors who track such indices, especially before the final index is published. If your stock has been building in valuation and your company is executing, the release can underscore these positive developments in a credible manner.
Such a release might quote management, saying “We aim to be a leader in our U.S. market and during the past year we have grown sales by XX% and earnings by YY%. Our addition to the Russell Index reflects the market’s growing recognition of our company and will help enhance awareness of our progress and opportunities in the investment community.”
The Russell 3000 Index measures the performance of the largest 3,000 U.S. companies, according to Russell Investments. Membership in its indices is determined by a ranking of all listed companies by market cap yearly at the end of May, during each annual reconstitution period.
Top 3,000 stocks = Russell 3000 Index
Largest 1,000 stocks = Russell 1000 Index
Next 2,000 stocks = Russell 2000 Index
Smallest 1,000 in Russell 2000 + next smallest 1,000 companies = Russell Microcap Index
Companies may be excluded or deleted from the Russell indices at the time of rebalance if the stock is trading below $1.00, are on the Pink Sheets or Bulletin Board, or if there are other adjustments for cross ownership and privately held shares. Closed-end mutual funds, limited partnerships, royalty trusts, foreign stocks, American Depositary Receipt (ADRs) and the like are also excluded from the Russell indices.
Final membership lists for all Russell indices are posted on Monday, June 29th, and can be found at www.russell.com.
Social Media
For business, Twittering is a waste of time unless built around face-to-face communications
Like most social media, Twitter is a trap. It’s easy to spend a lot of time on it thinking you’re getting a message out.
At the end of the day you have nothing to show for it but a follower list of indefinite value and screaming fits from the legal and regulatory departments over some of the messages you sent out.
Read what we had to say recently in PRWeek and you’ll get the idea of what to do to make it worth your while.
The takeaway is, be a broadcaster second, and a listener first. Put smart content up, but more importantly pay attention to who notices, decide if you would like to get to know them better and then dispense with social media altogether and meet them over coffee. If you don’t do it face-to-face, at least get one-on-one.
No matter how charming the guru you’ve hired, social media messages from a company or their agent do not win hearts, minds or dollars. The word of an objective and credible observer - like a traditional media journalist - does. Use social media to find and get to know those people and get into close quarters with them without a screen between the two of you so you can tell your story.
Now about those screaming fits your smart content elicited from legal and regulatory, stay tuned, more on that soon.