How to manage your virtual PR teams using the Active Communications Index, and take a vacation whilst doing so.

What gets measured gets done, and PR productivity can be monitored by the Activity Communications Index. On this episode, I share what happened to our public relations activity when I went to wonderful Wales for a weeks holiday with the family.

I include the tools which I've used to automate content distribution and the performance of that content in my absence including Repurpose.io and ZOHO. Overall I found that my metrics have held up but that there are sales leads which I should have in my CRM but which aren't for some reason being captured which is an indication that my funnel isn't working properly and that my content strategy needs work. I share that the website is now really only one part of the communications ecosystem that we have to service whilst we are away, and the ACI is a tool which helps to keep a tabs on all the channels which we are using.

The ACI formula:
content x frequency x channels.

On the subject of creating better content, I am excited to be interviewing the Kate Bradley CEO of Lately.ai in an upcoming podcast to explain how I can do this better.

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Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgan sports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars

Transcript

Jim James: 0:13

I'm going to share today EastWest PR's Active Communications Index. This is a very simple productivity metric that any business owner can use by either asking their internal team or their agency to compile some simple numbers. It'll help business owners understand how much work is going into their public relations activities at the company while they're away. In fact, you can use it all the time. Let me dive in and share with you about how I've used social media and automation while I've been on holiday, and the Active Communications Index, which I believe will help you grow your business effectively and efficiently using PR. As we know, marketing is all about creating compelling and consistent content. So I'm going to look at what I've done in the last week, and share some of the numbers with you. I'd like for us to look at metrics when we're undertaking marketing, because the fun stuff around PR is the getting noticed. But the reality is that we want to spend this time and have a return on the cost of that time, so let's just look at some of the stats of my website and the 10 different platforms that I've been publishing content onto over the last week while I'm away in My website has received 138 visitors, 24% of which were from Wales. America, 17% from the UK, 6.5% from Singapore, and the rest from other countries. The site visitor numbers declined by 6.1%, but the amount of time people spent increased to 1.39 minutes. Now, it's interesting to think that we only have 1.39 minutes of somebody's time to get them to be interested in such a complicated service such as public relations and international marketing. On the upside, I saw that nearly 9% of the traffic to my website is viewing the podcast page, and 24 visitors or 4% went to the Contact Me page. I've done something right, but that means I should have 24 leads from my week away. When I looked at the CRM in Zoho, we do have a couple of leads, but those are ones that came through partner agencies in America or through direct referrals. Somewhere down the line, I've got people to my Contact Me page, but then I've lost them, so that's something I need to look at. The SPEAK|pr podcast has had 593 downloads in the last week, and I can check that through Buzzsprout Analytics. Considering how much time I've been putting into this podcast, that's really great news. I've been posting twice a day in my Facebook group using the Zoho automation software, and the links and images are getting 40% engagement, which is much better than the straight text which is only getting 23% engagement. Clearly, images and links to articles are working on the Facebook group. My profile views and page impressions are both up to 60% which is great. So, I'm getting some good traction in my Facebook groups. Another highlight is that my Social Selling Index on LinkedIn is now at 80 out of 100. I'm in the top 1% in the industry and the top 1% in my network. The average is about 47. If you're interested, you could check yours out here. Also, in the last 90 days, 685 people have looked at my profile on LinkedIn, but I'm down 52% in the last week, because I have not been posting as often on LinkedIn as I do when I'm normally around. On Twitter, we have three additional followers. On Vimeo, the SPEAK|pr videos that we've created have had 984 impressions but only two views. Our newsletter, Cognition, which comes out every Friday (which is free by the way, so sign up!) gets sent out to 2,695 contacts. We've added five subscribers in the last week, and we've had 260 opens with a 6.5% click-through with 4% unsubscribe, so we're net one up. Zoho suggests splitting our mailing list into smaller batches to improve the click rate. It also suggests that we think about the timing. Interestingly enough, when I look at the open rate, 80% of all the emails are opened within one day of the sending. And after that, they're pretty much dead, so there's really not much long tail there. What this tells me is that the constant delivery of content has worked in terms of the maintenance for the marketing, but I am off a little bit, for example, on my LinkedIn, in terms of the number of people that looked for me or looked at me. I've had a good number of people check out my website, listen to the podcast, but not the same number of people as I would like to have as a percentage actually click through and give me an inquiry. I have a couple of things to think about. Firstly, I have to think about the nature of my content. I'm plainly sending out quite a lot of content, but not all of it is resonating with the people that I'm sending it to. The second thing is that I'm sending content to people that are already within my network. I haven't been proactively going out and pitching to new audience groups, and this is something that Russell Brunson talks about in his Click Funnels strategy, that what we need to be going out in pursuit of those people by going to where they are already. I need to start thinking about promoting my content to other entrepreneurs. At the moment, I'm sending the content to people that I've met over the last 15-20 years, but not all of them are that interested in public relations, so I really need to think about my audience group and start to go out and target who I'm sending my information to. Another element that we need to think about is the need for simplicity. I've gone through these metrics, but it's taken me an hour or so to go through the various platforms in order to add up all of the different numbers. I believe that, as business owners, we need to know our metrics in the same way we want to know our cash flow and future sales forecast. The marketing forecast is also key. These are what Verne Harnish, in his Rockefeller Habits, calls"smart numbers," because they're going to be an indicator of our future business. If I've got lots of content going out, but not many leads, then how on earth am I going to build the sales pipeline without those leads? I've developed something I'm calling the Active Communications Index because, going across all of these resultant numbers like impressions, engagements, viewers, and so on, is great, but it's not telling me how much work I actually did to get to those numbers. So the Active Communications Index, which is a productivity matrix, talks about the number of pieces of content, how frequently we publish them, and across how many channels. This is part of our SPEAK|pr methodology where we talk about Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know. Most business owners don't have the time or the tools to run across all these different platforms to get the different engagement numbers, impression numbers, and so on. But also, those numbers don't tell us how much work we've put in. They're just telling us, in a way, some of the effectiveness or efficiency that we might have from the content, but because so much on social media isn't a result of our own input, but rather a trend somehow, it can be misleading. So, the ACI gives entrepreneurs a metric to manage the internal or external team. If I look at my own metrics, I have 10 channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, Twitter Business, Twitter Personal Google My Business, Instagram, Vimeo, YouTube, WeChat in China. Over seven days, I have twice a day engaged with content that is unique across these 10 channels. That gives me an ACI of 140. What I can do with that is track that and start to build it up. I can start to increase the amount of content that I prepare in advance and get ready everyday. I can start sending out content three times a day, which by all accounts is a better number for Facebook and Twitter. I can also look at how many channels I've got. It's only when I start to monitor the input and the productivity of my marketing that I will start to get a better idea of the performance of the team. And as the team at the moment is relatively small, since we have a zero employee agency where everybody is operating on known deliverables and contracts as all of this work is outsourced, one direct input productivity metric is key to managing the process. I share this, because for everybody out there who's either going on or coming back from holiday, there will be the stresses of the first day back as I've had of trying to gather all the reins back in again. Through automation and content preparation, I have managed to keep the cadence and the balance of the materials going into the market. I'm relatively happy overall with the performance of the preparation before going on holiday. I'm not very happy with the content engagement. But with my ACI, I have created a tool which will make it much easier for myself and for everybody working with me, and for you out there who are running your own businesses or your own teams. This is a simplistic tool for measuring the productivity of your marketing activities. Just to recap, the Active Communications Index is the[amount of content issued] x how frequently you posted] x [ umber of channels], and that g ves you a simple number. rack that regularly, and yo'll see a trend. There isn't a right or wrong number. It's w at's going to be right for you a d your business. Over tim, the goal is to increase th t number. But of course, it's eq ally important is to ensu e that the ACI remains consis ent over time, because communic tions is about consistency of messaging and consistency of e gagement with our various audien es. As we know, I talk a out three different audience g oups: our internal audi nces, our partners, and ou external audience or our custom rs. We need to communicate wit all three and with slightly d fferent messages, becau e they all want to know differe t things. They'll have di ferent relationships w th our businesses. While I'm away, I have a virtual assistant who helps me track emails and ensure that I'm communicating with my team. I have autoresponders to ensure that I am communicating with partners and clients in case they write and don't get to me as immediately as they would like to. I have also delegated to the other members of my organization different kinds of work, be it managing the Zoho social pitching, putting content into my LinkedIn, managing the Repurpose content from the podcasts across to YouTube and Facebook. So, communication and the Active Communications Index is a way of looking at public relations that recognizes that PR isn't a one-off event. It is a consistent and well-planned campaign that our business should deploy in order for it to be fully understood. And then when we come back from holiday, there may not be as many sales inquiries, but there certainly hasn't been anybody that's lost from the business. I've returned from my one-week camping trip feeling refreshed, but also a little bit stressed, as I always do after holidays, as I find out how the business has done while I've been away. I've tried to share some strategies and tools that I've put in place so that the marketing activity for the business has continued. Just as I had hoped, client servicing, sales, finance, all the other business functions are still taking place in my absence. The beauty of public relations now is so much of it can be automated. But as I've shared, automation is not a guarantee of effective communication. It's simply a way of reducing time. Public relations needs creativity. It needs the human touch. It needs constant guidance and management. Over the coming weeks, I'm going to be sharing more about the SPEAK|pr program, because we're also going to be launching this with The Progress Shed team. In that program, we have SPEAK, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know, and today has been all about knowing. It's been about knowing the productivity of my own activities and the performance of my automation strategy. Bear in mind, I'm one man working from what I call the tardis here in the countryside of England, so the tools and the technologies that I'm putting in place are all either low-cost or free, and they're all designed for business owners, large and small, to leverage the value that they've got in their own business through effective communications. I hope this has given you some food for thought about how you can get away and enjoy your vacation in the knowledge that your business is still building a brand in your absence and will be ready for you to come back recharged and develop content and your brand story that you know is going to be relevant in these post-COVID times.