"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates,” says Pearson’s law.

In this new era of public relations, measurement has become a key underlying component of PR. Of course, traditional PR skills and tactics are still the core tenets of any good media relations program. Clients still value creativity, industry knowledge and contacts more than anything else, and the media love a scoop and need good sources.

However, there are new priorities and drivers. Factors such as the new media landscape, greater expectation from PR, budget pressure and the facilitation of the communication process (think Twitter vs. BusinessWire), are all changing the industry. They put pressure on businesses to be more effective in their communication with pressured resources. Do more with less, essentially.

Good measurement should go beyond volume and sentiment. At Cognito, we believe that we have taken media and measurement to a new standard by developing a simple and effective solution to help companies improve their media targeting and PR programs overall.

We believe you should measure the following:

• Type of coverage your firm gets, as well as volume and sentiment
• Media targeting i.e. how well you focus and get results
• Message composition and effectiveness
• Composition, impact and consistency of news flow
• Spokesperson effectiveness, activity and placement
• Social media and leads from PR

These should all be measured against key competitors and this should be done at the beginning, middle and end of a media program.

It is only through an analytical approach to PR that companies can really see where they are being effective, and how they need to change. As the expectation from PR increases to delivering leads, establishing a share of voice and maintaining thought leadership, PR’s must use more data and analysis to steer their programs more effectively and really show their value.

Watch the video on Cognito analytics here. 

Visit our site: www.cognitoanalytics.com

Last month, Cognito hosted the latest in its Breakfast Byte series. These informal gatherings tackle topics affecting the communications function. They are always popular for PR and marketing professionals but this particular one saw attendance that far exceeded our expectations. Why the huge turnout? I’d love to think it was the moderator (yes, yours truly) but the truth is it was the topic: we were discussing how to get tangible results from social media marketing in B2B financial services.

And that’s no surprise really. Anyone involved in marketing or communications – regardless of their sector – has seen how quickly the arrival of social media channels – like blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube – has changed the way many of us communicate:

• In our personal lives, I don’t think anyone would disagree that the likes of Facebook have fast become ubiquitous.

• The mainstream media has embraced Twitter: often as a source in their news stories, sometimes as the story itself.

• Silicon Valley has adopted the notion of social as a business model: everyone it seems is clamouring to be the next LinkedIn.

• Many consumer companies are building entire marketing campaigns on the basis of social.

The end result is that there is an increasing expectation that companies – whatever they’re selling – will have some kind of presence on social channels.

The question that preoccupies us - and many of our clients - is whether this can be successfully translated to the world of marketing in B2B financial services.

Cognito firmly believes that it can. More than that, we think that any firm that is not baking social into its communications strategy is missing a huge trick. Social is not going to replace the old ways but it’s certainly here to supplement them in a cost-effective and trackable way.

Our Breakfast Bytes are designed to be opportunities for participants to have a conversation with fellow practitioners. We were delighted to have such a great panel, people who are rolling up their sleeves and putting social media to work for their businesses every day:

• Dan Marovitz, CEO of buzzumi, a company that enables individuals and companies to create paid video chats and webinars in seconds. His product is a social platform but he also leverages social media to promote it. And Dan’s not just at the vanguard of innovation in social media, he also has a deep understanding of the drivers and constraints of operating in large financial services organisations. Before starting buzzumi, he was a managing director at Deutsche Bank’s global transaction banking unit and also serves as an advisor to SWIFT’s innovation team.

• Jennifer Reid, is marketing operations manager at Caplin Systems, a provider of software for advanced online trading. Its customers include Barclays Capital, Citi, Nomura, RBS and UBS. Caplin has made social an integral part of its marketing efforts and – with a client list like that – you can see that we’re a world away from Old Spice adverts. Indeed, Jennifer uses some pretty sophisticated social media marketing techniques to reach them.

• Allan Schoenberg is head of corporate communications for CME Group, the derivatives marketplace. CME is one of the most socially active organisations in finance, with a lively Twitter account and even its own online social magazine, called Open Markets. On a more personal level, Allan himself is one of the most accessible and active individuals that I know online – maintaining a presence on almost every major social network and often straddling business and personal lives: clearly a man who has embraced social media.

To find out what the key takeaways from the discussion were, please download out summary.

We’d love to hear from you about your own experience in using social media marketing. Are you thinking about it? Have you started? What were the results? What were the pitfalls? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

7th Annual Financial Services Cares Gala
Cocktail Hour

Monday, June 18, 2012
Cipriani 42nd Street, New York City

6:00pm to 7:00pm
Dress: Formal Business

Please join other area leaders in the financial services industry as they
celebrate the lifesaving work that happens each and every day at the
American Cancer Society in the fight against cancer.

Cognito is happy to arrange a one-on-one meeting with you and

John Thiel, Head of U.S. Wealth Management and the Private
Banking & Investment Group at Merrill Lynch Global Wealth
Management, to discuss this important industry initiative to give back.

RSVP Today
ACS@cognitomedia.com

Next in our 10 Commandments of B2B Social Media in Financial Services series is Commandment #2: Align Strategically.

Brush up on Commandment #1

Many people mistakenly think that social media can be done as a standalone activity, without a real strategy in place. On the contrary - to be effective, social media should actually be done to reinforce and support your current communications activities, especially in B2B communications. After establishing your business objectives, it is important to support each objective through an integrated marketing approach that includes marketing, advertising, events, public relations and especially social media.

By having coordinated efforts that support the same goal, companies are able to leverage current content and activity that internal teams and external agencies invest a large amount of time in. Leveraging content through multiple channels helps firms achieve their goals, reach new audiences, reinforce their message and ultimately demonstrate more ROI.

Take a 60-second look at one of Cognito's proprietary pieces of technology, Cognito Analytics, and how see how it helps the financial services sector.

Many consultants I work with believe that their power to influence lies in their ability to persuade and their ability to persuade lies in their ability to explain. They imagine themselves at the head of a boardroom table giving an excellent presentation to a group of senior executives, standing back and basking in the deserved adulation and praise. But the most experienced and best consultants – the most persuasive people- understand that their power does not reside in their ability to explain. It lies in their ability to ask the right questions.
Especially in client management, asking questions is one of the most powerful mechanism for controlling the situation and its outcome and convincing the client of your expertise.
There are several reasons for this:

1) Asking questions at its most basic level, gives you the opportunity to find answers, the right answers. Many people are keen to leap in to the answer before they’ve done the work to develop a deep enough understanding to be able to give the right the advice, in short before they’ve asked the right questions. They are keen to show off what they know already but consequently, in doing so they often demonstrate how little rather than how much they know. So put simply, asking questions enables you to get closer to the right answers the right solutions.

2) Asking questions is also important because the people you’re asking probably enjoy listening to themselves speak. I am yet to meet a senior executive who did not, to a certain extent, like the sound of their own voice. As the president of a company I have firsthand experience of this and I much prefer conversations with my vendors that give me an opportunity to express my feeling and voice my opinion rather than those where my vendors talk relentlessly at me. So the point here is that asking questions gives senior executives the opportunity to do the thing they most enjoy, which is talking about themselves.
I have run thousands of interactions with clients and prospective client and I have found that those in which the client spoke more than 50% of the time were considerably more positive than those in which the client spoke less than 50%. Even – in fact especially - meetings which are billed as major presentations go better where the client is asked questions and does most of the speaking. Presenters tend to bore and presentations tend to be boring. So, unless you know you are a scintillating speaker able to engage a room in silent admiration for 60 minutes, why put the pressure on yourself? A conversation I much easier and will be a lot more fun.

3) Thirdly considering the power dynamic of a meeting, asking questions is a great mechanism for controlling the flow and direction of the conversation. It has been said that ‘he who controls the agenda, controls the meeting’ and the same could be said for questions: he who controls the questions, controls the conversation. Champion tennis players stand close to the net and do very little work as they angle their racquet to simply push the ball in one direction or another, while less experienced players run frantically from one end of the court to the other, trying to keep up. In exactly the same way, experienced consultants use questions to keep the conversations moving at their pace and to angle the conversation in the direction they want it to go in.

So here then are three ways in which asking questions can be a more effective tool than simply giving answers or offering solutions. Firstly it gives a genuine opportunity to learn. Secondly it puts less pressure on the ‘presenter’ and is more enjoyable for the recipient. Thirdly, most crucially, questions control the direction, flow and pace or a conversation.

We all know LinkedIn is great for building relationships with industry contacts and participating in industry discussions, but it is also a great place to gain insight in to any company that you may find interesting personally or professionally.

Companies on LinkedIn now have dedicated pages where users can “follow” them. By following a company, you get access to the company’s biography, statistics, career opportunities, an overview of the firm’s products and services, and you can also see who’s employed by the firm. This gives you more information about a company you’re interested in which can help you establish new connections and also helps you see what the company is saying about itself.

Cognito Analytics has looked at American Banker’s FinTech 100 and ranked the firms by the total number of followers their company pages have on LinkedIn. The results may surprise you…

*Follower count as of March 14, 2012

One of the most interesting things our research uncovered was that companies further down in the FinTech 100 actually have a strong presence on LinkedIn (i.e. L&T Infotech). A variety of factors contribute to follower count including: size of the company, number of employees on LinkedIn, participation in discussion groups and the amount of interaction and information on the company’s page.  When a company posts information and integrates its news feed in to LinkedIn, users find that the company actually gives them valuable information and they are more likely to follow the company.

Every company should, at the very least, have a LinkedIn page. As the go-to social networking site for professionals, companies should have an accurate profile. If you’re company really wants to leverage LinkedIn, host discussion groups, that way you can push out key corporate messages and really position your company as a thought leader.

In the competitive world of financial industry events, firms are finding it increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. Establishing a notable presence at your industry tradeshow can be a costly endeavor, but how can you maximize your conference investment and measure the returns?

It’s not really a big surprise to hear that Dodd-Frank is a big point of contention in the financial services industry. Since the bill’s passing in 2010, and even quite some time before that, corporations on all sides of the market spectrum have been grappling with this 2,000-plus page document. Interestingly, in a recent poll of TradeTech USA panel attendees, 71% believed that implementing Dodd-Frank is not enough to prevent another “too big to fail” situation and will not make the financial market any safer. Only 3% of respondents thought the bill would be successful in its original purpose.

One of the panelists had a poignant explanation for the poll result: although the market learned a lot from the 2008 implosion, it has a short-term memory. While industry participants are now extra vigilant for the problems that eventually gave birth to Dodd-Frank, there appears to be a fundamental need to make money in the marketplace. People will look to new financial instruments that can generate alpha, products that could potentially cause another major financial catastrophe.

Regulation is a powerful tool, as another panelist put it, and needs to be used carefully. There could be many unintended consequences from Dodd-Frank that may impact the market in five, 10 or 50 years. One thing that seemed to be clear from the sentiment of the panel attendees is that there seems to be little industry confidence that proposed legislation will protect the market from another crisis.

Wordcloud of Greg Smith's resignation letter from Goldman Sachs inside the outline of the GS logo