It's All in the Power Statement

We live in a world of sound bites, preferably 10 seconds or less in length.

This “give it to me quick” mentality is the foundation of Twitter’s success.  You get 140 characters, that’s it.

This challenges communications professionals to articulate often complex issues, trends or themes in a succinct manner.  Beyond tweets and status updates, this extends to concisely constructed blogs posts, traditional media relations, marketing collateral and other thought leadership materials.

How you say something is often just as important as what you say.  Personally, I refer to a high impact message as a power statement.

Here are two examples from this week of power statements in action:

1.  We scored a 30 minute informational interview for Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) client KippsDeSanto with an influential trade magazine.  KippsDeSanto’s managing director was incredibly effective conveying complex themes in a simple, engaging manner that the editor chose to develop a profile article from the phone conversation.

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2.  I then came across an interesting read in Computerworld about outgoing Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s presentation to a team a President Obama’s top science advisors.

Rather than expressing concern about the influence of a select set of systems integrators on the federal government’s adoption of technology, Kundra characterized these companies as an “IT cartel.”  It’s no surprise that power statement captured the headline.

Healthy Balance Delivers Impact

During a sit down with government 2.0 wunderkind Steve Ressler a few weeks back I asked him when he knew the GovLoop community he created had the potential to be something very special.

Ressler thought for a moment and then said, “When reporters began to call me about it.”

Readers of this blog know of my conviction to the belief that there has been a shift in influence in the market from traditional sources of credibility -- such as journalists, analysts and industry conferences -- to social networks and online communities. This transition of power will accelerate, further eroding the value and ROI of traditional advertising and public relations programs.

Yet, the media’s sway remains, and respected editors, writers and pundits continue to serve as a critical audience for any company with growth aspirations.

I was reminded of this when Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) was tasked by long-standing client GovDelivery to announce their acquisition of GovLoop.

We tapped into social networks and connected with a myriad of Web 2.0 influencers to share this exciting news. However, it was the good, old fashioned press coverage we generated from business, financial and trade media that truly made this a portfolio-worthy effort.

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Social Network GovLoop Sold to GovDelivery


Facebook for Feds Social Networking Site Acquired


The take-away here is when it comes to marketing promotion, PR professionals should strive for a healthy balance. It’s critical to connect with key audiences through a mix of both traditional and emerging channels of communications.

Mending Media Mistakes

It eventually happens to all public relations professionals. A corporate executive is misquoted in an article or a media outlet inadvertently reports an inaccurate fact or statistic. With traditional print media, your best hope was for a correction to be published in a future issue.

It’s different with Web-based media. Check out how the influential bloggers at GigaOM corrected a fact in their assessment of Monster.com’s acquisition of Affinity Labs.

The take-away here: it’s important to quickly take action if your company is misrepresented in an article. Contact the journalist, point out the inaccuracy and validate your suggested correction with supporting facts and/or a third-party resource.


Monster.com Pays $61M to Get into Social Networking
Posted: 04 Jan 2008 02:57 PM CST

Career site Monster Worldwide has bought social networking startup Affinity Labs for $61 million in cash, the two companies said today. A jobs site getting into business networking makes a little more sense than, for example, Cisco buying Tribe.net and Five Across, but the purchase price seems rather high. Affinity was just getting off the ground and had raised only $6 million from Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures.

Affinity Labs’ products consists of seven recently launched sites aimed at various professions, among them the informatively named NursingLink, PoliceLink and ArtBistro. None of them are seeing traction yet — VentureBeat reports fewer than 500,000 visitors per month in total.

Update: The company contacted us to say it has 800,000 visitors per month and about a million registered members. Affinity CEO Christopher Michel contended that the acquisition price was appropriate given Affinity was generating “not a small amount of revenue” through highly targeted advertising including email newsletters and lead-generation. He also pointed out that Goldman Sachs released an analyst note praising the acquisition.

At the same time, shares of Monster hit a two-year low today due to forecasted online recruitment declines.

There is some history here — Monster was already providing advertising to Affinity and Affinity was giving Monster account holders access to its sites. Further, Affinity CEO Christopher Michel had sold Military Advantage, also a Mayfield investment, to Monster for $39.5 million in 2004 after raising $31 million in funding, so maybe the shareholders were able to defer a better return to a few years later.

At last check, shares of Monster (MNST) were down $1.14 at $27.79.