A Jack of All Tactics Won’t Beat Your King

I am a firm believer that content is king and that the vehicles in which you distribute content are your tactics. Yes, that includes you Social Media. You are not a strategy like so many pretend you are; you are a vehicle for dissemination. One of my pet peeves is when the medium becomes the driving force behind what we’re trying to communicate. Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t consider a tool or tactic and brainstorm how it might fit into your programs, what I am saying is that if your message and intent doesn’t drive your overall strategy, you’re going to end up with a lot of tactics cobbled together and your goal ….. well you may reach it if you’re lucky, but you increase the risk that you won’t.

Yesterday I sent out 31 campaigns

And got a response rate of 97 %. Well, that is if you think like SalesForce. 

One thing that I’ve yet to come to grips with is the result of SalesForce’s influence in communication programs. When using the SaaS-based CRM solution, an email distribution is called a campaign. In my world of PR, a campaign is defined period of time in which a key message or intent is communicated using a series of tactics and tools (one of those tactics may be an email distribution in SalesForce) designed to influence an audience. This is nothing more than a language barrier between PR and marketing, but it’s one that can create confusion when discussing programs. My advice, be sure to establish some definitions up front. You may end up talking about to entirely different projects with very different scopes of work!