Coffee With QMSL – The 1st Edition

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

We are excited to bring you a brand new edition of #CoffeeWithQMSL! We’re closing out Women’s History Month by introducing you to Bukky Akomolafe, the Commercial Manager of Travelstart Nigeria. Here, we talk about everything from building a brand from scratch to how to genuinely connect to African consumers.

Communications Trends in 2019

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

In the communications industry, 2018 was a great year. We witnessed the advancement, progression, and extinction of some communication trends. We saw brands bring more creativity, innovation and efficiency to communication. Storytelling was the focal point of most communication strategies, as companies hoped to make more personal and emotional connection with their audiences.

Certain trends and media platforms which were thought would be obsolete in 2018 proved resilient, while new platforms and strategies emerged, providing wider options for communication experts.

We’re a few months into 2019, a year which, holds even more potential and excitement, with a great opportunity for more innovation and creativity.

Here, we’ve outlined some of the communication trends we expect to dominate 2019.

Wide/Increasing Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Communication

2018 was a year of experimentation in the application of AI in business communications, but 2019 will be the year it becomes more integrated. The communication industry witnessed a significant increase in the use of artificial intelligence in 2018 and the results are very positive.

AI has proven efficient, sustainable and relatively cheaper. According to Adobe, only 15% of enterprises are using AI as of today, but 31% are expected to add it by the end of this year. In 2019, we expect to see increasing use of AI in communication activities such as data gathering, media monitoring and even, interaction with consumers.

Email is Here to Stay

Since the introduction of electronic mail as a means of information sharing, it has proven extremely effective in both external and internal communications for businesses. Despite several innovations and improvements, in communication technology, and even with the rise of social media, e-mailing still remains a trend that will not be abandoned soon.

The Radicati Group Email Statistics Report, shows that people send and receive 281 billion emails per day in 2018, with an expected 3.8 billion email users worldwide by the end of the year. In five years’ time, there will be even more email use, with an expected 333 billion emails sent. Businesses should make sure their e-mail databases are up-to-date and always growing, as important as social media is, many companies are only one Instagram crash away from going losing their full customer base.

Influencer Engagement Thrives and Shifts

According to Solberg Audunsson of CampaignLive UK, 2019 will be the year influencer marketing shifts from who to how. 2018 was all about brands learning who to work with, but in 2019 the focus will be on how to get influencers to push sales. The influencer engagement landscape is shifting and the way social personalities and brands work together is changing. This is as a result of shifts in areas such as social paradigms, customers’ expectations of transparency, brand purpose and accountability.

As influencer engagement budgets are bulging, brands and businesses also want to be sure they receive their money’s worth. These changes present marketers with new issues and challenges, therefore organizations using influencers to reach its audience will adopt new strategies.

More Personalization

One goal of communication in business is to get the full attention of the target audience – hence businesses should always be working to make their messages more attractive. 2018 saw the use of storytelling by brands to enable them connect emotionally and communicate with consumers, the year 2019 will see the intensification of storytelling, but on a more personal level.

Companies will try as much as possible to personalize their messages to fit their target audience, in order to cut through the noise and get the undivided attention of the consumer.

Traditional Media (Print and Electronic) Live to Fight Another Day

Traditional media is not dead yet. The digital age has significantly disrupted the place of traditional media as the main means for mass communication, but it has not totally killed it. Despite the reduction in the use of traditional media in communication by businesses, a study from Zenith Media, indicates that traditional media accounted for 69% of global media consumption in 2017.

Therefore, there are strong indications that traditional media will survive 2019 and beyond. Traditional media still pulls large numbers, and it is shifting and evolving to mimic the things we love so much about digital media.

All in all 2019 is proving to be a banner year for the industry, we’ll be back at the end of the year to see which trends hold true.

Public Relations in the Post Digital Age: Implication for Practitioners

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

Every day, we see the many changes that the post-digital age brings to business. New industries are springing up, consumer habits are changing, and industries we are accustomed to, are evolving at an accelerated rate. The public relations industry is not any different.

With a history as far back as 50 B.C., the business of public relations has become a legacy business. The key problem with legacy businesses operating in the new age is that they are quickly becoming obsolete. There are schools of thought arguing for or against public relations becoming obsolete. The truth is that perception and reputation will always have to be managed. Relationships with customer segments and key stakeholder groups will always have to be considered and executed seamlessly. It will be unwise to play the ostrich concerning these changes. The industry will require a continuous re-invention to remain relevant to the evolving organizational structures and changing consumer habits. The ‘how’ of public relations is threatened by new industries, a new workforce of the future, and clients’ changing requirements which is largely influenced by the changes in the marketplace.

Like with most other businesses, public relations companies would have to keep doing the nuts and bolts work at the core of the trade. But they also have to be ready and agile enough to compete in a fast-changing environment, one that’s almost hard to predict. Prior to the digital age, traditional public relations practices consisted of the creation and distribution of press releases, trade show participation, and relationship building through philanthropic efforts and press agentry to gain media exposure. Companies focused more on disseminating information to the public than on the how or why. Measuring results proved difficult as well. The technological boom has redefined the roles public relations professionals perform within an organization and how results are being measured.

In spite of the changes the digital age has brought, there are some core fundamentals of PR that haven’t and will likely never change. Excellent storytelling, great relationships, and a strong brand identity have always been and will always be essential, but how they are put to use has been forever altered.

Some of these alterations currently waver between small and big changes. To make changes today, however, there are three key practices that PR practitioners must be in tune with.

 

The first is the Dynamism of the modern media landscape. What this means is that what was once a small, consistent and niche group has ballooned. Beyond influential core news platforms, talkability and buzz leveraging new media tactics are increasingly important. News channels have expanded to include social media, blogs, and even comedy shows. Every single touchpoint of a story has become a channel for information dissemination. PR practitioners must stay in tune with this and expand their horizon beyond media contacts. Modern PR teams have to keep track of who is writing, talking, tweeting, and making videos about relevant topics. It can help you target just the right pitch with pertinent content for each person who might be in the position to share your brand’s messages.

The second key practice today’s PR practitioner must stay in tune with is Measuring Impact and Return on Investment. Before the digital boom, measuring the success and impact of PR was very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that many brands simply didn’t do it. PR was seen largely as a nice to have cost element that didn’t in any way tie back to revenue. While that was the general perception, it was not true. Being consistently seen and heard meant that a business was building momentum in the minds of customers and key stakeholder groups, keeping them top of mind when it came to their area of operation. Unfortunately, there was little to no metric to prove this.

The Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) measurement metric became commonplace as a way to measure public relations value. AVE refers to the cost of buying the space taken up by a particular article, had the article been an advert. This measurement meant that PR executives would sit with a ruler and a bundle of newspapers to measure the size and space in column inches, of a piece of coverage and match that to the measure of the equivalent of advertising. Today, AVE festers as a public relations metric. Though, AVEs are still valid today, they are slowly changing. Communication Directors and PR managers in organizations are now constantly asking the question, ‘What does this really mean for our company?’

What this means for PR practitioners today is that the measurement of PR must be related to a campaign’s objectives, key messages, sentiment and what these mean for how an organization is perceived. The ability for PR practitioners to track the behavior of people who connect, act or react to a story changes the game. Thanks to digital, PR outcomes can be measured based on a number of metrics including website traffic, reach, impressions and audience reactions.

The third key practice for today’s PR practitioner is Analytics and Reporting. Based on the need to measure ROI, the modern PR report is swiftly moving from being activity-based to becoming outcome-based. Spreadsheets are rapidly giving way to interactive PR reports that analyze a client’s share of voice and the general sentiment across industries. Company Executives can now get a real-time look into the impact of PR without any time wasted. What this means for PR practitioners is that if they do not heed the validation of the power of analytics tie to what their clients want, they will clearly be at a disadvantage.

The implication of these changes combined is that there are more opportunities for PR professionals to disseminate and expand communications for clients using different elements and channels such as events, experientials, videography, social media, digital, infographics; all of which before now were majorly a prerogative of advertising and marketing functions. There has never been a one-size fits all approach, and so the industry continually evolves to meet the changing needs of clients and their audiences as well as leverage the new and emerging channels available to reach these audiences.

More so, the function of public relations is largely storytelling. Media results, web traffic and sales leads that clients demand are largely dependent on compelling storytelling skills, which is strategic and deliberate in aligning communication with the organization’s objectives. Public relations professionals will continue to tailor messages for individual audiences as well as identify platforms through which to reach them.

It is clear that PR is changing a great deal and will become more important than ever, helping individuals, brands and organizations manage their communication to inform, engage and persuade even in this post digital age. These point to the fact that, like the proverbial fine wine, PR practitioners will need to keep getting better at the job with creative, out of the box thinking that helps in delivering communication solutions to clients.

Interestingly also, current statistics shows that the biggest population of internet users are aged between 18 and 49 years, a majority of whom are millennials. We are talking about a globally growing population of millennials whom the old tactics of public relations do not serve. These are people who are increasingly becoming weary of what they read, advertisements they see, and are not easily swayed. How then do PR practitioners catch and sustain their attention and convince them to take action? To answer the question, the future of PR will have to entail more dependence on balancing data with creativity – an approach that has long strengthened PR campaigns to predict future trends, identify new audiences and ensure programmes are engaging and interesting.

Quadrant MSL’s Media Visit to Guardian Nigeria

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
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Our media visit to Guardian Nigeria, where we met with the top editors and had a dynamic discussion regarding the evolution of Quadrant MSL and the Nigerian media landscape in recent years.

Coffee With QMSL – The 3rd Edition With Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

On the 3rd edition of Coffee With QMSL, we had a conversation with Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe, Group CEO of Insight Redefini. We discussed about everything from his career, the evolution of the Marketing Communications industry into business transformation and must have leadership skills.

The Evolution of Hashtags

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  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

In recent years, the hashtag has majorly impacted both social media and public relations. Hashtags have essentially created databases of information, by archiving and aggregating any topic or name with a “#” sign at the front of it, and making the name clickable on most social platforms. Through clicking on a hashtagged topic, users and public relations (PR) professionals alike, gain an understanding of what is being said by a cross-section of people.

This means that every PR campaign that engages the online space can benefit from the smart use of hashtags. Communications experts, understand that hashtags help spark brand conversations, expand content reach, engage target audiences and improve search and SEO. These simple signs will surely keep making waves in the way we engage and understand modern consumers. Let’s take a look at where they originated from.

How it all began

Outside of Generation Z, who grew up with the hashtag as we know it today, most people probably first knew the “#” symbol as the number sign or pound symbol. The use of the sign to ‘tag’ content can be traced back to Chris Messina who first used hashtags on Twitter, in 2007. The technical aspect has evolved since Messina first used them 12 years ago, but the idea behind them has remained the same. Simply put, Messina created the hashtag as we know it to, “[improve] contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity” online.

Soon, other social platforms caught on to how much users were engaging hashtags and, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and other sites, incorporated hashtags into their platforms. Simply put, the hashtag has become the SEO of Social media.

Hashtags Today

The hashtag has transformed language for millions around the world. Today, they can indicate where you’re posting from (#AsoRock) or what you’re posting about ­ (#EndSars). But they have also shaped elections, launched social movements, and transcended their original meaning as a mere keystroke, to become a defining symbol of the digital age. Today, hashtags are a very effective way to build brands through promotional material, announcing new products, or just generating interest for your business.

Hashtags aren’t just good for brand building and engagement, they can also help your brand find its target audience online. More interestingly, hashtags can help your target audience find you, by the hashtags you choose to use and engage. This is particularly effective on Instagram where users can follow hashtags, the same way that they follow actual people. For example, if someone follows the hashtag #naijaweddings, they’ll see all the recent posts that have used that hashtag in their feed, plus the posts that have the most engagement. This is incredibly useful for brands who want to build their audience. By leveraging hashtags that people follow, they’ll be able to get the attention of different users.

The effectiveness of hashtags can be seen in how widely they’ve been adopted. Hashtags are now used for brands in relation to politics, TV shows, breaking news, celebrities, movie campaigns, activism and more. Pretty much every show on television has a hashtag associated with it, and sometimes a show will broadcast a specific hashtag for that episode so fans can talk to each other and see what others have to say during the airing of the show itself. Hashtag use for television shows is a strong example of using the tags to generate buzz, build user generated content, and foster connections. In this case, they’re being used to build interaction with excellent content.

Hashtags work best when marketers think of them as boosters and enhancements, not as a replacement for quality content. We’ve sure come a long way from 2007 when hashtags first popped up on twitter. Today, hashtags form an integral part of marketing campaigns and branding, and we’re sure there’s still a long road ahead in their evolution, and their incorporation into the daily lives of consumers.

QMSL at the Brandcomfest 2019: Digital Disruption & The Future of Brand Marketing Communications

• 
  By Tiarhan Oghenejode
  
• May 28, 2018
• No Comments

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