The Atomic Blog

Human beings are very bad at retaining what they hear. On average, people forget more than 75% of the info they take in each day. On top of simple memory decay, add distraction - email, alerts, text messages, social network profile updates, tweets, multimedia, phone calls, cell phone calls, meetings, hallway conversations, etc. Oh, and then there’s actual work; multiple assignments, multi-tasking, etc. Plus all the inputs from life away from work. This is the baseline of noise level into which company spokespersons enter when talking with influencers, journalists, bloggers, business development associates, sales prospects, etc. And yet, most spokespeople say too much.

When a lot of ground is covered, most of a conversation is forgotten and takes on no particular shape in the mind of the listener. To cut through today, you need to go short. Think of conversations as opportunities to focus on the very few select topics that matter most to the particular interaction (especially with regard to what the listener is most interested in), and organize your content into short, discrete clusters around those topics - think in terms of a very short paragraph per topic. And stay high level. Get the big picture right first, then let the listener ask for or deliver more detail next. Avoid sub-referencing and tangents. Focus exclusively on the 25% of the content that matters, and give yourself a better chance that they’ll remember any of it.

Atomic posted growth of 44%+ in 2008, exclusively by referral and client side inquiry, and was included on the list of fastest growing private SF Bay Area companies published by the SF Business Times last week for the 4th consective year. We appreciate it. 100% of the growth in revenue was from referrals from current and former clients, performance-driven budget increases from existing clients and from unsolicited inbound inquiries from prospective clients. Over the same period, nearly a dozen of our start-up clients were acquired - good news/bad news. We’re grateful to our clients and colleagues for their enthusiasm, endorsement and active partnership in helping Atomic continue to evolve our methods and grow our business. Working closely with them, and generating orders of magnitude greater ROI than their past programs is our only new business activity. Snapshots of recent Atomic-designed breakthrough campaigns and results here: www.atomicpr.com/results.

More campaign result updates coming soon.

On a technicality, they listed Andy as the sole blogger from Atomic - but actually, we both wrote the post from today about measurement, and also the one about traditional vs. social media to come. Sean Mulholland, Atomic’s director of digital operations wrote the one on the greater power of search to run later in the week. Liz Haas contributed a related link from Silicon Valley Watcher -http://tinyurl.com/ybt5cnv. Here’s the Insider post from today.

PR measurement: don’t CYA - drive strategy instead:http://insider.prweekblogs.com/2009/10/05/on-measurement-don%E2%80%99t-cya-%E2%80%93-drive-strategy-instead/.

PR firms know that measurement is a good thing. And clients want it. But both often get the why wrong. Here’s an excerpt from a recent email selling a webinar on PR measurement: “You’ll learn how to communicate PR’s value, help drive PR funding and gain insight to create the right evaluation system for your organization and your budget.” Justifying your existence and driving higher budgets are OK I suppose, but they leave the far greater power of metrics and analysis sitting on the sidelines.

The very best use of measurement and analytics is to help PR people more professionally and reliably build, shape and protect their clients’ brands. With the sheer volume and velocity of content careening around our culture today, PR strategies based on personal opinion and past experience are no match for the more deeply informed strategies engineered by PR pros armed with sophisticated analytics tools, in terms of growing and shaping media coverage, online dialog, WOM, sales and brand value. So flip the proposition — use measurement for building strategy. When you achieve and surpass goals on a regular basis, CYA gives way to more productive forward-looking collaboration, and program funding usually takes care of itself.

The announcement of Atomic and Huntsworth’s new venture to open Atomic PR offices in Europe and Asia generated a number of interesting pieces in communications trade outlets in the US and the UK this week. The story broke first in PR Week US with a solid, basic article.O’Dwyer’s was next to run, with a more in-depth piece that went a bit farther into the context around the venture from both companies’ perspectives, and profiled our new European managing director, Sandeep Kalsi. We especially enjoyed the very first sentence. Yesterday, PR Week UK ran a full page cover story featuring Huntsworth and Chime, and the new venture with Atomic was described as a good move for Huntsworth’s overall digital strategy. Then UK media services company Gorkana ran the following piece, which contains a flattering quote from senior Huntsworth executive Vikki Stace, a deeper profile of Sandeep and mentions some of the breakthrough work we’ve done for clients with global presence.

Global communications company Huntsworth, plc, announced in London today that it is providing financial, executive and logistical support to a new venture to open Atomic PR offices running Atomic-style programs outside the US. Atomic PR remains an independent agency, and is contributing similar resources to the venture, including financing, staff plus its own ComContext analytics platform, a sophisticated Web application for research, planning and program results measurement. View press release…

Atomic’s London office is up and running with a starting staff of 5, including several who have worked for Atomic in Europe for more than a year, as well as 3 clients, including global security leader ArcSight, smart grid technology leader Echelon, and Roamware, a global provider of roaming solutions who selected Atomic only weeks ago. The London office is currently in talks with several other potential UK and global PR clients as well as candidates for open spots on Atomic’s London team.

London is the first of four Atomic offices initially planned; others include Germany, France and Asia. London will be the hub for coordinating Atomic programs outside the US. Sandeep Kalsi, a highly experienced global PR executive and former board director of Next Fifteen Communications Group, owners of Text 100, Bite, Outcast and other PR firms, has signed on as managing director of Atomic PR Europe, working out of the London office.

There are three reasons why Atomic and Huntsworth teamed up to open Atomic offices outside the US.

• First, a growing number of clients and potential clients would like us to be able to run Atomic style programs from Atomic branded offices outside the US, mixing analytics-fueled strategies with traditional + social media, video and SEO-supported programs in countries where we don’t currently have our own offices. Like many smaller firms, we’ve traditionally partnered with networks of smaller, independently-owned agencies in other countries on client work outside the US. But as the size, complexity and number of our multi-country engagements has grown, collaborating with other independents has become more complicated from a management standpoint, and there are IP protection issues around sharing Atomic’s analytics applications and related intellectual capital.
  
  
• Secondly, combining our resources with those of Huntsworth gives us more financial backing, hands-on experience and logistical support that will allow us to grow our international footprint more quickly and intelligently. In addition, Atomic will leverage resources from Huntsworth’s network of wholly-owned offices on an on-demand basis in countries where Atomic doesn’t have its own. All of which is very good and cost-effective for Atomic clients. 
  
  
• Lastly, it’s the best of both worlds: Atomic stays independent while being able to leverage the resources of a large and highly experienced agency group while we expand internationally.

A quick bit of backstory: We had been planning opening Atomic offices in London and Hong Kong on our own for more than a year. We met Huntsworth by chance, when Huntsworth business development executive Vikki Stace visited our San Francisco office.

We’ve been contacted regularly by companies looking to acquire agencies and we always let them know that we’re not interested in being acquired. Vikki was interested in meeting anyway to see if some sort of mutual referral or other relationship might come out of it, so we got together. The chemistry was good from the start, and both sides shared plans for growth and the future. A few weeks later, Vikki invited Judy Wilks and me to Huntsworth’s HQ in Marylebone while we were in London looking at potential locations for our own office there.

Vikki introduced us to a number of other senior Huntsworth execs. More visits took place over the next few months, and it percolated up that a joint venture outside the US might make sense.

Atomic’s advisors, including a few top VCs we work with as well as Keith McCracken, an agency growth consultant with Results International collectively felt Atomic could move faster and more surely with Huntsworth as a partner outside the US, and soon, we felt the same way. A definitive agreement was signed this summer to form Atomic Communications Holdings, Ltd. in London with the board to be shared by Atomic and Huntsworth. Sandeep Kalsi signed on as MD shortly thereafter.

We’re delighted with our new venture partners and colleagues at Huntsworth; and we look forward to seeing more of the world together. We’re very pleased with the welcome our new London office has gotten from clients and prospects, even before we were able to formally announce it. And if you know solid, creative and progressive PR people or tech clients in London looking for an authentic alternative, please send them our way.