Category: Technology

WORDUP PR is celebrating a wonderful anniversary these days: Exactly one year ago, we began representing the Bulgarian fintech company Payhawk, based in London, in the German-speaking market as a PR agency.

A lot has happened this year: Around 80 media publications in the financial trade press and German-language business media give the highly innovative spend management specialist the visibility it needs for clients and partners. In collaboration with agencies from the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria, we work consistently within a powerful European team. We localize international press releases and also support the German Payhawk branch with PR activities for the local market. We also make suggestions for events, awards, and speaker slots in the German-speaking market and coordinate their implementation with our local colleagues.

One year of PR consulting for Payhawk is an important milestone for us in our successful, long-term communications consulting in the fintech segment. We look forward to continuing our collaboration.

Our new fintech client Payhawk announced last week that ATP Top 10 tennis pro Grigor Dimitrov has been named the company’s new global brand ambassador. As part of this sponsorship, Grigor will wear a Payhawk logo on his tennis clothing and participate in various events held as part of the ATP and ITF tennis tournaments. This gives fans the opportunity to get in direct contact with the athlete. Payhawk customers can look forward to exclusive signed merchandise including t-shirts, posters, photos, tennis match tickets and invitations to exclusive meetings with the tennis star.

Grigor Dimitrov was ranked 3rd in the world singles rankings by the ATP, making him the highest-ranked and most successful Bulgarian tennis player in history.WORDUP PR is very pleased about the new collaboration, which once again demonstrates our many years of expertise in the area of ​​fintech and IT public relations. With the listed companies SHS Viveon AG and Blue Cap AG, but also with fintech startups like yavalu, the Munich agency has been supporting customers from the financial services and fintech sector to increase their media presence for around 15 years.

In this international PR project, WORDUP PR works in a European team under British leadership, which also includes agencies from France, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Spain.

Payhawk is a spend management solution for medium and large businesses operating in the US, UK and Europe, helping them manage and automate their financial processes while providing visibility and control over business spending. By combining corporate cards, reimbursable expenses, accounts payable, and seamless integration of HR and accounting software into a single product, Payhawk makes business payments easy for everyone. Payhawk helps customers in over 32 countries maximize efficiency, control spending, and remain agile. Payhawk has offices in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, ​​Amsterdam, Vilnius and Sofia.

LinkedIn has changed its algorithm. From now on, quality comes before quantity. If you regularly post on LinkedIn and want to be seen doing so, you should adapt your posts to the requirements of the new algorithm. This article explains many of the the LinkedIn rules 2023.

Where did the change come from? 

The reason for the changed algorithm was indirectly the Covid19-pandemic. While home office and contact restrictions became the rule and personal exchange a rarity, more and more people felt the need to share their thoughts online. Quickly, even LinkedIn, which had previously always been kept professional, became a platform for sharing individual opinions and private problems. There were many topics: Loneliness and challenges in the home office, the now brutally apparent lack of digitization, and the management of children when schools and daycare centers remained closed.

But while people still enjoyed reading through personal stories and looking at private pictures in the beginning, more and more users felt that the platform no longer offered them any added professional value. LinkedIn degenerated into a kind of second Facebook. And it wasn’t just typical Facebook content that could be found on LinkedIn; Twitter-like tendencies were also evident: More and more frequently, political opinions or statements on current world events were posted. Mostly polemical, without background knowledge of the respective authors and with a lack of context. It is obvious that it is not necessarily good for one’s own reputation to angrily express one’s opinion in comment columns. “If you’d kept quiet, you’d have remained a philosopher,” applies here to most posts and comments that would have been better off on Twitter.

In order to retain its users, the platform therefore set itself the task of returning to its own roots and delivering more professionally relevant content to its users on the front pages again.   

 What users really want 

LinkedIn recently identified two main needs of its users: first, to get new knowledge and real added value, and second, if possible, from people already known in their own network. To meet these needs, LinkedIn now automatically identifies posts that have the potential to deliver knowledge and real value. 

 Therefore, anyone who wants to continue to be seen on LinkedIn should keep the following in mind: First of all, posts should be aimed at a specific target group. Posts about general challenges and their solutions, which everyone already knows anyway, are not interesting. Expert knowledge is the trump card! So it’s not good for your own visibility to report that coffee wakes you up in the morning. Everyone already knows, everyone already does it. In addition, you should only post what you really know about. LinkedIn compares the content of posts with the professional qualifications of its authors. If there are discrepancies here, the reach is lower.

If a lawyer writes about the challenges in the nursing profession, this is not conducive to his visibility. In addition, articles with a personal perspective and point of view are preferred. If someone describes an issue or a situation from their personal professional perspective, it attracts positive attention. If a recruiter reports on application processes from her perspective and underpins this with a personal experience from her job, this will probably also have a positive effect on her reach. 

These tips can be used to increase your own visibility: 

• Commenting on others’ posts also draws attention to oneself. 
• Your own posts should be posted regularly, at least twice a week. 
• The ideal number of hashtags is between three and ten, especially your own personalized hashtag is helpful #wordup 
• The perfect LinkedIn post is between 1200 and 1600 characters long. 
• Linking to other people or organizations in your own post is risky: if the tagged person/organization responds, it increases your reach. However, the opposite is true if the tagged person/organization does not react. Then the reach is limited. 
• LinkedIn pays attention not only to the content of the posts, but also to that of the comments: Many meaningless comments consisting only of single words are not conducive to reach. On the other hand, a few comments over several sentences that contain a reasoned opinion about the post are an indicator of its quality for the algorithm. Here, too, you can play a role yourself: Comments under your own post should be answered within one hour. 

Back to the roots 

In summary, this means: Quality comes before quantity. Before you publish a contribution, you should ask yourself: Who can I help and how, and do I really have the competence to do so? 

The content of the posts may have changed in the meantime, but LinkedIn’s goal has always remained the same: to give its users a feeling of productivity and success. The new algorithm is the first step back in the original direction. 

In the past few weeks, SHS Viveon CEO Ralph Schuler has presented himself to the specialist banking press with two major interviews.

The portrait of the Payment & Banking platform covered, among other things, the career of Schuler and his view of the financial services industry. What is particularly interesting is the assessment that the term “fintech” can also be used in a broader sense: “I don’t think that fintechs should only be defined as hip start-ups run by young people. In general, one can say that with increasing As a company grows, in-house processes become more and more important. This could be seen in the emergence of the Facebook universe, among other things. In the beginning, a lot happens on demand, and the motivation is mainly fed by the ‘founder fever’.”

As an independent economic hub, Payment & Banking reports, researches and analyzes the most important topics relating to payment, banking, FinTech and now also crypto and digital assets. With over 600,000 page views per year, the podcast with over 350,000 plays and the four pioneering specialist conferences, Payment & Banking has become one of the most important contact points in the industry in Germany.

The second major interview can be found in print edition 5 of the well-known Bankmagazin. Here, SHS Viveon CEO Ralph Schuler speaks, among other things, about the borrowing needs of German companies and how digital creditworthiness and risk assessments make it easier for financial institutions to make credit decisions.

Bankmagazin (Springer Fachmedien) has been published since 1998 and is the association-independent, leading trade journal for the banking industry in German-speaking countries. The independent reporting on the financial sector and banking practices reaches readers from all three pillars: cooperative institutes, savings banks and private banks.

In any case, we are happy about so much good personality PR and are showing a short excerpt of the interview here (printed in full in issue 05/2023).

An extremely dynamic international sanctions regime, rising standards in ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) criteria and, above all, increasing political pressure from the German Supply Chain Act, which will come into force in January – companies currently have no shortage of current challenges for compliance along international supply chains. For all these cases, our customer, the listed SHS Viveon AG from Munich, has developed a comprehensive all-in-one solution and now introduced it to the public for the first time.

The new Supply Chain Compliance product is the first module of the SHS Viveon platform architecture. With it, companies can meet all requirements of the Supply Chain Act without much effort. In addition, automated sanctions list checks can be performed for all business contacts and suppliers’ ESG efforts can be evaluated. SHS Viveon thus offers an optimal solution for the most important challenges in supply chain compliance.

The fact that compliance in international supply chains is currently an extremely relevant topic that affects companies from a wide range of industries is demonstrated by the extensive media response to the launch of the new product. Numerous well-known trade media from the logistics, IT and finance sectors, such as LOGISTIK HEUTE, Digital Business Cloud, eCommerce Magazin, DerTreasurer and other trade media, reported on the launch. Our innovative PR dashboard provides those responsible at SHS Viveon with all current clippings, evaluations of the publications, and other additional information on a clearly arranged SharePoint page.

WORDUP PR has been responsible for the entire press relations of SHS Viveon AG in the DACH region since the beginning of 2021.