Wow, I go offline for a month and the next thing you know people are switching jobs! Bob LeDrew – blogger, musician, house concert promoter and all-around good cyber-dude extraordinaire – is leaving his job at Thornley Fallis PR in Canada to move back to the dark side academia and become the Director of Communications at Algonquin College in Ottawa.
Congratulations Bob!
I was reading Chris Brogan’s blog this afternoon (where anyone interested in getting better with social media should go) and found this post interesting. Chris talks about ratcheting up your ability to get through information, especially when dealing with social media, faster and faster (think Ben Johnson on steroids, then crystal meth fast).
The problem starts up when you don’t know where to look for information. Like me, sometimes I finally find out what’s going on only to turn around, write a brilliant masterpiece you have all come to know and love ( 😉 ), get something online and find out I’m still behind the curve. It’s like the saying goes, sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you. It’s just a matter of not getting caught off guard too often. Two questions are, how can you get the information synthesized fast enough, and in this day and age of instant online media, how can you get faster?
P.S. Chris, if you have any ideas on staying up to speed, I’d love to hear them. 😉
When trying to get the media interested in your story, don’t send a blanket email out to every reporter you can find an email address for. Because the reporters are starting to push back and not only block those email addresses, they are also posting the worst offenders online.
Hat Tip: my friend Peter Shankman, creator of the excellent Help a Reporter site.
When trying to get the media interested in your story, don’t send a blanket email out to every reporter you can find an email address for. Because the reporters are starting to push back and not only block those email addresses, they are also posting the worst offenders online.
Hat Tip: my friend Peter Shankman, creator of the excellent Help a Reporter site.
Earlier today I was listening to NM political blogger Joe Monahan as part of a media roundtable. He was a decent member of the panel, making a few good points about social media, but at the end he really blew it. He was asked about the future of blogging and he said that blogging had reached its heyday a couple of years back and that blogs would start to fall by the way, much like some of the mass media outlets that have shuttered their doors in the last decade – the market would decide which blogs will survive.
Joe’s looking at the story of blogging as an independent source of revenue, he had discussed advertising on blogs, or blogging independently as a career – like he does. He’s not thinking about the use of blogging and other social media in a business setting. That’s the future of non-independent, non-hobbyist social media use.
Because starting May 26th, you could be arrested and thrown in the dock in the United Kingdom for misrepresenting your company as a consumer (Walmarting Across America comes to mind here).
The legislation is already in practice in Europe, the UK is just getting into the act a little (fashionably ?) late. On one hand this can be good because it’s going to cut down on the amount of BS astroturfing that companies and their PR firms do. It’s a kind-of enforced authenticity.
Is this a good thing? Isn’t it better if people know that a company isn’t communicating authentically of their own accords? The press, and other bloggers, are more than happy to shine a light on the astroturfing efforts of those corporations and PR firms. Isn’t that the way it should be? Online news organizations, like the newly created New Mexico Independent or well-established PR Watch, are sprouting up to watchdog various organizations and report the news without fear or favor (if not partisanship).
And another question I’d like to ask is, for activist groups throughout Great Britain – do these rules apply for them as well? Will the same group of activists who misrepresent themselves as a greater number of people (think about the blogger equivalent of a phone bank calling talk radio shows to comment) be subject to the same rules and punishment? Ad Age explains the law as applying to “Brand Owners” and Greenpeace, or the Sierra Club, or the Christian Coalition, or Wake Up Walmart are all brands and should be subject to those laws as well. All things being fair and all that.
What this means is that companies and organizations should be authentic and true in their online communications. A lesson to corporations, activists and PR firms around the world: if you represent themselves truthfully when dealing with online and social media communities, they can avoid a lot, if not almost all of, these kinds of problems.
It will be interesting to watch Great Britain in the upcoming months and see what happens.
Hat Tip: Ad Age
Finished reading this by CNET blogger Charles Cooper. He takes a look at how press releases, especially those that are stacked with easily searchable words, are showing up higher and higher in online searches. It’s a great story, I highly recommend giving it a once over when you have time. One of the ideas I liked to mull throughout the article is the idea that the mainstream media is becoming increasingly marginalized, and how organizations can take advantage of that.
Cooper starts the article with a scenario familiar to many public relations professionals.
A few years back, representatives from the Industry Standard, Wired, and Upside were invited to a public-relations gathering to talk about how they decide what to cover. After they finished their prepared remarks, a young woman in the audience stood up to ask a question.
“You talk a lot about tricks and tips on what we should do,” she said. “But I’ve done all that and I still can’t get you to cover my clients.”
The reporter from Upside recognized the opening and rammed a Mack Truck right through it. “Ma’am,” he replied, “you need better clients.”
.. “and s/he is us”
I was talking with a co-worker a couple of days ago about all of the great stuff I learned at the PRSA and CASE conferences. Our conversation, as it does sometimes, veered into the number of alumni/a/ae/aeiou/eieio who start trashing the university upon graduation, and how that has been affecting our brand. It’s almost as if, in addition to the degree, we give them a card that tells them they can start talking about all of the stuff they didn’t like about the institution.
I could have, and have at various times, gone into “evangelist mode” talking about the great things going on around campus, or the really cool research our profs are doing. My view is, when talking about the university, I tend to talk about good people (students, staff, etc.) doing good work at a good school. My co-worker said that I was one of the rare exceptions, I graduated from the college I work at now, and I’m fired up about the school in general. (although not this fired up…)
Instead I started taking time to think about what our grads are saying. There’s the usual talk about the food or the facilities around campus (computer labs are always full, library’s not open 24-7) or that some of our faculty aren’t available at the necessary times or aren’t receptive to student concerns. These are all factors which have hurt the university’s brand, especially since we are not holding up our end of the bargain and addressing these students complaints when brought up. In the past we’ve tended to “shield up” when these concerns come to light and that is being reflected in the response of our alumni when they graduate. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of alumni out there who are proud graduates, and maybe this is nothing more than an expected percentage of students who were not happy with their experience in college.
Our uni. president mentioned this during his webcast last week to present his strategic plan for the next five years. One of the first things he addressed was openness and transparency with the public, our students and employees. This might be the opening our office is looking for to add blogging and more podcast/video work to our efforts. The key is going to be transparency, and if we can get everyone on board with facing our detractors and telling them what we are doing to improve the university, we might be able to reverse some of the negative feelings people have towards our university.
True? False? Indifferent? What do y’all think?
.. “and s/he is us”
I was talking with a co-worker a couple of days ago about all of the great stuff I learned at the PRSA and CASE conferences. Our conversation, as it does sometimes, veered into the number of alumni/a/ae/aeiou/eieio who start trashing the university upon graduation, and how that has been affecting our brand. It’s almost as if, in addition to the degree, we give them a card that tells them they can start talking about all of the stuff they didn’t like about the institution.
I could have, and have at various times, gone into “evangelist mode” talking about the great things going on around campus, or the really cool research our profs are doing. My view is, when talking about the university, I tend to talk about good people (students, staff, etc.) doing good work at a good school. My co-worker said that I was one of the rare exceptions, I graduated from the college I work at now, and I’m fired up about the school in general. (although not this fired up…)
Instead I started taking time to think about what our grads are saying. There’s the usual talk about the food or the facilities around campus (computer labs are always full, library’s not open 24-7) or that some of our faculty aren’t available at the necessary times or aren’t receptive to student concerns. These are all factors which have hurt the university’s brand, especially since we are not holding up our end of the bargain and addressing these students complaints when brought up. In the past we’ve tended to “shield up” when these concerns come to light and that is being reflected in the response of our alumni when they graduate. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of alumni out there who are proud graduates, and maybe this is nothing more than an expected percentage of students who were not happy with their experience in college.
Our uni. president mentioned this during his webcast last week to present his strategic plan for the next five years. One of the first things he addressed was openness and transparency with the public, our students and employees. This might be the opening our office is looking for to add blogging and more podcast/video work to our efforts. The key is going to be transparency, and if we can get everyone on board with facing our detractors and telling them what we are doing to improve the university, we might be able to reverse some of the negative feelings people have towards our university.
True? False? Indifferent? What do y’all think?
Got back from Little Rock on Friday. The conferences were amazing! At PRSA I got to listen to Chris Brogan, Adam Denison from GM Blogs, David Neff from the American Cancer Society – the two of them are doing some amazing things in social media, check out http://www.sharinghope.tv/ right now! (All three of you reading this! 😉 ) it’s amazing! There is some great work going on in the PR Social Media-sphere! And some of the speakers, like Adam Broitman and C.C. Chapman, that I really wanted to but didn’t get to see.
Plus I got to hang out with the Marketing Diva herself, Toby Bloomberg was speaking at the conference as well! Talked with her quite a bit about how to introduce social media to my organization, and hopefully will see some of the fruits of that labor come to pass sooner rather than later.
And, just as an aside, I got to listen to Duncan Wardle, VP of Walt Disney World and Global PR for Disney Parks talk about branding and social media and a lot of the cool stuff that Disney was doing in that sphere. Oh yeah, and there was Richard Edelman, one of the godfathers of PR and Social Media, discussing Authentic Communications. It was an amazing discussion, and one that I’m glad I have the PPT to – since there is a lot to digest in that presentation.
Then there was me.
As the three of you 😉 who read me regularly know, I was a little nervous about speaking at the conference. But the Arkansas PRSA and a lot of the other speakers I was hanging out with were great and helped put my mind at ease that I knew what I was talking about. And Adam and David (and Chris Brogan bounced in and out a few times) were in the audience and I saw them nodding in agreement a few times so I figured I was making sense. 😉
There’s more to talk about, like the hotel we were staying in – the Peabody – and the twice daily duck march (which I have pictures of and will post more on later) and the Clinton Library. But I’ll get to that in a bit, now it’s off for some coffee and taking the dog outside for a run around the yard.
Benson Hendrix - Brain for Hire 