Strategic Public Relations

Walter Cronkite | Sharing Video on Twitter | Costs of Meetings | Mommy Bloggers | Four Links | 07.19.09

2009-07-19T21:41:19-04:00

1)
Cronkite's Greatest Hits | Mediaite: These highlights from Walter Cronkite's career remind us why we ~~want~~ need journalism to survive. Cronkite was so Super Bad he had chunks of guys like Michael Arrington in his stool.

2) 5 Ways to Share Video on Twitter | Mashable: This post raises my iPhone 3G-S envy. But more importantly it shows one way how videos are being made more shareable.

3) Calculate the True Cost of Meetings | AdLab: A meeting cost calculator? This tool should be a mandatory Outlook Calendar plugin.

4) Mommy Bloggers Fight Back | PR Newser: The title of the post sounds like a B-Movie. But PR Newser details the latest dust up in the blogosphere to ignore PR for a week straight. As Susan Getgood notes, the boycott misses the point.

Walter Cronkite, 1916 - 2009uploaded by John McNab

Meanwhile at The Bad Pitch Blog…

2009-07-19T19:23:15-04:00

While Summer Hours are in effect, Richard Laermer and I are getting ready to do a Bad Pitch blog teleseminar to help folks with their media relations skills.

The pitches seem to be getting worse vs. getting better as they become the story. Personally I’m blaming the misuse of tools vs. the tools themselves.

Learn more about Bad Pitch Night School (during the day) at Crappy PR.

We have 10 free scholarships we’re giving out to some folks between jobs as well as some students (who I guess are before jobs). And every single registrant gets a free copy of the “Full Frontal PR” e-book. So it’s a pretty good deal.

If you’re interested, make sure you register in time for the Wednesday, June 29^th event. It’s from 1-2pm edt. And I should probably note you can follow the Bad Pitch blog on Twitter. Cause all the cool kids are doing it. Well, the older kids anyway.

Summer Hours?

2009-07-19T19:07:13-04:00

If my Typepad CMS were a typewriter, there'd be an inch of dust on it.

But this is a classic case of going quiet because of a busy schedule.

New Gig: My new role at Empower MediaMarketing is going very well. In addition to marketing the firm, I’m consulting some of our clients in the CPG, food and retail industries. Eventually some of this work will make great blog content.

Bad Pitch Blog: Richard Laermer and I are gearing up for a teleseminar on Wednesday, July 29^th. We're giving out scholarships to some students and to some folks that are between jobs. Each registration gets a free "Full Frontal PR" e-book too. More info is available here if you’re interested in honing your media relations skills.

Live United: I’m helping United Way of Greater Cincinnati gear up for their annual campaign. This will be a very different year for United Way as they reach out to much smaller businesses and individuals for the first time.

Cincinnati Social Media: Our local Social Media Breakfast group has grown to more than 500 members so our name reflects that it’s not just for breakfast anymore. For now we’re using LinkedIn as our central point of communication for events like our upcoming Open Mic night on Monday, July 27^th.

The Open Mic event takes a page from the Ignite tour popular in other cities nationwide. We’re also one of several groups sponsoring this year’s Digital Hub Initiative which builds on last year’s successful event.

So the good news is I have plenty to talk about. The bad news is that it might be a while. But there is a lot more to come.

Old electric typewriter uploaded by tiredofkim

Does Your Brand Have a Point of Difference or a Red Flag?

2009-06-29T07:23:20-04:00

During a recent hotel stay, I saw a brochure promoting a cultural destination that singled out two of its accomplishments. This destination was chosen as “one of six best buildings in the world for 2007.” It was also the first building of its kind in the world to meet a set of exacting environmental specifications.

While both accomplishments were surely hard-earned and worth touting to some degree, are these dusty factoids drawing visitors to this destination? Similarly, if it turns out I’m the tallest marketer in the 45202 zip code, does a basic fact do anything to establish my abilities?

When choosing ways to differentiate your brand from the crowd, claims like “first one in the world” seem like a safe bet. But if these claims don’t resonate with your target audience and reinforce your goal they’ll come off as overcompensation.

The next time you’re establishing a brand, topic or source with a target audience make sure you ask an important question on behalf of your audience: “Who cares?” This will help you stand out for the right reasons.

Altered Reailty VI uploaded by Yushimoto

GM Taps Social Media for Recession Communications

2009-06-02T23:35:42-04:00

WSJ’s Digits blog tipped me off to this commercial from GM that was launched online via YouTube and Facebook, I assume in lieu of media buys, as it filed for Chapter 11 protection.

To call this a case study in crisis communications is an understatement. GM lost nearly $82 Billion in the last four years. The 10-year-old company filing for Chapter 11 protection makes for the fourth-largest filing in U.S. history and the largest for an industrial company.

This topic is worthy of its own web site. And there is one.

GM Reinvention is harnessing the dividends of GM’s social media 401(k) program when it needs it most. The company is being as transparent as possible to tell their story on what’s next. If GM had not been establishing itself over the years in social media, this effort simply would not be as effective. Social media won’t solve GM’s problems, but it will help the company keep an open line of communication in troubled times as it prepares to rebuild. Let’s hope they reach their new goals.

Get the Picture or Get Lost – Why PR Needs Visual Thinking

2009-06-01T01:19:42-04:00

Between PR Newswire and BusinessWire, around 2,000 press releases go out over the wires each day.

Wow, 2,000 press releases! How many of those actually contain news? Noise from traditional PR tools across fragmented media channels are fueling bad pitches and stunts that have little or nothing to do with helping the client’s business.

As a result PR people are struggling to help clients stand out – in any way possible. But more isn’t the solution to any problem. Better is the answer. How do we improve?

We must embrace the visual.

Visuals decrease our word count and increase our effectiveness. And in a Web 2.0 society it's become cheaper and easier to make our efforts über visual. The evolution of news and search is making this visual leap essential.

The rest of this post is actually available as a free .pdf file that you can grab here if you're interested. This is also cross-posted to The Bad Pitch Blog.

Empowering News

2009-05-13T11:56:00-04:00

Five weeks ago I became a free agent. Perhaps more accurately the recession paid me a visit.

Fine. I was laid off.

Since then I've been pretty focused on three things--networking, interviewing and freelancing. Not to mention the mortgage, food and money.

OK, six things.

So I'm pleased to note I've found a new home. I'm now the Director of Marketing at Empower MediaMarketing.

It's a hybrid of everything I want in a job--applying marketing, public relations and social media. It's a client-side role, but I'll also work on some client projects as well.

Empower manages every facet of media--buying, planning, strategy and consulting. They also have a full-service digital practice and a consumer research team with a set of proprietary tools.

They have many stories to be told and I can't wait to get started.

Thank You
I have many people to thank for helping me through my transition and I'm following up with each of you individually.

Prezi.com
In my zeal to announce this, I took Prezi.com for a test run. Unfortunately I did the presentation on my desktop. So instead of sharing a link to the online presentation, I can only offer you the whole honking thing as a zip file. If you're interested in Prezi, check it out. If you're on the fence, I'll manage expectations and note that it takes the above content and makes it look (much) more interesting.

Social Media Starts with Experiments and (Beautiful) Mistakes

2009-05-13T01:50:01-04:00

This Ad Age article rightly stresses the need for first-hand experience when implementing a social media project.

“The biggest challenge that I see is getting people who have practiced traditional marketing for their entire careers to adopt a new set of values. The first instinct is to treat any form of social media as a channel that you use to drive a corporate message. It's relatively easy to grasp the tools but more challenging to understand how new technologies have changed communication behaviors and patterns.”

Spot on.

This is why some clients are experimenting with it. Others might focus on a particular site like Twitter. But most everyone sees the value in this facet of communications.

Regardless of where clients are on the social media curve, I stress is the concept of campaign vs. commitment. This phrase, crystallized for me in a presentation by Mitch Joel, is more than fodder for a t-shirt, bumper sticker or ppt slide.

Campaign or Commitment
Several projects I’m involved with are using a specific event or a time-based reason to get more involved in social media.

This is an excellent idea unless you think you can go from zero to Facebook page in two seconds. Trying to gain traction in social media with the flip of a switch doesn’t happen unless you’re @aplusk perhaps. For most brands and people, attention is earned through participation.

These projects are building off already established profiles. These profiles represent active participants who follow community guidelines spoken and unspoken.

Anything else comes off as drive by marketing. This is more than simply ineffective; it draws the ire of your new found community. So if anyone questions the value of experimenting or concern over making a mistake, consider the above Ad Age article and realize why they’re asking these questions. They need more than shiny new. They need to understand the new set of values in play here.

Social Media 401(k) Fund
Recessionary jokes aside, your involvement and participation in social media is a long term approach. And it might require a commitment and resources that some are unwilling to devote initially. But consider that Google is a big investment fund and all of this content builds relevance and awareness over time. This can pay off but you have to invest. And the earlier you do it you can experiment and learn from your mistakes.

Google Sees All. Get Over It.

2009-04-24T01:16:12-04:00

Between some well-intended privacy stories, some (very) sensational privacy stories and recent news from Google, I’m compelled to state what might be the obvious.

----

You need to be smart about what you say and do online. For example, when creating a company policy about social media usage, I suggest that if an employee can’t say it in front of their Mom or in front of a competitor they probably shouldn’t put it online.

As marketers, however, we should be taking full advantage of the fact that Google sees all. We should be syndicating content across as many platforms as our customer community frequents. If they look for us in these 2.0 hot spots we want them to find us.

Consider the search implications of this distributed approach to content. In the past we created walled gardens to aggregate all of our content in one place. By turning that content into spreadable media, the opportunities to impact search results increase exponentially. And if in turn all of this media has distribution capabilities like ShareThis the search impact increases even more.

It all starts with Google
Have you Googled yourself, your client or your company lately? A brand’s search results are the first moment of truth online. Google now allows you to improve these results by creating a Google Profile.

It’s imperative that we make sure that everyone understands the implications of Google’s ability to catalog and cache seemingly all online activity. But we should also be deliberate in making sure Google finds our story in as many places as it makes sense. If we don’t? Google might find someone else’s version of our story instead.

Free Agent Nation 2.0

2009-04-15T17:29:51-04:00

The news media have been making a lot of historic comparisons when serving up various economic statistics. The journalists are simply trying to depict the level of economic turmoil around us. But, more often than not, their readers are already living it.

In fact I started working four-day weeks in January. So I launched a new site promoting my consulting practice. It’s hard to believe I’ve had my vanity URL parked since March 11, 2000. But nine years later, I proudly launched kevindugan.com.

And the timing couldn’t be better for my launch. As of April 1, I became a full-time, free agent. So my silence here has been due to my full frontal consulting efforts. I’m also exploring full-time opportunities.

Powered by Ample
The site was created in Ruby on Rails by the team at Ample. Josh, Rob, Bobby, Kevin and Adam do great work and I enjoyed working with them.

Eating my own Dog Food
The site design is based around the concept of content distribution, something I’ve written about before. The definition of content has changed and, more importantly, how content can be shared and served up in new ways. Kevindugan.com serves up my content from a variety of online properties. I’ve aggregated these content streams into one site to “get credit” for all of it in one spot.

So I appreciate your patience as my reports might be a little spotty until I either settle comfortably into free agent nation or find another full-time gig. In the meantime, there’s plenty more on the concept of slippery content to dig into. Henry Jenkins calls it ”spreadable media.” Check it out, stop by my shiny new site and watch this space for (so. very. much.) more.