Moving from “Buzz” to “Business”: Social Commerce Camp DC Is Coming Up
Why bother with PR?
One of the things that yours truly focuses on in her, er my, “day job” is the business use of public relations – or, in other words, why bother with “PR” if it’s not going to impact business indicators? Far too often, I see and hear people assuming the raison d’être of “PR” is to “create buzz.”
I won’t belabor the point here but in a nutshell, it’s not. Effective PR is designed – and implemented – with a view to helping an organization achieve its business objectives. In other words, it really is about managing the relationships between an organization and its “publics,” and thus impacting the bottom line.
Which is why I’m excited to be a part of Social Commerce Camp DC this weekend (Saturday, Feb. 20); a free educational event that is geared towards small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses and are looking for the tools to get them started.
Now, it’s a half-day event so no, you won’t be writing an encyclopedia on small business after attending, but what you should definitely walk away with is an understanding of how to use “social” to jumpstart your business (or kick it into high gear). And yes, PR is a part of that, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on.
Here’s the agenda
- 8 – 9 am: Continental breakfast , registration and networking
- 9 – 9:45 am: Social Media 101 for Small Business, with Shashi Bellamkonda , Social Media Swami, Network Solutions
- 10 – 10:45 am: Creating a Killer Social User Experience with your e-Commerce Site, with Steve Fisher, browncoatsmovie.com
- 10.45 – 11.15 am: Check your Twitter account/ blogging time
- 11:15 am to 12 noon: PR Tips and Best Practices for Small Business – Shonali Burke (me!)
Major props to the sponsors: Mayer Brown, Network Solutions, Kikscore and MyBusinessAssistant.com.
Will I see you there? Remember, it’s free, so come on out. You can register here.
Image: Daniel Broche, Creative Commons
Cross-posted from Women Grow Business, of which I am editor.
Help A PR Pro Out: The Michael Clendenin Edition
I know I’ve been talking (or having other folks talk) about job hunting, do’s and don’ts, etc., quite a bit lately. Honestly, I can’t help it; given this blog is all about “personal” musings on our business and our lives, it really is a reflection of what’s going on with, in, and around me.
Even though I’m not looking for a job myself, I’ve been helped countless times by both friends and strangers (who then become friends… what a wonderful world!) when I have been in the market – and the least I can do is pay it forward.
So when Arik Hanson and Valerie Simon asked me to be a part of a wonderful initiative: “Help a PR Pro Out” or #HAPPO for short, where several of us PR pros are going to do our bit to help our colleagues in the job market make excellent connections – and hopefully, find a great job – on February 19 – of course I said “yes.”
You’ve probably already heard the buzz online, but if you’re still getting up to speed, here’s the 4-1-1 on the HAPPO website itself.
Today’s #HAPPO Focus: Michael Clendenin
Specifically today, I want to tell you about a good friend and an excellent communicator, Michael Clendenin. Mike was most recently with Freddie Mac (yup) and is now in the job market. Having known and worked with him in a volunteer capacity at IABC/Washington (he’s on my current board of directors too) I can tell you that not only is he one of the most patient people around, he’s a really smart guy too; and whether it’s through sheer persistence or the luck of the Irish, invariably manages to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat when most needed.
Please – if you have, or know of, a senior-level communication position in the DC market, will you contact Michael? Or leave a comment below so that he can get in touch with you. And thank you in advance for your time and thoughts!
And now I’ll let Mike speak for himself. Please help this PR pro out!
The Scorsese School of PR
I’m delighted that today’s post is a guest feature by Narciso Tovar, who reminds us the silver screen has more than a few lessons for communicators.
Filmmakers come and go – some have the staying power to make a real career out of it, while most fizzle out after a few films. As a lead player in cinema, until you’ve earned some street cred in the business, studios and executives look for any kind of upward trend in your work – even though you were well-received in your last feature, you could very well tank (hard) in your next flick.
This is why veterans always tell newcomers that you’re only as good as your last picture.
One filmmaker who has earned his stripes (and then some) is Martin Scorsese. He has not only made a career out his cinematic ventures, Mr. Scorsese has made his name synonymous with brilliant movies. And even though he’s got some interesting eccentricities like never really wanting to go to Central Park and is listed as one of 50 people barred from entering Tibet, Martin Scorsese can teach us a thing or two in PR.
Martin Scorsese is:
1. A consummate student – his knowledge of films is encyclopedic and his mastery of various techniques is remarkable…the guy served a tour of duty at NYU and taught the likes of Oliver Stone and Spike Lee. Moreover, Mr. Scorsese’s love of films has led him to establish The Film Foundation to promote the preservation and appreciation of film history.
Regardless where you may be in your career, there is ALWAYS time to learn something new in PR.
Yes, you have to stick to the basic tenets of public relations…and, yes, you have to be a strong writer…but there will always be a new way to skin that communications cat – it’s our job to find out how we can leverage their power for our company / client(s) and be smart about using these tools…wisely.
2. A guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously – how many other film legends can you say would be even open to the idea of being a shark character in an animation film, poke fun at his own eyebrows or take some fun jabs on national TV about his fondness for film reels.
Be it from our clients, bosses, colleagues, whatever – working in PR can be a bit stressful. There’s a lot to handle and it has to be done in a timely manner – now more than ever. Who the heck has time to breathe…?…YOU DO. This is not rocket science and it’s not like we’re working on a cure to end world hunger.
Yes, it’s important, and yes, there is a great deal of value that we bring to the table; but the work we do is not so imperative that you can’t take a break or get some perspective by having a laugh or two at your own expense.
3. Always trying new things in his work – from directing Michael Jackson’s Bad video, to a film like The Age of Innocence and then onto Casino takes a tremendous amount of stretching…not only from the dynamics of the actors he had to work with, but from a storytelling perspective as well.
Hold fast to the tried and true methods of communicating your ideas, both internally and externally; but explore these new social media devices that are well within your reach. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, CrowdCampaign – they are easy to use, manageable and effective in communicating your client’s /company’s message.
So go out there and be the ‘Good Fella’ in your PR team. Keep refining your methods & approach… never get ‘too big for your britches’ and keep yourself in ‘sponge mode’ – there’s always more to do in the Scorsese School of PR.
With more than 14 years of public relations experience, Narciso Tovar is president and founder of Big Noise Communications, that runs on Method + Moxie. He lives in Dallas with his wife, Rhonda, and has a strong track record in media communications, both “old” and “new,” with organizations such as Vonage and the Wall Street Journal Online. One of the most energetic young voices in social media, you can easily connect with Narciso on Twitter.
Announcing #measurepr
I had a terrific time on Twitter today. Sean Williams organized a Twitterchat with Katie Paine and myself as a precursor to our respective visits to IABC/Cleveland, and we had a good old time chatting about measurement, PR, social media and the like.
You can read the entire transcript here, if you’re interested.
I sit in on quite a few chats every now and again and the one topic that always seems to come up is measurement. I figured a regular chat on measurement, especially as it pertains to public relations, might be worth setting up.
So I’ve created the #measurepr hashtag and hope that anyone who’s interested in discussing the ins and outs of PR measurement will join.
For now, we’re going to start with a bi-weekly chat, every other Tuesday from 12 – 1 pm ET. We’ll kick off the first one on February 2, and the esteemed queen of measurement, Katie Paine, will be our featured guest.
Do mark your calendars, and join me. If you have questions on PR measurement (which will encompass both “old” and “new” PR), drop me an email, leave a comment below, or tweet me. I’m looking forward to it!
Image: Creative Commons, Darren Hester’s Flickrstream
The Queen Writes on Measuring Engagement
I knew there was a reason I hadn’t written what seems to have become the obligatory first post of the New Year (because it invariably deals with resolutions, predictions, motivation, yadda yadda). That reason being I needed something really thoughtful to kick off 2010. And this post on measuring engagement aka relationships from – who else? – the queen of measurement, Katie Paine, is just that.
Thanks for starting off 2010 right, Katie.
Posted via web from simply shonali
You Can Call Yourself a Social Media Guru If…
I couldn’t help but giggle when I read B. L. Ochman’s recent post on self-proclaimed social media experts, gurus, ninjas, etc. on Twitter “multiplying like rabbits.” Based on her search of Twitter bios, they went from 4.4k to almost 16k in seven months.
Wow. Rabbits indeed!
And then I saw this cartoon from HubSpot today.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but recall Lisa Hoffmann’s post from earlier this year, when she posited that “if social media experts aren’t experts only the charlatans will be ‘experts.’” It sparked a great conversation on her blog, which you should read, if you haven’t as yet.
I do believe, however, that while expertise is earned, the title of expert is bestowed.
You Can Call Yourself a Social Media Guru If…
So, as far as I’m concerned, here are the top 10 things you’ll need to be able to do before calling yourself a social media guru. Counting down, now…
10. Make the sun rise in the West.
9. Along those lines, how about making the earth orbit the moon (thanks, Chip Griffin, for this one).
8. Speak Sanskrit backwards and forwards at the same time. (You’re calling yourself a guru, after all, gotta show some respek to the land from whence that term comes.)
7. Prove global warming.
6. Disprove global warming.
5. Leap tall buildings in a single bound.
4. Levitate on demand. Mine.
3. Get Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston back together again.
2. Make the Cubs win the World Series (direct your tomatoes to Colby Gergen for this gem, please).
And at #1 is:
1. Bring Elvis back from the dead. And no, the TCB concerts don’t count.
And When You Do…
… Please let me know so that I can sign up to worship at your altar?
Holiday Cards, PR and ROI
Heads up: I ramble quite a bit through this post, so if you’re hell-bent on reading it, you might want to settle in with a cup of hot cocoa. On the plus side, there are some pretty pictures involved. Having said that, read on!
It’s two days until Christmas Day (which we do celebrate). Though I still have a lot of festive “stuff” to do, I’m not feeling as manic as I was yesterday.
That’s because I finally got our Christmas holiday cards out yesterday. And they all arrived the same day; because I used Plaxo (of which I’m a premium member, and I have to thank John McCrea for responding almost immediately via Twitter to an issue I had yesterday, which was resolved in record time) to send out customized cards to our family and friends.
Remember When…
I can remember the time when December 22nd would have been unthinkable as an acceptable time frame for a holiday “mailing.” In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that we’d do the holiday card thing the traditional way: via snail mail.
It was certainly fun to design our cards and get them printed (we’d use Ofoto, which is now Kodak Gallery) to order our cards. Then write in each of them (which I think is a must-do if you’re going the traditional route, otherwise it’s like sending a bcc email to people) while trying to avoid carpal tunnel, embark on the inevitable trudge to the post office, buy a gazillion stamps, and get ‘em in the mail. And hope they’d actually arrive in time.
Since we don’t have kids but are “pet parents,”our cards would feature our pets; more specifically, one of our pets – the basset hound, Hank. It’s not that we don’t love our other dogs, but bassets just seem to be made to be cover dogs. Hank died very tragically last year, so 2007 was the last time we actually had a “real” holiday card:
We did adopt another basset, Lola, and I guess were ready to bring back the basset holiday card this year. However, also this year, life “stuff” happened, and it also seemed a good idea to curtail at least some non-essential spending (yes, it’s that whole economy thing).
So all our cards this year are e-cards (we’d started bringing an e-version of our cards into the mix a few years ago, but went 100% electronic this year).
To Mail or Not To Mail?
I was curious as to how my friends and Tweeps were approaching the holidays, so I sent out a Twtpoll asking whether they were doing holiday greetings the traditional way or not:
Quite honestly, I expected most of them to say they were going online. But out of the 38 responses to the poll (not to mention a couple of responses on Facebook), the majority WERE going with traditional cards. Here are some of the responses and reasons:
Relationships Rule
You can read all the responses if you click through to the poll. I found it rather heartwarming that in this age of technology, when we have a tendency to bemoan anything that’s not at the speed of mouse, a great many people choose to stick with tradition.
Admittedly, this was not a scientific poll, but I did think it revealed a lot about the importance people attach to relationships and their thoughtfulness about what the recipients would prefer… as well as the fact that many of them made a conscious decision to incur the expense involved in sending traditional cards, which is no small potatoes if you have a large family and extensive business or social networks (I don’t know if that’s going to save the US Postal Service, but that’s another post… or several).
Taking this a step further, this is really good public relations on a micro level, if you think about it. Knowing your audience, how it likes to be communicated with, and then sending the communications that will appeal to them.
What About ROI?
I thought the comment about “ROI” was interesting. How do you measure the ROI of holiday greetings? By how many responses you get to your cards, or cards you receive in return? By how many of the recipients become clients, or brand evangelists? By how much pleasure you derive from them?
From my point of view, I don’t have a quantifiable objective to my holiday greetings – I know, that sounds like heresy coming from an avowed measurement fanatic! I want my friends and colleagues to know I hold the relationships I have with them in high esteem.
So my goal, when I send out greetings, is to do just that – maintain my relationship with treasured friends or business contacts, and move those relationships that are at the acquaintance level up a step or two. It’s one stage in the constant (hopefully mostly upward) spiral of relationships.
And that, in my opinion, is what public relations needs to do, and be. Because business is all – ALL – about relationships.
Which brings me to you.
Even though I might not actually “know” some of you reading this post right now, we do have the beginnings of a relationship by virtue of the fact that you’re reading this. So I hope you’ll enjoy our 2009 holiday greeting, featuring Lola, the Burke Basset during “Snowmageddon” 2009.
Thank you for stopping by, and I’m looking forward to getting to know you better in 2010. Happy holidays!
And before I forget: what do you think about holiday cards, relationships and ROI? I really do want to know what you think about that, so please do share your thoughts in the comments section.
Lessons Learned From the Obama Campaign
Now that I’ve been back in D.C. for a few weeks after the PRSA 2009 International Conference, I finally find myself sitting down to reflect on a couple of the sessions I attended. This is mostly because I wanted to be able to do so thoughtfully, and not rush through my posts.
The first of these was “President Obama and the Citizens’ Campaign: Lessons Learned,” which was conducted by Mike Smith of Mike Smith Public Affairs. Leave it to a PRSA conference all the way across the country to be the place where Mike and I finally met “in real life (IRL),” even though we both live and work in the D.C. area. Ain’t that somethin’? (By way of disclosure, you should know that Mike’s firm was a sponsor of #shonalitweetup, which was a ton of fun that weekend.)
Since Mike graciously agreed to have his presentation, President Obama and the Citizen’s Campaign, reproduced here, I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow description. I will tell you that his presentation was standing room only, at least until the latter half of his session. When it came time for the workshop part of his program, he broke us up into four groups to discuss an assigned topic, and report back to the entire room. There was a beeline for the door when he announced this; I kid you not. C’mon, PR peeps, where’s your sense of adventure?!
What was Interesting? Well. . .
- It was interesting learning about Mike’s experience as a citizen journalist during the Obama campaign. There were some great examples about building communities and letting them run (which is a concept that, in my opinion, nonprofits know how to do particularly well).
- Actresses, no matter how well trained they are on messaging, can sometimes let blatant honesty shine through. Mike gave the example of an interview he conducted with Anne Hathaway where she admitted she doesn’t know anything about Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
- One of the most interesting parts of the program was when we were put in breakout groups (I’ll get to that later).
What Public Relations Practitioners Should Take Away:
- It’s about you… but it’s not about you. Focus on brand champions — the bloggers/influencers with the biggest networks that can make an immense difference to your campaigns. Leverage how you network and you can create a movement.
- Understand the media cycle (yes, “MSM” is still important), and realize that when you want to reach a local audience, local news crews and pools — the media locals are consuming — are always going to get preference.
- The old model of messaging was “top down.” Not anymore. Now, to be successful, you have to engage your community.
Breakout Groups:
As I mentioned earlier, Mike divided us into four groups. Each group went into a huddle to discuss a topic, and then reported back to the larger group. In a nutshell, these topics were:
- How do you turn your agency around so that it’s more nimble? Your agency can be nimble at any size as long as you’re bringing all aspects from the company to the table and everyone is represented. Doing this will break down silos, which will make you and your agency more nimble and efficient.
- If you’re doing an interview for CNN, who are you? Remember that it’s not just about you, so find local news hooks and media angles.
- How do you respond to attacks (or public relations Jiu Jitsu)? There’s real potential to use social media in crisis situations. Start with an audit across your different audiences; because once you understand how they use social media, you can make a case to use it. Learn from others’ case studies, and build your “battle plan.” Remember to incorporate social media tactics into your overall crisis plan.
- To tweet or not to tweet? (This was the group I was a part of.) There was much discussion on if and/or when to use “surrogates. While I didn’t necessarily agree with some of the others on “using surrogates when necessary,” I do agree that you need to have transparency at all times. Don’t think that you need to have your CEO tweet if she or he isn’t comfortable with it; as long as there is representation from your organization and it’s transparent, that’s fine.
I think the key point Mike tried to drive home was this: we live in a world that’s changing very rapidly, and the 2008 election showed how the adoption and smart use of new technologies energized a completely new audience. Those of us who are still resisting the adoption of these technologies might find ourselves on par with the dinosaurs. On the other hand, much of what Obama’s campaign did was grounded in Saul Alinsky’s principles of community organizing and the populist movement. So perhaps it would be wise to revisit our history books once in a while.
Marry history with new communication tools, and while you might not be the next president of the United States, you’ll probably pull off a darned good PR campaign.
This post, with extremely minor edits (only in the first sentence), was cross-posted on the PRSA ComPRehension blog. Thank you, PRSA, for being so welcoming to me both as a speaker and blogger in San Diego last year. You rock.
Google on PR
Lee Odden gets complete credit for this post, title and all. I was catching up on my reading when I saw his post on what Google thinks of social media, SEO and advertising. You’ve got to read it, it’s great.
I couldn’t resist experimenting with what Google “thinks” of PR.
And then I tried “public relations.”
Oh well. At least some people are asking why what we do is important. Now we just need to get everyone to believe it.
Grab The Mylanta®
Because you’ll need it after reading this press release from Pepto-Bismol®.
This great photo – just in case my words aren’t enough to convey how I feel – is from ducamendes’ Flickrstream.
