Monthly Archives: October 2009

The Business Case for PR: according to whom?

Posted on by

Today PRSA rolled out its “Business Case for Public Relations” initiative, aimed at spit-shining the image of the PR industry and combating a lot of the misperceptions and negativity that surround the profession. The campaign includes a variety of features like resources to help articulate the value of PR to the C-suite, formation of a measurement task force to standardize measurement practices, and a newly organized collection of case studies.

I haven’t dug into all the materials yet. I’m sure there are many good tidbits in there. And frankly, as much as PR practitioners (myself included, on occasion) complain that other people “don’t get” PR or that we’re misrepresented via shows like Sex and the City that overemphasize the publicist role, at least PRSA is trying to do something about it.

But what caught my eye was the section on the Business Case section of PRSA’s Web site called “Industry Thought Leaders.” It profiles the nine individuals who were involved in the Business Case effort. Here’s what I immediately noticed about this list:

  • All are very accomplished PR professionals, with many years of experience in the field. The youngest is maybe 40-ish.
  • Seven of the nine are men.  Not exactly representative of the PR profession as a whole.
  • There’s no cultural diversity among the nine leaders (at least judging by the photos).
  • Seven of the nine are from PR agencies, most of them the big ones (H&K, Edelman, APCO, etc.). One is from corporate communication, one is from academia.

I’m sure that all nine of these people offered great insight and input into this initiative and I’m in no way knocking their individual qualifications or contributions to this effort. They have clearly differentiated themselves in the PR field. But essentially it’s a bunch of old(er) white guys from big agencies.

dartboardI would have loved to have seen a more diverse group of PR professionals involved in this effort. It would have  resonated with me more if I had looked at the list and seen more women, one or two early- or mid-career professionals, some practitioners from small boutique agencies, some non-profit and corporate communicators, and some practitioners from different ethnic backgrounds.

I don’t know how this advisory panel was chosen; whether it was self-nomination or invitation or some other process. I’m not saying that PRSA should have gone out with a pre-determined list of certain types of PR professionals and “ticked boxes” to create this group. But it causes me to wonder what else could have been included in this advocacy campaign had some more representative voices been included in the process.

Knowing and understanding your audience is one of the fundamentals of public relations. I feel like maybe PRSA missed that mark here.

What do you think?

Image via Flickr user Paul Peracchia

Why I was wrong about lifestreaming

Posted on by

I sat staring down the white screen of WordPress death tonight knowing that I was due a blog post but unable to come up with anything (I’m sure no blogger has EVER had that problem before, EVER).

So, in my writer’s-block-induced haze, I sent out the following tweet:

Crowdsourced tweetThe lucky winner? Mark Krynsky (@krynsky) responded first:

Mark Krynsky LifestreamingCrap.

(Although I suppose I should be glad that Arik Hanson didn’t beat him to it, with his “Everything I learned about social media, I learned from Barry Manilow” suggestion.)

Mark was calling on me to refute a post I wrote several weeks ago asking what the big deal was about lifestreaming. That post generated a healthy discussion as readers tried to help me understand what value sites like Tumblr and Posterous added versus a traditional blog and other outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Mark, who authors the LifestreamBlog, left one of many great comments on the post.

I revisited the post and my initial stance. I wrote that original post from the standpoint of genuinely questioning and being curious about the value of lifestreaming, and not necessarily dissing or deriding the practice. A lot of the comments helped clarify my thinking. The most common reason people cited for lifestreaming was that it occupies the space “between Twitter and a blog” and provides an outlet for “off-topic” items that may be out of place on a subject-specific blog. Others use Posterous as a way to clip and save items from the Web, almost like a juiced-up Delicious account.

All are valid reasons, but so far I still haven’t found the time or interest to update (curate?) my own lifestream or really follow anyone else’s.

But, specific to Posterous, which seems to be the most popular lifestreaming tool right now, I will say that I do see the potential from an ease-of-use standpoint. The ability to send in blog posts via e-mail directly to Posterous is very compelling for someone who wants to blog or share information but doesn’t want to deal with a complicated (or even a simple) CMS. And Posterous makes it very easy to record audio clips and send them directly to the site. It’s a way to start creating content with extremely low barriers to entry.

Another interesting “group lifestreaming” experiment took place at Social Media Breakfast Houston. Bryan Person created a Posterous account and had attendees e-mail info and photos. I could see this type of format working for events and conferences as a place to have people collectively contribute content (holy alliteration). The concept is similar to Collecta, a site that pulls in Tweets, photos, and more for specific hashtags.

So, I’m not sure that asking a question can really be “wrong”, but I’ll certainly admit that my eyes have been opened to many more possibilities for lifestreaming. Heck, I may even get around to updating my Posterous account one of these days.

Thanks to Mark and everyone else who participated in my little Twitter/blog/crowdsourcing experiment. For now, writer’s block averted.

Reaching stakeholders through social media

Posted on by

Here are the slides from the presentation I gave today to the Capital Region Chapter of PRSA:

PRSA: Reaching Stakeholders Through Social Media
View more presentations from amymengel.

Here are some links to content I referenced:

If you’d like to attend Social Media Breakfast on Oct. 30, register here (still a few seats left).

Let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed that you’d like a link to.

Skip the business cards and use Contxts

Posted on by

At last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit I met the lovely Joyce McKee, a marketing events and trade show professional who’s working her way through Chris Brogan’s material at TrustAgents101.com.

She asked me if I had a business card, but they were buried in my purse back at my table. I told her she could text my name to 50500 and Contxts would send my info to her phone. It turns out she had never sent a text message before, so I walked her through the process. D.J. Waldow caught it all on his iPhone:

Contxts is a great tool if you don’t have business cards on you or don’t have an iPhone with the crazy-cool Bump app. Check it out!

Five reasons corporations are failing at social media

Posted on by

rocket“It’s not rocket surgery.”

That malapropism became a bit of a mantra at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and built trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

So why is it so difficult for so many companies to successfully integrate social media? I dug through my (30 pages of) notes to try and find some themes in what the speakers shared and came up with a this list of why organizations might be getting hung up.

1. They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products

Chris Brogan shared how Citrix Online created the Workshifting community to address the rise of telecommuting and remote work. Sure, it ties in with Citrix’s GoToMeeting/Webinar/PC product line, but the blog isn’t a commercial for its products. The same holds true for Kodak’s photography blog that Chief Blogger Jenny Cisney talked about. It’s about photography and creativity in general, not about Kodak cameras. Greg Matthews shared how Humana developed the Freewheelin bicycle sharing communities with plenty of online and “real life” components to the program. Bicycles don’t have much to do with health insurance specifically, but they are about being healthy. If a company is only talking online about its specific products and not looking for ways to connect to the bigger picture, it’s pretty difficult for people to be engaged.

2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action

If you’re going to listen to your customers, you’d better be ready to do something about what you hear. Valeria Maltoni noted that if a company creates an online presence that’s open and allows customer feedback, it creates the expectation that the company is going to do something with that feedback. Worse than not being heard is being heard and then ignored. Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines shared how a simple blog post stating the airline was considering assigned seating amassed tons of customer comments showing a lack of support for the idea. This feedback changed the direction of their internal debate and led to a new boarding procedure that maintained the open seating arrangement.

3. They aren’t calibrated internally with the technology

Jason Falls chastised corporate Web sites for being little more than online brochures. Customers expect interaction. Content creation is key to social media success, and every company should have a Web site with a content management system that allows for quick, easy content creation without the IT department needing to recode a Web site. Anyone in the organization should be able to publish via a CMS. And companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees.

4. They’re not framing risk accurately

Dharmesh Shah reminded us all that a corporate blog has never been fatal to an organization. NBC cameraman Jim Long said the often a company’s entry into social media is a clumsy, shotgun blast and that there’s an equal chance of looking foolish by having a ham-fisted marketing department launch a social media presence as there is if a rogue employee “goes off” on Twitter. The risk of social media is not abated by not participating. And really, while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company.

5. Their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success

In Shiv Singh’s presentation, he discussed how the customer should be at the core of the brand. When policies, procedures, products and processes become more important than the customer, there’s no way social media efforts can be effective. When your employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for your brand. Yes, Zappos was cited time and again as a case study, but largely because it has a culture that makes social media work. All of its employees are focused on customer service at the core. The same holds true for Southwest Airlines.

I could go on and on. So many of the speakers at IMS shared great examples of simple, effective social media strategies that have humanized organizations and allowed them to build better relationships with customers. But time and again companies are either rejecting social media or participating in a way that defeats the purpose.

It’s not rocket surgery.

Image via Flickr user StephenHackett