Tag Archives: Albany

Social media tactics for recruiting and staffing

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Tonight I presented to the Capital Region Recruiters’ Network, a local organization of HR and staffing professionals. They asked me to share some advanced techniques for using social media to help identify candidates and fill positions.

The topic was timely, as I’m currently trying to fill a key role on the readMedia team (anyone know of standout Community Manager who wants to live in upstate New York?). While I don’t have an HR or recruiting background, I tried to present a few concrete tactics that attendees could take  away and implement immediately.

Tonight was also my first time using Prezi instead of PowerPoint. I saw a fair number of Prezis on the higher ed conference circuit last year, and my buddy Arik Hanson also gave Prezi a ringing endorsement. It certainly is a more unique and interesting presentation of material than straight-up slides tend to be, but as someone who is used to thinking linearly, it takes me a lot longer to build and structure a presentation in Prezi.

Below is what I shared with the CRRN:

Beyond the Basics: Using social media to attract & connect with candidates on Prezi

What three PR & media takeaways would you share?

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Tomorrow morning I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at Leadership Tech Valley’s Media Day. A collaboration between the Albany-Colonie and Schenectady Chambers of Commerce, Leadership Tech Valley is a year-long professional development program in the region that provides courses and networking to a selected class of participants each year.

Media Day will consist of a panel discussion with journalists and PR professionals, as well as a mock press conference and an introduction to media pitching and coverage. The members of the class are from diverse industries and professions – everything from nuclear engineers to banking to healthcare. Many of them don’t work directly in public relations, but no doubt spending a day learning about how the media works will be helpful to them in terms of leading organizations in the future.

I’ll be sharing the stage with some PR professionals as well as TV, radio and newspaper journalists. Gina Luttrell, the panel moderator, has asked each of us to prepare our three must-have resources for members of the audience – it could be a website, a book, or even just an important tip.

I have a few in mind, but thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what you all think. When talking with a group of professionals who have limited knowledge of the media and how it and PR works, what would you tell them? Where would you send them for more information? What resources do you continue to go back to?

How many conferences are too many?

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I know, I know, quiet around here lately. It’s the same excuse as always: busy, busy. I’ve been on the go for what feels like eternity (and it actually got the better of me last week – hello, flu!). Thus, I haven’t been “musing” much. But here are some random thoughts and observations from my many travels these last months, starting with…

Louisville

I’m sure it’s a great city – it looked like it from the air. Jason Falls invited me to speak at the IABC Kentucky / Social Media Club Louisville’s Content Marketing Summit in September. Thanks to some flight snafus, I ended up flying in and out of Louisville in under 10 hours and seeing nothing beyond the airport and the conference room of the hotel across the street.

In addition to presenting, I got to sit in on the rest of the day’s sessions and hear from Michael Schechter of Honora Pearls, Joe Pulizzi of Junta42, and Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware. During my presentationI talked about online newsrooms and using press releases as content marketing, sharing some examples form readMedia clients and other savvy organizations who “get it” when it comes to organizing news on the web. My slides on Making Online News in the 21st Century are here.

Then a week later, I was off to…

Boston (technically Cambridge)

It was nice to spend a day at a conference where I was actually only there learning, and not presenting or exhibiting or meeting with clients. As part of Boston’s FutureM week of marketing events, I spent a day at MIT/Microsoft’s NERD Center (it’s actually called that) for Start-up Marketing Bootcamp. It was great to hear from some of the non-mainstream social media and marketing speaker-guru-expert-ninja people and get some “real” stories from entrepreneurs at start-ups who’ve implemented innovative marketing tactics and social media strategies to develop a customer base. There was substantially less talk about Twitter and Facebook and more about things like design, user interface/user experience, marketing analytics and A/B testing, and low-cost tools and resources for marketing at a start-up. Meaty stuff.

I most enjoyed hearing from David Cancel, founder of Compete.com and now with Performable.com, and Ross Kimbarovsky from CrowdSpring.com. The day ended with a panel of CEO-types like Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway and Seth Prietbatsch from SCVNGR. Smart, in-the-trenches folks who shared their experiences, good and bad, of life at the helm of a start-up. The day suffered from not having enough interaction among all the attendees there (it would have been great to break into small groups and talk through common issues or share ideas for marketing start-ups), but overall it was a solid event. And, bonus, I managed to grab a long overdue beer with Jay Keith and confirm that we share a brain.

Fast-forward two weeks and I’m in…

Crotonville (it’s in New York, on the Hudson)

All you need to know about Crotonville is encapsulated in this episode of 30 Rock. GE invited several other former GE communicators back to its leadership development campus for a day of networking with other company alumni and current GE communications professionals. It was great to see former colleagues and some of the invited speakers were top-notch. A crisis communications panel included representatives from BP and AIG, and it was fascinating to get an insider’s view on these crises, as well as their lessons learned (Apparently no one in the UK thought Tony Hayward sounded “posh”, and in Britain his accent is actually quite common-sounding. Meanwhile, everyone in America thinks any type of British accent is posh…).

Now we’re to early November and I’m off to…

Troy

Not that far of a trip for me, but I spent a day in the Collar City for the PRSA Northeast District Conference. I was a little surprised at the lack of social media sophistication at this conference. It seems like PR people, of all professions, should be all over social media as tools to help them achieve their goals (and if they’re not ready to jump in with clients, I’d at least expect them to be reading basic social media blogs like Mashable and experimenting with social media personally, to try and get a handle on the technologies available and understand how to fit them into campaigns).

But, there was very little Twitter usage at the conference. People were asking questions during sessions like, “What is RSS?” and “What’s a hashtag?”, which made me worry I had been transported back to 2008. The kicker was that a few days after the conference, the organizers emailed a PDF of the conference survey to attendees and asked people to reply and check off their answers (um, surveymonkey or surveygizmo, anyone?). It frustrates me that so much discussion about social media seems stalled out among certain PR audiences. At some point, you need to stop expecting social media enlightenment to fall from the sky and just roll up your sleeves and start experimenting.

On a good note, I got to meet David Binkowski and hear about some of his work with Price Chopper and Schick (he is seriously tall in real life, btw). I also attended a media panel that featured Mark Mahoney of the Glens Falls Post Star, who is far too humble for a Pulitzer winner.

Three days later I’m on a plane to…

San Diego

I attended the American Marketing Association’s 2010 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. San Diego in November sounds great, but I honestly only made it outside of the hotel twice (though once was to meet and have dinner with the lovely Rachel Kay and Jennifer Wilbur). The conference was packed with content, and in addition to meeting with a lot of readMedia’s higher ed clients, I also tried to attend as many sessions as possible. A lot of the conference revolved around big university branding campaigns, like those at American University, Purdue and Michigan State. I shared my impressions of the conference with Seth Odell of HigherEdLive via a video post here.

I’m really enjoying being so involved with the higher ed community through my work with readMedia, and it’s great to be able to learn from them and also share knowledge gleaned from working with our clients. I’ve made great connections with people like Michael Stoner, Rachel Reuben, Fritz McDonald and Charlie Melichar.

Back from San Diego and two days later it’s back to…

Troy (again)

This time, Troy played host to the eighth installment of Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, with the very cool Revolution Hall as a backdrop. Patrick Boegel was able to entice Guy Gonzalez of Digital Book World to come talk to SMBTV about Audience Development in the Digital Age. With Guy’s poetry and publishing background, it was really interesting to get his take on building communities online. Guy shared his view of how online platforms (Kindle, iPad, eBooks, etc.) are disrupting traditional methods of getting content to audiences. I love that SMBTV has been exploring deeper and more niche-y topics lately. The audience is so sophisticated and asks such great questions, and it’s great to be beyond Twitter/Facebook 101 content. Guy’s shared his recap and slides from SMBTV on his blog.

…Somewhere in there I also flew out to Colorado for my first Dawgs game in six years (we lost), picked up responsibility for sales at readMedia (a big, scary, exhilarating, awesome challenge for me), and managed to squeeze in some fantastic hikes in the Adirondacks and beyond. I suppose that schedule is enough to land just about anyone in bed for two weeks. I’m on the mend now and happy to be off the road for a while. I won’t go so far as to promise I’ll be back to blogging regularly here, but hopefully it’ll be more than once every three months.

What’s new with all of you?

Image via Flickr user kmanohar

Media2010: Print, Web, blogs, ads, and The Wall

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On Wednesday I attended the “Media 2010 Summit” presented by the Albany Times Union. It featured a panel discussion with three of the TU bloggers and Greg Dahlmann, co-founder of popular local blog All Over Albany.

It took a while to get to some meat in the discussion, and it felt like time ran out just as we arrived there. The Times Union runs about 155 blogs on its site. A handful of those are written by TU staffers; the rest by unpaid volunteers from the community. Topics range from food to politics to dogs to parenting to religion.

I was most interested in hearing about how the TU is (or plans to) turning their stable of blogs into a revenue source for the paper — and what its plans are for more tightly integrating the news content on their site with blogs and being able to package and sell ads against all of their content.

We didn’t quite get there.

Panelist Kristi Gustafson, who writes the fashion/lifestyle blog for the TU, talked about “feeding the print product” and how they’re constantly trying to use blog content to drive people to the print newspaper. She repackages some of her most popular blog posts and features from the week for the Sunday print edition of the Times Union. To me, this seems backwards, as people continue to consume more content online and less in print.

The topic of “The Wall” (the traditional partition between editorial and advertising) came up, and Steve Barnes, a senior writer at the TU and author of its popular food/restaurant blog, made one of the more interesting statements of the night:

The revenue aspect completely not my concern. I build a brand because I know it brings more readers to the TU. I have no idea what they charge for ads. I don’t want to know. We have a department for that. We have people who go out and sell ads.

Steve is an “old-school journalist” with a great respect for editorial and journalistic integrity (and I respect him for that). But his statement is a bit contradictory. He wants to use his blog to bring readers to the TU, but doesn’t want to take the full step to equate those readers with dollars and that what he writes impacts that. In the Web world, readers = traffic. Traffic = ad revenue. I don’t believe it’s as decoupled as Steve thinks.

Journalists in the future, like it or not, are going to need to understand media business models better. While I’m certainly not suggesting that advertisers should directly impact content (be it “traditional” news content or blogs), driving traffic is what drives revenue (and let’s not get into that other Wall, the pay wall).

Journalists and editors need to figure out how to make the content/traffic/revenue marriage work. It may mean that journalists DO need to think about the revenue side of the house when writing. The Huffington Post does real-time A/B testing of headlines in the first few minutes a story is live and then makes a decision on the most effective one.

I certainly don’t want to see all news content devolve into keyword-optimized nonsense, but we can’t pretend that media companies can exist without revenue to support them. Consumers have so far shown that they’re unwilling to pay for news online. Advertising is, and always have been, what funds the editorial side of the house. I don’t think that one side of the house can afford to ignore the other.

I’ve been noodling on this since the event on Wednesday. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Beyond the Facebook Status Update: SMBTV #5

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If you’re a brand trying to market to customers on Facebook, how do you cut through all the noise and reach your audience? What can you do to engage people through the medium, beyond just having them fan your page? Atlanta-based social media strategist Brad Ruffkess tackled these questions this morning at the fifth Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley.

Brad shared some interesting data points about Facebook:

  • Brad Ruffkess SMBTV The average user fans two pages a month on Facebook
  • Facebook approximates 30 billion page views per month
  • Gaming in social media is huge. Farmville has more users than Twitter
  • Facebook’s self-service ads drive $200 million in revenue

He shared some interesting ways brands are using Facebook: Adidas’ Star Wars campaign that integrates Google Maps and a Facebook user’s location to “blow up” their city with a blast from the Death Star. Canada’s CTV broadcast network integrated the Olympic Torch Relay live video stream with Facebook Connect to allow viewers to post status updates about watching the relay live.

Brad left plenty of time for Q&A that covered everything from the benefits and differences of profiles vs. groups vs. pages to the intricacies of FBML and ways to measure effectiveness of Facebook engagement.

Some of the key takeaways:

  • The value in Facebook is not necessarily the “share” but the “re-share” – what can you do to get your network to post content on your behalf? People like and trust information they see from their friends more than they do from brands.
  • Don’t forget to take your Facebook engagement off of Facebook. It’s very easy to use widgets and simple lines of code to add Facebook functionality to your Web site. Add a fan page box, allow users to comment on content on your site (video, e.g.) via Facebook status updates, use Facebook Connect for people to comment.
  • Quantity does not always (or sometimes ever) trump quality. A small number of passionate fans is more valuable than mountains of people who don’t really care.
  • Paid media is critical to success on Facebook and one way to cut through the noise. Advertising on Facebook is extremely targeted and affordable. At the very least, you can use the self-service ad tool to look at data surrounding the particular group you want to target.
  • There are rules of the road to Facebook and if you violate them, your page and community can be removed. Know the restrictions around things like contests and protocol for contacting fans and asking for their personal info. If you abuse the rules, Facebook can and will remove you – and then you’ve lost all the time and effort you’ve spent building up your page and following.

You can watch the video of the entire presentation via UStream, courtesy of MZA Multimedia. You can also view the Twitter transcript of the event.

What’s the most creative marketing use of Facebook that you’ve seen?