Tag Archives: Social Media

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

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

Michael Sebastian reveals how ‘PR Daily’ gets to your inbox

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PR Daily

If you work in PR, you’re likely among the 50,000+ subscribe to Ragan.com’s PR Daily e-mail newsletter (and if you aren’t, you should be). Editor Michael Sebastian and his team put together the best links to PR-related articles and blog posts from around the web each day — with plenty of fun and snarky commentary added, free of charge. I’ve often wondered how he does it, and Michael agreed to give me the inside scoop on how PR Daily happens:

Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in PR.

Michael Sebastian

I worked in journalism—newspapers, magazines, book research—and took a job with Ragan in January 2007 to be part of its maiden Web editorial staff. So, I started covering the corporate communications industry—PR, marketing, internal comms, speechwriting, and the emerging world of social media. (I wrote a weekly column for Ragan about the corporate blogosphere called Blog Dogger—not my choice for the name. I wanted to call it Bloggy Style, but the powers-that-be nixed it.)

I digress.

At nearly the same time, we launched MyRagan.com, which at the time was pretty groundbreaking. It was the first social network for the industry. I was—and continue to be—the managing editor of the site.

In 2008, I started writing Ragan’s PR Junkie blog and the success of that spawned PR Daily, which we began developing in December 2008. It launched in March 2009. The audience is a mix of PR professionals—corporate, agency (big and small), and independent or freelance pros—marketing pros, internal communicators, members of the media professionals, and social media enthusiasts. It’s grown, steadily. We also saw a spike in traffic when we incorporated the share buttons below each item.

How do you go about curating articles for inclusion in PR Daily?

I wouldn’t say it’s a process, more like controlled chaos!

Currently, the site is updated twice daily—at midnight Central Time (when the page turns over from the previous day) and around 9 or 10 a.m. CT. The stuff that goes live at midnight is the previous day’s late breaking news and the evergreen how-to items. The morning update is meant to reflect what’s in the morning papers.

Of course, this news is directly or indirectly related to the PR industry. So, first thing I do each morning is check my e-mail, and I go right for the dozen or so e-mail newsletters I receive. These e-newsletters cover PR and advertising, general news, and gossip. Then I see what the PR Daily contributors have sent. That’s where I start. From there I check The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, then I head over to Twitter to see what’s going on.

The e-mail alerts, the write-ups and heads-ups (is that the plural of “heads-up”? Sounds weird.) from the PR Daily contributors, and what’s in the NYT, WSJ, and on Twitter give me a pretty good feeling for what’s going on. After that I’ll visit some blogs to see their take on things and check if there’s under-the-radar stuff I’ve missed.

As a side note, people often ask if I subscribe to RSS feeds. I do, but I hardly use them. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to remember my RSS passwords. Do they even take passwords? See, that’s how removed I am from RSS. Twitter is my new RSS reader.

What do you look for when determining whether or not an article/post should be included in PR Daily?

The items must have some connection to PR. Of course, one could argue that almost everything has to do with PR—and it’s a valid argument—but if you subscribe to that too closely—as an editor, at least—then next thing you know you’re just scraping the top headlines from the Times and giving it a little topspin. PR Daily readers don’t want that.

In addition to being PR-related, stories should be useful (and by that I’m mainly referring to tip sheets and how-tos), interesting (survey results fit this bill), sexy (company X gets into a PR mess—that kind of thing), or just bizarre—a plum, as we call them—such as, “11 notes written to thieves.” True, that has nothing to do with PR, but damn that one was funny.

You’ve been adding team members recently. What are their roles and how do you manage this growing team?

They [the team] are all remote, so they send me stuff throughout the day, though usually the stuff comes in late at night or early in the morning. If it’s timely, I make sure it runs that day; if they send an evergreen item—you know, 10 tips for Facebook, or something—then I might hold it if things are getting tight that morning.

I’ll also say that when contributors join the PR Daily roster they often grow into more than just writers for the website. For instance, Jackson Wightman—the first PR Daily contributor, and a very funny French Canadian (don’t hold it against him)—just took part in a webinar for PR Daily and he’ll be doing more in the future.

Susan Young, a veteran reporter and PR pro in Dallas, is developing a super-top-secret project for Ragan. Matthew Royse, a man bursting with knowledge and enthusiasm about PR and social media (seriously, this guy loves talking about social media), has worked with Ragan on other projects, too. Recently, we just added Claire Celsi, a PR pro in Des Moines, Iowa, to the roster. She’s a great writer—and prolific, knowledgeable, talented.

Clearly, I’m a fan of the contributors.

The fulltime editorial staff at Ragan is wonderful, too. Roula Amire, the managing editor of Ragan.com, is my rock; Rob Reinalda, the executive editor at Ragan, is my guru; Jessica Levco, Ragan’s healthcare editor, is my comic relief.

All great people to work with.

There are several PR-related daily newsletters (PRSA, SmartBrief on Social Media, etc.). How do you differentiate PR Daily and make it valuable to your audience?

My boss, Mark Ragan, gave me carte blanche to create PR Daily. He trusted my vision and my voice for the project, and he’s supported me in that ever since.

I look at PR Daily as the bastard child of Gawker and Open Forum. News, advice, oddities, trends, humor, and most of all, VOICE. Beside the content, PR Daily has voice.

Reading industry publications—online or off—is important, but it can also feel tedious, like it’s part of your job, like you’d much rather be reading that US Weekly, Elle, or Esquire, but you have to read this industry pub first.

I know PR Daily will never compete with a mainstream pub or gossip blog in terms of peoples’ attentions, but I also want them to look forward to PR—to learn something useful and interesting, laugh, and share it with their friends or network. I also hope it attracts people to an industry publication who may have never read one in the past.

And really, what I’m doing is an extension of the Ragan brand; it’s been approaching industry publications in this manner since the company launched in 1969.

The future is all about growth! We’re expanding to Europe; we’re going to continue to grow staff; we’re going to increase the frequency of the updates on the site; and we’re developing Smartphone and iPad apps.

What big changes do you see on the horizon for PR practitioners in 2010? What is the biggest challenge they will face?

Content. Creation.

This is something my boss, Mark Ragan, was talking about years ago and you’re really seeing it happen now, particularly at larger agencies. The gaping hole left by newsroom cuts–and the new ethos of online journalism (key words, gossip, et cetera)–has given companies a chance to produce news and content.

If the reporters covering an industry are getting laid off–or getting shuffled to other parts of the newsroom–then companies should create their own content. And I don’t mean in press release form. I mean in the same way you’d see an article appear on The Huffington Post, with art, video maybe, and, most of all, voice—and not the stuffy corporate kind. If the content is good, people will visit, say, General Electric’s sponsored news page to read news and opinion. It creates another point of contact with consumers.

And don’t get me wrong, I know critics might toss around the word Orwellian. That’s a valid concern. Last thing we want is for companies to report on news without an independent media validating that stuff. I suppose I see it more in the way professional sports teams kick out content. Head over to any professional team’s website and you’ll find a professional writer/reporter–usually a very talented one–writing articles and curating content about the team.

Anyway, someone’s going to need fill that gap for companies and brands. Why not PR?

Social media in three hours: Government communications

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I was in Washington, DC, earlier this week to present a workshop at ALI’s “Social Media for Government” conference. A three-hour workshop. While I initially worried about how I was going to fill that much time, it actually went by pretty quickly. I think the 25 students survived, and maybe even learned something.

Since so many conferences feature speakers just using slides and talking at the audience, I wanted to be sure that I got the class involved. It’s easy to talk about social media, but another thing entirely to do it. The first part of the workshop involved splitting the class into groups. I asked each group to find things they had in common and write a collective “Twitter bio” in 160 characters or less that described the group, and also give three hashtags about their group.

The teams stayed together throughout the workshop. I shared some information about how the media landscape is changing and how traditional media and social media are still important. One of the most important strategies for communicating to the media and directly to audiences? Content creation. I gave examples of several organizations that are doing a great job of creating lively, interesting, multimedia content that appeals to mainstream media and to the public – the kind of content that gets written about, linked to, and shared.

Each team was assigned a “content creation channel” – video, podcasting, blogging or microblogging/aggregation. The teams had 25 minutes to create a piece of content about the workshop. I didn’t give too much guidance, I just told them to be creative and stick to their channel. Each group shared their content to a Posterous site I created for the class: http://smgov2010.posterous.com

The results are fun and I think (hope) the class enjoyed getting to do something participatory and creative, versus listening to me ramble on for three hours! My slides from the session are embedded below (and also on the Posterous site):

Social Media for Government

View more presentations from Amy Mengel.

Social Media continues to be a challenge for many in government, who constantly struggle with complex processes and layers of approvals in order to get anything accomplished (social or not). Earning buy-in is tough, and articulating the value of social media engagement with higher-ups and then gaining enough flexibility to execute social strategies and campaigns outside of traditional, strict oversight rules that exist in most government organizations is still an uphill battle. One organization I spoke with must have every single tweet approved. Seriously.

Still, it was good to see a group of government communicators excited and interested in social media and attempting to figure out how to make it work in their organization. Hopefully I was able to help some of them move a little closer to integrating social media into their communications plans.

Yes, I’m still here…

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It’s been quiet around the blog lately. I’ve been traveling a lot for work (and some for fun) and blogging has taken a back seat. Plus, it seems like I haven’t felt like I’ve had too much to say. I’m resolving to get back on track, though.

Here’s some of what I’ve been up to over the last six weeks:

I guest lectured on social media to a graduate-level PR class at The College of Saint Rose and talked with them about how social media has influenced and changed PR over the last several years. The class is working on a social media strategy for a local non-profit and I gave them some ideas for ways to encourage volunteering and fundraising via content marketing. My slides from the class are below (and they’re pretty bland – I usually try to jazz up presentations more!)

Social Media and Public Relations
View more presentations from Amy Mengel.

I was a member of a panel of speakers on social media at the 2010 Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership Conference at the NYS Museum. I had never heard of this group before, but it’s fantastic! This national organization has chapters all over the US and brings together 10th graders from different schools for a weekend devoted to leadership and community service. The kids were excited, energetic and inquisitive. For my part of the panel, I talked to them about how social networking is an important component of online reputation management. When they’re applying for jobs or scholarships, people are going to Google them. They need to make sure that their social activity (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other online postings) reflects the type of person they want to show to the world. I also taught them how to Call the Dawgs.

I read Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. I received a copy of the book at last October’s Inbound Marketing Summit, when it was pretty new, but never got around to reading it. I thought it would be interesting to wait to read it until almost a year after it was published and see how well it held up. I’m generally not one to like social media books (or even business books in general). I’ll probably save my observations on the book for another post in the coming weeks.

I flew three round-trips to BWI for conferences about PR in higher education and communications in government. I talked with lots of readMedia clients (and hopefully future clients) about effective ways of reaching hyperlocal media, how to manage enterprise-level PR and communications within complex organizations, and how to ensure social media is baked into PR best practices so that it becomes a natural extension of communications activities. I go back to BWI in two weeks to present a workshop on social media for government communicators. I’m going to be the mayor of that airport in no time.

I finally pulled together a group of smart, hard-working people to help me keep Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley moving forward. The event has grown so much in the last year and was more than I could handle on my own – so I’m now happy to have a team behind me making it happen. We took a break from our typical early morning programming in June and instead hosted a social media happy hour at a local biergarten. Networking was greatly enhanced. We’re looking forward to bringing back regularly scheduled programming in August.

So, this post is a total cop-out, but I plan to be back to blogging (semi) regularly soon. Stay tuned…