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Upcoming: IABC Social Media Presentation

I’m excited to be leading a pre-conference workshop on social media next Sunday at the International Association of Business Communicator’s (IABC) International Conference here in New York.

Organizers are expecting over 1,500 communications professionals from all over the world, and they’ve assembled a terrific lineup of sessions and speakers to ensure participants get their money’s worth.

I’m particularly excited about the General Session on Monday, where hotel scion Bill Marriott will be the guest speaker. His blog, “Marriott on the Move,” is often cited as one of the best large enterprise CEO blogs. It will be interesting to hear more about his experience as a C-suite blogger and how it fits in to the company’s larger communications strategy..

My session is one of several that will focus on social media communications. Shel Holtz will lead a session addressing the role of social networks and Ryan Williams will review the results of an IABC member survey on their use of social media.

If you’d like to follow (or join) the conversation, I’ve set up a Twitter profile for the event, which we’ll use as part of my workshop to help attendees begin building their own community.

There are some other informal meet-ups planned for communicators in New York to gather informally. I’ll post them here (and on Twitter) as details emerge.

- Aaron Uhrmacher, NYC

Technorati Tags: social media,IABC,Marriott

Seattle Social Media Club: A Published Stream of Consciousness: Do Business and Micro-blogging Mix?

The next Seattle Social Media Club meeting is coming up on May 1! The topic is micro-blogging services such as Twitter and how they can be effectively used in a professional environment. We’ll be discussing everything from the basics (What exactly is a tweet?) to using micro-blogging to enhance your personal brand, grow and strengthen your business network, notify customers, promote your blog and more.

 

Meeting Details

When: Thursday, May 1, 2008; 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Where: Text 100 Public Relations: 110 Union St. Ste 210, Seattle

Register: http://mayseattlesocialmediaclub.eventbrite.com

More Information: Katie Hoyne, Text 100 Public Relations, 206-267-2021

Social Media Breakfast: Taking the Conversation Offline

Text 100 sponsored the first Social Media Breakfast NYC today along with  Converseon.

About 30 people interested in all different aspects of social media gathered to hear Eric Krangel, who reports from the virtual world of Second Life under the avatar Eric Reuters, discuss how he sees social media affecting traditional media and communications.

In addition to the conversations at the diner, there was a bit of banter over Twitter as well.

This morning was a reminder that face-to-face meetings are an important part of building relationships, even as we continue to expand our connections through social networks.

There's group of smart, vibrant people working with social media here, and I'm glad we could all connect for the first of what I hope will be many occasions.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

- Aaron Uhrmacher, NYC

Technorati Tags: SMBNYC,social media

 

"PR vs. Advertisers: Can't We All Just Get Along?"

Last Thursday, I was on a panel at a "TurnPRon event on "Communication 2.0 - The Convergence of PR, Advertising, Media and the Consumer". The title question of the evening was "PR vs. Advertisers: Can't We All Just Get Along?". The venue is worth a mention, too. It was on the 47th floor of Times Square Tower at the offices of law firm Brown Rudnick providing a truly gorgeous view on Manhattan. I could almost become a lawyer to work in an office like this :-). Thanks to Diane Katz of ExcitePR for organizing it! I also enjoyed the exchange with an interesting mix of co-panelists. There were Tom Burg (Marketing Director, DoubleClick), Sarah Skerik (VP Distribution Services, PR Newswire), Larry Thomas (COO, Medialink), Bob Fitzgerald (VP Sales and Marketing, BizBash), Jiyan Wei (Product Manager, Vocus) and Miranda Tan (CEO, MyPRGenie). Heidi Cohen (Columnist at ClickZ and President, Riverside Marketing) was the moderator. It turned out to be an interesting evening, even if for different reasons than I had expected.

The panel didn't really discuss much of what the title of the event suggested. We spent most of the time on Heidi's opening questions "What is Web 2.0?" and "How does PR differ from marketing and/or advertising?". All panelists were pretty fluent in social media speak, so there was much agreement on the changes in our industry and that they needed to be addressed. You might expect that from service providers who ultimately hope to sell services in response to the change. After all, most of the panelists fell into this category and some of them made their points eloquently such as PR Newswire's Sarah Skerik. However, even the only potential buyer of these services on the panel, Doubleclick's Tom Burgan, not only concurred, but demanded that PR agencies still had a long way to go embracing the change and going beyond media relations. With so much agreement in the room I felt I needed to remind everyone that Tom is an exceptionally progressive marketing executive and that trends usually take longer to become mainstream than trend scouts would hope. For instance, "blog" was the word of the year 2004. Three years later, approx. 10 % of the Fortune 500 and approx. 19 % of the Inc. 500, the fastest growing companies in the US, have adopted corporate blogs. These are still impressive numbers, but they are certainly much lower than many would have expected during the blog hype. And media relations will continue to be a major part of our business for the foreseeable future.

While the panel didn't address much of the title question of the evening, the audience ended up doing it in a surprising way. It emerged from a part of the room where influential blogger and social media consultant B.L. Ochman was sitting between a couple of people from the advertising industry who obviously were fairly new to the world of social media. First, there was an attendee on B.L.'s left who struggled with the social media concept of transparency and authenticity. He felt his business was about "lying" (his word) in an efficient way, and he wondered how PR could comply with the idea of transparency. If transparency was the maxim, then PR either shouldn't filter what is coming out of an organization or become invisible which would mean that it wouldn't be transparent. From his perspective, it's a really good question. In short, I offered the argument that the role of PR would have to change from being a gatekeeper of corporate information to a facilitator of trusted relationships so as to solve the conflict. I'm not sure that this response helped him much, but it struck me that it obviously didn't occur to the questioner that the transparency maxim also presents a challenge to advertising, at least as long as you see it as the business of lying efficiently.

Next, a woman to B.L.'s right made her entry to the discussion with a statement like this: "Web 2.0 is good for advertising, and I'm in advertising, so I'm all for advertising and against PR." Here you go: can't we all just get along? She didn't provide evidence why Web 2.0 is good for advertising, but, of course, B.L. was quickly coming up with an example why it actually might be pretty bad for advertising: the story of the South African winery Stormhoek. This case is pretty well known in the PR and marketing blogosphere, but it certainly was very pertinent to this situation. Ex-advertising copywriter turned marketing blogger Hugh McLeod has helped this winery to increase their sales fivefold since mid-2006, without any advertising, but engaging with a lot with of bloggers! UPDATE: In case you are interested, B.L. provides more background on the Stormhoek story here.

Unfortunately, the advertising lady wasn't impressed with the example and probably didn't know that B.L. was a blogger, so she went on to share her perceptions of bloggers and blog readers such as "people who read blogs aren't very educated". B.L. wasn't very pleased, and rightly so. By the way, 63.9 m people in the US read blogs. (I reported about this and many other facts on the global adoption of social media as researched by Universal McCann here.)

We can't assume that the attendees of this event were representative of the advertising industry, but the discussion provided enough validation for the question of the evening. I also believe that we still should have other parts of the discussion we didn't have that evening, such as: Do we have to redefine the relationship between advertising and PR? Advertising is the source of life for the media industry. Google already revolutionized the advertising model. With the recent news on Facebook's ad platform and Google's OpenSocial Web initiative the next revolution is on the horizon. What does that mean for advertising and PR? I will write more posts about this and do invite the panelists to continue our conversation here.

Georg Kolb

PS: Just found that Jiyan also shared some thoughts on his blog following the event.

Technorati Tags: TurnPRon, advertising, PR, Public Relations

Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, Joins Text 100 to Discuss Crisis Navigation

In today’s fast moving world, organizations of all sizes are faced with potential crises that have the ability to disrupt business, damage brand reputation or worse – involve a loss of life.

And this topic was definitely top of mind for the greater Seattle business community. On, Wednesday, November 7, the Seattle Text 100 office hosted a dinner and networking event to discuss best practices for helping an organization navigate through a crisis.  We had more than 30 attendees ranging from CSOs to communication executives from the likes of RealNetworks, AT&T Wireless, Amazon.com, Boeing, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Cray Computers, The Gates Foundation, The City of Seattle, Puget Sound Energy, Websense and Xerox.

The Virgin Way

Our special guest, Will Whitehorn, gave a thought provoking discussion about how organizations of all sizes need to consider the “law of unintended consequences” of their business and make sure they have the proper plans and procedures in place to deal with virtually any crisis incident that has an operational and brand impact.  Will explained that the way a company and its executives respond to a crisis often dictates how they’ll be perceived by the public in the long-term. 

In the case of the Virgin brand family, proactive crisis planning and executive participation in a crisis incident response is part of their DNA. Will provided a detailed account of how Richard Branson flew half-way across Europe in the middle of the night to be the first on the scene of a Virgin Rail accident earlier this year. And, when a police officer at the crash asked why the CEO of a major company would travel to middle of a rain swept field in England, Branson replied, “Because if I was the parent of one of the kids involved in this accident, I’d damn well want to the boss of this operation to be here.”  I think that pretty well sums-up what separates Virgin from so many other organizations that want to bury their head in the sand during a time of crisis.

Seattle Weighs in

Following Will’s presentation, each table continued the discussion with a collaborative sharing of crisis communication concerns and security best practices.  Topics of interest included:

• the increase in date breaches
• compliance requirements around data breach notification to internal and external stakeholders
• government's role in protecting consumers from data breaches
• selling the importance of crisis communications to the CEO
• the emotional side of business continuity planning

Feedback from the Event

Here’s a note from one of the attendees…

Mr. Whitehorn, Great meeting you last night, and thank you for an informative and thought-provoking discussion.
Reflecting upon your approach towards unforeseen contingencies and the example you provided about the train accident, I was literally stunned by the lengths you took to ensure customer safety and brand integrity.  I’m a military academy graduate and a former climber, so I’m familiar with the necessities of risk assessment, and detailed logistics and contingency planning when life and limb are at stake.  Before last evening, however, I have not seen anything approaching that level of rigor and discipline in a corporate setting.  With these values central to your brand, it is no wonder to me why you have remained part of Virgin’s leadership for 20 years.

Moving Forward

In reflecting upon the discussion of how to navigate through a crisis a couple of key points come to mind.  As with any effective crisis communications plan, there are several bottom-line benefits associated with the investment in crisis prevention and preparedness. For example, planning, which includes creating specific “what if” scenarios, can help mitigate a crisis from happening or at the very least, reduce anticipated response time to an incident. In addition, employing a crisis communications plan can reduce the cost of a crisis and above all, help protect corporate reputation.

In sum, be proactive, transparent and sincere.  And, as we’ve seen with the Virgin example, providing genuine communications from the top of an organization as well as ongoing communications to stakeholders goes a long way with respect to customer confidence as well as brand reputation preservation.

Christopher Barker and Hally Wax

Technorati Tags: crisis communications, Will Whitehorn, Virgin, Text 100