HYPERtext

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

Council of PR Firms Launches Newsletter

Today the Council of PR Firms launched The Firm Voice, a new email newsletter for PR agency practitioners.

I was asked to participate as a member of the editorial team to help ensure that the content was relevant not only to individuals at the executive level, but to junior agency staff as well. Our firm's first contribution was this video, where some of our digital natives talked about how we use peer media both inside and outside our organization.

If you have any feedback you'd like to share about the newsletter, please do so in the comments.

Aaron Uhrmacher, NYC

Technorati Tags: Council of PR Firms,digital natives,public relations

"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

Students & Social Media: The Future is Bright

I was recently invited by the communication department at Rochester Institute of Technology to give a brief lecture on the for-profit public relations milieu. It's been so long since I was back at college that the students made me feel a bit like an old man. Nevertheless, I persevered through my presentation on what agency PR is, what corporate PR is, and what Text 100 has to offer. In particular, I pointed out how Text 100's peer media practice and Second Life expertise is a big differentiator for us. You could feel the interest level in the room perk right up.

Text 100 isn't new to the peer media landscape, especially not as the first PR firm to have a presence in Second Life. But these students have been utilizing all kinds of peer media for years now. When I was in school, AOL Instant Messenger was all the rage. But now with the advent of YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster and a cadre of other tools and applications, the students sitting before me in the auditorium were no newbies (read: "n00bs") to online social environments.

But the interest they showed in Second Life was really astounding. While only a dozen raised their hands as actually active in-world, I think many more were able to grasp the scale of the SL economy and the opportunity for building brand awareness through PR. After my presentation, Dr. Susan Barnes from RIT told me they were offering a class in conjunction with RIT's Lab for Social Computing for winter quarter focusing solely on Second Life.

In the end, it was great to see so many young students so excited about PR and the future opportunities for the field. Based on the acumen demonstrated in post-presentation questions many of them brought to me, I'd say the future is in good hands.

Kevin Ptak

Technorati Tags: Rochester Institute of Technology, Second Life, Text 100 

The World's Not Flat After All!

If you've read a business magazine in the past year, you won't have missed the impact Thomas Friedman's Book has had on the way we view globalization. It's interesting then to see the Harvard Business Review giving some airtime to a contrarian point of view articulated by HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat in a book called Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter.

I wouldn't go so far as to dispel the value of Friedman's work, but what I like about Ghemawat's book is that it diffuses the notion we're all racing towards a homogenized global society where one-size fits all. If you're a Japanese PR manager trying to make a communications strategy forged in San Francisco work in Tokyo...then you'll understand what I'm getting at. The truth is that cultural, political and even economic factors still have a massive impact on how companies communicate around the world.

What I really like about Ghemawat's book is his assertion that smart global strategies comprise three elements: Adaptation (adjusting to local markets), Aggregation (finding efficiencies and commonalities that overcome distance), and Arbitrage (exploiting specialist skills or lower costs wherever they happen to be).

In that three-piece-suite, Ghemawat nicely sums up our philosophy to globalization too. Text 100 has taken 26 years to build 31 local businesses market-by-market. We continue to invest in technology to ease collaboration and in sharing local knowledge globally (10 percent of our workforce has spent time in another market in the past five years). Last but not least, we've set up our GRO group (yes, we have to get a new name for it!) to take advantage of both specialist skills and cost advantages in Asia.

We'll find out whether the PRWeek judges think all of that adds up to a great Mid-Sized Company strategy in a few months!

David McCulloch

Text 100 Speakers on the Road!

Text 100 is on the road with multiple speakers at both last week's Bulldog Reporter's PR Agency Management conference in New York City and the 2007 PRSA NE District Conference taking place this Thursday in Rochester, NY. Text 100 CEO Aedhmar Hynes is particularly busy - delivering keynote addresses at both conferences. "Trust and PR: An Unlikely Marriage Made in the Agency of the Future" was the title of her address to attendees at the PR Agency Management conference and she's currently gearing up to deliver "I Have Enough Trouble with My First Life!" - detailing how to build brands across the next generation of the social media landscape for this week's PRSA event.

Text 100's CFO Bruce Bishop also participated in the PR Agency Management conference, joining a panel discussion on "Setting and Achieving Key Financial Ratios to Increase Agency Profits."

Joining Aedhmar at the PRSA event this week will be fellow Text 100 employees Aaron Uhrmacher, peer media consultant, participating in a panel discussion on PR for Web 2.0, Erin Humphrey, vice president, presenting with client Xerox on Silver Anvil successes and Jessica Ward, account executive, who will be joining a recent graduate track aimed at PRSA attendees and recent graduates.

Six presentations in one week - thanks to all of our presenters!

29 Essential Facebook Applications for Public Relations Professionals

Since Facebook opened up its API to developers, over 4,000 applications have been created for its users. As a result, the social networking site has surged to become one of the most highly trafficked web destinations. A recent BusinessWeek article reported on how companies are leveraging employee interest in social networking platforms to strengthen corporate ommunity engagement online.

If you’re a PR practitioner, you should have a Facebook profile, if for no other reason than to try and understand this phenomenon. Many of my colleagues use it to maintain both business and personal relationships. With that in mind, I’ve developed a list of 29 Facebook applications PR professionals can use to maximize the value of this social networking site. These tools can help you to share and exchange information, promote and publicize events, analyze your spheres of influence and of course, to learn a bit more about the people in your network:

Socialistics is a social insight tool providing an analysis of your friends and networks in a bunch of colorful graphs. The app also creates tag clouds analyzing the relationships between the friends in your network.

MyCard displays your virtual business card on your profile. Keep your data up-to-date in one place and transfer it to other services. You can download your friends' contact information as well as attach your business card to any Facebook message.

My Questions is a friend-polling application: ask your friends questions, answer theirs right on their profile pages,.

Countdown Calendar puts a flash based timer on your profile counting down to events. You can also search popular countdowns in the global calendar and share event countdown with friends.

Polls allows you to create your own multimedia poll, which you place on your profile, invite friends to vote, and monitor the results. This applications allows you to use images, videos, or sounds in the poll.

Extended Info helps you to customize the titles of fields that are put on your profile, as well as the content. Friend tagging, view the most popular field titles and categories used, include MP3s and images, YouTube and Google Video clips, news feed integration and support for all character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.)

Interactive Friends Graph shows all your friends and their interconnections. You can even send messages, poke, and add-to-friends from within the graph.

My Links acts as a social identity aggregator, providing a space to link to your pages on other sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, Friendster, Wikipedia, and others

Call Me on Skype is an application that gives you the ability to make Skype calls from within Facebook, and even start group chats on your network.

My Profiles is similar to MyLinks, but with a different layout. If you have an account on Friendster or MySpace, or any other site, this application will allow you to list them with links within your Facebook profile.

Connection Cloud is an experiment in grouping and social webs, helping you to visualize your social network and find out who knows who. After simulating a number of steps, the application outputs a .PNG file for your personal use or to post on Facebook.

Friendly Search takes the hassle out of scrolling through lists of friends. Powered by Deloitte Innovation's Vizzl™ Technology. Friendly Search provides a new way to find, sort and filter your Facebook friends. It's simple, fun and has a cool interface.

Super RSS is an RSS reader for Facebook “on steroids.” Features include: multiple RSS feeds aggregation, story sharing, commenting on stories and even the ability to view your friend's stories.

NewsFeed Blast lets you blast a message out to all of your friends' News Feeds at the same time with up to 4 images. This seems like the best way to get a message out to all of your friends at once, and they'll see it right on their main News Feed page when they log in to Facebook.

zuPort: Flickr automatically imports your public Flickr photostream. It’s automatic so you no longer need to post photos to Flickr and Facebook. Customized options let you pick how many photos to show in your profile, how your photos are displayed and which photos are shown. It also displays your newly added Flickr photos in your mini-feed.

Vodpod is a search engine that trolls for your favorite videos from Comedy Central, Myspace, Daily Motion, Google and YouTube, and easily adds them to your profile. You can also add videos from over 800 other sites with an optional browser button.

Mediafire is the easiest way to share files with your Facebook friends. You can create an unlimited number of folders and sub-folders to store, organize, and share your files and images. Use privacy options to keep some files hidden as private and other files as public.

Twitter is a client that lets you see what you and your friends are up to on Twitter and update your Twitter status without leaving Facebook.

News Headline lets you browse hundreds of news feeds from the world’s top news providers, including BBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, Sky, Reuters, CNET, Yahoo and more. Watch feeds and add them to your profile, bookmark individual stories that matter to you and show them in your profile, share news with friends and see what the most popular news feeds are for users on Facebook.

DivShare is similar to Mediafire. It gives you the option to send documents, photos, music and videos to your friends. You can send your files to individual friends, post them to your profile or add them to your news feed.

Top News delivers the latest news from various sources, right into your profile.

Upcoming shows all the events you're attending on your Facebook profile. You can also link your Facebook account to the Upcoming website. Then you'll also see all your Upcoming events on your Facebook profile, and your friends will get News items about everything you're going to.

Friend Stats answers questions like, “Which one of your friends has the most wall posts?” “What concentration do most of your friends have?” “Who has the longest first name?” Adds a page full of graphs, lists, and more graphs about your friends, including: Most popular movies, music, TV shows, etc, Who has the most wall posts/ notes, Political Affiliations, Gender and more.

fonebook can update your number for all of your friends with one click, securely access your fonebook numbers from your mobile phone, call/save numbers to your phone with the mobile site, and switch phones whenever you feel like it.

Super Wall is one of the most widely used Facebook apps. It’s like your old wall, but with videos, pictures, and so much more.

My Wikipedia allows you to display sections of Wikipedia on your profile page. It can be customized to display any article of your choosing.

Splashcast helps create a personal media channel mixing videos, music, photos, and podcasts.

SMS gives you the capability to exchange free SMS messages with your friends on Facebook. The great part is that your phone number is not revealed to anyone and you can view your conversations.

CircleUp lets you “socialize and organize.” Send one message to as many friends or groups as you want and get a single, organized, visual result in return that you can share on your profile.

If there are other Facebook applications that you find particularly useful for public relations professionals, please share them in the comments.

Are You Ready?

As a result of an increased number of data breach incidents occurring over the last 12-24 months, companies are taking a closer look at how to protect their sensitive data. At the same time, companies must consider new regulatory measures to ensure data is properly safeguarded and meet data storage compliance standards.

The Text 100 Security Team is pleased to invite you to an exclusive roundtable discussion with security industry leaders, members of the press and influential security analysts to discuss how businesses can prepare for and respond to potential data breach incidents.

Are You Ready? An In-Depth Discussion on Data Breach Readiness

This roundtable discussion will look back at the major data breach incidents of 2007 and provide valuable insight and lessons learned. Included in this discussion is a dialogue about how crisis communications planning can help organizations effectively prepare for and respond to a potential data breach. Click on the link above for more details and to RSVP for the event.

London Rising!

Our US and UK marketing teams are together in London this week for the CATAPULT conference in Westminster. The conference is for early stage companies considering an expansion to the US in the next 18 months or so. Text 100 is a sponsor and I'm speaking on a panel on "Launching into the US" on Friday morning.

The various sponsors and speakers of the event gathered at the fabulous Institute of Directors building on Pall Mall tonight and despite only managing three hours sleep on the flight from San Francisco overnight, I got a real buzz of excitement about the event over dinner. London seems to be buzzing, thanks partly to the regulatory tightening of the American financial markets (and consequent boom in London), and partly due to a resurgent entrepreneurial scene.

Being in Silicon Valley for the past six years, I've grown rather used to (and depressed by) Europeans complaining about the lack of innovation in the technology industry here, so it's a refreshing change to sense that Europe is once again on the rise.

Nick Giles, MD of our UK business tells me Text 100 London is on the rise too. The London team has received a nomination for PRWeek's Specialist Agency of the Year award and finds out whether there'll be an extra trophy to add to the cabinet on October 24th. Good luck all!

David McCulloch

Technorati Tags: Text 100, London, Public Relations,CATAPULT

Talking about what's next for PR

This Thursday, September 20, 1 p.m. EDT, 10 a.m. PDT, Bulldog Reporter's next PR University audio conference will explore "What's next for PR". Moderated by Bulldog's Brian Pittmann, the panel will include Jenny Dervin (Director, Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways), Penelope Bruce (Director of Corporate PR, Cisco), Emmanuel Tchividjian (Senior Vice President/Chief Ethics Officer, Ruder Finn), Julie  Freeman (President, International Association of Business Communicators), Matt Shaw (Vice President, Council of Public Relations Firms), and my good self. More details can be found here. It seems like this will be an interesting discussion. There will be an open Q&A at the end. It would be great, if some of you could join.

Georg Kolb

Technorati Tags: Bulldog Reporter, PR University, PR trends