The PubCon PR panel: (l-r) Lisa Buyer, Sean Jackson, Sarah Evans, Victoria Harres
Last week I was on a panel atPubCon Las Vegas 2010, “Twitter and Social Media from the PR Experts,” with some top-of-their-game folks: Sean Jackson ofCopyBlogger Media, Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group, and Sarah Evans of Sevans Strategy. None of us had connected before-hand on what we were each presenting ........read the recap and view my slides here
Twitter is fairly easy to master. Meeting objectives on Twitter is a different matter. That requires careful thinking and strategic planning. Throw multiple people into the equation of one Twitter account and you have to do some serious planning. @PRNewswire is a serious effort by four dedicated individuals. This coming Thursday, November 18, 2010, I'm going to be teaching a workshop at TWTRCON SF on the secrets of successful team micro-blogging. We'll be discussing: If you're going to be at TWTRCON, I certainly hope you will join me for this workshop scheduled for 11:20 - 11:55 AM. See you there!
(The panel of dad bloggers from BlogWorld 2010. From left, Jim Turner, Brad Powell, C.C. Chapman, and Craig J. Heimbuch.)
I found myself in a predicament at BlogWorld LV 2010. The “mommy” bloggers and the “daddy” bloggers were speaking at the same time. I wanted to hear from both sides of the parental blogosphere. Alas, I had to make a choice...
I was inspired by a local museum's Twitter account this morning to write a letter of advice to hopefully save them from their social media engagement woes. Alas, dear local museums, @TheEllenShow will not help you when you need people to show up for a local town hall meeting. People like 'me' on the other hand could. IF YOU FOLLOWED ME! Please click the image above and kindly read the full letter. If you deem it worthy, please share. Thanks!
I am excited about the new, not-yet-available, 2011 Ford Explorer! But why? I drive a lovely little black, 2004 Saturn Ion with leather seats, sun roof, a six CD player and tinted windows, which I brag about all the time. It gets great gas mileage and looks very sexy. And, most important, it’s fun to drive! People tell me it’s a cute little car that perfectly fits my personality. And it doesn’t hurt that in the six years I’ve owned it I’ve only put 45,000 miles on it and the finish still looks perfectly shiny and new. So why am I so darn excited about the new Ford Explorer!? (please read why at The Accidental Twitterer blog)
Bulldog Reporter's Media Relations Summit held in New York City, June 28th rocked! What a pleasure and an honor that I was given the opportunity to participate. The folks at Bulldog, especially Fay Shapiro, are a class act. And it didn't hurt that NASDAQ invited us to ring the morning bell the Friday before the event. What an experience! This Texillian (Brazilian living in Texas) was made to feel like a New York celebrity by the NASDAQ staff.
So what did I get out of the summit?
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. Bulldog brought together an impressive list of journalists and industry stars that shared insight, pitching tips, and social media savviness. There were super stars like Tina Brown of The Daily Beast, who gave us a tour of the site and said newspapers are dying due to the greed of the conglomerates that own them. She also stated that relevance and news awareness is key in pitching.
Ellen Levine of Hearst Magazines stated that the iPad would not replace magazines until one could read it in the bathtub without fear of it touching the water. She also said "Don't give it away for free" in reference to both online content and advice her father gave her as a young woman. The crowd laughed heartily.
Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal stated that a bad PR pitch might start with "You may have seen this in The New York Times..." He also stated that to go into journalism now you have to be at the cutting edge of your business (multimedia, technology, etc).
There was also a big a mud slinging here an there from one publication to another, mostly centered around the sensitive subject of content aggregation, but no one seemed to take it too personally, or they were too high class to show it.
At a more personal level, I moderated round-tables for Daryl Chen of Parade in the morning, and Carl Sullivan of Newsweek after lunch. PR practitioners from far and wide gathered round like adventurers around a campfire listening intently to the storytellers.
Daryl said something that really struck all of us as enlightening. She was talking about how their readers are generally reading Parade on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee, sitting with a spouse or significant other, and that anyone pitching a story should keep that in mind. Which, of course, made me think of the fact that this is something to keep in mind for all publications: where is the reader likely to be when reading a particular publication and who will he/she be in the presence of. Parade wants human interest stories. If you have a product to pitch, find the human angle. Is the inventor 85 years old and also invented the light switch?
Carl stated that editors at Newsweek will keep their eyes on Twitter and may even get story ideas there. He talked about the fact that the magazine is up for sale but things are running as usual for now. Carl said as a managing editor people really shouldn't be pitching him stories directly. It's better to form relationships with the section editors and send those story ideas in that direction. Someone asked him if he'd ever received a Twitter pitch and he said no but that he wouldn't be apposed to it if it was done well.
Everyone seemed to be in agreement that you have to keep your pitch, whatever form it came in, brief and to the point. Make sure that the subject line on an email is telling of the content. Get to the point in the first paragraph and save the details for deeper in the pitch. No one seems to want phone calls either, especially not within 24 hours of sending the email pitch. It might take an editor a few days to around to an email depending on what is going on.
One last tip we heard from Daryl, if you do call an editor or journalist, don't start the call with the question "are you busy?"
Victoria Harres, the voice of @prnewswire, leads PR Newswire’s Audience Development team which focuses on increasing the use of PR Newswire’s customers’ content, and is responsible for increasing the use of PR Newswire’s industry-leading distribution networks and platforms such as PR Newswire for Journalists and ProfNet.
I first met Vicky as a speaker at TWTRCON in San Francisco. A frequent speaker and writer on how professionals are making use of Twitter and other social media platforms, Vicky was recently invited to lead a Roundtable at the BDI Social Communications & Healthcare conference and shares her perspective with us here. (You can also follow Vicky via her personal Twitter account @victoriaharres.)
This sold out event attracted the cream of the crop in healthcare communications.
Attendees were mostly folks already using social media professionally and wanting to share ideas and case studies of what works, and in some cases, being very candid about what doesn’t work. Those who were not already social practitioners spent the day taking furious notes and asking great questions.
So what works?
What I heard over and over in slightly different words is that healthcare companies need to make sure the door is open and welcome communication from patients and healthcare providers. Ray Kerins from Pfizer stressed that point especially as it concerns adverse events. Ray said we need to make it easy to report them and encourage detailed information for better understanding.
There was also a lot of talk around communities and how to facilitate discussion and participation. Rebecca Goberstein of Johnson & Johnson said you need engagement, fresh programs, call to action, and moderators with credentials that can add valuable input to conversations.
Side note: An interesting tidbit I heard from a LiveWorld (online community managers, among other things) rep is that their most successful moderators are women older than 35 who work from home. Apparently, they are more likely to listen intently and research a matter more carefully before engaging.
Louise Clemens from Within3 said something that should be obvious, but perhaps needs reminding: “in a professional community, it’s important that members be non-anonymous.” People are less likely to trust professional advice from an anonymous source.
Then again, Wikipedia may disprove that.
Many people in the audience seemed appalled (judging by their tweets) when keynote speaker, Marc Monseau from Johnson & Johnson said that according to a study 50% of physicians go to Wikipedia for information.
Side note: On Twitter, the same statement was reported as 50%, 60%, and 21%. The 50 and 60% versions got lots of retweeting. Interesting how we hear things slightly differently.
Some other very popular retweeted lines from the conference were: “You can’t copy-approve a conversation,” “Communities need to be accessible via mobile devices,” “Pfizer is successfully using Youtube and Facebook to recruit people for clinical trials.”
So what was my main take-away from the day?
Whether it’s healthcare, finance, commercial aviation or any other highly regulated industry, the principles of successful social media communications really aren’t much different from other industries that may be less regulated or not regulated at all. In the end, we all have to think carefully about the message we want to send and be receptive to feedback from our audiences, so that we can be better at what we do.
At the end of the day, being better at what we do will result in better relationships with the people that matter to us. And healthy relationships have always been the key to success in business.
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For more details and slides from this event, check out these sites:
VeoMed (presentations) http://www.veomed.com/bdi
BlogTalkRadio (presentations) http://www.bdionline.com/socialhealthcare2010recording.html
Pixels and Pills (interviews) www.pixelsandpills.com
SlideShare (slides) http://www.slideshare.net/bdionline
Twitter transcript http://bit.ly/dxVvOf
Dosie Award winners announced at the conference http://ht.ly/1Mg2O
Thanks to @OdomLewis for the opportunity to guest post my take-aways from last week's BDI healthcare and social media event.
I just spent some time playing with the new Replay feature on Google. This is really exciting. I can't wait for the full history of Twitter to be loaded. Then the fun will really begin.
So, what does this mean for your brand? Think of the research possibilities around old PR and marketing campaigns, either by your company or a competitor. Need to know what the chatter around a particular product or concept was last Thanksgiving so you can plan for next year? What about just seeing the chatter around your company name through the history of Twitter. Are you doing a good job of keeping your brand name alive and fresh?
It's time to put some coffee to boil and dive into some serious research.
Last week I had the distinct honor of contributing to a very noble blogging project called The3six5 - - 365 authors will record all 365 days of 2010. Each day is from the unique perspective of its author. I remember writing last January about the project and worrying that I would have nothing interesting on my day to talk about. But alas I found my subject right in my backyard (photo above).
Please click on the photo and read not only my contribution to the3six5 about the environment and the water we drink, but follow it for the rest of the year. I am fascinated each day to see who will write and what they will write about.
This is a terrific piece by Jay Rosen. I attended the panel he speaks of at SXSW and he's right, it was a really good panel. Great information was shared and lively conversation was inspired. But, as he also mentions, too many 'gurus' of social media showed up to SXSW with the assumption that their name was enough to draw the crowds.
Well, yes, the crowds came. But the crowds were not shy about walking out or commenting their displeasure via the backchannel. I walked out of several such sessions. If after 15 minutes I wasn't engaged, they lost my business and I went to a different presentation.
I must say, some of the most memorable discussions for me were in rooms with no big names at all, like the session on freelance not being free. Journalists, bloggers, and publishers discussed passionately the challenges they were facing trying to make a living in a market of 'free' content. Also, the panel on citizen journalism inspired great conversations and truly made the audience part of the discussion.
Hopefully some lessons were learned this year. Rosen outlines in his post the exact steps to a successful panel. So lets hope potential speakers for next year's SXSW take note.
