Strategic Public Relations

Does Your Brand Have a Point of Difference or a Red Flag?

During a recent hotel stay, I saw a brochure promoting a cultural destination that singled out two of its accomplishments. This destination was chosen as “one of six best buildings in the world for 2007.” It was also the first building of its kind in the world to meet a set of exacting environmental specifications.

While both accomplishments were surely hard-earned and worth touting to some degree, are these dusty factoids drawing visitors to this destination? Similarly, if it turns out I’m the tallest marketer in the 45202 zip code, does a basic fact do anything to establish my abilities?

When choosing ways to differentiate your brand from the crowd, claims like “first one in the world” seem like a safe bet. But if these claims don’t resonate with your target audience and reinforce your goal they’ll come off as overcompensation.

The next time you’re establishing a brand, topic or source with a target audience make sure you ask an important question on behalf of your audience: “Who cares?” This will help you stand out for the right reasons.

Altered Reailty VI uploaded by Yushimoto

GM Taps Social Media for Recession Communications

WSJ’s Digits blog tipped me off to this commercial from GM that was launched online via YouTube and Facebook, I assume in lieu of media buys, as it filed for Chapter 11 protection.

To call this a case study in crisis communications is an understatement. GM lost nearly $82 Billion in the last four years. The 10-year-old company filing for Chapter 11 protection makes for the fourth-largest filing in U.S. history and the largest for an industrial company.

This topic is worthy of its own web site. And there is one.

GM Reinvention is harnessing the dividends of GM’s social media 401(k) program when it needs it most. The company is being as transparent as possible to tell their story on what’s next. If GM had not been establishing itself over the years in social media, this effort simply would not be as effective. Social media won’t solve GM’s problems, but it will help the company keep an open line of communication in troubled times as it prepares to rebuild. Let’s hope they reach their new goals.

Get the Picture or Get Lost – Why PR Needs Visual Thinking

Between PR Newswire and BusinessWire, around 2,000 press releases go out over the wires each day.

Wow, 2,000 press releases! How many of those actually contain news? Noise from traditional PR tools across fragmented media channels are fueling bad pitches and stunts that have little or nothing to do with helping the client’s business.

As a result PR people are struggling to help clients stand out – in any way possible. But more isn’t the solution to any problem. Better is the answer. How do we improve?

We must embrace the visual.

Visuals decrease our word count and increase our effectiveness. And in a Web 2.0 society it's become cheaper and easier to make our efforts über visual. The evolution of news and search is making this visual leap essential.

The rest of this post is actually available as a free .pdf file that you can grab here if you're interested. This is also cross-posted to The Bad Pitch Blog.

Empowering News

Five weeks ago I became a free agent. Perhaps more accurately the recession paid me a visit.

Fine. I was laid off.

Since then I've been pretty focused on three things--networking, interviewing and freelancing. Not to mention the mortgage, food and money.

OK, six things.

So I'm pleased to note I've found a new home. I'm now the Director of Marketing at Empower MediaMarketing.

It's a hybrid of everything I want in a job--applying marketing, public relations and social media. It's a client-side role, but I'll also work on some client projects as well.

Empower manages every facet of media--buying, planning, strategy and consulting. They also have a full-service digital practice and a consumer research team with a set of proprietary tools.

They have many stories to be told and I can't wait to get started.

Thank You
I have many people to thank for helping me through my transition and I'm following up with each of you individually.

Prezi.com
In my zeal to announce this, I took Prezi.com for a test run. Unfortunately I did the presentation on my desktop. So instead of sharing a link to the online presentation, I can only offer you the whole honking thing as a zip file. If you're interested in Prezi, check it out. If you're on the fence, I'll manage expectations and note that it takes the above content and makes it look (much) more interesting.

Social Media Starts with Experiments and (Beautiful) Mistakes

This Ad Age article rightly stresses the need for first-hand experience when implementing a social media project.

“The biggest challenge that I see is getting people who have practiced traditional marketing for their entire careers to adopt a new set of values. The first instinct is to treat any form of social media as a channel that you use to drive a corporate message. It's relatively easy to grasp the tools but more challenging to understand how new technologies have changed communication behaviors and patterns.”

Spot on.

This is why some clients are experimenting with it. Others might focus on a particular site like Twitter. But most everyone sees the value in this facet of communications.

Regardless of where clients are on the social media curve, I stress is the concept of campaign vs. commitment. This phrase, crystallized for me in a presentation by Mitch Joel, is more than fodder for a t-shirt, bumper sticker or ppt slide.

Campaign or Commitment
Several projects I’m involved with are using a specific event or a time-based reason to get more involved in social media.

This is an excellent idea unless you think you can go from zero to Facebook page in two seconds. Trying to gain traction in social media with the flip of a switch doesn’t happen unless you’re @aplusk perhaps. For most brands and people, attention is earned through participation.

These projects are building off already established profiles. These profiles represent active participants who follow community guidelines spoken and unspoken.

Anything else comes off as drive by marketing. This is more than simply ineffective; it draws the ire of your new found community. So if anyone questions the value of experimenting or concern over making a mistake, consider the above Ad Age article and realize why they’re asking these questions. They need more than shiny new. They need to understand the new set of values in play here.

Social Media 401(k) Fund
Recessionary jokes aside, your involvement and participation in social media is a long term approach. And it might require a commitment and resources that some are unwilling to devote initially. But consider that Google is a big investment fund and all of this content builds relevance and awareness over time. This can pay off but you have to invest. And the earlier you do it you can experiment and learn from your mistakes.

Money Back Guarantee uploaded by Roby©

Google Sees All. Get Over It.

Between some well-intended privacy stories, some (very) sensational privacy stories and recent news from Google, I’m compelled to state what might be the obvious.

----

You need to be smart about what you say and do online. For example, when creating a company policy about social media usage, I suggest that if an employee can’t say it in front of their Mom or in front of a competitor they probably shouldn’t put it online.

As marketers, however, we should be taking full advantage of the fact that Google sees all. We should be syndicating content across as many platforms as our customer community frequents. If they look for us in these 2.0 hot spots we want them to find us.

Consider the search implications of this distributed approach to content. In the past we created walled gardens to aggregate all of our content in one place. By turning that content into spreadable media, the opportunities to impact search results increase exponentially. And if in turn all of this media has distribution capabilities like ShareThis the search impact increases even more.

It all starts with Google
Have you Googled yourself, your client or your company lately? A brand’s search results are the first moment of truth online. Google now allows you to improve these results by creating a Google Profile.

It’s imperative that we make sure that everyone understands the implications of Google’s ability to catalog and cache seemingly all online activity. But we should also be deliberate in making sure Google finds our story in as many places as it makes sense. If we don’t? Google might find someone else’s version of our story instead.

10 Years Google by Patrick Chappatte
© Copyright 2007

Free Agent Nation 2.0

The news media have been making a lot of historic comparisons when serving up various economic statistics. The journalists are simply trying to depict the level of economic turmoil around us. But, more often than not, their readers are already living it.

In fact I started working four-day weeks in January. So I launched a new site promoting my consulting practice. It’s hard to believe I’ve had my vanity URL parked since March 11, 2000. But nine years later, I proudly launched kevindugan.com.

And the timing couldn’t be better for my launch. As of April 1, I became a full-time, free agent. So my silence here has been due to my full frontal consulting efforts. I’m also exploring full-time opportunities.

Powered by Ample
The site was created in Ruby on Rails by the team at Ample. Josh, Rob, Bobby, Kevin and Adam do great work and I enjoyed working with them.

Eating my own Dog Food
The site design is based around the concept of content distribution, something I’ve written about before. The definition of content has changed and, more importantly, how content can be shared and served up in new ways. Kevindugan.com serves up my content from a variety of online properties. I’ve aggregated these content streams into one site to “get credit” for all of it in one spot.

So I appreciate your patience as my reports might be a little spotty until I either settle comfortably into free agent nation or find another full-time gig. In the meantime, there’s plenty more on the concept of slippery content to dig into. Henry Jenkins calls it ”spreadable media.” Check it out, stop by my shiny new site and watch this space for (so. very. much.) more.

Pepsi’s SXSW Mash-Up Creates Content from Twitter Cacophony

Social media continues to morph the definition of content -- the latest example of this evolution comes from Pepsi. Pepsi Zeitgeist, a Twitter Mash-Up, tracks activity at the SXSW festival to serve up content that is equal parts fun, pretty and impressive.

Fun: If you’re reading this blog, odds are good you’ve seen more than a few tweets in your Twitter stream sporting a #sxsw tag. Pepsi categorizes all of these tweets into one of six buckets (arriving, drinking, registering, eating, connecting or partying). The tweets are aggregated into a simple visual so you can keep your finger on the pulse of the event.

It’s a smart way to aggregate the metric ton of #sxsw tweets being dispatched from the army of mobile phones and laptops in Austin, TX for the next few days. It also gives the event’s non-attendees a fun way to easily connect with it (and Pepsi).

Pretty: The interface is dead simple. The content is served up as easy-to-digest visuals and the end result is powerful in its simplicity. If I tried to wade through 500 tweets and create something like this for a tracking report it would not be as easy on the eyes.

Impressive: This is only one facet of Pepsi’s efforts at SXSW this year, including their own Twitter ID, blog posts and their Podcast Playground. But for someone not at the show, the Pepsi Zeitgeist site is their crown jewel. The site is a simple way to make a big impact.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the site is the Swarm page. The Swarm page measures the sentiment of food-related tweets and maps them to eateries around the Austin area. So someone tuning into the site can get a great WOM recommendation to see if it’s worth their time to stand in line at that barbecue joint they’re anxious to check out.

The Zeitgeist site is a smart use of Twitter data and a great example of how even thousands of tweets can become visual content.

Zeitgeist also provides a memorable brand experience for consumers by providing value without requiring anything in exchange.

screen grabs uploaded by prblog
tags | public relations | PR | social media | marketing | Pepsi | SXSW | brand

Being Digital at P&G, Raising $100K for Disaster Relief

To inspire some of its key employees with the power of social media, P&G held a social media experiment tonight.

Folks with social media experience of one kind or another from around the country converged on P&G to team up with employees and help raise funds for disaster relief through Tide’s Loads of Hope project.

And we did just that…$20 at a time. $50,000 was raised in four hours employing everything from Digg, blogs and Twitter to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a host of niche community sites. Tide matched the $50K for the $100K total.

What did I learn?

It’s not about age, it’s about attitude.
This event reinforced what I’ve been seeing anecdotally at every event I attend. Many assume that high school kids fall out of bed knowing how to create profiles on these sites and become power users and that, er, more mature folks don’t know a tinyurl link from a sausage link. This is just not always the case. While digital natives might figure out online more easily than others, you cannot assume your audience’s technical ability based on age alone. It boils down to attitude.

Fast-Moving Collaboration
The teams that broke their groups down into smaller groups around specific strategies were able to test more ideas more easily and quickly, focus on the ones that did work and drop the ones that did not gain traction.

The competitive nature of the event was intense as the final minutes approached. It felt a bit like being on The Apprentice--less the washed up celebrities of course.

There was an amazing dashboard in every room that listed sales, site visits and conversion rate for each team with a Tide Twitter Feed running beneath this information. As my team fell behind, I wanted to invoke the spirit of Glen Garry Glenross and note that "coffee is for closers." But I needed to focus. By the way, if you still want to get a vintage t-shirt orders will be taken until 11am EDT on Thursday, March 12.

A Benefits Extend Beyond Event
The real benefits from this exercise for the P&G participants are yet to come. Social media is an investment that increases in relevance over time. While a newspaper ad loses its value a day after printing, social media content increases in value over time. And this fact alone is an exciting opportunity for brands, individuals and great causes like Loads of Hope.

tags | Tide | P&G | Loads of Hope | social media | advertising | marketing | brand

Make a Difference. Buy a T-Shirt

I'm here at P&G's digital hack night tonight and we're raising money for disaster relief by selling vintage t-shirts at http://www.tide2.com It is a four-hour (friendly) competition and we're trying to raise $100K for charity.

More on Loads of Hope is below:

And here is a pic of the t-shirt.

I'm competing against the likes of David Armano, Sam Decker, Jason Falls and Pete Blackshaw so Dave Knox and I can use all the help we can get.