When you’re a geek, there’s nothing quite like knowing that there are other people out there that “get” you. This project we worked on with Nick Iannitti at Ottawa Tourism is the kind of funny that will only appeal to you if you’re an internet nerd, but let’s face it. If you’re reading this, you probably are.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to one and all, and see you in the new year!

I don’t talk about social media tools very much anymore. Before I started my own agency, I had a lot more time to read about shiny new objects, but it was one of the things that I cut out very quickly when my time suddenly became much more valuable than it once was. I don’t think I’m alone there.

It’s not that I totally ignore the space now. I’m just much more judicious about what tools I try, use, review or even talk about. The litmus test is that they have to make my life easier. Otherwise, they’re just more noise.

A few months back, a guy named Mike Potter emailed me out of the blue and asked if he could show me a new social media tool that he was working on. He was a friend of a friend, so I met for a coffee, and he told me about Arkli, which he described as a “social campaign manager”.  Essentially, a tool that allows you to schedule entire social media campaigns, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, in advance, and the invite others to schedule retweets, reposts and comments on that content – also in advance.

This is a thing that would make my life easier.

Since then, Arkli has grown and expanded, and just today announced that it now integrates with Mailchimp, so email marketing can be part of your pre-scheduled integrated campaigns.

Think about this. If you have an announcement, you can schedule an email campaign to your customers, set video explaining the announcement to launch at the same time as a blog post, followed by announcements to your personal and brand Facebook pages, Tweet it at various points during the day. Then, you can invite employees, friends, supporters or pre-briefed bloggers to add their tweets, blog posts, comments, and “likes” to the campaign before it launches.

For instance, Mike asked me if I could help him spread the word on this announcement last week, and all of my tweets and posts were set up then and just launched today so I could respect his embargo and have everything launch at the right time.  He set up all of the dominoes, and set a timer to knock them down.

There are no shortage of shiny new objects, but social media tools that actually save you time and make your job easier are few and far between. That fact is going to separate a lot of startups from the rest of the field in the coming years.

You can try out the Arkli Social Campaign Manager at www.arkli.com.

(Full disclosure: My agency, Northern Army, is helping Arkli develop its communication strategy.)

I’ve been blogging since 2005, and while I’ve never considered myself a prolific blogger, this past year I haven’t even been a periodic blogger. In fact, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it’s been almost a year since my last post.

The reasons? Well, a few things, but mainly it’s that my return on blogging was getting lower, and as a result I decided to cut back the time I spent on it. So, to say that I wasn’t blogging because I was too busy isn’t particularly accurate, but because I was busy, I didn’t make time for it.

The thing is, I’ve noticed that after almost a year off from blogging, I’ve missed something important that blogging gave me – an outlet that forced me to continually keep on top of trends and made me constantly think about marketing and synthesize those thoughts. In short, blogging made me smarter.

So, now with a new look to the site, I’m planning to make more time for blogging in 2011. I still plan to stick to the tenet of only posting when I have something to say, but I can at the least say that I’ll post more often than never.  Hopefully the quality won’t go downhill as a result.

Last week, I spent a few hours talking to the students of the faculty of communications at Carleton University about public relations, web strategy and getting a job.  The night was segmented into six half-hour round tables, so while most of what I said started to blur together by hour two, I found myself answering a lot of the same questions.  So, in the interest of helping out those just embarking on their career in PR, I thought I’d summarize what I said, in a much less rambling fashion.

• Right out of university, think “career” not “job.” You’ll be tempted to go for the highest paying job right out of school, but look farther than salary when you’re considering where to work.  Your first few years out of school is a time to invest in your experience.  You can come out of it with a few bucks more, or you can come out of it with a marketable skill set that can ultimately earn you more.  If it’s between a job that doesn’t pay well but offers a lot of experience and a job that pays more but makes you a glorified file clerk, take the lower pay.  It doesn’t seem like it, but you’ll be that much closer to that big paycheque.
• Experience trumps education. Almost everyone that night asked me if they should take a PR certificate.  My answer?  Those programs are often very good, but they’ll set you back two to three years, and ten to fifteen grand without guaranteeing you anything.  Education is important, but if you already have a degree, commit to learning on your own.  Read voraciously, and do everything you can to get more experience – volunteer, intern, or start something of your own.  Personally, I would hire someone who has actual experience over someone with a few more years of college any day.
• If you can’t write, you’re useless to me. Blunt, perhaps, but it’s the truth.  If you’re starting out in PR, you should be writing as much as you possibly can, whether it’s in a personal journal, a novel or a blog.  You need to learn how to write like a journalist, like an advertiser, like a CEO and like an engineer.  A good PR writer has no writing style – he or she can adapt to the situation seamlessly.  The only way to get there is through practice.  As my thesis advisor was fond of saying “the first million words is the hardest.”
• Network. Find out the events that are going on and go to them.  Find out who’s an expert on what you’re interested in and follow them.  Meet people, but don’t do it looking for a job – do it to learn.
• Don’t stop learning. 90% of the job of working at an agency is the ability to learn.  When I was starting out, I had to go from being an expert on export tariffs to hospital staffing to carpet off-gassing emissions in a single day.  You need to take subjects you know nothing about and become an expert on them quickly, and the only way to do that is to be good at learning.

I hit a turning point with a long-term client recently.  For a while, we’d been having a regular “social media” meeting with the team, where we would talk about analytics, SEO, web design, content, email marketing, as well as things like blogs and Twitter.  Finally, after all these meetings, what social media really was clicked for them – and we changed our approach from a social media strategy to a web strategy to a consumer relations strategy.  What had started as a perceived need for blogs and Facebook had turned into something very different – and went from being an additional part of their marketing to a core part of their business strategy.

Of course, it wasn’t the tools that made the difference.  It was the understanding of the consumer that ultimately led to an organizational shift, and a fairly major change in how they communicate with their consumers.  It was the exercise of communicating in a more real way, more regularly, and allowing the people they’ve been talking to to talk back.

The reality is, for all the talk about social media – there’s really no such thing.  There is only communication, and while our academic pursuit of what we call social media has certainly advanced the practice of communication as a whole, social media is nothing but a buzzword, a marketing ploy, a big ol’ bottle of snake oil that a slick-talking sideshow act is selling for a dollar to cure what ails you.

This isn’t to take away from any agency that has a real social media expertise (as opposed to a 20-year old intern who knows all about this Facebook thing) – the agency of the future will understand those channels as well as the agencies of the past understood television and print.  The successful agencies will understand how to make all of these media work together to achieve a goal.  Sadly, a number of agencies will achieve a temporary success tricking clients into thinking they understand these technologies and communities, but that gold rush is running out.

If you want to communicate effectively, you need to use the channels that your consumers use – that’s marketing 101.  If that means Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or some obscure web application, then that’s what you should use, but it all needs to be part of an integrated approach with a real goal in mind.  There’s nothing wrong with playing with new tech, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s a strategy.

photo credit: webtreats