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

As you probably read in my last post, Ottawa City Council is proposing to cut 100% of funding for most arts organizations, which would decimate local culture at a tax savings of about $4 per person, per year.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a fair share of outrage from the local arts community and the people who support it.  The community has united in a way that it doesn’t normally do to fight these cuts and to get people to take action by writing their councillors and telling them that their Ottawa includes culture.

The same thing happened in 2004 when the same cuts were proposed, and the arts community had to drop everything to fight a ridiculous budget plan.  The difference in 2008 is the way the community mobilized.

They created information pages with a mechanism to send a letter directly from the page, Facebook groups with thousands of members, videos and microsites for people to pass around and get their friends to express their concerns.  Social media gave the local cultural a much larger voice than they’ve ever had.  Beyond that, we organized through social media as well – collaborating on spreading the word and assembling at City Hall to make our voice heard.

The results won’t be seen until Friday, but most of the councillors I have spoken with have expressed that they have been inundated with hundreds of comments about the cuts.  If they listen to their constituents even a little, this proposal will be defeated.

So, to those who live in Ottawa and value culture, I say this:  “Pass it on.”

Thanks to Susan Murphy and Cheryl Gain for helping out with the editing on these videos.

Even if you don’t buy into the whole “you can’t control your brand” mantra and insist that it is you and you alone who creates what your brand means, you can’t argue with this quote from Chris Anderson at ad:tech last week:

“Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what Google says it is.”

This doesn’t just go for businesses, either. Your personal brand is pretty transparent these days, with Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, blogs, and so on. Yet another reason to turn your marketing efforts (for business or self) to creating quality content. Well-written blog entries, white papers, manifestos, portfolios all add to the sum total of what Google is showing the world about you.

In the long term, banner ads are seen, remembered and clicked by almost no one. Great content is archived forever.

[via Adrants]

The unwritten rule of the PR blogosphere is that you’re not allowed to be an A-Lister until you declare something dead. What can I say? It’s a morbid profession.

This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that as the mediascape continues to shift toward an always-on, on-demand world, the notion of the advertising campaign makes less and less sense.

Advertising campaigns are short because traditionally, they had to be. Campaigns were based around television and print flight dates and took different approaches – sometimes staggered, sometimes increasing, sometimes steady. Advertisers would shout a message at us until we were numb to it, and then they would change their message to something new and exciting so that we would pay attention again.

This, it has been noted, is not a sustsainable advertising model in a million channel universe where consumers have dozens of electronic and personal filters at their disposal. Instead, we switch to interactive and social media, allowing consumers to interact with the brand in a meaningful way, to give instant feedback, and to give audiences a message they want instead of shoving one down their throat.

Now that advertisers are beginning to realize the importance of these tools in their communications arsenal, they’re beginning to ask for it. The problem is, they’re asking for it to be integrated into their campaigns, which typically have a flight date of 2 or 3 months, and, at least for Canadian brands, are geographically targeted.

When it comes to things like social networking, blogging, social media and the like, the typical notion of the campaign makes absolutely no sense. Joining a community of your consumers and participating in a meaningful way takes time, and unless you’re doing it yourself, takes a fair amount of money. That’s fine – there’s a lot of value to this kind of interaction with your key markets, as long as you can reach a state of sustained inertia. In the campaign model, however, there is no time for inertia. We need results now, and three months from now, we won’t even think of this campaign, until we submit it for an award to show how creative we are.

The environment has changed and therefore so must our approach. The longer we try to cram a square peg into a newly-round hole, the more our industry is going to suffer. I’m convinced after this weeks conference and conversations I’ve had, that we as an industry are at least talking the talk, but my sense is that it’s more of an “I want one of those” approaches rather than a real understanding of the underlying principles of the new marketing arena.

Of course, messaging and product launches must be timely, but if agencies and marketers are going to work together to bring brands to their communities, we need to work together to stop compartmentalizing our approach into a finite window of time, only to throw it out and start all over again when we’re done.

Community is constantly evolving. Attempting to cram it into an ad flight is counterproductive and will ultimately fail. Once we kill the idea of the campaign and think of marketing and community as a living organism that needs time to thrive, we’ll all be better off.

A while back, I mused about how newsrooms can integrate social media tools to better serve the media and bloggers alike.  A few weeks later, I was happy to see an email from Todd Defren announcing the release of a social media newsroom template that he had been working on.  Rarely does timing work out that well in the real world, but it was especially nice to see given that I was right in the middle of finalizing my own newsroom for the relaunch of our corporate site.  Serendipitous indeed.

There are a lot of great ideas in this template, and I want to comment on a few.  The template is laid out as a series of content buckets, which I think is important in terms of layout as it gives reporters a wealth of knowledge at a glance, which they can further drill down into when they see something that interests them.

Executive Corner

A no-brainer, really.  Every media room should include bios of spokepeople and senior management.  Todd has added a LinkedIn link on each of those, which is something I was toying with, and this solidified the idea for me.  Each of those pages should also include upcoming speaking engagements if any exist.  Confabb has a decent widget that does just that.

Multimedia Gallery

This is another no-brainer, but it’s one of those things that may have been put off because it was too hard.  PR people have no such excuse these days.  Putting pictures on Flickr or YouTube is now dead easy, professionally accepted and increases reach.  If you don’t know how to do these things, you owe it to your clients to learn.  The hard part is actually getting the content, but with speaking opportunities, candid interviews with CEOs and stakeholders and product demos for little other than the investment in some lighting and a digital handycam, it’s a lot of value that can be added for little money and a modest effort.

Del.icio.us Accounts

I’m kind of up in the air on this one.  On one hand, the purpose-built del.icio.us pages are a good way to provide relevant links to a reporter.  On the other hand, I find it hard to keep up-to-date.  My preferred approach is a list of relevant links, but you may find success with the del.icio.us approach. 

Press Releases / News Coverage / Schedules

If this part is surprising, perhaps a change of profession is in order.  This is the obvious stuff, but what I like about this approach is the subscription and sharing options built into each.  Providing email links as well as social bookmarks for each release / news bite provides reporters with an easy way to catalogue their research, and makes it more likely for them to come back to you as a source if you fit the story.  RSS and Email subscriptions are also key for allowing reporters to stay informed on developments within your organization.

Tag Cloud

My first impression of this was “ugh, another useless tag cloud.”  Then, I thought about it a little more and it occured to me that a newsroom is the ideal place for a tag cloud.  They allow reporters to see information at a glance that they would not necessarily think to search for.  In our case, if a reporter comes to our site because they’re doing a story on interactive advertising, but sees that a number of items have been tagged “toys,” and they also happen to be doing a story on online toys, I have just provided them with a lot of information in one click.  If they didn’t know or didn’t stick around the site long enough to know that we’re active in the toy industry as well as advertising, I now have two potential stories instead of just one.   I spent a half hour convincing my design team of this.

RSS Feeds

To me, this is the most important part of the newroom redesign exercise.  You can aggregate and microchunk so much information and allow reporters to self-identify and hook themselves into a steady drip of information from you.  To me, there is no argument you can possibly make against this.

What We’re Reading

This to me falls under a “nice-to-have.”  It’s a good way to educate reporters on your specific sector of your industry, but I can’t see it getting you anymore ink.  That said, in Todd’s words - if they’re going to leave anyway, why not help them?

StoryLine Syndicator

The only thing in this design that requires some in-depth explanation is the storyline syndicator.  Todd has gone into this in-depth on his blog, but in essence, it’s a password-protected RSS feed or microblog populated with story ideas.  I think this is a good idea, though I suspect that adoption will be very low.  My suggestion if you want to try this is to monitor subscribers actively so that you’re not yelling into the wind.

Other bits

This is not about cramming as many “web 2.0″ toys into a site as possible.  This is about giving media and bloggers a cohesive, complete and easy-to-navigate place to learn about your company – one that keeps them coming back.  The site has to be sticky, so make it easy for them to stick, through subscriptions, bookmarks, and any other way you can do it so that it makes life easier for reporters.

All in all, this template both validated and inspired a lot of what my company’s newsroom will be.  I’ll be sure to point you to it as soon as it’s live, likely early next week.  Ultimately, I don’t think this will be anywhere near as controversial as the social media news release, but in the end, it will be far more beneficial.