Ryan Anderson dot ca

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.

There’s been some debate in the social media PR world recently about whether or not we can really profess to advise clients on reaching clients through social media if we ourselves are not on the bleeding edge.  Specifically the question being asked was “do we need to be on Twitter in order to be effective PR people.”

I’m of two minds on this.  On one hand, there are plenty of PR people who have far more knowledge about the profession than I that are not on Twitter.  Does that make me better than them?  No, but it does mean that I understand an increasingly important side of public relations on a level that they can’t achieve from anecdotal accounts of what it is and how to use it.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust an electrician who didn’t have lights in his house… why should I expect clients to trust my opinion on a specific aspect of social media if I’ve only ever heard about it and visited the “about” page?

As I’ve said before, PR isn’t about the tools, but the new tools that are available to us every day of the week are changing the game so drastically that if we’re not on top of what’s happening in that arena, there’s no way we can be expected to provide our clients with a full understanding of the environment their brand is operating in, and that means either missing opportunities that would have been a perfect fit, or convincing them to throw money at everything that sparkles along the way.  Either way, the client loses.

It doesn’t mean that we have to spend our entire day on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Second Life or whatever the next big thing that comes out tomorrow happens to be, but it is our responsibility to at least engage with these communities, assess the tool fairly, and understand how it will affect current and potential clients.  Otherwise, we’re trying to fix the wiring while we’re working in the dark.

Bonus link: Todd Defren’s excellent post on why PR folk should be using Twitter.

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.

It’s a beautiful time where I work right now.  We’re about to move into a brand new studio, and we’re just about to ditch our two-year old flash website and replace it with a brand-new, sleek, RSS enabled, social media-friendly thing of pure Web beauty.

When I started almost a year ago, I asked to have a media room thrown together on the website.  At the time, my main need was somewhere to store the releases, ideally RSS enabled.  At that point, we were beginning the website redesign, so I couldn’t ask for the moon.

But now, we’re at the planning stages of developing the our new not-tacked-on media room, and I have to place my order.  I’ve done quite a bit of research, but I’ve found that not many people are talking about online media rooms, except for saying that they’re important.  We’ve talked about the social media press release, but what about the social media room?  Seems like there should be something there.

So, my question is – what does your dream media room look like?

For my purposes, I need the media room to provide reporters with instant access to breaking news (through RSS or email subscription).  I also need reporters that I am source-filing with to have access to a breadth of information about the company, our experts and our latest projects.  We need to be easily found by journalists researching stories in our industry.  We want bloggers writing on the advertising and gaming industy to find the site and use it as an ongoing reference for material.  We want conference and event planners to have easy access to our main speakers bios, and to ensure that they can contact us easily.

In a nutshell, new visitors should be introduced, educated and convinced.  We then want to transition those visitors to subscribers so that they are kept up-to-date.  Subscribers should then be retained and kept instantly appraised of any news from the site.

So, that’s all pretty much under the “obvious” header.  The question is – how do we do it?

It’s pretty clear that when it comes to retaining users and keeping them up-to-date, RSS is absolutely key.  All of the sections, from bios to new press releases should be tied into an RSS feed that allows interested reporters, bloggers and the like to be kept up to date.  That being said, not all reporters are RSS users, so it needs to be backed up with an email feed as well. 

The purpose of the section is also to promote our experts as, well, experts.  Since we want to connect media and bloggers to our experts, we can used LinkedIn as a resource for source filing.  This way, media who needs sources on a particular subject can add and easily find our experts. We will also want to link these bios to their blogs, podcasts and media quotes where possible, so that those interested can get more detail on the expertise of the writers. Bios should be tagged as well, so that a search on the site will find these articles.

Most of the content of the individual press releases is done for us, thanks to Todd Defren and the social media press release gang.  Of course, all press releases should include relevant multimedia, links to articles and bios of people mentioned in the release, links to projects mentioned, Technorati tags to give context within the blogosphere and of course, a method to easily bookmark individual releases.

When it comes to speaking, all upcoming and past speaking engagements should be listed, with links to their respective websites.  Where possible, it would be nice to have archived footage of highlights from speaking engagements as well.

So, those are my thoughts – I’d love to hear yours.  Are there other ways we can integrate social media tools into a media room in a meaningful way?  I think there are possibilities for Skype and instant messaging, but I feel that would require far too many IM clients on the go at any given time.  Comments?  Not sure about that… possibly, but they’d have to add value to the materials already there.

To my mind, the information must be broad, but must have third-party depth.  It’s one thing to say you’re the best, but if we can back it up with blogs and LinkedIn users and comments that agree with us, that’s where the real value of social media comes in.

This isn’t going to change the world in any way, but I think it’s worthwhile to dust off the old-fashioned media room and do something interesting with it. So,speak up, social media dreamers.  What does your dream (media) room look like?

I don’t usually talk about specific projects that I’m working on at my job, but I thought this one merited a mention. For those of you who don’t know, I work for an interactive marketing firm that specializes in online branded entertainment. Try cramming that into pithy boilerplate.

Anyway, our latest project is one we’re doing with Mazda Canada in conjunction with their graduate program. Instead of sticking with traditional media, Mazda is working with us (through their agency, Doner) to develop an live online driving game that’s going to launch at the end of February.

To get university students actively involved with the campaign, we decided to create the soundtrack entirely from the music of Canadian college and university bands. Now, the challenge is letting those bands know. We’re taking a combined media relations and social media approach to the communications strategy behind it, talking to the universities and colleges, as well as the bands themselves.

Now, bands can upload their tracks at http://www.mazdarockinrollcall.ca, and fans can vote for their favourites. The top 25 as voted by the fans will be judged, and the best five will be featured in the game. The number one track will receive a $2000 recording package, and the four honourable mentions will receive $200 worth of iTunes music each.

So, if you happen to know anyone who’s in a band that has one member still enrolled in a place of higher learning, or happen to be in such a band yourself, pass this on and have them enter. We’ve already got some quality music, and it just launched today.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

I’ve been reading speculation about the iPhone for a while now, and in all honesty, I wasn’t terribly excited. I’ve had a Mac for about a year now, and my Mac gadget-lust has since worn off. Love the products, but I’ve got better things to covet, frankly.

I can’t find it or remember where I read it, but I read my favourite quote about the iPhone on a gadget blog a few weeks ago. It went something to the effect of:

“The iPhone is kind of like God. If we were sure it existed, everyone would stop caring.”

That is what I thought until I saw it today on engadget, and promptly dropped to my knees in worship of what may be the most perfect piece of consumer gadgetry that I have ever witnessed. It’s small, and sleek. It’s based on MacOSX. It’s a widescreen video iPod, a brilliant phone, and email device all in one. I gazed in reverence upon its touchscreen-based interface, sleek widgets and intuitive controls.

After a few months of researching my next phone, I have come to one conclusion: the people who design phones are idiots.

Apple has designed something that actually seems useable – unlike my Blackberry that causes me to constantly hang up on people because the disconnect button is right where your thumb goes, and which almost always makes me select the wrong email / contact / whatever because of that useless click wheel. More than that, Apple, if they are successful, will revolutionize the way we view the mobile web.

Apple fanboy-ism aside, this device is going to have a major impact on the way we consume information, much the same way the iPod changed the way we listen to music and watch online video content.

These are my predictions:

1. As the phone catches on (and I’m 100% certain it will), other cell phone companies will rush to copy it. This means that widgets will become commonplace for consumers with cell phones (read: all of them) and the widget will become an extremely powerful marketing tool.
2. The readable mobile web interface will increase the number of people who are surfing the web from their cell phone. This means that online marketers will have to really have to consider these consumers when designing their sites.
3. Although PC-compatible, an increase in the number of people using the iPhone and the user-friendly and attractive Mac interface will cause a jump in Mac computer sales.

Of course, by the time it comes to Canada, the phone will likely be extinct, and we will communicate solely by telepathy, but you can bet that the second it’s available, I will have one.

The Apple iPhone: http://www.apple.com/iphone/