Ryan Anderson dot ca

I’ve been traveling quite a lot lately, and one of the things I always enjoy about visiting a new city as a social media user is meeting face-to-face with my “social graph” – Twitter friends, blog readers and others who I may have had conversations with for years, but never met in person.  Living in Ottawa, there are far fewer chances to meet like-minded people in person on a day-to-day basis, so this is always top of my list when I’m on the road.

As part of an effort to build more of that community locally, I have been working with Simon Chen of Ramius Corporation and Rob Lane of Overlay.tv to bring the Social Media Breakfast to Ottawa.  The Social Media Breakfast was started in August 2007 by Bryan Person in Boston, and has since spread to cities around the world, including New York, San Francisco, Singapore and now, Ottawa.

The innaugural breakfast will be held on June 10 and will feature speaker Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA11, a company that creates custom works of art from your DNA.  Adrian will talk about his experience with social media, and how it caused a spark that led to a traditional and social media explosion.

The event is free and includes breakfast, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Overlay.tv.  All you need to do is RSVP at http://smbottawa.eventbrite.com/ and show up.  If you live in Ottawa, I hope that you’ll be able to make it.

When: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 from 07:30 AM – 09:00 AM (ET)
Where: Ramius Corporation, 55 Metcalfe Street (at Queen – the Manulife Building; if driving, the most convenient parking is underground at the World Exchange Plaza)
More details at: http://smbottawa.eventbrite.com

Also, if you’re looking for more opportunities to connect with social media and PR thinkers in Ottawa, be sure to attend Third Tuesday Ottawa, organized by Joe Thornley and Brendan Hodgson.  It’s always a great event, and an excellent discussion of social media.  Ottawa may be a small market for social media, but the more we work together to create these discussions, the more the whole community will benefit.

I’m very lucky to work with very smart people, as you might be as well. But the thing about very smart people is that they often make you question your estimation of them by saying very dumb things. Here are some of those things that drive me crazy… I’d love to hear yours.

• “Let’s flush out the idea.” It amazes me how many people say this. What you want is to flesh out an idea, as if the idea was a skeleton, and you needed to add flesh to it to make it complete. If you have no ideas and you want to flush them out, as you would a terrorist, I suppose that’s acceptable. Also, if your ideas are shit, you should probably flush them out anyway.
• “We’ll need to action that.” Action is not a verb. The verb form of action is “do.” Your flagrant waste of syllables is causing global warming.
• “Let’s ideate around that.” First rule of language – you can’t just make up whatever word you want and start using it, much less tenses of that word unless you are Shakespeare. You, my friend, are no Shakespeare.
• “Jimmy and myself…” I don’t know when we started using the reflexive pronoun to refer to ourselves, but it’s wrong – and pointless. The correct version is “me” or “I” depending on the sentence. If you’re confused, take the other person out of the story, and you’ll see which pronoun you should use. “Jimmy and I went to the store,” but “Hernando came to the store with Jimmy and me.” (Disclosure: I didn’t understand this one until I was about 24 and my grammar nazi boss corrected me. My kindergarten teacher taught me that it was ALWAYS “the other person and I.” I hate her so much.)
• “I literally wet myself,” or any other variant of creating emphasis by stating something you didn’t literally do. “Literally” is not intended as punctuation. When you use this word incorrectly, you actually say the opposite of what you mean. Unless your boss goose-steps around the office and wears a red arm band he is not, in fact, “literally a Nazi.”
• “Let’s take a decision.” I’ve noticed that it’s usually bureaucrats and government types who use this, and I’m not sure why. I’m not sure it’s technically wrong, but it makes you sound like a government-bot, which is a good enough reason in my books.
• “A whole nother story…” Really? Come on!

And, the bonus round…

• “Media is…” The word media is plural – one medium, two media. Same rule applies to social media. Anal, but I’ve found this distinction actually helps me understand the concept of social media better. When you start thinking of it as a collection of individual media that are inherently social, it makes more sense than one amorphous idea.

By way of disclosure, I should point out that yes, I do correct people’s grammar on a constant basis, and am very unpleasant to be around.

Every now and again, I’m asked to give lectures on marketing and social media. I truly enjoy doing it, simply because I enjoy the feeling of actually educating a room full of people and helping them understand something new or to shed a new light on something they already knew. I don’t think I’d ever want to be a teacher full-time, but the occasional guest lecture is always fun.

I particularly enjoyed speaking to the group I talked to at the University of Ottawa last Wednesday. In the last few years, the business school started an entrepreneurship track that is led by a friend and former professor of mine – Bruce Firestone. I had a lot of business professors when I was in University, but I have to say that Bruce definitely had the biggest impact on my career and my life. Plus, it’s always easier to take business advice from someone who has done something as incredible as found an NHL team, rather than just another academic. It’s exceedingly rare to find both in one person.

My lecture was on, as you may have already read, The Social Startup – the notion that the group most perfectly aligned to make use of social media is entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial culture of networking and creating opportunities has been largely overtaken by the corporate broadcast mentality – something that has sullied the name of the entrepreneur and created shills and laughable late-night commercials. In reality, the possibilities afforded by social media to the masses are much more in line with entrepreneurship in its purest form – being connected to your customers, understanding their needs and responding quickly.

In an hour, I gave them a brief overview of advertising history, the way media consumption habits are changing, an introduction to the ethos of social media and some examples of entrepreneurs and corporations alike who “get it.”

Overall, I was impressed by how many took what I said to heart and got thinking about how they can start getting more active with social media. I’ll go into more detail on what I said and the questions they asked in the next couple of weeks, but overall, speaking to a group of really smart young entrepreneurs underlined for me the importance for entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) to be active in their online communities. We may not be face-to-face with all of our customers anymore, but at the very least, we can understand and connect with them as individuals – and that’s a big part of what being an entrepreneur means.

Things are changing rapidly at Fuel (my day job), and one of the areas that we’re growing is our PR / Editorial team.  So, if you or anyone you love is an amazingly awesome writer who knows the media (social and otherwise) like the back of their hand, please forward them this URL:

http://www.fuelindustries.com/careers/job.php?id=24

The job, for lack of a better title, is PR Manager, but it’s really much more than that.  The person in this position will spend their time writing, interviewing, connecting and generally eating, breathing and sleeping social media.  The perfect fit for this position?  A young, outgoing, somewhat geeky journalist or PR person who has a passion for new media and thrives in a creative environment.  If this is you, Fuel is your dream job.  I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.

Also – I’ll warn you… if you’re comfortable working in bureaucracy, you probably won’t be comfortable here.  Our CEO routinely throws fart bombs into conference calls.

This job is in Ottawa.  No, you can’t telecommute – I need someone to be part of a team.  We’re in a beautiful space near the Parkdale Market, very close to everything by car or by transit.  Interested?  Forward your resume and blog address (you do have a blog, don’t you?) to randerson [at] fuelindustries [dot] com.

Seems like this is the least good thing I could possibly do for my personal productivity, but I’ve gone and gotten myself into this whole Twitter thing.  Sooo…. if you find yourself dying to know what I think about random crap at miscellaneous intervals during the day, feel free to add me (ryananderson) on Twitter.

For those of you who know me or who have read this site for any length of time, it’s no surprise that I spent the first part of my career working and studying theatre and arts marketing. It’s a vaguely fascinating pursuit for me, mostly because it’s incredibly challenging, it’s an industry surrounded by creativity (and from time to time, massive pretention) and because as a marketer, it forces you to think differently. Budgets are miniscule. Theatre is no longer part of the collective culture. It requires real, honest to goodness innovation.

I recently went out to lunch with the artistic director of the theatre company that we co-founded together seven years ago. At the time, it was essentially a community theatre company with dreams of professionalism. Now, it’s a professional theatre company with a lot of good will, but not a lot of money, and it needs to grow to the next step. I agreed to take on the task of consulting on marketing the company pro bono – and I’ll be writing about the progress along the way.

So, here’s the situation. You’ve got a small company with a small, hyperlocal customer base, located in a city with a practially desolate local arts scene. Awareness is hard to achieve, but inciting action is even more difficult. The company has extremely limited financial and human resources, a lack of technical savvy, but a healthy amount of good will from the community. Also, the product is only available three to five times per year, for a few weeks at a time.

Thing is, the theatre marketing model is old and broken, and mostly handed down from marketing manager to marketing manager. Most companies are more focused on printing posters than engaging community. Very few have blogs, but many have email lists. It’s about as marketing 1.0 as you can get.

But this whole conversation thing is a lot easier now than it was even a year ago. There are a ton of tools that enable it, and some of them even have best practices associated with them. More people are active in social networks and social media… in other words, now is the perfect time for theatre to change the way it markets itself, and in many ways, the entire experience of going to the theatre.

Obviously, our first goal will be to bring the company website into the social media realm. I have a list of changes that I want to make, but I’m interested in hearing your opinions as users and communications professionals. What would you ideally like to see from a theatre company (or other event-based company’s) website? We’ll provide a link to the site of everyone who lends their expertise when we launch the final product. I’ll also be reaching out to some fellow PR and social media bloggers as well as some people in the theatre world to see if I can get some deeper insight on what Theatre 2.0 could mean.

Of course, I’ll post all of the answers I receive on the site for all to see in the spirit of sharing, just as Shel has done in his SAP study. I’m excited as to where this could lead.

If you want to see where we’re at now, the current site is a static one that’s a few years old and now was designed and maintained by volunteers. The URL is http://www.thirdwall.com.

Via Clickable Culture, comes a photo on Flickr that every single PR person needs to read before deciding to pitch bloggers in their next campaign. 

Tom Coates, who is a regular dude who blogs at plasticbag.org is sick of getting press releases, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

It really pisses me off that press people consider me an outlet to push their marketing messages. It upsets me that people in the world can look at me and only see ways that they can scavenge some limited advantage through which to push their agendas. They see my personal expression, my unadulterated opinion and they think they can use it as a host for their parasitic bullshit.

Worse still, I’m not sure they understand how revolting I find the whole thing. I’m not sure they get that I don’t consider it part of my life’s mission to carry the messaging they want to distribute. I don’t think they understand that it’s an insult to me for them to think that my voice is so apparently for sale. I find it degrading, patronising, cynical. It makes me want to hurl.

One of the absolute worst things that has ever happened to my blog was an article last year that named plasticbag.org one of the UK’s most influential blogs. I think it was on PRBlogger.com. The amount of crap I received from people who now viewed me as a useful and exploitable commodity put me off writing for months. Longer maybe. Being viewed like a piece of meat by people who wanted somehow to carve off a little of my feeble authenticity. Disgusting.

Anyway, it would be difficult for me to say that getting sent lots of press releases consituted a real invasion of my life, or that it compromised my existence. But it did spoil a pleasure. It did sour a joy. It made me come to dislike one of the things that had been a particular pleasure in my life, and for that I’m furious.

I post this much of it because it’s the most important insight I’ve ever read about pitching bloggers.   As an industry, we’re used to pitching the media – business pitching business.  Now that blogs are where everyone wants to be, we’re into business pitching private citizens, which is a completely different thing.  Imagine if before blogs, big corporations emailed you to say “Hey [NAME] – thought you were a cool guy, so would you mind telling everyone you know about our new dish detergent?”  Confusion and anger would abound, but that’s essentially what we’re doing here.

Merlin Mann gets into the discussion as well, practically begging PR people not to contact him.  He refuses to post links from PR people and wonders if we’re all developmentally challenged.  Ouch.  Merlin whores David Allen and GTD like it’s going out of style, but I doubt he does that as a result of a press release.  GTD is a community, and Merlin is a vocal member of that community.

“But I pitch blogs the right way,” you exclaim!  Maybe you do.  Maybe you’re the best darn blog relations professional in the world, but chances are, if you’re pitching regular dudes like Tom on behalf of clients, whether you’re using a SMNR template or a link to YouTube to do it, they think you’re a filthy spammer.  And the reality is, if that’s what they think, that’s what you are.

So, what do we do?  First, stop pitching bloggers you’ve never talked to just because they’re in your media list.  Second, learn to differentiate between personal blogs and news blogs.  Third, realize that blog relations is a slow burn, and that it’s very difficult to control where you show up.  Create relationships, create community, create linkable content, and participate in conversations genuinely and without being a sleazy PR guy.

People hate PR people because they don’t understand what our job really is, and that’s to create relationships and tell stories.  Our collective image is tarnished by the “PR people” who don’t understand that our job is to create relationships and tell stories.

In our collective defense, I will say that the idea of pitching blogs is quite new, and not something that we’ve quite figured out completely.  I’m not innocent of pitching bloggers in a way that probably made me look like a filthy spammer… because at the time, nobody really understood how to do it right.  We have a lot more insight now, and if you read the comments that follow the Flickr page, you’ll have a whole lot more insight into what bloggers really think of you when you send that release.  It’s difficult to resist the urge to jump to the profession’s defense, but the thing is – he’s not wrong.  It’s a hard truth that we need to accept and learn from so that we can advise our clients and do our jobs better.

Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language has compiled an impressive list of 62 (!) ways to improve your press releases. There are some serious gems here. Among my favourites:

Remember your audience, forget your client. A press release that your client loves is not as useful as a press release a journalist (and her editor) loves. Make sure your press release will help sell the story and get you coverage.

Relax. Relax! For heaven’s sake won’t you people RELAX! Press releases don’t have to sound like a lawyer’s letter or the small print of an insurance contract. Write like you speak. Imagine explaining the subject to an intelligent friend.

Stand up to clients and managers. Don’t let them turn your press release back into porridge. Explain that a well-written press release will get them more coverage. One tip: show them a ‘typical’ press release side-by-side with an article in a magazine. Explain the differences and ask them which one they would want to read themselves.

Its usefulness may be waning in some ways, but the press release is still a staple of media relations, so you might as well do it well. Matthew’s tips are all spot on… and he gets bonus points for quoting me. Vanity, thy name is blog.

Read the whole post here.

After reading the Bad Pitch Blog for so long, it’s nice to see something like this on a journalist’s blog.

But kudos to 5wpr and its client the Hanger Network for crafting a great lead to tout the EcoHanger:

‘No wire hangers…ever!’ Joan Crawford was a woman before her time in the 1981 cult classic Mommie Dearest. These days, she would be happy to know that people share her thoughts on the wire hanger and are finally starting to do something about it.

Because they were kind enough to entertain me, I’ll share with you the second paragraph of the release to tell you what the product is all about.

I’m sure whoever wrote that release is over the moon, despite the fact that they’re still stuck hawking coat hangers.

A little creativity goes a long way with reporters who read about synergy and crap like that all day long.  One of my favourite things about my job is the fact that I can be as creative as I want with our press releases, and it always seems to get approved, regardless of how ridiculous it is.

Frankly, that’s always been my problem with the SMPR.  I like it in theory, but its just-the-facts format seems to neuter the ability to be creative with the release.  Of course, for most brands and clients, this works… I’ve always preferred the creative latitude of the regular format release.  I guess I’m an ad guy trapped in a PR guy’s body.

On the recommendation of Brady, one of my coworkers, and one hell of a smart guy, I bought and read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week, and was surprised to find out that the third chapter outlines the “low-information diet” that I had just written about a few days prior.

In fact, the book has actually inspired me to cut my extraneous information intake even more drastically.  It’s very difficult for someone whose stock and trade is knowledge, but just the process of deciding what is useful and what is not has been elucidating.

If you’re interested, Tim has published a ChangeThis! manifesto that encapsulates most of what he’s talking about in the low-info diet chapter.  You may not be able to use all of it, but definitely worth a read if you spend your day tethered to Outlook, which I’m almost willing to bet that you do.