Top blogger urges: Send your PR pitch via Facebook

I read Silicon Valley Watcher from time to time and I subscribe to it on my feeder. But had Tom Foremski not been my Facebook pal, I’d have missed his important message today — a message that tells PR folks how to get his attention.

I saw the post because Tom placed the link on his Facebook page. I visit FB 4-5 times daily; I check my feeder 4-5 times weekly.

Now let’s be clear. I may be Tom’s friend on Facebook, but we’ve never met nor have we spoken. We exchanged a couple of terse emails shortly after I “friended” him, which came after he joined my Facebook group, “PRSA Need Professional PR Help — NOW!” Tom found that Facebook group because I promoted it in this post, which also links to Tom’s now-classic essay, “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!” That’s how it works in the tangled web of social media. You get used to it.

Tom’s headline sucked me in: “PR Pitches Through Facebook: I Have 37, 366 Unread Emails in Gmail…”

A question for Monsanto: Got transparency?

My friend and colleague Jeanette Drake has an op-ed piece in the Akron Beacon Journal today, and it’s a “must read” for any PR professional who cares about ethics and transparency in this business.

It’s a story about a campaign, led by the chemical giant, Monsanto, to keep important information about our milk supply out of the public eye. At center stage is Monsanto’s rBGH, bovine growth hormone, a genetically engineered substance that increases a cow’s milk production.

Monsanto says rBGH is no threat to public health and is lobbying the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture for new regulations that would “restrict what dairies can say about the milk they produce.” Under current rules, dairies may label their milk as rBGH-free. Many have, and consumers have responded.

Says Dr. Drake:

When it comes to food we eat and the milk we serve our families, preventing full disclosure flies in the face of free-market democratic principles and common sense.

Jeanette’s essay makes a great case for transparency and for the role that public relations should play in the promotion of public discourse. If this issue piques your interest, run a Google search on “rGBH Monsanto,” then thank your maker that you aren’t the lead PR counselor on this one!

Time Warner vs. Amazon.com — Now here’s a contrast in customer service

It took me three days to stop fuming, and I’m still not over the fact that Time Warner Cable betrayed me last week. My newspaper TV listing on Jan. 23 was clear: Kent State vs. Akron, 7 p.m., TWC, Channel 23. The game was sold out and certain to be a madhouse. I opted to watch the most-anticipated basketball game of the season so far in the comfort of my home.

NOT!

TWC didn’t carry the game on Channel 23. I found out later, after two complaining emails, that the game allegedly ran on Channel 79. Who knew? Certainly no one who reads the local paper.

I don’t routinely surf the 700+ channels on my digital dial or I may have tripped across the game. And I still don’t know if the error was Time-Warner’s or the Beacon Journal’s. I asked TWC to look into it and let me know who goofed. The rep said he’d do that, but I’ve not heard a peep. So, today, TWC learns that I’m not just a customer, I’m a customer with a blog — and I know how to use it!

Contrast the Time-Warner fiasco with my Amazon.com experience a day earlier. I was shopping online at the Amazon-Borders site and attempted to use a $25 Border’s gift card my son had given me for Christmas. The site wouldn’t accept the card, so I sent an email to customer service asking for help.

Two hours later, a rep sent clear instructions. My order went through, but the email confirming my shipment two days later showed no gift-card credit. Arrgh!

I sent a second email. Again within two hours the rep responded, apologized for the mistake, and said there was no record of my gift card number. “But you’re a loyal customer,” he wrote, “and we trust you.” Amazon deducted $25 from my bill. End of story. I still have the valid gift card, but I don’t plan to use it. Screwy, isn’t it? Borders got the $25, and Amazon took the loss to keep me happy. The least I can do is applaud them on a blog that deals with issues of reputation and trust.

A few months back I wrote a post about the “weakest link” for most companies — the link of the customer interface. While customer service doesn’t report to public relations, it has the most lasting impact on how people perceive those companies. It affects what we say to our friends, and what we write in our blogs and post to our social networks.

Amazon showed me why it’s among the most respected companies in the world. Time Warner Cable showed me it’s the plodding dinosaur we all know it to be.

Reputations are built on performance. Let’s hope the PR professionals among us never forget that.

Some days the events write the posts for you…

Can’t resist commenting on some of today’s more obscure news stories. There’s a good chance you missed them, too.

Cronyism in West Virginia? Pshaw! No one knows for sure if Gov. Joe Manchin’s daughter actually attended classes en route to her executive MBA at WVU. But plenty of students enrolled with Heather Bresch say she was a phantom student.

I’ve been following this scandal since last fall, when an investigation by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette concluded that Bresch completed fewer than half of her required courses. WVU is calling it a recordkeeping snafu. Today the New York Times is on the case, which means the university’s PR problem just got bigger.

The backstory here is complicated but really juicy. In addition to being the governor’s daughter, 38-year-old Bresch is an executive with pharmaceutical giant Mylan, Inc., whose chairman, Mylan Pushar, donated $20 million to WVU back in 2003. But that’s not all. Seems that WVU Prez Mike Garrison, hired in 2006, is a high-school chum of Bresch’s and friend of the Manchin family. Some say the search process was rigged in favor of Garrison.

Of course, none of this would matter if the No. 2 Mountaineers had beaten Pittsburgh in the last game of the regular season. I suspect a trip to the BCS championship game would have healed a lot of wounds in and around Morgantown. Let’s all hum a few bars, OK … “Almost heaven…”

Thinkin’ about marketing, pseudo events and why men don’t study public relations

My attention span this week measures in nanoseconds.

Nothing like the start of a semester to destroy all focus. Take today. I sent my first email at 7:22 a.m., my most recent at 7:56 p.m. It was my 50th email sent today and I ain’t done. I received and read nearly 100. And I missed lunch — dammit.

We all have those days, but I have them every day. So since I don’t have time to write a thoughtful post, I offer these random rambling thoughts.

PR is looking for a few good men — but I’ll settle for one, maybe two. My PR Case Studies class, for the second semester in a row, is 100% female. In the previous year, just 7 men completed this gateway class and moved on in the major along with 36 women. Our 90-10 ratio reflects a national trend in the field.

I’ve written about this in the past, but now I’ve decided to do something about it. This semester, my PR Case Studies class will examine the gender imbalance in PR education and they’ll try to determine what’s causing it. We hope to survey freshman at 5 large universities, but I also expect my students will interview professionals and high school advisers, and, of course, examine past research on the topic. More about this as the project unfolds.

But let me speculate for a sec. Does PR need a new name? When last I wrote on this issue, my friend and Kent State alum Dino Baskovic posted this comment:

Not to be crass, but is PR viewed as a “chick” degree? It didn’t seem so when you took me in (from those cold, dreary days of architecture studio). It did seem odd that I was outnumbered 10-1…so maybe it gets back to recruiting.

Maybe Dino’s right. Maybe we just need a more aggressive effort to reach men. But I wonder if the term “PR” is too “soft” for the testosterone-driven among us. Might some young men see “relationship building” as too touchy-feely. Just thinkin’ out loud. I do that a lot here.

Bojinka Bishop, a colleague at Ohio University (my alma mater), added this comment to an email we exchanged yesterday. She gave me permission to share it.

An interesting anecdote – I also teach in what used to be called the “Global Learning Community” — about 85% female. The name was changed to the Global Leadership Center a couple of years ago — now we are 60% female. It would be interesting to see how many males vs females are in programs called marketing communication or corporate communication.

What’s in a name? Apparently quite a bit.

I need your help this semester, so chime in

The new semester begins tomorrow, and with it comes a new assignment for me. I’m taking over the “Public Relations Online Tactics” course from Michele Ewing, who has created and shaped it over the past 24 months. Michele’s will be a hard act to follow, but follow it I must.

Because the class comes with a huge grading load and a steep learning curve (on the tech side), I’ll have less time for ToughSledding over the next 4 months. But maybe I can use this space to share the lessons that come from coaching a group of digital natives on the use of digital media.

This challenge might worry some folks my age, but I’ve been experimenting with online media, 1.0 and 2.0, as long as any of these students. While they were chatting on IM and stealing music with Napster, I was studying and observing the whole phenomenon. I think I can hold my own with these kids, but we’ll know for sure come May 2, won’t we?

You can help me with the class, and I trust you will. While the syllabus is in place, the course is in constant motion. So please let me hear your ideas on what a course covering online strategies and tactics should include. Keep in mind that Kent State is a professional program that prepares students for jobs as PR professionals. Everything we do is based on strategic analysis and measurable results.

“Audience-Objective-Strategy-Outcome” is our mantra. And while we love to play with the new digital toys, we aren’t distracted by them.

Here’s a list of the core elements of this course, followed by a list of the hands-on projects that later become part of the students’ portfolios.

What’s missing?

The course examines/dissects…

• Analyzing and writing for online publics
• Monitoring and tracking online media, including blogs and social networks
• Integrating online and traditional strategies & tactics
• RSS feeds and aggregators
• Responsible search engine optimization
• Tagging and bookmarking
• Blogging as a strategic communication and research tool
• Social networks as strategic communication tools
• E-newsletters to serve vertical audiences
• Intranets and wikis and where they fit
• Website navigation and usability variables
• Online media relations/blogger relations
• Online newsroom planning and content
• Podcasting

The course includes hands-on experience with:

RSS Feeds. Students set up an aggregator to monitor blogs and websites related to strategic public relations and report useful content to the class via online discussions.

Blogging. Students create blogs focused on specific areas of PR and post 10 times over 12 weeks. They create and implement a plan to build readership, but without resorting to trickery such as blog memes and selfish link-baiting.

E-newsletters. Students use content management software to write and design a newsletter for a student organization.

Podcasts. Student teams take on a real-world client and create a 5- or 6-minute podcast to support the client’s objective. The experience goes from research and concept to final production and presentation to the client. (We don’t yet have a video component here, and that’s a weakness we must address.)

Newsroom critique. This segment calls on students to analyze and dissect the online newsroom of a large corporation or organization and produce a report that points to strengths and weakness while making recommendations for improvement.

Since grad students make up half the class, I’ll ask them to research and report on case studies in the strategic use of social media in public relations practice, with a special emphasis on measured outcomes. I have a vested interest in this assignment, as it’s the focus of my sabbatical research next fall. Grad students also will read “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and participate in online discussions about this seminal work.

I know. I know. It’s too much for one course — way too much. But that’s the digital world. It’s overwhelming. We’re in the process of migrating segments of this class to other skills classes within the program. E-newsletters will end up in “PR Publications”; online newsrooms and blogger relations will go to “Media Relations & Publicity.”

Our challenge is to integrate emerging NEW-media content without sacrificing important OLD-media content, as much of it remains relevant to PR practice. We’re blessed in that our new, $21-million facility here at Kent State — the envy of PR and journalism educators everywhere (blatant plug) — has the tools to support us.

Yep, since Tim Berners-Lee empowered us with his World Wide Web, we’ve all been working longer and harder. That’s not going to end. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never catch up — never, never, never. But we must stay in the race, even if it means losing some sleep.

Ten years ago, I didn’t have a wireless laptop. If I had, I would never have envisioned writing blog posts like this one on a Sunday morning. Instead, I’d be having coffee with the beautiful lady in the kitchen and talking about our favs in the NFL playoff games. She’s watching them now. I’m editing this post.

So maybe this class should start with a segment on how to avoid compulsive online behavior, you know, digital addiction. Sadly, I’m not qualified to teach that part.

********************

Update: Rob Jewell offers an excellent perspective today for PR professionals thinking about moving from the business to the classroom.  If you’re one of those, check it out.  1/14/08. 

See You Wednesday late!

After that stimulating 2-day conversation on the previous post, I hate to cut and run. But I must to escape to the woods for a few days of regeneration before the next semester begins. It’s a Thoreau thing, but with guns.

I’ve asked my bride to approve comments that come in, so please post away. I’ll rejoin the discussion in a few days — assuming there is a discussion. Maybe someone PRSA will decide to join in. Meantime, don’t forget to join my Facebook group, “PRSA Need Professional PR Help — NOW!”

PRSA needs lessons in “News Release 101″

First, a confession. I paid my PRSA dues for 2008 after saying, and pretty vehemently, that I would not. I sent the check to New York yesterday for three reasons. First, I wanted to show support for a friend and colleague who is president of the local chapter this year. Second, I’m feeling guilty about abandoning my friends in both the Cleveland and Akron Area chapters, despite seeing little value in the national affiliation.

Finally, I was hoping this year’s PRSA leadership would bring new spark to a tired organization that’s been my professional home for 25 years. I ‘d be a great Cubs fan, wouldn’t I?

Does PRSA have a new vision? If so, you won’t find it in the society’s first news release of 2008, a release that announces Jeff Julin’s ascension to the chairmanship — but not much more.

Is there news here? Not really. Jeff’s selection as PRSA chair was rubber stamped by the Assembly back in November. But hey, it is his first day in office, and it’s Friday of a holiday week. Maybe we can steal a headline on a slow news day and make a little splash.

Nice try, but the news release typifies what Tom Foremski ranted about back in ‘06 when he called on PR folks to stop using the tool altogether.

Some highlights from PRSA’s first release of 2008: