Tag: Uncategorized

I had a hard time narrowing the choices down this week, so there are a bunch to take a look at. Enjoy! and thanks, blogosphere for some terrific posts.

How-To: Identifying Influences, Neutralizing Detractors, Marketing Vox: Tips on how to find those individuals to whom you should be listening.

Getting to Know GenWhy, BusinessWeek: An experts look at managing millennials (that’s you).

For Small Companies, Blogger Relations’ Double-Edged Sword Bites Deeper, PR Squared: An example of how a small company does it wrong with blogger relations.

Inspiration Matters, Presentation Zen: Garr Reynolds has a great post about inspiration in words, speeches and presentations and why it matters.

The Oprah Factor, Origins of Brands Blog: Branding expert Laura Ries sizes up each celeb endorsement behind Obama and Clinton.

Social Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: Do you know the difference?

Grad School Decision Time…; More With Les: MA, MBA or IMC… so many questions. For those of you considering grad school, this is a good post.

Lewis Green: Green and Authenticity Make a Good Marriage, Marketing Profs: Lewis says ethics and values drive transparency and gives a glimpse into what business looks like when you “lead with your heart.”

Paul Williams: Food for Thought, Marketing Profs: Planning a team meeting, planning session or a brainstorm, Paul shares a list of the best fuel for brain power and it’s not chocolate chip cookies and white cheddar cheetos. I’m shocked. Shocked, I say!

The Novelty Curve, Logic + Emotion: Where are you?

Teen Girls Outnumber Boys as Web Content Creators, PR Week: A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project determined that female teens are the primary creators of Web content, far outpacing their male peers in the areas of blogging, Web site building, and creating social networking profiles.

Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with a client to brainstorm ideas for their brand spankin’ new social media campaign.

I’m very excited – despite my best efforts, so far my social media campaign ideas haven’t been terribly well-received and the implementation? a little half-baked. Usually I’m passionate about the idea and see the tremendous potential of social media and the client just isn’t ready yet.

Once the campaign rolls out, I’ll share it with you, but until then, I thought I’d share my process for getting started. If you have ideas to contribute, please (please!) feel free to include them in the comments, or take the discussion to your own blog.

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Take Stock of the Conversation: I knew social media was going to be a good fit. When I did a Technorati and Google Blogsearch on my client’s brands, the results were great. I didn’t expect posts to be bad, but for a decidedly low-tech product, I was a little afraid that I wouldn’t find anything. Primarily what I found were posts and discussion forum conversations about customers using the product. Great news! The posts and comments were very positive and really showed the ingenuity of some of the product’s users.

Using this stock of current conversations, the next step was to pitch my ideas to the client. I focused on two strategies, a corporate blog and a YouTube channel. I talked about all the great reasons for participating, I referenced some successful campaigns and anecdotes and the return on investment that they saw and I walked through how we could work together to ease any worry on their part (mostly around staff demands and time requirements). In the end, social media will be more than half of our annual public relations budget.

Moving forward to the planning process, we’re going to spend a couple of hours talking about blogging and making videos. Client is on board with both, but I want to start out with some basics. I’ll show the Common Craft Blogs in Plain English video and share Rohit Bhargava’s 25 Basic Styles of Blogging slideshow (or part of it, anyway). I’m also looking for some popular videos that were low budget and fun/shareable, too. I like Will it Blend? – it’s relevant to this client/product and the response to Blendtec is remarkable.

Inventory Existing Content: The client’s product is project-related (think crafts, home improvement), so we plan to mix in a heavy dose of how-to projects alongside guest posts from product developers, posts related to the local community and others. To write (or even repurpose) the how-to posts, we need to develop an inventory of what we have and what we need. I know this client likes the how-to focus, so I think starting here will get them thinking and open up the discussion to wider posts.

We’ll do the same process for the YouTube channel ideas.

This process of taking stock of what’s out there, inventorying the projects and content that already exists and making a list of “what to order” will put on a good path.

Low-tech, project oriented and a lot of fun! I expect this brainstorm and the subsequent planning session and the implementation to be a terrific way for this company to connect with its audiences. I look forward to sharing more details with you in the future.

Thanks to all the smart folks that contributed this week to some outstanding insights and conversations – here are my faves. MWAH!

Does Knowledge of Social Media Make You a Better Job Candidate?, my 2 cents: Interesting post. Some great insights and I always love when professionals back up things I say in class. Thanks!

Measurable Objectives Precede Meaningful Evaluation, Les is More: Les, a professor at Towson University, is judging the IABC awards and provides some advice about the PR process that leads to a well-planned and executed campaign.

Social Media Will Change Your Business, BusinessWeek: I’m sending this link to every business owner I know.

Consequences for Not Having a Blogging Policy, Neville Hobson: We’ve been talking about blogging and ethics policies in class, so this is a perfect example of why such things are important.

Cleansing Your Online Reputation, Murphy’s Law: Understanding search engine results is, apparently, one piece of the pie. Three firms in the US and UK are offering services to clean up your reputation online and ensure only positive results.

27 Proven Freelance Marketing Tips, Bad Language: Thinking about freelancing? These are some great tips to consider when trying to make it work.

Old School Pols Running the Campaigns Still Missing the Social Media Boat, what’s next: BL Ochman says the presidential candidates aren’t using social media to their advantage and relying on old school campaign techniques.

© Bob Jacobson/Corbis

Lots of my students want to plan and implement special events. I’m not great at meeting/event logistics (caterers! florists! incentives! promotional items!), so I find special events a bit tedious. The best lesson I’ve learned from event planning experience? Plan a massage the day after a big event. Thanks, Marilyn for that lesson!

That said, there are tons of great jobs in event planning. And what a great way to meet people, make connections and go to a lot of great parties.

Ned’s Job of the Week email newsletter has a section specifically for the Hospitality and Event Planning Network. Weekly job posts galore! If you’re interested in this field, you can subscribe and get updates via email or via your feed reader.

This isn’t breaking news, by any means, but I just came across this YouTube video. It’s from our local United Way and has a great message about homelessness.

Project Homeless Connect is a nationwide movement to end homelesses. In Eugene, the event is held at the Lane County Fairgrounds. In just one day, 1,007 adults, youth and families who were homeless or at risk of being homeless sought help to meet basic needs.

Project Homeless Connect is a collaborative effort between Lane County, the cities of Eugene and Springfield, and United Way along with more than 150 individual donors.

Congratulations to my colleagues at many of these agencies that made this event happen. It’s a community effort that serves some of the most vulnerable and puts a face on homelessness in our community.

It’s all about the love this weekend with a guest post from Marilyn Hawkins of Hawkins & Company PR. She offers seven tips for students and new PRos negotiating those tricky client relationships.

1. Relax. This always demonstrates confidence. And never sell yourself – your ideas or solutions – too soon. Allow the client to “buy” the service or make the assignment. Your clients will love you only after they trust you – and they see competence, feel legitimate rapport and sense genuine value.

2. Never Complain About How Busy You Are. The client needs to feel that he or she is the most important thing on your work mind at any point.

3. Seek a Peer Relationship. You’re not a mere order-taker, so work to establish a joint-venture environment. Yes, you’re smart, but let the client discover that. If she or he ever complains – hear it undefensively, then adapt accordingly. And if you mess up, ‘fess up. To have clients with integrity (and ethical behavior), you must practice those yourself.

4. Guide Every Conversation with Good Questions. Demonstrate true interest in, enthusiasm for, and ultimate understanding of every task at hand. Always listen before you talk. Clearly hear what the client thinks will signal success – not only what you think will.

5. Remember “The Project is Boss.” Don’t waste time and energy fretting about who’s the controller and who’s the controllee in any situation. It’s you and the client against the problem or opportunity, not against each other. You can accomplish anything you want, as long as you don’t care who gets credit for it.

6. Disagree Agreeably. Use conversation starters such as: “Let’s talk about that for a moment…” or “Maybe we’re coming at this from slightly different points of view…” Remember Michaelangelo’s famous dictum: Criticize by creating. (And never let clients make dumb mistakes “just to teach them a lesson.”)

7. Honorably Ease Out of Impossible Situations. If the project/product, or your personal chemistry, just isn’t working – collaborate with the client to find a different and better way to get the job done. It’s not enough to be right on the facts of the matter if you’re wrong in the mind of the client.

image: © Serge Krouglikoff/zefa/Corbis

This is a guest post from Leona Laurie, PR/Marketing consultant, graduate student and blogger.

I see resumes as being living documents, and I treat them as one part of a trio: resumes, cover letters and interviews. I tweak my cover letter and resume for every position I apply for, and I update my resume every three-to-six months as a matter of course.

Putting together a custom resume can be very time consuming if you’re applying for more than one or two jobs, but if you have an exhaustive master resume that covers every position you’ve ever held (including every measurable result, every duty you were responsible for, every computer program or machine you used, and how much you were paid), it’s easy to cut and paste the most relevant things into a shiny, new document.

The complementary tool I use with my master resume is what I call a “spiritual resume.” In a separate document, I have a history of all the qualities I expressed at each job, the things I learned and contributed, the relationships that helped me grow, and the principles I grasped. In addition to being a psychologically valuable exercise (affirming the fact that even the worst job has some value), creating a spiritual resume leaves you with a document you can use as a resource when writing cover letters and preparing for interviews.

Imagine a scenario in which you’re applying for a job you really want, doing a task you’re very capable of doing, but in an industry you’ve never worked in before. If you’re tailoring your resume to the position, you’ll be able to highlight the jobs you’ve held in the past that demanded similar skills. With your spiritual resume, you’ll be able to easily recall moments in which you tackled other transitions or learning new things or being adaptable, and you’ll be able to refer to them casually in your cover letter. What’s more, when you make it to the interview (because how could you not?), you’ll be ready with solid, positive answers for tricky questions about prior working relationships and your decisions to leave other jobs.

To build a spiritual resume of your own, I suggest starting with your master resume. Once you have written or typed up every job, volunteer position, internship, etc. you’ve ever held and mined your memory for every detail about what you did at each of them, get out a fresh piece of paper and address each position in the order they appear on the master document.

For example, my actual resume says that in the year 2000 I was a print shop coordinator who managed inventory, acted as liaison to outside vendors, streamlined intra- and inter-departmental systems, supervised other employees, used a Macintosh computer and the Adobe design suite to do graphic design, and produced printing and bindery projects for clients in a timely manner. My spiritual resume focuses on the relationships I built with my colleagues using the things I learned that year from Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It makes note of the fact that I improved the delivery time for projects, increased the department’s productivity, figured out that my boss was too busy to act on my first request for something—but always gave me what I needed if I was confident enough to remind him, and that I struggled with not being taken seriously because of my age.

The success I had in relationship building was especially notable because of this last point, as I’d been hired into a position above a couple of people who were more than twice my age—one of whom was my uncle—and I’d replaced a well-liked woman who was let go rather abruptly. When asked by future hiring managers about how I would be able to cope with working with people who might not be thrilled to have me coming in to shake things up for the sake of image revitalization or improving efficiency, I’ll be able to easily recall the details of how Dale Carnegie got me through a situation like that when I was only 23.

It isn’t difficult to stand out from the crowd when applying for a job. All you have to do is combine your knowledge of the company you’re hoping to join with your knowledge of your own strengths and communicate to the hiring manager how the two fit together. Keeping a complete record of everything you’ve done and how it helped you grow will allow you to focus on the best parts of what you have to offer, and your positive tone and ability to draw connections is sure to make a good impression.

To contact Leona, email l.ementary(at)yahoo(dot)com

Because I conversate with a (almost) 2 year old on a regular basis, I can understand this mom’s predicament. Very cute!

One of the things we’re doing this term is each student gives a short (5 min) presentation on a Web 2.0 service. They started at Go2Web2.0 to find their pick. I thought I’d share today’s picks… just for fun: 

I really appreciate Kami Huyse’s three part process for organizations that want to get involved with social media – Active Listening, Outreach and Engagement.

The listening part seems easy enough. Even engagement makes sense. But students (and probably lots of new bloggers) get nervous about the outreach part.

I understand their apprehension. Listening is anonymous and (they think) chances are no one is going to read their little blog. But outreach! Yikes. There’s 100% chance the blogger will see their comment.

So, here are five tips to leaving good comments:

1) Be relevant and timely. Rather than comment on the general awesomeness of the blogger and their blog, talk about what you appreciate about the particular post. You don’t have to agree, of course. If you disagree, same tips apply. Relate your disagreement to the post.

2) Contribute to the conversation. Don’t comment for the sake of commenting or to just say, “nice post!” One of the simplest comments is one that tells the writer what you’re taking away from his or her post. Or maybe the blogger left out an important facet of the discussion and you’d like to bring that up.

What I’m not saying, but I hope is clear, is that you should be polite. Do not attack the blogger personally and obviously keep your comments clean. If you’re representing a client and doing outreach on their behalf, please mentally underline and highlight that last sentence.

I’ve heard stories (which of course I can’t find now!) about junior account people lambasting a blogger for not agreeing with his client’s position on a topic. Ouch.

3) Know when an email is better or when to just leave it be. If you cannot be relevant, timely or you don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation, but you want to develop a relationship with the blogger, try sending an email.

If you’re angry about the post and you can’t find anything of value to say, maybe it’s better to leave it and walk away.

I read a really stupid review of local client’s business. It was vapid and clearly not well thought out. The blogger was clearly new (she only had three posts) and after drafting a couple of comments, I ultimately decided to just leave it alone. There was no substance to her post, which prevented conversation and I remembered Hanlon’s Razor…

4) Keep it short and sweet. If it’s longer than, say, 50 words (my arbitrary rule of thumb), save it for your own post. In fact, I often encourage my students to leave a comment on the “linky love” post to which they are already writing a response. Clearly they have a point of view, so why not share it with the blogger and get some visitors to their blog out of the deal.

5) Be accountable and take ownership. Do no post anonymously. Ever. If you’re posting a comment anonymously, think about why. And then see #3.

More tips here and here.

Image: Corbis