social networking – Page 54

Shel Israel: PR in the Conversational Era

Note to the PR folks who read this blog:

Click on over to Shel Israel’s post, The New PR Practitioner, at Global Neighbourhoods. It’s worth your read. (Anal-retentive grammarian types — and you know who you are — please ignore Israel’s typos long enough to soak in the overall message. It’s important that you do.)

Israel has a solid PR agency background. He cut his teeth at Regis McKenna Inc., where “we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects.” So he knows whereof he speaks. And this background gives him no small insight into the issues facing the modern-day PR agency.

That insight translates nicely into higher ed PR. Oh, sure, we don’t pitch as aggressively as a lot of the agency folk, and unlike many of our corporate colleagues we’re more interested in getting coverage for our institutions rather than keeping their names out of the press. But with the rise of social media, our role is evolving, and the very nature of our work — at institutions of higher learning, where online access is ubiquitous — ought to prompt a greater sense of urgency among us than our agency and corporate brethren.

Folks, we need to get this:

PR people have a future as the same kind of trusted resources we were back in the days of Regis McKenna. except now we can use blogging and social media. We get to establish our own credibility over time and when we discuss our own clients on our blogs, we are trusted sources of information relevant to our audiences. …

[I]f you are in the PR proffesion … you will not succeed if you focus on smiling and dialing a media list of strangers, if you are intent in inject hubris into what you have to say or write. If you think you can succeed by being just cute or clever, you are living in the wrong Era.

Today, you need to join the conversation. You are part of the news distribution system, not just for your clients, but for the community where your clients would like to flourish.

This to me is very liberating. The PR people I know and respect are all interesting people and great story teller. They often know so much more than their clients allow them to express. We are now in a Conversational Era. It looks like we will be in this Era for some time to come, and the best and brightest of the PR professionals will join in that conversation, while others will just be left behind.

So. What are we doing to build those relationships? How are we becoming those trusted sources of influence and information? How are we joining in on the conversation in this Conversational Era?

Friday Five: viral edition

Viral is all the rage, it seems — in video, in marketing, in sickness. Or at least it’s enough of a rage to give me enough Friday Five fodder.

Let’s start off with SCADshorts, a viral video campaign developed by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Developed by the Dandy Dwarves, a group of SCAD alumni who put their video production education to work, the campaign consists of a series of oddball videos — one a month — that are part of a puzzle prospective students must solve in order to win an iPod. Morgan Davis of erelevant offers his take on this clever campaign.
More about viral video from Karine Joly, who discusses how Vancouver Film School made the most of one graduate’s video, “Piece of Mind” (YouTube link), by creating and releasing on YouTube it’s own “making of” video (YouTube link). “In this 7-minute video,” Karine writes, “VFS manages to let this talented student promotes the Canadian institution, its professors and its offering – all this done by presenting the work that went into ‘Piece of Mind.'”
Great writing, unfiltered. Seth Godin extols the benefits of infectious prose that is free from corporate filters, and creates a mini-virus by uncovering some pretty decent, linkable bloggage. “The filter,” Godin writes, “is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.”
In what we hope will become a viral campaign across campuses, 70 presidents of U.S. colleges and universities have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, a move to make college campuses more sustainable.
Virality is not confined to cyberspace. Take the underground press movement. It’s alive and well on a campus where you’d least expect it: right here at UMR, a predominantly engineering- and technology-oriented university. While the official student newspaper (The Missouri Miner) is threatening to sue the university and student council for cutting the paper’s budget, a group of students have created an alternative newspaper called The Mineshaft. (Tag line: “Where the real news is buried.”) This weekly publication sprang up in December. In the fine tradition of Soviet samizdat newspapers, The Mineshaft is printed on 8 1/2-by-11 paper, photocopied and distributed throughout campus. All the writers use pseudonyms, but according to the latest edition, that may change. (Writes Sybil, the editor in chief: “While we initially thought that anonymity would allow for all discussion to be on our content, we have found instead that the issue of who we are has just become even more controversial.”) The writing and reporting isn’t terrific — as I said, most of our students are here to study engineering, and we have no journalism program — but the spirit behind The Mineshaft is right.