I just read an interesting study from the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) that said, “80% of businesses plan to boost investment in social networking.” I can’t say this surprises me too much and don’t know what their definition of “boost” might be going into 2010 budgets:). I do think that as communicators and advocates of social media we need to be cognizant that social media isn’t our savior.

Okay, I won’t go as far to say that social media isn’t right for business – I actually do think there is a place in social for every type of business. What gets me the most excited is what the practice of social media has now uncovered in business communications. For example, I believe that businesses are now smarter about how they are distributing their stories to the audieneces that matter most…through social and traditional means.

As a result, here are 3 ways your organization can benefit from implementing a formal Story Distribution process:

1 – Leveraging Existing Communications – One of the biggest mysteries in the world of corporate communications is why so many useful and amazing studies, stories and facts are bottled up internally as if it were a map to the Holy Grail. Instead, look at each of these valuable communications tools, wrap your company messaging around it in an email and send it off to your employees, clients, investors and prospects.

2 – Actually Deliver an ROI – There is nothing more frustrating as a communications professional than having to quantify how awareness and branding effect a company’s bottom line. You know why? It doesn’t! Before you jump all over me…give me a chance to explain. There is significant value in landing a media story, having bloggers buzzing about your brand and unbelievable engagement across your social platforms. It may even result in a sale or two or several for your company. But it isn’t and shouldn’t be a direct tie into sales…until your Story Distribution process came along. Now imagine all of the validity, awareness and branding that you’re helping establish for your company is repurposed throughout the organization and among your targeted audience by the sales team, HR, investor relations, customer service, etc. In essence, you would be hedging your bet by doing so and allowing your communications to actually tie into your company’s bottom line – a true ROI.

3 – Because It Already Exists – What I mean here is the communications tools and channels already exist within your organization. Your sales, HR, investor relations, customer service and marketing teams already exist. You just need some real time communications tools developed around each story being distributed in a way that is complimentary to the platform and process that already exists. If Sales need it in a PowerPoint slide – it happens. If HR needs it in a 500-word article for their weekly newsletter – it happens. If Customer Service needs it in scripted bullet points – it happens.

I’ve always been a big believer in Story Distribution processes although I have also been caught up in the traditions of clip reports and focusing on the results. Today, I’m happy to say that I believe my job begins when the story takes place because now it is time to share that story with others…through social media, through additional media coverage, and through hand-delivering the story to your key audiences.

Do you use Story Distribution in your communications strategy? If so, how is it working and what makes it happen? If not, why not?

I’m sure by now you’ve learned or heard that YouTube is currently the third largest search engine with 85 million unique visitors in November alone…

Compared to Google and Yahoo, YouTube is growing three times as fast with a yearly growth rate of 35% compared to 11% (Google) and 6% (Yahoo). I’d say Google has a lot to be thankful for here in 2009 as reported by the WSJ yesterday.

As PR and media relations professionals, I believe we have a lot to learn from this reality – people (including the media) crave video.

We’ve been incorporating video into our Awareness Campaigns for clients for well over a year now. One way has been creating vlogs which are part of an online library of video content for their websites  and even “vitches”…yes, you heard me right a vitch, a video pitch:).

Learning from YouTube’s popularity, we’ve come up with 3 reasons you and others should strongly consider doing vitches:

1 – Direct Contact to the Resource - The media’s needs continue to evolve and change. Traditional press releases are more for SEO today than for influencing a reporter to write about your company or client. An email pitch gives you limited time and words to make an impression. You might have great success picking up the phone…but time is even more of a crunch as newsrooms get cut and beats begin to pile up. Try capturing your next pitch on a Flip Video of your resource (not you), send the link to the video quickly outlining what the media contact will see in the video and see what happens. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

2 – Entertain Don’t Educate – Don’t get me wrong, it’s valuable and necessary to educate the media, but in today’s environment you might consider taking more of a lighthearted approach to convincing them of your story or resource. You don’t need to be “funny” but just by doing a video vs. written pitch you will allow them to sit back in their cubicle and give them a fresh change of pace to trying to figure out where their story is in your pitch or release.

3 – Broadcast Requires Video Footage – The vitch is especially influential when pitching broadcast including TV and radio. If they’re going to have your resource on as a guest they need to be sure they have someone who is going to be of value and is ready for a “live” interview. If they see your resource can carry the conversation for 60-90 seconds (the longest these should be) they’ll certainly feel much better about booking them as a guest.

Curious to hear if you’re vitching. If so, how’s it going? If not, why?! Looking forward to this conversation!

Should it be of any surprise that consumers think of themselves and their personal needs before the brand they’re buying from?! Not to me…

I just read today’s SmartBrief on Social Media - if you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter, please do so ASAP – it’s great! Below is a link to my video response/reaction to a study that recently came out from The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009.

Take a look at the report yourself as I’d love your thoughts on the findings! Thanks!

I chuckled after reading Ben Parr’s story yesterday on Mashable entitled, “AP and News Corp: Facebook, YouTube, Google Are Exploiting Us.” Within Ben’s story he quoted the shared frustrations coming from Tom Curley (AP) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp):

Tom Curley: “Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers. We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”

Tom Curley: “We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost, to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it,”

Rupert Murdoch: “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”

When on earth are traditional media outlets going to understand that consumers aren’t out to get them but rather would prefer their news faster and throughout a variety of different mediums (social media included)?

Here are my 3 Reasons Traditional Media Will (Has) Fail Online:

1 – It’s All About Your Reader…Not You! Case and point from the quotes above from Curley and Murdoch, folks aren’t trying to take anything away from anyone, we’re just listening and responding to the needs of news consumers.

2 – Its Almost Too Late – Traditional media outlets have seen this coming for some time and for whatever reason never put any value into the fact that consumers demanded their information throughout such mediums. With the exception of a select few (WSJ & USA Today…in my opinion) most are trying to play catch-up when so many of their audience has already left seeking other means for their news fix.

3 – People Don’t Want to Pay $ For Free News – Until traditional media outlets realize that in today’s world access to news is free (and will be for good) they will continue to fail and subscription numbers will plummet even faster. Don’t get me wrong, they should provide paid content but only after they begin offering what the consumers want to see such as video, transparency, consumer feedback, etc.

Do you think traditional media still has a shot within the online world? I’d love to continue this conversation:)

  Chris Brogan          Peter Shankman

Together, they’re now etched in history as “Broman,” thanks to the August 4, 2009 seminar held via Conference Call University.

I wisely spent an hour and $50 yesterday listening to social media gurus Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman talk about how businesses can take advantage of social media. If you already paid that fee to listen to Conference Call University’s hour-long session, you can re-listen to it at http://bit.ly/BZqEy.

I love the pearls of knowledge and wisdom I get from these exceedingly bright and wise sages of social media, and I’ll bet you do too. So I’ve created this summary of the key points I picked up from their conversation. 

My notes reflect the flow of topics and conversation as I heard them. If I’ve omitted something, please feel free to add it as a comment, because I was multi-tasking during the conference – tweeting about it from @michelledamico while taking these copious notes. So I admit, the following is not an exact transcription of the vibrant conversation that took place. But it does capture the essence of what was discussed and I think it’s definitely worth a read. So here are the best nuggets I culled from their seminar:

Listening is more important than talking. Social media provides the opportunity to enhance your personal/corporate brand. It’s the place people go for valuable information. So provide a value for your info. Utilize social media listening. You can’t listen if you’re constantly talking.

The tools are just tools. You’re not going to save the world. If you’re not considering a better way to interact with customer, these tools won’t help at all.

The number one rule, improve your customer service. We’ve seen companies being raised to new heights by rabid fans who fall in love with something the company marketed to them or fixed a problem for them. A company that uses social media tools and fixes problems for them through social media will attract happy customers. Their customers will get the feeling that “I matter.”

In social media, your big job is to get customers and clients to do your PR for you. You can do great things on this scale.

Look at Facebook – Fan Page, a rudimentary way to communicate with your audience. The first hard-and-fast Fan Page rule: a fan page only works with interaction. Shankman said he had inside knowledge from Facebook that people who join fan pages, will soon be able to see month and day of their birth. What does that mean for the company that owns the fan page? Make it your routine to go into Facebook on a daily basis and reach out to each person celebrating a birthday and wish them a happy birthday. That generates a smile and top-of-mind presence, you’re generating interaction. Social media is not a one-way street; Radio is a one-way street. With social media, you ou have to communicate back.

Information used to flow from outside the network in.  Now it flows from inside the network, out. It’s all about listening at the point of me. Bloggers and tweeters are asking Questions every day. There’s an opportunity to do business fast with people who are asking for it.

Are your competitors on there? Are they doing a hell of a job? It’s a defensive move as well. If you’re competitor is on social media, you have to get in on defense.

Chris Brogan said posts case studies at del.icio.us.com (I didn’t have great luck finding the case studies, and will tweet him for the link).

B-to-b use of social media: Thing to remember in b-to-b, people are still in business with people. There are large b-to-b businesses that are doing well in social media, particularly technology companies such as EMC (a storage company) Cisco, IBM.

If you’re a b-to-b company, the first thing you should do on social media is to determine what people are saying about you. Go to search.twitter.com and find people talking about you. Use Blogsearch.google.com to see if they’re talking about your products. It’s not always there.

Chris cited an October 08, Social Media Optimization article said b-to-b marketers are still struggling. Less than 31% use blogs, podcasts, social networks to engage. Don’t be discouraged by those stats: All that’s saying is that they’re waiting for somebody else to pave the way.

Go where there is no road and leave a trial. It’s cheap and inexpensive. You can take first steps without selling the bank.

A lot of services professionals are also questioning the value of social media for their practice. What can come from lawyers on Twitter? They can share interesting thoughts. Answer commentary. People who put interesting thoughts about the industry on a regular basis tend to wind up being searched.

Here’s social media’s secret trick: putting our wishes and wants on the web every day.

You have to switch from thinking about ”where do I advertise?” to “where do I listen?”

To move at the speed of trust will generate revenue. If not today, than it will happen down the line. Pass along information we find fvaluable and can trust and we will give it to others. If we trust it enough, we’ll put it out there. We are participating in the action call to viral.  You can’t create anything viral. But you can create something good!

Funny and timely don’t necessarily = viral. It has to be helpful to be viral.

Some of the best revenue generators start from doing something with no course of action. Giving information as a free gift will generate people coming to you and asking what else do you have?

Have to answer real questions from real customers. Because  people, more and more will ask real people for help before going to Google. You need to create an army of loyalists for stellar client relations so they come to you first for help.

How can you use the human web to grow your business? By having your clients and customers grow your business.

Shankman cited this “brilliant” idea: Large and small companies are creating “So you found me on Twitter?” pages.  Those companies are asking visitors to provide the names of folks who recommended the firm on Twitter. That gives you the chance to send a thank you to whomever gave the referral.

Build followers by providing valuable info that you know will be retweeted.

Audience question: Should you have one message across all platforms? No, they are different audiences and be human in treating them that way. I’d rather have the most famous Tweets vs. most followers. If you respond to people, you’ll get more loyal communicators.

100,000 followers doesn’t mean that much action. Compare that to the percentage of people who take an action when you ask them for help.

Audience questions:

Q: But what if people are creeped out by companies following them? If you’re posting information to the public, you’ll be surprised when a company answers; not creeped out. You want companies to pay attention to you.

Q: How often should a small business tweet or Facebook? All the time.

(Don’t remember if this was a question or a comment) Some of most interesting stuff we’ve seen comes on a corporate level. The most informative tweets come from people who have screwed up royally and are willing to teach people what you’ve learned from it. Saying sorry fast is also huge.

Tony from Zappos. He shares  real personals thing. Shy is interesting. He has admitted that he doesn’t understand humor so well. Share your failures. They are people like us. We’re all at different parts of the race.

Final inspiriting quote from Peter:  Only way to silence the voice of self doubt is to cross the starting line. It’s a lot of fun out there!

I’m usually pretty good at including links in my blog posts (as I advise any of my clients to do) but surprisingly, I can’t find much about a topic that has been very near and dear to me recently – advising businesses on how to effectively leverage their media coverage and other news to their targeted audiences.

Myself included, I believe that PR professionals should take a hard look at how we are conducting business. Too often the end result of our efforts are in the form of a “clip report” listing out all of the media hits we’ve received for the month or targeted campaign. Although media coverage is an essential part of what we do, it is only the beginning to an end.

As a result I’ve come up with “5 Steps to Effectively Leverage Your Media Coverage”:

1 – Gain Organizational Buy-In - It is so important that the most influential departments of an organization (not just marketing and sales) understand the value of passing along successful media coverage to their targeted audiences. These departments don’t need to create new ways to communicate with their important audiences, they just need to understand the value in “merchandising” these stories to such audiences. By doing so your entire organization is hedging your PR spend bet by ensuring these audiences have seen the coverage…directly from you.

2 – Customize Your Distribution – Once you have buy-in from the most influential departments (i.e., sales, marketing, customer service, HR, IT, IR, etc.) you need to make sure the materials you are arming them with are customized for their specific needs. For example, HR might prefer to send something out to the employees via an email while sales might prefer some speaking points about the coverage since they typically meet face-to-face or over the phone. In order to support the entire organization, you must customize your correspondence accordingly.

3 – Designate a Department Contact - It is one thing to arm a department with the right tools to effectively communicate with their respective targeted audiences, it is another thing to assume they know what to do with these tools and/or will use them at all. As a result, you must have a point of contact within each department who takes ownership of this communications strategy. Someone who can train, advise and measure how effective such outreach was within each department.

4 – Measure Your Impact - Building on point #3…you must develop the appropriate mix of measurements that are consistent with you management team’s expectations. Typically this is a blend of quantitative and qualitative measurements. Quantitative might be tracking how many people each member of your department reached out to with these tools – via email, phone, in-person, etc. Qualitative might be some anecdotal feedback you received from your targeted audience about the coverage.

5 – Report to Key Management – Once you’ve discovered the right mix of measurements for this program, you have to ensure that the executive teams are able to see how such a program is being implemented across your entire organization. In addition, they have to see how effective such outreach is for the overall goals of the organization. Seeing that you’re creating a minimal amount of work and leveraging existing means of communications…they’ll likely see the value of such a program.

I’m sure I’ve left out some of the important steps or details but I believe we as communications professionals need to remember that the validation we create with media coverage is only as good as the number of targeted audiences that see it. What am I missing? As always, thanks for reading and/or joining the conversation!

Call it the “Oprah Effect” the “Ashton Effect” or the “Ellen Effect.”  With swarms of celebrities staking their plots of real estate on Twitter, the Twitterverse is now mainstream and I’m not crazy about it.

I was lured to Twitter more than a year ago by former CIO Magazine Editor Abbie Lundberg in a blog post on the Business Value of Twitter. I quickly learned that as a business tool Twitter lets you engage with people, learn from and  help others. When done well, Twitter will help you nurture relationships that could inspire you personally, and help you grow professionally.

I emphasize the “done well” part. All Twitter participants benefit from a two-way conversation.  Twitter done well is a 1-to-1 engagement, unearthing common interests and spawning new conversations. It’s relationship building 101 and the value we emphasize in the social media workshops we host for  friends and clients at Pipeline Media Relations.

How can you possibly build relationships when you have 1,299,224 followers, but  follow only 14 (yep, that’s Oprah’s status today). We all know her goal – use another medium to spread brand Oprah. Her intent is not to send a DM to JoAnne from Peoria.

So is Mainstream Twitter ruining it for the rest of us? Do the celebrity citings on Twitter turn off entrepreneurs and other business people who have already questioned whether Twitter is already a big waste of time? I hope not. I’m still finding great value in Twitter and have connected to  folks I never would have dreamed of meeting. How about you?  Would love to hear what you’re telling your clients about Twitter in the mainstream. Write to me at michelle@pipelinemediarelations.com.

You’ve just wrapped up a successful PR campaign and generated numerous stories across national, regional and trade media. Your client is pumped up as you deliver the culmination of your program in the form of a massive clip report. Everyone is happy…right?

I’ve constantly been agitated by the PR industry (for which I’m a part of) and our inability to tie into the most important aspect of our profession – validating the client’s that we serve. There are many different ways for us to measure the effectiveness of our programs. In fact, Katie Paine, founder of KDPaine & Partners is probably one of the very best at designing the measurement programs in our industry. However, I’m not talking about measurement; I’m talking about educating companies about how to effectively “merchandise” these media placements throughout their organization directly to their targeted audiences. Validating their business by hand-delivering such media coverage to these targeted audiences.

Here are just a few of the things you can do to make your PR program an internal success that will have the entire organization (and targeted audiences) singing your praises:

• A Reason to Call or Email - How many times do sales teams bitch and complain about having to make cold calls or never having anything new to take to their clients or prospects? Now they do as a result of your media coverage. Draft a number of communications tools including emails, speaking points, etc. that anyone in your organization can take to their respective audiences directly relating to these stories. They now have a great reason to connect that isn’t self serving or traditional.
• Encourage You Organization to Leverage Social Media – Too many times we hear about companies looking to put restrictions in place for their employees on social media. Bad idea. Instead, encourage and arm your employees with the links, Tweets, and summarized posts about the media coverage on their personal profiles. Besides any employee should be excited about their company being featured in the media.
• Wear it on your Sleeve – Okay, not literally but employees should be proud of such coverage and should let others know via their email signature, on their website, marketing materials, business cards, etc. Everyone appreciates being featured in the media and besides, it will certainly be a great conversation starter.

I could go on and on but would love to hear what you’re doing to “merchandise” your stories. This has become a standard practice for my firm and I hope others will catch on and not move on once the results come in but instead let the games (and outreach) begin!

I continue to be amazed at all of the interactions being had on Twitter with traditional/social media professionals and others. In fact, today’s announcement by Cision introducing their new service called JournalistTweets followed by another amazing conversation tonight on #journchat made me think about something…

Is Twitter becoming a new media platform itself?

I say this for many reasons…not just because of the Twitter hype we’re experiencing today. Let me try and explain with these 3 points:

1 – The News Push – I’ve been able to replace all of my RSS news feeds because most of the major news outlets I traditionally follow are broadcasting their news via Twitter (i.e., here is an amazing list compiled by Sarah Evans – MediaOnTwitter).

2 – The Micro Blog – Most media (journalists and bloggers) are using Twitter to market their stories or blogs to others. Granted, they are only using Twitter to supplement their “story marketing” but there is no doubt that the traffic being created by these tactics are growing rapidly.

3 – The “Conversation” – This is the biggest reason (and most powerful weapon of Twitter) I am so bold to make a statement that this is becoming it’s own media platform – like TV, radio, print, etc. On Twitter journalists are conversing with mass audiences (not just PR/Communications professionals), tapping into general interest and niche expertise alike.  In the same right, these casual conversations are becoming news themselves.

Am I going on a limb here? Perhaps drinking too much Twitter Kool-Aid? Or do you too believe that Twitter has morphed into so much more than just another social media or networking platform. Talk with me!

Back in February I wrote a post entitled Is it Too Late for Traditional Newspapers? – Like many, I believe innovation and adoption of social media and online components will be the downfall of these traditional newspapers.

Today many people continue to ask me why we are now playing in the “social media” space when our firm has been focused on traditional media relations. I always think I have a good answer for such a question, “because as traditional media evolves, organizations will have the unique ability to reach their targeted audiences without using the media as their mouthpiece.” I’ve since realized that this response fails to answer the full picture about why we are involved with social media – because many of these traditional journalists are also playing in this space.

Many others have recently weighed in on this topic including the story yesterday by @woodylewis on Mashable (@mashable) entitled, “5 Ways Traditional Media is Going Social.”

What I like most about Woody’s story is how he talks about the successful approach that John Byrne (@johnabyrne), editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek Online has had leveraging his Twitter profile. In fact, his post “What’s Your News Story Idea” John gives readers a chance to share and submit their story ideas to John and a number of other BusinessWeek editors. This looks great on the surface, but from what I’ve seen, John is truly delivering on this promise since April…2008!

Another great example of the traditional media’s use of social media would be the wiki that PR & social media expert Sarah Evans (@PRSarahEvans) put together called MediaOnTwitter listing out all of the journalists and media outlets currently on Twitter. I love this list and often forward to any PR or marketing colleague who doubts why they should be using Twitter. Not to be pitching per se as John suggests, but to be interacting with these influential journalists and to be reading their respective outlets.

What are some examples you’ve seen of traditional and social media blending together? And to Woody’s point, do you believe his closing comments, “When the economy recovers, those brands that have survived by innovating should benefit from the social media tools they’ve put in place.”? I do.