Photo courtesy mrbillt6 via Flickr

In 2008, when my colleague Heidi Sullivan and I kicked off the new CisionBlog, a survey of PR professionals found that only half were reaching out to bloggers (in a study this year, four in five said they do blogger outreach). In 2008, Facebook had barely eclipsed MySpace and was still largely the province of college students. Receiving your entire Twitter feed as a series of text messages was considered perfectly reasonable behavior.

When I think about how technology has reshaped PR, marketing, media and the social Web over the past few years, it’s been a dizzying array of adaptations and innovations. To me, what drives this evolution is both positive and inspiring. You might call it the social business expectation.

The social business expectation first presented itself when we began to expect brands to fess up and apologize earnestly each time an employee tweets a sarcastic response to an angry customer, or a company’s workers are caught doing unseemly things with cheese in a YouTube video. But it’s much more than that. Read it all..

Vivek Kundra, EVP emerging markets, Salesforce

“Making a phone call, sending a fax, sending an email. These ways of communicating with companies are broken,” says Vivek Kundra, who served as the first chief information officer of the United States and is now executive vice president of emerging markets for Salesforce.com.

Kundra shared a variety of case studies in companies engaging their customers on the social Web during this morning’s keynote at Salesforce’s Cloudforce Chicago event.

Read it all..

Supporters of the Stache Act revel in their fine mustachery at the Million Mustache March on April 1 in Washington D.C. Photo courtesy Alan Kotok

When H&R Block announced that it was supporting a bill that would offer Americans a $250 tax deduction to offset the cost of maintaining facial hair, some of the company’s tax preparers didn’t think it was very funny.

Neither did some consumers who didn’t understand that the campaign for a mustache-related tax break was just a joke, a plan hatched by Scott Gulbransen, H&R Block’s social media director, to raise brand awareness amongst younger taxpayers. But the tongue-in-cheek tone of the campaign is hard to miss in the Stache Act’s YouTube video, so the disapproving reaction on social media was funny in its own right, bringing more attention to the pseudo-legislative effort. And when commenters began channeling their outrage at special interest tax breaks toward the campaign for the Stache Act, Gulbransen said, “that was even funnier.”

Gulbransen presented the Stache Act case study at the International Association of Business Communicators Corporate Communication and Social Media Summit on Friday in Jacksonville, Fl. Read it all..

Philip Sheldrake delivers his talk, "The Business of Influence", at PRSA Digital Impact 2012

I think it was evident at this week’s Public Relations Society of America Digital Impact conference that the PR industry has turned a corner from “playing at” developing social Web presences to focusing on advanced tactics. Having mastered the basics, we’re moving on to discuss techniques for optimizing our efforts and  honing our message for conversation rather than broadcast. That’s great to see. Here are three things I learned about at Digital Impact. Read it all..

Photo courtesy Yahoo Into Now

Attracting social marketers, analysts, mobile strategists and digital technology futurists, the Inbound Marketing Summit (Twitter hashtag #ims12) is one of the best conferences I go to.

When I first attended about three years ago, the conference series was focused exclusively on social marketing tactics. But it has come to include a strong focus on the rapid evolution of the touchscreen devices, social TV and what these shifts mean for professional communicators.

This week, a singular theme emerged: understanding user behaviors is far more important for marketers than in-depth knowledge of the emerging technology platforms that facilitate them.

Here are three takeaways from the event. Read it all..

I’m very excited to announce the public beta launch today of a new community site presented by Cision: Seek or Shout.

We’ve built this site to help journalists, bloggers and professional communicators research and promote their content while connecting with each other in a productive, relevant way. Here’s what you can do inside of Seek or Shout:

• Seek products for review, experts to interview, and research materials for an upcoming news article or blog post. Choose to make your requests anonymously, or syndicate them to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for maximum response.
• Shout about your latest content, campaign or product. Users who follow you or the tags you place on your Shout will see them in their News Feed.
• Communicate privately with other users about exclusive inquiries and offers
• Define your Interests and find relevant messages from other users in your News Feed
• Maintain a profile outlining your roles and background. Point people there to take back control of your inbox and let other users, along with Cision customers, know what you need from them.
• Search editorial calendars,  CisionWire and PitchEngine to spark content ideas

Go check it out, or stick around and I will briefly tell you how we got here.

Read it all..

Photo courtesy LG via Flickr

There are many ways to track the media industry’s evolution in the digital age. Look at the thousands of journalists using social sites to find stories, for example, or count the myriad devices and delivery methods we now use to consume news content. But the shift really becomes clear when you have a look at the business card titles that some media professionals now use.

Chief Content Officer. Engagement Manager. Multiplatform Editor. Social Media Producer.

Suffice it to say, journalism schools were not preparing people for these roles 10 years ago. Techniques and strategies for these positions are growing and changing quickly but some best practices have begun to emerge.

Our media database lists contacts with all of these titles and hundreds of similar ones. I searched the database for titles containing the following words: community manager, ambassador, evangelist, social, content, engagement, curator, strategist and platform. I found that globally, the media profession has seen 165% growth in positions described with these terms since December 2009. Read it all..

Photo courtesy of John Fowler via Flickr

As the new year begins, many professional communicators are hard at work planning upcoming campaigns and content. The underlying concepts behind these campaigns may already be well refined, but visualizing them is often a challenge.

Which raises the question: How to avoid another year of boring stock images and graphics? Read it all..

Photo courtesy Elvert Barnes via Flickr

Journalists and bloggers have been talking with brands and professional communicators on social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for several years now. Yet, the public relations community has struggled a bit with the terminology around the outreach we do on these sites. The social media release. The twitpitch. The biztweet?

It’s just the start of a conversation.

One thing that struck me about the results of our journalists and blogger survey, conducted jointly between Cision and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, is that terminology matters when we’re talking about using online tools to build relationships. Read it all..

Photo courtesy Karin Dalziel via Flickr

Public relations and marketing professionals I talk with sometimes express frustration about  technology terms that get bandied about in our industry without clear definitions. Often when I give the explanations below, the response I hear is “That’s it? That’s all there is to it?” Well of course, each of these technology concepts and tools are incredibly complex and multi-faceted. But it’s important that we can discuss them from a business standpoint and understand each other.

Why do these terms matter to someone who crafts words and multimedia content for a living? Because increasingly, your work is being delivered using these technologies, each of which have ramifications for the way you produce your own content and curate information from elsewhere.

I think the worst thing you can do when someone uses a term in conversation that you don’t understand is keep quiet and pretend to get it. Speak up and get clarity. And if you already understand these concepts, spread the word. Read it all..