Monthly Archives: August 2011

Keith Trivitt

Assessing the Economy’s Impact on PR

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Unless you’ve been in a cave the past two weeks, then you know things aren’t looking too good right now for the economy. It’s yo-yoing like crazy, which has investors, CEOs and entrepreneurs fretting.

Friday’s Wall Street Journal reported that America’s entrepreneur class shrunk during the Great Recession (despite predictions that it was rapidly growing because so many people were out of work). And The Financial Times reported that business leaders’ confidence in their industries and the global economy has deteriorated sharply.

But how well is PR holding up throughout this fracas? Continue reading →

Jason Mollica

Blaming Social Media for the Market Crash: Finger Should Point Elsewhere

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It’s no secret that the stock market is falling faster than someone with cement shoes. The blame game focused on Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgrading the United States’ credit rating from AAA to AA+. The markets reacted violently, dropping 635 points on August 8. It was enough to get many queasy about their financial futures.

The next day, the markets rebounded. But that didn’t stop the finger pointing from journalists and “experts.” A story in The Atlantic Wire’s technology section by Rebecca Greenfield placed blame on social media, saying it “could be making the market crash worse.”

I usually read these stories because it’s remarkable that they get published, in print or online. This quote is from the initial paragraph of the post: Continue reading →

Jeff Esposito

From “Yes We Can” to No You Didn’t; A Cautionary Lesson in Social Media

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President Barack Obama’s use of social media has seen its ups and downs. Back in 2008 his social media savvy helped propel him into the Oval Office. His use of technology was instrumental in his campaign, and it is looked at as the blueprint for how campaigns should be run in the Web 2.0 world. Many social media books use his historic campaign as an example or case study of an effective social media strategy.

Now that he’s in office, however, there is significant room for improvement in his social media activity. First of all, after the election, his social accounts lost their personal touch and turned into more of a broadcast medium managed by his staff. As his Twitter profile notes, only Tweets marked BO are coming directly from the Commander in Chief. So engaging, it is not. While I wouldn’t expect the President to be Tweeting away, his staff should have kept up an engagement level similar to large corporations.

In the middle of the federal debt ceiling negotiations, Continue reading →

Whitney Jones

Child’s Play? Learning Lessons from Japanese Video Game Creators

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Losing touch with your audience can spell disaster for those of us in the PR. It’s likely we’ve all spent some time in a rut caused by becoming isolated from our target market, but hopefully, we refocused, recharged and then most importantly, moved beyond the point where we became distracted in the first place. But how do you know you’ve lost your way long before your effectiveness drops off? A surprising analogy may offer the architects of public perception some valuable lessons.

The ashbin of history is heaped with examples of how familiarity truly bred contempt between once dominating industry giants and their once happy customers. To review one current example with notable implications for the public relations industry, we need go no further than our children’s gaming products. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Success Metrics Should Propagate Success

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My boyfriend was recently asked to help review a new Masters program plan for a local university. Part of this plan included success metrics like the following:

–       Number of students enrolled in the program

–       Feedback on courses and professors from students (through annual surveys)

–       Number of students who find employment (upon graduation or within six months)

–       Number of students who receive a promotion or other recognition (upon graduation or within one year)

While the first two are valuable metrics for other purposes (budgeting, curriculum building, etc.), I would not necessarily consider these to be success metrics. Continue reading →

Chuck Hemann

Social Content Optimization Requires Looking at Micro Trends

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What time should we be posting our content? What messages are resonating best with our audience? Is there a day of the week where our content performs best? How do we truly optimize our content on Facebook or Twitter? What kind of content generates the most clicks or interactions? How long does it take before we receive interactions after publishing a piece of content?

If you are managing your brand’s social media presence or working for an agency on behalf of a brand, you’ve no doubt heard these questions from your boss. All of those questions are things we’ve helped to solve in traditional marketing and PR for years, but the question of how we “scientifically” optimize our content in social is relatively new.  Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Airbnb Crisis: PR Has Seen This Before

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Another week, another PR crisis. This one comes by way of the Quixotic, pie-in-the-sky Silicon Valley start-up Airbnb, which allows people to rent their apartments, a bedroom or even their living room floor to complete strangers, with little to no background check of that person’s character. Think about how absurd that concept sounds.The crisis in question involved a San Francisco woman, known only as EJ, who blogged that she was the victim of a heinous property crime by a guest who arranged to stay there through Airbnb. In what is being called “#ranscackgate” (sidebar: Another “gate”? Really?), Airbnb has, perhaps not surprisingly, totally flubbed its response. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Generalizations are Broad Guidelines, not Gospel

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Let’s get something straight: generalizations are not gospel. I’ve seen too many blog posts and articles lately which use broad generalizations to show how to be successful with social media, particularly Facebook.

For example, analyzing when your brand’s Facebook page community is most active (time of day, day of week) is incredibly valuable. This can help you time your own activities to catch the most people at the exact right time. But writing posts at noon because you read a blog post that says that’s when people are most active is lazy.

Studies like that look at Facebook brand pages across industries and categories. Their core consumers are likely vastly different, and each page likely has very different fan bases. Averaging these numbers doesn’t tell you anything for your own brand. It tells you the average time of day people across 30 different Facebook pages are most active. Continue reading →